Dear Client:

I’d be happy to explain the different considerations when choosing a platform or service to deliver your email newsletters. As we discussed, it’s possible to use your blog or a third-party email newsletter marketing service.

In many ways the technology behind a blog and an email newsletter management service are the same. They both contain a back-end database to store data like addresses and names and a front-end website component to collect the data. Both offer a way to deploy emails, but a specialty email newsletter service will allow for highly stylized html emails.

The major divide between the two platforms comes in the email delivery and management process. Third-party email newsletter services, like Constant Contact and Email Labs (more listed below), specialize in meeting all the technical hurdles involved in successfully delivering email. Some of these hurdles include spam filters, ip blocking, and so on. Another difference is the ability to deliver a high volume of email and track usage and overall campaign effectiveness.

It’s worth noting that email marketing is a highly monetized segment of the industry and generally carries a hefty price tag (est. $25-100+/month). There are different fee structures used by the third-party services – i.e. pay by the number of subscribers, pay be the number of emails sent, and everything in between. Knowing how large your database is or will be and how often you intend to send e-newsletters will help to select a service.

So should you use the blog or a third-party email newsletter service? If the newsletter is a simple, text email and you’re subscriber database is under 5,000, then I would recommend starting with the blog. For a stylized, html email and a database to exceed 5,000 subscribers, I would recommend a third-party service to use from the start.

Here is an expanded list of email newsletter and e-marketing third-party services:

• http://www.constantcontact.com/
• http://www.benchmarkemail.com/
• http://www.boomerang.com/
• http://www.emaillabs.com/
• http://campaigner.com/
• http://www.myemma.com/
• http://www.graphicmail.com/
• http://www.icontact.com/
• http://www.mailbuild.com/
• http://sendloop.com/

I hope this was helpful in your decision making process. Please feel free to reply with any questions or comments.

Regards,
Dominic

Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.

Dear Client,

I’m writing to recap our conversation yesterday regarding improving your website’s visibility in the search engines. The following is a detailed description of SEO (search engine optimization) techniques as they apply to your website and practices in general.

As we discussed, efforts in SEO can be broken into two basic categories, external and internal. External efforts are those actions that take place outside of the website and are designed to drive traffic to the site. Internal efforts include structural and contextual changes on the website that are designed to improve the relevance of the site to search engines and subsequently, pull traffic into the site.

External SEO Efforts

Also known as SEM, or search engine marketing, external efforts take shape in a broad comprehensive marketing campaign that targets other websites, directories, news agencies, etc. Several examples of external marketing efforts include:

• Press releases written for and distributed to online PR channels – these are specific to online media in that they contain dynamic web content that may not necessarily translate to print.
• Content contributions to popular, high traffic, relevant websites – an example would be contributing articles to a legal blog, where the topic is specific to a choice keyword/key term (i.e. real estate law) and the article contains a link back to a corresponding website page that is geared towards the same keyword/key term.
• Utilizing social media outlets like facebook.com and linkedin.com (among many others) to create additional traffic channels to the site from other high traffic sites.

Internal SEO Efforts

We covered all the internal page structure elements that need to be in place to best position a page for search engine relevance. Regarding specialty SEO pages, it’s important to remember that no single page can perform well for many keywords/key terms. To that end, each page will be built around a single word or term. The page we looked closely at was for real estate. Following are the page elements that need to be in place and revolving around the single keyword or term. [some specific instructions are for Adobe Contribute website template, but can be applied universally]

• Page name: “keyword or term”.php – for example “realestate.php” or “real-estate-closing-negotiation.php”
• Found in Template Properities
  • Page title: titleBar_pageName – “keyword or term” i.e. “real estate”
  • Page title (extra optional): title_pageMsg – short message, perhaps an abbreviated versions of the meta description, including keyword or term
  • Meta Description: meta_description – a summary of the page under 250 characters, including the keyword or term. This description can be pulled and displayed in search results
  • Meta Keywords: meta_keywords – “keyword or term” and synonyms, along with other relevant terms like South Carolina or private practice, under 200 characters. Remember that plural forms aren’t necessary.
• Found in the body or content of the page
  • Page Title: This is the first editable region on the page. It is significant in that it is a Header 1(code <h1>), telling the search engine that the text here is the header for the content to come. You can think of this in terms of an outline. Header 1, Header 2, Header 3
  • Section Title: These editable regions have been set to be Headers 2. To continue with the outline idea, break the content of the page into sections and give them each a Section Title that contain the keyword or term or a synonym. If you’d like to subdivide the page further, manually enter a Header 3, 4 and so on within the Section Text region of the page. Be sure to keep the outline logical without skipping a header, for example Header 2 then Header 4. This structure is significant because it meets the accessibility guidelines of the Section 508 and enable text readers to better deliver the information.
  • Use of keyword or term in the copy: consider using each the following styles or forms at least once
    • Bold
    • Italic
    • Hyperlink
      • to an external, popular, relevant site – do not use “click here” use “keyword” as it appears in the natural flow of a sentence
      • also link back to internal pages, such as the Practices page
    • Header – covered above
    • Image name and image alternate text (alt text)
• Site map: after creating the page, be sure to edit the site map (sitemap.php) to include the new special SEO page just created. The significance of this is to make sure the page isn’t buried deep in the site where search engines assign a lesser value to the page. Note that the sitemap link in the footer of the home page (and every page) makes each link just two levels away from the root domain.

Blog

Internally, we also discussed the value of a blog. Blogs (derived from “web log”) is a database-driven, server-side application that allows for the easy creation and distribution of editorial content. Blogs are built to catalog articles or posts chronologically and have been constructed to syndicate the content automatically. An example of syndication is the use of RSS (real simple syndication, also known by other names), whereby anyone out on the web can subscribe to receive real-time updates of content on your site. This content can be received by an individual users’ pc or automatically published to another website. For this reason, it’s important to include a link back to your site inside each article.

A great deal of the value of a blog lies in the frequency of updates. Search engines record how frequent content on your site is updated and adjusts their return frequency accordingly. Frequently updated sites are crawled by search engine spiders more frequently and are subsequently considered more relevant than sites that sit stagnant. So the combination of frequent updates and the cumulative mass of relevant content on the site is a powerful tool to improve the site’s ranking with search engines over time.

Per adding a blog to the site, I would purpose customizing the design to match the site and integrating special features to maximize the reach and functionality of the blog. Again, the real value of a blog is frequent content contributions. So someone or several people within the organization would need to commit to a frequent or semi-frequent updates to get the most out of it. Publishing an article a week would be advised, even if just two paragraphs centered around a single keyword.

I hope this was helpful and please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

Best regards,
Dominic

Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.

The day has come that search engines edge out Yellow Pages for local business searches. According to a study by TMP Directional Marketing, search engines have taken over Yellow Pages as the more popular way for people to look for local businesses, 31 to 30% respectively.

Worth noting however, the decline in Yellow Pages use from 33% in 2007 to 30% in 2008, resulted in an increase in Internet Yellow Pages use from 17% to 19%. So with that, the 3% lose in Yellow Page use went online with 2% going to going to Internet Yellow Pages and 1% converting to search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Also interesting, despite the advancements in mobile technology, handset functionality and mobile broadband speeds, local search on mobile devices did not see an increase from 2007 to 2008. Curious! I’m not a mobile Internet user, so when I watch TV advertisements and read tech articles, I’m convinced that more and more people are going that direction.

The Take-Away: Local businesses can no longer rely on print alone to get in front of customers. A web presence is increasingly more important as local business search trends migrate to online resources.

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Even great things come to an end. We’re sad to announce that the long running Myrtle Beach Web Technology Discussion Group has come to an end. With my relocation to Charleston, so goes the group.

Over the course of the past year and a half, I’ve had the great privilege of consulting a number of Myrtle Beach small business owners. And in such a turbulent business climate, the value of our discussions were worth their weight in gold . . . for everyone involved. As a web specialist and small business consultant, my continual education is the value that I pass along . Well, this past year spent with local Myrtle Beach businesses—discussing their website needs, marketing campaigns and branding efforts (among many other topics)—has been a great leap forward in my professional education.

In the next chapter of my career, aptly named “Charleston,” I’ll be firing up a new web discussion group in the Charleston area for small business owners and non-profit organizations. A continuation of the Myrtle Beach incarnation, the Charleston Web Technology Discussion Group will be free and open to everyone, with discussions on topics such as: building and maintaining websites; search engine optimization; Internet marketing and measurement; business blogging; graphic design & do-it-yourself advertising; or wherever the discussion leads…

As always, bring your curiosity and any unanswered web design questions.

The Charleston Web Technology Discussion Group is led by Dominic Taverniti, owner of Applied Web Vitals.

Applied Web Vitals’ latest nonprofit client website is now live. Protect The Human, an Amnesty International special project, was another collaborative effort with Citizen Group, a premier branding and design firm located in San Francisco, California.

We were hired to write and implement the XHTML, CSS and Java Script for this one page special purpose website. The website incorporates the latest standards in usability and web semantics as well as clean, light, search engine optimized code.

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

As we mentioned in an earlier post, Applied Web Vitals is developing a line of website templates for the Adobe Contribute platform. These Contribute templates will be designed for plug-in-play use and will incorporate the latest SEO standards as well as clean, light XHTML and CSS code.

We anticipate our market for Contribute website templates to be end users and developers alike. Our basic Contribute template will be an excellent starting point for further development and third party application integration by web developers.

At this point, we would like to invite input on features and functions. Please share your wish list of top features with us. We also invite fellow Adobe Dreamweaver template gurus out there to chime in . . . and/or participate in development. Contact us to discuss getting in on the ground level of development.

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Quick announcement to Applied Web Vitals’ clients and others using the latest version of WordPress, version 2.6—the plugin PodPress, used for podcasting and video casting, is not working with the latest versions of WordPress. This issue has been outstanding for several weeks now and a resolutions does not appear to be available in the near future. For those interested, I can suggest an alternative to keep going. One that actually offers great advantages in media management, including sideshows, video and audio.

While on the topic of freeware though, some other thoughts have come to mind…

The reality of open and free technology catches up with us eventually. PodPress was developed and is maintained by a gracious individual who doesn’t profit from his work and offers it free to the public. Thousands (141,380 to be exact) have benefited and profited from this great tool. And at the same time, when it stops working, the same number of users come to a screeching halt. While some users like myself are occasional to frequent users, I know that others include large news syndications. What a great deal of faith and operating efficiencies we put into freeware!

Man, it hurts when your tools stop working! But if I tallied up the potential cost of all the freeware tools that I use, my business wouldn’t be able to afford them and wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is now.

…And so we appreciate the great benefits of the latest information revolution

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Our weekly Web Technology Discussion group will resume on Wednesday August 20th at 7pm - at The Market Commons Barnes & Noble cafe in Myrtle Beach. We will not be meeting 8/6 or 8/13.

Unless I get a special request otherwise, the main topic for 8/20 will be e-commerce. We’ll cover the different shopping cart options available, store functionality and things to consider, inventory management, payment processing and credit cards, and all the little details that need to happen before you get your first e-customer.

Thanks and I look forward to see anyone and everyone that’s interested in attending (it’s free by the way).

- Dominic

More info about the web technology discussion group.

We are pleased to share the launch our most recent client site, The Teak Hut at theteakhut.com. This South Carolina company has been in operation for a number years as a brick-&-mortar business. Several months ago, Applied Web Vitals was consulted to explore the move to e-commerce. At the same time, The Teak Hut decided to go for a full site redesign to better reflect the quality of their product–indoor and outdoor teak furniture.

Through a close dialog with the client, the site was mapped and a design, modeled after select premier online retailers, was mocked up for review and an enthusiastic approval.

TheTeakHut.com was built on the Dreamweaver template structure to give the client full site management control with Adobe Contribute. With our developed template platform in place, The Teak Hut was able to take the reins right out of gates and begin adding and removing content, creating new pages and optimizing their keywords for search engine placement.

The shopping cart application of choice was Ecommerce Templates, a robust and versatile cart that could be customized to meet The Teak Hut’s needs. Integrated throughout the site, a smooth shopping experience was achieved by seamlessly weaving the dynamic shopping cart functionality into every page on the site.

With sixty unique product categories and a very large, and growing, list of products, the ability to integrate the online shopping cart with the company’s Quickbooks POS system was an absolute must. The project required several e-commerce customizations and third part integrator, and in the end a one-of-a-kind solution was tailored for The Teak Hut.

For additional information on e-commerce websites

For additional information on Adobe Contribute, 2

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Applied Web Vitals is planning to release a line of website templates for the Adobe Contribute CS3 platform. The line of fully developed templates will be designed for plug and play use, for quick installation and launch.

Contribute CS3 is a website editing software program for the PC and Mac, developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Contribute is designed to edit and “contribute” to sites originally built with Adobe Dreamweaver templates. The program allows users to update content, add pages, files and media without any technical expertise or HTML knowledge.

When built on a robust Dreamweaver template structure in conjunction with other select web technologies, Contribute enabled websites are given the legs of a full content management system (CMS). Based on clean HTML/XHTML, CSS and search engine optimized code, Contribute sites are offered some great advantages over other popular CMS platforms.  Notably, traditional content management systems rely on server side technology and database counterparts that make customization and ongoing system management time intensive, technically complex and costly. Contribute sites on the other hand, once put into place, get better mileage between maintenance and have the huge advantage of simply having less parts to break—1. a premium Adobe program that comes with support and 2. straight forward server files—it doesn’t get any more simple than that.

Read how Adobe Contribute CS3 has helped Hopalong Animal Rescue save time, keep their website up-to-date and ultimately save the lives of more animals.

Applied Web Vitals’ Contribute CS3 website templates will incorporate a host of common small business website features and will come SEO and cross-browser compatible.  Years of best practices, scripts and cutting edge techniques will make this line of Contribute CS3 website templates an exciting addition to the market.