I want to give you a heads up on a few things we are working on and  how these may affect you.

New Automated Subscription Plans

We are currently working on integrating automated subscription plans for Komotion WebPacks. Existing Komotion customer sand clients are on custom plans so those new subscriptions will not apply to you, at least not right away. Over the next few days you may see changes in the admin dashboard, in the top menu bar and sidebar menus. Please ignore those new menu sections for now. If you encounter any screens prompting you to sign up for a  paid plan, you should be able to ignore, cancel or choose a “free” plan and get back to what you were doing. There should be nothing preventing you from continuing to update your website during this transition. Please let us know if you find anything otherwise.

As you are currently on a custom plan, any restrictions in terms of plugins, upload quota, etc. that apply to those new subscription plans will not apply to your custom plan.

I will follow up if there are any changes that will affect your website. Once the new features are implemented, you will be able to access additional features from your dashboard including many help resources, tutorial videos and an automated way to get support.

New Network Infrastructure

Following this we have another exciting transition that we will undertake, related to moving our hosting infrastructure from dedicated servers to enterprise class infrastructure using Amazon Web Services Cloud Hosting. This will provide your website with the highest level of reliability, security and performance in addition to being able to dynamically scale with your needs.

This transition means our server will have new IP addresses so your domain name will need to point to a new IP number. We will follow up with more specific instructions when the time comes.

Updated Komotion Website

We are also working on updating our main Komotion website with tutorials, samples and other useful information to help you get the most out of your Komotion WebPack.

For more, go to Komotion - Packaged solutions for website design and hosting.

Should a gallery page (one of several galleries in the website) be nested under a page about the specific gallery topic or under a main gallery page?

A client recently posed this question, related to their sitemap which had pages dedicated to several treatment services and photo galleries related to each treatment:

There will be multiple galleries (1 for most treatments), there should be a main Photo Gallery page that links into the other galleries. I think each treatment gallery should be on a separate page from the treatment page itself.  With that said would best way to create the nesting of the pages be:

• Treatment Pages
• Treatment A service page
• Photo Gallery for Treatment A
• Photo Gallery Main (with links to the gallery pages)

– OR –

• Photo Gallery Main
• Photo Gallery for Treatment A
• Treatment Pages
• Treatment A service page

I think this is a great question and one which has relevance for many different cases. So here is the answer:

It can go either way, depending on what and navigation strategy you want to promote. The way to think about it generally goes like this: If the user is on the Photo Gallery for Treatment A page, are they more likely to want to go (or do YOU want to have them to go) to the  main Treatment A page or to the main Gallery page?

Generally the former is better. The individual treatment gallery page has conceptual/semantic ties that are stronger to the Treatment A page that to the gallery page. When someone is looking at a Treatment A image, they are likely more interested in knowing more about Treatment A, rather than look as images in general, such as images for other treatments.

There is another important reason why it is better to nest gallery pages to some richer text parent pages rather than having them nested to a main gallery parent page. Google can’t extract as much information from an image – basically only text that is in the image title, description, alt tag, etc. Subordinating the image page to the word rich treatment page, will trickle more keyword juice to those images than if the parent of the page is just the main gallery page, which is likely to lack text content or specificity.

Since I see utility for user to also want to look at pics and navigate through several galleries, it is useful to have a main gallery page linking to each treatment gallery, as well as have the reverse; a link from the treatment gallery page to the main gallery page. But these links are secondary.

The primary, most important navigation or logic structure should drive where the actual pages reside and specific parent/child relationships. So even though you can have any page link to any other page, when creating a sitemap one should create the nested structure that identifies the unique location of the page in the hierarchy. The sitemap is at the basis of how the website pages will be nested into directories, with each page at one unique location.

For more, go to Komotion - Packaged solutions for website design and hosting.

On a macro level, our capital based society is bases its growth on people buying “stuff”. This growth has been fueled by companies artificially inflating the desire for consumers to have more, better, faster; to discard the old and upgrade to the new. Technology has enabled the producers to get more and more sophisticated in their ability to manipulate consumers and further fanning the demand. I have been concerned about the time consumers realize the growing desires are less and less related to true need. Will our society’s economy crumble like a house of cards?

The benefits we got from free over-the-air TV and more recently from Google Search or Facebook social networking are not really free – we get it in exchange of our privacy or by allowing companies to continually pitch us; overtly through ads and more covertly through various recent online marketing schemes.

I see a glimmer of hope though. The technological advancements which can help producers manipulate demand, can also help the consumer side of the equation. I came across an interesting article – The New Sharing Economy (from Fast Company) – which provides more insight into this topic; a great read.

The ability for consumers to find and squeeze more value out of the product cycle may ultimately save us. Access to online networks enabling sharing of tools, transportation, even lodging, enables us to be smarter of how we participate in the new economy.

For more, go to Komotion - Packaged solutions for website design and hosting.

Write your own optimized page content?

I recently had a number of clients ask about search engine optimization (SEO, for short) and if/how they can tackle this themselves. They varied in the knowledge they had about it; some knew a few valid tips and some had erroneous notions or interpretations. This post is meant to shed some light on how to decide if a business should do SEO in-house or if they should hire an outside expert.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. Wikipedia

Many businesses or website owners don’t have any idea how to best approach SEO and when to hire consultants or specialized copywriters (people writing copy, or “text”) to do this for their website. Sometimes this is best done in-house. Other times, it makes sense to get help from an outside expert you trust.

Writing for the Web Yourself

As long as you have a person with an understanding of your business, decent writing skill, some basic technical aptitude and logical thinking, they (or you) can do it themselves. Developing this type of expertise in-house can be a valuable business asset.

Not only will it save you money, it may possibly save you time when you consider that for a consultant to do a great job, you will need to teach them about the specifics of your business. The time you would spend educating a third party about your business, competitors, website audience, clients and business strategy may be better spent for you to learn and understand how to do SEO yourself.

Going through this process yourself will also surely sharpen your own understanding of how SEO works and can have a positive impact on how you develop your online business strategy for best effect.

Note also that if you are already planning to write copy (or “text”) for your website in-house, it makes practical sense to have some knowledge of SEO, so your writing is conceived the right way from the start. Otherwise most work will need to be redone (more time and money investment) when the person doing the SEO revises it.

Hiring an SEO consultant to write your copy

This is the best approach if any of the following conditions apply to you:

• Your budget affords you to hire an expert
• You can get an expert you trust (important since good SEO work is not readily and immediately apparent)
• You already did your best and want to further improve your Website SEO performance
• You are in a highly competitive business and need help to get on top
• You do not have internal resources or time required to perform this task
• You read about how to do SEO and got overwhelmed
• You do not have the interest (or aptitude) required to perform this task (that’s OK, not everyone wants to become an SEO geek)

The consultant doing SEO for you should have at least two important sets of skills:

• Be a good copywriter with experience writing for websites (which requires a specific style)
• Know SEO techniques (how to create relevant copy, quality links, domain trust, social popularity, search engine connectivity, etc.)
• Provide examples of measurable SEO success they have achieved (search rankings)
• Offer references from previous clients using their SEO services

Next Steps

To learn more about SEO, read our Search Engine Optimization Guide.

If you need help, we can teach you how to do it, assist your during this process or do it for you. Find out more about how we can help your business.

Have some relevant experience related to making this choice? Please share by leaving a comment below…

For more, go to Komotion - Packaged solutions for website design and hosting.

Technorati provided the annual State of the Blogosphere, based on a survey of 7,200 bloggers.

Some key takeaways as identified by Erick’s Schonfeld from TechCrunch:

Click chart to expand

• Self-employed bloggers now account for 21% of those surveyed, compared to 9% last year.
• But only 11% say their primary income comes from blogging.
• Hobbyists still make up the bulk of bloggers at 65%, but that is down from 72% last year
• Corporate bloggers now make up 4% of the total, up from 1% last year.
• Two thirds are male
• They use many types of social media (LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg), but when it comes to driving traffic back to their blogs only two social media services really count: Facebook and Twitter
• Tablets and smartphones are impacting impacting blogging styles for 39% of bloggers
• Of those, 70% are writing shorter posts, 50% are posting photos from their smartphones, and 15% are using less Flash
• When writing about brands or products, 71% will only write about brands they approve of.
• One third boycott products, but only one fifth write about their boycotts

Check out the full slide presentation below.

State Of The Blogosphere Presentation 2010

For more, go to Komotion - Packaged solutions for website design and hosting.

Microsoft has announced that their blog offering, Live Space will be terminated and users forced to move to WordPress.com. If you are a Windows Live Space user, now is a great time to improve your blog website. Here is how to do it.

First use the official Microsoft function to move Live Space to a WordPress.com account. This will get all your posts, comments, and photos to WordPress.com. See more details on how to upgrade from Windows Live Spaces.

You will use this as a bridge only. From WordPress.com you can easily export your blog to a more versatile format, freeing you to move your content wherever you want. To get your site to have all the features and power we offer Komotion users, simply import your site to your Komotion account.

For more, go to Komotion - Packaged solutions for website design and hosting.

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For more, go to Komotion - Packaged solutions for website design and hosting.

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Page can display full-width or with a sidebar. Portfolio image above is automatically generated (optional). Following is just filler text, arranged in a multi-column layout… Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, adipiscing elit. Aliquam dictum metus ipsum, ac tristique mauris. Donec aliquet leo eget risus tempor sed bibendum ipsum dignissim. Nam ante ipsum, dictum egestas pharetra ac, tempus ac libero? Aenean non ornare lectus. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, adipiscing elit. Aliquam dictum metus ipsum, ac tristique mauris. Donec aliquet leo eget risus tempor sed bibendum ipsum dignissim.

For more, go to Komotion - Packaged solutions for website design and hosting.

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Page can display full-width or with a sidebar. Portfolio image above is automatically generated (optional). Following is just filler text, arranged in a multi-column layout… Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, adipiscing elit. Aliquam dictum metus ipsum, ac tristique mauris. Donec aliquet leo eget risus tempor sed bibendum ipsum dignissim. Nam ante ipsum, dictum egestas pharetra ac, tempus ac libero? Aenean non ornare lectus. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, adipiscing elit. Aliquam dictum metus ipsum, ac tristique mauris. Donec aliquet leo eget risus tempor sed bibendum ipsum dignissim.

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