Storm Code

What is Craigslist?

Craigslist is a classified website divided in sections, as well as communities. Craiglist presently supports more than 450 cities worldwide. Except for job listings in certain areas, posting on the site is free. Though many areas and sections required that you register for an account before posting, no account is required and no fee charged to view ads. The ad sections contain everything from dating and puppy sales and business services and job offers. Craigslist is moderated by its users, who have the ability to flag a listing as spam, miscategorized, or over posted.

How to do it?

The first thing you need to post your ad is a good title. A good title catches the eye and gives the reader a clear idea of what you are looking for or what you are selling. A good title is well-worded, punctuated, and professional. It should not contain all capital lettering.

The second thing to remember when posting an ad is to pick the right section. Picking the right section is not always the easiest of tasks. Many of the sections overlap in their coverage of certain topics and services. The best thing that can be done is to search through the various sections until you find the one with the highest amount of similarly purposed posts. Craigslist only allows its users to included links in their ads in specific sections such as Services.

The last thing to consider when posting an ad is to avoid spamming. Spamming an ad across many different sections or posting similar ads in the same section may increase the leads generated temporary but it can have a devastating effect on your company’s reputation and respectability within the online community.

What’s the downside?

Every good website has its drawbacks and Craigslist is no exception. Indeed, competitors seeking to gain an unfair advantage may flag your posts, causing them to be deleted.

Craigslist is also known to be a site where people come when they are looking for a bargain. This being said, it’s best to offer competitive prices through trial and error.

The third disadvantage of Craigslist, and the biggest, is the lack of moderation, which leads to spam, junk postings, and less opportunities for serious companies to use the site for business. The upside of this is most seasoned Craigslist users can spot spam posts with ease and avoid them entirely.

How to get ahead

Craigslist has some stiff competition in most sections. Depending upon the area and the section, this can included hundreds of posts an hour. The more populated the section, the more important it becomes to stand out from the rest of the pack. A good title and competitive prices are important but what is equally as important is the presentation of the information in your ad.

Craigslist supports a good deal of HTML and CSS, but it does disallow some. It can be a lenghtly process trying to create a professional looking template for your ads when you are unsure what aspects of HTML and CSS Craigslist will allow. It can be difficult for someone who is not an experienced web designer to craft a professional looking ad that will stand out at a glance. Every Craigslist ad you post should reflect the professionalism of your company. Badly crafted or poorly worded Craigslist ads can result in missed leads and reflect badly on your company, product, or service.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social website that is growing in popularity among people of all ages. It allows you to post 140 characters at a time to let your followers know what you are doing. Followers are people who added you to their page and who can see all your updates. Twitter also lets you post pictures and links, as well as communicate with other users. Also, there are a lot of interesting applications for Twitter, such as TweetGift (virtual gifts), and TweetWhatYouEat (a food diary).

Why is Twitter good for your business?

Twitter is a good way to promote your business as it lets you post information about your company and also about current/upcoming products and services you offer. Also, you can follow
people in your area, most of whom are likely to follow you back, allowing your ‘tweets’ (your 140 character messages) to reach more people, which gives you a greater chance of building buzz as well as generating leads. Twitter can also help with networking in many ways, one of which would be finding and vetting new employees.

Most people these days are on at least a few social networking sites. It’s become a common practice to vet potential employees by visiting their pages on these sites.

Twitter Limits

One probably wonders if Twitter users have limitations on following and being followed. The answer is that there are limits, mainly to prevent spam.

• 1,000 updates per day
• 1,000 direct messages per day
• 100 API requests per hour
• Follow limit (Per day)
• Unlimited amount of people who can follow you

Also, everyone is allowed to follow 2000 people, and this number can go up according to the number of people who are follwing you.
Those limits were imposed last year, due to the enormous amount of spam the site was encountering.

Tips on how to use Twitter for your business

Even though you are using Twitter to boost your business, each tweet should not be business related. People are people, and they want to feel like you are a person, not a computer promoting a product. This being said, here are a few things you can do to move away from the typical advertising:

• Post a joke or a funny picture
• Ask questions that can be answered by people following you
• Give advice
• Post a useful or just interesting link

Twitter can boost your business, build buzz, and find new prospective employees. But it can be time-consuming, especially at first when trying to follow as many people as possible and post useful and informative tweets. Here at Storm Code, we can help you build a network, and manage it for you. We always find new ideas to promote your business as well as looking at what your competitors are doing. This helps to ensure that you get the most exposure as you can. For more information about our Social Marketing services or if you have any questions please contact us at support@stormcode.net

When you are starting up a website there are literally thousands of things to do and one of the most important is picking a good domain name. This is often trickier than one first might think as many of the best names already are taken. A good domain name can be that success factor which your website needs, so we recommend you reading this guide on
picking a domain name before you do anything else.

Get matching names

The first thing you should look for is a domain name that matches the name of your website. This is important since when your website becomes a household name, your visitors should be able to type in the domain with as much ease as possible.

One big risk in not matching your names is that people will have problems remembering your URL and hence not finding your site again. Also, try to pick a name that is as “reflective” as possible of your business – all to keep its memorability. Take advantage of free domain registry tools to check the availability of domain names.

Keywords in name

A great way to increase the traffic, or at least increasing the chances, is by using a keyword in your domain name. Obviously, this will not be easy as people are quite up to date on this little trick which means that most good keywords already are taken. Should you however find a good domain name with your most important keyword – grab it at once! Optimizing your domain for your visitors as well as for the search engines is the most optimal situation.

Keep the name short

The shorter you can keep the domain name the better for your visitor as it is easier to remember, as well as being easier to spell. Remember though that the domain name should not be kept short just for the sake of keeping it short. If there is a risk of losing your branding or memorability in trimming down the name – keep it as you first intended it or even extend it a bit.

Picking a domain name can be both time consuming and at times you might even want to put it all on hold. But trust us; take the time it takes since it will be worth all the effort in the end. This is the time for you to exercise your creative muscles. Then later you will also have to give efforts on selecting a suitable web hosting plan for your site.

Many people wonder what a Blog can really do for their business. The answer to this question depends on what your website needs. A well written blog gives your website a more professional feel. An informative blog can drive hits to your website. A blog that is updated often will keep people coming back to your website and offer new visitors fresh, up to date content. A properly integrated blog can help save money by allowing you to control the content on your site without needing to pay for the services of a web developer. Keyword rich blog posts can dramatically help your search engine optimization.

A Blog gives your site dynamic content. Content that you, the owner of the website, can control. There are many different kinds of blogging software that can be integrated into your existing website. Wordpress is our Blogging software of choice. It has an easy to use interface, numerous plug-ins and is constantly being updated and extended.

Armed with a Blog powered by Wordpress you no longer need to pay a web developer when you want to add content to your website. If you need to update information, fix a spelling mistake, add new content, change a picture, or any other situation in which information on your website needs to be added, updated or deleted, the power is in your hands.

Once you have your Blog integrated with your website you can begin to write the content. Informative and up to date information in your blog posts is a great way to get people coming back to your website over and over. They may even send the link to your website to friends, or others they know would be interested in the information posted on your blog. This gives you even more chances to convert these visitors into leads and clients.

Most Blogging software (such as Wordpress) is designed to be very search engine friendly, and easily installed and configured plug-ins can be added to make it even more so. Links to your blog posts can be submitted to Digg.com and LotText.com, further increasing traffic to your website as well as your Search Engine Optimization.

There are some pitfalls to having a blog as well. If the blog is not setup properly, or properly integrated with your existing website, it can be hard to find, hurt your Search Engine Optimization, or appear unprofessional to potential clients visiting your site. The initial installation of Blogging software can be very difficult for anyone who is not tech-savvy.

If you do not already have a website and are looking for set one up around a blog, then Wordpress can be used not only as a peice of Blogging software, but as a fully configurable content management system that can run your website. Each page, post, category, link and image, fully editable by you.

At Storm Code we install, setup, design and host numerous Blogs. If you have any questions, or would like to get a quote. Please contact us.

Affordable Web Design is a rare commodity these days.  Many companies will claim to be affordable, even quote you an affordable rate, but you must be wary.  Hidden charges, development delays and endless headaches await if you choose the wrong company.

Starting five years ago many Web Design Firms began to make a killing all across the United States by offering cheap web design and development.  They accomplished this by outsourcing all of their development and design work to places like India and more recently China and Russia.  Sometimes the websites created were exactly what the Clients had hoped for and more.  More often then not though, the Client paid the price not in dollars, but in wasted time, lost leads, and empty aspirin bottles.

More recently these same web design companies have begun claiming that they don’t outsource their Project Management and Web Development.  This is true in some cases.  They do in fact have a Project Manager in-house, that talk with the clients and manage the project.  However they are still sending the projects to designers and developers overseas.  While some of the headaches may be gone, the development slags and hidden project costs remain.  The fundamental problems with outsourcing are not going away.  Time differences, language barriers and communication problems coupled with unrealistically low initial quotes are nothing more than a recipe for disaster.

Pick a company that does all of its Web Design, Web Development and Project Management in-house.  In this day and age do you really want to gamble on something that looks and sounds like it’s to good too be true, or would you prefer the comfort of knowing your project is in capable hands and that your developers are just a phone call way?

The choice is of course yours.

Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is a vastly important part of growing your business.  Having a high page rank on Search Engines like Google  for keywords relating to your business does more than just drive sales to your website.  It gives you credibility.   It has a psychological effect on potential clients, immediately bolstering trust in your product or service.

If you are marketing a unique product or service then ranking high for your search terms is not all that hard.  After all, you don’t have much competition.  However, for the rest of the businesses out there that actually compete either locally or on the global market, SEO is the bread and butter of your business online.  If your website doesn’t rank in the top 25 on Google or Yahoo for your search keywords, chances are potential leads are going to your competition.  Not only does this hurt your business as a lost sale, but it bolsters your competition.

Think Local.  If you don’t already have an established name online, the best thing you can do is pick an area and tailor your website and search terms so that you rise to the top of the search results for that area.

Get Specific.  Don’t choose search terms and keywords that are vague.  The more specific the better.  Don’t try to get to the top of Google for ‘Home Renovations’.  That’s nearly impossible.  Think of all tens of thousands of companies all across the world who do home renovations.   Does your website really stand out enough and can it ever be optimized enough to get you to that coveted #1 spot on Google?  Probably not.  No matter how good the optimization of your site is, you would still be competing with the huge corporations that have hundreds of back-links to their sites.  Those back-links are what drive them to the top of the charts.

While ‘Home Renovations’ might be out of your reach, ‘Boston Home Renovations’ is surely not.  Web page optimization alone could get you into the top 10 results.  Weekly management of your site and its content could get you into the top 3, and keep you there.

When you think about it, do you really need to market your company on a Global scale if you don’t offer your product globally?  Do sales leads from London for your Real Estate Brokerage located in Boston really do anything more then waste your valuable time?

Think Local.  Get Specific.  Those are the fundamentals of SEO for a small business.  We offer a variety of SEO solutions for businesses of every size.  From one time Web Page Optimization to Long Term SEO Management.  All our solutions are guaranteed to grow your business.

No one likes waiting.  Not in line, not on hold, and certinaly not for a webpage to load.  That’s why optimizing your website for speed is so important.  Many things go into website optimization.  In this article we will focus on how database queries can slow down your website if they are not done properly.

Bulky queries to your database can drastically slow down the speed of your website.  This isn’t specific to MySQL, this problem is present in any website that is backed by a database.  Normally when you go to a website, the web server serves you a page of HTML.  That’s simple, small and quick.  When you have a dynamic page done in PHP, ASP or JSP an extra step is added (this article assumes that PHP is the language being used).  The web server must compile the code on the server and then serve the resulting page.  When you have a dynamic page that queries a database, the server must compile the code, stop to query the database server, wait for a response, continue compiling the code, and then serve the page.  Another added step.

The time it takes the server to serve up a page that requires one or more queries to the database server is negligible most of the time.  Especially if the database server is hosted locally on your web server.  However, with large, complicated queries, the time the web server must wait for the database server to run the query and return the result can go from negligible to intolerable.

This is mostly caused by poor structure in the queries made on the database.  As a rule a query should never return more results then is needed, and should never return information that is not needed.  This might seem like common sense, and indeed it is, but never the less, some developers do not take care when writing their SQL queries.  The result is extended load times for the pages that use them.

Page load times can have a negative effect many things.  First and foremost the patience of  your visitor.  Second and less well known is search engine optimization.  Long load times can result in lower page ranks.  Third and possibly even less well known is the effectiveness of your CPC (Cost per Click) advertisement campaigns.   Google Adwords as well as many other online marketing tools take the load time of your landing page into account.  Longer page load time can result in lower quality scores for your keywords.

Let us examine an example.  You have a table in your database that holds information about various books.  That information is as follows: Author Name, Purchase Price, Sale Price,  Number of Copies in Stock, ISBN, Date Published, Publishing Company, Number of Pages, Blurb about the book.

On your home page you want to display a random book.  The information about the book you want to display is: Author Name, Date Published, Blurb.

Some developers will take a shortcut when writing the query to the database and simply ask for all information about all the books that are stored in the table.  Then they’ll pick a random book and the information they want about that book in their PHP code.   This causes several things to happen.  First, the query takes MUCH longer to execute because it has to return all the information about every book in the database.  Second, the PHP code has to deal with the massive amount of information.  Third,  significant strain is put on both your web server and your database server.  Fourth, the page takes much longer to load then it should.  That is the fast way, not the right way.

Two things can be done right off the bat to optimize this query.  First, instead of returning the entire tables worth of books, have the database server pick a book randomly and return only the information about that specific book.  There is no need to use PHP to do something that the database server itself can do.  Second, structure your SQL query so that you are asking for only the information you want.  Author name,  Date Published, Blurb.  This significantly reduces the strain on your database server and increases the speed at which the query executes.  It also increases the speed at which your PHP code can execute, as it is dealing with much less information.  It also doesn’t have to randomize that information, or sift through it.  It simply displays the result of the database query.

The example above may seem unrealistic, but it’s something we see time and time again when we take on new clients.  Some developers charge such a small fee that if they took the time to develop your site properly they wouldn’t make any money.  That is the proverbial catch.

There are many things that must be taken into account when your site is being developed for it to be as optimized as possible.  Properly structured and thought out database queries are just the tip of the iceberg.

Google Adwords when properly utilized and managed can drive business to your website. You may not know it, but you are already familiar with the Adwords program. The advertisements that appear on the right hand side of your Google Search results, in your GMail, on Google Maps, and on the massive and ever growing Google affiliate network are the end product of a Google Adwords campaign.

The idea is simple enough. You pick keywords that you want your ad to show up near. If someone clicks on your ad you are charged a fee. This is called CPC (Cost per click) advertising. Popular keywords cost more when someone clicks through your ad. Maximum bids can be setup for the campaign on the whole and for specific keywords. While the fundamentals are simple, a successful Adwords campaign hinges on several key factors.

Balancing your Keyword Costs is the first step. You can compile a huge list of keywords that your ads will show up near, and generate a great deal of clicks, but that will not guarantee any of those clicks turning into sales. All a huge list of keywords will accomplish is costing you money. A great deal of thought must go into keyword selection. Adwords is not something you want to just setup, forget about, and hope it’s working. It must be monitored on a regular basis. Your campaign needs to be fine tuned until your find the perfect balance of cost to conversion ratio. This can take weeks, even months, and fluctuate (depending on the business) based on the month, time of year, or economic climate.

Keywords that are generating a large amount of impressions but very few clicks should be discarded. Bids should be increased on keywords that generate a large amount of clicks. If you notice a good deal of clicks, but very few conversions (a conversion being a visitor to your site that ends up purchasing a product or service) the bids on those keywords should be reduced or the keyword should be removed altogether.

Seasonal keywords should be added and removed based on the time of year. Keywords relating to breaking news that relates to your business should be added, and removed as click through ratios fall.

Common misspellings of keywords that relate to your business should be added. These keywords will usually have a low impression count, but they also have a low cost per click.

If you only do business in one part of a country, or in one city, your campaign should only be serving up ads in those areas. Don’t waste you money having your ads displayed in parts of the country, or world, if you have no intention of converting those clicks into sales.

A properly managed Google Adwords campaign can be both effective and cost effective. Small businesses with a tiny advertising budget can get by with a budget of $1-5 dollars a day if they focus on cheaper keywords. Larger businesses can generate great leads with a bigger budget. However, beware, a large budget and hundreds of clicks does not necessarily mean you will convert a large amount of clicks into sales. Your campaign needs to be properly managed, maintained and monitored.

If you do not have the time to setup and maintain your Google Adwords campaign you should hire a proffesional to maintain it for you.

Many people hear the words ‘Live Chat’ and think ‘Expensive’.  However, it is possible to have a live chat service installed on your website that will allow you to communicate directly with your clients, and potential clients.  The costs do vary depending on the business and the level of customization involved.  That being said, with your input, you can have a ‘Live Chat’ option available on your site within a day or two, not weeks as you might have assumed.

There are many benefits to having a ‘Live Chat’ option available to your clients.  First and foremost,  it allows them to contact one of your representatives quickly, and with little effort.  If no representatives are available (lets say it’s the middle of the night), then they have the option of leaving a message (which is then e-mailed to an address of your choosing).

Aside from the initial cost of setting up the ‘Live Chat’, there are very little, if any, maintenance costs.  At Storm Code, our ‘Live Chat’ setup allows you to manage the Online Support you provide to your customers from any computer.  You don’t need to outsource your technical support.  You can run it easily from within your office.

In times of economic trouble such as this, it’s important to keep costs low.  Take for example phone support.  Not only does it tie up a phone line, but the person who is giving the support is pretty much incapacitated.  They have to give their full and undivided attention to the person they are speaking with.  With online chat support that is not the case.  Computer users are used to multitasking and switching between several chat windows and e-mails.  A user giving ‘Live Chat’ support can handle multiple chats at the same time, there-by increasing the amount of support available.

Demonstrations of the ‘Live Chat’ are available.  Feel free to e-mail us with any questions, or if you would like a demonstration.

In this time of economic turmoil everyone is feeling the pinch.  Your customers are spending less money, which in turn leaves your business with less money to spend.   No company can stop spending entirely even in the most dire of times, which leads you to reanalyze what you are spending your money on.  Where is it going to generate the most sales, or be otherwise profitable?

No one can say that having a strong web presence will protect you entirely from recession, the dot-com bubble burst is evidence enough of that.  However, a strong web presence can increase your local customer base as well as increase your global customer base.  It allows you to market your product all across the globe without the need for old fashioned paper and print marketing.

That doesn’t mean you should run out and spend all your money buying ad space on Google and Yahoo.   Having a strong web presence isn’t all about getting people to your site.  You have to consider what happens after you get people to your site.

Are you offering up to date information about your products and services?  Is all the contact information current?  Is your website easy to navigate?  Does it have the functionality that will help drive your business in the 21st Century?  Is it capable of handling a large stream of visitors or will it fold under the pressure of more hits?

If you answered no to any of those questions or you were unsure of any of your answers, then it’s time to contact a professional.  Gone are the days when you could pick up a book on HTML and setup and maintain your company website.

You should be treating your website like a digital version of your Office.  It is representative of your business as a whole.  If it is well designed and developed then you instill confidence into your clients or potential clients.  Just like you would if you had a well put together and clean Office that you met clients in.  If a client were to walk into your office and it were to be a disaster, with half a wall missing and a ‘Dummies Guide to Office Renovations’ sitting on your desk, what impression would you be giving?

You need to have that same mindset when thinking about your website.