My intention here is to share research, provide a guide to resources identified in the area of Mechanical Design, particularly the 3D CAD tool SolidWorks including material for Instructors. Also included are professional learning and networking opportunities in the Massachusetts area, Social Media, and whatever else comes along. Anybody interested in free range veal?
Speaking of Social Media, check out these excellent webinars.
http://www.inboundmarketing.com/university/imu-kit
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To update the discussion of Inbound Marketing University previously cited, note their archived webinars are now available as an mp4 video download – plus pdf of their slides. The webinars had been offered as a stream earlier, and though personally I ran into technical problems, hats off to them for offering the download as an alternative.
www.inboundmarketing.com/university/imu-kit-download
In other news, their “2nd semester” has begun, with additional content provided live
PR for Inbound Marketing
Professor: Todd Defren, SHIFT Communications
Twitter for Business
Professor: Laura Fitton, Pistachio Consulting, Twitter For Dummies
Date: Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Time: 1:00pm EDT
Tags: Social Media Howto
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I’ve heard lots of talk about websites lately, so I thought I’d share my experiences in pursuing one, and welcome any expert input.
The need for a entrepreneur to have a Web presence keeps coming up in discussions at WPI events, so I’ll share what I’m learning as I update my own website. And of course a website needs traffic, so I’ll also start a separate discussion on “social bookmarking” (basically public favorites), and discuss “blogging” (e-publishing as a way to add value to your website) as well. Any other suggestions? Because this Linkedin discussion format seems designed for brief text, I’ll generally include summaries and links to other resources and my blog – also just being setup. (What you have here).
How is a budding entrepreneur to get his or her bearings? I start with a simple goal like finding a vendor to host a website under my own domain, and next thing I know I’m sucked into the technological vortex. Researching the topic online I feel like a Cro-Magnon in Las Vegas. Everybody’s on the make, and they’re talking over my head!
Still, anybody can build a modest website with the right tools. Of course from there it only gets more complicated. What’s it take to create a retail site? At what point should I hire a consultant? Pending resolution to those questions, let us proceed as best we can.
Knowledgeable people at WPI events have told me your website needs its own domain name, www.yourdomainhere.com. It improves your rank in search engines, makes you look more professional. Besides, it’s available cheap, so why not? All you need is a web hosting company.
Web Hosting Vendors
I’ve spent three days Googling “Best Web Hosting” and such keywords, reading top 10 reviews, pro’s and con’s, and looking up terminology. Some tentative conclusions follow. First, there are plenty of good candidates offering very respectable, upgradeable web hosting in the neighborhood of $5-10 a month. That includes unlimited disk space and should even cover a modest ecommerce capability.
But how do I pick a vendor, weigh this vast set of specifications, when I’m just learning what needs doing? For example, from a review of web hosting company IXWebHosting:
Uses “HSpere”, one of the best web hosting “Control Panels” which comes with “SiteBuilder.”
There’s three basic topics to research. Luckily, web hosts provide extensive tutorials on their various software modules, which seem the best way for grasping what the customer experience will be like. Still, I won’t really know how well I’ve chosen until I’m well into the implementation. Doesn’t somebody out there have a starter kit?
To improve the odds, I have decided to limit myself to paid vendors recommended by reviewers. I find they spell out the features they offer and charge about the same. That saves me from playing detective so much and even at a 2X cost range, the money is overshadowed by considerations of functionality and implementation.
I have arrived at these hard requirements:
Support of WYSIWYG app running on my PC
Email that my PC’s MS Outlook can pickup
Ability to post images, perhaps video
Blog
Ability to post MS Powerpoint, Word, and PDF documents
Perhaps Ecommerce
It would be best if the site provided tools that stretched my current, clumsy web creation capabilities. I don’t need a wiz bang look for the website. Simple and readable is good, but I don’t want to be stuck choosing among canned, clip art solutions. I need to have some control over graphics and flow.
The largest web hosting vendor is Go Daddy, though numberless high quality and non-Hugh Heffner-esque alternatives are available. A few I’m considering are JustHost, Globat, WebHostingPad, IXWebhosting.
For more, check out
http://www.webhostinggeeks.com
or perform a search on www.delicious.com
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Here is a summary of feedback generously received by collegues at the WPI Venture Forum:
From Barbara Finer, www.acceligentgroup.com:
You just learned some of the things that Marketers need to know and why our job is more than pretty advertising. For a simple 1-5 page, no e-commerce, no blog, no downloads, no content management.. site (i.e. a brochure) it can be fairly straight forward. For a website that is a key part of you conducting business, you are right, there is more complexity.
Use a firm that specializes in these things and pay them! It is worth it. There are several local firms from Fresh Tilled Soil to our own Member,Telesian. Let them recommend the hosting company. All you need to do is get and pay for your own url (do this; don’t let them or the hosting company as I’ve heard of big rights issues). I use the original firm, register.com
If being ‘found’ matters to you, you need someone who also knows about SEM (Search Engine Margeting).
Regardless, I’d phase it in as you are planning to do a lot.
From Jerrold Sharpiro:
You and Barb are correct that creating, maintaining and using a website to generate business requires a whole new vocabulary and skill set. Since January 2008 I have belonged to an SEO Meetup Group that usually meets at 6:30 PM on the first Monday of the month at the Robbins Library Community Room in Arlington Center. For the summer their meetings are June 15 and July 13. You may want to attend a few meetings to get up to speed. SEO, or search engine opitimization, is a series of techniques to bring your website to the attention of someone searching for information, for example on product design.
Some of the places that offer cheap web hosting will put their ads on your web pages, or as footers to e-mail you send through them, so be careful. In addition to the software side of the web hosting company, you need to consider the reliability of their hardware and of the power grid that supports it, controlling physical access to the computer that acts as your web server, and many other considerations. I’d recommend that you pay a professional to help you make all these choices.
From Barbara Finer, www.acceligentgroup.com:
You can’t do SEO before you know why you’d want to use SEO and if you are unique enough to be found in an organic search or willing to pay for paid search. And SEO can’t happen without a website that is design to fit your business model and target customers’ needs.
From J Singh, www.EarlyStageIT.com:
David, how far you go without seeking help is obviously a function of where you put yourself on the DIY—pay-for-stuff continuum.
Have you thought about whether your web site has to achieve all of your objectives or whether you may be willing to integrate multiple solutions? What I mean is, WordPress for blogging, a something like Huddle.net or DropBox or Box.net for document storage and perhaps a web site to tie it all together?
From Barbara Finer, www.acceligentgroup.com:
This is really an outsourcing question: at what point does it makes sense to outsource something that is not in your own area of expertise. Several dimensions of this, I think:
– is it something you’ll need to work on often in the future (if yes, you may want to invest in learning)
– is it somehat complex and really important that you get it right (if yes, you may want to outsource)
– are you rolling in dough (if yes: you may be able to afford to take time away from your key business; you may also be able to afford to have someone else do it right)
– Do you know what you want to accomplish and why (if no, don’t hire anyone else until you do or you’ll drive both of you crazy)
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Thanks for all the great contributions. They will take time to follow up, but here’s a start.
Granted, hiring a professional is wise, though as any 3 year old will tell you, there’s nothing like doing it yourself. I have just enough experience to appreciate the time required and to know disappointment at my own results. My ability extends to putting information in tables, sans artistry. So thanks for the names and links. Anybody care to toss out a dollar figure for professional services?
Internet, What Works
I still can’t resist sticking my toe in the water given the low cost of entry and the range of tools for even the least skilled. Besides, to stretch a pet phrase of my high school trig teacher, “Software is cumulative.” Anything learned will inform what’s done further down the line.
As I understand the biggest risk of DIY your own digital persona is opportunity cost, the risk of overlooking something useful. On the other hand, a little DIY makes for a better informed digital consumer. For, as Wendell Phillips almost said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of technological relevance.” So put in a little sweat, attend groups like the Venture Forum, but know when to outsource.
My own explorations are driven as much by awe at the ever growing net as by any hard business considerations. If I lived during the advent of electric utilities I’d have installed my own light sockets and copper wire. Electricity freed us from the solar cycle. The net seems to have suspended every law of nature: time, distance, wealth, and boundary, offering innumerable appliances to curious teenager and old-ager alike. There’s fizz in the internet yet.
I’ll confess though, I’m also pursuing a pet peeve. Why is it so hard to find out what purpose a software tool or product is good for or not? Why so hard to learn the mechanics of its operation? Instead of clear and succinct descriptions, maybe a couple of flow charts, we get sales propaganda, technical minutia, and industry jargon.
I have long had the habit of creating my own manual when pursuing an enterprise, and that’s pretty much what I’m doing here. Once it got so out of hand I ended up teaching a course. Maybe I’ll end up writing a book, quaint as paper sounds in this context, unless I can find one. Guess I better start searching.
In the meantime, let me share another link I’ve found on web how to:
www.recommendedwebtools.com, which points to various tutorial resources including examples at http://www.csszengarden.com .
Domain Names
Regarding legal pitfalls, specifically domain name ownership, whreviews.com recommend closely reading the “service level agreement” of any web host before signing up – and avoid those that make doing so difficult. Paste it to your word processor to control text size, search for terms, and save it for future reference.
As for Go Daddy, under the website support tab click on “legal” bottom right. This brings you to 13 single spaced pages of often impenetrable legalese, followed by 3 more of LINKS, including 12 containing the word domain.
I quickly gave up, but I did find the following text:
“Go Daddy expressly reserves the right to deny, cancel[, freeze] or transfer any domain name registration… in compliance with any dispute resolution process” – including if you owe them money.
Clearly, the safest strategy is to follow Barbara’s advice and register your domain directly – which I have now done. I paid more, but there’s no question of ownership. Allow me to introduce www.1stPrinciplesDesign.com. Register.com charged $80 for 3 years, including $20 to keep my contact information “private” i.e. dummied out in a “whois” query so I’m not deluged with spam and phone calls. I saved $20 with a discount code found by Googling “Register” and “discount” – something you should try before making any online purchase.
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I started this exploration of online tools prompted in part by a series of articles in the Worcester Telegram DBA on social networking. I follow up on that a bit here.
One excellent resource the Telegram articles point to is www.facebook.com/dellsocialmedia described as a guide to “Social Media for Small Businesses.” This series of short articles is intended for industry professionals new to the online social phenomena. While I grant you every computer and business magazine on the rack probably has a article on the topic, I found that Dell does a good job of addressing some of the big picture questions: “What’s it do? And what’s it good for?”
Of particular interest is the first article in this series, “Learn to Listen,” which provides the overview. It says much of what a business needs to know can be gleaned from the conversation going on online – and listening is cheap. The article then moves on to what online tools you’ll be interested in.
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From J Singh, www.EarlyStageIT.com:
Thus begins a great adventure. Reminds me of the first time I went to a lumberyard. Enjoy the ride, David. I agree, the learning is totally worth it.
From Jerrold Sharpiro:
The old styles of marketing, like trade shows and unsolicited e-mails, are now called “Outbound Marketing.” The new marketing offers value to a potential customer, and gets them started searching for you and going to your web site in a process called “Inbound Marketing.” I just started learning about this a week ago at a series of twice-daily webinars, each by an expert in the field, offered through the Inbound Marketing University, or IMU. The ten webinars and today’s review session should be available at http://www.inboundmarketing.com/university ; you may have to sign up for them. You can also study them, then take an exam by June 30 to be certified in this topic.
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Jerry,
What a great resource, likely to be a valuable introduction to the technology whatever your level in an organization. For those who haven’t tried it, it’s a sophisticated free mini course on social media. (Though only viewable during certain “class periods” determined by the provider). You can watch the webcast live, view it from the archive, participate in the related forum and even connect with other viewers/students. I watched the first presentation, on blogging, which gave a state of the industry tour including benchmark page designs and practices. For me it raised as many questions as it answered, so I look forward to trying things out, then viewing it again. Here’s the webinar list. I believe they each run an hour, including questions.
How to Blog Effectively for Business
Professors: Ann Handley & Mack Collier, MarketingProfs
SEO Crash Course to Get Found
Professor: Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing
Social Media and Building Community
Professor: Chris Brogan, New Marketing Labs
Successful Business Uses for Facebook and LinkedIn
Professor: Elyse Tager, Silicon Valley American Marketing Association
Viral Marketing and World Wide Raves
Professor: David Meerman Scott, author of New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave
Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research
Professor: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Calls to Action and Landing Page Best Practices
Professor: Jeanne Hopkins, MECLABS, Marketing Experiments
Inbound Lead Nurturing
Professor: Brian Carroll, MECLABS, InTouch
Successful Email Marketing
Professor: Eric Groves, Constant Contact
Analyzing Inbound Marketing
Professor: Marshall Sponder, Monster.com, Web Analytics Association for Social Media
Tags: digital tools, howto, social media, Web design, WPI Venture forum, wpivf
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Ready for every weather, that's survival
