A few years ago, it was sufficient for a business simply to have an online presence. However, technical developments such as e-commerce functionality and interactivity have turned the modern business website from a collection of static text pages into a commercial powerhouse. Web 2.0 tools and software are creating new opportunities both for marketing and interaction with customers, with options such as live chat support, interactive feedback and personalized interfaces. The rise of Google and the success of its PageRank search results have changed the way people look for websites, and the way businesses think about how they are found and what to offer searchers when they arrive.

Viewed through a modern lens, many business websites have simply not kept pace with technological developments. Instead there has been a tendency for businesses to build a website, put it out on the Internet, and then assume that leaving it there is enough. Even large companies with dedicated in-house staff often focus on one aspect of their websites to the detriment of others; for example, content over features, design over content or software over design. Instead, Web designers should take a holistic view of their sites as organic and constantly evolving entities, incorporating relevant content and features as well as identifying the value in new technologies and leveraging them to benefit both the business and the consumer.

For example, building RSS feeds into a website allows consumers to receive regular updates on company news and products, bringing information directly to their desktops. Incorporating social feedback such as rating and reviewing products encourages a sense of community, fostering word-of-mouth and viral marketing among current – and potential – clients. Search engine optimization allows businesses to use the power and popularity of Google to their advantage, and link exchanges and clickthroughs such as AdSense offer additional opportunities for revenue generation. The potential for interested businesses to take advantage of new technologies to build better, more successful websites is enormous.

Routine maintenance, while more mundane, is just as important as evaluating and incorporating new technologies. Failure to carry out regular checks and updates can result in broken links, features that do not run properly in newer Web browsers, and dated style and design. Usability and accessibility standards are constantly evolving, and businesses that fail to keep track of developments will soon find that their websites suffer as a result. An out-of-date website suggests that a company does not care enough about either its clients or its products to keep its marketing materials up to date – a company that is lazy and behind the times. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen stresses the negative impact of linkrot on the consumer: “It is in your interest to reduce the amount of dead links in your own pages. The overall quality of the user experience strongly influences people’s assessment of the credibility and value of a site: if a site doesn’t work well, users will abandon it (1).” Worse still, if the most fundamental part of the website – the information it contains – is not regularly reviewed and revised, in addition to aggravated customers the end result could be a hefty fine for breach of trading legislation, as one New Zealand company discovered at great cost (2).

A company’s website should be thought of as a virtual store or branch, as important to its customers as any physical location – indeed, in some ways more so, because a website that has been optimized to take advantage of search engine rankings can draw interest and trade from all over the world. A company’s website is also a primary marketing tool, where it can gather core information about products, services and facilities that it wishes to disseminate to its clients. In Canada alone, close to 70% of the population is online and a total of $7.9 billion was spent in e-commerce transactions in 2005 (3). This is a significant market share, and one that is growing all the time.

A website riddled with poor spelling, dated information or dead links is the online equivalent of a store that hasn’t been cleaned in months, with old products cluttering the aisles and dirt accumulating in the corners. Alternatively, a clean, up-to-date, user-centered website that utilizes the best of the Web’s new technologies is a flagship store built to the highest customer service standards. Attempting to save money on website maintenance and design is invariably a false economy; as the average consumer grows increasingly tech savvy, the importance of maintaining an up-to-date website as a communication, marketing and commercial tool will only increase.

1. www.useit.com/alertbox/980614.html
2. www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=11451&cid=3&cname=Technology
3. www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/061101/d061101a.htm

Just as employers are figuring out the role of blogs, their value and downside, along come wikis. Actually, wikis have been around for quite some time, but experts say it’s just now that mainstream employers are starting to tap into the power of such Web sites - where users can add and edit content at will - as a means of collecting employee knowledge and enhancing productivity.

Even as the research firm Gartner Inc., based in Stamford, Conn., is predicting that by 2009 half of companies worldwide will be using wikis, employers ranging from investment banks to book publishers to nonprofits are using them in a variety of ways.

Source: www.newsday.com/…

RO »» Websites hosted with Reliably Online have wiki capability pre-installed, it just needs set up and customized for your business. Contact us if you think your company website could benefit from having a wiki.

… If Chambar was perhaps the most anticipated restaurant ever to open in Vancouver, it would also become an unwitting model for “Opening Soon” blogs. Contrived by restaurateurs as diverse as Sean Heather (The Irish Heather, Salty Tongue, Shebeen et al), Brian Fowke (Rare One), and Tom Doughty of the soon-to-open Fuel, these blogs were added to restaurant websites, or started in culinary websites such as eGullet, WaiterForum and Urbandiner.

These blogs take the food-obsessed through the travails of real estate deals, renovation and licensing hazards, physical exhaustion and emotional upheaval. More importantly, they take foodies inside, so that they feel let in on trade secrets. They feel empowered, and ultimately gain a sense of ownership in the project. Importantly for the restaurateur, the blogs provide a platform of eager customers on opening night. Forget old school marketing and expensive public relations tactics, and even artfully created websites: blogs are essentially free and easy …

Source: www.vanmag.com/…

RO »» Have a budget but need to create some buzz for your endeavour, contact Reliably Online to discuss the possibilities.

Email Forwarding: This allows you to check your you@yourdomain.com email address at your regularly used email address as your domain name email is forwarded to your regular account, whether it is an online account, a corporate account or a home account provided by your ISP.

POP Accounts: This allows you to set up a separate account with you@yourdomain.com in an email application such as Outlook Express or Apple Mail so that your domain name email is kept separate from your regularly used email and so you can customize your email’s header info. We will provide you with a username, password, incoming server and outgoing server to set up in your email application. If you are going to have multiple POP accounts you may want to consider getting more storage space.

Webmail: This allows you to access your you@yourdomain.com POP Account via your own website (eg. www.yourdomain.com/webmail ). However, it is recommended that you get additional storage space if you plan to use this as your primary email option.

A good place to start building up quality links for your website is to submit your site to the DMOZ Directory. Listing can take a while but once you are listed you will receive a quality inbound link. Also other directories use DMOZ as their source for listings thus you will likely get additional links from these sites.

Besides the bold, italics and list options that are built into the Text Editor, there are a few other options that you can use:

• Paragraph breaks are done by simply hitting the Return key on your keyboard.
• Line breaks are done by holding down the Shift key and then hitting Return.
• Heading tags are also built into the CSS code of your website that you can used to make text of varying sizes and usually of the main colour of your website. (eg. <h3>use for big, coloured text</h3> or <h4>use for slightly bigger, coloured text</h4> or <h5>use for normal size, coloured text</h5>)

Please contact Reliably Online if you require more help editing and formatting the content of your website.

Reliably Online has refined its customer-centric system for creating and managing the design and development of websites. Using our template based layout system and WordPress for content management we can quickly and efficiently create a custom website for your business. SEO is also incorporated into our Standard Website Package so that your website will not only look and function well, it will be found.

Contact Reliably Online to learn about what we do, what we can do for you and what it costs.

<strong />
Sometimes it likes to add this code when you have edited around text that was bold. If you click on the HTML tab in the Text Editor’s Toolbar and delete all instances of <strong /> then that should take care of everything underneath that being made bold. (Please note that you do not want to delete </strong> as that is a proper closing tag for bold.)

Your website is composed of Pages, Posts, Links, Categories and Comments which you can manage through the Dashboard once you are logged in — www.yourdomainname.com/wp-login.php

Pages
Most of your website’s content will be on Pages. Go to Manage > Pages and click Edit in the list of pages. From there you can edit the text using the built-in Text Editor. (Note: Text Editor’s Toolbar does not yet work in Safari.) You can also preview the Page before clicking Save. For most Clients it will not be necessary to touch the options in the right column as these will have been preset by Reliably Online.

Images
Images can be uploaded (without FTP) and inserted into the content using the built-in Upload Form. Once your images is uploaded you can click on the image icon and Send To Editor as well as choose to Use Original or Use Thumbnail among other options. You can also browse through all your uploaded images.

Posts
Some of your content will be managed through Posts. Posts are more for blogging type websites but they can be good useful for pages in which you want content to accumulate and be archivable. (eg. Blogs, FAQs or News). The content of each Post is managed in a similar mannner to that of Pages. However, in the right column you will want to choose the appropriate Category for your Post.

Links
Links are also organized into categories but they are used for creating lists, especially lists of Links. These lists can be displayed according to user-defined specifications and they are often displayed in the side columns but they can also be integrated into content of specifically designed pages (eg. Links & Resources).

Categories
Your Posts are organized into Categories and you can add, change or delete Categories accordingly. Posts can also go in multiple Categories and Categories are hierarchical (as can Pages be).

Comments
Notification of Comments will be emailed to you and then Moderate them accordingly.