You may not have noticed it this weekend, except those on the website around 8:30PM on Saturday, but we did some house cleaning.

With my Voodoo Chicken Magic L33t H4×0R skillz (ok, maybe not), I moved the site from a static page, to something a little more dynamic to allow updates to the site to happen a little easier. While I broke the blog in the process, it’s fixed – it was only “broke” for about 10 minutes.

So, with that said, you, Google, and the rest of the world, should be seeing Protocol16 just as you normally do. If you have problems with a file, please feel free to report it and we’ll take care of it rather quickly.
Justin

I’m pretty excited about this. While most business owners would probably say “What’s PageRank”? and wonder if I’ve lost a marble or three, it’s actually something that’s required for a decent website. It also helps a businesses Google search results and a few other things.

Google ranks each website it finds based on a 0-10 number, called PageRank. 0 means that your website is “un-important” and hardly visited. 10 means it’s one of the most popular sites on the internet (Twitter is a 9, Google.com is a 10). In two months, Protocol16 has gained a rank of 2, and the blog is now at 3…

Not bad for less than 2 months of the new website being up… It also shows that we’re staying busy!
Justin

Some clients that we help out with in Portland for computer repair and services ask us if Protocol16 designs websites. The short answer is “No”.

Here’s the long answer:
Websites for SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) ans smaller businesses can run many hundreds of dollars, if not thousands of dollars to be designed. This is typically not something that is budgeted with most businesses and can be a huge expense for businesses. We understand that a “cheap” website can cost upwards of $600 for an actual designer to sit down and design your site, money you don’t (usually) have.

If you build it they [won't] come… Unfortunately, this is something that is a common misconception. Even with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), building a website does NOT mean instant success and an instant pickup in customers. I’ve personally been through this situation with another company I started years ago. I had the whole mentality that all I needed was a website and I’d be set for business. Nothing could be further from the truth – nothing.

Building a website, or even redesigning a website does not mean that traffic will pick up. It takes time to do, time for traffic to pickup and you must do several things, in a specific order, to stay ahead of the search engine game.

SEO is not an “instant result” problem solver. SEO takes time. I’ve personally consulted on websites being built and typically, I hear “well, we’ll design the site and have someone SEO it later…” Don’t fall for this mentality and please don’t think things work like this, they don’t. SEO takes time to work. For this website (protocol16.com), we’re working on SEO and it’s taking a bit to go after specific terms due to everyone else targeting them. The funny thing is, for other terms, we’re #1 on Google.  That sounds great, but it took a month to get there. On top of that, here’s a hint about how things went:

Before the launch of Protocol16, we had a landing page, otherwise known as a “coming soon” page. On this page, just before launch, we used targeted keywords to get Google, Bing, Yahoo, et al to understand what we were up to. When we launched, Protocol16 was on page 96 for our target keywords. We are now (almost a month and a half later), below page 10,and much less depending on the term you use. Again, for another term, we are already #1. After launch, with SEO changes, blogging and a few other tidbits, we had an increase in traffic of more than 2,300% over one month to the next. Sounds great, until you realize that we had a total of 19 visitors that hit that launch page for August 2009…

Launching a website typically a huge affair for a business. There is great celebration, everyone gets excited and then….nothing happens. We have typically seen that a website gets abandoned, information becomes outdated and eventually, things just stop working correctly since phone numbers and email addresses have changed. Eventually the website may be lost to cybersquaters that grab your domain after it expires, costing more money.

Now, after reading all that heart ache, you’ve been warned, and as such, prepared for launching a website – something we FULLY support. Yes, I just said “No” then “we support it”…

For small businesses, we specifically recommend TemplateMonster.com for website templates. This can save THOUSANDS of dollars, very quickly. Unfortunately, these websites are not setup, in the code, for SEO in the beginning. The templates typically need to be altered to ensure that things happen correctly, in terms of SEO. There are also several other things that must happen in order to ensure that things go well.

It may sound crazy for an IT company to send business to another company, but we honestly and wholeheartedly feel that this is the best bang for the buck for a small business. At the same time, I’m currently considering hiring a web designer to assist customers with their needs (ie: taking a Template Monster template and setting it up). Unfortunately, it’ll probably be about a month out before I do so, due to another project Protocol16 is taking on. That project will be another story for another day, but we feel it’ll be a huge success for our small business customers.

If you have any questions about this article or computer repair, in general, let us know – we don’t bite!
Justin

There are A LOT of people here in Portland asking for repairs and fixes for spyware and viruses. Many of you – ok, most of you, have asked how you got infected. Aside from the standard industry answer of sultry websites you shouldn’t visit, there are multitudes of websites, blogs and different types of software that can infect your computer. This is actually why Protocol16 recommends not running your computer in Admin mode (another story for another day).

As a case in point on how you can be infected, it can happen simply by viewing a nasty ad on any normal webpage. Drudge Report, Lyrics.com and even Horoscope.com were recently hit by some nasty ads. These sites didn’t know these ads were listing on their site since they all used the same company to display ads.

As the above link points out, you can pick up some nasties anywhere… This is all the more reason to run antivirus software, at least a weekly anti-spyware check (if you don’t run the software full time) and a few other requirements to stay safe. Check back tomorrow for more recomendations as to what you should do to keep yourself protected even more.
Justin