Search UtilitiesWritten by Richard Lowe
Supporting a web site is hard work. I should know, I support sixteen of them, plus two intranets at my day job. If you do everything properly, you (or your staff) have to design site, prototype it, code it, maintain it, promote it and do any of a hundred other things. There are a bazillion details to take care of, from color of text, size of characters and, of course, site navigation.Coming up with a good navigation scheme can be very hard. The larger site, more difficult task. Having a site with lots of pages and a good mixture of material makes it even more difficult. How do you get your visitors to information they want without lots of confusing labels, pictures and links? Virtually every site will have some top-level links on their primary entry page. Most webmasters have learned to duplicate those links on most or all other pages on their sites so people can get from anywhere on site to anywhere else. The problem is that this only gives your visitors a few options. If they don't see what they like, they may look at a page or two, become frustrated and leave. This has happened to me many, many times. I'll visit a site and if I don't see what I want I'll go somewhere else fast. Unless, of course, I find some way to search for what I need. You see, adding search capabilities to your site suddenly gives you an incredibly flexibly, user-definable navigation scheme. Unless your site is very small, it would be extremely difficult for you to provide a navigation scheme which gets your visitors to anything they might need. Site specific search engines provide this capability.
| | "Making Money, Not Excuses"Written by Mike Beriault
Making Money in 2002! So You Want to Make Some Money This Year?Webmasters and small business owners who are lured online by tremendous profit potential are often overwhelmed by enormous amount of information they have to sift through, especially if they are trying to maintain their web site as well as market it and provide some customer service! Arghh!!!!! ======================== How Do You Eat An Elephant? ======================== One bite at a time! That is how you have to manage your online business as well! Whether you are lucky enough to only be responsible for a single task, or if you wear all hats you need to set clear cut goals and attack them one at a time. It is easy to become swamped these days, it is hard to focus when you are up to your knees in crocodiles! ===================== Stop What You Are Doing! ===================== You may be most organized person, or most self motivated (or not) but if you don't have something concrete to keep you going eventually ship will flounder! Take a moment to sit down and evaluate your business objectively. 1. Look at your expenses. Decide what is absolutely necessary, Millions of dollars are wasted unnecessarily every year in expensive domain registrars, inflated hosting costs, useless software and ineffective marketing.
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