Bits & Bytes

http://www.letmeknow.girlscouts.com

Ok.. last week we talked a little bit about getting a website before we ran out of time. Let’s revisit that discussion a little bit and see if we can shed a little more light on the subject. A few people commented on last week’s show and I was surprised how many people said they loved the history of the Internet segment we did. I really hesitated to do that because I thought no one would be as interested in such a geeky topic, so maybe we can do more of that kind of thing in the future. A lot of people also said, “you talked about what you need to have a site but why would I want one?” Here’s an article from Entrepreneur.com discussing this issue:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/gettingstarted/article65204.html

Any business can benefit from a website, and I’d go so far as to say any business will suffer without one. I’ll give you a personal example of this: a friend of mine, I won’t mention his name but it starts with an “L” and ends with an “eland Franklin” gave me an old tractor because that’s just the kind of guy he is. I went looking for some place to get it serviced and I looked through the phone book to find some places that might service the tractor for me. I know NOTHING about this kind of thing and I didn’t want to just call around places because I hate doing that. I don’t know why, I just do. So I was talking to Wade, our producer, about it a couple of weeks ago and he told me the name of someone who might be able to work on them, but he didn’t know their number. I tried to look them up in the phone book and couldn’t find them (although with a million phone books out there now, who knows who’s listed where anymore?). Well.. I did a quick search on the net and found that they have a website! The website gave me all the information I needed to decide that they were who I wanted to call to work on the tractor. So this small lawn mower shop got my business because I was able to look them up online. It’s not a big shop, by any means, but their site was professional enough and useful enough to help me decide to call them.

Our website of the week is SongFacts.com.  Check it out!