John McKown: President of Delaware.Net, Inc.
Since I was a kid, I have fond memories of going to the Delaware beaches. Rehoboth Beach has always been a special place for me. The boardwalk, the shops, restaurants, all of it. It still has that charm that brings a flood of Pennsylvanians and Delawareans to the beach. Rehoboth IS the beach for many folks.
There are many Content Management Systems (CMS) software packages on the market if you want to manage your own website content. Some are very inexpensive or free, and other enterprise CMS suites can cost over $100K. Delaware.Net offers our own system, called Team-Logic. It is neither costly nor free, and it is incredibly powerful but still easy to use. Prices start at $50 per month for the whole system.
There ARE cheaper open source solutions out there, and on the low end you have systems like Drupal, PHPNuke, PostNuke, .netNuke, Joomla, and others. These can be made to work if you have the time and patience, but for the most part they are solutions for non-profits and companies that don’t want to spend a lot on their website design work. I would never recommend them for a growing business that really cares about their website. Especially if they don’t have an in-house IT team. These low-end systems are well suited for a website where it is OK to use design templates for someone that wants to get up and running quickly. But there WILL be problems when using these systems, and like everything else - there is a trade-off.
If you are like me, you might own more than one domain name that you can use for your websites. What you may not have known, is that Google rewards the older names that you aren’t using for your website. Over the past year, we have noticed that Google is rewarding domain names that are older with a higher Google Pagerank. This is important, because the Google Pagerank variable can be thought of as a multiplier that use used against the keywords in your website for relevance to the terms in your site.
What does all that mean? It means that your older domains could possibly come up higher in Google, and that you should consider working some of your older domain names into your marketing plan.
All homes in the Delaware area are now on Delaware.com!
Today I relaunched my real estate portal at Delaware.com. The portal now includes an expanded real estate search that includes all real estate listings in both the TrendMLS database, and the Offutt database that serves Sussex, County Delaware. The site is updated daily, and has over 60,000 homes. You can search by city, and also by neighborhood to view comparisons of listings that you are interested in. The site also includes virtual tours of properties, and you can search those as well. If you are a licensed Realtor, I can put this technology into a site for you. I will continually add new features to the site to make it the leading real estate site for the state of Delaware.
Free Delaware Business Directory Also Launched
I also launched a local web directory, where you can add your business for free. Simply go to the site and add your web site to the directory for free. If you opt to pay for a premier listing, we have included additional categories that you can be listed under, and there are additional search engine optimization fields that will help to direct traffic to your web site. Premier listings allow a logo, and they show at the top of each category.
I just updated my Windows laptop to XP Service Pack 3 this morning and I haven’t had any issues with it. The update went pretty smoothly, but the Windows Update site was a little slow to download from, since there are so many people updating their systems today. In fact, my Windows Update program didn’t automatically do the update - I had to run Windows Update manually. No doubt Microsoft has to break up the scheduling of the updates so that their downloads aren’t too slow. If you are impatient like me, then you can run Windows Update manually and you will get SP3.
I just launched a new real estate portal on Delaware.com. The new real estate search engine for Delaware includes all homes in both Delaware area MLS databases. This allows us to offer a local real estate search that covers ALL of the available homes in Delaware. Each morning, we syndicate over 60,000 homes into our databases. With newer XML-based MLS data being integrated, we will expand this database even further.
I don’t use a desktop computer anymore
I’ve gone 100% laptop, and I really don’t miss having a big desktop computer any longer. I get asked a lot by friends and customers what computer they should buy. My advice is that if you are a businessperson that needs to be closely tied to email, you should just get a laptop and forget the desktop. Laptop sales are now greater than desktop sales, and there is a reason for that. At our office, everyone used to have desktop machines. Now, we have several new employees that are only using laptops besides me. I expect everyone to be on laptops in the future. I also use a docking station, which allows me to have dual monitors when I get to work. I just plug into the dock, and my second 24″ monitor boots up – works great. All of our staff at work has either two monitors, or a large 24″ monitor. I’ll never give up having two screens, and the 15″ laptop screen combined with a 24″ flat panel gives me all the room I need to have a large workspace.
Find out what I am buying after the jump.
Companies that offer email hosting service have seen quite a few changes over the years. Compared to years ago, spam is obviously more of a problem for everyone that uses email. To combat spam, we have employed special technologies on our network, and we have also used on-demand filtering services to pre-filter spam email before it comes into our network. Clients LOVE this service, because we are able to stop over 98% of spam before it gets to our customer’s mailboxes. While filtering spam has been has made email much more enjoyable, there are still other threats that can affect email delivery and spam. The biggest problems are mail-forwarding and catch-alls. In this post, I will explain what these are, and why they are so bad for email hosting providers. These two types of email accounts used to be OK to provide, but we have had to completely eliminate email forwarding over the last year. In speaking with other email hosting companies, I have discovered they have all had to make the same change, or are planning to. Find out why after the jump.
“we are able to stop over 98% of spam before it gets to our customer’s mailboxes “
Three years ago, I came up with an idea to get a little more local exposure for us, and to also help out area chambers of commerce. The idea was to have a business-to-business (B2B) trade show, where businesses that sell to other businesses could mix and market. On March 5th, we held our third one. It went great!
Thanks to all of our customers, friends, and partners that attended the Third Annual Delaware Expo Trade Show. The weather was perfect yesterday and we had over 1,000 attendees at the show. The exact number was close to 1,200. Our show is now the largest business-to-business networking event in the state of Delaware, with over 120 exhibitors. We got a lot of positive feedback on the show, and some ideas that we will use to make the 2009 show even better.
I installed an alternative to iTunes called VLC, and I love it. It is small, clean, has no spyware, no advertisements, and it loads super-fast. It also plays every major codec and streams Internet radio easily. You can download it here. Why did I ditch iTunes? More after the jump.
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