The Sysgen Media Blog

So today’s post marks the beginning of a series of posts attempting to explain some Internet Buzzwords. There’s a lot of tech talk spoken in buzzwords and every once in a while I’ll be trying to de-mystify some of them. Today I’ll tackle: The Cloud. Ooooo.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about being “on the Cloud” or “in the Cloud” or “part of the Cloud”. But what does that mean really? What exactly is the Cloud?  What initially seems rather amorphous is actually a rather simple concept. So simple in fact, that it can be fairly easily explained with some simple drawings and an explanation.

Luckily, someone over at CNN.com has already done this! Check out the link below for a whimsical description of what “the Cloud” really is.

So after a brief blogging hiatus to get some actual work done (which it turns out is necessary to run a business), I’m back on the blogging bandwagon. In the last few weeks I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration however, so expect to see posts a bit more frequently again!

Which brings me to a conversation I was having with a new client a couple of weeks ago in which he asked my opinion on pop-ups on websites. To be honest, as a website user they annoy me, and I said so. He completely agreed and gave me a great analogy that I’d like to pass along.

What’s great is that it’s an analogy that applies not only to popups, but also to excessive use of Flash transitions on a site and to those silly entry pages that have a “Skip Intro” link on them.

To roughly quote the client: When I see popups, it feels like I’m walking into a store and getting rushed by 5 salesmen.

And he’s right. It’s annoying. What I thought about myself when he mentioned this was walking through the perfume / jewelry / makeup section of department stores where there seems to be a person every 5 feet with a perfume trying to get you to make eye contact so that they can suggest you try their perfume / jewelry / eyeliner. How frustrating is that when you just want to get to a different part of the store to pick up what you actually want?

We just want information!

If someone is visiting your business’s website, they’re most likely there for information about your product or services. That Flash intro / transition or popup is just delaying that process. Avoid the temptation to use them on your website!

If you want to highlight something on your website, design the site so that area draws your visitors’ eyes.

Don’t annoy them with unnecessary delays. Remember: Sometimes Less is More.

But I thought Twitter was just for teenagers and self-centered adults?

Not anymore it’s not. Twitter is a tremendous business tool.

I just finished my second meeting this week where using Twitter to drive traffic to a website was one of the main topics. Is Twitter going to be the magic solution that you need to increase traffic to your website? No, probably not. But if used properly (and yes that means actually learning the community, spending time finding people to follow and building your followers, and having meaningful things to tweet)  it can be a huge boon for your business.

Excuses

I’ve heard a lot of excuses to stay away from Twitter, and can counter them all (have any reservations that I missed? Comment and I’ll get back to you!):

• I don’t have anything to say. Be creative! Tweet a quote of the day. Tweet links to blog posts (more on Blogging For Your Business in an upcoming post). Tweet random advice. Tweet links to useful articles related to your business. There’s no end to what you can do if you put some thought into it.
• I don’t understand how it works. Learn. Seriously, it’s worth it. Take some time to look over the Twitter pages of businesses that you know. Sysgen Media, for example. Or contact us if you’re looking for a more guided tour. We can talk to you about all of our Internet Marketing packages.
• There’s no way I can fit anything useful into 140 characters. You’d be surprised how much info you can stick into two sentences if you try. Check out the tweets of businesses you know of for examples. And use a url shortening service like http://www.bit.ly to shorten urls for your tweets. For example: http://www.ultimateathletemagazine.com (38 characters) can become http://bit.ly/3nnh6V (20 characters).

Connect With Your Clients and Customers

Just as important as Tweeting however, is connecting to other Twitterers. The search feature of Twitter is amazing. Once you’ve created your account, search for people with similar interests. Find existing clients and follow them. Find potential new clients tweeting about products or services that you offer and connect with them. The possibilities are endless.

Brand Your Twitter Page

This goes beyond just filling out the basic information that Twitter asks. A plain twitter page is boring. Make sure that you grab the eye of anyone who visits your site with a custom background. And make sure that this background is consistent with the look of your site and any other promotional material you use.

If you want to display more information than the basic twitter fields allow (and you should!), make sure that that background includes all of this extra information on the top left-hand side of the screen.

Let Us Help!

Still unsure if Tweeting is right for you? Need help figuring out how to get started? Contact us for help with your Internet Marketing and Branding! We’re working on this type of work for a few clients now, and are always looking to help more people.

As always, if you have any questions or are interested in help getting your website started or improved upon, feel free to get in touch with me either at nlandis@sysgenmedia.com or (631) 343-2211!

Last week, as I was browsing various websites that I frequent, I stumbled upon an interesting blog post titled: The Myth of the Rational Buyer: How Too Much Thinking Can Hurt Your Brand. It was an interesting read, and to sum up the relevant portion of the article,  it states that many buyers don’t think rationally and that sometimes saying too much gets them thinking too much… and then they don’t buy your product.

From personal experience, one of our biggest points of delay when setting up a new website for a client is getting content from them about their business, product, or whatever they else they want to talk about on their website. Perhaps they are just thinking about it too much.

Take the iPod packaging for example.

It’s sparse, with just a bit of detail of the product and the iPod itself. In short, it’s brilliant.

While an approach that’s this sparse probably won’t work for everyone, perhaps it’s a good model to follow to a point.

On the other end of the spectrum, check out this youtube parody of what would happen if Microsoft created the iPod package.

My Point

If you’re having trouble figuring out exactly what to put on your website, just keep it simple. Especially in this age of information overload, many people really don’t take the time to read more than the first few things they see. Instead, as a starting point, just get the facts out and get your website online.

End of an Era

When I got to work this morning and checked my email, I had a pretty huge surprise waiting for me. I’m a member of the NY Tech Meetup email list, and someone sent an email to the list announcing that Geocities would be shutting down at the end of the month.

For many younger web developers (myself included), Geocities was where we got our web design start. Suddenly web design was accessible to just about anyone who was curious enough to put in the time playing around with their free tools. In fact, about 10 years ago I put up a (relatively useless) site on Geocities with my own web design tips. I only vaguely remember it, but I’m pretty sure it was mainly about then-cutting-edge things like changing text colors and sizes when you moved your mouse over it. Ah the good ol’ days.

But what about all of those websites still on Geocities?!

I have a website at Geocities. What do I do now?!

To everyone who still has a Geocities page and is unsure what to do, I’d like to help. For starters, if you have any basic questions, you should look through the FAQ that Yahoo! has put up about the transition located here.

To sum it up, you have until October 26th to move all of your site files to a different web host or they will be lost.

The New Era

Of course, Yahoo! suggests moving to their paid hosting (big surprise, right?)… but what surprised me is that Sysgen Media web hosting is actually cheaper than Yahoo! web hosting.

Yahoo! is offering hosting at $4.99 per month for the first year and then $9.99 per month after that. If you look at our hosting plans you’ll see that our cheapest hosting is $4.95 per month if you pay upfront for the year and will stay $4.95 as long as you don’t need extra space or monthly data transfer.

Save Over $60 Per Year with Sysgen Media Website Hosting

Your savings: First year – $0.48. Woohoo! But your savings each subsequent year: $60.48.

You’ll need to purchase a domain name (such as sysgenmedia.com or yourdomain.com) but that’s a low one-time-yearly cost, and you’ll get at least 3 email addresses at your domain (ie: yourname@yourdomain.com), possibly more depending upon which hosting plan you select. We’ll be happy to guide you through the process of transitioning to our hosting, and are also available to help move your site for you at a low cost.

Sign up for Sysgen Media website hosting here today!

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at nlandis@sysgenmedia.com and I’d be happy to answer any questions you may have about our hosting, moving your site to Sysgen Media web hosting, or anything else website related.

And don’t forget, we’re Website Designers and Developers too!

Just a quick update, which I meant to write about yesterday but ran out of time.

I’ve been attempting to actually be active with our Twitter account (follow us!) recently for various reasons, and in doing so, I stumbled upon a message from someone I don’t know, and who doesn’t appear to be working directly in the web design industry.

To quote lacefaced:

When a company doesn’t have a website (and myspace doesn’t count), I don’t want to give them my business.

This is the point that I’ve been trying to get across to all of the businesses (and just about everyone else) that I’ve spoken to lately, a point which many simply don’t seem to understand. I’ve heard a lot of excuses, everything from “I don’t have the money right now” (somewhat understandable, given the current economic situation) to “I’m just a small business, I don’t need a website.”

But let’s re-read the quote, just so that it can completely sink in:
When a company doesn’t have a website (and myspace doesn’t count), I don’t want to give them my business.

This is the attitude that’s being adopted by more and more people of all ages. It’s not just the youngsters anymore. It’s not just the 20 somethings that, when they go looking for a company and find either just a MySpace page or nothing at all, simply won’t give that company their business. It’s almost everyone.

Not having a website makes it look like you don’t care about your company. And if you don’t care about your company, how can you care about your product?

Having only a myspace page is like you having your 3 year old niece decorate your storefront with cardboard, crayons, glue, and macaroni noodles.

Businesses need to realize that their situation online is now going to affect their business whether they want it to or not. Even if you aren’t selling on the internet, be sure to have a website for your business, and that it properly reflects your business! Let people know who you are, what your products and services are, when you’re open, and how to contact you!

Ignore the internet at the peril of your business!

Contact me today at nlandis@sysgenmedia.com or (631) 343-2211 to find out how I can help you build the website that will recapture the business that you’re losing without it!

Hi folks,

So I spent this Sunday with Matt and Jared at the Cow Harbor Day festival in Northport, NY. This was our first year attending this awesome event, and we had a booth on Main Street, in a prime location both for people to walk by and so that we had a great view of the bovine-themed parade!

Besides the parade, there were games, food, and plenty of vendors with everything from arts and crafts to landscaping displays and even some local politicians showed up.

But it was the vendors that really caught my eye.

We’ve been to a few similar events lately in order to spread the word about our great web development company, and we’ve found that we’ve gotten as much work from the other vendors as we have from the people who attend these events. This makes a certain amount of sense, since the other vendors are pretty much guaranteed to be business owners and potentially have a need for a website.

So, despite the rather gloomy, rainy weather, I took some time out of our booth to go speak with the other vendors. What I found amazed me. Well over half of the vendors who weren’t publicizing their website on their various marketing materials actually has a website!

This just boggles my mind.

These are businesses that have likely paid good money to have a website built for their business (unless they had “The Nephew” build their site for a case of beer [more on this phenomenon in a future post), and yet when I pointed out that their marketing materials didn't have their website url on it they were generally surprised and hadn't even thought about it.

It wasn't even a thought to put their phone number on their cards or their trucks, but they didn't even consider their website url!

Just because you have a website does not mean that anyone will visit it. Your website is like one really cool tree in the middle of a vast forest. If you want someone to find it, you had better give them some good directions to get there!

Sure, you can pay a company like us to do a Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization campaign for your website (and I recommend that you do!).  And it will be incredibly effective at bringing your site traffic.

But you also need to include your url in all of your marketing materials!

My Sysgen Media Business Card

Our Current Sysgen Media Marketing Flyer

Why wouldn’t you? It’s one more way to bring potential customers to your website!!

Hi folks,

When visiting a website, which is more interesting:

A website that is almost entirely text-based?	A website that is image-rich and visually engaging?
BlandWebsite	Selective Living

Odds are good you chose the second option. Providing your customers and clients with images so that they can -see- what you do is invaluable. Simple, text-heavy websites just aren’t cutting it anymore. You need to show your clients what it is that you do.

One of the best ways to do this is through an image gallery. The benefits of using an image gallery instead are tremendous. If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine the power of of having multiple images in one place!

But don’t just take my word for it. Check out some of the image galleries that we’ve developed:

Drink Protegy – Carousel style image gallery on a website we built for a new energy drink company. This style of image gallery is mobile and best for just a few images. The still doesn’t do this gallery justice, make sure to check out their website!

Drink Protegy - Carousel Gallery

Selective Living – Gallery style image gallery for a custom cabinetry and woodworking company. This gallery style isn’t quite as flashy as the Carousel style, but are a great way to browse through many images.

Selective Living

Gary and Reina Bronz Painting – Standard style image gallery. While this is just a simple table of images, it’s very easy to implement and easily allows the viewers to see what images are available.

Gary and Reina Bronz Painting

And many, many more! There are hundreds of styles of image galleries out there to choose from. Don’t like what you see here? There are many other options of gallery styles out there.

Give us a call today at (631) 343-2211 or send me an email to nlandis@sysgenmedia.com for more information on how we can help you spice up your website with an Image Gallery!

Hi everyone,

Great News! We’ll now be updating the blog every few days. With what you ask? With tips on how to stay on the cutting edge with your website! I’ve been interacting more and more with our clients lately, and the general feeling that I’ve been getting is that they are unaware of how many awesome things that they can do with their website.

So, I’ll be writing here about how to use and improve your websites! The plan is to write an article every few days with articles ranging from a new feature that you could add to your website to a method to drive more traffic to your site to a feature about one of our client’s websites. For example, my first article will be about how adding an image gallery to your site helps you stay on the cutting edge and keep your viewers’ attention.

So keep checking back! I’ll be providing useful tips on how to use and improve your awesome website!

Signing out,
Nathan

We just got back from the 2009 Empire Challenge at Hofstra University. It was a rainy day out, and just as the guests arrived it started to pour. Unfortinuately the band got wet and shorted out, so we rushed to put up a tent to keep them dry. Event though it was bad weather, the crowds still came in full force and the game was still played.

Congratulations to the LI team for winning this year! Final Score 31 / 14.
For more in game shots and interviews visit visit Ultimate Athlete Magazine.