Here are some of the projects finished recently:

Metis Nation – Saskatchewan

The Metis Nation of Saskatchewan already had a website with a content management system, but found it too cumbersome for easy updating. One of their biggest goals is to maintain regular communication with their citizens and the general public. The new site is easier to maintain and navigate, allowing those communication channels to stay open.

GT Performance

GT Performance is a family run business in Saskatoon that sells and services powerboats and trailers. After the summer we’ve had, it’s no surprise that Saskatchewan residents are keen to be outside on the lakes of our province soaking in the sun and having fun in the water.

More and more though, phone books are being pushed aside, tucked inside piano benches, or immediately recycled. Why haul out the encyclopedia collection when wikipedia is a link away. Trades, whether general contractors, plumbers, or electricians are seeing more and more customers looking online for service providers.

Imagine you’re at work, knowing that you’d like to add a bathroom to your basement. This isn’t a snap decision, and it isn’t made in the course of five minutes. During your lunch break, most people would be more comfortable browsing through the various websites of local plumbers than finding the office phone book and comparing the shape of each plumber’s logo that fit within the 3 inch square adspace allotted for each contractor.

The cost of a professionally created website has decreased in the past 10 years, to the point where for the cost of a website is comparable or cheaper than a fair sized yellow pages ad. Regardless of the cost though, you want to be where your customers are and when 90% of Saskatoon is online regularly, your business is well served by being there as well.

Beside are three websites completed last year by Saskatoon Web Design.

• J & A Heating – redesign of older site
• Razor Heating – new website
• Airstream Mechanical – redesign of older site

Was I upset, not really. Perhaps a little frustrated, but it’s important to put things in perspective. I won’t use those 100 minutes as a reason to consider ‘in-sourcing’ my email because to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t do a better job than google at creating an email program and managing the servers associated with it.

I’ve worked for a number of universities in Canada all with in house email service. The IT staff did a fabulous job, but guess what: there were outages there too. No system will be 100%, and sometimes, it’s better to sit back and enjoy the 100 minutes of silence than loose an hour of your life hitting the refresh button.

That being said, here are three quick tips for maintaining a steady stream of new material:

Change your perspective

It is vitally important that you view your online presence as a core expression of your business. If the sign outside your storefront has a bulb go out, or otherwise needs repair, I’m guessing you make it happen. Potential customers will judge you by whatever you put forward, and if that happens to be an out of date website, they may make the wrong assumptions.

View your website or blog as you would any of your other marketing material. Certainly you don’t hand out outdated business cards with phone numbers that don’t work. Similarly you ought to avoid a website with broken links.

Make a Schedule

Set aside an appropriate amount of time to your online presence. It doesn’t have to be every week. Even one hour a month will go a long ways to ensuring that your site doesn’t wither. If you have nothing to write that month, then spend the time submitting to search engines, joining a social network, or finding link partners.

Delegate

Do you have staff, associates, or even a peer group or business network? Find others with interesting knowledge and offer to let them cross publish their articles on your site. Give them a back link and it’s a win-win. They get more exposure and your site gets more content. Visit OnTask Ergonomics for an example of the approach. They found a business partner that offered a service they previously hadn’t and forged a relationship both online and off to better serve their customers.

I won’t go into detail about the decision except to highlight that the CRTC has left the larger issue of the legality of traffic shaping open to future decisions. They have been specific in that they have decided that Bell Canada treated it’s ‘partners’ who lease their network the same way they have treated their retail customers. It’s a funny partnership when you change the terms of the agreement without telling your customers, deny it, then become intransient enough to force them to take you to a regulatory body.

What bothers me most about this decision and the practice of throttling is that it seems rather short sighted. The ‘problem’ as defined by Bell is that some users are congesting the internet by using it too much (through peer to peer networking).

Really?

First off, I know I pay a premium for a certain speed of access to the internet (5MB/sec). My ISP goes to lengths to assure me that I’ll only achieve that speed in optimum conditions and that they will never guarantee it. Fair enough. I also know that I can’t go beyond that speed due to limits placed on my connection to the internet by my ISP. Fair enough.

Why does Bell think that they have the right to charge for that access (which you rarely ever receive at the best of times), then artificially reduce your speed even more? If it truly is the case that their network cannot handle their customers using the services paid for on a monthly basis, then reduction of services doesn’t seem like a long term solution.

The analagy used in the Globe and Mail is of a highway with dedicated streams of traffic. This is false and misleading, here’s a better one…

Bob works downtown. He drives to work. In the city he lives in, all parking stalls are owned by a group of private companies. So, in order to park downtown, he pays a monthly fee to one of them for a parking stall. The company in charge of the lot naturally tries to maximize revenue by overbooking all of their parking lots. Bob deals with this, sometimes it takes him longer to find an open space, even though the price he pays per month for the stall does not change.

One day though, he is stopped on the way into the parking garage. The attendant says that they have been monitoring his use of the garage and have noticed that he parks for five days a week (Bob happens to have a full time job). This is not acceptable because it causes too much congestion in the garage. Imagine if everyone tried to use the garage every day. The solution to this problem is for Bob bike to work, he can park his bike in the garage too.

“But I’ve paid for a parking stall” says Bob.
“And so have all of our other customers”, the attendant responds. “What makes you so special as to be able to use a parking stall every day? Surely you aren’t so greedy as to think that you can use this space at the expense of others?”
“I suppose your right — I’ll start bringing my bike.”
“Oh, by the way,” the attendant called out as Bob left, “this month’s fee is due, bring you chequebook when you come back”.

A cynic might argue that perhaps Bell should sell fewer subscriptions, upgrade their network, or stop telling people that they offer high speed internet. I’m not paying extra so that my emails are sent at 10MB per second (that would allow me to send a few thousand emails per second, and I can’t type that fast). Of course, this all might be moot. Who can really say if in the next five years internet traffic is going to increase or decrease. Maybe people in developing/developed countries will unplug themselves. Maybe people will decide they don’t like reading the news online, teleconferencing, listening to music, catching up on tv series’, talking with overseas relatives, and so on. Or, Bell can start preparing for yesterdays pattern of internet use.

Ed Ryan has helped local groups and individuals sponsor refugees, businesses attract foreign labour, and most importantly, he’s helped the families of recent immigrants to come join their relatives.

Edge Immigration also has a blog component where Ed will be pointing and commenting on articles of interest to both potential and recent immigrants to Saskatchewan.

Microsoft seems to be getting older by the day (I know we all do, but some of us age better than others, Seinfeld humour being of the ‘other’ variety). As much as I’d like to comment on the commercial, I’ll focus on the birthday boy and mention a few of their more useful services, many of which are competing directly with the 800 pound gorilla mentioned above.

Gmail

Gmail, can’t effuse enough about this one. I don’t bother with Outlook anymore. I prefer web based email regardless since it allows me to check it from anywhere and reduces my risk of contracting a virus. Add to that a far better search function, the ability to send emails from different addresses, huge storage space, and the best spam filter I’ve seen.

Gmail also marked the first time Google took a run at Microsoft. Though it seems ages ago now, it used to be that you’d expect to pay $5 a month for a decent email account through Yahoo, Hotmail, or other providers if you wanted more than 5 megabytes of storage. Google came from nowhere and offered up to a gigabyte for nothing. I currently have a limit of 7 gigs and it increases every second. They changed the way we think about web based email for the better.

Google Calendar

Another free application, google calendar has the advantage over a number of other calendars in being very shareable as well as slick. It’s very easy to set up five to ten cascading calendars so that your class schedule is in one, meetings in another, and personal dates in one more, so that one can be shared with certain people and others kept private. Also, it’s very simple to embed the calendar into web pages and export the content for other applications if needed.

Adwords and Adsense

Two halves of the same product, adwords and adsense are what generates most of google’s revenue. Adwords is a program that allows you to advertise your business to web users through the sponsored links you’ll find in most of Google’s services as well as sprinkled liberally through the internet. Adsense allows owners of websites or blogs to make money by publishing those same ads on their sites. I’ll be adding a new post shortly about adwords since to me, it’s something that I think all business owners should be aware of, so I’ll leave it at that but encourage you to check it out.

Her site is simple and sharp, full of photography taken by Celestial Photography. Good luck Shannon, Saskatoon is supporting you!

The core of this website is osCommerce, a free and open source e-commerce solution. As a designer, I like the fact that osCommerce has about 12, 000 active stores across the world and a huge community devoted to improving the product. We’ve employed about a half dozen ‘mods’ to the mashed bananas store to customize the experience and add the features needed. Just about every graphical feature of the base application has been replaced by custom designed images. And best of all, the store owner is capable of adding, deleting, managing her products, inventory, coupons, newsletters, and much more without the help of her web designer.

For as much as I’m a fan of work, I also acknowledge that many clients would prefer to save some money and take a hands on approach to their operation. They then become more knowledgeable about their store, its operation, and their needs, all of which is only good for business.