Friends & Family of the DownRiver Group: It’s a difficult task starting up a business, especially in the economy we’ve been dealing with over the last year and a half or so, and without the intellectual, moral & spiritual support of our friends and family it would have been even more difficult. Though the DownRiver Group has been around for many years(we started in internet services over a decade ago, in site development of our own in-house projects), the decision to offer our skills & abilities was made just before the recent upheaval. Even in the face of those economic changes, you saw the value of our intentions, believed in our abilities & offered resources more precious than money at crucial times. We will continue return dividends on those investments.

You, The DownRiver Clients: Last but not least, our clients; without you there is no reason to continue this aspect of the business, is there? Along with offering our thanks, we promise to continue scouring not only the internet but all venues for the information, the tools and the resources to improve your web presence and make your endeavors successful. It’s our reason for being and your success is our success.

Thank you all & we look forward to serving you all for the years to come in this new decade!

New Features For Web Presence & Web Success

With the new year we’re adding a number of new features designed to enhance your web presence.
AJAX Applications: One of these features to improve your site usability is the use of AJAX applications. These are specialized & powerful scripts that provide a wealth of interaction on your site.

Here’s a simple example of an application in action.

Media Applications: We now offer a new form of video application that allows you to embed your own videos on your site. This video app allows you to brand your own content & removes the unsightly banners usually included with the embeds from the popular video site embeds. Custom controls & skinning(the look of the player itself) are also part of this application giving you incredible control over the operation, look and feel of your site media.

Web Advertising: This is an exciting aspect of the business! We are now offering not just the design & creation of visual ads for use on websites but also a network for distributing those ads across numerous sites with significant traffic.
While newspapers & other periodicals are experiencing waning circulation, the eyes on the internet continue to grow & we have finished our beta testing on networks such as Facebook, with very encouraging success. We’ll create an ad for you, place it in effective venues & track and report on the traffic generated to your site with metrics that guarantee results!
You can also use the ads created for your newspaper, flyer & magazine needs(and we can help you with media in the proper publications, if you need).
We created the ad shown to the left, in house, and you can feel free to call Withum Sailmakers to inquire as to how their decision to entrust the Withum web presence to the DownRiver Group has worked out for them!

One very important job of a conscientious webmaster is that of security and it entails a wide variety of tasks.
One of those tasks is too follow traffic patterns on client sites, watching for strange activity. Another is to make sure that all the software used for clients’ sites is up to date and to update as needed.
In an earlier post I discussed how being conscientious prevented a coordinated hack, perpetrated on tens of thousands of websites, from corrupting any of our client sites.

If you use Kaspersky and receive such a warning from your site or any of the DownRiver Groups affiliated sites, please contact us.

Our Recommendation For Anti-Virus Software

We’ve worked with many free, and paid, security software packages and for our money, the best, by far, is the Professional Anti-virus by Avast.

In the interest of transparency, I’ll tell you that purchasing Avast through any DownRiver group links results in a small commission for us. We could promote any of the others, and receive a commission based on sales here, but this is the one that we use on ALL of our systems.
If you’d like to find out how you too can participate in generating such revenues, contact us. It’s one of the many services we provide for clients.

Use The Link For An Extra 20% Off ~ Limited Time For DownRiver Visitors!

That being said, I’ll tell you that the Avast anti-virus is the BEST we’ve used thus far and has saved us from countless hours of agony!

I’ll be back later with an updated post.

B.A.

A recent occurance brought this topic to the forefront. One of our clients is involved in some active brand building and, in the course of my regular client tasks, I discovered a cyber-stalker making use of videos(along with meta-tagging, descriptions, linking & the works) made on the clients behalf.
Since we made these videos in-house (one of our many services), I was none to pleased, either.

I won’t go into detail, here, how I decided we would respond to this affront but suffice it to say it was pretty effective.
Still, I always feel an ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure and this episode reminded me of the importance of being proactive.

There are a number of tasks that should be fulfilled in order to protect your brand in the internet age. The landscape of the world wide web is still much like the wild, wild west and I’m often reminded of Deadwood, the wild west town depicted in the HBO miniseries, for it’s brutality and lawlessness.

Protect your Brand ~ Maintaining Proper Web Presence

There are numerous ways to affect and manipulate ones web presence and that effect can be sudden and intense with the advent of the “social web”, which is, essentially, a growing network of a social sites. You may recognize the names of many and the list grows almost daily.

Set up accounts with your primary web identity/business name at the following sites:

Facebook Myspace Wordpress Blogger Twitter Tumblr Youtube Metacafe Dailymotion viddler This is just the short list. There are others but these are the most important, right now.
(A good antivirus is an important part of the defense ~ we use and recommend Avast Professional.)

You don’t have to use the sites but what you’re doing is preventing some malicious entity from using them to damage your reputation or worse (and, believe me, it can get worse). You may argue that you’ll simply engage legal representatives to handle any problems with internet ID/theft/squatting issues, but some 14 year old hacker in the Ukraine, who is simply having fun while toying with you, isn’t going to be affected by any threats you can come up with after the attack has occurred, as it continues to occur and continues damaging your reputation or worse.

Accounts on these services are all FREE(which makes it so appealing to someone who may want to embarass you, or worse) and relatively simple to set up.

By the way, do you have a company-brand “gmail” account? If not, consider this; what if someone sends a trojan or virus out via a gmail account in your name? Certainly, you can explain that the poison wasn’t delivered by you but consider the potential effect to your brand.

This is a DIY project well worth your while or should be very inexpensive for your webmaster to manage in a reasonable time frame.

With a few hours of proactive effort, you’ll be immunizing yourself from the potential for some serious headaches and reputation management tasks.

In the world of internet services, what specific services a webmaster can offer a client covers a wide range and services can pop up, or become defunct, in what sometimes seems the blink of an eye.
The supposed internet marketing services the modern day snake oil salemen(aka SEO specialists, web marketing specialists and the like) offer for ridiculous fees knows few bounds.

I have had numerous people tell me that they got a great deal to “get on google”. Often, when I ask them exactly what services they raided their marketing budget for, they don’t really know and more often than not, they have tapped the marketing money, and continue to pay a recurring fee, for the promise of being included in Google search results.
Just to be clear, Google does not charge to include websites in their search results. To do so would be against their own best interests.
Google, just like Yahoo, MSN search(now known as Bing) and all the other search engines, include relevant websites in their listing when someone enters a search term. If they only included those that paid for entry into search results, internet search would soon lose eyes to newspaper classified listings and similar venues.
Google is the most popular of search engines because they have found a method for ranking and presenting the most relevant results for a keyword or keyphrase search(the words you put into the search bar). You can imagine what a terrible experience it would be if all you got when you searched were the ads you see in the columns and headers of the Google pages you pulled down. It’s doubtful you would use them if that’s what they always served up, right?
If you’re using your marketing budget to appear on Google, you should be on top, front and center and you should be getting proof of ranking.
It’s the people and organizations that placed ads that appear prominently in headers and in the columns, that have paid Google for the right to appear there. But that is an entirely different matter than simply “getting on Google”, which I’ll cover in another blogpost, later on. For now I’ll tell you that the ad construction, bidding for placement and the per-click costs can get quite expensive but the ROI on PPC(pay per click) campaigns can make it an excellent investment.
If you are paying simply for the rights to appear on Google, you’re wasting your money. If you have a website it will eventually start appearing in the Google listing when you type the name of the website into Google’s search bar, without anyone doing anything. In fact, in time it should start showing up at or near the top of page 1 on Google. That is the power of relevancy and the mission of search engines in general.
Case in point:
Below is a screen shot of a search I did for a DownRiver client, TroutFlyandTackle.com.

Now, to rank on page 1 for keywords and phrases that your prospects actually use? That is worth paying for, that’s online marketing money invested wisely but, again, is different than simply “getting on Google” and deserves a post of it’s own.

So, please, before you spend your marketing moolah on dubious web presence claims, contact us and we’ll offer worthwhile advice on web presence, getting the biggest bang for your marketing buck and getting found by the people who want and need what you have to offer. You’ll be glad you did!

DownRiver Creates Web Presence…

You can have a website built at almost any price point. You can build a website for virtually nothing(and nothing is about what it’s going to be worth).
At DownRiver, we do more than create web sites; we’re creating your web presence. A powerful web presence, a web presence that generates the success you want, rarely happens by accident.
Web presence requires the use of specific techniques, with the proper tools and applied by a qualified practitioner with the correct knowledge.
The way the internet changes…
…building and maintaining web presence can be like a juggler spinning 9 plates atop 9 poles.
It’s not as easy as it looks!
If you’re here looking for quality service(s), we urge you to look around, do some more searching. Look into the millions of service providers, most of whom make grandiose promises of ease and instant success(we’re a little skeptical); then contact us with your questions, concerns, comments.

Internet Buzz

Bing-Bang-Brand
The new search engine from Microsoft with $80-$100million marketing budget…
Have you heard of it? You will. If you’re a DownRiver Group client, “Bing” has already heard of you and you likely appear(highly) in Bing results for the keyword/keyword phrases that your prospects use to search your niche.
Here’s more on Bing, on BusinessWeek.com.
GBase ~best kept secret
Long sitting in beta is Google Base, a listing service/application with an awesome potential. I’d suggest you do a product search with Google Base and consider if you could benefit from listing your product via this service.
And if you need/want help of course we’ll be here to help.
Safe Surfing ~BAD Bugs In The Web
There is yet another attack, crawling across the internet, as of late; the gumblar trojan, and this one is a horror show! For a full write-up on this little nasty, I recommend the Avast antivirus company blog post. It’s a very technical article but at the end of it is a statistic regarding infections of Avast antivirus users(which is why we use and recommend Avast products.

We’ve also installed a new Twitter application, TwitterTools, for which we have high expectations…
The plan is to have this sweet little widget update our Twitter feed automatically, saving us time while allowing us to reach out to an even more efficacious degree. IF it works(and we’re certain it will), it’s an excellent application of a free(there’s that word again) technology that increases our web presence and effectiveness!
On a side note, the Twitter-hype seems to be swinging to the negative side, to a degree; I hear many folk lambasting twitterers as narcissists and that may be true, to a degree. But the effectiveness as a social networking tool was borne out again this past week when Mir-Hossein Mousavi was able to “connect” with the outside world after the Iranian elections & subsequent shutdown of most networks by Iranian leaders. This is no political endorsement of any kind, simply a re-iteration of the usefulness of a freely-available tool.
Okay, here’s hoping we’ve set the dials properly!