David Crane's blog

It seems every company is being pushed into having a Facebook Page, Twitter Account, and Google +. These are all great tools and each can be used to market your business. The greater question: Do you really need all of this. Our primary focus is on small companies who don’t have unlimited man power or payroll to have all these tolls managed. So you have to break out what your web presence really is.

Some recent changes on ALO. A little while back we added a ‘Groups’ function to the site. Around Austin there are hundreds of businesses networking groups. Already an ALO member? Login and set your favorite groups. Not a member yet? Register for your free profile today and add yourself to a listed group that you are currently a member. These groups have pages that list the associated businesses, so make sure to select your group associations. Don’t see your group listed? Please send an email from our contact form and we will add the group and then add you to that group.

The weather is finally changing and its fall cleaning time. When was the last time you cleaned up your website. Gave it new face or added some information about your business. Search engines like Google and Yahoo like to see updates and comments on your site. If you aren’t updating new information on your site then your competitors will be ranked higher then you, sending business there way.

At Austin Living Online we help small business grow their business in the Austin and the Texas Hill Country with business directories and help improve their website traffics. I occasionally come across very useful articles about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The team at AustinLivingOnline.com finally got all our old profiles reloaded and pictures of the week rebuilt. Now is the time to start adding new members to grow our free membership across the Austin area.

AustinLivingOnline.com is back on line and running. Many friends and business associates wondered what happen to the site and when we would get our old content back up, as they found it very useful to find local Austin area business. So the site has been updated, renewed and placed back on line. We are working out a few bugs still but should have those worked out soon. So go ahead and list your business in our business directory and enjoy the ease of finding solutions to your business and personal needs!

So this week was a little warm and muggy here is SW Austin so I stayed inside and downloaded the Release Candidate for Windows 7. I have read a few good things about it especially in performance. 2 years ago I bought an HP dv5000 laptop with 2 gigs of ram and a T6400 Intel chip. Vista barely would run. With outlook and antivirus it was sitting around 1.9 gigs of ram in use. After a pain staking roll back to XP professional it went on to be an excellent laptop until it was replaced by a newer machine and the entire base Vista reinstalled.

I just wanted to take a minute to acknowledge that we have been having some technical difficulties with our hosting provider. They are currently upgrading their server that hosts our site.

What a great week. Moved the last load of dirt to backfill our new rose garden and did major cleanup in the back yard. It is spring cleaning time again. So on that list of cleaning the house and the yard is looking across all your internet pages and making sure they are all up to date? How is your Linked In profile doing? Have you touched your business profile on this site?  If you haven’t your profile is dropping in your rankings so update it the get raised in the pages.

So in developing the logo we made a start on putting together your company’s website. This is a large topic with many different outcomes. This gets down to how you want your company’s online appearance to be. For every company this is a very different answer.