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News
[Top] [News] [Net Watch] [Product
Review]
- Dog River Design has partnered
with a local Accounting firm, L. Hanger Tax and Accounting, to
create "The Computer Shoppe" providing computer
sales, service, and consulting for the Summerville South
Carolina area.
- Dog River Design has contracted
with Richard Baldwin, computer consultant and web designer
formerly with Dog River Business Solutions, to provide computer
support services and web design services for our clients in the
Vermont area.
Net Watch
[Top] [News] [Net Watch] [Product
Review] Will they
every make up their minds? That is the question that I keep asking
myself when the major search engines keep changing how they do
things. From as way back as I can remember, webmasters have been
pushing the envelope to get their sites at the top of the list.
Many techniques have come and gone and now they are, yet again,
taking away another. Over the past several years we have had some
real success due to our marketing of clients home page as well as
the sub pages within the site. Most clients have seen site traffic
double, triple, and even quadruple in a year. Well those days are
over, things are changing. Actually I understand their reasoning,
I just don’t like it. This is the scoop. The major search engines
have started or will be starting to penalize sites that send them
multiple pages. They are going to start dropping them in the
ranking or dropping them completely from their listings.
Their justification is that there
are just too many pages being sent to them to handle. They all use
spiders or little programs that look at your site once you send it
to them, so there should be no reason to send multiple pages.
Where things get real confusing is who is following what
guidelines. For that reason, organizations such as http://dmoz.org/
have sprung up to act as a main database for other search engines
to pull from. With DMOZ, you send your site to them, when they get
around to looking at it several weeks later, you may or may not
get added, and then you may or may not get picked up by search
engines that use them. It is a real mess.
All of this can be conquered if you
are willing to send a bunch of money. You can pay for keywords at
google, yahoo, altavista, msn, etc. paying per ‘click-through’
from those keywords. (A ‘click-through’ is when your site comes up
at the very top of the search engine and someone clicks on it to
go to your site.) On the surface this may seem to be a good idea.
I have a client that pays $.50 every time someone clicks through
their keyword on yahoo. What happens if they get 200 click-throughs
in a day? The product they are selling only sells for $3.25 or so,
seems like they may make more sales but lose a nickel on each one
in the long run.
So now that you’ve heard the bad
news, how do we cost effectively get our sites out there. The new
answer to the problem is more in the design of the site than in
the saturation of the search engines with all your pages. In my
research one common theme keeps coming to the top. “Content is
King“ If you don’t have good content, hang it up. Also, if you
have not prepped every aspect of your site to be “spider friendly”
you are wasting your time. Fortunately we have been thinking this
way for our clients from the beginning. For those clients that use
us to submit your sites to the search engines, we have modified
your marketing profiles in our submission software to comply with
our new findings.
If you’d like to talk to us about
performing a marketing compatibility audit on your site, or would
like to talk to us about marketing your site, please give us a
call or send us an email. We will keep everyone posted as we
continue to research the best ways for your site to be a success.
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Product Review
[Top] [News] [Net Watch] [Product
Review] This really
is my favorite part of this newsletter. First of all, I have an
excuse to buy something new every month! Well I was going to talk
about a new Multi-Function printer we just got for the office, but
that has been pre-empted for this month. As much as I love to
tinker in the back computer shop getting computers to run right, I
just don’t have any patience for my own computers when they are
not running correctly. When one of our office machines is on the
fritz, the whole office is down.
Most recently Sue’s computer
started giving us a problem. Just locking up when it felt like it.
Our first stab at solving the problem was to upgrade to Windows XP
home. Things were fine for a while but ultimately were not
resolved. Just about a month ago I decided to install XP Pro on a
fresh drive and reinstall everything. Things just got worse. Well
after watching her struggle with it and have it lock up several
times while working with a client, each time requiring not only
her to reboot, but also the server as it locked all the files she
was using at the time, I agreed to look at replacing it as soon as
affordable.
I started looking at some of my
favorite sites,
www.tigerdirect.com,
www.geeks.com, www.dell.com,
www.bestbuy.com,
www.circuitcity.com, etc.
I found what I thought to be the best deal at
www.tigerdirect.com, a P4
barebones with everything but the monitor, and an operating system
for about $550.00. It was really more than I wanted to spend, but
I just could not deal with the hassles of things not working
right. I started looking on the web some more and was astonished
to find myself looking at
www.walmart.com. I’m almost embarrassed to say that Wal-Mart
is where I found myself going at 10:00pm that evening.
I have a few requirements when I
look for computers:
- upgradeability being at the top
of the list. If it cannot be upgraded, I don’t want it.
- With our job in particular,
having the ability to use a dual display video card is a must.
Well Wal-Mart had an Emachines AMD
1600+ on sale for only $598.00 What amazed me was that it was not
just the CPU but EVERYTHING, computer, keyboard, mouse, monitor,
speakers, software, even a CDRW, EVERYTHING for $598.00. I cannot
begin to build it for that price even when buying wholesale!
 I
really was skeptical, but Wal-Mart is very good about returns so I
decided to take a chance and bring it home, it is a business
deduction anyway right ;)? Once home it went together quickly and
easily. We were up and running in no time. The onboard video is
adequate for most everyday stuff, it has a big enough hard dive,
fast enough processor, and the added bonus of a CDRW is really
nice. Did I mention that it was only $598!
Sue was very pleased with the
machine…. Being a woman she tends to look more at what the machine
LOOKS like than how it runs (as long as it’s fast and works she
doesn’t care), but if it doesn’t LOOK good then it’s not worth her
money! She thinks this computer system is very pleasing to the
eye.
 There
were some down sides. It only came with 128 megs of ram. Windows
XP likes 256 megs or more, and the monitor is only useable at
800x600 resolution. At 1024x768 it only supports a refresh rate of
60hz, I need a minimum of 85hz or I get a headache. But seeing as
I had extra ram in the shop and Sue already had her nice dual
monitors and dual monitor video card, the down sides were not an
issue.
All in all I would really recommend
this little computer to someone that needed a comprehensive
upgrade and had a decent monitor and was willing to spend an extra
$50 for some more ram. Frankly most would be just fine with the
package as a whole right out of the box, but if you are picky like
me and want a little more punch and a great monitor, look at the
Sony deal at Wal-Mart for $1198. This was out of my budget, but
was a real temptation. The Sony would be a true “out of the box”
powerhouse computer. Maybe next time…
Please send any questions about, or
ideas for, product reviews here at
Staff@dogriverdesign.com.
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