Albert Einstein On Experimentation, Investigation, and Internet Technology

Albert Einstein didn't just pioneer modern physics with his enduring and revolutionary theory of General Relativity, he also said some smart stuff about the value of independent curiosity and experimentation. Let's apply some of this to how you can use the internet to help your business.

Words of Wisdom

1. "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
2. "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
   

If Al's second quote scares you, fear not; we're talking about research on our dime, not making mistakes with clients' time and money. Here's what it all boils down to:

• Ask, ask, ask, inquire, question, and ask some more.  Then experiment, test and do some more experimenting.
• Investigate and Innovate—don't be afraid to lead rather than follow. Then when you've got it all figured out, be sure to keep testing—and verifying results.
• Never settle into a finalized "method," because the only constant in the internet world is the light-speed change (get it, physics people? light speed... constant?). Yesterday's thinking never works for today's internet.

At CDLLC: we've already done the research. The experimentation, the investigation, the trial and error for you, on our dime. We've got close to fifty combined years of experience with this stuff. And we keep doing the research. It's part of our business.

Tested results are what matter, not just copying what you read in an instruction manual, or delivering the status quo, or doing what everyone else is talking about and doing. With the internet, any documentation on the right way to do something, especially SEM and SEO, is outdated by the time it's published.

And Google's "what matters and what doesn't" rules aren't published at all; experimentation and ongoing research are the only way to ensure the great results we deliver.

We're fond of saying that most of what we do isn't rocket science. Dr. Einstein, tongue planted firmly in cheek, would have said the same about his work. And he's still the guy we all go to when it comes to relativity... and space... and time.

It's time for your business to get serious about its Internet Presence. We're here to help.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President, Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

CMS is a Beautiful Thing, or Confucianism Part IV

"Good people distinguish things in terms of categories and groups."

In prior Confucianism-inspired posts, we talked about the benefits of using Content Management (CMS) at your website. We've made the case for organizing, ordering, and arranging web pages, so now onto breaking bottlenecks in controlling costs and maintaining efficiency while moving forward with today's standards. With navigation management addressed, here are some other bottlenecks that we eliminate by using a CMS:


1) Without CMS, each time you redesign the website look-and-feel you create a need for extensive programming. This becomes both a people management and a cost issue.
2) Now add the need for multiple contributing editors/authors having to get their content to a "webmaster," and costs explode. Again.
3) Adding functionality, like forms, e-commerce, and online payment? More programming and webmaster skills get added, too. A CMS reduces the costs associated with these—tremendously.

CMS makes life easier by separating/disentangling content editing, copy writing, and navigational elements of your web site, design, and functionality.

1) Design becomes a separate module- a wrapper for the web pages. With CMS you change this design wrapper in one place, and the changes take effect globally throughout every page of the website.
2) As many content editors as you need can login, protect pages, and change just the content they're responsible for without the risk of breaking the design.
3) Applications that "do stuff" are programmed and arranged independently, so modification and re-programming creates no risk to the rest of the website.
4) And while we've already mentioned this, it bears repeating for the cost savings it brings you: changing the order and hierarchy of the navigational links becomes as simple as making a few clicks with a mouse.

Sounds almost like magic, right? With a CMS, the magic comes from putting all your stuff inside a database, grouped and categorized with an eye toward Internet presentation as needed to suit your company's needs relative to customers, vendors, employees, and whomever else stumbles upon it. The pieces are stored separately so they don't get entangled with one another, and "global site elements", like search engine META tags, polls, online payment, and sign-up forms are all grouped separately so changes to them only have to be made once!

And with a database, EVERYTHING is easier to categorize and group. For example, if you set up and write an FAQ section and it grows unwieldy, it's stored in the database so modification of the Q&A is a snap.

CMS is all about simplicity. How much so? Let's take our buddy's words, and summarize them as though he was hosting a radio program, circa 2010:

Confucius, out. (thanks, Ryan Seacrest!)


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President, Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

A History of Web Content & Confucianism

"Study the Past if You Would Divine the Future"


Confucius would say: The Internet is a Big Deal. And Big Deals Change, but then return to whence they came.

Or something like that.

The Internet has been “around” now for several decades. We can trace its beginning to when Tim Berners-Lee “invented” it (and no, Al Gore was not in the room), but the Internet didn’t start doing anything until 1991.

That's when the first web page went live. Hardly anyone noticed, since if you were on-line at all it was through a company like Compuserve or America Online, but the Internet was starting. What went on line was simple, though: the pages all looked the same, with either left or center alignment throughout, and a single column of text formatted in one font with a few different sizes for emphasis.

A few years later, we had tables, which originally were designed for presenting data in rows of the same ugly text. But them something amazing happened: people commandeered the tables for formatting how you saw things in addition to what you saw, and then CSS (bye-bye tables) came along, and that idea for consistent presentation was adopted by the pretty police, too.

It was a short jump to limited interactivity. First we had Javascript, which when combined with CSS became Dynamic HTML. But at the same time there were problems between different browsers as we all started noticing that Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari didn't do quite the same thing.

Then e-Commerce came along. Site management tools. Software to make creating web pages easy. Everything was exploding by the year 2000, and over the last ten years all the tools, all the technologies, and huge changes in the way people do business evolved into what we have today:

Everyone is a web publisher.

But all the tools and all the ancillary ideas that the tools have created (or is it the other way around?) haven't made this any simpler. "Site Management" has become "Content Management", and while it's more precise, it's also more involved. Distribution of your information is important, too; not everyone who wants to hear what you have to say wants to take the step of coming to your web site, and many people who do so are using SmartPhones with tiny screens. We have blogging, Social Networking, and now the dreaded Search Engine Optimization. Yikes.

So the future is based on the past, and while we all might like to think that we're creating cool new stuff the point of all these tools remains getting your information in front of your clients. A simple task, made far more complicated by technology.

At CDLLC, we manage the technology for you. We know the past, and can future-proof your web/business needs. We use (for example—here's one more piece of "progress")—database-driven web sites separated from your content to make redesigns easy.

You become a content editor, not a programmer. We do everything else.

Because even as things get harder and harder, easy still matters.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

cdLLC Newsletter - July 2009