4 Elements of a Successful Business Website

A really great Mashable.com post that outlines in an easy to digest way the very basics of a business website.

What’s the most important piece of your business’s web presence? Your website, of course.

Creating a website requires a good deal of thought; it’s important to plan what information you want on the site, what the layout will look like, and how you’ll connect each piece together.

Think of your website as your hub; it’s what people will see when they look for you. Here are four elements of a successful business web presence that can help ensure that your first impression is a good one.

Click here to read more

My Experiment with Google AdSense

I am fascinated by all things Google. Google has reinvented the world as we know it in many ways and has made some extraordinarily smart moves. I am particularly fascinated by Google’s efforts to get to know us as individuals, to predict our needs and to predict what might interest us. Given that the majority of their revenues (just under $22 billion in 2008) are achieved by Google AdWords pay-per-click sales, their entire business model is based on predicting as accurately as possible which ads, which vendors and which information might interest us. Google continues to get smarter…to know us better while staying within the bounds of acceptable privacy practices.

I write three blogs—this blog as well as two blogs in which I address interests, opinions and thoughts outside the context of my professional life. I am now permitting Google ads to be served on all three blogs.

No, I do not envision getting rich via blogging. And no, I have no plans to quit my day job. Rather, I am interested in following the types of ads that are served. As traffic continues to grow on my blogs, I am interested to observe to what extent Google gets to know my audience. Quite possibly, Google will get to know my audiences more quickly than I do.

It will be a fun experiment and maybe within twelve months or so a check large enough to take my husband out to dinner might roll in from Mountain View, California.


This Wikipedia article offers a very good overview of how the Google AdSense program works.