4Chan is something I have decided to explain right here.

4Chan is an English imageboard based on the Japanese’s  Futaba Channel. Its basically just a whole bunch of funny pictures posted one after the other. People can comment on someone else’s image with another image.

And another example -

So you guys can head over to 4Chan to check out the things going on at the moment. Its tilted towards the adult side of the age spectrum, so just a warning.

I’m going to be posting more of these type of posts, because I did say that I was interested in the internet. Who knows, you may find something cool or interesting.

Okay, fine, so I didn’t post that post I promised I would yesterday. Thing is, I was away from my computer so it was kinda hard. Moving on….

I know that when it comes to the internet and blogging in general, it is important to have your own personal brand. Another word for this in the blogging world is ‘Character’ or ‘Personality’. Its really difficult to gain these things if you are just another person blogging about ‘blogging tips’ for example. Look at the most famous bloggers, Jeremy Schoemaker, John Chow and Darren Rowse to name a few. They all have a really well-established brand. Jeremy is also known as “Shoemoney” and has a logo which looks like the Superman thing.

John Chow. Everyone knows this guy! He’s the first “rich” blogger many people hear about and he’s quite a bastard (clever bastard though). Reason? His fight with Google. For more info check Google.

Then you have Darren Rowse who had a “rags-to-riches” story. He worked really hard on his blog and now he’s a celebrity. Everyone pretty much follows his advice and he never does anything wrong either. Also, he has a shaved pip which is recognisable pretty easily.

Are you following the pattern here? These people have strong online personalities. People can identofy well and like their blogs. Also, a good blog design is essential. I am not happy with my blog design at the moment, so I’m going to change it eventually.

So, here’s the list I’ve been putting off:

1. Good Design - Your blog should always have a well-identifiable theme and look/colour scheme.
2. Interesting writing - Don’t write the way that other bloggers write. Please try to adopt your own way. People can identify your writing easily.
3. Attitude - Decide how you are going to treat readers. If you’re going for the asshole approach, be consistent. If you’re going for the really ‘nice’ guy image, stick with it.
4. Favicon - Get yourself a favicon. This makes the difference when people look in their bookmark folder.
5. Professionalism - This is more for online business owners than bloggers, but bloggers can still take things out of it. Having a professional website with no popups or adverts will really improve your brand. Also, please don’t make spelling errors. Use CSS as well please.

There it was. The list which should help your business improve its brand today.

Tomorrow’s post will be a bit more interesting and light-hearted. Stick around.

I saw an advert recently for a new and emerging fast-food/family restaurant. Name is irrelevant, they won’t want to be  associated with negative press. So, the ad was crap. What will this do for their image and brand now? Ruin it? Degrade it?

Well, many people may try the restaurant, but I won’t. The ad put me right off. One of the problems with the ad was the core/underlying joke. It was lame! Not the type that I laugh at either. Secondly, they had this computer animated character as the main guy. That really ruined it and probably cost them more than a human actor would have. If they had chosen a better advert I would be enthusiastic about trying them.

I could rant on about this for the rest of this post, but why? My point is that bad branding is fatal for your business. The same applies for branding in internet businesses. If you can get a good brand and image across to the customer, you will win them over.

Trust is crucial in internet business. Something that annoys me is when a business that requires trust, has a webpage with pop-ups and flashing graphics. Also, yellow. Nauseating. A business like that should have chosen colours like blue and white for their page. Something that begs trust. Webpages should not bombard the potential customer, they should allow them to look at what they want. When a customer doesn’t get frustrated, they’re more likely to buy. Fact of life.

I hope that you all understand the true importance of trust and branding in your business, because tomorrow (next post) I’m going to be posting a list which will give some tips on branding.

I’m going to skip all the crap about SEO and its history etcetera. I am going to jump into the topic fully by posting the list:

1. Check the “title” tags - Many people forget to include something here, and some websites will have “Untitled” instead of the name of their site. Also, remember to make the name something descriptive and not just the name of the company. For example - “RedZero :: Web Design” is a better idea than “RedZero”. Reason being that Google uses your title for keywords.
2. Don’t abuse Meta tags - You get some really bad cases of this, where people put all keywords imaginable in the “keywords” tag. Remember that when putting porn or drugs/viagra in your meta, you are associating yourself with those sites. You know what that means. Also, try to make different meta “descriptions” for each of your pages, this makes your site look extra legit.
3. Don’t abuse Meta tags - Just because its that important!
4. Use h1, h2 etc. properly - I must admit that I didn’t always know this, but you should always use your h1 tags effectively. This means that you make the name of your article and all important keywords an h1 tag. Then, sub-headings can be h2 and h3 and so on. Search engines actually put a lot of weight on these tags.
5. Check for hidden text - If your site has text in colours that are hidden from readers eyes, get rid of it. You are no doubt trying to stuff this with text and keywords. I will slap you. This practice will, if discovered by readers, discredit you. They’ll trust you as much as a lying Pope.

If I have any more to add to this list, I will do so tomorrow.

Read the next exciting installment of “The Web Guy” tomorrow.

PS: If you have some trouble understanding the terminology and jargon I used here, you can contact me for a more in-depth explanation. Or you can look here.. The reason I don’t go in-depth here is that many readers skim through information and don’t really care for huge explanations.

I’ve also changed my persona. I’m now known as “The Web Guy”, so refer to me as such. This time round, I’m going to be focusing on things which I am interested in, such as the Web and Web Design.

What I have done while I was gone? Nothing really. What I have started, is my Website Design business.  RedZero  Web Design. You can go have a look at it now if you want, http://www.redzero.co.za . The design is quite minimalist at the moment, but I am working on a “widget” of sorts which will show the latest posts on this blog, there! It’ll be pretty cool.

I also plan on building a couple of widgets for people to download on this site, as well as a theme or two. You can stick around for that, because I first want to get my business Website sorted. If you need a website, we can build one for you. Just visit our website.

That’s the post for today, come back again tomorrow for an official first post.

Digital Point. I hope that all of you have an account there, because it really is the best thing you can do for your business.

If you’ve ever ventured into the “General Business” area of Digital Point, there are lots of threads with people telling others about their next big plan to make a lot of money. Usually, they request PM’s and so on. Well, if you have a product in the Computers/IT sector, you can advertise here as well. Just tell people about it either in a new thread, or in a reply to a thread.

Word of caution though, DON’T SPAM! Please don’t make endless threads about your product or write a thread with no useful info in it. In order to write a nice thread for your product, first provide some useful advice related to your product, how it can benefit others, and why they should buy it. This way, the thread can actually help someone and people might be interested in your product. Also, it benefits you in another way because you can get some backlinks in the process. Once again, don’t just SPAM. Please don’t be the irritating salesman who shoves the info down people’s throats.

Digital Point isn’t your only option though, find a forum related to your product. Join it and become known as the real genius, i.e. You can help them with problems and queries. This way, you can earn their trust and then they will be more likely to buy from you.

If you can’t find any forums on your product, that can be a bad and VERY good thing. This means that you can set up your own forum on the product and people will come to your site to find information and your shop will literally be right there. This is good because people will associate your shop with the forum and they will be more likely to buy from there, as you are, after all, the leading source for information on the product!

So I hope that in the future, you begin to start using forums as a stepping-stone to business. You help people, earn their trust and they buy from you. Simple. And just by the way, it has been proven that people will choose trust over price, that is, they will buy from the more expensive source if they trust you. That’s yet another excuse to get people to trust you. Tomorrow I will actually write a post about getting the trust of your customers.

I must say that after a while I was considering switching to Joomla, but I decided against it because that would be giving up. Another reason is that I just don’t think Joomla has quite the amount of options that Drupal has. Drupal is also far more customisable and I think that it can achieve far more of what I want.

In addition to Drupal, I installed Ubercart. I think that Ubercart is very well done, although I was irritated that I had to download 4 other modules to make it work! Its fine though, because it has so many things that you can do. I especially like the user interface.

This post was just an update post, and I will inform you when I am finished and when the site will be completely done, i.e Store and Cart configured, products added and modules figured out!

As soon as the site is done, you can head over and check out my scripts for sale.