From the Editor

I’m pleased to present the premiere issue of InSites. I’ve launched InSites as a new monthly newsletter to replace Dream Seeds. Each month, this newsletter will feature useful information on getting the most bang for your buck when it comes to your website. Occasionally, I may include some general marketing tips and other tidbits specifically of interest to small businesses and nonprofits as well.

I love Dream Seed Multimedia because I get to work with creative entrepreneurs and amazing nonprofit organizations. I enjoy being part of the their teams, and I sincerely hope you find InSites helpful as a member of the team, too. If you do, share the love, and forward it to a friend!

All the best,

Adam J. Barkafski

Insightful TipGuard yourself against spam: Protect your email address

Certainly one of the greatest banes of the internet age is spam. If you’ve ever been the victim of spam, you know that it seems to snowball exponentially until you’re drowning in a pit of spam! That may be because your email address has been harvested by spambots (little computer programs that search the internet for poor, defenseless email addresses).

Don’t find yourself in this situation—protect your email address. One simple way to do this is not to post it anywhere online…in forums, in blog comments, even on your website. Once a spambot gathers your email address, it can be very difficult to reclaim it from spam.

But what if you want your website visitors to be able to email you? Simple! Use an email contact form. It’s simply a form that people complete with name, email address, and a message. All that information is collected and automatically sent to your email, and you never have to expose your email address!

Website MarketingHow to title your web pages for better search results

You can spend untold amounts of time on the content of your web pages—writing and rewriting (and rewriting!) your text, taking perfect photos, experimenting with just the right way to ask for the sale—for the singular goal of making that all-important conversion. All of your website’s components contribute to encouraging a visitor to take action…or not. One area often neglected on a web page, however, is the page’s title, which is the first thing a visitor sees when coming from a search engine.

Learn how to write the best web page titles!