In recent times we have come a couple new project leads where we are bidding on a web development project where we were the local and more experience design shop and the competing bids were from another local development shop that outsourced the work to India (not to single them out, we have seen Vietnam & Russia).

In this situation we actually pulled our firm out of the bidding process.  We felt that it was not in our best interest to devalue our services to compete against a firm that was using talent that was under-experienced and qualified compared to our firm that has team members that hold degrees to show their commitment to their craft.  Not to say that in this fast moving web world you need a degree to produce quality work but it does help when you are looking for that quality work.

We felt if we lowered our quote to be competitive with the other firm it would actually do more harm to us and other professionals out their that work very hard to charge the rates they charge.  It is my personal opinion that I would rather support local professionals and economy than ship our money over seas just to make a profit.

My view is that you get what you pay for in these situations.  There is a place for outsourcing in the web development world but there are trade-offs you make when going that route.  Here is list of items you should think about when making the choice.

Items to consider when Outsourcing:

1. Do you need to meet face to face?

2. Do you need a designer or developer that speaks “Web Design English”?

3. Do you need someone formally trained in the fine arts for creativity?

4. Do you need to get feedback during normal business hours?

5. Are you looking to build a long term relationship with a local firm?

6. Is quality and attention to detail your biggest concern?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions then you should really consider a local (Made in America) design and development firm.  Yes, I agree you will pay more for local talent but in the end you will usually get a higher quality product in the end.  The situation were outsourcing IMHO works the best is when you know exactly what you want and you have diagrammed it to the last detail so there is not decisions that will need to be make by the outsourcing firm.

Dal

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It looks like this chapter is still not over.   Today I read that Legg Mason Capital Mgmnt has back Jerry Yang and the current board of directors.  This rejects Carl Ichan’s arguement that the board of directors botched the Microsoft merger talks.

Its my personal opinion that they should stay independent of Microsoft’s Live search if they are acquired either way.  Obviously some technology sharing is needed to help improve both search engines results (Live more that Yahoo).  To the public they should stay separate.   We need more choices that less in the search engine industry.

Hopefully Yahoo! in its current form can resist the massive pressure that is being put on the company and stockholders for major change that will go with its acquisition talks.

Here is a link for news on the current situation

This article was emailed to me this morning and it was a very interesting read. It talks about Microsoft using fake search spiders to generate hits on a website analytics referrer log. I would usually stay clear of rumors like this but in this case I have seen a bunch of traffic on one of my other websites from Live Search.

When I go to check the listing the supposed traffic came from I can’t seem to find the domain anywhere. This has been happening about atleast 6 months that I have noticed.  Here is some of the post on encodable.com.

“As this log snippet from VisitorLog shows, I get about 30 separate hits per day from hosts named livebot-65-55-*-*.search.live.com.  The vast majority of them are bots, not real humans, as evidenced by the fact that they have no screen resolution (and therefore no screen), which while not a guarantee of botness, is a pretty strong sign of it, especially when combined with other bot-like characteristics such as having “livebot” in the hostname.

So far this is all OK.  However, the bot’s USER_AGENT string is set to IE7/Win2003, which is bogus [the full string is: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)].  It’s clearly a bot, and possibly a spider, so it’s not a real IE7 browser; it should identify itself with an accurate user-agent string like a responsible internet citizen.”

Click Here to Read the Full Post

Well the has finally come. Flash is now SEO-friendly according to Google’s Webmaster Central blog. First off, I do not recommend anyone go out and design their new website in 100% flash and then expect to do as well or better than and text based website.

Internally at Infoscour we will be creating a flash website to rank for some search terms that are mildly competitive to see what we “can” and “cannot” do. We still believe that unless you have a Fortune 1000 brand, it will be increasingly hard to outrank websites that do major content production through website development or blogging.

With that out of the way lets look at some of the Q&A that the Google engineers put out on what this actually means and what limitations are still in place:

From the Webmaster Central Blog:

Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
A:  We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
A:  All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
A:  At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

Q: How does Google “see” the contents of a Flash file?
A:  We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
A: Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google’s ability to index Flash?
A; There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

In closing I feel this is a BIG announcement but without testing to see “how” indexable a flash site is and “how” well it performs compared to other websites, before I make a claim sayings “it’s okay and the water is warm” on flash.  We will be writing a follow-up article on this in the future after we gather some data on our tests.

Source: Google on Indexing Flash

Today’s post we will talk about website hosting and what to look for in this type of service. With so many host choices available for your website it is hard to know what you need and how to judge a web host. Please forgive me if I miss some questions or tidbits of information, this is meant to be a primer to get you thinking about your needs when it comes to hosting your website. First we will put forth a number questions you will need to ask yourself or web developer:

Questions you should ask yourself:

1. What Platform [Linux(Apache) , Windows (IIS/.Net) or Macintosh (OSX Server)] ?

One of the first questions you will come across is what operating system you will be delivering your website or web service on. A majority of websites are delivered on some version of Linux as the operating system (OS) using Apache as the the web server. Others are developed using Microsoft’s OS and IIS as the web server or Apple’s OS X operating system on the Xserv server platform.

2. Service Requirements of your Website?

Next you will need to look at the different software and technologies you will be using on your website. Especially with open-source software you will need know what the software’s requirements are (PHP, MySql, Python, etc…). Not all hosts are running the most current or older version of the software you will need so that will create a compatibility issue. Also there might be certain types of access you will want like Shell or default settings you will want enabled like mod_rewrite on apache.

3. Response & Uptime of the Server and Datacenter

This has to do with the hardware, connection and setup of the datacenter. Depending on the desired response time (hopefully well under 8 secs) you are looking for, you will want to get info on the type of connection and server you will be on too gauge the kind of performance you can expect from your host. If you are going shared rather than dedicated hosting you will also want to know how many other accounts they put on your box. Another consideration for shared hosting is what other companies are hosting on your box. If you are using a shared IP address this could have affects on your SEO rankings. If one of the companies on your IP block is spamming or doing other tactics that violate the terms of service then your website could be associated with this practice and that would harm your rankings and traffic. Datacenters are gauged in tiers from (1-4) with 4 being the highest. The higher the tier the most redundant their power and network systems are and the lower the downtime or higher the uptime. People usually have heard about the five nines uptime (99.999%).

Things to look for in the Web Host:

1. Pricing

Well this is pretty self explanatory. Low price is always sought but make sure you understand the lower you go, the more you will be sacrificing something, features, space, bandwidth or support. Read the fine print

2. Customer Service & Tech Support

This is the either the most important or top two things that I look for when looking into a web host. I can’t tell you how many times I have dealt with inadequate customer service or innate technical support. Most very cheap hosts will make it almost impossible to get someone on the phone or if you do then they do not know anything useful. Other will make you submit everything through a email ticketing system. When you are running a web business you need to make choices like you would for a offline business. So when you find a host that actually has good support and a knowledgeable staff, keep them close like a blanket. I am not going to make any specific recommendations in this article, but there is a host in Southern California that has a beautiful website and service & support that matches the flashiness of their site. I kid you not that they “actually” answer the phone between 3-5 mins and the person on the phone either knows something or will really send it to the right person and you will get a phone call back within 45mins. I was so blown away by this service that I feared they would go out of business or I was dreaming because that almost never happens.

3. Features

Other than having the services you need for your website, you will want to look at the features for the web host’s packages to see what they come with. Most some with Cpanel (admin control via web browser), this is very useful for companies that need to manage their computer services internally or can not afford a part or full time server administer. Also you will want to look at the bandwidth and storage you get with the package, Look for other feathers like the ability add on multiple domains and how many FTP/Email accounts it will allow you too have.

4. Location of Datacenter

Lastly, you will want to take into account where your website host’s datacenter is physically located. Even through the internet is interconnect at near light-speed, that doesn’t account for traffic on network switches. Having a host that is located close to the backbone should give you faster response time to you and your customers. For larger websites you might want to have servers on the east and west coast so your traffic is load-balanced depending on the location of the server request. This is usually for websites with heavy traffic but if you know you are going to have the next big thing then it would be wise to think about this and incorporate it into your planning.

In closing I hope this primer about web hosts and hosting feature will be helpful in helping you choose you next host.

-Dal

Will the record oil prices and rising gasoline costs be the boon needed to create a renaissance for e-commerce?

I believe so. At the writing of this article according to Bloomberg.com, West Texas Intermediate crude is at $136.33 /barrel and the average price for a gallon of gas is $4.03/ gallon. With record prices with not sign up retreating anytime soon I believe we could see a whole new waves of online consumer that will use the web to purchase items to save gas to the mall or whatever superstore you prefer.

Main Reasons People Shop Online:

1. Save Time

2. Save Money (might be changing?)

3. More Selection (usually)

4. Save Gas (????)

5. Enjoys Shopping Online (small but growing)

At this rate I believe more people will move purchases online to save trips they would normally drive to a shopping center.  Suburbs and Rural areas will mostly likely see the greatest growth in this area, being they are usually the farthest away from major downtown business districts.  This brings us to the next question.

With the rise in fuel prices, will we see prices online rise?

I think so as well, with these higher gas prices (and a host of other issues) we are already seeing prices for air cargo and travel rise in step.  This increase will have too be offset at some point.  I am not sure how long Amazon.com and the likes will absorb these increased operating costs before they will need to offload some of that too the consumer to maintain or prop-up decreasing margins?

In conclusion I wanted to close with saying that we are entering an unprecedented time that will have many ups and downs and a good thing to do is to keep an open mind, weigh the options and make your own choice.  In the end, this is just my opinion. Please email me with comments and if they are insightful or interesting I will add them with your first name, last initial and city/state.

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Dal

This afternoon I am watching a video on SEOmoz and reading a post on Shoemoney.com about the ramifications of giving away tactics that work effectively on gaining higher placement in the search engines like Google or Yahoo!.

I posted a comment on SEOmoz so I will follow up on that.  In my opinion if you are a search engine marketing and you “out” a tactic that you are using for a client and it gets “fixed” by Google and harms their rankings then you are a fool and your client should fire on the spot.

Personally I only give away valuable information like this in a 1on1 situation with someone that I know and trust.  This is a billion dollar industry so you have a market that will try anything to get on top of the rankings so if someone posts a tip that actually works, people are going to not only copy it over and over again for their vertical they will also pass it too all their buddies as well or even blog about it.  At that point Matt Cutts or one of his minions will read it and he will whip out is “Easy Spam Block” button and kill it like Ludacris at Summer Jam.

I already mentioned a cool trick for a social media website at the SMX Advanced after party and I had emails in my inbox the next morning asking me to email instructions on how to reproduce it.  It dawned on me that maybe I should STFU as well.   I am going to sit down with my buddy and explain it too him but it will not be written down and I will ask him to use it for his personally projects only and not never discuss it period.

In this type of environment there is way too much upside for keeping your mouth shut and only sharing with trusted friend then too openly talk or blog about tricks and tactics that work currently.  I know some will say “well, if you so good then it shouldn’t matter”.  Well my answer is “I like to work smarter not harder”.

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Dal