Turns out I have been to busy building websites to notice that Google announced its new revolutionary product to the public just a few short months ago. I first started my search by typing in Google Wave into Google. I found the first result was this 1.5 hour long presentation that left my jaw on the floor.

Google is about to reinvent the most common social media tool available today.

The video starts out talking about how email was created nearly 4 decades ago before the internet was a thriving success. Email tends to be something we all take for granted because it gives us our mailing address in the internet universe. Not everyone has facebook, twitter, google chat, instant messaging, skype etc… but nearly everyone has email these days. Personally I have met illegal migrant farm workers that spoke very little english who use email on a daily basis. Email has had its day, it is a huge part of many peoples every day lives. I personally read several hundred email messages a day. I even have a special system to categorize and track my emails because I get so many for so many different reasons.

As a marketing medium email is replacing print and direct mail advertising!

So how can this widely used tool that everyone uses be upgraded? Who knows, but google decided to upgrade email with gmail, with this new project google is not trying to upgrade email, it is trying to reinvent the concept of personal communication on the internet.
If you have yet to see the presentation I urge you to watch it. Imagine a tool that has the following capabilities:

You can send messages like email, but in real time, something even text chat can not do.

It can act like a Wiki, or a community document.

It can correct spelling mistakes instantly, in multiple languages.

It can translate as you type

Drag and drop file sharing

The ability to embed the string of messages/document/wiki/photos/vidoe in a website or blog post.

You can play back the history of the message and watch its evolution.

No one message is ever sent from one person to another. Instead all of the messages live on a server, so all changes to the “wavelength” (series of wave messages) are submitted to one location that stores the waves.

So what does this mean?

Imagine you sent an email with a document attached, but afterwords you realized you left out an important part of that document. Instead of resending a second document you can simply edit the first document after you sent it, because the document was the message.

Imagine making changes to a file at the same moment another person is changing another part of it.

Imagine now that the entire platform connects to the rest of the social media universe. Now your email conversation can be included on facebook and shared with friends, while also being embedded on your blog. Instead of visiting any of these locations you read the responses from one location. Make the conversations you want public, leave the rest private, or a mix of the two!

Imagine this service also connects to other mediums like smart phones.

This is only a tiny piece of what this system will do. Google was brilliant in designing this application because they decided the entire system will be open source and will allow federation. This means you can host your own wave service and it will automatically connect to Google’s wave service. This is the same way email works.. email is not a system any one person has ownership over.. email is a protocol. Google wave is more than a robust web 2.0 application with more break through features than anything before it.. Google Wave is a protocol! This is the biggest leap forward in personal communication since the invention of voice over ip telephones.

I am putting my bet on google with this big gamble. Here is why:

Google had the google maps team develop it. These two brothers that developed google apps single handedly wiped every other maps site off the grid with their amazing maps API and the developer community who has used maps to change the way maps are experienced online.

Because google is offering transparency, open source, a protocol, and federation this new product from google is going to become the next sensation. This will dwarf Gmail, Maps, and possibly even Youtube in its reach.

I am not sure email will every really go away, but I would bet that Google Wave is going to put a huge dent into how many time consuming emails I have to read, and I look forward to that day.

If you are a small business owner, the answer is a clear NO!

Why not automate it, shouldn’t everyone aspire to 10,000 followers?

Auto-following people on twitter can be very useful if you are going to publish a new book, sell a new product, or reach the masses as a corporation. If your goal on twitter is simply to do branding, by all means automate away! I personally ran a test using twitter and automation to follow several thousand people in a matter of days and as a result my new blog had 500 hits on its first day with no other marketing than a couple of tweets. When you think about the impact that could make over a year, or two.. thats great branding for free!

However, if you are a small business owner and you are trying to reach new potential clients and contacts, you should steer clear of the automation fad. Twitter is a great tool for building new relationships, meeting new people, and getting a glimpse into the lives of people that you would otherwise never know. That said, this is impossible if you are friends with ten thousand strangers! The other side of the coin is that you could actually do damage to your brand through a negative emotional response to your automation.

In the world of internet marketing is has been shown that people can actually gain a negative opinion of a brand by its invasive advertisements. In plain english that means people might think badly of you for inviting your brand into their lives, without inviting yourself along with it.

People are adaptable, and they learn to spot advertising very quickly. Think about how many people have followed you on twitter and when you visit their profile you see they follow 2,534 people. At the same time you see they only have 1,234 followers. This is a tell tale sign that they have no interest in yout tweets, they are just scraping twitter for followers.

Scraping doesn’t even sound nice, and when you do it to someone, they don’t think highly of you for it.

Twitter can be a world class education, and relationship building tool when it is used as such. If you are trying to meet new people to grow your business, stay away from twitter automation and try human interaction instead. Respond to the follower on your own with something personal. Retweet something someone said that you liked on occasion. Reply to someones tweet and start a conversation. Get involved in using hashtags to enter the larger community discussion.

Its a social networking tool.. be social.. not robotic!

As a professional in the web design and development field there are a vast number of sites that I glean knowledge from on a regular basis. The infomration shared on these sites is like taking a never ending series of mini-classes from the trade school of web development and design. Without the vast ocean of knowledge freely available, no one in our industry would be able to learn as quickly or as easily as we do.

As a website owner part of your responsibility is to be educated on anything needed to run your websites, update them as nessesary, and every once in a while to give them a good overhaul. This list has the sites you need to get the information you want. Enjoy!

Sites About Design

Logos

The Philosophy of Good Logo Design – What makes a logo great? What doyou need to make sure you have in your logo?

Fee Logo Templates – These need some work to act as a finished logo, but are a great place for inspiration.

The Web 2.0 Logo Collection – Want to see what the big names on the net are doing, check these out!

Stock Images

Getty Images – A collection of professional stock photography

Corbis – High Quality stock photos, high end =  high price

Shutterstock – Membership based site with photos from nearly 200,000 photographers.

Stockvault – A free version of Shutterstock and iStock. Lower quality, lesser selection, but free!

Photos.com – Subscription based site

iStockPhoto – My personal favorite Stock Photo Site

Architecture

Website Architecture 101 – A good read for anyone about to undergo a re-design

Understanding Web Design – Great Alistapart article!

Inspiration

The CSS Zen Garden – a Classic on using CSS, read the book if you want to understand what CSS is all about!

StyleGala – A Resource of great designs, (May not be around long, so take a look while its still up!)

Learn CSS

W3 Schools CSS Course - This is another classic course on understanding how CSS works. CSS is nearly an art in itself, but this will get you started in the right direction.

Sitepoint CSS – There are a lot of good CSS resources on sitepoint

Color

Adobe Kuler – Find, Create, and Share color pallets. This is a great starting point for any design!

Colour Lovers - A Color Social Network

Sites About Development

HTML / XHTML

W3 Schools Tutorials – Learn about what HTML is and how to use it.

HTML Cheat Sheet – A handy PDF

For Developers

What is Ajax – This is a good explanation of what Ajax is, and what it does

HTML Validator – Make sure your site has good code, you can validate it here

Browser Testing – See your site in multiple browsers

Dreamweaver – One of the most popular HTML editors available

Learn Ruby on Rails – A beginners guide to the greatest framework ever developed!

MySQL Cheat Sheet – A useful cheat sheet for database development in MySQL.

Blog Platforms and Content Management Systems

Wordpress – Often used as a blog platform, and more recently a content management system, wordpress is where its at

TypePad – More robust than wordpress, this is the blogging platform often used by professionals.

Drupal - One of the most popular content management platforms

Expression Engine – This is an industry insider favorite CMS.

CMS Made Simple – My personal favorite when it comes to Content Management. Flexible, simple, and powerful enough for serious websites! This one is a little less turn key than applications like Drupal, but far better at being a simple search engine friendly website.

Joomla – Another popular CMS

That’s it for part one, check back in 24 hours for part 2!

In any marketing campaign you need to justify the money spent by providing a track record of success. You need an ROI (return on investment) for the money and effort involved.  In the realm of social media this can get a little bit tricky unless you are tracking everything before, during, and after your campaign.

They key to successful discovery of your social media campaign ROI is setting defined objectives. For instance I might decide that I want to measure the effect 1,000 more twitter followers, 100 more facebook friends, and 50 more connections on LinkedIn on my business. I would then set out to accomplish that goal, but I would need to know some other data before I started to measure its effectiveness. Some of the background questions might include: “How many sales did I make in the target month last year, and the year before?” “What other marketing am I currently using at the same time, and how effective has it been historically?” One great way to measure social media is to combine it with a traditionally successful marketing approach that you have already used. Measure the difference in results after the injection of social media into the approach.

The other thing that really must be done is to setup analytics. There are many services and web applications out there built specifically for tracking your website visitors and giving you a better understanding of what happens when people visit your website. Of all the paid and free software available Google Analytics is by far my personal favorite. For free software, it has a lot of powerful features that can help you understand whats going on in your website.

Using Google Analytics is relatively simple. You start out on a dashboard screen that gives you a line graph of the recent site activity. You can graph by day, week, or month. At first you get some simple information such as site visits, pageviews, pages per visit, and so on. When you explore the menu on the left you discover just how great the software really is. For instance under Content you can select “site overlay” and this brings up your website with the clicks overlaid on top. This can help you develop a logical process to understand what people are clicking on, and possibly the train of thought associated with a visit to the site.

Another great feature is the map overlay. With this tool you can see your visitors on a map, and calculate the number of visitors that came from specific countries, states, and cities. You can also break down the visitors browser, and by a host of other filtering options. Having visual tools to track your progress can be very helpful.

Getting local with your tracking can also be a big help. If you choose a specific locality as a market to test your social media campaign and combine it with traditional marketing you can track your website results using analytics and see them on a map.

Get Goals Setup!

The cornerstone of tracking results is having results goals setup. If you do not know what pages of your website should be goals you need to rethink your strategy for a minute. Every website should contain goals that visitors are meant to help you accomplish. For instance a pizza company might have online coupons, they would be a goal when someone looked at them, they might have a viral marketing piece on facebook, the page the advertisement links back to would be a goal, and of course anytime the checkout screen is reached to sell a pizza online would be another goal. If you are trying to develop more connections through social media, a social media page might be in order, and when someone visited the page a goal would be achieved. You can estimate the effectiveness of your page by looking at the number of new friends/followers/connections it has developed for you. Google also has a goal tracking mechanism in its analytics application. Setting up Google Analytics is fairly easy to do, but it does require some code to be copied and pasted into the bottom of your pages. If you think you will mess this step up, I would recommend asking a professional to do it for you… it should not cost much, as its not a very hard thing to do!

Much of social media is viral in nature, and its often true that successful social media marketing will snow ball and bring more success. It is for this reason we must always develop solid goals, and track those goals with real numbers. We should be asking ourselfs questions like, “How many new facebook connections = 1 new sale?  Based on what I know about facebook how many new quality connections can I make in a month?”

It is important to know that unless you track your progress, and can establish the real world results of your social media, you are probably wasting your time!

PS: check out Jen’s blog post about social media and traditional marketing

Everyone has had a coupon or an advertisement for something placed on the car windshield while in the grocery store or at a concert. They often contain a mix of fonts, colors, text sizes, and italics and bold. It is rare to see a xerox copy of an advertisement with good design applied to it. This is also often the case with websites.

For those of us who have to “design” text on web pages it is easy to get carried away with using multiple colors, fonts, and sizes to try and make our document somehow better. This is even more true when we are not designers by trade. With no formal design skills it is easy to make a gigantic mess of our documents and in the process make them harder to understand.

This doesn’t just apply to websites, but also emails. I can not count the number of emails I have received at one time or another that was full of terrible colors that were unreadable against the dark colored background. Myspace seems to be a great example of what happens when non-designers try to make things look nice by adding new colors and backgrounds to the web. The result can be a real mess and a headache for anyone who eventually needs the information given on these pages.

Lets look at two examples of well designed content to see how things should be done.

Newspapers

Convention with readable documents begins with looking at your morning paper. Because newspapers are some of the most read documents in the world the designers of newspapers follow a set of conventions to make things easy to understand for everyone. For instance the caption always belongs below an image. This is not because it is somehow easier to read, but because everyone has done it for so long your eyes will dart to the bottom of an image expecting a caption to be there. If you placed that same caption at the top or to the right of an image people would get confused.

If you look at the type used in newspapers you will always see some simple conventions followed. The title of the article always belongs at the top right hand corner. This will be a larger darker style than the body of the article. The article itself will then be black text on white (or off white) paper with enough spacing between letters and lines to create an easy to read document.

The next thing you will notice is that all of the articles in the entire paper will be formatted the exact same way. You will not find an article with blue and green text in it. You will also not find an article with the title centered. Each part of the whole must be consistent.

Web pages should be written the same way. This is why the idea of using style sheets first came to the web with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Book layout experts, magazine editors, and newspaper people all use a style sheet to define everything they do. When they show some “quoted text” it is always shown the same way (or at least using the same principles).

A website needs a stylesheet that is easy for people to read, and every page and article on the site should use the same styles to keep the look consistent.

Less is more

The principle you should take home after reading this, is that less is more. Your pages and emails do not need to have five or six or twently differenly styled text areas in them. You should be able to create a readable document with one (two at most) colors of text, one font (unless used in a logo or image), and font sizes that only change when the type of text changes. Thus your largest heading should be your title. Your sub headings should be smaller in relationship to each other, and your text should be a uniform size.

Keep it simple and your readers will love you for it.

The web is full of new technology, new marketing possibilities, and in reality this web of ours is still in its infancy even now. I am sure none of us has come to realize the full potential the internet will bring into our every day lives. As information grows, and technology evolves it is going to be very important for all of us to become better at using it.

“Social Media” is only one avenue, and while it seems there are a million new “gurus” out there every ten minutes, we are still in a shortage of people who understand how to harness the power of these new marketing mediums.

It is important to remember that no one web company can accomplish every goal for every company in every industry. As technology evolves more experience, and more talent are needed to fill the information void businesses will experience. I believe the storm of new “experts” is a reaction to a need that many web professionals, and others are seeing in the industry. The last big buzz word was “SEO” and while search engine marketing is as important as it every was (if not more so) many search engine experts are not experts at connecting with people or building relationships. Social Media requires a mix of talents. The first being the ability to use the power of new social media tools in the webosphere and the other is the ability to help make relationships happen.

Social Media Experts should be like the man behind the curtain in OZ. This is much like a good SEO, in that the client does not need to understand every aspect of what is happening, but the client needs to learn the basics to keep a good thing going. Social Media is more personal than SEO, and requires more involvement by the company trying to create new connections. This is even more true for small business and non-profit organizations that need to develop lasting relationships beyond a point of sale and product relationships that good marketing can create.

When choosing a web design expert, development expert, Search Engine Expert, or Social Media Expert it is very important to choose a real professional with experience that can show true results. The web has been an ocean of fakers that have been taking money from businesses without really knowing their craft for its entire existence. Real marketing and development companies have always stood out because they provide real results, while everyone else needs a website makeover on launch day.

In a recent conversation with another industry professional of ten years web experience she told me “Aaron, in the last ten years everyone went out a paid a lot of money for a website. Almost none of them got what they paid for, and now its a golden opportunity to fix/rebuild/redesign all of those sites for all of those unsatisfied people.”

Whatever the project may be, always remember that paying for a true professional to do the work will turn out so much better in the end. Everything else is a waste of your money.

JotForm.com

Make web forms in an online WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor.

FormLogix.com

Build web based forms backed by databases you can export and filter in no time flat.

Webformfactory.com

The web form factory is helpful when designers need to make their forms work with email or a database. This one more geared toward experienced web designers.

Wufoo.com

Wufoo is my personal favorite of all the web form tools.  Wufoo not only lets you create web based forms that you can then paste into your sites with iframes or javascript… Wufoo will let you process credit cards to Authorize.net, or Paypal for a small monthly fee. This is a great solution for someone like me that has many clients all wanting custom payment forms on a regular basis.

Tips and Best Practices

• Make sure your forms include verification!You dont want people submitting bad data to your database or email account. Just imagine what might happen if some random form “bot” were to add an extra 1,000 entries to your database because your form was not safe! Trying to weed out all the bad information would be a nightmare.
• Use BIG text, its the futurePeople find big text easier to read, so take advantage of the new trends in form style with big boxes, big text, and big buttons. You don’t have to go overboard, but try to stay current with the times.
• Give DirectionsSites like Wufoo let you add in Ajax powered instructions to your form fields. Adding in some helpful hits about what information you need from your form can help you collect better data!
• Don’t forget the thank you response!Always respond to your forms with an automated message that lets people know it worked.

In fact it is safe to say that design is an important part of daily life! Everywhere we go we our senses are assaulted with the hard work of designers. Everything from the color scheme of Walmart, to the sleek curves of a corvette were designed with you in mind, by a designer of one sort or another. Good design is often more attractive than bad design. It is simply more pleasant to experience design that is done well, and thus god design reflects value and quality, while bad design reflects well, just the opposite!

This also applies to websites. With the right design and development your site can appear to be as big and important as the webs biggest players. You can stand right next to your multi-billion dollar competition in the realm of the internet and look like a rival even when you are a two million dollar a year business. The internet is the great equalizer, and design plays a big role in that.

It is very safe to say that the webs most successful websites are often designed by the webs best designers. It can also be said that well performed design work by a seasoned professional will add value and quality to your brand perception and awareness.

This bieng said, not all designs and for that matter, not all designers are created equal.  The design field is full or artist from design school, and self taught visual masters. Every designer may have a different take on the same project, and every designer has a style that is a little bit different than everyone else.

When it comes down to it design is a matter of personal preference. This is why you find autoparts websites that have very ugly outdated designs, and photography websites with a photorealistic look and feel. The decision makers behind the website play a huge role in who designs the site, and in the end their personal preference (or lack there of) is reflected in the finished work. Even in the realm of Good Design, and there are many good designers out there, in the end its a subjective science.

My strongest word of advise on design to website owners is this: Are you artistic? Do you consider yourself stylish for todays popular culture? If you learned to draw could you become a professional designer in any field? If you answer no to any of those questions you may not be qualified to have an opinion. WHAT!? Yes I am serious, if you lack style, and do not have any experience with art or design you may not even know what looks nice, or be qualified to make a decision on the creative style of your website.

So if you think there is even a chance that you have bad web design taste, you should leave the design decisions to a professional designer, and let them do their job. Every web designer and developer in the world can tell you horror stories about the perfect site the client destroyed. It happens every day. People with no design sense are asked to make design decisions, and this results in badly designed websites and web pages.

If you feel this could possibly be you (and be honest this is actually most people) your best bet is to find a designer with a portfolio you think looks nice. Then ask a couple friends for their opinions (preferably artsy ones). If you find the right designer your lack of design sense will be overcome by the designers skill and experience.

I know this is a brutal article where you may feel attacked, but the natural world (of the world wide web) shows I am right on target. My biggest example is myspace.com. This is a website where people all over the world (millions of them) were allowed to create their own designs for their own pages. What resulted is the worst collection of poorly designed pages in the universe. Myspace is a hodge podge of ugly, disgusting, porrly thought out, and unusable mess. Note that its biggest compeditor has overtaken it in many ways. Myspace has become the childrens version of a much better designed, and more well thought out site… Facebook.com

Myspace is proof that ordinary people mean well, but they also suck at design.

Let the designers be designers, and the businessmen be businessmen.

When you do find a designer that you like, and they promise to create the worlds most amazing website for you, make sure you let them do their job. A designs biggest enemy is often its own client. What you should be doing instead of trying to impart some form of control on the design process is imparting your knowledge of your own business into your website.

If you are an accountant of 30 years, you know exactly what your clients are looking for. You will also have the best understanding of how the internet can be used to benefit them. Use your own skill set to make sure the finished design incorporates all of the important things a site of your industry needs to include. Together with the designers “mad skills” and your experience you are going to be fast on your way to a great website.

Quality to Price Relationship

People do not always notice the price to quality relationship in the world of design. For the most part, that is because one does not really exist! I know that sounds odd, but you may pay a designer in new york city to create a business card for $5,000 and find a designer in Montana of the same skill that creates a similar card for just $200. Just like corn or sugar designers will charge what they can based on supply and demand. The better the designer, the more demand they will have and the higher their prices are likely to be. This can change greatly on geography.

Artists often work in specific realms of design. For this reason a great painter might make a terrible tatooist. This can also be said of architects and web designers. It is often a good idea to stay away from designers that are not comfortable with the medium you are looking for. A great video effects artist might have no clue how navigation on a website should work.

A great example of where people often make mistakes is hiring a long time print designer to do web work. A website is completely different than a print piece. You might find people that have great skills in both mediums, but having a skill set in one medium does not always translate to another.

When it comes to price there is a baseline truth that seems counter to the last point. You pay more for better design. While it is true that quality and price are not reliant on each other, it is true that experienced web designers are not going to work for pennies, and the highschool kid down the street will not turn out the same quality of design as the professional web designer downtown. In your geography there will be a variety of designers with different levels of skill in many mediums. The cheapest designer will almost never be the best designer. The key is in finding a great designer that has reasonable pricing for your area.

Is your designer also a geek? When we are talking web design we have to keep several issues in mind. The first is usability. Does your designer have an understanding of web usability best practices, and is he or she capable of creating an easy to use website?

The second issue is Accessibility. Disabled people often use screen readers and other programs to use the world wide web. Also if your client base is older you should consider how your site is designed for these people. The best web designers love to make sites viewable by everyone. (This always excludes 100% flash based websites! Never build a 100% flash based website)

You should also consider your return on investment. If your designer is capable of creating better brand perception that will add up in dollars and cents, and can be well worth the money for a good designer. It is also true that current, fresh, professional designs we be something you can keep online for a longer period of time. If you pay for a cheap design, you may end up re-designing much sooner when you realize it was a mistake.

How much is to much money for web design? That is hard to say, but for my local market in central virginia you should expect to pay $40 – $100 per hour of design work.  A simple design for a website will require 10-15 hours for the front page and a secondary page. If you include several sessions of revisions (that is up to you) it may run as high as 40-60 hours for those two pages of design. If you need dozens of sub-pages with individually created designs this can add up very quickly, just make sure you get an estimate before hand, and ask the question “are revisions included in this estimate, and if so how many?”

In the end when it comes to web design you get what you pay for. In my professional experience a well seasoned web designer will be more efficient, and will turn out a better design in the end.

There are many reasons. First, site builders are cheap. Why pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars doing something that you can accomplish yourself, (sort of), with an online site builder. Cost is a very big reason for people to be attracted to site building tools.

Second, people assume that because technology has come so far “there must be a program I can use to do this”, and our WANT IT NOW! society does no thelp matters.

Beyond price and instant gratification people assume the same things they have always assumed as long as the web has existed. People think that “If I build it they will come”. This is something I could write another article on by itself, but needless to say this is not, and has not ever been true. Just because a site is built does not mean it will be found by anyone, serve any purpose, or generally produce any return on invested money and time.

The web is still a wild fronteer in the realm of technology. Because so many Billions of websites exist, and people all over the planet are putting them up at an ever increasing pace even mom and pops businesses need a professional web presence with the experience of an expert team behind them. Websites need to stand out of the pack to produce any results, and the look and feel is one a small part of that puzzle.

Lets look at some really good reasons that site builders are a waste of your time, money, and energy.

Search Engine Invisible

While there are some really good Content Management System (CMS) out there that are search engine friendly, but I have only seen one or two that was turn key. Even the great ones like wordpress, drupal, and CMS Made Simple need to be integrated, installed, and tweaked for your individual site. This is the reason that working on drupal sites and modules is the number one outsourced web development task in the world!

Site builders are way behind when it comes to search engines. Google, Yahoo, and now Bing all visit your website and read its contents. They then make decisions about your sites content, and relevance in relationship to every other site on the web.

Lets give you a good example. When you title a page in your site “Purple widgets” and then describe those purple widgets within that page Google and the rest scrutinize that content. They run mathematical equations against the content of your site to determine what your pages are about. If you were smart and followed all the best practices for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) your page would come up in google when you type the words “purple widgets”. If you are lucky google will decide your page is more relevant than the other 2,330,000 pages with the same words in them. This means you will show in the top 10 results.

Site builders just don’t build pages that show up in search engines. Even the ones claiming to be search engine friendly are full of it! When you build your site with an online site builder instead of a full blown CMS you are creating a site that is Search Engine Invisible. Considering that most sites get up to 80% of visitors from Google and Yahoo.. this is a site killing problem. Your site will never get off the ground to accomplish your dreams if no one can find it!

Your Stuck

The other huge problem with site builders that even the very poor quality CMS aviod is the lack of transportability. When you build your site into an automated builder you can not take it with you when you decide you want to expand or build in functionality the builder can help you with. I see this problem all the time when I am forced to build sites from scratch because the clients existing site is in proprietary software that can not be moved to a real hosting environment. In most cases the designs are also property of the site builder and thus they own almost nothing for all their years of paying the monthly dues!

Poor code quality

Beyond all of the other issues we have already pointed out most site builders build very poor quality pages. This can be an issue for not only search engines but also the blind. Yep you got it, blind people surf the web to, and if your site is not accessibility compliant those people will never get the change to “hear” your site with the software that speaks the pages for them.

Just Say No

The web is not a place where the uninitiated can make a big impact. In fact its mostly full of junk, so standing out takes talent and experience. No matter how nice you think your computer generated website looks.. you should trust the experts and save your money for a website that will deliver the goods and an ROI!