Like many small firms, we use Basecamp for our project management duties. One of its miraculous features is a system which allows you to reply to an email to post a new message; it does this through a galaxy of email addresses which can be used to identify which topic thread you wanted to handle.

So recently, we’ve began to get posts to projects that were closed off several months ago. Linkedin friend requests, and now advertisements for some sort of incentive debit card. I suppose those are really germane to the operation of a website.
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Went to Snowflake this morning to deliver a truckload of new office furniture and computers. We have been expanding about a truckload of office furniture and equipment a year. I guess it’s not a startup anymore.

We hit a snowstorm during the trip. Glad to be back in the sunshine.

“Skate where the puck is going”

In the obnoxious sports cliche industry, everyone knows to try to target your business based on future trends, instead of past results.

Strangely, this seems to be a very rare occurence in business, especially the web business sector. Instead, there seems to be a lot of thinking along the lines of “skate to where someone else has already captured the puck and hope you can flail at him enough to release it and claim it”. The hundred Instagram clones, the fifteen million local sites which do exactly what Yelp does except without the user base, the penny auction sites which figured “well, Swoopo did well” (until they went broke).

The fact is, trying to cling to a “borrowed” business model often fails for two reasons:
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Had a great lunch today at the Las Vegas country club with business partner and friend Greg Herlean. We discussed the kick off next week of our new site Horizon Trust. We are also partnering on the new business and website called Business Plan Bluprint. Thanks to both Greg and Chris for showing me such a great time today.

After being in the website business as long as anybody has been in this business, there is one attribute we have decided that helps is more than any other, patience. It has become much easier to be a patient because we have money, and a strong belief in the future of what we do.

Look at these two charts comparing January 2011 to January 2012. If you make the mistake of measuring your growth from the beginning of each month till the end, it’s hard to see any increase. However, if you’re patient for a year the growth becomes quite apparent.

Wireless Security Systems is rebranding their company as Link Security. Justin Fawson visited our offices from their headquarters in Ogden, Utah to discuss the upcoming years strategy. Thanks Justin, you guys have been great partners.

We are all up in Snowflake visiting our partners with The Guru. Millions of dollars worth of windshields being sold with our amazing partners on this site. A special thanks to all our partners and wonderful employees who have turned this business into a huge success over the last several. Thank You

Exact Match Domains Are Dead! Long Live Exact Match +Plus

Here at Web-Op we’ve acquired a LOT of domains over the years and consider domains some of our best investments. The market has changed recently though – making exact match domains less valuable. In the past – having an exact match keyword domain was a shortcut to top rankings. Today – those same domains provide seemingly less bang for the buck. This new hurdle hasn’t been unexpected – but that doesn’t make it any less painful to deal with.

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A few years ago, we got a checklist of proposed features from a client. They wanted the site “.mobi enabled”. We spent a few minutes looking at each other like dogs trying to understand calculus, and then realized, fundamentally, that we were looking at a “someone read a white paper” scenario. They wanted to get in on the big buzzword, but had yet to analyze the value proposition.

Nobody’s going to discount the growth of mobile. We’ve all got our collections of phones, tablets, and even the occasional netbook. However, a fortune thrown at mobile development will net you no extra revenue if it doesn’t serve a user purpose.
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Visits from mobile devices are up three times over the last six months on WindshieldGuru.com. The ever changing world of the Internet keeps us scrambling to keep up. Check us out on your mobile device tomorrow. We’re going live with a new mobile site today.