Now Hiring: Web Developer/Programmer

Corporate Web Services is now accepting applications for a Web developer to join our highly motivated design team. This person will be an integral part of our web development efforts and will be responsible for creating custom Web-based solutions for our customers. Good communication skills are a must. We prefer a full-time position, but would consider part-time employment for a highly skilled individual. Compensation is based on experience.

Corporate Web Services is a leader in providing web development services on a national basis. As a developer with CWS, you'll have the opportunity to work in a fast-paced environment with opportunities for both personal and professional growth.

Applicants who meet the qualifications below should apply online at our website. This position is located in Rochester, MN.

Development

• Able to code, rigorously test and deploy Web applications.
• Pursues best practices and standards-based development
• Able to work with clients to effectively determine project requirements
• Familiar with standard Web development tools including Photoshop and Dreamweaver (additional software is always a plus)
• Understands basic relational database design concepts.
• Strong working knowledge of at least one of our standard development platforms, which include LAMP (php), ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails.
• Strong working knowledge of HTML and CSS

General

• Excellent communication skills
• Ability to work independently
• Ability to prioritize and balance simultaneous projects
• Attention to detail in all areas
• Desire to learn

Ask CWS: Should I buy links to my web site?

I have received a couple of questions about paid links and whether one should consider them. As you may know, inbound links are an important element in search engine optimization. However, the priority should be to have quality links to your web site and not just quantity.

The offers that I have seen claim to be from many web sites and websites that they own. To be honest, links from a lot of web sites can help only if the sites are truly different (content, design, and links) and are on different web servers.

Google even has guidelines about paid links and link schemes. One article states that:

"Examples of Link Schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate
  PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods
  on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive
  link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
• Buying or selling links that pass
  PageRank"

Google and the other search engines have started to seriously focus on the issue. In cases where they have good reason to suspect links being bought and sold, both the selling and the buying web sites are usually dropped in rankings or have a penalty which downgrades the ranking. This may mean nothing to the big company that has 1000's of web sites, but most small companies have one site. To be dropped in the rankings for a domain means, transferring to a new domain, or reworking your links and that can be a long process.

Google does not forbid paid links. They have this to say about links for advertising:

"Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"

I have read posts and emails that say there are ways to hide the paid links, and experts show that the search engines cannot see all of the paid links. Google has made it easy for just about anyone to report paid links. They have an anonymous form to point out a web site that someone suspects of buying or selling links. There are two way to do this:

1. Sign in to Google's webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word "paidlink" (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you'll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.


2. Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word "paidlink" (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

Paid links can help a web site move up in search engine rankings. A sudden increase in inbound links can looks suspicious to the search engines and hurt your ranking. In SEO there really are no set rules to abide by right now. The search engines all operate under slightly different guidelines and what they like and don't like can change more than daily. Most SEO experts frown upon doing something that is questionable now and could cause a drop in rankings later.

What does this mean for me and my web site? Well, some paid links can help your rankings, be very wary of getting a lot of paid links. If a company offers to have links on a number of "their" web sites for a fee, remember that a sudden increase of links from a couple of web sites may look suspicious to the search engines. Trading links are not the best way to go, but if you are doing your own SEO, it is the most cost effective and safest way to build links.

CrossLoop Unveils Helper Marketplace

Back in 2006, I informed you about a new piece of software called Crossloop. As you may recall, they specialize in connecting two computers together for remote management. For example, I could easily connect with my brother in Texas if he needed me to assist with installing software on his computer.

But what happens if my bother needs help and I'm too busy helping my sister, my parents, my brother-in-law, and my uncle? Don't laugh, it could happen!

Earlier this week, they added an interesting component to their business model called the "Helper Marketplace". The idea is that you can connect with other "tech savvy" individuals who are experienced and can help you solve a computer problem. So, when my brother runs into an issue, he can search for a "geek" to log onto his computer and assist him.

As a "techie", I have the option to register with them and get paid for assisting others. I might make a little money and you get your computer fixed... it's a win-win for everyone.

From a business perspective, I'm impressed by CrossLoop's innovation in this area. When I first wrote about them they barely had a concept, and as of today they have served 30 million desktop sharing minutes and received some excellent recognition - CNet's Download.com recognized them one of The 10 Best Downloads for 2007, Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal recommended them and InformationWeek recognized them as one of the Top Tech Sites for 2008. That's fantastic for a little start-up with a big idea.

Ask CWS: Should I register this domain?

Every few weeks, I'm asked a question about a domain name and if it should be registered and/or renewed from a particular vendor. Most recently, I received the following email which had been forwarded to me from a confused customer:

Dear COMPANY, Inc.,

We are Beijing Inveis Network Information Technology Co.,Ltd which is the domain name register center in China. We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register "COMPANYinc" as their domain names and Internet keyword on April 19th, 2008. Because this involved your company name or trade mark so we inform you in no time. If you considered these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and there was necessary to protect them by registering them first, contact us soon.

Kind Regards,

Kevin zhang
Tel:+86-10-82476192 ext.604
Fax:+86-10-62477798
Beijing Inveis Network Information Technology Co.,Ltd

While I do not believe this to be a complete scam, I do find it hard to believe that COMPANYinc.cn is in high demand. They are probably simply trying to persuade the owners of the popular .com domain name into purchasing the .cn domain (by creating a sense of urgency). On a side note, I also found it interesting that the company was not using a .cn domain name themselves, they preferred the .com domain name too.

I advised the customer that there are literally hundreds of domain name extensions available (for nearly every country) and that you can't possibly register them all. Nor would you want to, as the cost of doing this far outweighs the benefits.

To keep it simple, here are a few tips to remember when it comes to domain names:

1) Know who your domain is registered with and keep this information in a safe place.
2) Know who to call if you have questions about your domain.
3) Know when your domain renews. You will receive solicitations from other registrars as much as 6 months before it will expire. If the notification is not from the company listed in #1, ignore it.
4) Have one primary domain and do your best to get it listed with search engines. Avoid trying to market/promote several domains at once. If you do have several domains, use them for testing and measuring ad campaigns.
5) If you have multiple domains, consolidate them at one company to avoid confusion.
6) When in doubt, refer to #2.

Case Study: Mayo Medical Laboratories

Last summer, CWS worked with Mayo Medical Laboratories to redevelop the structure of MayoMedicalLaboratories.com, and we have continued to support the expansion of its offerings. We put a lot of effort into the architecture of this site's codebase, and recent statistics have shown that these efforts are paying off.

Overall traffic to the site has doubled, but even more interesting is a six-fold increase in traffic specifically referred by search engines over an eight-month period. More recently, we've worked to develop a system for public access to the catalog of medical tests offered by MML, and this tool is already drawing nearly half of the site's traffic.

Here are a few of the strategies employed to achieve these measurable results:

• Good separation of content and style. Most people know that a Web page is driven by some underlying code that's not usually displayed. But what's not always understood is that not all code serves the same function. Of course the actual text you see on a page is included, but a good portion of the code that's loaded into your Web browser is about style -- the way a page looks. When a search engine looks at the page, it doesn't care about style; content is king. In modern Web design, it's possible to almost completely separate style code from written content, but this practice isn't always followed well. When it is, the results can be dramatic. In addition to giving search engines a clearer picture of content, code separation can significantly reduce the time required to load pages and make changes far easier to implement. It also opens the possibility of repurposing content for alternative devices, like mobile or print versions, without duplicating the content.
• Appropriate use of structure. The third type of code that makes up a Web page represents its structure. Many types of structure can end up yielding the same visual result. Looking at a building from the outside, you might not know if its studs were made of wood, steel, or Styrofoam. But that doesn't make all three building materials equally sound. The same is true of Web pages; the underlying structure can have a big impact on accessibility and maintainability. It's also particularly helpful for allowing search engines to assign context to words. For example, human beings rely on visual cues like text size and color to identify headings and other important words on a page. Search engines (not to mention visually impaired human beings) can't do this, so they rely on the document's structure to determine what's important.
• Internationalization. When websites aim to attract a global audience, it's important to correctly encode and structure multilingual content. This improves performance with international search engines and also ensures that pages display consistently across a diverse range of platforms and browsers.

CWS believes in producing Web sites and applications that are focused on meeting business objectives and producing measurable results. Contact us for a risk-free assessment.

THIS IS A SOLICITATION

OK, it's not. I selected that title for this article because it is important to know these four words and look for them on all invoices you receive. Two years ago there was a Search Engine Optimization scam that people asked me about often. Today, I've had two customers send me emails asking if the "invoices" they have received are legitimate. Take this one for example:


Now one might say to themselves, "this looks an awful lot like a bill." However, if you read carefully you'll see the following mixed into the text:

THIS IS A SOLICITATION FOR THR ORDER OF GOODS OR SERVICES, OR BOTH, AND NOT A BILL INVOICE, OR STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT DUE. YOU ARE UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO MAKE ANY PAYMENTS ON ACCOUNT OF THIS OFFER UNLESS YOU ACCEPT THIS OFFER.

Well, that's nice of them to make their "flyer" look just like an invoice. The only reason they put that text in there is because it's what keeps them out of prison. I checked out their website, which had no phone number to contact them, and they are located in Nassau, Bahamas.

Apparently they don't have jails in the Bahamas... because that's where these guys deserve to be. Their legal disclaimer may make this type of activity legal, but it's far from morally correct.

Personal Touch From 1,000 Miles

As I mentioned back in February, my family is gearing up for the March for Babies walk on April 26th. We've been actively fundraising and spreading the word as best we can for a cause that is very close to our hearts.

This year, we decided to do something a little different and order t-shirts for everyone who joined "Team Carson". Since we were ordering a very small quantity and needed a quick turnaround, my wife decided to order them online from CustomInk.com. They had a cool web interface that allowed her to "build a design" online and send proofs back and forth with me. She ended up with a nice design (below) and placed the order.


This is where her "automated" online ordering experience turned personal. Within a few days, Kim received an email from Robin at CustomInk.

Hi Kim,

I noticed that you have designed shirts for an upcoming March for Babies charity event. We think it's terrific that you are participating in such a worthy cause! CustomInk would love to help you reach your fundraising goal by making a small donation to your team.

Could you please reply to this e-mail with the link to your individual sponsorship page, team page or an address to which we may send a check?

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Warm Regards,

Robin Matheson
CustomInk.com

In a matter of hours, we had received a donation from CustomInk via our online fundraising website. This small gesture was enough for me to become a raving fan of CustomInk.com for life. It's nice to know that other online companies have been able to connect with their customers in a personal way. Keep up the good work!

SEO Yourself?

After the last post about SEO, we received an anonymous comment about the article which said:

Hello, I agree with you, Alan, that it is important to use SEO, but I do not think that it is neccessary to hire a SEO Firm.

This got me thinking about the perceived value of hiring a professional SEO firm. Is it really absolutely necessary to hire a firm like CWS for search engine optimization?

Amazingly, the answer is "No."

I must concede that one can perform SEO on their own website and not hire a professional firm. With enough research, analysis, and a little bit of luck any intelligent person could achieve measurable results without professional help.

However, I'll also argue that a professional can do it much better and faster than any novice who doesn't have the software or knowledge that comes by working with it every day. For example, a few years ago I decided to build my own deck. I studied websites on the subject, I reviewed the requirements of my local planning and zoning department, and I carefully built a deck with the help of a few friends. It took me nearly a month but turned out satisfactory.

A few weeks later my neighbor had his deck built by a professional deck builder. It took them only 3 days to finish a deck similar to mine, as they knew exactly what they were doing and were highly skilled.

To strengthen this point, I received an email from one of our hosting customers who had been doing his own web design and search engine optimization for the past few years. Frustrated, he turned to us for some help. I think his thoughts sum up the situation best:

"I just wanted to mention that working with Jon on SEO objectives and with Ryan on design for my website has been a real pleasure. I am very happy with the results so far both in terms of current rankings, which are greatly improved, and functionality of design.

For the past several years I and my wife have designed and optimized our site. This was the first year that I decided to hire professional assistance and I am very glad to have had your firm fulfill our current objectives. I came to you because of your consistent hosting of an older site, ascencionrecordings.com, which has been with you for several years."

Gordon Kreplin
Ascencion Recordings/Photography

This is an excellent example that not everyone has the patience, time and tools to perform SEO themselves. Just as some will never try to build their own deck, finish their own basement, or fix their own car. Some things are best left to a professional -- the choice is yours.

Importance of Search Engine Optimization

For anything and everything, the Internet users today go to search engines, and type in what they want to find out. They get the result pages (SERPs), and click and visit some of the first results. This is what is happening everywhere; millions and millions of users access Google every day for information.

When a website offering a particular service gets a hit (traffic), it has a chance to make a sale. So, all of the companies out there try extra hard to make their websites hit the top of the search engine result pages. The simple set of procedures for this purpose is known as Search Engine Optimization, the art of getting a website to rank high on search engine search result pages.

Search Engine Optimization is done through various steps, and if not done properly, it can backfire.

Basic Steps of Search Engine Optimization

For a site to be well optimized for search engine traffic, its content should be understandable to the search bots (the program used by search engines to index a particular site; also called web crawlers, search spiders, etc.) The content in the site has to be generally useful to the reader as well as understandable to search engines; keywords and descriptions in metadata help you achieve this. An important step of Search Engine Optimization is creating Meta tags for each page, with keywords and descriptions. Also the title tag should have your most important keyword.

Search Engine Optimization requires keyword-rich content. People search for keywords on the search engines. And the search engine bots look for these keywords on the indexed pages. So, keyword-dense content easily scales up the search results. However, overuse of the keyword will blacklist the site as spam. Search Engine Optimization, hence, requires an expert to prepare good quality search engine-optimized content. Also, highlighting the main keywords with such formatting as bold, italics, underline, etc., is very advantageous.

A minimum keyword density of about 2-4% is effective. And the content is best optimized targeting only one keyword or two at the most.

Another important aspect of Search Engine Optimization is the number of incoming links to the page. The incoming links convince the search engines that the page is important enough to be displayed as a result. The incoming links, however, have to be from reliable sources (there are unreliable sources like link farms, which are websites solely made for linking to other sites). So, it is very important for Search Engine Optimization to create some links to whichever page you try to optimize.

These methods just introduce you to what you should do to achieve good Search Engine Optimization for your sites. There are, however, so many other important aspects in Search Engine Optimization. Google itself is known to count hundreds of different metrics to calculate the PageRank of a site (Google's measure of the importance of a site).

Conclusion

The potential business a firm can acquire on reaching the top of search engine results is amazing. Search Engine Optimization, as I said earlier, is an art by itself. It should be done methodically and painstakingly. If done properly, you will enjoy great profits from it; on the other hand, malpractices can get you undermined very easily. Hence, it is important for you to hire a reputed, reliable professional for the purpose.

CWS Acquired by Google

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Today we're excited to announce that CWS was aquired by Google for $80.5 million. "It's an exciting day for us", said Alan De Keyrel, who was playing Guitar Hero when we called. "We were holding out for $100 million", said De Keyrel, "but then we decided that another 20 million wouldn't affect our ability to play video games all day."

Continuing its trend of gobbling up promising Web 2.0 startups, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) acquired CWS, the developers of GroupLoop.com. GroupLoop allows users to store and work with text documents on the Web and had been hailed a threat to Google Groups. Users can share selected documents, manage a group calendar, and post messages.

Google declined to discuss its plans for GroupLoop. "We acquired GroupLoop for the innovative technology and talented design team", Google spokesman Larry Fudder said in an e-mailed statement.

Google has become an aggressive acquirer of innovative software startups in recent years. Last year, it snapped up Measure Map, a blog traffic tracker. Other recent Google purchases include radio advertising platform dMarc and video sharing social platform YouTube.

"Nothing will change here at CWS", said Lyle Mullican, "except it might take a little longer for us to answer the phone". When questioned as to why this would be, Lyle said, "It takes time to pause the game console".

Ask CWS: How do you track customers?

Question:

I own a small company and have a hard time tracking all of the conversations we have with our clients. We have several employees now, and it always seems like one employee tells a customer something and then another employee tells them something else. How do you keep track of communication you have with clients so that everyone is on the same page?

Answer:

This is an excellent question and one that was a challenge for us too (especially as as we grew). As you mention, it was easy at first because I was the only employee and knew everything about each customer. But as you grow, there is no possible way that you can handle every customer request. So, you do the logical thing and hire additional employees and hope that everything will go well.

It won't.

You'll soon realize that you could have done a better job training your new staff. Or maybe that they handled a situation just a little differently than you would have. Or even worse, that something was forgotten and now you have an upset customer that wants to speak to the boss! You think to yourself, "How could this have happened?"

Wouldn't it have been nice to know about this situation BEFORE it turned into a big deal?

Of course it would, and that's why we started using some web-based software called Highrise a while ago. In the most simple terms, it's a website where we track email and phone conversations with a customer. This means that any employee can pull up a customer and see who said what to them, how they communicated, and when.

I know you're probably thinking, "You take the time to re-type every email you send to a customer?" Hardly. Each employee is given a Highrise "drop-box" address that they BCC each outgoing email to. This attaches the email to the customer so that other employees can review it if the need arises.

In addition, Highrise has an RSS feed for all communcation. This means that in Outlook, we can keep an eye on all communication that we've had as a company that day. Want to know if Johnny called Customer XYZ back today? Just review the RSS feed and you'll see everyone that Johnny communicated with that day. It's that easy.

Our Highrise account is affordable at only $49/month. It's an invaluable tool as it includes information about everyone that associates with CWS. Highrise offers a wide variety of plans based on the number of contacts and emplyees you have. Check it out.

My Inbox: Abandoned Shopping Cart

Earlier this week, Jon wrote about E-commerce R.O.I. and mentioned that 60% of users will abandon a shopping cart before finishing the checkout process.

I was one of them yesterday.

Let me explain -- I received a catalog in the mail from a company called IDville.com, which sells employee identification tags and such. We've been contemplating enacting a security policy at our building where all visitors must sign in/out. So, I started the order process for a Visitor Log Book at IDville.

However, during the checkout process for this $17.95 item, I realized they wanted another $8.00 to ship the item to me. This made me change my mind and convinced me that I might be able to buy a similar item locally.

Now the important part of the story. IDville impressed me by sending the following email this morning:



As you can see, they noticed that I never completed the order yesterday. Since I had started the checkout process they had already captured my email. Instead of just forgetting about me and losing the sale, they then sent me an email with a link to "proceed to checkout now."

This is very smart.

Not only did it remind me about their company, but it gave me yet another option to complete the transaction I had already started. If they can get just 20% of the people to come back and complete an order by using this method, it could mean an increase in revenue of 50% or more. Great idea.

How Long Should You Keep an Email?

I don't like to delete emails. It's true, I'm the guy that can find something that was sent to me long before Britney Spears married Kevin Federline.

This means that my inbox is loaded with tens of thousands of emails, some of which are from as far back as 2004.

This prompted the topic to come up recently at our weekly office meeting. How long should you keep an email? A week? A month? A year? Forever?! What if you delete it and then you need it again for legal purposes? Once it's gone, it's gone forever.

The discussion quickly escalated to what type of policy a company should have regarding saving emails. Up to this point, CWS has had a loose policy that we keep a copy of all email communication with customers, but delete all those emails from your brother-in-law. You know, the ones that you shouldn't be getting at work in the first place.

But if your company policy is to keep a copy of every email, how do you monitor whether this is actually being done and support mailboxes that become very very large? This brought up an interesting discussion... Does your company have a policy on deleting or saving emails? If so, what is it and how is it enforced?

Does your website make you money?

How profitable is your website? When people visit the site, do they take action? Do you even know what you want them to do? Unfortunately, too many organizations fail to ask these questions, and thus fail to understand their website's ROI (return on investment). ROI is a fundamental business concept, but it's too often neglected in this specific area.

According to the book Web Design for ROI, there are 3 key figures to ponder when considering a new website project or redesign:

• 43% of retail sales will either be influenced by or complete on the Internet by 2012
• 83% of businesses now use the Internet to research potential vendors
• 75% of users admit to making judgments about a company's credibility based on the design of its website

The bottom line is that a large number of people will make business decisions based on the form and function of your website. How appealing is yours?

Even small details such as updated content and appealing visuals can make a crucial difference in keeping people on your site. Imagine a business owner who spent a lot of time, effort and money remodeling the interior of a store, but left the outside looking like an old, crumbling ruin. Customers would quickly assess the credibility of the business and pass it by.

The average home page abandonment rate (the rate at which visitors leave a site within a short period of time) is between 40% and 60% in general. Why? Because visitors decide almost immediately if they've found what they're looking for. What the site actually offers is secondary to what a customer thinks the site offers. What if a small change to the wording or placement of elements on your homepage reduced the abandonment rate by just 10%?

E-Commerce ROI

Nowhere is ROI more critical than on websites that directly sell a product or service. Unfortunately, some studies show that 60% of customers drop their purchase during the checkout process -- after they've made a buying decision! Imagine a restaurant where 6 out of every 10 customers ordered lunch and left before it was served. Any rational business owner would consider this unacceptable.

E-commerce site owners should constantly monitor the usability of their systems. Does the checkout process makes sense? Is it simple and free of distractions? Think about it... before you lose another customer.

Converting Traffic Into Sales

More traffic does not automatically mean more sales. If the website does not effectively convert customers into sales then the traffic is not useful. Keeping visitors on the site long enough to perform a critical task is what counts. The longer the visitor stays and learns what he/she needs, the more likely he/she is to convert.

How do you track conversion rates? Measure actions -- filling out a form, requesting a free sample, ordering a product, or contacting you. Track your conversion rate on a daily basis and see if you can improve the numbers. A simple formula would be the number of people who completed the desired action divided by the total number of visitors. You can even set up Google Analytics to do this automatically and email regular reports to you.

For a consultation on website ROI, please contact us a support (at) cws (dot) net.

The Value of Clear Writing

Many people think of design in purely visual terms. This kind of thinking can influence everything from the kind of car we buy to the food we eat. We're attracted by things that look good, and style is, in fact, an important component of good design. But it's not the whole picture.

A great-looking car with critical safety issues would not be well designed. Nor would an innovative packaging system that didn't keep food fresh. Good design not only means that something looks good, but that it performs well, that it's efficient and that it's reliable.

I have an ice cream scoop that fits this description perfectly. Designed by Michael Graves, it's heavy and solid, making perfectly round scoops even when the dessert is solidly frozen, and its polished surface never sticks. It's also ergonomic and durable -- a simple product that does its job well. Nothing complicated.

When it comes to the Web, one aspect of good design that's often overlooked is writing. And yet the content of your site is what will ultimately make it succeed or fail as a business tool. Visual presentation is important -- to establish credibility, as an expression of your brand, and to give appropriate structure to your content -- but the content itself is fundamental.

Unfortunately, many people write website content as an afterthought. It doesn't have to be complicated -- indeed, it shouldn't be, as people read more slowly on screen than on paper -- but it ought to be thoughtfully considered as a core component of design.

In general, writing for the Web should be:

• Clear and brief. People who use the Web a lot get in the habit of moving quickly and don't like to read lengthy texts (with a few exceptions). Help them learn what they need to know with minimal effort.
• Correct. English isn't everyone's field of expertise, but we all know someone who's good at it. Have your content proofread, because errors will both undermine your credibility as a professional and lengthen the time required to understand the material.
• Well organized. Judicious use of headings, bold text and lists makes it easier for both humans and search engines to capture the essential points on a page.
• User-centric. Address the questions that your visitors are asking, rather than just telling them what you want them to hear. Use the kind of language they use, not industry jargon (unless your audience is likely to be using such niche terms when searching).

When you undertake a website project, consider the total package. Don't hire anyone who is just an artist, a programmer, or a businessperson. It takes attention to detail in every area to make a product that's truly well designed, whether the end result is as simple as an ice cream scoop or as complex as a building.

Lessons from a 3rd Grader

Back in December, we heard about a website called DonorsChoose.org which has the goal of helping teachers fund projects for their classroom. The concept is rather simple:

1. Teachers ask for materials and supplies for a project
2. Donors log on and give to projects they find compelling
3. Students learn and provide personal feedback to the donor.

During our search, we found a class of local 3rd graders that needed a few hundred dollars for storing their supplies. The project was already partially funded, so we decided to top it off.

Today, we received a thank you packet in the mail from the class. I say "packet" becuase it included not only a letter from the teacher, but also each of the kids. They told us how much they appreciated our donation and explained how helpful the jabberwockies (that's what they call them) are. Even better, our thank you note was the first letter that these kids have ever typed on a computer.

We think that's pretty cool.

If you're interesting in experiencing something like this for yourself, there are several teachers in Rochester that are looking for funding right now. Searching for a project is easy as you can search by state, school, grade, subject, and much more. Check it out.

CWS Exhibits This Week

CWS will be exhibiting at two tradeshows this week. On Tuesday, March 4, we'll be at the Southeast Minnesota Association of REALTORS annual Affiliate Fair. On Thursday, we'll be at the Ramada Hotel and Conference Center for Business After Hours EXTRA with the Rochester Area Chamber of Commerce.

Please stop by and see us if you're attending either of these events.

When was the last time Google visited you?

You probably visit Google several times a day, but do you know how often Google visits you? There are ways to find out. Google offers a free tool that will not only tell you when it last "crawled" your website, but what pages it looked at and any errors that were found along the way. Google Webmaster Tools are a great way to find out what your site looks like to a search engine. They can help identify problems, learn what search phrases are being used to find your site and which ones actually result in clicks from the results page.

This valuable information can help you adjust the wording of text on your site and fix errors that could prevent search engines from indexing your content and giving your site a better ranking. Webmaster Tools can also show what sites are linking to and from your own. Google considers the value of a site that links to yours when it's determining the value of your content, so it is important to monitor those and try to collect links from valuable sites. These considerations are some of the basic elements of search engine optimization.

Another great feature of Google Webmaster Tools is Sitemap creation and submission. Not to be confused with the "site maps" you view in a Web browser, Google Sitemaps are special XML files that describe your site to search engines. Essentially, they allow you to give advice to Google about how your content should be treated. You can say how often a particular page changes (daily, weekly, monthly) and describe the relative importance of different pages. For example, you might prefer that someone searching for the name of your CEO should land on his official biography in your "About Us" section rather than a press release from three years ago, even if the press release mentions his name more often. Google Sitemaps allow you to give such instructions. They also allow you to specifically list pages on your site that might be hard for Gooogle to find by looking at links.

Webmaster Tools also allow you to verify the structure of your robots.txt file, which is another specially-formatted file giving instructions to search engines. This file has the opposite purpose of a Sitemap -- it exists to tell the spider what parts of your site should not be indexed. Google Webmaster Tools can make sure your robots.txt file properly follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

See the quick start guide that Google provides for more in-depth coverage of the available tools. If you find that your site needs some changes to be more accessible to search engines, drop us a line at support (at) cws (dot) net.

Site Launch: KASInvestment.com

CWS is pleased to announce the launch of kasinvestment.com, a Rochester, MN company established to operate three glass and glazing subsidiary companies: Ford Metro Inc., Architectural Contract Glass Inc., and Swanson Glass Inc.

There is a definite art in designing glass, and we wanted to emphasize this by developing a unique site that reflect the architectural splendor and talent that goes into creating residential and commercial glass projects, while maintaining the quality and ease of use you expect from CWS websites.

Throughout the site you will find information on doors and hardware, retail glass, commercial glass, and much more. There's an extensive photo gallery showcasing the work and craftsmanship of FMI, ACG, and SGI.

It was a pleasure working with Mitch and Kevin of KAS Investment Co., and we look forward to our continued relationship as we further expand their web presence with our search engine optimization services.

Site Launch: premierbuildersmn.com

Premier Builders of Rochester, Inc. is a residential home builder focused on customer satisfaction and streamlining the often stressful home building process.

To help alleviate some of the stress, Premier Builders approached CWS to develop an attractive, user friendly website to showcase projects and to give potential customers an idea of what they can expect when they build with Premier. The site includes project photos, multiple floor plans, a list of frequently asked questions, and an extensive list of the highest quality vendors handpicked by Premier Builders.

We've enjoyed working with Jamie at Premier Builders of Rochester, and look forward to helping him further decrease the stress of the home building process through inspired ideas and innovative web applications.

Site Launch: semnrealtors.com

CWS is proud to present the redesigned Southeast Minnesota Association of REALTORS public website. This newly renovated site offers unlimited property and open house searches -- without the need to log in or register!

The ever-changing demographics of southeast Minnesota mean that there will be a variety of users in this real estate market with just as many varied needs. With that in mind, CWS set out to make SEMAR's site as accessible as possible for every user. What does this mean for you?

• To allow those with poor vision or other visual impairments to navigate the site freely, we minimized the use of images to allow screen reading applications to function properly. We've also added controls for users to increase or decrease text size on the page they are viewing.
  
• Because of the minimalist approach to graphics, the site will load faster for everybody -- helping you more efficiently find that dream home or business.
  
• The simple architecture of navigation makes it easy for anyone to find the information they need without searching.

We're also here to help any member REALTOR whose website may have been affected by the recent MLS conversion at SEMAR. We know your business is important, and we also know how important it is to receive up-to-date data when potential clients are searching for a home on your website. As a full service web provider, CWS is capable of making the transition for you quickly and seamlessly, and we can help you every step of the way.

If you have any questions or concerns about your website's property search, please give us a call at 507-289-2229, or e-mail us at sales@cws.net -- we're here to help.

Sara Pennington Joins CWS

As you may have noticed, we've been adding to our team recently. We were blessed with 39% growth in our business last year and it's been a challenge for us to support this growth (and still provide the exceptional service you've come to expect from CWS). We're honored to be a growing company but the last thing we want is to compromise our level of service just for additional customers.

As of Monday, we are pleased to announce the addition of Sara Pennington to our team. Sara will provide assistance to our administrative and sales teams, greet you with a smile (maybe even a cup of coffee), and help keep us on track.

A native of Rochester, Sara has worked at the Mayo Clinic for 9 years in various departments. Most recently, Sara returned from New Mexico where she spent the last nine months. She enjoys new challenges, fun outdoor activities, participating in historical re-enactments known as Rendezvous and spending quality time with family and friends.

Please welcome Sara to our team. You may reach her at sara at cws dot net or (507) 289-2229 x200.

Launch: Mayo Clinical Trial Services and Event Registration

In January, CWS completed two new projects with Mayo Collaborative Services. The first is a design refresh of the Clinical Trial Services website, for which we have provided support since 2005. This realignment brought the site framework into the same family as other MCSI websites, with new graphics that emphasize cutting-edge service offerings without compromising the site's content-first approach.

We also deployed a new Web-based registration and management system for the many educational events offered by Mayo Medical Laboratories. This system has been in development for several months and is built on top of the evaluation system that was launched nearly a year ago. It provides an all-electronic workflow for participants and staff, covering the event registration process from end to end. The automation of a large number of processes is providing an enormous gain in efficiency to MML staff and an improved experience to registrants.

Both projects have been enjoyable and challenging. Additional projects in support of MCSI Web initiatives are ongoing.

CWS specializes in developing applications that directly address business problems. If we can help to improve your efficiency or redevelop a process that's causing frustration, we encourage you to contact us.

Site Launch: FoxHillOfRochester.com

Fox Hill approached CWS to develop a simple, effective website to inform prospective buyers about this new residential land development project in southwest Rochester.

The result is an elegant site designed with a focus on plat maps, lot information, and profiles of the development's neighborhoods and surrounding communities.

We enjoyed working with John from Fox Hill and look forward to working with him again in the future.

Our Web Design Guarantee

Recently we've been thinking about the kind of guarantee we want to offer to our customers. You may be thinking to yourself, "Who cares about a silly guarantee?" We do. In fact, it's been several months in the making as we have been re-analyzing our mission statement, business values, design values, and vision. We feel that we are one of the most effective web design firms in the Midwest and we're proud of the work we do. We felt it was important to let the world know and that meant taking a hard look at ourselves and where we want to go.

Before I get to our new web design guarantee, let me take a step back and tell you what makes us tick. These are our core beliefs:

Our Mission: Our mission is to produce expert web solutions through constant innovation and inspiration. Nothing is more important than delighting our clients through delivering exceptional web solutions.

Our Business Values: We have a profound respect for our clients and each other. We deliver. We care. We innovate. We do web. We enjoy the process!

Our Design Values: It must be inspired. It must be user-centered. Form follows function. Consider every click. Create superb customer experiences.

Our Vision: To be a nationally recognized organization for providing superior web-based solutions, interactive marketing, and effective search engine optimization.

I know you're probably thinking that Mission Statements and Vision Statements are silly corporate stuff, but I encourage you to do this for your own business. It forces you to reflect and determine what you're all about.

With that said, we feel it's important for our potential clients to know that we'll do everything possible to make them happy. Hence the reason we decided to draft an official web design guarantee. We wanted it to be bold. We wanted it to be valuable. We wanted it to push us to be better.

So, without further ado, here's our promise to you:


We hope you like it as much as we do. Tell us what you think.

RapidNewsletter Gets New Features

This morning we pushed out some enhancements and fixes to our RapidNewsletter service. In case you haven't heard, RapidNewsletter is our full-circle email marketing solution. It allows you to effectively reach those who matter the most to your business -- your customers. Research has shown that a quality email newsletter can be one of the most effective ways to maintain customer relationships.

With RapidNewsletter, you can design and execute an email marketing campaign from beginning to end -- build and edit email lists, create newsletters with articles and images, run detailed tracking reports, and much more! We designed RapidNewsletter to drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, solidify customer retention, and strengthen customer relations.

Here are the changes we released today:

Better management of the address groups within your mailing list. When adding new addresses or editing existing ones, it's much easier to designate which groups the subscriber belongs to.

Any subscriber can now be marked to receive "Text Only" messages. Most RapidNewsletter mailings are sent in HTML (for formatted text and images), but for a variety of reasons, people prefer to receive all their email in plain text. For a long time, you've been able to send a RapidNewsletter mailing in text instead of HTML, but now you can manage this preference on a user-by-user basis as well.

New ways to edit the content of existing newsletters. It's much faster to make changes to your existing mailings. You can reorder articles by dragging and dropping, and click titles to edit in place. It's also easier now to remove an image from an article after you've loaded it.

Improved statistics displays. For large mailings, the statistics tables could get unwieldy. We've added paging and better handling of long URLs to make these charts easier to read.

You'll see these improvements immediately the next time you log into your account. If you haven't tried RapidNewsletter yet, now is the perfect time to set up a free account and give it a try! We're working on a number of other new features that you can expect to see in the near future as well. If you have any suggestions on features, improvements, or enhancements to RapidNewsletter be sure to let us know.

How to Get Your Site to the Top

The Internet, once only the home of computer nerds and hackers, has long since exploded into mainstream business. A new profession has sprung up in response - Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a service industry based on getting your site to the top of the search engine rankings and keeping it there.

The truth is that SEO boils down to three simple steps:

1. Build a great site
2. Incorporate keywords
3. Get other great sites to link to yours

That's the recipe that will continue to work no matter how often Google reprograms its search algorithms. Following these steps won't catapult you instantly to #1 in the rankings; it's more of a "slow and steady" strategy. But it's a lot better in the long run than resorting to shady SEO tactics that will put your site at the top of the results page... only until Google bans your site!

Building a great link structure has been a part of SEO for some time. However, thanks to Google's changing search algorithms, the ideal type of link structure has also changed. Here are some tricks that will help you build useful links.

Note: Throughout this article, Google is cited as the target for SEO. There are two reasons why it's best to focus on Google. First, it's the most frequently used search engine, so optimizing for Google will tend to bring in the most traffic. Second, Google has the most stringent requirements and elaborately programmed algorithms, so if you're doing well in Google- you're likely doing well in the other search engines.

Not all links are created equal
One strategy you should not rely on is soliciting links right and left. Links from important and reputable pages build your own site's reputation; links from less important sites help a little, but not as much; and links from certain shady sites are no good at all. An example of the last is the link farm, a site that's designed solely for the purpose of providing links to other sites in exchange for money. Google hates link farms with a passion and refers to them as "bad neighborhood" sites. Associate your site with several "bad neighborhood" sites and Google might decide your site is in that neighborhood, too.

On the other end of the link quality scale are the major informational sites and directories. Links from directories like DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) and Yahoo! can provide an impressive boost to your ranking. So can links from extremely reputable sites like CNN.com.

The quick rule of thumb when deciding if a site would be a good source of an inbound link is to look up that site's Google PageRank. You can get this information simply by installing the Google toolbar on your browser. Once the toolbar is installed, click on the Options button and select "PageRank display." Then you can browse to sites and their PageRank will display in the toolbar. As a rule of thumb, don't bother soliciting links from sites with a PageRank of less than 4 (PageRank works on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest possible rank).

Get those links
So how do you get important sites to link to you? Start with having useful and relevant information on your site. If you have a page that's relevant to another site, just bringing this page to their attention can get them to link to you. After all, these sites want to be useful resources for their visitors and providing those visitors with great sources of information will keep them coming back.

Once you've identified an important site and have produced information that's useful to them, search that site for the webmaster's contact information. Call or email that person and suggest that they take a look at your site and, if interested, provide a link to it. This strategy isn't likely to get you a link from MSNBC.com, but it can work very well with smaller sites. Don't limit your searches to .com and .net sites, either - Google tends to look with particular favor upon .edu and .gov websites, so getting links from these sites can give your ranking even more of a boost.

Another way to build links fast is to set up reciprocal links - in other words, contact a webmaster and tell them that if they link to you, you'll link back to them. Having a few reciprocal links is fine but if you have too high a percentage Google will get suspicious. To be on the safe side, try to have at least 3 one-way links for every reciprocal link you build. This will create what Google calls a natural link structure.

Patience is a virtue
The techniques described above are not a magic bullet. Don't expect your site to immediately shoot up the results page. But if you take the time to build a solid, "natural" link structure, you will be able to get your site highly ranked, and you'll be able to keep it that way.

Site Launch: UltraShopRochester.com

CWS is pleased to present you with The Ultra Shop's new home on the web - http://ultrashoprochester.com Nestled within the heart of Rochester, MN in the Kahler subway; this world famous boutique offers an extraordinary selection of interesting and fine merchandise. From mirrors, tables, and frames, to jewelry, hats, and rainwear - if you're looking for high class merchandise, look no further than The Ultra Shop. And now -- with the development of their new website -- finding that International Traveler Shiny Cow Print luggage you've been after is quicker and easier than ever! It was a pleasure working with Pat, and we look forward to our continued relationship as we help further their online success with search engine optimization.

Spread the Word... get a $100 Gift Card!

At CWS, we're grateful that people say wonderful things about us. In fact, almost all of our business comes from either referrals or existing customers. To show our appreciation, we want to give back to our friends and customers with a new referral program. When you refer someone to us and they complete their first order or project, you'll receive a gift