I’ve opened a new category to give clients a place to leave comments and ask questions. The Dawg is a blog now to make it easier to share the kinds of information you ask for, and to get a sense of questions that might come up about making the most out of your Web or advertising presence so that I can answer them or invite guest contributors to answer them. It’s all yours. Enjoy! –Lynn

As much as I like to do business locally, I am purchasing Web hosting elsewhere. I am also a hosting service reseller. This enables me to manage multiple clients from a single Web Host Manager control panel. The time I save is time spent on checking client’s Web sites and server data routinely, as well as responding to problems (very few, usually having to do with client configuration of email accounts or email quotas) which is what they get for their money when they buy a hosting package through me instead of vendor-direct. I don’t expect clients to use my hosting service, and for non-profits or folks who want to do business with thoughtful companies, I’ve recommended AcornHost.com. I am a reseller with InMotionHosting.com. I have had positive experiences with them and like how they handle support issues and questions. My clients have hosted directly with them, or have purchased an account from me. I also have clients hosted on LunarPages.com, as well as a reseller account with them, but after a couple of bad experiences, I am no longer recommending them. I might have hit them at a bad time, or engaged with the worst of their tech support people, but their interface...

A lot has been written about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and it can be confusing and contradictory. Without going into great depth about costly models (pay for results placement, or per click, or hiring SEO consultants) versus the free methods, I thought I’d offer some basic free steps for improving your position in search engine results. For clients wanting to improve results for free, I take the simple steps described below. These have been working well for me and my clients. Note that the very best thing that you can do is to use good page titles and to write rich content for your Web pages. (And promote your site; don’t wait to be found.) Here’s a brief intro to: META tags (easy to do, but of limited use with today’s search engines) Using meaningful titles for all your Web pages Using descriptive text with image tags Using a file with instructions for search engine robots (robots.txt) Sending Google info about your site’s structure and how often it should be indexed Improving results with links Blogs and search engine results

After we finished their site designs, a couple of clients were looking for more interaction with site visitors, so we added a blog. We ruled out traditional guestbooks; even if we spam-proofed them, a one-way form didn’t achieve what the client wanted. The blogs make nice complements to their Web sites, and could be nicely customized to fit the look of the static web pages (See aaronschuerr.com/aaronsblog and gillianswanson.com/resources.) The more my clients adopt blogs, and the more I work with the three that I maintain for business and personal use, the more I think that it is a good choice for new client Web sites. Some blog themes do a nice job of combining a lot of stable content with dynamic post content (e.g. the Revolution theme that I based this site on), and there are many plugins for the WordPress blog platform that I use. The plugins extend the blog themes to handle things like image galleries, online shopping, spam filtering in blog comments, notifying Google to index your site, et cetera, making it possible to develop a multi-faceted and lively site. Blog Web pages are assembled dynamically in a browser at viewing time using PHP (server-side scripts) to process...