Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
    I am also call’d No-more, Too-late, Farewell;

~Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “A Superscription“

We have made the difficult decision to wind down SearchViz.

When I say this was a difficult decision, I mean it. It’s especially difficult because it’s the synthesis of a personal decision and a business decision. Demand for our services was as vigorous as ever, far more so than when we opened our doors. But our demands on each other, two partners in a small agency trying to mature into a boutique, concierge vendor that actually helped to make the Web better, were equally intense and ultimately unsustainable.

It is my great disappointment that you never heard Helen‘s voice through her typed words on these pages. You certainly saw them in the original art she produced for each of my posts and in the design she created for our site as a whole, somehow creating an elegant visual brand out of one of the worst names (SearchViz was a domain name I had bought years ago when I realized how dominant SEO was going to become; apparently I never said it aloud) in the history of business. She could have had an entire blog about markup or stylesheet disasters, or how to build a better mousetrap with Drupal, or a series of posts on why something that might look good to the casual observer was an accessibility train wreck under the hood. Or pretty much anything else that came up in our near-daily banter. So any of you who took the time to look at our site but weren’t a customer probably never met Helen. And that’s a shame.

We serendipitously become colleagues at SouthComm, working on a great team that started to unravel when our group leader resigned, and she ultimately responded to my pleading to walk away from a steady paycheck to do something audacious in a down economy. From where we sat, one would not have known there was a down economy. From day one, we had enough business and qualified leads to keep the lights on and then some. Frustratingly, we left far too many leads hanging because of our over-deliberative approach to adding capacity and preferring to offer high quality service to existing customers, even when it gnawed at our margins.

In our just over two years, though, we (mostly Helen) did some great work that deserves a little more attention, and there won’t be too many opportunities for additional celebration, so we might as well do it here:

• built Ashley Judd‘s first ever official website
• created a website for bestselling author Adam Ross who, with our help, catapulted into the top of the SERPs ahead of that CSI guy
• reinvented the online presence, front-end and back-end, for BookPage, where you should go discover your next great book
• enhanced a great collaborative project now maintained at Perkins School for the Blind called WonderBaby
• launched a completely redesigned and rebuilt Who2, one of the Web’s longest-lived sites with a blog that is and will continue to be worth your time

We worked on a number of other great projects with a group of customers that I think will be as difficult to reprise as our team at SouthComm where Helen and I met. To our customers, many of whom were with us from start to finish, I can only say thank you. It is our hope that our work created mutual and lasting value.

In parting, I will confide that Helen is the only person I would let build a website for me. I’ve never met anyone who understood the complex relationship between visual design and the Web—everything from end-user interfaces to editorial workflow to the semantic underpinnings derived from the raw markup to layered PSDs—better than she. She is also a Drupal expert. And has many other hidden talents besides. She likes to make things, and if you ever have the opportunity to have her make something for you, you should avail yourself of it. I can only hope that she doesn’t wind up too busy with whatever she does next to be available to work on my next crazy idea. If she is, then my next crazy idea will probably stall indefinitely.

For a while, anyway, you can still contact us through the website. But in the spirit of SearchViz, if you’d like to find us individually, we recommend that you just look for us.

Looking back on the early days, we never did make too much headway making it to the top of the SERPs for [nashville seo]. We got too busy with other things. And now we’ll head off to keep ourselves busy with even otherer things.

In the past, I have to admit, I was a skeptic. I had long put off joining or participating in NTC because it seemed, especially in my younger days, too much a tool of non-technology industries that rely on technology workers as pure IT worker bees and not enough of an innovator for technology startups. And, frankly, I don’t feel that initiatives like Techville actually put us on the map. I kept expecting to see workshops that facilitated explorations of the technologies that our entrepreneurs were leveraging to get their businesses off the ground. Or internship opportunities, like the one I lucked into at Telalink while I was in college, that connected Nashville students to Nashville-area companies, providing an opportunity to keep talent local in the long run. Finally, I remain concerned that Digital Nashville, possibly taking advantage of opportunities in social media partly missed by NTC, has muddied the waters further.

That said, as with my sideline civic pursuits, I decided it was finally time to do something about it. At the beginning of 2011, SearchViz joined NTC. Our principals attended the membership luncheon. I’ve expressed an interest in working on the T3 Committee. And I’m impressed with what I’ve seen from the collaboration with the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.

By way of explanation of why this matters to me, I think it’s worth exploring my professional history. I’ve worked for an internet service provider (Telalink) that was successfully sold before the dotcom collapse, a startup application services provider, an ecommerce subsidiary of a major book retailer, and a media company. I also co-founded a technology services company (whose first contract was with a major email marketing company and which recruited a partner from outside of Tennessee) that is now a successful SaaS marketing tools platform. And I’m now one of the principals at an agency in the design/development and inbound marketing space. In each of the cases, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the technology talent that was available, but it frequently seemed unplanned. Throughout my career, I’ve discovered a trend toward negative unemployment among my peers with technology skills. Whenever anyone asks me if I know any programmers looking for work, the answer has always been no. I’ve watched my friends embedded at larger companies or starting growing companies struggle to find great people. I’ve written before about Nashville’s limitations as a true technology corridor. And whenever I think about how we can grow our agency or how I could start a technology-driven business, I get nervous when thinking about talent.

With more than a decade of work in technology under my belt, I think it’s worth weighing in on the qualities the NTC board should be considering in candidates. Here are the qualities I’d seek in an ideal candidate:

• a sense of balance between the needs of heavy industry to have great IT shops with the needs of technologists to pursue their 20% time projects as viable businesses in the role of entrepreneurs
• a plan to ensure that our academic corridor (Vanderbilt, MTSU, Fisk, TSU) is appropriately connected to our technology corridor
• a recognition that post-secondary education might not always be the pathway pursued by talented tech entrepreneurs
• possession of a talent scout’s mindset, being willing to talk to high schools, colleges, universities, recruiters, and industry to understand who the individuals are around whom great teams are or could be built
• an ambition to make Nashville a great attractor for technology talent
• an awareness of quality of life beyond the basic mission of NTC as a factor in talent recruitment and retention
• a willingness to be regionally minded, as we see the mayors caucus address initiatives on a regional level and leverage the experience of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce
• an interest in pursuing close working relationships with the IT divisions of local and state governments, as well as their ECD operations
• an innate passion or ability to develop passions for contemporary technologies and their deployment through NTC as proofs of concept, through web, mobile, and beyond
• an appropriate embrace and skepticism of both free and open source software and proprietary software
• a little black book that grows from day one, creating an opportunity for feedback from departed alumni (e.g., Luke Kanies)
• a combination of actual, deep knowledge of technology and management experience

In my view, all successful companies of the future, those that outperform, will have some internal innovation engine that is based on software or related development. Nashville needs to plan for that future now.

Finally, thanks to Tod for his work (which included engaging staff who successfully encouraged us to join and who have been perpetually helpful ever since) on these important issues, and best of luck to him on his next steps. I regret that I’m so new to the NTC as a member that I didn’t have the opportunity to discuss any of these thoughts with him as he sought to shape the organization.

I’ll look forward to seeing and hearing the thoughts of others on what is most needed next at NTC.

“Wait,” you might be asking, “What does Amazon.com have to do with third-party website hosting?” For those not in the industry, Amazon Web Services is the one truly exemplary implementation of the cloud I’ve seen. It’s a nearly infinite amount of disk space and bandwidth paid for on an on-demand basis. In short, Amazon.com built their own amazing internal infrastructure so well that they were able to productize it effectively. It’s a game-changing service.

One nice aspect of the modern era of web hosting for sites that get a lot of traffic is that I no longer have to spend time in data centers installing more RAM or moving servers around. To use AWS, I fire up a web browser. And possibly, but not necessarily, a shell.

Honestly, though, as cool as the cloud is from a resource management perspective, it isn’t appreciably different in terms of points of failure from traditional server environments. It might be someday, but right now it’s possible for lightning to strike and cause an outage. There’s still latency when traversing the full internet (say, from a data center in Northern Virginia to a data center in Palo Alto), which makes true geographically independent redundancy difficult.

Even Google occasionally experiences technical difficulty with products that spent 6 years in beta. Like Gmail. Even worse, data-eating software bugs do still get released into the wild.

So while you might not want to run your website and keep all of your email on your personal computer, having a good backup strategy is still a good idea. And if your business depends on your site being up, having a strategy for rapid mirroring from unhosted data (i.e., an ability to switch hosts completely if necessary, possibly from cold storage) is an even better idea.

For the moment, we’re still waiting to be able to discover great books again…

A few years ago, when debating pricing for a web project that involved a mix of design and development, I wound up on the losing end of the discussion when the account executive concluded, “It’s just a website.” I’ve also been in countless discussions with managers (none of whom have any true technical experience) where they set the expectations for a project (both theirs and mine) by asserting, “That should be easy.” And I’ve also been at the end of the assembly line of idea factories, where the non-technical people hold a brainstorming session and enthusiastically present me with all of them because they’re all good.

One thing that has long appealed to me about information technology and software development is that it is possible to do just about anything. It is possible to implement all those good ideas. The hitch to that as an applied technologist is that it makes it very easy to say “yes” to the question, “Can we do that?” But that doesn’t have any bearing on the answer to, “Should we do that?” or the similarly troublesome, “We need that by next week.”

I’d like to take a little bit of time to explore appropriate expectations for web and software development for non-practitioners who will be responsible for managing them. First and foremost, it’s okay and probably best to accept that web projects are difficult to build and difficult to manage.

I would imagine that 1% of web developers are the sort that have a rich grasp of everything that drives a website, from operating system to database to programming language to interface. Maybe 5% are the sort that can hack great code for years on end just for you. Chances are that you don’t have one working for you, and chances are that the agency building your website doesn’t either. This will complicate things slightly, but it won’t make them impossible.

Let’s remind ourselves of what a website is: it’s a collection of documents and elements (like Ajax modules and so forth) that, when requested by a browser (whether Web, mobile, or other), deliver markup (often some variant of HTML) that can be rendered in a predictable way.

Honestly, despite starting my life in the industry almost 15 years ago working for an internet service provider (ISP), I’ve never maintained a personal website. Actually, while in college, as a result of working as a consultant for the computer science lab, I wound up with some web space that I used for a simple personal site that vanished when I graduated. And that site was a collection of static HTML documents that I edited manually (probably with vi).

At it’s most basic, a web page looks like this:


<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello, World!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Hello, world!</p>
  </body>
</html>


Easy, right?! It’s just a website!

(Here’s an aside. We maintain this blog in WordPress, which, for a robust blogging platform, still makes it surprisingly difficult to include examples of markup because of the aggressive desire for its editor to render everything. So I had to include a bunch of individual HTML entities to get the above example to show up correctly.)

Sure, it’s just a website. But it doesn’t have any images or links, it’s just one page, and I haven’t thought about how I’m going to manage it. I don’t know what the domain name is or where I’m going to host it. I don’t know whether it’s going to be a static HTML document or the output of a dynamic document (e.g., PHP). I haven’t thought about whether referencing the document reveals whether it is static or anything else about its implementation (e.g., does it live at /hello-world.html, /hello-world.php, or /hello-world with the help of server rules?). I don’t have an update schedule or anything else. And every website is different.

Let’s survey the common types of website that exist out there (and if you think I’m omitting anything or oversimplifying, please feel free to elaborate in the comments):

• brochure: A mostly static site with relatively few (< 100) pages designed to present a person, place, thing, or idea with a focus on basic text and image content with occasional opportunities for rich media.
• blog: A content-oriented site typically presented with posts in reverse chronological order and often providing visibility into most popular posts, tags/labels, and other ways of considering the content.
• content: A rich content site like a news, government, or academic site that is constantly producing new content, often not in a simple, steady stream like a blog.
• e-commerce: A site wherein any content is a pre-cursor to a financial transaction of some kind, whether a donation or a purchase.

Our site, for instance, is basically a brochure paired with a blog. I expect that someday there might be e-commerce considerations. Depending on what happens, there could be a content site in there somewhere.

All of the above types likely include some variety of form, which is the essence of interactivity built into the primitive Web. A contact form, an order form, a comment form, a rich text editor (which might need to be submitted to publish a news story, for instance). And forms invite the first of our series of complicated decisions: What happens to the output of the form?

Form submissions could be emailed. They could be emailed to a single email address or to multiple email addresses. They could be stored in a database. They could trigger a server-side action of some kind. They can do any and all of the above.

And Web interactivity involves all kinds of corner cases. Let’s say we’re considering a limited inventory retail operation. And let’s say it involves an online shopping cart. And let’s say I, a potential customer come along and, perhaps unknowingly, put the last item in my shopping cart. And then I remember that I have to run an errand before the place I need to get to closes for the day, and I leave. Maybe I even leave my browser window open. And then you come along. And you were looking for the item I just put in my shopping cart. Has the merchant considered how his or her site will behave in this scenario? After all, it’s just a website.

And all this is to say nothing of security considerations. After testing performance for a while, Google recently decided to make secure communication the default for Gmail. Not just for authenticating but for the entire session. For transmitting each message body. Google is judicious about its use of secure connections across its services. I’ve often wondered why secure connections aren’t the default for all web-based authentication from financial services to FTP.

Let’s get into the basics of what it takes to build a website:

Domain Name, Registrars, and DNS

The first thing you really need for a website is your domain name. Until Yahoo! shut down GeoCities, you could go there to get a free site. You can try Google Sites, but it’s not quite the same. And if you’re just doing a blog and you don’t care about owning this basic asset, you can do something like Blogger or WordPress, which will give you something like justawebsite.blogspot.com or justawebsite.wordpress.com. How do you do this? Well, geez. We’re just trying to pick a domain name, and we’ve opened a can of worms. Because a domain name gets us tied up in the Domain Name System (DNS). So first we need a registrar, and then we need to make sure that we can configure DNS appropriately to work with our web hosting environment (see next item).

Web Hosting

So you’ve registered your domain name. Now you need to make it so that when someone types in justawebsite.com and it successfully resolves to an IP address that the server at that IP address is listening, probably on port 80, and is ready to serve pages. I’ve mentioned previously that we host with A2 Hosting.

Shared Web Hosting

Most websites just need shared web hosting, which basically means a bunch of other websites about the same size (disk space, traffic) as yours are using shared resources. Which is fine.

I used to host some sites with TextDrive, which became Joyent, which seems no longer to offer easily understood web hosting services (despite TextDrive at one time having been a semi-official Ruby on Rails hosting service).

The two other major web hosts that I’ve seriously considered using in the past are DreamHost and pair Networks. I’ve also recently evaluated Media Temple for WordPress hosting. Yoast seems to like WestHost for WordPress hosting, but that could be helped by their paying him to like it.

Managed Hosting

If, however, you’re doing something where you expect to be doing a lot of development or managing a number of services that require a dedicated server, you probably want a managed hosting solution like Rackspace or Tilted Planet. In these cases, you get access to a server or servers on a network that should be reliably managed, and you can get various packages and levels of management in the event that you don’t want to hire a system administrator (and, unless you’re doing something very innovative, why should you?).

Based on the coming of the cloud and the maturity of managed hosting and dedicated (and virtual servers), I would never encourage any but the most ambitious of enterprises to buy a piece of enterprise hardware. Someone else has already hired several sysadmins better than yours and is making the process of administration more efficient than you ever could.

Content Management Systems

Content management systems (and frameworks) are web software packages that typically give you a rich text editor, some basic formatting rules and templates, and let you run wild adding pages, posts, widgets, and the like.

In recent years, I’ve developed the most familiarity with Drupal and WordPress. Both have some maturity as platforms and both have vibrant developer communities that make support possible if not always reliable (especially as the ecosystem frays around the edges, sometimes even with popular modules and plug-ins). WordPress came to prominence as a blogging platform, but it’s now mature enough to be able to support brochure + blog sites if not outright content sites, although I still think Drupal is a better fit for full-featured content sites.

We’re about to begin work with a bastardized version of Joomla, and a professional acquaintance recently suggested that I take a look at MODx. I’ve spent a long time admiring TextPattern, although I’ve never used it. And I used to want to try Bricolage because it was built by default on PostgreSQL. For some reason, a number of local designers seem to enjoy paying for ExpressionEngine.

We also have done some projects that leverage Sitemason, a locally developed web-based content management system and hosting platform. While still a little more dotcom than Web 2.0 just because of the history of the company (where I worked as we launched into the dotcom implosion) and because of the dynamic nature of open systems (or closed systems that happen to be named Google), Sitemason continues to innovate quietly. In recent years, besides building incredibly innovative JavaScript libraries and a brilliant database abstraction, they also recently moved their entire hosting operation into the cloud, leveraging Amazon’s EC2.

Competing locally with Sitemason is Bondware. I can’t give Bondware awards for administrative interface, but I will say that they’re one of few products I’ve used where the Web and email platforms fit together nicely.

Which brings up a point I haven’t raised yet: the successful integration of a website among all the evolving marketing tools from email to social. There don’t seem to be too many people creating killer apps allowing small and medium-sized businesses to jump in and be truly in control of their inbound marketing. But that’s a topic for another time.

Blogging Platforms

What if you just want to blog? Well, we’ve already mentioned Blogger and WordPress. You could get a little funky and try something like Chyrp, which is pretty but carries the caveat of being a sole developer project.

E-Commerce

The first thing you’ll need if you’re going to build an e-commerce site is a merchant account. Then you’ll need to connect it to a payment gateway. Within the last decade, PayPal purchased Payflow, and CyberSource purchased Authorize.Net. I’m honestly not sure what other major players are even in this space. BancCard, a Nashville-based company, plays nicely with both Authorize.Net and PayPal.

I’ve used both osCommerce and Zen Cart, and I came away unimpressed. I’ve also done custom PayPal integrations, which were fine except that they were custom.

It’s recently been suggested to me that I give FoxyCart some consideration, and it looks like a worthy contender for any upcoming from-scratch e-commerce implementations. Also, somehow it had completely escaped my attention that they’re a Nashville-based company.

Custom Development

Here’s my position on custom development. It’s not all bad, but it should generally be the province of someone who is actually developing something innovative. If what you want is a 3-page instead of a 2-page pipeline for your online marketplace, you should be leveraging an existing e-commerce solution. If, however, you’ve got something you think is worthy of a patent, like single-click shopping, then develop your own.

We try not to do a lot of custom development. We try to strengthen standards for existing content management solutions by, first, relying on them and then, if necessary, extending them. We generally aren’t in the business of projects; we’re in the business of process.

But if you’re going to do it, even rolling your own involves some amount of choice. I’m only going to cover free and open source platforms, but I know there are plenty of sites out there implemented in any of ColdFusion, ASP, etc. Otherwise, popular choices include PHP, Perl, Ruby, and Python. Of course, Google recently unveiled their own programming language, Go, so who knows.

With every language, it seems, comes a framework—Ruby on Rails or Symfony—which allegedly make development easier.

Maintenance

Wow. You finally did it. You launched justawebsite.com! Now what?

Well, if you’re not using fully managed hosting and instead you’re managing your own LAMP stack, you’ll need to keep up with Linux kernel patches, GNU/Linux distribution patches, Apache (or equivalent patches), database patches, and programming language/framework patches. If you’re leveraging a content management system, you’ll need to keep up with patches for the core system as well as for plug-ins/modules.

Generally, you can track security patches, but if you let your system suffer too much bit rot, APIs might change out from under you, so that a must-have feature becomes beyond reach.

And, of course, you’ll have dev, staging, and live versions of your site for testing with version control as necessary for any custom development.

Maybe we should just stick with hello-world.html…

Other Considerations

Recently, SparkFun had their Free Day on the same day that Google launched the Nexus One. Each site suffered. Chris Anderson wryly tweeted, “Google’s servers can’t keep up with Nexus demand; Free Day brings down Sparkfun. It’s 2010–why do we still have these scaling problems?” It’s a good question. To me, the cloud reached adolescence when Amazon EC2 came out of beta. It will reach adulthood when the elasticity is dynamic and demand-driven rather than reactionary on the part of admins who frantically allocate new instances as traffic swamps a site.

The End

My point in writing all this is to give some guidance to non-technical project managers and executives to remind them that asking for the moon is likely to get you the moon from your web development team, but it is likely to be late and over budget. And I also included a number of the individual technologies I’ve had exposure to, either directly or through my network of IT professionals in the hopes that webdevs everywhere will help me refine this post, which might take on a constantly evolving life outside the scope of the blog depending on response.

When you launch a website, you’re not completing a project; you’re kicking off a process that will live for the life of the site. It involves ensuring that the site itself doesn’t rely on moving parts that can’t be maintained. It involves ensuring that if the site is bound by a temporal dimension that it provides a user experience consistent with the passage of time. It involves ensuring that both the user and search experiences are continuously refreshed in order to be optimized.

Over time, my hope is that SearchViz actually improves the Web slightly. Both by helping create standards-compliant websites with an emphasis on both user and search experience and by working to ease the process of building and managing websites, whether by contributing to free and open source software projects like WordPress and Drupal or by building our own solutions for management of the resources required to operate a site. If you have any suggestions, or you’d like to participate as a customer, let us know.

Obviously, I’ve missed a world of options, but that’s what the comments section is for. Let me know what I’ve overlooked.

That is to say, social media in general is yet another tool in the ever-expanding marketing toolkit. And most companies that have demonstrated notable success with social media are doing so because they have freed members of their staff who have engaging personalities to engage with customers or leads on behalf of their employers; not because of some new corporate strategy that has grokking Twitter at its core. Social media is like Web 2.0-lite. It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s a fad. It doesn’t really require any heavy lifting to get started. But that’s part of the problem. Or can be.

Nashville (really, JTMarCom) also recently hosted Chris Brogan. Given the level of excitement, I leveraged technology and watched from afar (somehow saving myself both the trip and the $40, although passing up my opportunity to get a copy of Trust Agents). And I’ll admit: I’m not exactly sure what I saw. Chris is a guru, which means he spoke in the equivalent of self-help jargon for digital marketers. His performance seemed remarkably similar to a sermon by a charismatic pastor as much as that of someone transferring valuable skills or knowledge.

Chris seems like a nice guy who’s doing quite well for himself. In fact, my guess is he’s the rare social media guru who actually gets it to the point of building real value for businesses and other organizations. But having followed his engagement with the Twittersphere, I’m not sure why I would want to pay him to do anything for my business. I’m not critical of his ideas or approach, which I think are generally positive and which have some overlap with my own approach to social media; I’m critical of the worshipful nature of Nashville’s geek community that someone from on high came and left us without a lot of added value. Maybe someone who attended will let me know that they learned something profound about engaging socially in a business context. But I’ll really be impressed if any attendees of Social Fresh experience a return on their investment. Just as I’ll be impressed if Social Fresh delivers attendees insight into how they might measure such a return. I’d recommend starting with Twitter 101 for Business.

Last year, having just opened the doors to SearchViz, I considered whether I should go to BarCamp Nashville. I reviewed the agenda, looking for learning, networking, or recruiting opportunities. In the end, I selectively went to presentations of a couple of people I knew were doing good work in the SEO space because so much of the agenda looked like marketing grain where I couldn’t separate wheat from chaff. I regret having missed Marcus Whitney’s presentation, which sounds like it was trying to say, “If I knew this was all we’d get, I’d never have helped bring BarCamp to Nashville in the first place!”

Fortunately, Marcus wasn’t just whining; he was actively working to help take Nashville to the next level with Enterprise LAMP. I’ve wound up a little too high up the stack to have been able to justify pushing my entrepreneurial schedule around to have been able to attend, but in my opinion, events like this are the ones Nashville needs to see more of. Events leveraging real-world experience and expertise with lessons for both enterprise and entrepreneurs.

Marcus cut his teeth in technology leadership at Emma and has achieved true success in getting his new web startup, Moontoast, off the ground. And his efforts, I hope, make the process easier for the rest of us who see ourselves as technology entrepreneurs.

I guess I have three primary points:

1. Fly-in gurus who aren’t here to do in-depth skills-building aren’t going to put Nashville’s technology community on the path to sustainable engineering success.
2. Unconferences, where expertise is actually democratized out, don’t give us any indication of who our actual experts are.
3. Social media is most useful if it’s built on a strong foundation of deep technology entrepreneurship that extends into the executive suite.

I write all of this not to pop the Nashville geek community’s balloon of enthusiasm but to help us realize that it might not be a balloon at all but rather a bubble. We’re a healthcare, entertainment, and finance hub among other things, but we’re not really a technology center. And we can’t all be social media experts and expect to be. How many Nashville-area web or software startups can you name that don’t have their basis in music or healthcare?

Here’s my woefully short napkin list:

• Eviesays
• Moontoast
• Raven

Personally, I think Sitemason and Emma are too mature to count as web startups. Please leave others in the comments.

And this is not to discount achievements that are being made in music or healthcare; but it’s to suggest that those sectors, not our technology sector, are driving innovation in the web technology space.

Fortunately, a few of our agencies recognize that the path to success for business in the 21st century will mean having engineering expertise involved. ICG Link developed their 111 suite of tools. Sitening is the team behind Raven, and they have engineered a number of other tools. And here I distinguish between custom developing unsustainable solutions for customers and developing tools that will be maintained across the life of the agency for fun, for internal use, and possibly for external use (the 37signals model). And CentreSource was recently recognized for having Nashville’s best programmer on staff.

I think that the most successful companies for the remainder of the century will be those that are capable of innovating in software. I.e., those that recognize that having development capacity whose expertise is geared toward business interests will thrive. This is true of content companies (where, surprisingly, Gannett, the dinosaur at tennessean.com seems to be outpacing SouthComm, the fresh-faced media startup), retail, services, etc. Just as with print, non-digital companies will never die, but those with more innovative ways to develop new business will not just keep pace; they’ll set the pace.

Managing web projects is an extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming prospect. It’s better conceived of as a development challenge than as a design challenge. And customers are better served by agencies that leverage existing frameworks and APIs than by those that hand off a pile of hodgepodge PHP for an application that starts suffering bit rot as soon as the vendor agreement is concluded.

I think there’s actually a lot of room in the marketplace for an agency that is exclusively geared toward developing sustainable solutions built on solid technology foundations. Leveraging free and open source software (FOSS) would make this about as cost effective as software development gets, and the services that could be bundled with such an agency would both add value to customers and be profitable for vendors. Optaros seems to have built some success with this model.

And I think what creates so much space is the digital divide as considered in the marketplace rather than society at large. Finding a trusted technology adviser is possibly even more difficult than finding a trusted technology practitioner. Who could assist with bridging this divide?

The Nashville Technology Council has lumbered for years as the voice of institutional and enterprise technology in the area. Somehow, despite not really being a part of the target audience, neither the Nashville Linux Users Group nor the irrational exuberance of the dotcom-1.0 era (when everyone suddenly realized they were web designers/developers) supplanted it or created an alternative outlet focused on LAMP-oriented entrepreneurs. But now it has a competitor in Digital Nashville, which seems to be speaking to the irrationally exuberant online marketing community. As I consider membership in both organizations for 2010, I’m laboring to understand why both exist, and I’m not sure either has discovered how to speak effectively to Nashville-area engineers and true geeks.

In many ways, this post is an extension of thoughts Luke Kanies left with Milt Capps (N.B. the comments section) as he relocated Reductive Labs and its flagship product Puppet to Portland as he capitalized it. There simply weren’t enough engineer-level geeks in Middle Tennessee to help him get where he wanted to go.

Though the Mac/Windows/Linux/BSD and Emacs/vi debates continue to rage, I’m constantly amazed that there is less agreement over everything from best hosting provider to best cloud solution to best content management system to best source code management system in the web development community. There’s probably neither time nor interest in creating groups around every framework that gets off the ground, but maybe a content management framework group would be useful. And maybe Enterprise LAMP will continue the process of tech-oriented meetups they began last year to keep people focused on deep tech.

As a computer scientist by degree, I am made anxious by reports that people are not pursuing academically rigorous pathways into IT. Yes, Google and search have made troubleshooting a breeze, but reviewing the online documentation for PHP is not the same as having an understanding of how to plan for scalability, how to design a database, how to manage and deploy releases (including how to roll back a release), how to ensure portability (by vendor, by platform, by version), and many other difficult problems (some of which, to be sure are as much project management as software development, but the interplay is significant between the two).

Engineering builds value; marketing lets people know about it. So who am I, at the helm of a young inbound marketing agency, to be spouting off about the value of engineering? Well, as a developer by background who has only ever worked deep in databases, on glue code, or around the periphery of actual software, maybe I write all this with a sense of longing. One of my goals for SearchViz in 2010, in fact, is to have at least one project under development in what I hope becomes a vibrant laboratory for web development. I remain, ultimately, a web developer entrepreneur who hopes to be able to build a true web startup or at least a collection of useful or interesting tools. For now, though, I’m someone who believes strongly in the principles of engineering that apply to success in web design and search engine optimization (SEO). The best web designers are secretly programmers who simply think about programming problems differently. And the principles I’m talking about include analytics (evidence), development (e.g., integration with frameworks, new modules/plug-ins/add-ons), and troubleshooting (debugging). So I need Nashville to have great developers as much as anyone.

For anyone who’s made it this far, I think one of the best essays for anyone interested in Nashville’s success as a technology center is Joel Spolsky’s article, “Finding Great Developers.” (In fact, if you do anything with the software end of technology and you’re not reading Joel on Software, you should be.) I offer it knowing that I could never get hired by Joel. I’m not focused enough on being a great hacker. I developed a curiosity but not a deep passion that could get me to true greatness in the last decade because my curiosity is too expansive. At this point, I’ve ranged the stack from system administrator to database administrator to database programmer to system programmer to web developer to internet strategist and marketer. I wound up a generalist, not a specialist. But we need specialists, and we need to be able to bridge the gaps. And I think if we stay trapped in the realm of gurus and unconferences we risk not recognizing that we don’t have enough great developers in Nashville. Or, if they’re here, we risk not leveraging their expertise to develop the next generation. Here’s another great essay by Paul Graham on how to start a startup.

Bottom line: I support the people who are working on Nashville Geek Breakfast, BarCamp, Social Fresh, Digital Nashville, and the Nashville Technology Council, but I want us all to recognize that we need to find a way to engage, recruit, retain, and reveal the great developers among and around us. We need marketers, and we need to be able to engage non-practitioners, but we also need experts and developers to give us something to market. I look forward to continuing to participate in this effort.

I offer all this as constructive criticism in hopes that the Nashville geek community will find new opportunities for collaboration and sharing of best practices as well as a profound technological curiosity that elevate us beyond having our enthusiasm constrained by events that amount to little more than online marketing self-help.

I thought this was worth remarking on for a couple of reasons:

1. The novelty of getting a letter from Google telling you you’re one of their favorite places makes for a neat moment and a nice picture.
2. Google has been pretty explicit about their favorite places being those that achieved a certain level of activity in Google Local Business Center.

Will McLemore, proprietor, is an enterprising fellow and had signed up for Google Local Business Center well before Get Found Friday (and well before he was a customer, in fact). His business is constantly selling things, but it’s not a store. It’s not the kind of place that gets a lot of retail foot traffic. In short, it doesn’t fit the profile of a lot of other local businesses, some of which I’ve worked with, that seem like more natural results of a Google Maps search or even just universal search results that include maps.

So we’re both interested in what put him over the top. It’s possible that having a maturing business that has been pretty smart about the Web and search for its duration meant that just being an early adopter of Google Local Business Center has given him more exposure. It certainly makes for an interesting Google Analytics challenge, as I look to see whether queries like [nashville auction] can be correlated meaningfully with the numbers mentioned in the letter for people who “found” McLemore Auction and then people who requested more information. Unfortunately, both seem like statistics that Google keeps to themselves.

Now Will has a barcode on his door. It’ll be interesting to see whether anyone scans it. And even more interesting to see what Google does with the results.

To my mind, if I’m focused on generating relevance and avoiding penalties for my customers, section 5.3 of Google’s TOS has relevance:

5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.

And a statement in their webmaster guidelines confirms my right to be suspicious, especially on behalf of my paying customers:

Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

So here’s a question: Is it possible to create a disclaimer or other indicator of certified white hat toolkits? Would it even matter without a more open review of toolkit source code? Should there be an independent SEO certification authority of some kind, and would SEOs even trust it? Or would Google (and other search engines) consent to creating a standard badge that a data (or other relevant) license of some kind exists between the two parties?

To other people in this space: Does it matter at all to you whether services, many of which are probably charging you money, are operating legally? Do you have some mechanism I’m missing for identifying toolkits that are thoroughly white hat?

Consequentially, I wonder what the ramifications are for the companies that are building black hat toolkits. With the rise of cloud computing (e.g., Amazon EC2) and IPv6 (and, thus, essentially unlimited/untraceable IPs), can Google and the other major search engines even identify SERP scrapers and the like?

I’ve heard tell (can’t find a quotation at the moment) that Matt Cutts is dismissive of scrapers as any sort of threat to Google (presumably in the context of bandwidth as the scrapers hit their servers), but I don’t know whether that means there is any kind of internal effort to track SERP scrapers. I’m personally more interested in whether they could wind up creating a cascading penalty if it were determined that SEOs were using a toolkit that was in flagrant violation of TOS, such that sites being tracked by an SEO wound up suffering.

A bigger social question: Does the ease with which TOSes and copyrights can be violated online make us all likelier to be criminals? Or is it justified as online civil disobedience?

Here are the criteria:

• Your business must be independently owned and located in Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County.
• Your business cannot have more than two locations.
• Your business cannot have more than 50 full-time employees.

Our focus in this promotion is helping small, locally owned business that are building their brand get found. Being listed in Google Local Business Center is one of many important steps a business—particularly in retail or restaurants—can take to get found by potential customers. And it improves the search experience, too. A customer might find out that you exist, and might even learn your address. But are you making your hours of business easily available to them? Are you learning how people found you? You should be.

Search and search engines (including variants from the general purpose heavyweights, like Twitter Search) are the Yellow Pages of the 21st century, and we want you to be listed.

And before you know-it-alls protest, yes we know that Google Local Business Center is a free service that anyone can sign up for. But we also know that some businesses are just getting their online presence off the ground and might not be as familiar with the Web and how to leverage it as you are, smartypants. We want them to get found, too, okay? And we want to ensure they put their best foot (and information) forward as they get started. And if more local businesses sign up on their own and discover how to leverage the dashboard, then more the better!

We look forward to supporting our independent and local business community. Sign up today!

Even if you don’t qualify or if you’re already listed in Google Local Business Center but want to learn more about the process of getting found, please contact us. We offer services that aren’t free, too.

Now, SEO is only one part of the SearchViz approach to getting found through inbound marketing, but it’s an important one. In a recent video in the excellent Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel, Matt answers the question of how he would run his own online marketing company. While he doesn’t give the million dollar secret to SEO success, he suggests that reputation and transparency are reasonable hypothetical foundations for good services. And that’s something we generally strive for at SearchViz. We’re not in the habit of doing things we’re uncomfortable telling our customers about, just as we’re not in the habit of doing things where we have to explain to the customer, “Look, we did this special for you, but it’s… unconventional. So we wanted to let you know this is how we did it, but don’t tell anyone, okay?” In short, when it comes to SEO, we’re not trying to game the system; we’re trying to ensure demonstration of relevance.

If some SEOs seem to wear black hats or practice dark arts, it’s likely because search is a black box. The proprietary algorithms used by the major search engines are one of the primary domains of market competition. If Google itself were a truly open system, it would be possible to tailor sites exactly to the algorithm, regardless of actual relevance. Viagra spammers could likely adapt to an open algorithm to ensure that they did well in queries for [art museum]. An interesting question is whether an open search algorithm would increase or decrease relevance in search results. To my knowledge, no one has attempted to create an open search algorithm that has achieved any sort of liquidity. So because search is currently proprietary, SEO research and development frequently yields short-term tactical advantages for those quickest to market with reverse engineered discoveries about the algorithms employed by the search engines. As these tactics become disseminated, their value decreases. With standard search engine results pages (SERPs) containing 10 results for most search engines, each keyword or search phrase has a supply/demand problem based on relevance.

We’re not really interested in the black box churn. To us, SEO is akin to an ideology, but it’s one that is evidence-based while still taking a long view. Here at SearchViz, our strategy is relevance, and our tactics include mostly widely known best practices designed to highlight relevance for the search engines. We’re not going to charge you to stuff a bunch of useless paid directories with your site, and we’re not going to promote articles about your site to sites you’ve never heard of unless they’re high-quality sources of information relevant to your site. What we will do is ensure that you have quality semantic structure that matches your content and markup that matches the recommendations of the search engines. We will make sure that you’re in quality directories and have quality inbound links that reflect the best relationships you already enjoy but might not be fully leveraging. We will keep up with the practices recommended by search engines and leveraged by SEOs to ensure that you are exposing your relevance.

The simple truth is that there remain a number of sites on the Web that, largely because of an unfortunate legacy of Web standards existing prior to standard tools for creating documents, are non-optimal for the search experience. Imagine if copywriters could create Word documents without using Microsoft Word akin to the way web designers hand-rolled their own HTML with no validity checking built in. Basic documents would have been nearly impossible to read or to transfer between computers. Try asking a web designer sometime, for instance, about designing for IE6. With Word, there are very few compatibility issues between versions or across platforms. With the Web, there are countless rendering issues across browsers and platforms. In some ways, our role is to improve the Web by returning to standards and exposing relevance.

“But wait,” you might be thinking, “Shouldn’t I be partnering with someone willing to put on the black hat at least occasionally?” You can if you want, but that’s one of many reasons why SEO isn’t the only part of our strategy. Remember: We’re an inbound marketing agency. This means we use a variety of tactics to help you get found. As long as you’re creating quality original content, you will be relevant to search, in social media, in email, and wherever else you’re likely to engage your audience. In the long run, we think this strategy yields more value to our customers than Googlebombing ever could.

If you’re concerned that your site might not be letting search engines know just how relevant it is, please contact us.

Google just announced a slew of new features for Google Analytics.

There are a number of features here that should be useful for more refined data mining and ultimately generating more conversions. For instance, I can already picture how Advanced Table Filtering would improve the resolution of the picture for an e-commerce company. There are also some subscription-based and user-based sites I’ve worked on in the past where Multiple Custom Variables would’ve come in tremendously handy, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to dig in with them on upcoming projects.

But the feature that puts the Google engineering I suspected would one day come (and will probably continue to be enhanced, including in other product lines) into Google Analytics is Analytics Intelligence. No more poring over trend lines to find singularities. Google will now find them for you and alert you to their presence.

So does this mean that Google has robbed people with Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) and their Certified Partners of a livelihood? Of course not. No more than it means that improvements to the algorithm or results interface mean that SEOs are out of a job. In fact, it means we get to stop spending as much time on mining and get to start spending more time on meaning. As in, what caused that singularity? E.g., “Why did the Bounce Rate jump?” rather than “Oo! the Bounce Rate jumped! Right there! I see it!” Ultimately, this means more interesting work for analysts and more value for customers.

Refinements to algorithms really just make the process of analysis more efficient. When the search algorithm changes, SEOs interested in R&D test the changes and refine best practices, allowing sites not optimized for relevance to meet Google halfway. Similarly, analysts get to move their workflow downstream and into the deeper pools.

For instance, now, using either Custom Alerts or Automatic Alerts, I’m likely to be able to jump straight into the right table and likely use Advanced Table Filtering for a given profile instead of having to review dozens of profiles scanning to find points of interest or singularities.

The next iteration of this process might result in Google making elementary recommendations, possibly about funnels, goals, and conversions. The greatest singularity of all will be when Google has refined their search algorithm and their predictive analytics to the point where SEO and analytics truly hold no value. But because that concept so closely resembles infinity, it’s a long way off. Until then, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Please contact us if you’ve got a lot of work that needs doing to help you get found.