Corey Smith's Random Thoughts

I was very excited to receive a message from my website contact form today that told me I was doing everything wrong. You can imagine how worried I've been and how nice it was to get a random email from someone I've never met before telling me that I could be doing so much better.

I was told three distinct things. The first was that I am not getting the traffic I should because I'm not found in the search engines for the terms I should be. The second is that my company is not doing well in most social media websites. And, third, my website is not user friendly on mobile devices.

Years ago, I travelled quite a bit for work. I would find myself in cities large and small and, because it was someone else's money, I would stay at nicer hotels than I do now that I have to pay for it myself.

Another indulgence when travelling was that I would get an ice cream sundae every night. Sure, it wasn't good for my figure, but I sure like ice cream.

One time I was at a show at the Moscone Center and staying at the San Francisco Hilton. On my way back to the hotel, I figured I'd stop at the diner in the hotel and take a sundae back to my room.

Since nearly the start of the internet, search engines have allowed searchers the ability to find cool (and not-so cool) stuff on the internet. Yahoo! was the first search engine and the search index for Yahoo! was manually created. Google provided the first automatic way to create their search index using every student dreads - math.

Because of the automated approach to creating the search index, the world of search engine optimization was born. The search engines have engineered the search results to yield the most relevant results that best benefit the user.

I've been building websites professionally for about six years. Before that, I spent plenty of time in design, marketing and business.

Over my career in the last 18 years, I've been very careful to make sure that I focus on being the best I can. I've always wanted to understand the nuance of everything. When I was a color systems specialist, I learned everything I could about color. When I studied a foreign language, I memorized grammar books and now that my company builds websites, I focus on understanding what it takes to build great websites.

When I was a sales manager, I would often have sales reps that lost a deal comment that the reason they lost was because we were just too expensive. It took me some time to help them learn that I would never accept that as an answer.

It's a lazy salesperson that says his or her client made a decision based solely on price.

The fact is nobody buys on price alone. Nobody. Period.

I know, you might ask, "What about the people who buy from Costco?" Or, you may ask, "What about all the people buying double-wide?" or "What about those that choose to buy a Scion instead of a Honda?"

Perhaps you are new to Twitter or you've started seeing these strange #tags on your Facebook profile since Facebook finally started using them. Maybe you've never heard of hashtags or perhaps you are just confused about how to use them correctly.

Here is a quick background on hashtags and their purpose.

The # (pound) symbol, called a hashtag in social media, is traditionally used to mark keywords or topics in a tweet. Twitter users created it as a way to call special attention to certain keywords in their tweets.

Now, Facebook is also using the hashtag.

I don't think a day goes by that I'm not asked to figure out how to accomplish something that I've never had experience in before. It could be something that others have done and I just have to learn. Sometimes it's even something that I don't think anyone has ever done before.

I love these challenges. I love the opportunity to stretch my brain. I love finding creative ways to solve problems. I especially love it when those problems are likely never going to be solved if I don't figure it out.

When I started Tribute Media nearly six years ago, I had to learn how to provide high quality websites to a variety of companies. I had taught graphic design for the web. I had plenty of print experience and had built a few websites for myself but I never had worked in or run a web development shop.

My first websites were mediocre at best. There are a few still in operation today so I guess they all weren't that bad. However, based on the standards I hold my employees to today, they are - how do you say it?

Not Good!

Cover photos are a relatively new addition to Facebook. Whether you are talking about your personal profile or your business page, your cover photo is an important indicator to your audience about who you are.

What does your cover photo tell about your company? Sometimes you might want to simply show off your location so people know what you look like when they come to your office. Sometimes you want to show off a bit of your personality. Hopefully you don't want to show off how much you want to sell by displaying product information or messages about how great you are.