To thank everyone, all the communities and individuals who’ve shown tremendous support for the project, they’ve launched a new website Google Fiber for Communities through which you can learn more about fiber networks and stay on top of their project. They also encourage you to advocate for common-sense federal and local policies that would help fiber deployments nationwide.

Google was so honored by the grassroots enthusiasm across the country for this project that they put together a short video to say thank you. Google plans to name their target community or communities by the end of the year. While I don’t think Google’s efforts will transform the landscape of web development for at least another decade, I did notice that our location, the city of Irvine and a couple other cities nearby are on that list of city responses. Would I move to a nearby city for faster internet? It’s definitely a possibility.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the city of Irvine.

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FXMD time attack NSX sponsored by Forge Web.

Every now and then, we try to get involved in something outside of what we do everyday and because of our relationships within motorsports, we were able to get an opportunity to sponsor a time attack car in the United States. A time attack is another term for time trial. The term is commonly used in Japan for individual time trial events for motor vehicles that involves a vehicle running around the circuit in lieu of a qualifying lap and the term is widely adopted outside the country for tuner event and media.

We’re sponsoring FX Motorsports Development (FXMD) and super modified class NSX, which for the most part competes in two series, Redline and Super Lap Battle, both of which are currently the dominant series in the United States. You can kind of see our logo on the hood of the car below NEO Synthetics and Race Engine Development. Most recently, FXMD crushed the competition at Super Lap Battle in Las Vegas by over 5 seconds. We’re looking forward to seeing how the team performs the rest of the race season.

Hopefully we’ll have some more opportunities arise in the near future that will allow us to further our involvement in motorsports as everyone on our team has an interest on a personal level. Depending on how much I’m able to develop my Honda S2000 and my driving this coming year, we might compete the car in time attack as well. Stay tuned as I have a feeling we’ll have something in the works soon enough.

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At first impressions, Magento Mobile doesn’t sound like a big deal; after all, most ecommerce websites are already viewable within mobile browsers. The key lies in the depth of integration which aims to provide a branded, native storefront application, and even uses a mobile payments library to provide a seamless and fast checkout experience from a mobile device thanks to PayPal. What we’re talking about here isn’t just a re-theme of a merchant website with mobile browser detection, rather a complete transformation in the user interaction unlike any others before.

You’ll be able to easily manage multiple devices with a single installation including but not limited to iPad, iPhone and Android devices. With so many mobile devices each possessing its own unique set of features, Magento aims to provide cost-efficient extensibility for each device and will use its Magento Connect community to allow the development of relevant features on an individual level for business and customer needs. More importantly, PayPal’s mobile payments library will tackle the biggest barriers in mobile commerce, ease of use and security.

North Face, one of the world’s largest outdoor products companies, is a big believer and is already using the new mobile platform. We’re hoping to get our hands on it soon so that we can start to implement custom solutions for our own clients, stay tuned for further announcements as we get ready to add this service to our arsenal. Expect full mobile commerce channel integration with a Magento store catalog, checkout, inventory, reporting and much more at a low cost of ownership.

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PAC-MAN's 30th Birthday! Doodle with PAC-MAN™ & ©1980 NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc

It’s been 30 years since classic video arcade game Pac Man was released in Japan by Namco Bandai Games, after which it was launched in the States selling over 100,000 units in its first year of production. To celebrate its 30 years anniversary, Google has a Pac Man game you can actually play on their homepage for the next 48 hours; the first time in history Google has implemented interactivity into their logo spot (notice I didn’t say animation, which was done in the past for Newton’s birthday).

What’s interesting to note is the game does not use Adobe’s Flash, enabling iPhone and iPad users to play too with the swipe of a finger. Make sure you take a screenshot of those top scores. With 256 levels, there’s bound to be a lot of competition going on and no leaderboard to keep track. Google’s Pacman tribute has also brought about feelings of nostalgia for old video games with searches for Google Tetris and Google Centipede rampant.

Wait there’s more; if you throw in another digital coin, Ms. Pac Man joins the game and you can play together with a friend using the WASD keys. Expect office productivity around the world to come to a screeching halt.

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His clients include but are not limited to AOL, General Motors, Hewlett Packard, Viacom, you get the idea. Whether you personally need those tools is a question for another time, but real quickly, I’ll say that if you’re not generating at least a couple hundred in traffic daily, you’re not there yet; your data sample is too small to act upon.

With introductions out of the way, Neil wrote an article in his blog Quick Sprout, about “How Not to Market Your Startup.” Essentially Neil made a top 7 hit list on what you shouldn’t do to market your new startup business and while I agree with the majority of what he’s said, there are a few things I do disagree with:

• I’ll believe it when I see it.

  While I can see the obvious benefit of having a splash page collecting emails, promising answers to problems yet to be solved and building hype with screenshots, I personally wouldn’t be all that interested until there was something tangible there. Even a demo video would be a step up from just a screenshot, just to let people know this thing is actually coming.

• Links at the bottom of each page are not just for Google.

  I agree that saturating your footers with a cloud of links to internal pages isn’t going to get you any rank with Google, but having a structured navigation in the footer with links to internal pages is good usability, especially when your website has a lot of long content pages. I always try to focus on the user experience first, search engines second, maybe even third.

• Bribing customers can work for some businesses.

  Having a great product or service with a serious competitive advantage is ideal, but unfortunately most small to medium businesses aren’t in that boat. They’ll often be competing with other players who’re doing the same thing for the same price, and they’ll be hard pressed to get a leg up on the field. That’s where contests, prizes, and gifts can help to win over customers, help to build a community, and take that lead in the game. Sure, customers might expect a regular giveaway, but if it’s working, how is it any different from spending dollars on pay per click every month? Free stuff and a better service is two times the smash.

That being said, when you’re in doubt, the best thing to do is try it out. Yes, mistakes are going to be made, but the worst one you could make is not finding out the answers for yourself. Take all advice with a grain of salt and be open minded, test it before you move on.

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While inherently any blog tied to a corporate entity is biased, even ours, distinction is in whether the goal is to actually help or to sell and make money, with the majority opting for the latter. It’s actually really easy to immediately spot who’s trying to do what; just ask yourself whether you’re wanting those 5 minutes of your life back after reading a post and you’ve got a good idea of what’s going on.

If you’re guilty of owning a sales hungry blog, it’s not too late to change your ways so that you may begin to genuinely build a loyal readership in hopes of establishing credibility and interest. It’s not an easy road to travel and requires hard work and endless commitment. Most difficult of all, it requires a significant investment of time before you start to see and feel the results.

We’re all familiar with the timeless cliché that time is money and as such begs the question to where the value might be in such a proposition. The value is in the work itself, for you are publishing quality and the readership is proof that you’re an authority within your domain. Your time, your insight as a result of your research and experience is a prize to yourself, your readers, and your product or service.

You should never underestimate the value of the traffic because even if you’re not directly selling, each one has a value which can produce sales or leads later on. Last fall, a new client welcomed our proposed strategy and has since experienced a generous growth in sales as a result. Based on the analytics we’ve mined, each visitor that viewed the homepage after reading the blog was valued at over $9 per visitor.

The value is calculated by taking the total revenue generated for that source and dividing by the number of visitors. The ecommerce conversion rate was almost 10% and we’re looking at data that has spanned approximately 6 months. With that said, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about achieving this; there’s a balance you have to maintain when attempting to maximize the value of each visitor.

We didn’t use any Flash animated ads, pop ups, interstitials, or anything that remotely resembled Google AdSense. The header has a link to the shop and in the sidebar, we placed a widget that would automatically display the newest products added to the ecommerce store, pulling from an RSS feed. It’s an absolute requirement that you do nothing intrusive, which will turn off your readership immediately.

Next time I’ll cover how you can make shopping an interesting part of your blogging experience, how to go about featuring products and initiating comparisons, listening to feedback or complaints and realizing how you can take advantage of a negative and turning it into a positive. Blogging and corporate can work together, we’ll keep showing you how.

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For the most part it’s the old school marketers who’re still holding onto their traditional marketing approaches from eons ago. They’ll spam you in every channel until you either buy into it or unsubscribe. Unfortunately it’s become popular for a lot of affiliate marketers too because there’s always one guy herding the sheep who’s going to claim that the hard sell is the secret sauce to landing pages.

You know what I’m talking about. The never ending, scrolling, landing page with tons of white space, sometimes a photo of the guy’s face in the header with a big smile and two thumbs up, an opt-in form in the sidebar, tons of testimonials they get their friends to write, and the price carefully hidden. They always have a story about how much money they made and how easy it is, or something like that.

What happened to being honest? If you’re selling something that’s just terrible, you’ve got a completely different problem altogether. Now if you’re actually onto something though, don’t try to sell people on it. You can recommend it, but let the product speak for itself. Better yet, do a product comparison; round up all the competitors and show everybody your product is king of the hill.

It’s rare that every single time, you’re going to bring a bulletproof product to the table. There’s bound to be some shortcomings and as minor as they might be, it’s better to let people know than have them find out the hard way and get all angry that you sold them on a product that isn’t perfect when you assured them it was. You’ll sell more and people will like you more, that’s always a good thing.

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What I’m going to do here is examine the value proposition of hiring an in-house web designer and marketing guy. You be the judge and jury, however as a professional who has been immersed in this work for years on end, I say in-house FTL (for the lose and in other words, a bad idea).

1. Your web guy is just that, a single guy.

Throughout my career, I’ve personally been in that hot seat countless times. When you’re budgeting for a new web site, don’t forget that with it comes ongoing maintenance, maybe brochures and other marketing collateral. You do some shopping around and it might seem like that polished agency down the street is handing you an estimate so bloated it’s going to put you in the poor house.

The truth of the matter is; an agency is handing you a team of handpicked, specialized professionals, each with their own focus at your disposal and not a one man jack of all trades. I feel the biggest misconception in web design and advertising today is that it’s easy and anyone can do it. If that were the case, then we’d have a world of pretty pictures, but we undoubtedly are far from such an ideal.

Saving money by hiring that one guy is essentially a surefire way to ensure that you’re spending more for less. You just can’t expect one man to do it all and prove to be a superhero.

2. Your web guy is not going to rock the boat; he’s all about smooth sailing.

There’s nothing wrong with job security, everyone understandably enjoys employment and the regular paycheck that come with it. The challenge you’ll have to overcome is that your web guy isn’t necessarily going to be as motivated to execute in the finest manner when his or her salary isn’t as dependent upon the precision of the timeline nor the effectiveness of the solutions being implemented.

Agencies on the other hand are held accountable to the deadlines they promise, albeit there are some less than worthy agencies in the mix. The talented tier one agencies are ready to flip the switch on whether you’re ready or not. Simply, for the most part, providing innovative, creative solutions for your business is not an automatic in the interests of your in-house web guy.

The alternative, which is to bring the absolute minimum in the comforts of ease and a reduced workload, is far more likely.

3. The web guy knows he’s a code monkey.

You’ve convinced yourself that you’re going to make the decision to not hire an agency and find a guy who can promise the world in all of his experience and more. Web guys are smart, they know what they’re doing and they know what you think you’re doing. The poor guy is going to be at the mercy of every supervisor of every department in the building and with it comes a workload fit for a pack mule.

He or she will be expected to solve problems that are not even remotely in the ball park of the job description. It’s all in the name of the mighty paycheck, and the fact that it keeps coming if one does what’s asked. I hear it all the time from in-house guys, the pain of being the monkey. They eventually get fed up, leave, and take all that training and experience that you invested in, putting it to work for somebody else.

Stop hiring code monkeys.

4. In-house quality is not be all you can be.

I’ll be the first to admit, there’s always an exception to the rule. Sometimes you’ll have some amazing work come out of an in-house code monkey web guy. Although, you’re most likely not looking at the product of one guy, but a team of in-house guys who’ve banded together to deliver the goods. But at that point, you’re no longer saving money, rather building your own mini agency within your organization.

Whether you go the in-house route or outsource to an agency, think quality. It’s a reflection of your products and services, and compromising makes doing it pointless altogether. Seriously, we’d rather you chance your luck in Vegas than to pay top dollar for subpar work. You’re only digging your own grave when you’re thinking about ways of spending less money instead of ways to more money than you spend.

5. Amortization, schamortization.

A lot of companies will claim that cash flow is a large contributing factor in their decision to hire in-house. Sorry, but I’m going to have to call you guys out on that one. Most, if not all good agencies offer payment plans that spread out the costs over a period of time, making it very affordable. If you do the math, in comparison hiring an employee is actually more expensive.

You can expect to pay on average a $60,000 per year base salary, in other words $5000 a month gross in which you will also have to pay an additional 7.5% for social security and medicare. Moreover your new employee will obviously require training to ensure that he or she is effective and can operate successfully within your company.

For argument sake, we’ll assume 3 months is what’s required for assimilation which doesn’t really factor into the math directly, but is something that should be kept in mind as it implies indirect costs. Back to the math, your new, very intelligent employee will also want benefits and healthcare, adding another $200 or so per month.

With a complete overview of expenditures involved in the acquisition of a new jack of all trades, do it all web guy; locked and loaded, ready to take on that huge web project that you needed like yesterday, it’s going to cost you right under $18,000 over the span of 3 months. That’s assuming what we’re talking about gets done in 3 months, and we’re being generous when we say that it might get done.

$18,000 is a lot of money, I’m sure you’ll agree. In that same 3 months, working with a talented agency will get you that same project done with more quality, with more people at the helm, and a more efficient implementation of features that at the end of the day will save you a lot of money you otherwise would’ve spent.

I’m not saying there’s always going to be such a huge discrepancy every time. No of course not, there’s always an exception to the rule. However what I’m identifying is the long term investment you’re most likely going to have to make in order for your web guy to become a worthwhile asset within your organization. Furthermore, if you’re not yet aware, web guys have a tendency to migrate to the next best thing.

Clearly, the in-house guy is an investment that rarely pays off. How does this pertain to you? Maybe it doesn’t at the moment, but if in the future you’re in need of web services for your company, do everyone a favor and hire a good agency. It doesn’t matter who you hire; as long as they’re professional, well qualified and will deliver what you need on budget and on time, we’re happy for you.

Take the time to find one that is willing to offer you advice, one that will take steps to help improve your business and can really showcase a portfolio with proven results that will drop your jaw to the floor. It’ll be money well spent and we’ll congratulate you with a high five well done.

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I’m absolutely, positively, guaranteeing you and anybody you know top rankings for any keywords and phrases, no matter how competitive or costly they might be. All you have to do is sign up for our newsletter and you’ll get access to our secret sauce that will put you in the top rankings without a single backlink within a week or less.

Many believe it’s only possibly to get high rankings after several months, but this technique will get you there right away. This is eye opening stuff, I can’t express enough the immeasurable value in what I’m offering you; I’m talking about high rankings for keywords you’d have to pay top dollar for with AdWords.

Does this all sound too good to be true? Yes, that’s because it is, April fools.

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1. Hire an agency to build them a customized e-commerce system tailored to their industry and works with tested and secure technology
2. Attempt to build something themselves using open source solutions and communities
3. Use hosted e-commerce solutions like Shopify.com or Yahoo Stores.

All three offer pros and cons that might or might not be deal breakers for business owners but there is one thing that all should definitely avoid: Yahoo Stores.

Actually, I’ll rephrase and say avoid Yahoo Stores and most hosted e-commerce solutions period. The idea behind their business model is to get you in for a low cost of entry, give you some kind of “easy to use” portal to manage your store, and then get you for the processing fees, transaction fees, and monthly fees. From a money standpoint alone, if the product you’re selling has a huge margin on it, all the fees are easy to swallow and pass off as the cost of doing business.

In reality, you’re giving money to them. Period. In businesses with small margins and strict MAP pricing such as electronics or automotive parts, it makes being successful online even more difficult to begin with! What most business owners don’t understand is the relative success of starting an e-commerce venture is directly related to the quality of their store. When I shop online, I’m especially picky about the quality of e-store I’m at because it has to ooze credibility for me to hand over my precious credit card number. I don’t think many people are far from my requirement.

Yahoo Stores is one of the grandfathers of e-commerce for small business owners. They’ve been around for over a decade providing what seems to be a good solution to getting your product online. What they don’t tell you is that the system they’ve been using to do that is also a decade old. The engineers of the Yahoo Store project decided that it would be a great idea to take all web standards, languages and conventions, tie them to a stake, and burn them in the name of “easy e-commerce.”

Using a proprietary language called RHTML, yahoo stores are edited, themed, and enhanced. Bearing the bastard resemblance of HTML and JavaScript, it is a worthless endeavor. Yahoo has created a niche of developers that specialize in RHTML and honestly, they all suck. The technology has no potential for growth and is behind the current e-commerce software by miles.

At Forge Web, we get inquiries consistently to repair, build, edit, or enhance Yahoo Stores and we flat out turn them down on principle despite them occasionally being very large contracts. We refuse to endorse a proprietary format with no future. However, instead, we suggest using tailored versions of the finest open source e-commerce platform out there, Magento. Bearing a higher cost of entry, a secure payment processor, and a more complex toolset, Magento requires a greater investment of time and money. However, then we ask the question, do you want to be successful online or not?

No one ever made it online by trying to half ass it.

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