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BOOMER eZINE
The Online Entrepreneur Magazine |
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Volume 1 - Issue 14 7-14-06 For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this
issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-zine.com/V1I14_071406.htm
and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com. Please pass Boomer eZine on to a friend. They will thank you for it. Volume 1 Issue 14 For those who would like
to read this in HTML format, this issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer
eZine website at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I14_071406.htm
and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com. Table of Contents for this issue..... 1.
Author’s Comments 2.
Yahoo Widgets 3. Building a Website Author's
Comments This week has been a
tough one. On my day job, I am the
chief operating officer of a technology company that makes a high tech shipping
container for shipping temperature sensitive products.
We manufactured and shipped the first five units of a new model container
on Thursday, and it was an intense week getting all the bugs worked out of the
manufacturing process. We have a
great crew at our plant and it all worked out well.
These units will be used to ship vaccine for children’s vaccination
programs around the Another highlight of the
week was a shipment of two units of a larger model of our containers to NASA.
These will be used in August to transport material from Yahoo
Widgets Last week when I was
researching RSS for Boomer
eZine V1 I13, I checked many RSS readers and finally settled on a very
clean, simple one that I am now using. In
the process, I learned about a really neat thing and that is Yahoo Widgets. Let’s go the Wikipedia
for a definition: Yahoo! Widgets is a free JavaScript runtime
engine for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, previously called Konfabulator,
but subsequently bought by computer services company Yahoo!. The runtime engine
runs small applications referred to as Widgets, and hence is part of a class of
software applications called widget engines. It combines its JavaScript engine
with an XML document structure that can be used to author custom Widgets. Note the uppercase "W" in Widget; this is the proper use of
capitalization when referring to the actual applets that Yahoo! Widget Engine
runs. The aforementioned use of capitalization is unique to this particular
widget engine. To use Widgets, you go to
http://widgets.yahoo.com and download
the Widget engine. This gives you
the platform on your PC to run any of the many Widgets that are available.
Yahoo says that there are thousands of Widgets.
I am using three now. One for
local weather on my desktop, MultiNewsReader to read my RSS feeds, and an analog
clock on my desktop. Some of these are helpful
and some are just fun. Check it out
and see if there is a Widget for you. Building
a website This is a tough subject
to tackle since there are so many reasons for setting up a site and so many
options for building one. I will not
attempt to guess your reasons for wanting to build a website, but let’s
explore the options for building one. If you want to have
presence on the Net and you want to build it quickly and cheaply, use www.blogger.com
and set up a blog. This will
give you a unique URL that is yours to use.
It does not cost anything and you can set it up in just a few minutes.
It does not have the status that a domain name with dot com after it, but
you need to evaluate your needs. This
might be a way to feel your way into business on the Net.
As an example, we post the Boomer eZine in a blog on Blogger at our own
URL http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com. If you want your own
website, you will need to get your domain name in the form of domain name.???.
The last letters will be .com, .org, .net. .biz, etc.
You can get a domain name from a multitude of registrars as cheaply as
$1.95 per year, but there is usually a “hook” with that low a price.
The norm is about $6.95 for a year. Go
to Google and search for “domain name” and stand back for the flood of
advertising that will overwhelm you. You can find many website
hosts on the Net that will host your website for next to nothing each month.
As an example, we use one host that will host unlimited domains for $2.95
per month. We are really just
“parking” the domain names there until we have time to build them out.
Go to www.boomer-success.com
and see the web page that lists them. As
we decide to build them, we move the hosting to a larger, more capable web host. If you just need a few
pages on your site and you are not concerned about getting search engine traffic
to your site, you can find numerous sites that will host your domain for a few
dollars per month. However, if you are
building a site that you want to create income for you in the future, I
recommend that you consider using Site Build It (SBI). In Boomer
eZine V1 I6 I wrote about starting our SBI site.
That was June 6. I wrote
follow up articles in several issues following that date.
Here it is almost two months later and there are 18 pages built in www.retirement-jobs-online.com.
We already have three number one
positions for keywords on the MSN search engine.
We are getting hits from Yahoo and Google, but our page ranking is not as
high with them as the MSN engine yet. These
will take more time. All the
feedback on how our keywords are doing and our position with the various SE’s
(I will abbreviate search engine as SE in the remainder of this article) is on
reports that we get as a part of the SBI management tools. My Personal Experiences
with Web Sites Let me give you a little
of my own experience with building websites so you will better understand my
appreciation of SBI. I built my first website
in 2000. I registered the domain www.jhowe.com
and used Microsoft Front Page to build a very basic website to give me a
presence on the Internet and to give me a dot com name to use for my personal
email. Since the, I have built
several other websites using Front Page for the HTML editor.
I will be the first to admit that I do not program in HTML, but use Front
Page which is called a WYSIWYG editor. This
stands for “what you see is what you get”.
With this type of editor, you develop the page that you want to see and
the editor converts it into the HTML to make it appear as you have created it. I built these sites and
used the premise “build it and they will come” and guess what, they
didn’t! In a bricks and mortar
business, the physical location of the business is the all important factor for
success. On the Internet, location
is also important, but the “location” is your page’s ranking with the
SE’s such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Off
line, you find a location where the customers go by your store and see it and
stop in. On the Net, your customer
finds you when he/she is searching for information.
The SE’s are how the searching is done, and if you are in the top 10
sites presented by the SE, you may have the customer come to your site.
If you are not on the first page of the search results, you are
invisible. Site Build It has so many
services bundled with it, that it I cannot list them all for you in this issue,
but the most important in my judgment is its handling of the SE’s for you. It helps you build each
page and analyzes it for content organization so that the page will be best
presented to the SE spider (SE program that checks your page for content to rank
it in the SE). SBI then handles the
submission of the page to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
It keeps track of when the spider visited your page, what the ranking is,
etc. It provides you with a traffic
report that tells you the number of visitors you had and evaluates the traffic
for each page. It tells you on which
page a visitor entered your site and the exit page from which the visitor left.
These are the statistics that you need to improve your site and make
decisions about how to improve it. Sir Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge is power.” In the case of working on the Net, that is true. SBI give you the support and knowledge to evaluate your site and improve it based on the information that it provides. I hope you can see from
my excitement over the capability of SBI that I plan to build all of our future
commercial sites using SBI. It
automatically handles so many of the small details for me that I would otherwise
have to remember to do for myself if I were building the site in the
conventional manner. On the surface, SBI
appears to be relatively expensive, but do not let the initial impression fool
you. You need to really study what
you get with SBI that are extra costs or are not supplied by the “cheaper”
web hosts. Linda and I are both of
Scots heritage and that naturally makes us frugal.
We would not be planning to use SBI for our future web sites if we did
not think that we were getting full value for our money. I strongly suggest that if you are planning to build a major commercial website for your business that you research SBI in depth. For more information about SBI, go to http://buildit.sitesell.com/boomer.html. That wraps up our issue
for this week. Until next week, stay
tuned. John and Linda Howe
If you are changing email addresses in the future, put a note on your calendar to send us a blank email after you have changed your address. Send the blank email to: boomerezine001@aweber.com. We want you to remain a subscriber to our newsletter! It is OK to go ahead and join our
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Copyright 2008 John Howe, Inc. Please visit the other Boomer sites
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