Jebrawebbed: Our Blog
The Real Reason I Blog: I’m Lazy
Blogging is often lamented as a torturous requirement of managing a modern business or nonprofit. Ugh, I know I should be blogging, I hear from my clients, but it's just so much stinking WORK. You know what I think? Turn that upside down. Blogging is not nearly as...
Website Quickies: 15 Minute Changes For Hassled Times
Let's get one thing straight: no one has time to update their web site. You are not alone in thinking it's just one more thing you really cannot squeeze into your week. After all, you probably spent dozens of hours working on it when you launched it, and you're...
Boxes & Baggage: How to Move Your Site to a New Host
We all dread moving a web site from one host to another. Even those of us who do this for a living find the task stressful. If you've discovered that it's time to break up with your hosting company, the number of things you need to do to get from one virtual home to...
It’s Not You; It’s Them: How to Break Up With Your Hosting Company
Remember when you first got that email confirming that you'd purchased space to host your web site? It was so good back then. You could remember all your passwords. After you and your host company got to know each other, you knew your way around that control panel to...
Should You Holiday-ify Your Web Site?
As soon as the Halloween items roll into the clearance section of the store, the winter holiday items roll into place. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you have to consider whether or not to add any decorations for the winter holidays, but what about your web...
Should You Build Your Web Site Yourself?
As a firm which focuses on very small businesses and cash-strapped nonprofits, our biggest competition is not some fancy soup-to-nuts internet consulting firm, but our clients themselves. Often the choice they make is between hiring us and doing it on their own. It...
Don’t Just Nod and Smile: 10 Questions to Ask Your Technology Vendor
I see a lot of nodding and smiling in meetings between geeks and non-geeks. The geeks say something extremely technical using industry terminology, and the non-geeks say something very vague about how they want their web site or software to work or look, and both...
What You Want: Why You Should Write a Requirements Document
"I would like a cake. How much is that?" If you walked into a bakery and asked that question, you can bet your sweet tooth that the person behind the counter wouldn't respond with a price. He'd probably ask several questions: what size? how many layers? what kind of...
Righting the Wrongs: When Web Projects Tank
I am shocked at the percentage of work I get that comes directly from someone's miserable experience with the last web designer they hired. This is not how I hoped to build my portfolio or pay my bills -- on the backs of someone else's hard-won client, defecting to...
Be Awesome Online
This is a public service announcement from me -- a veteran of the dot-com boom, a consultant for web enterprises medium and small (but rarely large), a person whose life is lived with integrity online and off -- to you, a person who owns and runs (or is about to own...
The Elephant in Your Web Site: Cost
The brilliant Jen Kramer wrote in one of her early books on developing web sites, a chapter entitled, "I Want a Web Site and I Want It Blue; How Much Will That Cost?" Everyone who has ever charged someone to build a web site understands immediately why this is sadly...
Silver Linings in Your Required Upgrade
It feels like a dark time in the life of a small business owner when their web developer breaks the bad news about needing to upgrade their software. Yesterday, their web site seemed just right. Suddenly, it's a violent approaching storm requiring an infusion of money...
Lose the Shoulder Pads on Your Web Sites
If you look around in any office that requires business attire, it is obvious that fashions change over time. Sometimes the changes are subtle -- cuffs/no cuffs, pleats/no pleats -- and sometimes, they are obvious. Neither men nor women would consider entering a...
Help Us Help You: How to Report & Describe Tech Trouble
"My web site is broken." "I can't get to the contact form." "Nothing happens when I click on that link." "I went to my site and now everything is messed up." These are all real email messages that I've received from clients or prospective clients with regard to their...
The Customize or Compromise Web Site Question
How special are you, really? This is not a rhetorical question. Before you make a major purchase for your business or nonprofit organization, it's an important one to consider. Does your organization's identity require defining by what you're about to buy? The answer...
Joomla vs. WordPress: Add-on Update Quickdraw
For the past two weeks, we've been tallying off the steps it takes for an average, not-super-technical business owner to perform basic tasks on a web site that uses WordPress versus one that uses Joomla. Both systems have their enthusiastic supporters, and both can...
Joomla vs. WordPress: New User Quickdraw
All too often, small businesses and nonprofit organizations are taught the basics of managing content on their sites without being taught how to manage the rights of the site's administrative users. If your organization has rotating interns, part-time staff that turns...
Joomla vs. WordPress: Blog Post Quickdraw
A business blog is the most often recommended way to get your business noticed and recognized for its vitality online. Because of this, most small business owners we know make the majority of their updates to their web site by adding blog posts. When you sit down to...