Author Archives: brad
SOPA – Cutting Through the Hype
I was asked recently by a local tech startup attorney, Dave Gillespie, to comment on some of the technical details of the DNS system as they relate to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Below is an excerpt of the full article “SOPA – Cutting Through the Hype” written by Scott Brown, intellectual property attorney at The Gillespie Law Group. Much has been written about the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) in recent months – most of it important, all of it passionate, but through all the fervent positioning, the [...]
Ohio Get Your Business Online by Google
This afternoon, Jessica and I are attending a series of 3 workshops at the Columbus Convention Center that were brought here by Google. They call the program “Ohio Get Your Business Online” (ohiogetonline.com), and they’re running these events all over the country with similar names. I will fill in more details as we go. Get Your Free Website 1:34pm: Marum, an Intuit business advisor, just started his presentation. This is the first official indication that Intuit is involved in the event. I did my research ahead of time, so I [...]
So you want to build a website | What is the Process?
Some of our readers may want to build their own websites, or at least understand the process from start to finish. If you’re an adventurous do-it-yourself kind of business owner, hopefully this guide will give you enough information to launch your own basic website. Before jumping into this process, you should definitely put some thought and planning into the goals you have for your site. In this series, though, I’m focusing more on the technical steps than on the business side of things. We’ll save that for a future series! [...]
Pricing Models: Time & Materials vs. Fixed Price
A developer friend of mine, Tian Davis, posted a little commentary about Five Skills Every Freelancer Must Have. He based his comments on his experience as a developer and on a talk given my Nathaniel Talbott some time ago. See Tian’s post for a summary and an embedded video. I agree with most of Nathaniel’s points, and they’re ones most freelancers don’t do well (i.e. taking every project/client they can get, not collecting promptly, failing to deliver value continually). There’s one point I don’t agree about, though, and it’s the one [...]
Drupal Starter’s Guide
Last week I introduced the Content Management System (CMS) and some of the reasons why I recommend selecting an open source CMS like WordPress or Drupal for your web site. This week, I would like to go more in depth on Drupal, and I will let Six Revisions take the discussion even further with their thorough starter’s guide tutorial. Drupal is one of my favorite platforms for developing small business web sites for several reasons: Flexibility (to use it for many different types of sites) Wide availability of free modules (a.k.a. [...]
Why use a Content Management System?
A Content Management System (CMS) is the holy grail of websites. It’s what every small business owner needs for his/her website. Let me explain… Every business should have a website, but I know many business owners don’t think they can afford to have one developed because web developers are so expensive (unless you offshore the work or have your neighbor’s high school son build it for you). The biggest cost associated with most professional websites is not the initial development, but rather the ongoing support and maintenance. I can’t count [...]
Shortest SEO Tutorial Ever – by HubSpot
Hubspot has a great short tutorial on SEO. While this alone probably won’t get you a top 3 rank on Google, and while it doesn’t provide details on how to implement the changes on your specific site, it is a concise guide for the DIY small business owner. Hubspot provides a lot of valuable webinars, whitepapers, blog posts and forums. They ask for your contact information almost every time the provide you with content (except for their blog), but they’re respectful if you unsubscribe from their emails. If you want [...]
Meet our Bloggers: Brad Griffith
Welcome to our blog. Hopefully you’re reading this because you own, manage or work for a small business, or you’re interested in online issues that affect small businesses. If we do our job well, readers will find here some great tips for creating, building, managing and marketing your website. In fact, you will probably find plenty of tips about creating, building, managing and marketing your company. The web provides countless opportunities for increasing revenue and decreasing costs, but I’ve found that a web presence needs to be tightly integrated with [...]
