Copyright © 2009 I-COM International 2009-07-04T00:15:02+0100 2009-07-04T00:15:02+0100 http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. http://www.i-com.net/blog/ http://i-com.net/images/icom-net.gif http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. I-COM International blogmaster at i-com dot net I-COM International I-COM International en SEO, SEM, Web Design, Web Development 1440 http://www.i-com.net/blog/what-recession-there-is-a-home-for-arts-graduates-internet-marketing-213/ When out with a large group of friends and relatives recently, I found myself sat opposite a friend of the family who owns a business. The business is relatively small, and according to my vague understanding has something to do with marketing. Anyway, we got to talking and, as a recent graduate myself, I inquired as to his thoughts on the age-old Degree vs. Experience debate, those two dark monoliths of the employment market. Youll forgive me for paraphrasing his response, wine has somewhat muddied my memory, but it went something like Oh degrees, yeah theyre relatively low on my list of priorities to be honest. What Im looking for is someone who has a proven track record in the job, good experience, and someone whos going to fit into the team. As a recent addition to the I-COM team, Im not long out of the employment market myself and am well aware of the pervasiveness of the must have at least one years relevant experience job advert addendum how it used to upset me, sitting at home endlessly browsing Monster for something, please something that was relevant to my degree subject (English Literature and Creative Writing). Ever the glutton for punishment, like a limpet I clung to the idea of Copywriting, the Holy Grail, yet time and time again my lack of experience was holding me back, but how could I get experience if no-one would give me a job without experience? Did no-one care about my three years of toil at university? Is it Worthless Though? If you ask me (and you havent, but Ill tell you anyway), its not; not at all. Its just that were entering the whole university experience with a muddied perception of what well have at the end. Unfortunately, an arts degree, or any kind of degree, is not an automatic pass into the employment market. There is an increasingly prominent idea that University constitutes some sort of step in a career ladder, and the institutions themselves are encouraging it. Universities nowadays advertise themselves on their statistics; how many people have gone into full-time employment, what jobs are they in, how much are they earning? Now, if youre there for a Medical or a Law degree, this is no doubt true. In fact Law graduates can expect to earn between 24% and 30% more than people who left school immediately after A Levels. But is it really true of an Arts degree? Of course not. If you choose Arts, youre choosing philosophy, history, literature; youre choosing a path of intellectual inquisition and acquisition. What youre not doing, is getting your foot in the door, climbing a rung in the ladder or particularly impressing your future employers, which is why so many arts graduates turn to teaching. Studying the Arts at university is almost the direct antithesis of the business world, which is why all those Arts graduates are sitting around twiddling their thumbs after graduation saying What now?, whilst all their ultra-organised marketing and business studies contemporaries are already eating at the captains table and applying for The Apprentice. All Change Now every man, woman and his/her dog goes to uni (has this popular saying suffered from the PC treatment?), theyve had to diversify, which is no bad thing. Surely theres no-one pining for the good old days when women werent allowed and foppish, upper class men lounged on the lawn musing aimlessly (well, maybe...). The Arts has been left behind, and all the proper jobs are for business, science and engineering graduates, unless youre willing to do a post degree conversion in accountancy, law or some other vocational subject. But dont listen to those miserable types you know the ones, moaning about all the debt theyve accrued during their university careers, desperately trying to rain on everyone elses parade as a salve for their own inadequacies. There are homes for arts graduates in business, and there are Arts-based opportunities for the chosen few with the killer combination of drive, ambition and creativity (If only...). As long as youre not the kind of person who gauges success by how much money you earn (or owe), you can feel good about your Arts degree; perhaps you even want to be a teacher. Dont Get Lost in Translation Arts degrees are chock full of translatable skills research skills, writing abilities, creative thinking and the general worldliness that comes with knowing a little bit more than your peers about where weve come from, not to mention the fact that youve stuck with something for three years, met deadlines and come out with a recognisable grade at the end. We know the papers are doom and gloom, just look at the swine flu debacle; they may as well report on the common cold. Its therefore inevitable that they will also report on the grave state of affairs in the UK jobs market, not to mention the state of graduate employment, as its a fantastic way of having a dig at a Labour government who encouraged more and more teenagers to consider university. What Im saying is, pay them no mind. Yes things are bad at the moment, but the internet is a limitless resource, constantly expanding, and the freedom it allows also allows for economic capitalisation and consistent business expansion. Arts degrees can be easily translated into the world of internet marketing, copywriting and web design choosing the right words to perfectly describe a clients product, targeting your copy to appeal to a particular audience, researching keywords that will ensure your website is found by the right people, designing a website that looks fantastic and is easy to use   Dont get lost in translation, steer clear of those graduate sales adverts and hold out (if you can) for a job that will utilise the skills youve acquired. Its done; you cant go back so you may as well go forward, and moaning about student debt, which is relatively small and friendly in real-world terms, wont help. Wear that BA with pride, re-draft your CV and get yourself back on Recruitment.com, Monster, Jobsite, Prospects, etc. You know the drill. I-COM News 2009-07-03 11:28:47 http://www.i-com.net/blog/what-recession-there-is-a-home-for-arts-graduates-internet-marketing-213/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/linkbuilding-a-matter-of-trust-212/ Over the years many SEO companies have touted link building as "the magic bullet" for improving search engine rankings - you get lots of back links with the correct anchor text linking to your site and the sheer weight of numbers will make your site rank in the top ten for a certain keyword phrase - easy as that. Over time, a whole industry has been built up sourcing and supplying both relevant (and irrelevant) back links to "game" the search engines and improve web site rankings. Offering packages of 50, 100 or 1,000+ links of a certain Page rank in 3, 6 or 12 months these companies offer top ten rankings for competitive keywords that couldn't be simpler. However the truth is that sheer weight of numbers of back links is no longer the way to rank effectively for many highly competitive terms. Large numbers of similar back links from similar, or same web sites, will build a linking pattern that the search engines can easily spot and eventually penalise. Research has shown that sites with much less but very high quality and, very importantly, trusted back links are now ranking much higher than those with thousands of back links with search engine optimised anchor text. By trust we're talking about those sites which appear to have been around for ages, or are considered sites of authority. Those sites you would visit to find out information that can be trusted as correct or accurate. In addition these quality back links will bring more qualified visitors who are really interested in your web site. Trust rank - the "new" Page Rank. Think about it - the search engines need to effectively rank sites and back links have been gamed to the limits, so new factors have been introduced to assess the "trustworthiness" of a website and to make the search engine ranking positions (SERPS) less of a back link numbers game. Factors of Trust There are several factors that will have a big impact on your site's trust rank, such as: The age of the web site -  if a site has been around for many years your site will have a much higher trust rank than a site that is less than a year old, regardless of how many articles that new site can produce or the number of back links with relevant anchor text that it gets. Quality content - good, well-written content will get read and referenced by the right web sites and also get back links. Quality Back Links - not just thousands of back links with relevant anchor text. If you source and get good links naturally from other related sites which will have a high trust rank, you will be rewarded with better ranking positions. Linkbuilding in the Future So what does this mean for linkbuilding? Linkbuilding has now moved on - back links should be sourced by experienced link builders and Search Engine Optimisers, not package bought, and any link building projects should be bespoke. It's not about getting 500+ back links with optimised anchor text - it's about getting the best quality back links that you can. It's better to have 10 quality back links from sites that are considered to be of authority or value to the subject matter than 100+ poor quality optimised links. Link building projects should now be seen as a long term strategy and not a short term strategy to rank quickly. So where am I going with this? Well if you want to rank effectively in the search engines building thousands of back links with anchor text is not really the answer. Sure it may get you a boost in the SERPS but this is now a short term strategy and the rankings may soon drop if the keyword terms are highly competitive and then you're caught in a back links "arms race" that will cost you more and more and may even result in your website being obliterated by the search engines. Search Engine Optimisation 2009-06-26 14:44:18 http://www.i-com.net/blog/linkbuilding-a-matter-of-trust-212/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-bad-site-in-a-good-google-serp-210/ So I was doing a bit of research this morning in Google under the query "affordable health insurance." I got the following result: Enlarge image in a new window Now, bearing in mind that I'm searching on google.co.uk, I've been given 3 American sites in the top 5 - although on the whole the results are for relevant websites (even though I don't really need American health insurance). The most interesting, however, is site #4, Rochester Gentle Dental. The name alone confused me as that sounds like the name of a dental clinic, not a health insurance provider, but it could be a small health insurance company offering dental insurance. There's even an address with the result, for a place in Rochester, NY, so I was expecting a clinic. I wasn't expecting a website, associated with an address in Google Maps for what appears to be a legitimate business, to actually be a cookie cutter spam site designed to push link juice to a bunch of other insurance sites. Enlarge image in a new window Ok, it looks nice enough on first landing but the site has no logo, no footer with Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions and no proper About Us page - yet they want you to submit your details for insurance, which frankly, seems a bit dangerous. I wouldn't entrust money for something that important with a site I know nothing about. Enlarge image in a new window As you scroll down the page, there's a single footer link to "insurance companies" which goes to an entirely different site, and a link to "old version" which takes you to a page of, quite frankly, gibberish: Enlarge in a new window Seriously, would a legitimate business actually put a site live that says "Health insurance napoleon and the prince with a lot of camellias are to have my dear!" about cheap health insurance? If you had (maybe by accident, or because your web developer had a weird sense of humour) and you did get some decent copy produced after the fact, would you leave that page online? No, you wouldn't. Not unless you were using the page to push link juice, via keyword-rich text links, to a different site -  hence the footer link. But this site gets even better when you look at the links to the other pages - some of which take you off site. All these links are wrapped in JavaScript so they don't pass linkjuice out anywhere - except to the site in the footer link. Enlarge image in a new window Someone's working hard to make that one link have weight because the home page has a PR of 3 - although they aren't being particularly choosy about the links they pursue. Yahoo delivers the following backlink profile: Enlarge image in a new window So it's foreign language sites, sex sites, and general garbage. In fact, running Link Diagnosis on the site reveals just how bad the backlinks are - a huge proportion are .ru sites, yet this is a dental clinic in New York state? From the WHOIS data it looks like the domain was originally purchased in 2005 and was renewed in February 2009 and has had 2 registrars. I can only assume that the current owner must have bought an expired domain from the actual Rochester Gentle Dental clinic and has now registered a trusted domain by proxy using the following information: Enlarge image in a new window This goes to show the power that domain age and trust must have, even months after a domain has changed hands and content. It also goes to show the power links - even incredibly poor links from bad neighborhoods - still have within Google. What confounds me is that the SERP has 102 million results, which is competitive in any industry, and the insurance industry is one of the most competitive you'll find in organic search outside of porn, gambling, travel or real estate. So Google, any chance that you're going to sort that particular SERP out, please? And businesses...don't lose your branded domain name because if you do, it could spell a horrific reputation management issue if the wrong person gets hold of your expired URL. Search Engine Optimisation 2009-06-25 14:51:17 http://www.i-com.net/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-bad-site-in-a-good-google-serp-210/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/the-strategic-decisions-law-firms-need-to-make-in-the-current-economic-climate-208/ Well before the current credit crunch, 36% of managing partners responding to a CLT survey said that Marketing and Practice Development was the number one priority - ahead of financial management, technology developments, HR activity and general management. Even in the current downturn, a recent '08 survey by Inpractice, showed that nearly 40% of senior managers in law firms surveyed said that client relationship management was their top priority. This was followed closely by developing new business strategies at 38% - and people performance management at 36%. During the current economic crisis, financial pressure has been mounting and understandably some lawyers have been paralysed by fear of the making the wrong decision. However, firms that want to produce better results in order to survive and capitalise on opportunities need to be proactive in making business development decisions. The decisions law firms need to be taking include: Whether or not to drop lower margin work and focus on higher margin work? Whether to join referral networks and how much time to commit to them? Whether to merge - for image, service offering and scale of operations? How to respond to clients whose needs and perceptions are changing; where corporate clients have more in-house legal expertise and individuals have more access to free information? They all demand a higher quality of service, are less loyal and demand value for money and expect lower prices. How best to capitalise on the new purchasing generation - the c14m 16-34 year olds legal websites will be the first point of call for half of those who will purchase a legal service over the next five years. Whether and how - or in which areas - to compete with a new generation of competitors from retail and financial institutions; and other traditional law firms who are already changing how they do business. Who should be undertaking business development and management roles? We should now take it as read that no partner can be too busy for business development. Networking (in all its guises), for example, should be regarded as a routine part of work as a lawyer. How do we equip our people with the opportunities, understanding and skills to make the most of every opportunity? How to focus on client satisfaction? A common understanding that disgruntled clients disappointed by poor performance, attitude or communication who dont come back will inevitably tell a lot of other people (who will go elsewhere) and will take a long time, money, resource and effort to replace. Bill Kirby is a director of Inpractice UK Ltd. The company specialises supporting law firms and accountancy practices with business, marketing, CRM and IT strategies, HR, Quality systems, IT troubleshooting and business continuity. He can be contacted at bkirby@inpractice.co.uk Law Firm Marketing 2009-06-23 09:23:12 http://www.i-com.net/blog/the-strategic-decisions-law-firms-need-to-make-in-the-current-economic-climate-208/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/nwvm-hoodwinked-by-search-firm-207/ I've just read with amazement an article in today's Crains about a Liverpool search firm CL5 that has been awarded a grant by North West Vision and Media to set up an office in Manchester. To be quite frank I can't believe it - search is one of the few parts of the market that are really buoyant at the moment with most firms of any merit recording quite rapid growth and acceptable profits. Why does a government institution want to pour money into a firm that if it was any good would be able to finance its expansion itself? The remit of NWVM, part of the North West Development Agency, is to help businesses in the digital and creative sector grow - but surely there are other businesses out there more in need of help than search firms. I'm thinking of all the traditional and pure creative agencies that are having a hard time as clients' budgets are cut. The other thing that upsets me is that for a long time Liverpool agencies have benefited from an unfair playing field in Merseyside. It's been very difficult for Manchester agencies to compete with the 20% discounts offered by Liverpool competitors because they had access to Objective One funding again administered by the NWDA. One has to wonder if the NWDA has a Mersey bias or whether it's just that Liverpool firms are better at working the system. Manchester 2009-06-22 10:09:39 http://www.i-com.net/blog/nwvm-hoodwinked-by-search-firm-207/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/death-knell-for-the-anonymous-blog-206/ I have just been reading on one of our law client's blogs about a recent ruling from the High Court which seems to suggest that bloggers' no longer have a right to anonymity. Following a case which resulted in the author of a blog entitled "Nightjack" being outed,  bloggers can now be forced to reveal their identity if it's considered in the public interest to do so. The blog itself has now been removed. The issue for me is who decides what's in the public interest? I can see that if someone was blogging about setting a bomb to destroy the Houses of Parliament it might be sensible to know who was considering doing it. However, in this case it seems that the author's identity was revealed so that the public could "make a judgement on the value of comments made (in the blog) about police affairs." That to me seems that a fairly weak reason and can only serve to limit free debate. What's even worse for me is that the whole case was brought about by The Times newspaper, who wanted to release the author's details. This seems a incredible tale of double standards; aren't the newspapers the organisations that normally fight very hard to protect their sources? What moral right does The Times have to decide it's time to out a blogger? Our client is looking to gauge public opinion on this so please take a look at their post and leave them some comments. Internet 2009-06-19 15:00:00 http://www.i-com.net/blog/death-knell-for-the-anonymous-blog-206/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/6-degrees-of-celebrity-bing-xrank-and-related-searches-205/ We've been playing with xRank today, a tool from Bing that allows you to search for celebrities and brings up related results such as biographies, videos, images, shopping, popularity trends and any other range of available information. I was impressed by its ability to actually map relationships between seemingly unrelated things. For searches for minor celebrities, the results are rather intriguing as xRank seems to be able to map some rather insightful connections. For example, a search for the lead singer of American indie-folksters The Decemberists brought up the following: View in a new window Colin Meloy isn't famous enough to have results (neither is Nick Cave, for that matter, so maybe they're working out the kinks still), but xRank is clever enough to bring up an list of related people that don't necessarily seem that connected at the outset: Carson Ellis - an artist who has designed all of the sleeves for The Decemberists' music, is also Meloy's girlfriend Kevin Canty - an author who teaches at the University of Montana, the state where Meloy grew up K Ross Toole - a American historian specialising in local Montana history Elliot Smith - a singer/musician with a similar fanbase to The Decemberists Slim Moon - the founder of Kill Rock Stars, the indie label that first signed The Decemberists While it might be easy enough to connect Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy or Slim Moon and Colin Meloy through online biographies, neither of these people are particularly considered celebrities. Yet somehow xRank has drawn a strong enough connection and identified them as important enough to list in related searches with the idea that people searching for Colin Meloy might also be interested in those results. Kevin Canty and K Ross Toole are more interesting results probably included because of the Montana connection but if xRank has been clever enough to understand through analysis of documents mentioning Colin Meloy that his songwriting gets connected to storytelling and historical references (if you count songs about Victorian chimney sweeps and sailors as historical references) and that he's written a book, then it's an even cleverer comparison. A search for Kim Deal, indie music goddess, and bassist for The Pixies, brings up the following: View in another window Kristin Hersh - lead singer of Providence, RI, band Throwing Muses and sister to Tanya Donnelly, an original member of Deal's band The Breeders. Throwing Muses not only recently played at the Deal-curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival,  and is on the same record label as Deal. Joey Santiago - Lead guitarist in The Pixies Juliana Hatfield - an indie music cult figure from around the same time that The Pixies first emerged, part of the same local Boston music scene Ivo Watts Russell - Founder of 4AD, Deal's record label for The Pixies, The Breeders and The Amps Clearly, these results are related, often quite closely, but in less obvious ways than a search for "Kim Deal" and a search for "Kim Deal photos" might be related or even less obvious than a search for "iPod" and "Macbook" might be related. When you do a search for Kurt Cobain, however, you get: View in a new window While a couple of results clearly relate to his time in Nirvana, the theme is actually information and pictures of his death, which leads to the question of - are these related searches based around what people who search for the person also search for? Is a person who searches for Kurt Cobain these days more likely to be looking for information surrounding his death and the various conspiracy theories than for his music? And is somebody searching for "Colin Meloy" subsequently likely to also search for "K Ross Toole" and "Bruce Springsteen" rather than "Decemberists tickets" or "Decemberists album"? By far my favourite result out of everything we looked at though has to be the result for "Oasis": View in a new window Apparently xRank can't actually distinguish between Oasis the band and Oasis the shop - or they think  that Oasis fans tend to shop at Warehouse, River Island and Topshop. Either way, these results suggest something fairly advanced at work to either gauge searcher intent or draw semantic comparisons (or both) and it will certainly be worth watching as Bing develops to see how this reflects in the overall search results. Internet 2009-06-17 15:55:00 http://www.i-com.net/blog/6-degrees-of-celebrity-bing-xrank-and-related-searches-205/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/gocompare-googling-by-the-rules-204/ Some people watch stocks go up and down, SEOers watch listings. One of the most watched sites is GoCompare. They advertise heavily on TV which drives strong brand awareness people know the GoCompare name. What typically happens is that they then go to the internet and type GoCompare into Google and follow the link to the site. They have a bit of a problem in that their listings seem to come and go. About a month ago they didnt even appear for searches on their own name. Instead a number of affiliate sites to whom GoCompare need to pay commission appear. The rumour is that GoCompare had been penalised by Google for not following their guidelines and trying to do things to manipulate the search results, the most recent occurrence being a repeat of something that happened around a year ago. This is a cautionary tale, which demonstrates why SEO needs to be done within accepted guidelines; the listing slip must have cost them a lot of money in affiliate commissions and increased TV advertising. Theres also a learning point to recognise that you cant try to cheat the system. When you receive emails from companies that say theyll quickly get you to the top of Google, be careful. If it seems too good to be true its likely theyll be using a short term trick to try to cheat the system it may give you go short term results but if found out you could be quickly demoted. The positive side of the story is that demotions need not be permanent, if you can show the engines youve tried to correct what youve done wrong its likely youll be able to recover the situation given time. Needless to say I-COM follows the Google guidelines as closely as possible and have helped a number of businesses get back their listings after other SEOs have brought them down. SEO by the rules may not always deliver the quickest results but it does deliver results that stick. Search Engine Optimisation 2009-06-16 08:51:00 http://www.i-com.net/blog/gocompare-googling-by-the-rules-204/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/everything-you-think-you-know-about-seo-is-wrong-203/ When people find out I work in search engine optimisation I get two reactions. The first is confusion from people who have never heard of SEO. The second is disgust - from people who have. SEO consultants are like the used car salesmen of the internet, or so people seem to think. Even other industry professionals seem to believe that an SEO expert will as soon steal your wallet and use your credit cards to squat on 1000 different domains that will rank above your website by repeating keywords ad nauseum before they'll actually help your business.I have gotten used to the sneers and eye rolling that accompany my telling web designers, developers, public relations people and technology journalists that I work in SEO because I know that they have no idea what I actually do all day. The average person who has heard of SEO thinks that the role of a search engine optimiser is to get websites ranking at #1 in Google for as many terms as possible by whatever means necessary. The search engine optimiser, as most people understand it, is responsible for 100% of webspam by producing incoherent website text stuffed with keywords, building hundreds of thousands of content-free link farms and generally destroying websites by ignoring visitors in favour of search engines. This is what SEO was about in 2001, it is not what SEO is about in 2009. SEO in 2009 is about taking a website and improving it so that search engines can find every page and understand what that page is about, but it's also about helping users find the information they need on a website straight from the search engine and then helping them complete the task they set out to do - whether that's research, feedback or a purchase. Today, any decent SEO consultant is an internet marketing expert whose concern is increasing the sales of his or her clients - and not with ubiquitous keyword rankings in Google. When we target a keyword to improve its rankings it's because we feel that keyword describes our client's services and that keyword is what people looking for those services will type into Google. Ranking a keyword in a search engine is only the means to the end - what we're looking to do is bring targeted traffic to the websites we promote. The idea that SEO is a dark art practised solely by maniacs conspiring to pollute search results with gibberish related to gambling, adult sites and pharmaceuticals is as ludicrous as the idea that every blogger secretly wants to be a journalist and that those who can't do, teach. Our goal is ultimately to improve search results by helping search engines to understand websites better. Whether you're looking to find a portable wheelchair ramp or a bed, our job is to help Google serve you a result so you can. We make sure that you can find the best solicitor to help you write a will or represent you in an employment tribunal. We want you to find job listings if you're looking to change your career path or a new apartment if you need to move. We even do our best to help communities tackle the problem of violence by making sure they know where to get help. So the next time you meet an SEO, don't sneer, say thank you, because we're actually trying to improve the internet - one website at a time. Search Engine Optimisation 2009-06-15 10:46:00 http://www.i-com.net/blog/everything-you-think-you-know-about-seo-is-wrong-203/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/that-cheap-website-may-cost-more-than-you-think-202/ Small businesses looking for their first professionally designed and developed website do not usually have a internet marketing expert on staff - or a web developer - and very often don't really know what things should cost. They may have a rough idea based on what friends or business associates have paid for their sites or they may have a friend or relative who works in web design. When they start looking at web designers and web developers, the recommendations and the cost can vary massively depending on who they call. It's easy enough to find a web developer who will build a site for 500 with a CMS included. It's also pretty easy to find a web designer who will tell you that you need to spend 20,000. If it's your first website, and you only need a few pages and a basic content management system in case you want to add anything new to the site, 20,000 on a website may be a little high. But, at the other end, 500 may be a little low - and if you're being offered a website this cheap, there's one BIG question you should ask in order to avoid headaches later on: "Will I own the code to my website and the copyright or will you?" One of the ways that companies cut costs in order to design and build websites on the cheap is to sell small sites built on a proprietary CMS that is owned and maintained by the developer. you pay them to customise a design for you and build the initial pages and you pay them for the right to use their CMS and host your website on their server. While this is a cheap option, and many of these packages are search friendly and easy to use, it also means that if the relationship goes sour, or you decide to redesign or upgrade your site using a different company you won't be able to take anything with you - you'll have to start from scratch and rebuild everything. You may not even have access to your own data including customer lists and your database of products in order to easily move everything from the old platform to the new one. When you sign a contract for a new website, always make sure that you own the copyright and you own the code - even if it costs you a little more money. Paying 1,500 for a site now instead of 500 will save you a lot of time and money later. Imagine that over the first few years  you've built your small shop into a thriving e-commerce business selling hundreds of products. If your developer owns the content of your site then you may have to re-enter every product, image and detail back into  your new site by hand - not to mention finding a way of reclaiming your customer database and order history! Is it really worth your time and money later to spend less now? "I still don't have much to spend on a website, what should I do?" In an ideal situation, you should be willing to spend enough on your website to get a bespoke system designed for you that can be upgraded and improved as your business changes and as technology develops. If you don't have the budget for that, however, there's plenty of open source software on the market these days that is easily customisable, easy to use, fairly search engine friendly and will do the job you need it to do. Open source software is free, you can modify it however you like, and you don't have to worry about who owns the copyright. Two quite workable solutions are WordPress, if you want a brochure site with the ability to add new pages easily; and Magento, if you want an e-commerce site. Because of the nature of open source software, your developer should be able to work with these systems - or another similar system - without claiming that it's their software so you can't take it away with you elsewhere. Web Development 2009-06-11 10:59:17 http://www.i-com.net/blog/that-cheap-website-may-cost-more-than-you-think-202/