One of our clients contacted us after she received an e-mail stating that her site was not appearing correctly in WebTV.  Here is how the site looks when viewed in Internet Explorer:

Now here is how it looks when viewed on a WebTV viewer (a freeware downloadable viewer that theoretically gives you the same view a WebTV user would experience on their television).

I tried looking at some other sites using the viewer, such as CNN and Foxnews.com.  They looked so bad as to be unsurfable.  

In fact, the only site that looked just fine in the WebTV viewer was webtv.com.  Imagine that!

You can see what your website looks like in the WebTV browser by downloading the free viewer for yourself.  The URL is http://www.freewareweb.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?ID=481 .  Or just Google webtv viewer.

I'm not sure we're going to rush to redesign all our sites to be WebTV friendly.  No one else is, apparently... maybe it is going to be up to the people behind WebTV to get it working more like a conventional browser a la your PC or Mac.  Still, it's something to keep in mind.  For now, there are a few things you can do to be more WebTV friendly, according to About.com.

It's worth looking into and keeping in mind for future web designs. 

It's perhaps not as clever as some blog names out there, but it's not completely brainless either... it's a bit of a play on words.  The church is in Stevens Point, which everyone around here calls "Point" and it is also the "other St. Peter's" (the original of course being in Vatican City - that would be, St. Peter's Rome vs. St. Peter's Point).  So it's not so much the name but the picture that gives you the idea behind the title. 

There you go, one more blog successfully named, I believe.

1) While it can be humorous, it cannot be dated or irreverent in any way.

2) It should reflect the overarching theme of the blog, which is the daily struggle of lay Catholics trying to achieve holiness as they go about their day to day life.  There will be a lot of advice, spiritual direction and resources for such people in this blog.

3) It should somehow reflect that we are a true Vatican II parish... meaning, we read the documents and we want to live them out in our parish.  If you're an active Catholic, you'll understand what that whole concept is about, or you should.  Anyway...

I've seen some catchy names out there in the Catholic blogosphere, like Young Fogeys, American Papist, and The Cafeteria Is Closed.  I'd love for us to come up with something equally catchy, if not as polemical sounding. 

Any ideas?

Well, you have to ask the search engines.  And some are better to ask than others.

GOOGLE 

Google will show you some of the websites that link to yours, but it is definately not the best source.  Still, it's good to see what they have.  So, go to http://www.google.com and in the search bar type in this:

link:http://www.yourwebsitename.com  

OK, obviously, you insert your domain name in there.  For instance, if I am looking for backward links on my folk's bed and breakfast site, I would type in,

link:http://www.dreamsofyesteryear.com

Google finds 15 links, which are web pages which link to www.dreamsofyesteryear.com, many of which have 0 page rank (a value Google gives to sites showing their importance).  Some of them are familiar to me because they are directories we list the site in, or some of our sites that we link to hers with, or her blog, etc. 

YAHOO

Now let's try going to http://www.yahoo.com and in the search bar type this:

links:www.yourwebsitename.com

I am going to enter the Dreams of Yesteryear Bed and Breakfast site in again here.  This time I get 102 results, way more than Google gave me.  Here we find some newspaper websites that wrote an article about the bed and breakfast, the Yahoo Directory link, several other directories, personal websites of guests who stayed in the bed and breakfast and either blogged or made a web page about it (very nice of them eh), a website we made to advertise a bike package she does with another B&B, a link from Promotion Web Design, various local lodging websites, etc. etc.  Of couse there are a number of useless links here, some familiar as among the hundreds of link exchange requests she receives (and doesn't reciprocate... these haven't been helpful and there are way too many to try to establish worthwhile link relationships with them). As you can tell, Yahoo has a much more comprehensive list.  It is much more what you'd expect from a site that's been online since 1998.

There appears to be a similar function provided by Yahoo at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites

MSN - LIVE 

Huh, you can't use them anymore for getting your back links apparently.

But here is a nice tool you can use to check for your own links and compare to your competition's websites: http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/

It is a little more complicated than just looking at the results from Google and Yahoo, but interesting to compare.

What does all this mean?  Well, nothing specific.  By doing this you can get an overall feel for the popularity of your website.  Each link coming into your site is a "vote" for your site that the search engines take into consideration when deciding if your page should show up on page 1 of their search results, or on page 20 or page no-where-to-be-found.  Incoming links, in general, are a good thing and you want them. Quality links are what you are going for.  Again this is only speaking generally!  But your typical link exchange (someone e-mails you and says they'll put your link on their site if you link to them from yours) is not usually very helpful.  Much better are natural links that develop because people like your site and they write a little something about you in their blog or in an article, or something like a press release, or an article you write to have placed on someone else's website, etc. Links that come from pages about a topic related to yours (anything travel related, for instance, in the case of the bed and breakfast) are more helpful than links from unrelated sites.  But don't be too picky.  Ultimately, links are links and links are good.  This does include, by the way, links on your own site that link to your home page.  Always remember to link to your home page. 

If you do your backlink check and find out you have very few or no links coming in to your site, you need to get going on a link building campaign.  Write more pages for your own site.  Write articles  which include your URL and have your friends upload them to their sites.  Do an online press release (a topic for another day), etc.  Or you could always hire someone to help SEO (search engine optimize) your site.  There are companies that do that kind of work ahem ahem.

One of the areas I help dad's small business with is yellow pages advertising.  I design display ads and small text ads for the multiple print directories he advertises in, and I handle the sales people and make sure we get our ads in to the directories each year, since sales people sometimes drop the ball or they switch companies, etc. and don't bother to make sure we renew the next year.  Invariably, when I'm talking to the sales reps of big yellow page directory companies, they try to sell me a package that includes their online yellow pages. 

I refuse to pay to be included in online yellow pages.  Why? A) Because you can be listed in them for free, for what it's worth which B) isn't worth much, because people looking for a business online will search Google, not the online yellowpages and C) you want links that help your site rank, and the listings in these yellow pages don't help.  They are not static links.  They only show up on results pages if someone happens to search that site... and I doubt much of your local client base will be there searching for your goods or services.

One time a sales person tried to tell me that paying for an ad in the online yellowpages would get me on page one of Google, because their directory is in the top 10 results on Google for the search term "online yellow pages" or somesuch.  I said I would buy on ad if they would give me a static link on their own home page.  That was a short conversation.

I just offer this as a word to the wise. Maybe as a small business person, you don't have a son or daughter experienced in web design or who understands how ranking on the internet works.  Consider me your surrogate family member who just wants to help small business owners avoid being tricked into buying worthless online advertising.

That is not to say you should never pay for online advertising, however.  You just have to choose the right kind.  More on that soon.

St. John Cantius Catholic Church

We have an interest in this genre of web design, since we do a lot of work on Catholic web sites of various organizations.  I have visited this website in the past, and though I enjoyed looking at the pictures from the renovation of the church (amazing what they have done there!) and I listened to MP3s of the choir and even bought a CD, the website itself was not real eye-catching or easy to navigate at that point in time.  They have recently redone it, and the website revamp is very impressive. 

The first thing that hits you is the overall layout.  It looks like everything is contained within columns with great scrollwork.  At the top, seemingly underneath the arch at the top of the page, a slideshow displays some of the beauty of the church.  There are two navigation menus.  One is at the very top of the page going across horizontally.  These are some of your "old stand-by" items, like about us and contact us, with a few that are probably of popular interest, like a link to information about the religious order that runs the church, the youth and young adults (it stands to reason that they are among the largest group that will visit the website), and the store and information about donating money to the church.  This nav bar is outside the main architectural motif of the page.

The other navigation is contained within the motif, just underneath the slide-show.  It is in what I'd call the "file tab" format.  The link for the page you are on is a light color, while the other options are a darker color.  Yet the link for the page you are on has a tiny detail of scrollwork in the corners of it.  Little touches like this just make this design.  The frames around the side-bars of information are a similar high-design touch.  The first letter of the main body of the text on each page has been overlayed by a graphic representation of the letter (one thinks of the way medievel monks would embellish the manuscripts they copied). 

Fancy, fancy, fancy!  Yet all the pertinent information you would need as a new visitor to the parish is there... the schedule, directions, what kind of groups you could connect with, etc. 

Beautiful photography is key to this design.  I learned how important this element is when I revamped my parent's bed and breakfast website.  My mother had hired a local professional photographer, a man who already had expressed an interest in photographing the house, to come in and do new pictures for the website.  The digital images he produced were huge, but because of their quality I was able to keep the quality when I reduced them down to manageable size and include sharp, eye-catching slide-shows with each guest room of the bed and breakfast, as well as all the common areas.  You notice the same at St. John Cantius.  Someone who knew what they were doing did the photography there, and it is fantastic.

If you've noticed some stunning web designs out there lately, I'd love to hear about them.  Always on the look-out for beauty on the web.

Another website that we're working on is for a Franciscan hermit in our area.  That's right, we are doing a hermit's website.  How cool is that?

In addition, a long-awaited update to Maher Water Corporation's website is finally underway.  This is the business my father owns.  I first put up a website for him in 1998, and it has not changed a whole lot since then.  In fact, its last design was done in Frontpage 98, which just goes to show you how old it is.  The new version of this small business design is being done in Dreamweaver, and I will let you know as soon as it is launched.  Visitors will find the site more interactive and dynamic.  It will be easier to navigate and there will be much more offered.  I can't wait to show it to you!

Other projects in the works... it seems there is an entrepreneurial spirit alive and well in Tomahawk WI where the locals are making all manner of Western decor and gifts and are looking to sell them on the internet!  Even though you can't get a cable modem at the Sundance Ranch, that did not stop my aunt Sunnie Mercier from seeking to open an ecommerce site.  She's getting started with a Yahoo Store, but there are plans to move from the included templates to a customized Yahoo store, something Jason and I will put together based on her design concept. 

Jason's also done some web programming consulting work, and we're working on a political advocacy site surrounding a hot issue in our area (to be revealed later).  There's the ongoing work on our own web businesses, always.  We're putting our Promotion Web Design shingle out a little more too, and that is bringing in quote requests so expect more news of new websites to check out in the near future.

Darcy

Just to be clear, this is not a techno-blog.  I do not understand the inner workings of search engines (rather, I have a good understanding of their external workings, like how they spider a site and things to do to make your web pages favorable for their index).  I don't try to stay up on the debate between CSS purists and those who still use (gasp) tables in their web designs.  In short, I am not going to attempt to write about technology that, frankly, most small business owners could care less about.  I like to write about web design from the perspective of someone like, say, my parents.  They own two well-established local businesses and they have picked up some knowledge about how websites work from me.  They are knowledgeable enough to realize the importance of having a website, to be sure.  (And the benefits of having their daughter and son-in-law as their web designers .)  If you ever wished you had someone who knows how to make a website in your family, well, read The Second Mouse blog because you've got Jason and me! 

More soon...

It turns out that the very existence of the technology hotbed is in some part due to a Wisconsin lawyer.  Leland Stanford of Central Pacific Railroad became a multi-millioniare in the late 1800s for the company's role in completing the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869.  Fifteen years later, Mr. Stanford founded a research university near his Palo Alto home in honor of his son, Leland, Jr., who died of typhiod while exploring Europe. 

Fifty years later, Stanford University's world renowned electrical engineering department gave rise to a new company founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.  Over the years, more technology companies arrived and the name "Silicon Valley" was coined in 1971 by industrialist Ralph Vaerst. 

Were it not for the loss of the Stanford's giving rise to the university, the Valley might still be an agricultural gem and who knows, the high-tech growth might have shifted to that other school, Jason's alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 We started our web design company because we realized that this is a natural fit for our God given gifts and talents.  Darcy's eye for style and detail has been recognized for years and Jason has been "under the hood" of computers and software for a decade.  We also saw a need for businesses to plug into the web without spending an arm and a leg.  So many companies are losing customers since they don't have a site, but can't afford the thousands and thousands most companies charge.  So we offer affordable, professional solutions and we aim to be a partner with our clients to help them achieve specific, measurable goals with their web site.

 What you can expect from this blog are tips, observations, and humor from a husband and wife team now bringing that teamwork into focus on website design and development.  We realize that the world of small business and the internet is sometimes a pretty crazy one, and we'll help cut through the haze, help make things understandable, and hopefully generate a laugh or two.