Jebrawebbed: Our Blog
Why Do You Have a Web Site?
Do you have a web site for your business? Not a Facebook page, not a Yelp page, but a real, honest-to-goodness www dot something? If you answered no, take a moment to read about why your answer should change ASAP. If you do have a web site for your small business, you...
This Is a Woman-Owned Business, and You Should Care
I'm taking a break this week from writing about web sites, social media, and the internet in general to come out as a woman. The late comedian George Carlin spoke once about how the news media sometimes describes a person as "openly" whatever-they-are, and sometimes...
Why You Should Pay for Discovery
In every web development project, at some point, the designer and the developer disappear into their offices for a period of time and come out with some finished work. During that time, they are creating universes for their client, building web pages out of lines of...
Think You Don’t Need a Great Web Site? WRONG!
Good web sites are not free or easy. Like all marketing, they have an associated cost and/or time commitment that can range widely from site to site. Hire a designer or a developer to build it for you, and the variations in price get wider. Because you can't hold a...
How to Make Your Technology Vendors Love You
They answer your calls on the second ring at the latest. They respond to your emails within an hour. They send you a nice basket of artisan coffees at the end of the year. They know the names of your kids. Or your dog. Your vendors love you! If that sounds like you,...
You’ve Got to Be KIDDING ME: How to Handle Mistakes in Your Web Project
In every single web site project I've ever done for a client, something has gone at least a little bit wrong. Sometimes I am the culprit, and sometimes my client is the culprit, and sometimes neither of us is at fault, but a hosting company or a vendor has...
Location, Location, Location: Where to Put New Content in an Existing Web Site
When you built your web site, if you took the time to do it carefully, you probably came up with at least a basic outline of the content. Perhaps you based it on the navigation menu -- the main links at the top or side of the site template. At the time when you...
4 Dull Things You Need When Your Web Site Launches
Hooray! Your new web site launches on Friday! After months of work and several checks written to your developer, designer, and copywriter, it's finally going to be visible to the whole world! You're probably going to email all your clients and prospects, blast the...
The Fast-Cheap-Good-Pick-Two Question for Web Sites
When you've been living without a web site for a long time, gathering the intestinal fortitude -- and what you imagine to be the appropriate funding -- to build one, it can be incredibly difficult to hold reasonable expectations for it in your head. Even if you...
Know Your Peeps, aka You Are Not Your Users
In 1996, I had the job of building a web site for a business run by someone who had only very limited, simplistic knowledge of the web. This was common in those days; the graphical web was just beginning its path to universal use, and a large portion of businesses had...
What I Learned by Being a Client
After years of coasting on my own internet research to keep my business official and legal, this year, I decided to hire an attorney. I needed help with a major business structure change and decided that it was way over my head, totally out of my area of expertise,...
5 Web Site Updates for Boring Businesses
Everyone who runs a web site for their business has some sense that they need to be updating their site regularly. Some people have set a production schedule for updating the site, including an editorial calendar that assigns different types of content updates to...
This Week in Our Web: April 25, 2014
All kinds of bright, hopeful things are popping out of the ground here in the midwest. We also found lots of hopeful, illuminating articles online this week -- we hope you enjoy our discoveries! We started the week with a blog post about how to finish what you start...
You Deserve Better: How to Avoid Switching Developers Mid-Project
In the past month, I've had two new clients come to me because they were deserted, let down, or under-valued by their current web developers. Both of them had existing contracts with these developers, and yet both of them were so fed-up that they were ready to walk...
Passwords for Your Web Site
We've all heard more than we ever wanted to about password changes recently, after the craziness with the HeartBleed bug compromised passwords all over the internet. By now, hopefully most of you have changed passwords for almost everything you have that you wouldn't...
5 Practical Differences Between Joomla and WordPress
As someone who has been dedicated to implementing Joomla web sites for many years, I was very reluctant to add WordPress to my client offerings. The two products ostensibly have a similar purpose, but ask afficionados of either one which is better, and you'll get...
This Week in Our Web: April 4, 2014
Even the marshmallow bunnies in the midwest are frustrated by the lack of real spring weather. The April showers have given us several chilly, damp days, but we snuggled up around our laptops and read plenty of good things we can share with you. (By the way, we're...
How Do We Know It’s You?: Brand Identity Online
A white, lowercase "f" in a blue square (hexidecimal color #4c66a4) is the logo for Facebook. Connected, white, rounded letters "CNN" surrounded by a red gradiant that runs from hexidecimal shade #920000 to hexidecimal shade #D60000 is the logo for CNN. The letters...