This site is less than 4 months old today.

The amazing thing is that it is already drawing over 100 unique visitors a day- and if it keeps going at this rate of growth, will quickly leave The Next Wave site in the dust (which is averaging 60 unique visitors a day). Note: The Next Wave site has been up since 1994 in some shape or form and has a lot of great content.

When we added the WordPress blog to The Next Wave site- we were averaging about 200 unique visitors a month! And this was with a code compliant site- that was built with search in mind. The difference was in how difficult it was to update the site with new content- simple additions could take hours. WordPress- or any actively served Content Management System makes changes take minutes- by someone with no HTML knowledge at all.

Granted, everyone is interested in blogging and easy site creation right now- and this subject is “so much sexier” than great advertising- but, the key is- building a site in WordPress isn’t only cheaper- it’s much better at doing what a good site is supposed to do- attract visitors.

This is why attending one of our “Blogosopher” (or “Blogosphere” as so many keep reading it) seminars can help you build a web site that can begin generating hits so much faster than an expensive hand-coded website.

The search for the perfect search engine is far from over. Even though Google is ruling the roost right now, and quickly expanding into other seemingly diverse areas- the eventual goal is not just connecting web users with information, but connecting web users to businesses to complete a sale.
AdWords and AdSense are a big part of their revenue stream. Now Google is moving into selling conventional media like radio as well with purchase of dMarc so they can serve up their targeted ads with response codes across the nation.
But no matter how good Google is, it still makes mistakes in guessing what you want. Offering ads on skydiving lessons while reading about people jumping from the World Trade towers on 9/11 wouldn’t be relevant, or helpful.
So out comes a new company offering to help you separate the %*^& from shinola- using the semantic meaning- instead of just the keyword. The company is called TextWise– and the product is called, yep: Shinola.
So, if you are looking at optimizing your search in Google either with keyword density (the old way) or by using organic search results (real content) there may soon be help available to avoid embarrassing unexpected results.
While many people have worried about click fraud in paid placement ads others have worried about being placed next to the wrong thing- soon, Shinola will make sure you don’t get placed next to the #*&!

Blogs and wikis thoughts (for Brian) at D’Arcy Norman Dot Net

A lot of people coming to this site are hoping to learn how to manage their own site easily and effectively. We focus on WordPress in the seminar- but also cover Wiki’s and Bulletin Boards- and the basics of Web 2.0. This post by the ever insightful D’Arcy Norman explains the importance of these new tools for the web.

This post is another example of using the Press-it capability in WordPress. Just remember- you don’t have to create all your content- you just need to be a good collection point.