This workshop has been rescheduled for Friday, 11/20, from 3:30-5 pm.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to organize the look of several pages across a website without having to manage the look of each page individually. The Wikipedia entry on CSS, of course, is chock-full of good information.

Additionally, Adobe’s Dreamweaver manual has a section on CSS, and Smashing Magazine has a smashing tutorial that can help you get started.

Tables can help you to organize the layout of your webpages. Within the Adobe Dreamweaver online manual there’s a section dedicated to tables that should help you get started.

Additionally, Adobe has two parts of a tutorial for Dw CS3 here and here. (Note that Dw CS4 is what we have on campus, but the steps are similar.)

Finally, remember that you can do a search for doing just about anything – just remember to include the software information. For example, you can search for “Dreamweaver CS4 tables” and get a lot of useful hits.

With your PantherFile webspace set up and simple html-coded pages up and running (see last post for more information), you’ll likely want to do more with your webpages.

Enter Dreamweaver, web development software that is available on campus computers, including the Mac laptops in 108.

If you missed the workshop or would like to reference what we talked about, here are the links:

• Adobe maintains tutorials and videos for getting started with and learning how to use Dreamweaver, as well as for building a website.
• Additionally, they maintain a searchable online manual.

PULL BACK ON THE BOW STRING

PLACE THE GRIP ALONG SIDE OF YOUR EYE

AND…

One of the ways to get started on your future is to look into yourself and discover where it is that you want to land or the direction you want to head toward!

Some times that decision alone is daunting to say the least! But we have to get over our fears and take a leap of faith. Not knowing that our motivations and fears may collide and create something we can’t understand is always a bit unnerving, but exciting none the less!!!

So, let’s jump into it shall we?

If You Would Like To Build Your Own Website For FREE! Keep Reading!

One of the newest forms of creating wealth in so many areas of the business world seems to be the internet. This medium is probably the most lucrative forms of business development ever!

One way to tackle this giant known as the world-wide-web is to understand it.

I like to keep things “stupid simple” if you know what I mean!!!

The safest way to view the web, is to look at it as an incredible tool, for your use in researching various ways to create your future! Anything else will just suck the life (your time) right out of you until you just plain shrivel up and die!!! Or “poke an eye out”, “go blind”, and any of the other things that your dear old Grandmother used to tell you when you were little!!! I’m not kidding!

It will suck you dry both financially and emotionally if you don’t use it as a tool and leave it alone when you’re not working towards a means to an end.

Anyway, I got a gift for you if you’re still hear reading this gibberish about building businesses! A fr*ee tool. And I want you to take action with it immediately or just turn off your computer, bury your head in the sand, and forget everything you just heard from me! If you click here it will take you to a download page (Download This Now Before It’s Gone!) for great website building software that will easily let you build your very own websites in minutes all for nothing, zilch, zero, Nada, and you can start making money with your new sites right away if take the ball and run with it toward a goal!!!

This is a top-notch software you can download
and use immediately and it comes with:

* Zero HTML knowledge required
* Easy step-by-step video instructions
* Over 100+ in-built website templates
* Instant one-click website publishing
* And much more!

You can build *unlimited* websites with this
and it’s super easy to use…

I have tons of cool stuff for you in the near future! Just keep coming back for more and we will end this silly recession and start the way to a recovery the likes that no generation before us could have even imagined!!!

God Bless,                                                                                                                                   and don’t forget to actually take action.

You can’t alter your course if you wont take the necessary steps to move your body in motion! Words to change by!!!

Gratefully,

Edward Fotion

P. S.

If you think you’re ready to start taking the next step…

You might want to check out this site I just found, CLICK HERE

Not quite getting the results, and hits to your website as you expected?

Here area few tips and idea that will boost your rankings in the Internet search engines, and have many more people visiting, your website, and buying your products.

Most of you already know this one, but making sure your website title is relevant to your website content. This can’t be stressed enough.

Avoid flashy or lengthy graphics on your website; some people still have a slow computer at home, or maybe they are using a public computer. if the page takes too long to load, they leave your site altogether, and not visit it again.

In your website description, avoid using all capital letters, or any symbols like dashes, slashes, quotation marks, exclamation points, etc. To the search engines, it looks like you are being too aggressive in your advertising, and you may be a scam; as far as the reader goes, website research shows that people respond better to ads that are simple and objective.

Avoid using statements like your website is the best, number one, second to none, etc. Your website may very well be the best, but let the reader decide; using these statements may sound gimmicky to some readers, and they may pass your ad by.

It is also very beneficial to track your progress, by using Search Engine Visibility,which is available at http://www.mydomainbag.com.
It’s a program that allows you to
track such things as how many people visit your website and from what source they came from,so you can avoid trial and errors, and know where to emphasize your ads the most. Search Engine Visibility is compatible with just about any website program that you may be using.

I hope that these few tips will help you greatly, in creating a successful Internet business for yourself.

As always, Domain Names for as low as $1.99, along with high quality, hosting is available at http://www.mydomainbag.com

See what the Internet Cash Map Can do for you!

Dp

WordPress, the word no one can forget are mistake as it is an essential thing being used by netizens and bloggers. If you want to use a theme for WordPress you have to pay some hundred of dollars. Nevertheless, here Devine lets you create your own free themes in a click. Device is a free plugin that lets you convert any Photoshop PSD design to well coded WordPress theme.
If you want to use this method,
•Download and install the Plugin Devine.
•Then open your PSD design in Photoshop.
•Then go to Devine in menu bar and publish.
•Assign WordPress elements in your theme.
•Then upload your theme to look the preview.

Click to know about Two Column Theme for Bloggers

Detail steps explained below :
Minimal system requirements:
Divine 0.5.0 version was developed as the plug-in for the popular editor Photoshop.
This is why minimal system requirements straightly depend on your Photoshop version’s requirements.
Step 1
Launch your Photoshop editor. (We have Version CS3). As you can see, Divine item has appeared in the editor menu.

Step 2
Open template ( Click to Download )

Step 3
After the template is loaded, launch the Divine plug-in.

Step 4
Next, we must assign the main roles to our template’s elements. Creating the elements blank parts of the template in advance and assigning roles to them, you assign the styles to all those elements at the same time.

Step 5
Additional elements assigning. To create a valid page you’ll need additional elements besides the main ones. To do that, highlight required elements and assign UserItem roles to them. After that we can assign links to them and change their ID.

Step 6
New theme creation and publication. After we assigned all necessary roles to the elements, we can set to creating a theme. All we need to do that is press Publish. And if your account is set correctly, the theme will at once be uploaded.
(See detailed instruction on profile settings in the chapter Documentation. Interface. Menu)

Step 7
Activate your theme and enjoy the result. After short and easy work we see the result.

[ More ]

When you start out you have no site. You go to a couple of people you consider to be your potential client base and pitch the idea. They love it. Then you build it. This takes ages. In this period you have two options. Sell the site you have not built or wait until it’s built and sell what you have created. We chose the latter.

This was for many reasons the right decision however it has had an unexpected side effect. Rather like someone coming out of solitary confinement when you get out there you want to speak to everyone and anyone about the site. This needs to be curbed.

There are only a few occasions in either your personal or professional life you will feel more lonely than at your first “industry do”. The fact that you know no-one wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that everyone else in the room seems to know each other. Really well. You’re the kid on their first day at a new school. An outsider to an established clique.

So you make a little conversation with anyone whose eye you can catch and start feeling more comfortable. The people we met were happy to tell us about the challenges their industry faced and the issues that impacted their ability to do their jobs. The temptation at this point was to solution sell but they could hear the pitch coming a mile away they’d switch off. Trying to sell something to someone you don’t have a relationship with is crackers. You lose the opportunity to find out the things that matter to them and to build a relationship. The relationship you’re going to need to get you to the sale and beyond.

We went to the event to place our product front and centre then ended up referring to in passing in the explanation of what you do for a living. It felt like a shame to have the site ready to go and not actively push anyone to it. In retrospect any push to the site would have ended up pushing the potential client further away.

I have been reading about resourceful individuals who have used http://wordpress.org as a backend for their websites. Apparently it runs using PHP (which is the way information is called up when the browser hits your URL) and MySQL (which is a database that can organize all your content). It sounds very user-friendly for those who are not code-monkeys, like me. I really need a site for my art that is easy to update, and is well-crawled by the search engines. I think I will be doing some further research into this. In the meantime, if any of you have tried this, please share your experience. I’d love to know how it went for you.

If you want a sure fire way to fall out of love with a beautiful idea all you need to do is be involved in the detail of its implementation. The love one has for the idea has the force and passion of pubescent first love.

It’s all very surface and non-specific. You fall in love with its effortless beauty and its potential. When you tell people about your idea it’s like you’re sitting with a sketch artist describing the most beautiful person you’ve ever met.

Specification is like writing the accompanying love story. It’s the back story of this great romance. The quoting stage is like being told that the person you’ve just fallen head over heels in love with is way out of your league. It’s painful and upsetting as you compromise your way to something you can afford.

Implementation, on the other hand, is like a marriage. The flames of desire that once raged have now dwindled. You know everything about it. It’s all about detail. There is nothing sexy about detail. It takes effort to remind yourself that you have made a beautiful forest when you know the colour, texture, thickness and hardness of the bark.

Selling is where you go back to the original idea and package it in such a way that lets others fall in love with the idea for all the things it could be to them. You don’t tell clients the detail or the process, the heartache and compromise. No-one’s going to buy that. Clients need to fall for the idea in the same way you did.

See you next week.
Jamie

You might be surprised how hard it can be to spend a really large amount of money with a supplier. It’s easy to hand over the money what’s hard is working out what you get and what you don’t get.

Rather than making you more sure of what you’re actually buying the process of clarification actually creates a huge amount of suspicion from both parties. That’s the problem with detail. As you learn more about what you’re getting you find out that you’re not getting some things you “assumed” you were.

Then the trading begins as you trade off things you didn’t know you were buying and don’t really need for things you thought you were getting but actually were not getting.

Then priority needs to be established. As you can’t have all of the things you have paid for at the same time you need to work out which of them needs to be delivered first. On closer inspection they all appear to be first priorities so the job is to work out which of the first priorities is first. I call the first priority 1.1 (meaning First of the first priorities), the next being 1.2 and so on. Having done this and agreed the delivery of these items you speak to the customer where it becomes apparent that they have a whole different set of first priorities and so the process begins again.

The whole time this is going on the lawyers are drafting an agreement that creates surety about the deliverables and outlines every conceivable thing that could go wrong. You find yourself having a conversation that sounds like this “And so, as stated in clause 13.1.2.3 if a truck, driven by a llama, that is overloaded with Chickens smashes into your business you have a disaster recovery procedure for that? Is that correct?”

Contracts are written by lawyers channelling a parent who loves giving backhanded complements. You know what I mean. “I love the soup you made – only I’m not much for cabbage”. And so a contract basically states “I award you this job because you are the best supplier we have seen – but just incase you’re incompetent, negligent, a crook, insolvent or you deliver late we’d best get you to sign here… and here.. and here.”

Have a good one. Jamie

Hello. This is a blog that will be updated weekly with the progress and achievements of this company as we build a social networking site. Sounds boring. Actually its a thrill a minute.

Like anyone who has commissioned the built a site from scratch will tell you the challenges come from everywhere and rarely from where you expected. I am the operations manager of issociate. As such I look after the contracts for the build and use of the site, the processes employed on an operational level and the capital expenditure. I also do the washing up and sweep the floor.

Also doing sweeping and other general cleaning duties are the directors Louise and Jenny. They take care of the client interaction and sign ups to the site.

I will report back in a week.

Dear friends,

I want to take this opportunity to say thank you to each
and every one of you who started this journey with me here
on WordPress more than two years ago.
Thanks for the support and encouragement, for the laughter, the fun we’ve had here….

I especially want to thank those of you who stood by me
as I survived the past year. The posts, the style of the blog
changed dramatically after I lost my Dad. One year ago today actually.

It is with a heavy heart that I tell you that One Last Time will be the
final poem I post here at Good at Getting Better. (You can read it by clicking the link
or scrolling down a few posts) However, this is not the end.

I will be launching my new website soon, and hope upon hope that
I will find most of you again as we continue on our journey as writers.
Once the new website is up, everything you’ve read here, and more
will be available there, including a blog.

And while parting from GAGB is nothing short of bittersweet,
I am excited about the changes to come.
In the meantime, feel free to continue to contact me via email.
Check out the upcoming trailer for writingandpoetry.com.  Once it’s up
and running, I will post the link here. Have a great summer, and
we’ll see ya again in September!

Love,

I looked at several options including Google, Webs.com and Webstarts.com. I chose www.webstarts.com and so far am pleased. The biggest hurdle is perfecting what I want the final product to be prior to assigning it to my own URL. I will say they have made it very easy;  if you know basic MS applications, then you can create your own site. I have had a lot of fun and learned a ton.

Advice to their building there own site: 

 1.  Download all the clip art you can, there are free places such as http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/clipart/default.aspx

2.  Have your brand determined, what do you want the site to communicate (in 3 short pages – Home | About | Contact)

3.  Resign to the fact that you will want to “upgrade” and utilize the pay tools.  Investigate what those future cost will be ahead of time, even if you are not ready to invest today.

Hey, not bad for my first attempt!  Feel free to see my 1st release www.webstarts.com/eusebeia.  Note, it is still “rough”, but I am getting there. I suspect in a few weeks with many sweat hours, I will have a solid working model. 

Comments welcomed!

Hi. I have been setting up my website all afternoon. It still needs a lot of work but at least it has started. Here it is evening and I’m blogging about it. I want to thank everyone who offered  recommendations: Susan Mitchell, Lynne Hoenig, Bruce Foster, Deborah Frontiera and Donna Maloy. Donna actually came over to my house to help me. What a great lady. Our SCBWI group rocks!

            So what would make a person set up a website? I attended an SCBWI event in Austin on April 25, 2009 featuring editors and authors from Blooming Tree Press. One of the workshops led by Madeline Smoot was titled: Marketing Your Book (Yes, you have to. And here’s why.) This workshop covered everything about marketing with many good ideas. An author needs to build a corporate identity and there are several avenues to take including: business cards, websites, blogs—how to blog successfully, why you should blog even before you have a book, facebook and several other avenues. She even gave some good tips on what you should not say on facebook.

            One of the best things that came out of the workshop was that Anna Herrington asked if she could keep my manuscript, BLOOMING BLUEBONNETS—JEWELS OF NATURE, to share with her group. She even called her mom and shared it with her. Of course I said, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes share it with anyone you want to.” After rewriting it 53 times I was glad an editor liked it!

S E O / Search Engine Optimization-
We can help you drive more traffic to your store!
More traffic means better business!

Bronze Web Package:

Website With Color Scheme Options
Logo/Updated Logo
Domain Name & Registration
Upload Up To 20 Products
Inclusion In Shop New York’s Buy/Seller Community/Directory
High Volume Targeted Traffic To Your Site
URL Submission To All Major Search Engine/Directories
Shopping Cart Integration
Paypal/Google/Merchant Account Integration
Standard Search Engine Optimization Tags

Please view our website for prices:
www.Newyorkshopexchneg.com

]]> http://workfromhomedirect.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/website-builder-review-sbi-sitebuildit-sitesellit/ Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:06:12 +0000 grantbn http://workfromhomedirect.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/website-builder-review-sbi-sitebuildit-sitesellit/

Well, it’s Friday and I want to take a few moments and share a key element that will categorically help building your home or small business – I want to share some information (30 minute video) that you can review over the weekend if you like – you will thank me later… First, let me say that this is not an attempt to sell you something! My intention is to share with you a brilliant tool that I have discovered for building and developing your business through effective website construction, whether you do it yourself or have them build it for you. I found this innovative company and I want to share it with you – “pay it forward” so to speak. If you are anything like me, you are spending a small fortune (or perhaps even a large one!) on paid ads hosted on the search engines (google and yahoo!). You may even be generating a reasonable level of clicks from your ad(s) but a poor or very poor conversion rate (actual leads). Most “turn-key” businesses offer terrible carbon copy websites and landing pages that are not tailored to your specific business. You have 4-5 websites to choose from, you select one and build your business around it – this methodology is not effectively sustainable. Your website needs to be about you and your business! That said, you may have created a successful ad(s) that generate clicks, but once the web-surfer lands on your site, they immediately bounce off due to the fact the content is terrible or not really relevant to your ad. This company shows you how to build an extremely effective website in reverse (what your mentors don’t want you to know). Think for moment, here you are all fired up with real passion about your great business service, product, idea, hobby, etc. but nobody knows that you or your website exist! Search engine surfers cannot find you! You need to be found when surfers are searching for “keywords” that are relevant to the content of your website. Now you can do this without solely relying on expensive paid clicks! Once you build a proper website using the CTPM approcah (this begins by creating effective and relevant content. Don’t choose a domain name first for example – click the CTPM link it will help you understand) you’re on your way to generating organic (free) searches and ultimately, traffic and leads that result in sales. Of course, this is not to say that you can’t also advertise on-line and offline to generate even more leads – it’s your business and you can do whatever you wish. Once your site is posted on-line, it takes a few months to become established organically with the search engines, but it will be worth it (get rich quick DOES NOT exist – it’s elusive). You can add videos, pictures and whatever relevant content you like. Remember, you are building a real business – not a get rich quick scheme. Building it properly takes time, effort, money and most important; commitment, attitude, tenacity and a willingness to learn. Here are some links that will direct you to this wonderfully helpful tool. I would love your feedback and if you have any secrets or ideas to share with me, please do! Click here to:

View a 28-30 minute video tour about building your own site: http://videotour.sitesell.com/Assist0.html

Visit and tour the website: http://buildit.sitesell.com/Assist0.html

A friend of mine asked me how to get started with the website for his business idea.  I thought that because I took the time to write this down, I’d share it here too.  I can’t say anything specific about this business, but it relies on some sophisticated, social-network-related algorithms to rank candidates.  Here’s what I told him:

The best way to fiddle around with the algorithms for ranking is in a spreadsheet.  Excel or Google spreadsheets are both fine.  Translating the formulas into website code will be easy.  Finding the right formulas is hard and spreadsheets make it so you can experiment agilely.

The best way to make mockups and design the pages and website structure is honestly on a piece of paper.  Lots of people, including experienced designers, try to write the pages in code too early and get locked into it.  This won’t take very long and will let you start coding it up soon to show people soon.

To learn HTML, you should have some sort of sandbox environment.  I imagine that your firm or program must give you some sort of webspace.  If so, talk to the IT department about how you can upload files to it.  If you don’t have space there, you can create files on your laptop and look at them locally in your browser, or use Google’s Pages application.

To write the HTML files, you can use a text editor (not Word it has to be like notepad) or a WYSIWYG editor like Mozilla Composer.  Mozilla Composer is free and pretty good: http://www.mozilla.org/editor/ .  WYSIWYG is an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get” which basically means you aren’t writing in code.   Rather, you’re formatting the webpage the way you would a Word document with the underlying code hidden from view.   However, you can choose to view the code which is a learning-experience.

To get to your actual question: how to learn HTML, I would say that any book on amazon that has a lot of stars is as good as any book I can tell you about.  I would just say that before you get the book, give a try to a couple of online HTML tutorials.  Whatever comes out on top of a google search and gives you the right vibe is fine.  If those don’t work for you, get a book, but if they do work, they’ll save more than money.  I’ve often found that web-based tutorials were easier to use, more up-to-date, had cooler and more interactive examples and had better self-referencing structure.

Use the comments to tell me what I missed.

So far it’s been going good. I have another website (CookieLane.com) that I’ve been using for about 2 years and it hasn’t given me very many problems…nothing that I couldn’t work out.

But last year I decided that I needed my business to grow to include cakes AND cookies. Another problem was that I was (and still am) paying $20/month for my website which uses an online editor. It’s very convenient but very limited from the design aspect. Thus began my newest project, 350BakerStreet.com. I thought that I might be able to learn html online through w3schools.com. Don’t get me wrong, they are a great resource for learning, but I wasn’t able to pick it up as easily as I had hoped. So I abandoned the idea of creating my own website.

Until now!

I was at Barnes and Noble a couple weeks ago and I found this great book called “Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual”. I read it from cover to cover in about 3 days (about 500+ pages) and started to apply what I had learned.

Today, I’m still working on my little pet project, but I’m feeling a lot more confident in my abilities than I did when I first started. Please note: the website is still under construction, but will be finished shortly…I hope

Thanks for reading!

Unit Akupunktur Rumah Sakit Dr. Cipto Mangunkusumo, Jakarta

PENDAHULUAN

Hipertensi merupakan kelainan yang mempunyai pre-

valensi cukup tinggi di dunia, menurut WHO berkisar antara

8 — 18%. Di Amerika diperkirakan 20% penduduk dewasa

menderita hipertensi

l. Sedangkan di Indonsia menurut Boedhi Darmojo

2 prevalensi hipertensi bervariasi antara 1.8 –28,6%. Seringkali hipertensi tanpa disertai gejala dan baru disadari setelah timbul komplikasi pada berbagai organ tubuh

3 Selain itu perubahan pola diet tinggi karbohidrat, tinggi lemak, tinggi protein atau banyak garam cenderung pula menimbulkan efek terhadap tekanan darah

4. Pengobatan hipertensi secara garis besar dapat dibagi menjadi pengobatan farmakologis dan pengobatan non farmakologis

8. Telah menjadi anggapan umum bahwa pengobatan secara farmakologis mengharuskan penderita meminum obatsecara teratur untuk jangka waktu yang lama, bahkan seumur hidup

1-7. Selain memeeukan biaya yang tidak sedikit,perlu diperhitungkan pula efek samping pemakaian obat dalam jangka panjang. Chat-obat anti hipertensi berdasarkan titik tangkapnya dapat digolongkan dalam empat kelompok yaitudiuretika, vasodilator, penghambat sistem saraf simpatis dan penghambat sistem renin angiotensin dengan masing masing mekanisme kerjanya. Pengobatan hipertensi secaranon farmakologis terutama memberikan efek terhadap hipertensi ‘ringan, sedangkan pada hipertensi sedang dan berat pengobatan secara nori farmakologis hanya merupakan penunjang untuk memperkecil dosis obat dan mendapatkanpenurunan tekanan darah secar optimal

8. Para ahli terdorong

untuk menyelidiki kelebihan pengobatan secara non farma-

kologis mengingat sebagian besar kasus hipertensi merupa-

kan hipertensi ringari dan mengingat pula akan adanya efek

samping obat yang dipergunakan dalam jangka panjang

5

Pengobatan secara non farmakologis ini meliputi modi-

fikasi faktor lingkungan, pengurangan berat badan, pengurang-

an minum alkohol, peningkatan latihan jasmani, diet rendah

garam, serta teknik relaksasi dan sebagainya. Dengan cara-

cara ini selain didapat efek pada tekanan darah, penderita

pun akan merasa lebih sehat dan kualitas hidup akan ber-

tambah

9,10

.

Akupunktur merupakan salah satu cara pengobatan alter-

natif secara non farmakologis yang dapat digunakan untuk

pengobatan hipertensi. Laporan The New York State Com-

mission on Acupuncture (1974) menyatakan bahwa hiper-

tensi merupakan penyakit yang seringkali dapat diobati

dengan akupunktur. Berbagai penelitian telah pula dilakukan

untuk meneliti efek akupunktur terhadap penurunan tekanan

darah pada hipertensi.

http://www.websitetutorial.googlepages.com/

http://xprove.blogspot.com/

http://seeit1st.blogspot.com/

http://www.caramembuatwebsitegratis.googlepages.com/

http://delicious-cooking-recipes.blogspot.com/

http://aneka-resep-masakan-indonesia.blogspot.com/

Yep, that is my predicition.

In 2009, while our economy continues to slug along, those that do a good job of marketing themselves online will have a very good year.  We’ve all probably heard stories of how a lot of people became rich during the Great Depression – because it is true.  Those that keep their eye on the ball when everyone else is distracted will continue to hit home runs – it won’t be as easy as it was before, but it will still happen.

Markets are shifting right now.  While mainstream for quite some time now, the internet is now starting to subplant other channels of distribution and marketing.  Newspapers are struggling, some either are, or are planning to go to internet-only distribution.  Video, which had the exclusivity of TV delivery, is now more popular than ever online (even traditional TV’s might be hooked up to a PC or Apple TV), Google searches are replacing Yellow Page look-ups, businesses are advertising online with pay-per-click advertising.  While lower than before, the spikes in gas prices over the last few years has more people getting used to the idea of staying at home.  A new generation is growing up not knowing of a world prior to high-speed internet.  Social networking is redefining public relations for major companies and public figures.

There is a fundamental shift that is taking place – while we thought we have already seen the impact of the internet on our lives, we are now realizing that the last 10 years was just a slightly advanced stage in it’s infancy.  A major grow spurt is coming in 2009 and a lot of companies that thought they had a “web presence” are going to get left behind, while a lot of companies that are “plugged in” to the coming changes will reap great rewards.

So, what are the nutshell nuggets of knowledge to pull from all this?

First you can’t be just a “web presence”.  You can’t be “static” online.  You can’t think of a website as the beginning and end of your online efforts.  Sure, it has worked in the past, and in many cases working still.  But at some point it no longer will.

Second, change the way you think about the internet – almost consider it a parallel universe.  20 years ago, they called the concept “virtual reality”.  It made a lot of buzz but died down as the real world realities of the internet’s limitations at the time softened our vision of this “cyber-space”.  Now we are seeing virtual reality slowly coming about.  Sure, it’s not a funny headset and Tron-like graphics, but the internet is becoming another place that we exist, or more importantly, where your customer’s exist.  They are not just hopping online to do a quick search with a keyword phrase to find your product or service and then signing off, they are living much of their life there.  So, you will need to be “plugged in” to where they are, what they’re doing and how to get their attention.

We are already seeing this shift in our business.  We are not a website development firm anymore, despite my old-habits-die-hard habit of calling us that.  We are actually an interactive agency now.  Developing the site for your web presence is no longer the beginning and end of our involvement.  Throughout 2009 we will be asked to build the “main” site, setup the blogs, create subsites, recommend lead tracking solutions, secure advertising, handle marketing campaigns, develop a social media strategy, manage company brands, oversee public relations, broadcast call-in radio shows, produce video, write copy, record podcasts, program applications, research keywords and provide consultation services.

By being prepared for changes in 2009 as the internet leaves behind it’s infancy, you can be a part of it’s growth spurt.

If you’re going to build and maintain a website, you’ll need to use html at some point, often to correct or adjust what your web design software does. Learning about html can also help you to understand how this whole “web” thing got started and a bit of how it works. (The Wikipedia, of course, has a great entry on html.)

Personal webpages on UWM server space are now managed through PantherFile. Here’s a silly example of what you can do with webpages built using just html tags: kkprins website.

If you missed this workshop or want an electronic copy of the handout from the workshop, here is Anne’s basic html handout.