Category — Miscellaneous

How awesome is this?  A few days after I posted about the coolness of Guy Kawasaki’s new startup, Alltop, this blog was accepted into the Entrepreneurship / Startups categories!

You can all see my cool new badge in the upper-right corner of my blog now!  Isn’t it cool?

As someone who utilizes the value Alltop offers each day - I plan to make my site more valuable to my readers because of this.  I know I have a problem posting often, but I have set time aside in my daily schedule to start updating and adding more content with value to my site, more frequently.  Since it is Fourth of July weekend, I will use this time to gather some creative posts and then start publishing them come the first of the week.  I know if I post them this weekend only a fraction of you will see them, so I can wait a few days.

Anyhow - I just want to say, Thank you Alltop.  I am truly honored to be listed on your featured sites.  Especially in more than one category! 

This company is top notch and I highly recommend them to anyone.

Okay, you know you Stumble too much when you start to see the same sites over and over, or they tell you to “go outside and play for a while”.

I love reading FastCompany magazine, but I feel like the same issue has been in stores forever!  Their website updates with the magazine, usually, and that is just not often enough!  I really wish there was some way to make the print magazine business more efficient and quicker.  I mean, it takes the press like one day to print all the magazines for an entire month, so what the heck is taking them so long?

On the flip side, blogs are just too damn fast.  I know I don’t update this blog often enough, but the blogs I read update so often, so frequently, that I am forces to speed read through them or just skim through the headlines.  It’s a little disappointing sometimes.

Darren Rowse and other bloggers have long debated over blog post frequency, and the effectiveness of different speeds, but I am going to have to say leave it at one or two posts per day, PLEASE.

I don’t expect anyone to listen, so whatever.  I just thought I would point this problem out.

All of this hype with blogging is starting to spread to most of the major media outlets. Is this good or bad? Well, only time will tell. Personally, I don’t think this is such a great idea.

I realize that social media is the “wave of the future”, but the whole basis for most established traditional media outlets is their integrity and quality. When major media outlets such as my local media outlet, The Indianapolis Star, try to become “social” then it really doesn’t work out as well as you would expect.

Go to IndyStar.com and check out any article, like this one, and read some of the comments that have been left regarding the article. This is just downright wrong, and I think some of these people need to be educated before posting. Sites like IndyStar.com need to disable comments or start heavily moderating them. It’s quite obvious they just want to get people involved like bloggers do, but they must realize they cater to a completely different audience. They cater to the general public while blogs and bloggers cater to more tech savvy users that are capable of using search, like Google, to find what they are looking for.

There is a lot of great things that the Internet and bloggers have which major news companies don’t. But if major outlets are going to start mimicking - Please do NOT allow for commenting. It’s just going to be a flame war between hundreds of thousands of un-educated people with opinions.

Yes folks, you read the title correctly.  I said that you cannot beat good old fashioned HTML.  What am I referring to?  Try to remember the times before Google when everyone was using WebCrawler, Alta Vista, and Yahoo while almost all sites were static and hand-updated with quality, innocent information.  This was a time before affiliate programs and internet advertising was very young.  Yes, those were the good ol’ days.  Now, web content has a higher value than newspaper articles and affiliate links run rampant.

What is the point of this post?

I am going to admit, there are new alternatives in website design utilizing CSS and PHP that can outrank and out perform any static HTML site in a heartbeat, but people with old content-rich static HTML websites are still reaping some profits from the early days of the internet.  There is a reason these sites have done so darn well over such a long time!

Old school HTML is basic, static, and time consuming to make changes.  However, it’s so simple that all search engines can easily crawl and index any content.  Making the crawling easier gives you the first shot at rankings and improves your chances of getting ranked for existing topics and terms.

I’m not really sure how to word this post without pissing a bunch of people off, but basically what I am trying to say is - Based on my personal experience, and historical data, some of my static HTML sites are still outperforming my much larger and more popular CSS, PHP, and dynamically driven sites (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) that have several more hours of SEO work done to them.

I’d like to get the opinion of what others think about this?  Obviously I am not saying let’s all ditch what we have learned over the years and start creating static HTML sites again, I am just pointing out how successful my older sites have been and still are.  I think the old K.I.S.S. (”Keep It Simple Stupid”) strategy is at work on the internet too!