United States
Ireland

KISS Has A New Web Site

June 30th, 2009

KISS is pleased to introduce our new web site this week.  It represents a new look and feel, and a slightly different content voice as we refine even further what we are and where we have come from.

We’re still a web site design and development house, to be sure.  We still design and develop custom software applications for entrepreneurs bringing business ideas to the web.  We still contribute web copy writing and search engine optimization services to those efforts, too.

We’ve become as much business consultants, though, helping those entrepreneurs determine whether there is a formal business plan in their idea, finding the flesh to attach to those skeletal ideas and making abstract ideas reality on the web.  Our experience of over 600 sites and several dozen custom software applications for them has helped elevate our game to the level of on-line business advisor.

In the construction of this new site, we took over 100 PHP includes from the old site and reduced the number to a very respectable 33.  From a programming standpoint, this represents a substantial cleaning up of the code, and a speeding up of the site.  The integration of two different slide show effects presents both current enterprise products and a portfolio of some recent work in smooth and easy on the eyes ways.  All of our resources from the previous site remain - - our site now just has a cleaner and neater feel to it, and content is presented with greater clarity, crispness and brevity.

The Tao of KISS is our blog, and we publish regularly on Web Copy Writing and SEO, as well as Internet Technology, as we explain our Way of doing things here.  We continue to offer our Free Resource Booklet on web copy writing and seo, and you’ll find that download on our Services page.

In essence, our site follows the same advice we offer clients:  tell the visitor who you are and what you can do for them in a clear and quickly discernible way, graphically and with words, and then tell them how to reach you for help.  “Keeping It Simple Solutions” remains the KISS Way.

One final note:  just as the cobbler’s kids go barefoot, so did we go without a new site build for more than 2 years.  We began discussing our new site in January of 2008, and an hour here and an hour there and 17 months later and several versions into it, we finally have our new web presence.

Web sites are a perpetual work in progress, and although this site has just launched on 29 June, we’ve already started tweaking it this morning.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in KISS News | No Comments »

Handshakes, Cold Beers and Business Today

June 19th, 2009

An online acquaintance of mine posted a “tweet” that started me thinking early this morning about the way in which we do our business today.

For those very few of you who are not familiar with it, Twitter is an online community that facilitates conversations, called “tweets,” in 140 character increments.  And, for those of you not familiar with characters, the first sentence of this column has exactly 140 of them.

Anyway, this acquaintance is a pretty smart guy.  He is a Digital Brand Strategist, a deep thinker in the world of online message marketing through social networking outlets, among other things, and I’ve learned a great deal from him.  We “met” on Twitter.

His tweet?  “Some day soon I won’t be working in front of a screen. All this tech tasking gives me ulcers. Whatever happened to a beer and a handshake?”

An excellent question, a serious lament, and cause for some examination.  Let’s look at how we do our business at KISS for some insight.

There was a time when all of KISS’s clients were within a short drive from the office.  Consultations were face to face, preceded and ended by handshakes.  All of the KISS staff were in-house and did the daily commute, albeit short.

Eleven years later, we’re like so many other technology companies, and many small businesses for that matter.  We have a core staff in-house, and an equally sized telecommuting staff in different states, and different countries.  One office in Massachusetts, another in Dublin, Ireland, able to be on the same page together always as a result of a desktop Project Management and CRM enterprise solution we designed and built ourselves.

Skype provides both instant messaging and telephone communications with the extended KISS family (free, even), and the technology of email and FTP transfers files effortlessly (and free, too).

Today, the majority of our clients are not even from Massachusetts, let alone Cape Cod.  They come from Connecticut, New Jersey, South Carolina, Florida, California, New York, County Sligo, County Limerick, County Dublin, County Wicklow, Finland, Romania, and more.  As you can imagine, we’re unlikely ever to meet them in the same room, and yet that has not interfered with our commerce together.

We could exchange photos, I suppose, and sometimes we do.  Facebook and Twitter all facilitate that, and having a profile on each of those networks does match faces with names.  With my Boston Red Sox baseball cap on, my photo on each of those sites, as well as our own just-about-ready-to-launch new site, announces my allegiance and my sport.

It’s now become a trite expression, but Thomas Friedman got it right - - the earth is flat.  The tools of our trade have obviated the necessity of face time to engage in commerce, and the virtual handshake is the rule today and in the future.  The toothpaste is not going back into the tube.

His name is Gunther Sonnenfeld, and his Twitter name is “goonth.”  Our handshake has been virtual.  However, we have no difficulty exchanging both pleasantries and business ideas. If you do Twitter, follow him, read his published materials, and learn.

My grandson is five months old.  He’ll grow up with either an iPhone or a Blackberry in his hand, and he’ll get on the school bus in seven years with a laptop in his backpack.  The business world he’ll inherit will be the Web 4.0, or even 5.0, and goodness knows what it will be like.

Handshakes, beers and business during a game of golf will be, if they aren’t already, things of the past.  Well, maybe not beers.  We do business so much differently today than we did eleven years ago when KISS first began, and it’s getting differenter every day.

Perhaps not progress, but it is change.  I, too, miss the handshake and the cold beer.

Posted in Internet Technology | 1 Comment »

How Big is the World Wide Web?

June 8th, 2009

Do you think we will see the day when there are as many web sites on the Internet as there are people who use the Internet?

It’s an interesting question, especially in light of blog popularity around the world. Depending on the study you read, we might be almost a quarter of the way there. Those who frequent the web number somewhere between 1 billion and 1.5 billion, while the number of web sites is now believed to be a little over 231 million.

Yes, that’s right . . . 231 million web sites. You can read the survey of servers where that number comes from here.    KISS has contributed over 600 of them, but I laugh as I say that.  It’s a lot of work extending over 10+ years in business, but it doesn’t even rise to the level of statistically insignificant.

It’s the rate of growth that I find interesting, though.  Let’s start with 2003 = 10.6 million new sites; 2004 = 12.1 million; 2005 = 17.1 million; 2006 = 31.6 million; 2007 = 48.7 million; and then dipping to 2008 = 29.9 million.

Now, the drop in new sites over calendar year 2008 might be attributable to the world-wide economic downturn.  But, then again, the Internet simply might need to breath occasionally, and rate of growth goes through cycles.  After all, technology doesn’t necessarily advance in linear ways, and access to the Internet doesn’t necessarily maintain a steady growth, either.

It would seem, though, that both technology and access have converged in 2009 to sponsor an incredible pace.  Since the first of January, 2009, a whopping 46 million new web sites have been added to the Internet, many of them Chinese blogs.

So, a quarter of a billion web sites so far, and growing rapidly.  As the world’s economy finds its balance again over the next 18 - 24 months, it’s likely the rate of growth will pick up again.  This year might bring 100 million new sites online, and if the trend of five year cycles is a true representation of Internet growth, we’ll see that annual number climb for the next few years.

That would bring us to a half billion by 2012, if not sooner, and that’s a staggering number.  Imagine the competition for search engine rank position then.  In fact, what will search engines be like in 2012?  Will Google, for instance, have introduced algorithms to actually “understand” the copy on a site’s home page, rather than simply “recognize” the words it finds?  How will those 500 million sites adjust to the changing world of search engine functionality?

The World Wide Web is pretty big - - that’s the answer today.  But, it’s still just a kid, with a lot more growing to do.  That keeps things pretty interesting around here, for sure.

Tags: ,
Posted in Internet Technology | No Comments »

« Older Entries