Usability is the most important element to your site design. Many potential clients need to navigate your site quickly and easily. “I don’t see a contact link anywhere on this website?” How easy – or complicated – it is to approach your Company’s products or services? How fast can a visitor order a product via your website? We can help you optimize the structure of your website to suit your business needs.

Bing is no Google killer; in fact it uses a different strategy than the world’s biggest search engine, and has a different niche to fill. In creating Bing, Microsoft set the bar pretty high: the company claims they set out to change the experience of online search, especially in the key categories of shopping, health, travel and local search. It is also no coincidence that these four categories make up the highest concentration of advertising revenue online. Microsoft is clearly going after advertising revenue that previously would have filled Google’s coffers.

But other than competing with Google for advertising accounts, Bing has very little in common with either Google’s search engine or raison d’être. Bing is designed as a more focused and niche-oriented search engine, and is optimized to produce the most relevant results within the specific (and quite lucrative) categories mentioned above. This is probably a smart strategy for Microsoft, as attempting to compete directly with Google in general search has been the downfall of many start-up search engines.

Microsoft has described Bing as a “decision engine,” and this denotes its focus on helping Web users find information relevant to their needs, particularly in the area of online shopping. Bing integrates several different features in order to help consumers decide between competing products. One particularly useful feature is the aggregated reviews that appear when searching products.

Bing displays both reviews and ratings from authority sites such as CNet, Epinions and others to help consumers get a quick snapshot of the features and popularity of a particular product. Conveniently, Bing also has a price comparison tab, which includes information on shipping and rebates or special offers.

The other area where Bing is likely to succeed is in local search. The same algorithms used to rank features and pull up reviews of products is employed here at the local level; so searching for a restaurant in a specific area will bring up reviews, directions and other relevant information which could be handy to the consumer.

Although Google is also expanding their local search feature, it remains disjointed in many ways. Microsoft’s attempt to consolidate local search in Bing sets the bar much higher, and could give Google a serious run for their money.

While Bing is not going to be the Google killer some have hoped for, it is certainly a different — and useful — type of search engine, and could become the preferred tool for online shopping research and local searches.

Just as MySpace was a worldwide phenomena a few years back, and then seemed to be quickly overtaken by FaceBook as the dominant social networking platform, Twitter now stands poised to outdo both of these giants, and it’s popularity and relevance within popular culture is increasing at a remarkable rate.

The big question for FaceBook is how to ensure future success, and change the site in ways so it that stays familiar but keeps pace with new Web 2.0 developments. Accordingly, FaceBook is now opening up areas of the site’s code to third party developers. This will allow independent programmers to develop a wide variety of FaceBook applications (or apps), and in theory, should help keep the site fresh and up-to-date.

What FaceBook hopes will happen is that third-party applications can be developed to allow users to stay connected to FaceBook, even when they’re not on Facebook.com. While this sounds like a good idea on the surface, in reality it could wind up backfiring in FaceBook’s, err…pardon the expression, face.

The problem is that, as new third-party applications make it easy to stay connected to FaceBook without actually being on the site, Web traffic to Facebook.com is likely to decrease drastically, prompting one BusinessWeek.com blogger to refer to the future of FaceBook as a “ghost town.”

And the blogger in question, Douglas McMillan, does have a valid point: if FaceBook users have an easy way to stay connected to their FaceBook page, friends, and status updates without logging on to Facebook.com. What’s going to happen to the millions of unique hits the site is currently getting every month? That’s right — they will fade away quicker than you can say “Netscape.”

In a sense, third-party applications could make FaceBook of whole lot more like its competition — Twitter. But is that really the direction FaceBook should be going in? After all, the Web already has one Twitter, why do we need another?

Allowing third-party apps is the risky move for FaceBook, and one that many observers think could wind up being the beginning of the end for the Web’s reining social networking champ. Unless, of course, they can find a way to monetize the immense popularity of the site, without using the on-site advertising which is currently their biggest income source.

Leverage Social Media & Networking Websites and increase targeted website traffic. We create social networking accounts, blogs, viral videos and social bookmarks for you. Creating a presence via social media is statistically proven to increase your website traffic. Social media marketing will direct traffic from your social networking microsites, as well as increase your search engine traffic. Our social media marketing services implement unique methods developed exclusively by Vanta’s experienced marketing professionals. We experience dramatic results taking advantage of social media ourselves, and as a result, we highly recommend these services to all of our valued clients:

• Social Network Advertising| Account creation and customization on site such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn etc.
• MySpace Marketing | Professional MySpace design and marketing services from our well known MySpace experts.
• Blog Creation, Marketing & Consultation | Blog marketing, blog design, Consultation on Blogging and blog commenting.
• Social Bookmarking Campaigns | Creation of accounts on social bookmarking sites such as digg. Social Bookmarking tips & advice.
• Viral Marketing Campaigns | email campaigns, videos, social widgets, social applications, facebook applications & more.
• Viral Video Conception & Campaigns | We plan videos, write scripts, act in, video, edit and distribute viral videos.

You could watch the most non-creative, linear-thinking, do-it-by-the-book cop work to solve a crime and you’d be amazed at how creative her solutions seem to be. Creative for you, because you’ve never been in that territory before, it’s all new, it’s all at the edges. Boring for her, because it’s the same thing she does every time. It’s not creative at all.

For me, creativity is the stuff you do at the edges. But the edges are different for everyone, and the edges change over time. If you visualize the territory you work in as an old Boston Bruins sweatshirt, realize that over time, it stretches out, it gets looser, the edges move away. Stuff that would have been creative last year isn’t creative at all today, because it’s not near the edges any more.

This gives you two useful tactics for problem solving:

1. If you want to be creative, understand that you’ll need to get to the edges, even if the edges have moved. Being creative means immediately going to the place the last person left off.

2. If you are “not creative,” if you are the sort of person that gets uncomfortable being creative or has been persuaded you’re not capable, don’t worry about it. Just stretch the sweatshirt in your spare time, watch the creative things other people have done, keep up with the state of the art. Then, when you do your “not creative” thing, most people will think it’s pretty creative indeed.

Quite an investment.

The goal is to reach the point where there’s some harvesting going on. The first sales might cost you a hundred or thousand dollars each to make. At some point, though, you want sales to happen for free, people to show up with money. At some point, you want word of mouth to replace promotion and to earn back the money you invested up front.

That’s why it’s astonishing to me that people develop projects where planting is difficult or impossible. Here are some of the elements of a market where you are likely to reach the point where you can harvest the benefits of your investment:

• Word spreads. You want a market where stories of your success and reputation will reach other prospects.
• Needs are similar. You want a market where the skills you developed to help one person can also be used to help another person.
• Budgets exist. You want a market where there is more than one player with money to spend (on you) to solve a problem.
• Barriers exist. The market should reward insiders (like you) but make it really difficult for copycats to come in and steal share and lower prices.
• Price should rise with value delivered. As your work spreads and your reputation increases, you should be able to charge more, not less.

I think 90% of all markets don’t meet these standards, and given the choice, I’d avoid them.