Website Development: Build it Yourself or Hire an Expert?

As technology grows ever more necessary for businesses to reach their audiences, technology companies try to offer solutions for non-technical people so that they can create their own websites.   Intuit's website building software or 1 & 1 My Website are the 2 most common sites that you may recognize.  For all of the advertising these companies spend to market and raise awareness for their website building solutions, the actual products fall short of graphical, structural, and functional design for most businesses.  The best example is my last client, Austin Simply Fit.  They began their website with one of these solutions and after they spent countless hours setting it up and then trying to design it within the software's construct they reached an unsatisfactory result.

A business website is the most effective piece of marketing material a business has to sell itself to its audience and keep them informed. Why go with and settle for a solution with an less than excellent result?    Companies like Intuit have a very strong brand name from products like Quickbooks and compared to the painstaking process of seeking out, vetting, and hiring a web designer  or web developer, the Intuit brand name persuades people to use their product.  Most of the time, these out-of-the-box type solutions yield a less than adequate means for a business to properly communicate ideas, services, and information to an audience.

When a web designer and web developer like myself encounter solutions like 1 & 1 My Website or Intuit Website Solutions they are a real let-down from a design, structural, and functional aspect.  Web technology and web programming has to be exact down to the very last punctation mark, yet at the same time it needs to be flexible enough because some pieces of code will conflict with other pieces of code and then you have to debug it to make it work together.  The problems with the out-of-the-box solutions, is that they DO NOT allow for flexibility in the layout code (CSS - Cascading Style Sheets) or functional code (programming) and therefore the user who is trying to design the layout will always end up with a bad graphical representation and a user who needs to add a functional database will not be able to do so.

If you are a small business owner and you want a website that will go the distance, the best option you have is to find a web designer  or web developer and let them guide you towards a viable solution for your business.  If websites consist of 3 moving parts: 1 part business, 1 part art, and 1 part technology- and you want your website to look good, work well, and convey the right information to your audience- you need to reconsider all your options and find a great technology expert, like Gennovacap Technology Services, to help you implement the best solution for your business.

Social Search Results from Google Plus

Google+ Your World

When Google Plus first arrived on the scene, I felt a sudden hesitation to sign up for the "newer and improved" social network because like most people I felt like it would be another mobile app I would need to manage like Twitter or Facebook.  Six months after my sign up, Goolge Plus is dishing out what tastes like another slice of the fruitful pie that Google loves to give out to its users.  The slices are socialized search results for a Google Plus user and it exhibits every indication of being a game changer.

In the past couple of weeks, Google began to immediately index content for Google Plus users.  Why does this create relevance?  If I were to initiate a search not only will I receive the usual search results, but I also receive personalized search results and I can choose to separately toggle between them.  The image below depicts both scenarios.  The upper image shows the general search query result and the bottom image displays the personalized and social search for a Google Plus user.

The search query for "web design" yielded common search results form the web, but my personalized search result yielded results from Google Plus and the web together.  The personalized social search result populated content, images, and posts not only from my business website (which offers web design services) and Google Plus posts, but also from my extended network of Google Plus friends and their networks.

Is it a Game Changer?

To the everyday internet user Google Plus may be just another social network, but to the internet marketer, SEO expert, web developer, and average business owner Google Plus is so much more.  With the indexing of content immediately to the Google Searchable Index, business owners don't need to spend a fortune on traditional or web marketing to become relevant on the real-time web.  They need to spend more time on Google Plus building their networks and creating content on their Google Plus Pages that will bolster their relevance on the web for social search results to their extended networks.  As long as Google does not change their stance on how these social search results are indexed and queried, then it will create tremendous value for anyone who is not a web developer but who wants to get noticed on the web and become relevant today.

Internet marketers, SEO experts, and web developers may have a totally different experience with Google Plus than the average business owner.  For anyone in the field of search engine optimization, Google Plus could either prove to be an extra boost.  If Google tweaks the algorithm for social search in the same manner in which it created the rules for SEO, then businesses in the SEO Services Market will get a real  boost from new network. The reason being that keywords, content, and links on a traditional website typically generate relevance and page rank for web pages AND most of the social results from Google Plus users will typically come from web pages, shared links, or blogs associated with the Google Plus user's POSTS, not from Google Plus profiles themselves.

So what does that mean?  Well, web pages and websites which are being referenced or Plus +1ed will inherently gain more relevance than website or a web page which is just sitting there without social engagement or interaction. However, the content, keywords, and links in those websites or blogs may help to form the hierarchy behind the social search results as a whole.  So as long as the traditional sites are coded with SEO keywords, content, and links correctly- the social search results will yield a far better result than the traditional search query for the information seeker.  In the long run, Google Plus doesn't make  SEO experts obsolete, it makes them more necessary.

As long as Google Plus Users are adding content which refers back to the traditional web, it will make websites which already have hard coded SEO keywords, content, and links even more relevant than before social search.  Will this boost traditional organic search query results or will Google make social search the next stage in searchable content on the web?  The answer to that question is best left to the Google Search Engine Engineers.