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Some reflections on the New Year

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
- Bill Vaughan

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
- Benjamin Franklin

New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.
- Charles Lamb

Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
- Hal Borland

New Year’s eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.
- Hamilton Wright Mabie

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.
- Oprah Winfrey

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.
- Henry Ward Beecher

New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving [the road to] hell with them as usual.
- Mark Twain

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.
- Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.
- Mark Twain

People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas.
- Author Unknown

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
- Oscar Wilde

New Year’s Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot. Unless, of course, those tests come back positive.
- Jay Leno

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
- G.K. Chesterton

Every man regards his own life as the New Year’s Eve of time.
- Jean Paul Richter

And my personal favorite…

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.
- Joey Adams

If you’ve searched on Google for a local business, you probably noticed that when a locality, such as city and state are part of the search terms, the #1 position in the organic (unpaid) search results is a Google map showing local businesses related to the search term.

An example:

This would certainly benefit you to be a part of that listing because of it’s position. It is a much shorter route to the top of the search results than any other.

The Google Map listing is not directly related to Google Search, but works in parallel to it. So listing in Google Maps is NOT a replacement for good search engine optimization, but a compliment to it.

Listing your business in Google Maps is easy and free. It should take you less than a half-hour to complete the process. If you are unsure about getting it done right the first time, call your web design or marketing professional.

Listing also opens the door to tying in your Google Maps listing with your Google AdWords campaign, and is an essential part of any online marketing strategy for local businesses.

Click here to add your business to Google Maps
or call or email OrangeCat at 859.544.9005 for a free consultation

If your answer was “Internet Explorer” only, you may be antagonizing huge and growing parts of your market. I never understood the “one browser” web development philosophy, even back in IE’s hey-day.

Back then I used to hear some non-forward-thinking developers say they only tested in IE because it had some 75% or the market, the rest of the contenders divided up the other quarter of the pie, there was only so much time in the day, blah, blah, blah.

But thumbing one’s nose at 25% of web browser never made any sense – at least to me.

But the nose-thumber’s lot has grown worse with time. Over the past year, IE’s segment of the market (combined IE6 and IE7) has shrunk from 53.2% to 46.6%. IE 5 has all but disappeared.

In the same 12 months, Firefox’s share of the market has gone from 36.4% to 44.2%, Safari’s from 1.9% to 2.7% and Opera’s from 1.4% to 2.3%. So anyone now developing for IE and ignoring the others is building for less than half of the market.

But I still see websites and applications that misfire or completely fail in Firefox, Safari or Opera. For a personal website, it’s just dumb. For a commercial website, it’s suicidal.

If the current trends continue, it won’t be long before Firefox assumes the #1 position, a mean feat considering you need to go get it, download it and install it. But Firefox is gaining popularity for a lot of reasons – not least of which is that it’s extensible.

There are Firefox extensions that add all sorts of useful features to the basic browser. One of my favorites is the Foxmarks bookmark extension that allows me to keep all of my bookmarks automatically synchronized across four different Firefox installations on two OS X Macs, a PC running XP and a Linux laptop on Ubuntu.

I also installed extensions such as the Google toolbar, the Web Developer Toolbar, ColorZilla (tells me the value of any color on my screen) and a Del.icio.us bookmarking button.

Add to that the fact that Firefox is Open Source (free) and very crash-resistant. If you’d like to try out Firefox, here is the link to download it:

10. Using free web hosting

If you were starting up your business right now, would you locate it in an out-of-the-way location where customers had a difficult time finding you? What if the landlord limited the number of customers you could have? Would you open there just because the rent was free?

That wouldn’t be a very good choice, would it? Unfortunately, free webhosting has the same issues. The biggest problem is bandwidth limits. Web hosts pay for the bandwidth they use and understandably limit the amount they give away for free. That can often result in your customers getting an error message instead of your website.

That error message is the equivalant of having a big “For Lease” sign on the front of your business. It may refer to one of the apartments upstairs, but by-passers can easily make the assumption that you are out of business. Not good.

Free hosting services also limit your ability to add essential services to your website. They generally don’t allow some important scripts to be installed and when they do, the limited resources they make available to your site can hinder their performance.

There are a number of low-cost web hosting solutions available. Sometimes, as with the marketing plans offered by OrangeCat, professional-grade web hosting is included in the package price. In OrangeCat’s case, domain name registration is also included.

IMPORTANT – When domain name registration is included in any plan you are considering, make sure that the registration will be in YOUR name, not the webhosting company’s or web developer’s. That can save you from some really BIG problems in the future.

If you are creating your own website, or if your web developer wants you to set up your own hosting account, there are several low-cost, high-quality hosting services available. One that we have used and found to be first-rate is HostGator. Another is Hostorix.

Either HostGator or Hostorix will provide you with professional-grade entry- to medium-level web and email hosting. So will most of the other low-cost hosting services. I recommend HostGator and Hostorix because I’ve had highly positive experiences with them. I can’t say the same for some others.

If you need a more high-level solution to handle large bursts or traffic, numerous email accounts or to maintain greater control of your hosting, you’ll need to give OrangeCat a call at 859.544.9005 and inquire about a custom solution that can be matched to your needs and budget.

Remember that your web hosting is the foundation on which your online business is built. Make sure that the foundation is a solid one.

9. No or poor contact information

I‘m often amazed when I visit a website that sells products or services and nowhere on the site is the contact information for the company that stands behind it.

Put yourself in the buyers shoes for a moment. Would you give your credit card number to someone whose name, address, phone number and email information are concealed. Are they someone up the street or an identity thief in some untouchable location? How would you know?

If you expect someone to pony up the bucks for your product or service and to give you their credit card info, you’d better let them know who you are. And the more information you can give them, the more comfortable they will be with the process.

When customers visit your website, anything you can do to eliminate confusion is to your benefit. It’s very easy for customers to “just say no” to whatever you are offering, and introducing any confusion into the process will encourage them to do just that.

At the very minimum, you need a contact phone number on every page and a separate “Contact Us” page with your company’s name, mailing address and email. Repeat the phone number again on this page and offer a link to your online support system if you have one.

This was a short post, but don’t underestimate the value of getting your contact information right. If you have any contact information issues, make a plan today to set them straight and reap the benefits from here on.