JCS Development

The folks over at Mozilla are about to realease version 3 of the popular browser Firefox.  If you don’t know anything about Firefox you should look into it.  I personally use this one as my default browser because of all the great add-ins that they have for it.  I’ve actually been using version 3 for a week or two now in it’s “release candidate” state just because it’s so much faster than the old Firefox, and Internet Explorer.  It really is a great product.

The Firefox guys are going to try and set a Guiness record for the most downloads in 24 hours.  If you haven’t downloaded it in the past to play with it, now’s the time.  Be a part of history!!

Over on Work.com they’ve posted a really good article about choosing the right web host. Guide to Web Hosting Services for Small Business talks about various traits to look for in a web hosting provider such as:

• Look for Reliability
• Look for Live Support
• Finding a host that grows with you
• Finding a host that hasn’t be blacklisted

I’ve done a bunch or research, as well as been through several hosts and
can say there are a few other things I’d add to this list:

• Find out if there is an escalation procedure for the support dept.
• Make sure you can have access to your DNS records. (technical I know, but can be very important)
• Make sure you will be notified BEFORE you go over the bandwidth requirements. Some providers will just bill you, and that can be frustrating.

I’ve had good and bad experiences with web hosts and have settled on GoDaddy as my provider mainly because I have access to my DNS records and their control panel is pretty easy to understand.

A web host can make or break your web presence and you should do plenty of research before making the commitment.

Websites are judged by their titles, their <title> tag that is. The title tag of a web pages is precious real-estate when it comes to search engines. Search engines look for keywords in the title to help determine the relevance of the content on the page. If the same keywords are found in the title tag as in the body headers and text then the search engine will most likely give you a higher ranking for that page.

Therefore you should not just put your company name, or website title in the title tag. For instance:

<title>Bob's Widget Company</title>

doesn’t give you any information about the paqe, where as:

<title>The Widget saves you thousands on gas | Bobs' Widget Company

Is much more descriptive and if you have the same line as a header in the text you’ll get an even better ranking. Also having the same title on every page is not a good idea. You should use a title that matches the keywords in each individual page. This will help each page have a higher ranking.

You never know what keywords someone will be looking for on your site and how they will find you so maximizing the search engine ranking of your site is very important.