Uncategorized Archives - Shawn DeWolfe Consulting

Squad Closes Down and Counterfeit “Help Desk” Impersonators Emerge

Shawn DeWolfe — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 01:39:29 +0000

Hackers in white shirts and black ties have taken up the call to answer end-user support requests in the wake of the closure of the popular service...

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The Best of 2019 – The Call

Shawn DeWolfe — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 19:19:00 +0000

We are looking for the best projects from 2019. Do you have something you’re proud of? Tell us about it!

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How Do You Pick A Good SEO?

Shawn DeWolfe — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 08:28:45 +0000

The task of picking the right SEO agency is difficult. There are so many of them. It’s the Wild West. When you give them your credit card, are they buying AdWords for your business or for themselves? A good SEO agency will never have a problem sharing all of their reports:

spending
keywords
target demographics
ad phrases

Don’t let an agency confuse you with jargon or box you in with strict contract clauses.

How Can You Let If Your SEO is working?

There are some key metrics you can look to:

Business: Are you getting bookings / business?
Analytics: Does your web traffic show an increase?
Mentions: Are people mentioning finding you via the Web?
Ranking: Do a Google search in a private broswer window for an important phrase related to your company: where do you rank?

When you contemplate hiring a reliable SEO agency. Don’t be fooled by them having a Toronto office, or multiple offices. A post box can rent for $150/year– that’s a hole in a wall, not the outpost of a marketing empire. Look at their level of experience. For example, I’ve been working online since before Google came along. You need a veteran not a huckster.

How Do You Compare SEOs?

These are some key considerations:

Are they a member of BBB? It’s an easy hoop to jump through.
How many complaints to they have? Google, ‘[company] complaints’ — you’ll find out.
Do they promise to get you to #1 in Google?
Do you like who they do business with?
Do you feel weaselly or considerate?

Whether you have a business who needs an SEO company in Vancouver or an SEO agency in Toronto, or Weyburn Sask. — it makes no difference. The web is global and they should be good. They’re not just the “best SEO in Toronto” or rank for “Reliable SEO agency” — they have to actually be good at what they do.

Some giveaways that your SEO agency is bad

These are some clues that could tell you that you need to keep working on your quest of picking a good SEO agency:

Do they misspell the basics? (eg. they use “2017 Copy rights” instead of ©2020 Copyright.)
Do they put phone numbers of your site, but do not hyperlink them? These are key for people who use mobile devices and want to click to call?
Do they use the wrong photos? Eg. clipart of tropical fish on your Northern BC fishing tour website.
Do they get work done at weird times? Eg. like all of the work could be coming from offshore?
If you’re in Canada, how do they spell words like “colour”?

What questions do you have? We want to make this article better. Ask us a direct question in our contact form (see below) and we’ll add the question with the answer to this page.

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Drupal 6 to WordPress

Shawn DeWolfe — Mon, 27 May 2019 03:03:05 +0000

At the Wordcamp Victoria 2012, we’re going to help site-owners who run Drupal in Victoria BC if they want to change that. This training session will cover migrating from Drupal to WordPress. Something for all of those Drupal users who want to switch to WordPress, a CMS that is simple and ideal for many roles.
The talk details the key differences between Drupal and WordPress. It talks about the pros and cons of both platforms and what a conversion may bring about. This talk will discuss the process of doing the database conversion to move content into place. It will cover which plug-ins can substitute for Drupal modules. With the remainder of the time, I will tackle questions about the conversion process and play as many what-ifs as time and audience tolerance allows.

This talk will be held first at WordCamp Victoria – on January 14th, 2012

We have three attachments associated with the Drupal to WordPress how-to

Drupal -> WordPress The SQL Script – this is the script to execute to put the data from Drupal into WordPress. Make sure to check out the PDF or the Powerpoint presentation and the walkthrough for how to do the export and conversion process.
Drupal -> WordPress (Adobe PDF)

Products, Services and Scarcity (Real and Imagined)

Shawn DeWolfe — Mon, 27 May 2019 03:03:03 +0000

In 2011, we did a podcast about getting the locomotive going—getting momentum. Then, I had a busy week and failed to live up to my pledge of momentum building. There’s saying it and there’s doing it. I said it, but everyone needs to do it. Getting the locomotive going is key.

In the quest for earning that first $10,000 of online revenue, there are some realities.
Spinning out spammy sites full of keywords is a dud. It’s not impossible to make money, but it’s unlikely. Likewise, you can definitely win a lottery ticket if you buy 16-million tickets. The days of Adsense rewards are over. The math can’t work: you need to run so many pages and get them ranked well and you can’t let them prey on each other and sap off each other’s popularity. The way to win at Adsense is raw traffic: lots of it, aimed at good quality unique content. Plenty-of-Fish does it right. If you can become a leader in some niche, you can get a lot of the attention and you can get a lot of traffic. That traffic like mining a mountain for gold. You can get rich, but you have to move a mountain to do it.
Products are a classic way to earn money online. The people I know who are making money are selling physical products. To a lesser extent, people are making money with digital products. We have digital products: 7 weeks ago, we published Pin It To Profit, to share our Pinterest knowledge with people who are still trying to figure it out. We sold it at a low price point. We had handful of paid purchases. When we put it out for free, we had thousands of downloads. There is finesse for how to promote products: this site has a great checklist of what you should do and when. Likewise, the $100 Start-Up is all about how push your products. Marketing is key, especially when you’re selling digital products because once the product is out there, your work is done and you have talk people into hitting that download link as often as possible.
Example Digital Products:

Ebooks

Digital assets (wallpapers, icons, fonts)

Apps and games (iPhone apps, Android apps, desktop apps)

Services are another legitimate method of getting to that first $10,000. Technically, digital products share a lot in common with many services: they’re electronic, they’re on demand and they’re intangible. You can see the impact of a good service or a good product, but you can’t pick up that difference and put it in a box. With services, the onus on you usually to make sure that the service is up-and-running. In the digital world, that leads to 24×7 vigilance and that can be grueling.

Examples of Digital Services:

Tracking stuff online

Completing work for you

Storing and organizing stuff

Products encumber you, but services can free you. A book has to be read. A physical book takes up shelf space and a virtual book takes up disk space; but a service can perform labour on your behalf or act as a digital valet. Something like Hotmail acts as a fusion: it serves to pipe and organize your mail, that mail being the product of others. So there are ways to fuse the two models. The big difference: services require an ongoing arrangement and products are usually a one-time affair. You can continue to bill your customers month-after-month until their service agreement lapse or until they cancel. I have this agreement with a few service providers and I don’t pay a small amount for the services, but I get an appropriate value.
Here’s some math on services:

$99 / month X 10 clients = $990 / mo. gross revenue.

$99 / month X 100 clients = $9,900 / mo. gross revenue.

$99 / month X 1000 clients = $99,000 / mo. gross revenue.

If your service is processor and labour hungry, it could cost a large amount to deliver, but maybe you can run at a thus consistent profit while allowing for scaling and an amplification of income? When SEOMoz received a large amount of funding, they uncloaked their earnings. It showed that they were bringing in a lot of money—14,000+ subscriptions or approximately $1,400,000 per month of cash flow. That’s some nice coin.
If you look at building a service to create an income for yourself, you don’t need a tremendous subscriber base or a high per month subscription fee to hit that goal.
Services need some things:

Provide a service that is worth money (saved time or a revenue generator of its own). You can likely sell a kitten-of-the-day service, but your audience may not see its value proposition.

You need to offer something unique—it can be truly unique, but you’re more likely to find a niche where your service offers a list of features that you cannot find in one place. Likewise, be careful to offer a service that some big player is unlikely to roll out for free. Last week, Bing revamped its webmaster tools and delivered some tremendous value for free. I have to bet that some SEO services were rendered valueless as a consequence.

You’re offering a 24×7 service or not. Spell out what the clients can expect for service and delivery times. One service I know of creates a manual report on a recurring basis—that’s not a 24×7 ad hoc service.

The subscription rate has to be something that you can bear were you to manually satisfy some of the clients at a rate of $10 / hour. In other words, could do what your service delivers, but do it manually at $10 per hour and not lose your shirt? You don’t want to become the mechanical turk for your clients, but you need to be able to survive if something rattles in your system and you want to carry out good customer service through manual processing to satisfy the needs of valued or noisy customers.

Act Now!—Scarcity Is Going Fast!

I was considering signing up for the Third Tribe Marketing program. I signed up for admission, but I was not allowed in immediately. I was lucky enough to be offered a chance to pay (lucky me!). Today, I got a notice that I time was running out! I had until 5PM today to sign-up! Hang on! There’s a limited time I can join and a deadline for enrolling? It’s a scarcity play. Scarcity happens when three people reach for the last dinner roll. In digital products, there is very little reason for scarcity to be an issue. Third Tribe is promising access to a forum, webinars and tutorials. By limiting enrollment and expiring the window of enrollment, it generates excitement.
I love and hate the concept of scarcity. Scarcity almost comes from a law of thermodynamics, but some sources are so ubiquitous and they negate the role of scarcity. Nobody worries about using up too much sun or wind, so solar power and wind generators are post scarcity tools. Computing power is so cheap that it’s almost limitless: you’re unlikely to develop faster than Moore’s Law can build out new processing. Our culture buys into scarcity. We think that something is worth more if it’s scarce. If someone is in a limitless supply, you can attach scarcity to its access to generate excitement, but its ubiquity can make it cheap for you to procure and sell. I hate being played with scarcity. But if people buy in because of the impression of scarcity, then that will generate sales for your product or service.

The takeaway:

Make a product or a service

Do your market research

A little scarcity goes a long way

Supplemental Reading:

resurrected from http://www.flexiofthemonth.com/mistakes-in-our-campaign-2/2012/06/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/23/1-month-old-buzzdoes-scores-750k-for-mobile-app-marketing-platform/

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/countdown-to-product-launch-12-key-steps/

http://alistblogmarketing.com/posts/launching-your-e-book-8-key-steps-for-success/

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Product Orgy

Shawn DeWolfe — Mon, 27 May 2019 03:03:03 +0000

Where has this column / concept of the First $10,000 gone? It’s been lost in the Hinterland of hard work.

Some of it has been hard work to prep for my own first $10,000 (that’s what this is– not a “I did it, now you can too”, it’s a “This is my journey, enjoy the show”). I was so Hell bent to get my act down, that I forgot that I needed to have the core of it– a product. A product in the broadest sense is something produced. It can be custom work. It can be a tangible item. It can be a book. It can be a website that people use. It can be a dog washing service. Like in elementary school, a product is the result of a multiplication. Raw material X Effort = Result. That doesn’t always mean it can amplify. Done right, it’s 5 X 5 = 25. Done wrong, it’s 0.2 X 0.2 = 0.04– a result much smaller than its contributions. Bad start-ups do that. They burn through cash and give you pretty buttons and FAQ pages; but no product.

So, I have some of my act down: marketing, planning, etc.. But the important part: the product is what I’ve been working on. I’ve always known that a product was key, but getting the time to do 20 minutes of marketing is easy. Getting the time to build the next Pinterest is trickier to come by. We launched, Pin It To Profit as an Amazon Kindle ebook at the start of May 2012. Another ebook (a fiction anthology) is coming in June. I am working on three sites in succession: Meatsplit, then Quaterfame, then turning back to that old chestnut CrowdPublishing.

I had a frustrating week that spurred me to get back on the train with this series. We all need money. We would all like to have enough money (the “enough” is subjective). I hate money and what it represents nowadays, but I still want it. Money solves many problems. Money is a product of your time, effort and smarts. I have a cautionary tale about a friend who has gone to the brink. Two of his tires are over the edge and pebbles are popping over into the abyss as foreshadowing. That’s not where I like to drive. I like to have all four wheels on the asphalt and cruising down the highway. I would like to just hand him and all of my friends money. Really: if I win the lottery, a lot of it will just be handed to friends. I hate the idea of saying, “You made a bad financial decision and this is your wake-up call.” I’d much rather say, “Let’s go to the bank and get you that money, so that we can put this disagreeable topic behind us.”

My friend has been working on a book. His work is excellent; so, as you would expect, his book is excellent. When you want to make money on a book, you publish it. You send it to a publisher; or you get an agent and ask them to do that on your behalf; or you open your wallet and fund it to be self-published. That is the only way you turn a salable book into cash. So in response, my friend builds a very polished slideshow with dramatic music and transitions timed to the music. Very breathtaking. But, publishers want a proposal, an outline and samples (chapters, photos, etc.). Making a publisher see a slideshow for a prospective book is like making your prospective boss watch you cook breakfast in lieu of a job interview: NOT WHAT THEY WANT. I urged him to prepare a proposal, or engage an agent, or use IndieGoGo to bootstrap it. Those suggestions were resisted.

So he has a slideshow for a book. Okay. (Breathe. Breathe.). What could one do with a slideshow? They could take it on tour, give presentations and talk about the slideshow. You’re playing to an audience of 10 to 100 people, but you could have a donation jar with the suggested take of $5 per person and that could be worth one’s while. That’s a little labour intensive, but it does allow one to monetize the slideshow that is otherwise not worth money. That was resisted, too.

When we were looking at a way to output it to edit the slideshow, there was a big “DVD Movie” option. Bam! A DVD and case is $1.50 or less to produce. Shipping would always be an added part of the cost borne by the customer. So, if you want a 5:1 retail:manufacturing ratio, any price above $7.50 for this DVD of the slideshow would be gravy. Almost every computer comes with a DVD burner. And printers can make DVD labels. You could start churning out DVDs in 2 hours. Put up a bunch of ads about the Interwebs, start selling these, and produce them as the orders come in. That was also resisted.

All of the material for the book has been matched to a cross reference on a map. You have a this crazy amount of historically significant information stored in a logical fashion. Canada is comparatively generous with its government grants. That version of this project screams a need to be funded by the Canadian government. That suggestion was not well received.

The lessons here:

Finish what you start.

A mediocre product outsells an unpublished product.

If your product’s intellectual property can be reworked into another product, do it (eg. Jar-Jar slippers, or Flinstones chewable vitamins)

Know when you’ve stumbled upon a product orgy– a whole slough of products that can come from one idea.

When you are aiming to satisfy the demands of a product release, do that. In the game of rock-paper-scissors, the guy with the candy cane doesn’t get to play.

Always look for the shortest path to completion. Life is journey, but product releases are about expediency.

Finish a product entirely and then move on. Or, dump the project, and move on. Sorry: it may be your baby, but it’s not a real baby.

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SEO and Drupal: Five Modules To Make You Stand Out

Shawn DeWolfe — Mon, 27 May 2019 03:03:05 +0000

In the days before I worked with a content management system, I built pages by hand. It’s an exercise in consistency. One of the joys of a CMS like Drupal is that it repeatedly put all of your best practices into place. Having such a large open-source community really helps drive the development of newer and better SEO mousetraps. Drupal code is W3C compliant and search engine friendly.

There are a number of contributed and core modules that can help with the optimization of a Drupal website. With the use of these modules you can ensure that your website will not only be search engine friendly but will have all of the components necessary to get a good search engine ranking. Installation is simple and there is generally little configuration involved.

To the right is a list of modules that can be used to help with the search engine optimization of a content management system. Complete with reviews and links to step by step installation tutorials, all of the most useful modules appear in the list. Follow the links to learn more and download. If you need help installing any of these, or getting the most out of them, let me know!

Content Optimizer

The Content Optimizer module for Drupal will help Drupal Developers improve the on-page SEO of their Drupal nodes. The module helps improve the search engine rankings of a Drupal website by analysis of page content with a guide to help webmasters follow best practices. The Content Optimizer performs an analysis using the Content Analysis API combined with Chaos Tools to provide an AJAX report of nodes, blocks, and admins forms.

Download: Drupal Content Optimizer Module

Keyword Research

The Keyword Research module for the Drupal Content Management System allows webmasters to get data about the keywords they wish to target for the pages of their Drupal website. It will help select the best keywords for Drupal page, help provide analysis about those keywords and allow webmasters to view data from Google such as Google Trends and Google Traffic Estimators specific to those keywords.

Download: Drupal Keyword Research Module

The ShareThis Module for the Drupal Content Management System will provide your users with the ability to share your content on a number of Social Networking sites. Customize your ShareThis code using the STAPI. Select node types you wish to display ShareThis module on Choose to display in $teaser view or not. Choose to display the ShareThis link in either the $link items, or in the $node->content itself. Customize the weight of the ShareThis link if in $node placement. Uses the ShareThis jQuery plugin so the ShareThis servers are queried after page rendering. Place a ShareThis block anywhere on your site.

Download: ShareThis

Twitter

Tie into Twitter from your Drupal site. Associate one or more Twitter accounts with their Drupal user account. List tweets in different ways thanks to Views. Post to their own Twitter account or a site-wide Twitter account whenever they create new content or based on Drupal Actions or Rules. Log in to your Drupal site via Twitter.

Download: Twitter

Yoast SEO

The best for last. This module checks things you’re bound to forget. It checks, whether your posts are long enough, if you’ve written a meta description and if that meta description contains your focus keyword, if you’ve used any subheadings within your post, etc. etc.

This real-time page analysis makes sure that your content is the type of content search engines and users will love!

Download: Yoast SEO

Do you need help? Let’s talk.

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Five Projects I Would Really Love To Do

Shawn DeWolfe — Mon, 27 May 2019 03:03:05 +0000

Twenty years of web development. Before that, I experimented in digital publishing. And before that: game design. Go back further and you get to the era when I used my computer solely for writing. That’s a lot of years in front of a computer. In the early days, I did my own thing. My friends and I worked on a game project and did some writing for magazine. I moved into programming and experimented with how to make a 2D scroller (X and Y dimensions. Think Mario Bros.– we were messing with that ca. 1983). I tinkered with using C++ to do game design about a decade later. During my era of web design, I shifted from entrepreneurial ideas to being a hired gun. People roll up with a project and I deliver. I have had all sorts of projects. There are several types of projects, I would like to take on. Sure: I can do anything, but here are five types of work I can do that I’d like to take on that I would find intriguing, interesting– maybe even fun.

What I am proposing are expeditions into application development. This isn’t the first time I have I had have a cool idea and wanted to run with it. This certainly isn’t the first time people have come to me with an entrepreneurial notion. People will come to me with a “If you build it, we can split the profit 50-50.” That’s not what I’m looking for with these ideas. What I looking for: working on a project that comes with a budget that reflects the risk and reward possible. Columbus wasn’t expected to set sail without a boat, without men and without provisions. I am proposing that I would be on-board with the following types of projects if someone is game.

So here are the five projects I would like to take on:

A Drupal Project Tied Into A Data Source Via An API

Drupal is really good. It can be used to control user roles, theming, the optional display of content. It can do so much. What if all you want is a site with pretty face? I do lots of stuff with APIs. I have tied into APIs. I have created API endpoints. I have done mashups with the combination of two juxtaposed API data sources.

What I want to do: I want to create a Drupal site as a front end. That Drupal site would tunnel into a data source, pull the page contents from that API source and produce it as output. I could build this as a wholly server side application, or a combination of server side and client side. Does your organization have some nicely tucked away data that needs a cool front end? A .Net application? A ColdFusion app? I want to connect your data to the world.

An Ad Network Project

Google AdSense is the big network. Behind them, there are dozens of smaller fish. Behind them, there are thousands of other small ad networks out there. There are so many outfits trying to make money with online advertising. The secret: most of them make money. If a new players get into the market, they could make money too. It’s a cool idea that has some potential. Cool ideas are easy to come-by. What’s difficult? Building an application. Marketing an application. If someone wants to take a run at building an advertising system and they want me on board to build the application– to give technical legs to the overall enterprise– then let’s talk.

The Shopify Marketplace

Shopify is a powerful application. Merchants selling their wares find its very easy to leverage Shopify for their purposes. What Shopify doesn’t have: it doesn’t have a way to network Shopify merchants. What if there was a way for one Shopify merchant working in a niche to feature products from another merchant who offered complimentary products? I think it would be cool to build something like this to let merchant find partners and feature their items to give customers an end-to-end product suite to choose from.

A System To Build And Share Procedures

Systems and procedures are the key to growing your business. When you take what you know and record it for others in your organize to use and re-use you can tap into the process that makes businesses into worldwide leaders. For a product to scale its success, it needs a system to diminish the amount of decision making that goes into results. A system will account for the variables and squeeze them into a manageable element of a process. The result is a recurring output that is predictable, scalable and something that can be tasked off to anyone who is adequately trained in the system.

What if there was a website to store, find and share procedures? I have an idea for how to pull this off. Do you have an interest in seeing something like this become a reality?

A Game

I would like to get back into game design to produce a game for the web. Maybe it’s been a 25 year pause of game design, but I am still interested in prospect. What about the specifics? Would it be standalone. Or, playable via Facebook. Who knows? I know how to develop apps for for Facebook. I know how to hold variable. All of the previous projects in this list aren’t much fun. Designing a game wouldn’t be any easier, but it could be fun. Who’s got a good idea for a game?

Do any of these ideas interest you?

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The Buy Cialis Problem

Shawn DeWolfe — Mon, 27 May 2019 03:03:06 +0000

WordPress is popular. As such, it’s a ripe target for those who want to exploit the largest number of web applications with the least amount of effort. Over the past two years, Web malware has grown around 140%. At the same time, WordPress has exploded in popularity as a blogging platform and CMS, powering close to 30% of websites today. But that popularity comes at a price; it makes WordPress a target for Web-based malware. When hackers find an exploit, they will work their black magic and add something malicious to a target website.

One such malware attack is one that overwhelms parts of the WordPress code and adds on malicious code. That code primes out tons of fake pages for things like Cialis, Viagra and other dubious products. Here’s a short list of phrases that had been snugged into this poor website:

homemade cialis

liquid tadalafil

viagra hearing loss reversible

cialis trial canada

amlodipine and erectile dysfunction

who is the viagra girl

viagra and hearing loss

poppers and erectile dysfunction

woman in viagra commercial kelly king

prazosin coupon

viagra and wine

order cialis phone

viagra dosage

max cialis dosage

cialis max dose

otc ingredients

viagra hours

marley drug prices

viagra football commercial

The malware I encountered messed with wp-blog-header.php to add on new code. I was able to rid my client’s site of the code, shore up the defenses of the website and clean up their online reputation. The best way to close the door on these exploits is to use the newest installation of WordPress with the best practice.

There are several things we’ll do keep your installation of WordPress ship shape:

Update software: the core, plugins and themes

Fix up your password credentials

Improve system administration

If all of the above doesn’t work, we can move the site to better hosting.

Deploy best practices

If you want to do it yourself, where are two good articles on the topic:
https://www.wpwhitesecurity.com/wordpress-tutorial/clean-hacked-wordpres…

Still need help? Contact me.

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HELP! The phone book has my website!

Shawn DeWolfe — Mon, 27 May 2019 03:03:06 +0000

In the 1990s, businesses paid to have listings in the phone book. When the Internet caught on, phone books tried to gain dominion there too. They offered value added services and marketing synergy. Let the phone book handle the marketing. That little patch of real estate of black on a yellow page, costs businesses a pretty penny. The phone book’s web pages would cost a lot as well. Contrast the high cost with low functionality. It doesn’t have to be that way. It is increasingly easy to deliver sophisticated functionality to a website– and it’s easy to deliver that functionality. My weapon-of-choice for Web development is WordPress. It has a tonne of useful add-ons (aka plugins). An adept web developer can apply these plugins to a website to get it do many things.

How could having the phone book make your web page be worse? What if they take your website? Clients who are looking to spend their marketing dollars better may find it’s hard to close the book on phone book advertising.

It shouldn’t be hard to change over to a different marketer. A good web developer will register a domain name on behalf of a client. The client will hold the domain registration and the web developer will offer advice, do the technical work and keep everything in good working order. Some companies will register a domain on behalf of their client, but keep control of the domain. If the client and the company part ways, the company will keep the domain name. When the phone book does this to their client, it will kneecap a client’s web presence. The good news: clients have a way to make a break for it.

How to Get Out

Step 1: Hire a Web Developer

Find a Web developer who you can get along with. Talk with them about what you want to accomplish online. Then, listen: listen for what they think they can accomplish for you in your market vertical. Figure out the budget you have in terms of time and money.

Step 2: Attempt A Rescue Of Your Domain Name

Ask for your domain name back. There will be some costs involved. If you were using a very valuable domain name, they may keep it and connect it to another client of theirs. If the domain name is associated with your business name, the company cannot keep it. You can urge them to transfer the domain and if that fails, there is a oversight body,, that you can apply to. They will negotiate the transfer through a dispute resolution mechanism (https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/help/dndr/udrp-en). It’s not ideal as there is a cost involved, but it will allow you to keep your domain when it closely matches your branding identity.

If that doesn’t fly, register a similar domain that still matches your branding. It’s not an ideal solution, but it is often faster than the dispute process.

Step 3: Get Your Content

A decent web development company will hand back creative files. When you embark on working with a developer, ask them for what the plan is when a) you and they part ways; and b) what happens when their business folds. These should not be difficult topics.

Designers will work with a client and launch a project. Until edits are needed or the next iteration gets planned and launched, a relationship is inert. Their inertia may just continue on. Or, maybe there’s a decent reason to part ways. Regardless, there should be a plan in place for how to get the material. I will often store content in Dropbox and prepare to share that data through a Dropbox share to my client. It’s seamless and doesn’t need media to be handed around or lost.

Businesses fold. While IBM has had a century of automation under their belt; when you hired Yamcoa Design Shizzle, they lacked the same longevity. I have worked for a dozen web design companies since I started in the field in the 1990s. Most of them died eventually. Clients have asked, “what if you go under” and my response has been simple: “I will bundle your assets (graphics, website, files, passwords, etc.) and give them to you.” Those assets should be ready to hand over at any time as an exercise in redundancy and portability. A laptop holds 1,000,000,000 kilobytes of data but is still vulnerable to a mug of coffee.

While you deserve your assets, understand that those assets don’t come with a guided tour. Expect that your next designer will have to get given time to assess what they have to work with.

When you hear of their backup / handoff plan, ask them to write it into the contract. If they won’t write it in, they won’t execute it when you need it.

Planning before the fact is all well and good. What happens when that didn’t happen? Don’t worry. There’s a secret weapon for content retrieval. It’s called The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/web/). I have gone there a number of times to exhume client content and bring it into the present. If your former developer won’t hand over your website or your content, I can help with that.

Step 4: When The Burn Stops, The Healing Starts

There is a sharp divide between what a print designer can do with a website versus a web designer can do for your website. While a website from a phone book may look okay, key shortcomings affect how discoverable a website is. Below are some examples. When a website comes up short in elements like these, the job of popularizing and marketing the visibility of the site becomes much harder to accomplish.

Security and “Secure Socket Layer” (SSL). Google is the number one search engine. It now penalizes websites that are not secured. When visiting a phone book based website, look at the lock icon next to the web address. If it has a red line struck through a lock that means the site is not secure. Web users will be cautioned to not divulge information via contact forms. Google will back burner a website in favour of an equivalent website that is secure.

Make your website easy for Google to figure out. There are ways to dress up your content to make the content easy to distill by a search engine. This is called “Open Graph” “Schema.org mark up” and phrases to that effect. It’s not hard to do and if your website lacks this, it gives Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, etc. less to work with.

Keep your code up to date. Nerds in the know will roll their eyes at these shortcomings. Google is the ultimate nerd in the know. This website is for a Canadian home improvement business. It lists the currency in use as the Euro. Several years ago, search engines started to mostly the chunk of code that included “keywords.” It was a well abused element, so they disregard its contents. When search engines see the keywords element, they will take that as a cue that the website in question is behind the times, by still using that element.

What’s next?

If you have a website tied to your phone book ads; and you want out, let’s talk!

The post HELP! The phone book has my website! appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.