Your website is your organization’s online persona—and whether you like it or not, the bottom line is that visitors are judging you based on their first impressions of your website.  Even though we all know that we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, let’s face reality…each and every one of us does exactly this all day long.

You Need A Professional Looking Website For Your Company.

In an environment where visitors landing on your page are apt click the back button in a split second, first impressions count.  This is your “book cover” we’re talking about here.  It doesn’t have to be overly complex and loaded up with all the widgets—sometimes simpler and cleaner is better.  It does need to come across as elegant, modern, and professional in all cases.  Going the extra mile and polishing up the smallest details of the site is like crafting a shiny lure that attracts visitors and convinces them to stick around the website and learn more.

Content Is Important, But Initial Impressions Are Unavoidable.

It’s true, in an ideal world, you’re going to need lots of really helpful, informative content loaded up throughout your website to attract visitors through SEO and keep them browsing the site and learning more once they’ve landed.  But again, if they hit your site—whether coming from the search engines or keying it up directly—and the first impression isn’t exactly flattering, guess what…all of the content in the world won’t stop them from back-buttoning their way out of your site. First impressions count—make yours not just adequate, but truly excellent.

What Are The Actual Benefits To Your Company?

Having a professional design for your website goes incredibly far beyond self-gratification.  It makes a significant difference in the way potential clients and customers perceive your business (and ultimately how they interact with your company).  Think about just a few of the benefits of having one of the most professional, attractive website designs in your competitive circle:

You’re the leader. The competitor with the best looking website is perceived by clients as being the most professional of the bunch.

You’ll earn trust. Whether they actually put two and two together, or it’s just a subliminal notion, the benefit is clear—your customers will trust you more if your website is very professionally designed.

You’ll gain more profitable sales. Let’s say you have an e-commerce site with maybe 4 or 5 other serious competitors out there.  Your site clearly has the most professional and trustworthy look & feel, even though your pricing is slightly higher.  Guess what—customers will pay a little bit extra to a company they trust.

You’re earning second looks. Even if the first impression doesn’t earn a customer’s business, by having the most professional design, you’ll be the one they remember and come back to when they’re ready to get serious.

Again, Let’s Face The Facts…

Every time you visit a website, you’ve got to admit your impressions of the design quality play a huge factor in how you choose to interact with that website and the company behind it.  It’s just human nature to judge a book by its cover like this.  And the fact of the matter is that your organization faces the same exact scrutiny when visitors visit your website.  Make sure your site is getting stellar first impressions by maintaining a perfectly professional website look and feel.

Going with an ultra-budget web hosting service—the kind of host that tends to run about five bucks a month or so—can be quite tempting.  Unfortunately though, while the price itself is mostly attractive, there are just way too many downfalls to cheap web hosting that make it a real deal breaker.

Here’s why you simply need to pay more than $4.99 a month for web hosting if you take your website seriously at all:

Cheap webhosting often equals bad neighbors. This happens when you use shared hosting that hosts your site on the same server as hundreds—or even thousands—of other websites.  Oftentimes, there is virtually no quality control with regards to the types of sites that are allowed on the server.  Being server neighbors with undesirable websites can cause problems for your own site when it comes to doing well with the search engines.

Cheap web hosts don’t offer the performance your site needs. No matter if you have 10 visitors a day or if your traffic count is in the tens of thousands daily, you still want to provide a quality visitor experience, right?  Well, with cheap web hosting, your site’s performance is at the mercy of the shared web server that hosts those other thousand sites that could each be pulling in their own thousands of visitors all at the same time…severely degrading your own site’s performance (and you guessed it—negatively impacting your site’s SEO as a result too).

Cheap web hosting is just unreliable all around. You get what you pay for.  And with cheap, super-budget web hosting, it’s not much.  Don’t expect the best up-time for your site with cheap hosts; don’t plan to get top site speed and performance; and above all, certainly don’t expect real human support with cheap web hosting.

When you think about it, your web host plays such an important role in your overall web presence.  It’s not just your website that your hosting affects, but also your email and other web-centric functions you rely on.  If you depend on reliable web service to keep your site (and your organization) up and running in all areas, you simply need to invest in quality web hosting.

So, What Is The Sleepless Media Choice For Web Hosting?

We prefer to have our clients use our own web hosting service.  It makes it easier and simpler for us to do our job with your website; but of course, there are quite a few benefits in it for you as well (and that’s what’s most important).  A few key benefits of using our hosting:

Dedicated Rackspace Servers. We host your websites directly through industry-leading, high-performance Rackspace hosting on our own dedicated servers.  It’s what the best professional websites use.  Enough said.

We Manage Everything For You. Our motto is we lose sleep at night so you don’t have to.  When using Sleepless Media Hosting, we’ll take care of everything for you—so you can focus on running your business or organization without worrying about all of the tech stuff.

Customer Support From Sleepless. If you ever experience a problem or have any questions at all regarding your web hosting, you can just call us—you’ll get a real human right here in California on the phone.  From there, we’ll go to work for you to address the query promptly.  No runaround required.

In the end, the choice is always yours.  Some will choose to go with the $4.99-a-month budget host and put up with the complications that come with the territory.  That’s okay with us if it’s okay with you.  But please consider that our satisfied clients tell us time and time again that choosing to go with Sleepless Media Web Hosting instead of ultra-budget cheap hosting is one of the best web and business decisions they’ve made.

We’ll be happy to provide the same quality service for you!

Is your website loading too slowly?  Load time is important.  After all, it significantly impacts the way your visitors interact with your site (or lack thereof), and also plays a notable role in the way search engines rank your site for their listings.  Clearly, faster is better.

Here are 10 reasons why your website could be loading too slowly:

1.  Table based pages

Using HTML tables is notorious for slowing down a web page’s performance.  The remedy?  Instead of relying on HTML to display table-based information in an orderly fashion, most professionals these days use CSS styling to duplicate the look and feel of tables while eliminating the slowness.

2.  Too much Flash

Flash-based website elements can be pleasing to the eye when implemented correctly.  However, having too much Flash on your website is a surefire way to slow things to a crawl.  The file sizes of the elements are one factor—but also important is to understand the way some users’ systems will handle the Flash.  It can really bog down your website if you’re not extremely careful.

3.  Too much JavaScript

Used frequently to create appealing, interactive user interfaces for websites—and also for lots of behind the scenes tracking and functionality—today’s fully featured websites rely heavily on the JavaScript code base.  Thing is, the more it’s used, the more JavaScript libraries (big files) there are for visitors’ browsers to have to preload before they can begin rendering the page visually.  Also relevant is the specific placement of JavaScript within the code.  In some cases, placing scripts towards the end of a page’s code can optimize the overall user experience.

4.  Bad/slow hosting

A reliable cause of slow-loading websites is the hosting server itself.  Many shared hosting services are just plain slow to begin with.  Then factor in the notion that your site could be just one of thousands all residing on the same server and demining the same system resources all at the same time, and it’s clear that getting better, faster hosting should be a priority if your website’s load time is important to you.

5.  Poorly coded

When a web browser looks at the site’s code and does it’s thing to turn that code into what you would expect to see on the page as a visitor…well, let’s just say that today’s browsers are pretty good at dealing with code and errors within to render acceptable outcomes most of the time.  And that holds true even when there are significant errors or bloated code.  But this doesn’t mean that the poorly coded websites are loading at top speed.  Badly coded sites can halt a browser to a crawl, even if the site is eventually displayed as expected.

6.  Your own internet connection

Makes enough sense, right?  Well, many are surprised to find out that it’s their own connection to the internet is what’s actually causing their site to load slowly.  Too make things even more confusing, your high-speed connection might bring up some sites instantly, while having significant trouble with other sites.  What it often comes down to is some anomaly between your service provider and the specific server your website is hosted on thousands of miles away.  Your web host or ISP can probably help you pinpoint the bottleneck if this is the case.

7.  Images or file sizes are too large

This one is a “gimmie,” but we’ll explain anyway.  Image file sizes need to be optimized for the web.  For example, a JPG image file might be 250 KB on a site when it could be optimized to less than 15 KB without any perceivable difference in image quality.  Multiply this by several images on a page and it’s easy to see how optimizing images and other file sizes can be a major contributing factor to slow-loading websites.

8.  Could just be your own browser

It’s not too unusual for the problem to lie within the visitor’s web browser itself.  Sometimes, the cache is overloaded and needs to be refreshed.  In some cases, multiple browser upgrades (or certain browser plug-ins) can cause conflicts—and yes, it can cause problems with even just one specific site.  When in doubt, check it out.

9.  Relying on external content or site elements that are slow

When so many websites actually bring in content or some other element from a third-party site or server each time a web page is loaded, it’s just not unusual for an external element such as this to slow down the rest of the site.  Example: if a script, image, or video is being pulled onto your site from another site, if that other site is experiencing a slow spell, then your site is going to be slowed down as well.  It’s a chain reaction.

10.  Just too complex

Ever heard of the K.I.S.S. principle (stands for keep it simple, stupid)?  Well sometimes a little K.I.S.S. is all that’s necessary to resolve a website that is loading too slowly.  One slow factor leads to the next, and by the time you add several site speed hang-ups together, much more severe issues can happen.  The best remedy is to go with the bare essentials to fulfill your site’s purpose—the visitor’s need.  Keep it a simple as possible.

It’s happened to many of us at one time or another.  All of the sudden the email account associated with your domain name quits working.  Then you punch in your URL to visit your site and it’s no longer there either—or worse yet, someone else’s site is there.

Well basically, there are two scenarios that can cause this:

1. Your domain got hijacked. In other words, someone else fraudulently got your domain transferred to their control.  This is actually pretty rare.
2. You forgot to renew the domain. This is by far the more common scenario—an innocent mistake, it still happens all too frequently.

First things first, it’s necessary to determine which one of these scenarios has caused you to lose your domain name.  There are other possibilities as well, but for the sake of clarity & simplicity, we’ll leave out these unlikely occurrences.

Getting Your Domain Name Back When It Expires:

Domain Recently Expired – The best case scenario is that your domain name happens to expire and you notice immediately.  In most cases, the domain registrar that the domain name was registered with is required to hold that domain back for a certain grace period.  If this is the case, all you have to do is go back to your domain provider and renew immediately.  You’ll need to check with your registrar for exactly how long their grace period is.

Domain Expired & Grace Period Passed – You’ll need to see who owns the domain name at this point.  If you do a search for that domain with your domain name provider of choice, and if it’s still publically available and not purchased by another individual, it might be a simple matter of just purchasing the domain again with the regular registration process.  Or it could be put up for re-sale or auction as well—these will be a little bit more expensive than a new domain purchase or renewal, but sometimes just paying a slight premium to get the domain back from the re-sale market is worth the peace of mind.

Someone Now Owns Expired Domain – You might try for a little sympathy and just ask the new owner of your old domain if they’ll sell it back to you for a nominal fee (be nice and make it worth their while for the hassle).  Some folks will probably happy to return the name to its previous owner.  At the same time, many domain name speculators purposefully purchase expired domains to resell, so don’t expect many favors from these types of people…and remember, if they purchased the domain legally after it has expired, they do rightfully have possession of it.

Getting Back A Stolen Or Hijacked Domain Name:

Domain Name Is Stolen Or Hijacked – First, let’s avoid confusion by making it clear that when someone else purchases your domain after expires, this is not theft or hijacking by any means.  When we say stolen, we mean that fraudulent means were used to obtain control or transfer of your domain name during its active registration period.  And unfortunately, when this does happen, it can be very difficult to get the name back.  You can try contacting your registrar to begin with (and also the registrar that the domain may have been transferred to).  This can be complex, and it might be difficult to prove legit ownership.  Just be persistent, continue to work the phones, and hope for the best…

Domain Is Stolen…Professional Help Required – If you really need the domain name back that was stolen and your efforts to contact the corresponding domain registrars and request return of ownership are unsuccessful, sometimes it’s necessary to bring in professional assistance.  In this case, you should obtain counsel from one of many attorneys that focus their practice on cyber-law.  Unfortunately, it will not be cheap, but relying on professional assistance might be the only last case scenario available to you.

An Ounce Of Prevention Is Worth A Pound Of Cure

One final thing to remember:  In addition to enabling email alerts with your domain name provider so they can notify you when your domain is due for renewal (along with other important notifications), also be sure to put a note on your calendar to renew your domain at least a month before it is set to expire.  Being proactive is much better than being reactive!

Surprised to find out that good SEO is more about good content than good web design alone?  Well, it’s true.  Many web designers will tell you that they’re going optimize your site to achieve top search engine rankings—and while their intentions might be perfectly legit—the fact of the matter is that a site’s SEO-friendly design & development really only serves to support excellent, keyword-rich content to be contained within a site.

At least that’s the quick version anyway.  Regardless, now that we have that common misconception out of the way, we should move on to the real bread and butter of getting higher search engine rankings…writing good, keyword-rich content.

What Are The Standards Of Good Keyword Optimized Web Copy?

Writing good SEO-friendly copy for your website will generally be a matter of customizing to specific site needs on a site-by-site basis.  However, there are some rather steadfast guidelines to follow:

Keyword Research First – It’s impossible to write good keyword-rich content without having specific knowledge beforehand on which keywords and keyword phrases you’ll utilize.  Many start their research by using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to come up with ideas for some high demand, low supply keywords to use.  Regardless of the method, you’ve got to pick topically relevant keywords to use first.

Write Naturally – Some “over-optimizers” used to suggest that the best way to rank well with good keyword rich content was to use a certain keyword density, or in other words, an exact percentage of how many times the keyword was used in the copy compared to the overall word count.  This is nonsense these days—could even be implied as spam—so avoid.  Instead, try to create a helpful piece of content that you would write regardless; it’s best to write naturally and then maybe go back and add in the keyword phrase you’re optimizing for a few times where it fits optimally.  Never, never over use it on purpose though.

Optimize Your Title & Headings – Definitely use the keyword phrase exactly once within the page’s title.  This is super-important.  You might also use it naturally in a heading or sub-heading within the page copy.  Other than that, just remember: keep it natural.

Use Similar Keywords – If you’re writing a topic focused piece of web content or blog post, chances are already good that you’re using lots of natural related lingo throughout the copy in addition to your optimized keyword or keyword phrase.  This is good—you’ll want to have a few appropriate related keyword variations and relevant similar keywords within the copy.  Again, though, this is almost instinctual anyway when writing topically-focused web content.

The Bottom Line – Keep it natural, natural, natural.  Write what your visitors want to read.  Be sure to answer questions they’re asking and address concerns they might have.  Really work hard to put yourself in the mindset of your target visitor when writing.  By all means, build the content around a specific keyword—and ideally focus on just one main featured keyword per page or post.  But at the same time, never push it to the level of becoming unnatural or spammy.

Follow these simple steps to writing good, keyword-rich content—and of course, make sure your web designer has paid attention to the important supporting factors within the design & development.  With this strategy in mind, you’ll be well on the way to getting higher search engine rankings.

Choosing the right blog platform is not always that easy—not that it really should be all that difficult either.  Here’s the thing…between the major blogging platforms out there, many get confused as to what these systems and services actually offer and how they work.  Let’s try and clarify the confusion here a bit if possible…

The Big 3 Blogging Platforms

WordPress

Extremely popular among its users and professional web developers alike, the WordPress blog platform has certainly earned its position at the front of the pack.  Often a significant point of confusion, though, is the fact that there are actually two different variations of WordPress out there—WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

For those looking for a standalone blog system that’s free and already hosted, WordPress.com is the answer.  While this is great for those just testing the waters with blogging, mostly because it’s free and easy, there are drawbacks.  For example, going this route more or less ties you to using their system, their hosting, and often, their domain—the dot com version of WordPress is not very flexible for developers and power-users.

Enter WordPress.org.  For those wanting to integrate a top-tier blogging system with their websites—or perhaps even use the system to power their entire site—the dot org version of WordPress is hard to beat.  Dot-org WordPress is actually extremely stable and robust open source software that you have to install on your own hosting provider (that must meet certain requirements).  From there, a developer is free to customize and integrate to their heart’s content.  This is probably why WordPress.org is becoming as extremely popular as it is.

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s entry into the blogging market.  While it’s hard to fault what comes from Google, this platform isn’t as pro-friendly as some of the others.  In other words, it’s created more for the average consumer—the person that just wants to start blogging without having to mess with all kinds of complex setup or anything of the sort.

Blogger is free—and most Blogger sites are hosted and reside on the service’s own servers.  From the standpoint of simplicity, all you’d really need to get started is to log in with a Google ID, pick a name for your blog, and pick a blog theme from the array that they offer.

Downfalls to Blogger?  Well, even though it was pretty much the first, it has lost some popularity with power-users due to fact that it simply isn’t as well-featured or easy to integrate with an existing site (like WordPress is).

TypePad

TypePad is another reasonable popular blogging platform.  As one of the top tier blogging systems out there, it adds a nice alternative choice to the above mentioned platforms.  While it’s secure, works as it should, and offers a good choice of quality designs to choose from, it is a subscription-based service with fees beginning under $10 per month.

This blogging platform can be integrated with your own existing website or can also be used as a stand-alone option through their provided hosting.  However, even when integrated into a third-party site, users still must manage the blog through TypePad’s service—this can be a hindrance for some.  The bottom line is that it’s probably worth a try if you’re not satisfied with the other options out there, even though it really doesn’t stand out as a best pick option for many.

Our Pick?

We knew you’d ask!  Here at Sleepless Media, we choose to use WordPress.org almost exclusively.  It integrates beautifully with our customers’ websites—and customization is practically unlimited.  Then there’s the fact that it’s been designed and tweaked from the ground-up by a passionate team of open-source developers to be faithfully SEO-friendly.

There’s a massive user-base out there, so any bugs or security flaws are quickly found and worked out by the masses—this also means that there are very frequent revisions and updates releases.  Not to worry though, because the platform integrates a one-click update option.  Just like “there’s an app” these days for pretty much anything, the same goes for WordPress.org—there’s a plug-in available to allow pretty much anything you can imagine.

Oh, and to top it all off, did we mention that WordPress.org is free?  It’s certainly hard to argue with this pick when the possibilities are nearly endless and the cost to access this excellent software is zero.  Although customizing, integrating with websites, and further development do come with a nominal price for time, skills, and expertise, all in all, the cost is kept to a minimum thanks to the head start from WordPress.

1. Goals.

Without specific goals in mind (in other words, a list of the exact traffic measurements and figures you’d like to achieve), effectively grasping quality SEO results is a misnomer.  Without goals, you might get there, or you might not…the thing is, you’ll never even know one way or the other.  The key to success is carrying out your optimization plans with focus and aim, through measurable and definable goals.

2. A Plan.

Yes, in order to be as SEO-friendly as possible, every website with this vital ambition in mind needs a plan to achieve the actual results they desire.  We make business plans when starting and growing our businesses, we use blueprints to build our homes—why not carefully craft a written game plan for SEO too?

3. Keywords.

Moving on from the conceptual things your website needs to succeed with SEO to the more tangible items used to carry out the plan, we definitely need to include keywords.  Every page of an SEO-friendly website is ideally optimized around just one or two unique keyword phrases.  This means the written content, the meta-data, the image tags, and so on.  Part of your SEO plan will be developing a list of targeted keyword phrases to utilize on your site (and defining where they’ll go).

4. Clean Web Structure.

Using squeaky-clean HTML/PHP/CSS coding (not Flash) is the way to go when creating a website structure that’s extraordinarily SEO-friendly.  Search engines really like to see attention to detail in the coding—this means being fully standards-compliant whenever possible.  Clean web structure serves two purposes with the search engines.  First, they’re able to crawl and index your site better because it is easy for their “robots” to understand.  And secondly, they know that if you pay attention to the details, you’re most likely offering a better quality site than your competitors that don’t follow this principle.

5. Great Content.

What do your visitors come to your site to see?  Content.  What do search engines help their users find?  Again, content.  Coincidence?  Not at all.  Provide great quality content—always go above and beyond and strive to make it perfect.  Be informative, yet different than the masses.  Offer your visitors what they’re looking for and over-deliver in every way with content.

6. Title Tags.

Moving on to the picky details of SEO, there’s one small technical detail that undoubtedly makes more of an impact than all the others combined.  Look at the very top left of your web browser’s window…okay, did you look yet…what does it say?  This is the page’s title tag—and it’s vital to a web page’s SEO-friendliness.  It should be brief, to the point, descriptive of the page’s content, and it should contain the page’s optimized keyword.  Search engines use this to understand your page and also to help them describe what your page is all about to their visitors.  If nothing else, be sure to get this one right.

7. Additional Meta-Data.

Other behind the scenes Meta-data like your page’s Meta-description, Meta-keywords, and image tags are often dismissed these days as being unnecessary.  This couldn’t be further from the truth—search engines today might not take this information verbatim, but it does help define the overall focus of your website’s pages.  It also helps with usability—which is another plus-factor when it comes to SEO-friendliness.  Don’t get spammy with Meta-data or “over-optimize” it, but do be sure to use it accurately for what it was intended for.

8. Balanced Link Profile.

For many SEO-spammers, achieving a great “PageRank” is viewed as the holy grail.  Ignore this strategy and instead focus on building a super high quality balanced link profile instead.  This means achieving a variety of natural incoming links (backlinks) to your site from a good cross-section of relevant authority sites when possible.  And the part that many forget is that it also means sharing a few outgoing links from your own site when they’re helpful to your visitors.  Search engines are smart enough to know that sites with a huge number of incoming links only—especially when they’re built really quickly—are suspicions and unnatural.  Being this is undesirable for sure, because search engines only want to share healthy, natural, organic quality sites with their visitors.

9. Great Navigation.

Having crystal clear navigation throughout your site is extremely important in order to be SEO-friendly.  Your visitors need to be able to make their way around your site with complete confidence.  But also an important factor, the search engine bots also need to be able to crawl your site with ease.  A great navigational structure will help you achieve both.  Also accurately listed under this category is including a search engine friendly sitemap within your website.

10. Activity.

What good is a perfectly SEO’d website if there’s just not any activity there?  Visitors want a vibrant, fresh website environment full of new and updated content (and the search engines know this).  Accordingly, the search engines do give favor to sites that are updated on a regular basis—sites that are full of activity.  One helpful way of achieving this, of course, is to include a blog section in your site.  Keep it professional…but keep it lively as well to look alive to the search engines.

At the initial sight or sound of the two-word terms “web design” and “web development,” it is understandably easily to assume that they are one in the same.  Or at least similar, for that matter.  But really, the two major parts that go into the creation of a website are substantially different from each other.

How about a few comparisons that help to explain web design vs. web development:

• Web designers are artists; Web developers are geeks (in a good way, of course).
• Web design is an art; Web development is a science.
• Web designers are architects; Web developers are builders.
• Web design is creative; Web development is technical.
• Web designers are right-brained; Web developers are left-brained.

The list could on, but these examples will probably suffice for now—and hopefully provide some initial clarity on the relationship between web design and web development.

What Does Web Design Involve?

Web designers basically practice a unique brand of graphic design.  Great web designers are creative artists that know how to bring design together perfectly with goals and desires in order to “paint a picture” that draws the visitor’s eye.  Web design is all about getting the colors right and getting the shapes and sizes right; it focuses on images, fonts, and where they should be on the page.  And naturally, it combines all of the elements found throughout a website into one cohesive look & feel.  Web design really is an art!

What Does Web Development Involve?

Web developers take the graphical web design—the look and feel, if you will—and make it work.  Web development is all about coding, software programming, and making the technical aspects of a website work exactly the way they should.  It also typically involves the ensuring that security and web hosting are setup and implemented just the way they should be…and that everything works well together from a functionality perspective. Your web developers are the mad scientists behind the scenes that bring the designer’s vision to life.

Now, For The Kicker…

Some web designers are also great web developers; and some web developers are also very proficient at web design.  If that sounds confusing, just remember, like anything in life, sometimes the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain work together in perfect harmony.  As a full-service web firm, here at Sleepless Media, we happen to be harmoniously proficient at both the art of design and the science of development.

Why Is Balance Between The Two Practices So Important?

You’ve probably seen websites that come across as way too technical and logical.  On the other hand, you’ve surely run across websites that theoretically look fantastic—but then they don’t work correctly or jam up your entire computer.  Either of these scenarios can happen when balance between design and development is off-kilter.

The bottom line is that in order for a web design to work, in order for it to achieve and carry out the goals expected of it, a fine-line combination of both web design and web development must be implemented with great care.

Trying to find the right shopping cart solution for your website?

On the surface, the task might seem like it will be fairly easy—after all, just about everyone on the web offers a shopping cart solution these days.  GoDaddy has a shopping cart system you can purchase; same goes for 1&1, Yahoo!, and so many other web service providers.  Factor in the concept that many of these kinds of shopping cart services and instant storefronts can be had for about $20 a month, and it can sometimes look like an obvious choice.

But nothing is really ever that easy is it?

Here’s a more typical scenario that fits with what so many customers have expressed to us over the years as they decide to pursue a better solution:

Step One: Find a discount “one size fits all” shopping cart service that can be added on to or integrated with an existing website for just $19.99 a month.

Step Two: Sign up for said service, wait several months before finding the time to learn how to use and setup the new shopping cart system.

Step Three: Begin to set everything up, only to find out that it’s not going to integrate with the website quite as expected (but that’s okay, with some modification and tweaking, it just might work after all).

Step Four: Tweak, adjust.  Tweak, adjust.  After several weeks’ worth of making changes to and playing with all of the options, it looks like the discount shopping cart system is all set to go.  It finally works with the site.  Well, mostly, anyway.

Step Five: Begin uploading products to the shopping cart software.  This could be simpler, but after a couple more weeks’ worth of effort, it’s just about done.  Oh, and the E-commerce system is only going to allow a portion of the pictures you’d like to use for each product.  But at this point, it will just have to do.

Step Six: Launching the system live on the website is finally scheduled to take place in just a few days.  But now, there’s a pesky security certificate issue that just won’t seem to resolve itself.  Tech support for the shopping cart service keeps referring to an online help article that is totally unrelated to the problem that’s being experienced.  Very dissatisfied and frustrated right now…

Step Seven: After what has now been about seven months, the shopping cart system is still not working correctly.  The launch of the new website has been drastically postponed.  Let’s just scrap the whole thing and start over fresh from the beginning.

Step Eight: Call Sleepless Media.  Problem solved.  Should have done this about 7 months ago!

As you can see, subscribing to a one size fits all shopping cart system usually ends up being way more trouble than it’s really worth.  It’s never as quick or easy as promised.

Those who do find initial good results with pre-packaged E-commerce software almost always eventually discover that it just doesn’t offer the flexibility and scalability that they demand.  And then, there’s the whole customer/technical support issue (or lack thereof, to be more specific).

Do yourself a favor and give us a call here at Sleepless Media before being forced to experience the scenario expressed here first hand.  We can help with a true professional custom solution that perfectly fits your needs and can grow effortlessly in the future too (and, you might actually be surprised to find out that utilizing our expert knowledge isn’t quite as expensive as you might have thought either).

Now this is as tough question.  Facebook vs. Twitter…which one is best to use as a social media promotional tool for your organization’s website (if you could only choose one)?

Let’s preface the rest of this post quickly now by saying that there are, of course, major differences in using social networking as a way to keep up to date with your family and friends and using social media as an online marketing tool to promote your business or website.  So, depending on how you’ll actually use social media, one option might be significantly better for you in general personal use, and the other might be best to use for more focused marketing.

But this still doesn’t exactly answer our question—if you had to choose either Facebook or Twitter, which would it be?

The Benefits Of Facebook

• Facebook has a huge user base. By far the most popular social media option around the entire world right now, the chances are pretty good that even grandma uses Facebook.

• This popular social networking platform attracts a huge spectrum of users. Again, these days it’s not at all uncommon for everyone from grade-schoolers all the way up to their great grandparents to have a Facebook account.

• Facebook has lots of media options. Beyond text-only blurbs, using Facebook makes it a breeze to share multimedia like photos and videos.

The Benefits Of Twitter

• Twitter’s user base seems to be more professionally-oriented. This is most likely due to the age group of its users—which happens to be mostly the post-college crowd.

• There are fewer privacy concerns. The Twitter crowd seems to clearly grasp that their “tweets” are intended to be public by default.  It’s a more open public platform because of this.

• Twitter seems to be a social environment that’s open to the little guy. In other words, when implemented with some creativity and ingenuity, even a micro-business owner can attract the same global attention from their tweets as major world-wide corporations can.

There Are A Few Drawbacks To Each Service As Well

With Facebook, there are ever-increasing privacy concerns that have been causing a little bit of a backlash among once-loyal users.  Also, some people find it kind of amateurish when businesses and organizations use Facebook (this is an unfair stereotype that probably derives from the fact that Facebook began as a way to stay in touch with friends).  And at the same time, people who use Facebook strictly as a tool to keep up with family and friends sometimes resent and turn away from any other derived use of the service—including marketing & promotional uses.

The drawbacks to Twitter are kind of similar in some ways, but totally different in others.  First things first, it’s important to realize that Twitter’s base of users isn’t anywhere near that of Facebook.  And those who do use Twitter regularly tend to be a little bit more technically or professionally inclined (which can also be a positive if this is your demographic target).  The other important thing to know about Twitter that could potentially cause issues is the fact that no one is exactly certain as to what direction the social networking service is going to grow—it could be drastically different in just a year or two from now.

So, if you’re going to focus your time and energy on just one social platform, which one will you choose and why?