Along with the new year comes our new site! Hope you like it. And along with all this cleanup, it’s time once again to clean out my many tabs in Opera. I had been collecting resources for web site design because I wanted the relaunch of our site to go well. Here they are, in no particular order:

• 43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid
• 6 Things to Note Before Changing Your Site Design
• Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings
• Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored
• How to Use Your Web Analytics Software to Improve Your Website
• SEO Made Easy
• How To Create a Search Engine Friendly Website

I hope you can pick up some good info on these links – I know I did!

What do you think of our new site? We’re glad to hear your opinion in the comments.

Today we went from WordPress 1.5.1 to 2.0.2 – the upgrade was very easy and nothing bad happened, so yaaay!! Along with the blog upgrade I installed a subscribers-only plugin, which means I'll be posting the Web Bytes newsletter here as well as sending it along with your backup file. The benefit of posting the newsletter here is that it will be searchable and will include the links to the featured resources. Back issues have been posted and are available for your viewing pleasure. Simply click on "Web Bytes" under Browse by Category.

Current backup customers, get your subscription here. You'll receive an email with your password so be sure to give the correct email address. After verifying your  backup subscription, I'll upgrade your status to Contributor so you can see the past issues of Web Bytes. This also gives you the opportunity to post to our blog – we welcome your  insight on issues of the day.

If you don't have a subscription to our backup service, please consider getting one.  The value of not losing your web site can far outweigh the small cost of getting the software.

To give more reliable and timely service, we’ve made a big change to the backup program. Now it updates itself when there’s a new version! To take advantage of this service you must have a subscription to the backup service. Also note this is optional – you don’t have to subscribe to automatic updates (though we highly recommend it). I’ll be updating our current subscribers over the coming week. As always, we would love to have your comments and suggestions for improvement.

I’ve been working on updating the site content, which of course, is an ongoing concern of any web site. The improvement is great, in terms of describing what we do/the problems we can solve. There’s still more, but now I’ll concentrate on learning a bit more about marketing, writing a sales letter, stuff like that. I’m sure as I go through those things, the site content will be updated, too. Do you have any marketing pointers, success stories, or tips you would like to share? We appreciate any and all feedback and if we use your tip, we’ll feature it in one of our Bytes newsletters, giving you full credit, of course! Thanks in advance.

We’ve added a new feature to our site – polls! I read an interesting story about popup advertising and decided I wanted to know if it’s really a problem for the average person. So, if you can spare a moment, please vote in the current poll. Thanks!

We’ve updated the web site! Someday we’ll make this blog look like our site but not yet since the design probably isn’t final. Yesterday I got inspired to work on the design (I wanted to do something FUN)… found some good stuff at GRSites.com (the background) and I created the shiny text from a Photoshop tutorial. Then I spent most of a day trying to make a shiny bar for the navigation and just couldn’t get the right look. Then again, I’m a programmer, not a designer, so it’ll have to do for now, until I get inspired again. Feel free to leave your comments – we would appreciate your feedback.