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Topics:

1. Search Engine Placement- what to do when you are in a hurry
2. Virtual Reality Tours
3. You have Built a Site- what's next?
4. New RapidWebSites

Search Engine Placement- what to do when you are in a hurry

Search Engine placement results can often take 2 to 3 months. Spider based search engines may or may not find you quickly, and directory based services are either too expensive or work very slowly. What to do when you absolutely, positively, need to be found by the search engines the day after tomorrow, and you don't have money to burn?

Here are two services I have found that are reasonably priced, and work well in a time crunch.

Overture.com - When time is of the essence and your site needs to be ranked right away, the best bet is a "fee per click" service. At the moment, Overture (go to their advertiser information page )offers the best placement and value of these types of services. With an Overture campaign, you can instantly achieve high rankings with Yahoo, MSN, Netscape, Lycos and many other engines, and you only pay for those who visit your site. If you bid your way into the top 3, your site will be highly visible on both MSN and Yahoo, virtually guaranteeing an increase in site visits.

Since you are paying per visitor, how do you know your campaign won't break the bank? Overture provides tools to show you how often the search terms you selected were chosen last month, so you will have a rough idea of the potential. You can also budget a fixed amount, and if your visits exceed that number your site will be temporarily de-listed. Many phrases bid for as low as 5¢ per visit, thus a small advertising budget goes a long way.

Learn more about Overture Fee per Click Placement by visiting their advertiser information page

Inktomi Preferred Search Engine Placement - The Inktomi network provides over 82 Million searches per day to sites such as About, AOL, Chello, MSN, Overture (formerly GoTo), !ICQ, !Infoseek, iWon, HotBot, LookSmart, Northern Light and many others. Inktomi is a spider based engine like Google and would normally check your site every 6 to 8 weeks. With infrequent checks it is hard to measure whether you site changes are having the desired affect. The Inktomi Search Submit program through Trellian ( visit Trellian's information page ) ensures that your URL is listed in the Inktomi search index within 48 hours, and checked every 48 hours after that.

AOL and MSN both display Inktomi results prominently, and if your site has been properly optimized, it will be readily found. The big advantage to the priority placement, with its 48-hour check back, is that you will be able to see very quickly whether you need to tweak your site for higher placement. With this placement service you pay only once ($38) for the whole year.

Virtual Reality Tours-

Virtual reality, or immersive photography, is a compelling way to better convey the visual message of your web site, immersing your viewer into the middle of an engaging scene. This technology allows the viewer to look around the scene with as much as a 360-degree view in any direction.

One of the leading formats in this arena is !QuicktimeVR. The benefit of !QuicktimeVR (QTVR) technology is that it is royalty free. This free browser plug-in is widely distributed. Many inexpensive tools for the creation of QTVR files allow your virtual tour to be easily viewed in most browsers and the images give the use a great deal of control over the view. The files are smaller than competing formats but these tours are best viewed by clients with a broadband connection. The files can range from 100k for a single scene to 4mbtyes for a full tour.

The basic process of creating a virtual scene is simple, but it will require some software tools to make it happen. Take a series of overlapping still photographs with the same exposure. Stitch these photographs together in a panorama stitching program like PhotoStitch. These programs range in complexity but generally it is a simple matter of ordering the images and setting a few preferences. Save the panoramas as .mov (QTVR) files. The last step is to bring these .mov files into a scene building program like VR Toolbox, and create relationships between the scenes allowing your viewer to not only move around in a scene but to pass out of the scene into another scene. Viola You have a virtual tour.

Here are two examples of recent wide-angle scenes that we have created (only view if you have high speed access and have installed Apple Quicktime):

http://www.caseyhalwighartle.com/index.php?OurFacilities (Select Virtual Tour)

A single scene 360 degree of the road I live on can be viewed at:

http://www.allegany.org/upload/images/fourmilepano360.mov

We now are offering Virtual Tour Photography as both a service and on a consulting basis. As a service we do all of the photography, image manipulation and file creation and provide you with a CD for use with your web site. If you have a need to create these tours on a regular basis, we can train your staff in the skills necessary to build QTVR files yourselves.

You have Built a Site- what's next?

You have bought a domain name, built a web site, marketed the web site and now have traffic. What else is there to do?

Check your e-mail.

I don't mean check to see if you have mail, but check to see if you are leveraging your cyber identity properly. If you are still giving out your e-mail address as mybusiness@aol.com or jack1@adelphia.net instead of yourname@yourbusiness.com, then you are not properly promoting your digital identity. All too many businesses are still promoting AOL in their e-mail address, when it is your own domain that needs the promotion

As we move forward in the new millennium, your cyber identity will become as important as your other business identities. You wouldn't think of ever changing your phone number, your business name or your fax number, why would you want to consider changing your e-mail address? You wouldn't (or rather you shouldn't) but maybe you just haven't taken the time to think about it.

There really are several very good reasons to get e-mail at youraddress@yourcompany.com. The obvious one is to promote your company name and cyber identity rather than that of AOL (who really doesn't need the promotion) or MSN (who definitely doesn't) or HotMail (who is starting to charge for the privilege of promoting their name). Another is to avoid the frequent arbitrary limits that many of these companies put on e-mail size. Another reason is to never again have to change your e-mail address. Over the past few years, many ISP's have been bought out or gone bankrupt, every time that happens you probably had to send out e-mails to all 400 of your contacts and let them know your new address.

Regardless, once you start using youraddress@yourdomain.com, you can keep doing so forever. In fact, by using mail@yourdomain.com you become totally independent of your service provider and can switch at will, with no interruption to your mail service, you'll never have to send out that dreaded e-mail address change notice again.

There are several different ways to easily use youraddress@yourdomain. The first is to have us forward your e-mail to your current Internet service provider. This works well if you have only one or two addresses. Another strategy is to use our severs to provide virtual mail service to your whole organization. We include some free pop mail addresses with each hosting account and can add more for as little as $2 a month each. The third strategy is to set up your own e-mail server in house. This choice is more appropriate if you have adequate in house IT staff or if you are still using a dial up connection to the Internet and have a need for 5 or more mailboxes.

We have encouraged many of you to receive e-mail@yourdomain.com already. However, if you still haven't implemented this change, call us or better yet e-mail us at mailinfo@blumenthals.com today so that we can help you take the next step.

Welcome to new RapidWebSites

This month 3 new RapidWebSites have come on line:

http://www.bigbrotheraddict.com Jodi first created a Big Brother Site 2 years ago and has updated it for each subsequent season. This new site integrates state of the art database driven design as well as all the features of a multilevel editorial managed portal...it supports polls, forums, messaging, user & group management, user news submissions, membership log in, member comments etc. etc.. The idea is to encourage the people who avidly follow Big Brother to be able to create their own content on-line

http://www.kightlinger.com- Dan Kightlinger of Kightlinger Motors in Coudersport, wanted a new look that reflected the dynamic nature of their car dealership, relied on modern design and navigation, integrated a preexisting auto database, pulled in tools from their manufacturers sites AND allowed them easy updating of text and images. RapidWeb and Jodi came through

http://www.lewhoc.com - Lewis & Hockenberry in Emporium specializes in hardwood squares. I didn't know what a square was either before we started on their web site. They are nestled in the heart of North Central Pennsylvania's abundant hardwood forests and provide kiln-dried dimension hardwood products to worldwide markets.

To see other recently designed sites go to: RapidWebSites