Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

There has been a lot of fuss about web 2.0, and it's often confused with AJAX, but i think this video explains it better.
Web 2.0 is about people.

New approach on content (part 1)

After doing a thorough competitor analysis I realized that more than 80% of the web design and development companies in Romania do not offer quality content. Even more, I would say that the content is missing.

Most of the sites have a very brief description of the company and their limited services, Fixed hosting plans or the "web site builder" packs, price offers and of course the portfolio, but that's about it.

Another type of "web design and development" company are the ones that offer 100% full flash sites. It's always been my opinion that graphicians are graphicians and web developers are web developers, this things shouldn't be treated as the same thing. I am not a graphic artist, and I don't draw print adds or flash movies, I am a

developer and I stick to my toys: XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. I admit you cannot have a complete web presence with just these 3, as you cannot have a complete web presence with just graphics and flash design.

A successful web presence should be built with a mix of Standards based design, quality client-side and server-side applications, good quality graphics and animations, usability, accessibility, strong marketing and last but not least quality content. Providing the visitor with just the info that he is looking for may be your best way to generate traffic and turn it into profit.

Having good descriptions of the services or products that you offer is a proof of professionalism and helps your customers better understand what you offer and even what they need. Publishing case studies and white papers helps a lot too.Also this is a huge help for your seo and online marketing efforts.Concerning the content I think this is what most romanian web design agencies miss . I went for this approach , I target a set of customers with higher demands and intellect. I sure hope this will work out or i'll be broke soon :).

I consider worth mentioning 2 interactive agencies from Romania that have been a huge inspiration for me:

1. TreeWorks


2. Kondiment

Also a great project that I support is Gandeste.net from the TreeWorks team.

On the second part of this series of posts i'll speak about Corporate blogs and a few things i know about the romanian blogosphere.

Moving on

I finished working on my site, at least 99% of it. The link is here. Google crawled my site 2 days ago, and today six of my pages are indexed. Unfortunately the old version of the site is indexed and not all the meta tags are there, but i guess this is the price to pay if you want to test stuff. I am curious how long is going to take before Google will change those old pages with the new ones.

Yesterday i added the site in Google, Yahoo and MSN and uploaded the site map for the first two. I wonder when will MSN step in the new era ...
By the way, GSite Crawler seems to be a very decent free tool for generating site maps and not only. I appreciate that they release a lot of new patches.

By this time the site isn't indexed in Yahoo and MSN. I'll wait and see how much is going to take now that i added the URL by hand.

Mean time i'll keep submitting it in different web directories and vortals related to my content.

Indexing errata

In my previous post i said that my site has been online for over 2 months, without adding the URL in any Search Engines, and no indexing untill now, but it seems that yesterday i got a visit from famous the googlebot. It came looking for my robots.txt file, that wasn't there, and then went straight to my index.html file.

I suppose that i was granted the honor of being crawled by Google because of this blog and the ping option. The link to my site, that is present in my first post, must have sent google there.

I also heard that using the ping option for this blog could get it indexed in 48 hours, max. 5 days, but untill now it hasn't been indexed in any search engine. I guess i'll wait and see, if i get no results by the end of this week i'll add the URL in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

working, working, working

I've been working on the content of my website for over 2 months now. It's not that easy to provide quality content and optimize each major section of the site for a set of keywords at the same time.

The site has been online for more than two months now, though it is in a very beta version, most of the content was there. I was curious if any of the SEs would index my site in this time, without adding the URL, but no indexing 'till now.

After i finish with the more techy stuff on the site i'm going to design a corporate blog with WordPress 2.1 i am curious about the new features that they implemented.

my first blog .. oo ha

I guess this is my first post in this blog, it's mostly for testing purposes and checking my grammar ( thank God for Mozzila's Firefox grammar checking option)

First of all, i should say something about this blog's purpose:

1. I intend to speak here about my web experience about standards based web design and my vision of how a web design company should present itself.
   
2. I also want to talk about search engine optimization and search engine marketing.
3. Web development and all it's aspects (mostly about client side development and AJAX - PHP is not my forte ).
4. Online marketing, ads etc.
5. Web moguls.
   
6. About your web experiences.
   
7. The web communities out there.
8. Test some blog stuff
   
9. and last but not least i intend to promote my web design and development company from Bucharest, Romania