Recent  Stories

Slow Lane: Canadian consumers are paying a premium price for the dubious privilege of being stuck in the slow lanes of the information highway. Figures provided by global telecommunications analysts TeleGeography Research shows international Internet speeds – the rate at which data moves to and from a computer – Canada may not be the slowest, but we’re far from the nimble speeds offered in Japan and Europe.

Plans go electrnonic: An Ontario-wide Electronic Plans Room is set to roll out in the New Year. John Mollenhauer, president of the Toronto Construction Association (TCA), said things are on track for an agreement between the 11 Ontario construction associations by Christmas.

Black Gold: Where most people see obsolete computers and electronics, Alfred Hambsch sees more than gold, he sees black gold. As the president of the largest eWaste recycling company on the planet, Mr. Hambsch has built not just a business but a calling, taking obsolete electronics and processing them back into useable raw materials including gold and diesel fuel.

Take Charge of Your Website: In the beginning there was the Webmaster and he was God. And the Webmaster said, let there be a domain for this business and there was; Then the Webmaster said let the home page be divided from the other pages, and it was. And then the Webmaster said: If you need to make any more changes, I bill by the hour and I don’t work nights or weekends.”  Ouch.

Videoconferencing: Dennis Sandow chuckles recalling his “Halo moment” – the illusion created by the videoconferencing system that a colleague was in intimate proximity even though they were thousands of miles apart.

Party Favours: If you’re going to crash a party, it’s best to bring something along to smooth your entry, like a keg of beer, or risk a humiliation and rejection. It’s a strategy businesses should consider as they seek to leverage the virtual block parties evolving from virtual communities and social media.

Silicon Valley, Calif – Imagine picking up your Toronto Star and seeing the headlines  update before your eyes. Science fiction? Don’t bet against it. ePaper as it’s often called, is a quest being funded with millions of dollars in research and development by some of the biggest names like Hewlett-Packard, Phillips Electronics and Xerox.

Social Media: Andy Warhol was half right: Fifteen minutes is just the beginning. Social media – the collective of blogs, forums, e-mail, Instant Messaging and text messaging – makes us all celebrities, all the time.

Getting there half the fun: “Kate” is not happy.“In 500 metres, make a U-turn,” she insists, the Irish lilt in her voice clear on the “ur” of the word “turn.” “Kate” as I’ve nicknamed her, is my newest traveling companion, a Ground Position Satellite guided navigation program running on my mobile phone.

Taking control of your website

SIDEBAR: Search Engine Optimization drives web traffic

By IAN HARVEY

In the beginning there was the Webmaster and he was God.
And the Webmaster said, let there be a domain for this business and there was; Then the Webmaster said let the home page be divided from the other pages, and it was.
And then the Webmaster said: If you need to make any more changes, I bill by the hour and I don’t work nights or weekends.”

“We were paying up to $3,000 a month,” recalls Kevin Kirk Layton, president and founder of Eservus (eservus.com) an online corporate concierge service providing event tickets and value-added services exclusively to tenants in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver office buildings. “And we paid more if we needed updates.”

Layton realized he needed to take control of the website since it represents about 75 per cent of the company’s revenues: “I wanted just a shell that we could add our content to.” He found SnapTech (snaptech.com based in Burnaby, B.C. which provides web hosting and content management systems for small to mid sized businesses.

In the year since Eservus, it’s been “night and day,” says Layton.

“It’s really as easy as cut and paste,” says Tim Groeneveld, Snap Tech’s sales director. It uses a software-as-service model in which clients pay an average set up fee of around $800 and then $250 monthly for hosting, domain, training, support and continuing software upgrades.

Using a simple browser-based interface, Web sites can be updated from anywhere there’s Net access. The overlay has “Word” type buttons which allow users to highlight and click to change fonts or size. Pictures or graphics can similarly be added to pages and updates can be scheduled to run and stop on specific dates creating a fresh, dynamic look. Many also have plug in modules to track essential web metrics such as referring links and search engines as well as an integrated e-mail marketing package.

“The trend we’re seeing in the one to 25 employee space is towards software as a service,” said Stuart Crawford, director of business development at IT Matters in Calgary which advises small business on technology issues. “It really takes the risk out for small business and it’s affordable.”

CMS are nothing new though they’ve become remarkably affordable and more user friendly in the last five years. Originally developed for large enterprise platforms, current versions run the gamut from multi-lingual, segmentable, e-retail platforms for large online sellers costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to free, open source applications.

Content, whether text or images, are assets referenced via a database. Moving content around merely requires a set of instructions linking an asset to a specified place on a targeted page.

“The days of putting up static site are gone,” notes Rick Patri, Vice President, Sales, and co founder of Marqui, a content management solution and web design company in Vancouver which recently completed the makeover for Backbone Magazine. It also operates on a software-as-service basis. “The Net has made it easy to do comparison shopping and people want to see new and fresh content. It’s not a nice to have anymore, it’s a must have.”

Integrated solution allows companies to repurpose content, poly-publishing through a variety of mediums, along with all the up-to-the-second analytics necessary to ensure the business plan is unfolding as it should.

Kevin Hollis, vice president of BAASS, an accounting practice spread across the Ontario cities of Toronto, Burlington and London knows the frustrating dance of the web master all too well.

“It was so frustrating that our web site really wasn’t updated for two years,” he said of the decision to go with Snap Tech’s CMS. “We get the software for what we used to pay for hosting alone. And it only takes about a half day a month to keep the site updated.”

The company has already built an employees-only section of the site where policies and procedures are posted and its evolving into a full blown intranet with Human Resources functions as well, he said, a critical factor for a business in which team collaborate from three separate locations.

Driving more traffic to your Web site may be as simple as investing in a search engine tune up.

While simple search engine optimization is usually built into most Content Management Systems (CMS) some business take the concept to the next level - hiring someone to constantly “tweak” their pages and bump up their profile on search engines like Google, and Yahoo.
It’s called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and while most Web software allows pages to be titled, tagged and key worded more sophisticated SEO requires dedicated resources and that’s where companies like 1st On The List in Abbotsford, B.C. come in.
“It’s really the most effective advertising you can buy as a business,” says Chris Genge of his 10-year-old company with nine employees. “You could spend $600 a month on SEO but you’d have to spend $6,000 a month on pay-per-click for similar results.”
SEO is a little understood art, he says, requiring some intimacy with how search engines differ, how their algorithms change and the clients goals.
“There are some 104 different factors, says Genge. “And it’s not a one shot step. You have to do it consistently every month and check the results.”
CMS should be search engine friendly, he says, and not contain a lot of extraneous coding which clutter up the buffers.
Set up is about $600 for the average site with a monthly fee running between $200 to $300 depending on the size of the site.
But it works. “The web is our lifeblood because we have no other sales initiative,” notes Terry Page, president of Artful Dragon Press, a Washington State based business which facilitates price competitive production of books, calendars and other materials though Asian printers. “Without search engine optimization we couldn’t do it. I don’t understand how it work but when our site is optimized it jumps up on the search engines. It’s much more important than keywords.”
He said the monthly fee paid to 1st On The Web is less than one percent of total sales.
“It’s insignificant as a cost,” said Page.
“We have other clients who spend about $100,000 on SEO but they’re turning about 40 to $45 million a year, more than a million dollars a week selling travel packages starting around $900,” Genge says. “Compared to what you’d spend in advertising, even just Yellow Pages ads, its very little. And unlike pay-per-click if you double your traffic you don’t pay any more.”