September Newsletter

Some of you may already know who I am but for those who don't I am Roger Syntak and I am the owner and President of the M9 Corporation, a Winnipeg Web Development Company. I am writing to talk to you about the M9 Newsletter which you started receiving last month.

You may ask why the Newsletter is important. To put it simply the Newsletter is designed to fill a need that many business owners have expressed to me, a need to increase communication with their clients. If you're like most business owners you are probably very busy doing what you do and you probably wear several hats all the time and do not have time to keep up to date with online technology.

And you probably can't keep up with how to market your business online through your website.

That is where M9 comes in. To meet the marketing need I decided a few months back to put together an article-driven Newsletter to help demystify internet terms and mysteries. To do that effectively I am bringing together over a decade of experience in web development, design, search engine technology and marketing into a monthly Newsletter written by our Lead Content writer, who has over 26 years experience.

This is the service I am offering to you out there; a Newsletter to inform, educate and amuse your clients. M9 Corporation can tailor-make Newsletters for you and provide content, structure, everything. Or we can set it up so you can write everything yourself, it's up to you. In any case the Newsletter will allow you to reach out to your clients and tell them things they need to know.

Try it, it works. An added bonus is that the Newsletter is very attractive to Search Engines, always a good thing. This month Google picked up on some of the articles from previous Newsletters and that means a higher page ranking and a higher profile for the company.

And that's a great thing!

Its official: Content is King on the Internet!

According to a study released on August 13, 2007 by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) internet users today are spending nearly half their time online visiting content of all types and forms, a huge increase from 2003 figures.

The study announced its results after a four-year analysis of the Internet Activity Index (IAI), a system designed to track internet usage by Content, Search, Commerce and Communications:

The Internet Activity Index is conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings and is posted each month on the OPA site. The index accounts for more than 90% of all Web users and covers approximately 55% of their on-line activities. The efficiency of the Index is impressive, for example: the IAI has tracked 2,238,000,000 hours of internet use from January to May of 2007 alone. Throughout the four years of the study the rise of interest in content has been steady with a 10% increase in 2003 and a 13% increase in both 2005 and 2006.

Overall the value of content on the Internet also continues to rise. In 2001 the value was .7 billion dollars, in 2002 it had increased by 96%, in 2003 the value had increased another 19.1%, in 2004 by another 13.7% and in 2005 it jumped again by 15% to a total of over 2 billion dollars.

According to Pam Horan, the President of the OPA:

Quality content sites see a consistent pattern -- major news drives traffic spikes, but traffic remains consistently higher even after the event. Major news events such as Hurricane Katrina and high profile seasonal events such as the NCAA Final Four Basketball tournament are clearly driving consumers to engage more deeply with online content.
_{Source: online-publishers.org}

The Online Publishers Association, which sponsored the study, was founded in June 2001 and is an industry trade organization representing high-quality online publishers. Association members reach more than 130 million internet visitors around the world on a regular basis and include organizations such as Walt Disney, CNN, Reuters, and Business Week, to name just a few.

Reasons for the increased importance of content are unknown but a tantalizing possibility is that the greater amount of content on the web is encouraging viewers to go online first to find what they need to know. In other words the greater amount of content on line is encouraging more content to be placed on line. And this trend, if true, is one that shows no end in sight.

For businesses which are active on the internet this means that their focus has to change to include more content. In essence consumers are looking to the web for advice, information and entertainment and websites will have to develop to meet these needs. If you are curious about how to make this happen please contact the M9 Corporation, a Winnipeg Web Development Company.

Anyone can write. However choosing the right word or words in writing anything is a science and an art. And that's where M9 Web Development Company can help you get your message across.

The correct word can make people fall in love and the wrong words can cause a lasting feeling of unease. It all depends on the word and that's where the fun begins because there are a plentitude of words in the English language; 171,476 words in the Second Edition of the Oxford English dictionary with an additional 47,156 obsolete words.
_{Source: askoxford.com}

This does not count jargon, foreign words, slang, profanity and so on.

At a rough guess this means that there are around a quarter of million words in the English language right now and the number is always increasing because English is an adaptive language beyond compare.

So pick a word, any word.

However effective writing depends on not just choosing the words but in understanding the connotation of the words. I'll get technical here and give you a definition from the American Heritage Dictionary:

Con.no.ta.tion (noun) 1. The act or process of connoting. Or 2. A. An idea or meaning suggested by or associated with a word or thing: Hollywood holds connotations of romance and glittering success. 2. B. The set of associations implied by a word in addition to its literal meaning.
_{Source: dictionary.reference.com}

The connotation can increase or decrease the power of the words. What sentence engenders hunger?

"Would you like a thick steak, medium rare, with two eggs over easy for breakfast?"

Or:

"Would you like to begin your day with an undercooked segment of muscle and fat from a castrated male cow along with two unborn domesticated fowl?"

In terms of effect the words in the questions stack, positive image on top of positive image, each reinforcing itself for a strong, positive image (unless you're a vegetarian). Or, in the case of the second description, reinforcing negative images until a negative image is engendered. Both describe the same thing but both leave people with a completely different feeling.

Just some things to remember when you're looking for the right word(s)! And if you'd like some help please give me a call, Michael Van Rooy, Lead Content Writer for M9 Web Development Company. I'd love to help.

Here at the M9 Corporation, a web development company based in Winnipeg, we build websites with the long term interests of our clients in mind. To do that effectively we use the PHP scripting language (PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page and now stands for PHP hypertext preprocessor, a recursive acronym), a general-purpose scripting language which can be embedded right into the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code. That gives it a great deal of flexibility and power.

Another choice would have been to use Microsoft's ASP.NET language which is another commonly used language on the net. However, in my opinion, ASP.NET has issues; it only runs on Windows operating systems and has new versions released every 3 years or so, whenever Microsoft decides. This contrasts to PHP which is more adaptive, has newer versions released more often and will run on Windows or Linux or almost any operating server on any platform.

Because of the basic functional design of PHP it is a much more flexible language than ASP.NET. It is also older having been designed originally in 1994 whereas the first ASP didn't show up until 1996 which means that more bugs have been worked out of the system. PHP is also faster and includes many capabilities that have to be installed separately into ASP programs, capabilities like FTP, data compression, encryption and email. Lastly the PHP software has very few bugs and glitches and when they do show up they are fixed very quickly indeed.

All this means that the end product that I can create with PHP is more flexible and less glitchy, it's that simple!