The folks over at Web Catholic Blog recently announced their pick for the 2007 web site of the year. Here’s what they said about their criteria:

First off, the “Site of the Year” judging panel rated entrants in four areas: effective design, timely content, technical functionality and a “wow” factor. Many of the reviewed sites were strong in one or more of these areas.

The winner is Christ the Light of the World Parish (Diocese of Pittsburgh) … recognized for its simple design, liturgical color scheme and elegant home page. While I find the site a little difficult to navigate, I do like the News page where bulletin articles are reprinted. It seems that the “wow” factor and technical flashiness weighed quite heavily… Personally, I’d prefer to see more current news on the home page.

What inspires me… The background color linked to the liturgical season and seasonal graphics. Hmm… I’ll need to see what could be used on the St. Ignatius web site.

It has been a while since I posted on this blog… But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing up a storm in the last two months! In fact, I’ve been writing more regularly than I have in quite a few years. The reason: I was participating in a program taught by one of the most recognized Internet marketing teams on earth.

No, I have not fallen down into the world of spammers and black hats… although I have seen a few of them. I wanted to learn more about how some web developers are able to pull in hundreds, thousands, even millions of visitors using some very specific techniques. What does it take to get a good ranking in Google? What are some of the new tools and programs? What’s cutting edge? And most importantly, how can it be leveraged to help those of us who are striving to help our churches and associations be noticed … and effective… on the World Wide Web?

It’s been very educational! This week, I’ve realized the most important lesson that I’ve learned… Just like any communication tool, the Internet is all about relevancy. Any visitor to your web site must connect to you (or your organization) … to answer a question or solve a problem… to share a feeling … or maybe to just have some fun.

Relevancy is a hot topic in the Internet world. Everyone wants top ranking with Google, and Google has rules about what it considers relevant. In theory, Google uses and measures things like keyword density, board match, exact match, optimization and something called latent semantic indexing. During a recent search for more understanding of this technical stuff, I found an interview with Bob Massa, who seems to have most common-sense comments on relevancy. Here’s one that I especially like:

For researching quotes, phone numbers, parts numbers and dates, exact match is all that matters and every database of any size has been doing that on the web since the early 90’s. But for anything the least subjective, it is only perception.

If your web site is about anything other than plain old data… and my guess is that your site is about much more! … then you’re dealing with the subjective. And if you’re dealing with the subjective, some of the Google rules are going to be difficult to apply to your web site.

What you can be sure of is this… Every visitor to your site is making his or her own measures of how it relates to what he or she needs or wants. That’s the measure that should concern you most… Go read the rest of the interview with Bob Massa for more inspiration.

In the work that I do for clients, the question of spam comes up almost every week. It’s actually a simple question: “What can I do to stop unwanted email?” I wish that I could install a program on the email server that would make the spam stop. We do use some filtering programs, but it’s not enough. Each of us user still need to know how to stop spam in Outlook.

So I’ve set up a new Squidoo page titled “How to Stop Spam in Outlook” (creative, eh?) with five tips that you need to know. Here’s an excerpt:

1. Turn on the Junk Mail Filter

Go to the menu item named “Actions,” select “Junk Email” then click on “Junk Email Options.” On the screen, the first screen you see will have four radio buttons. Recommended: Select “High: Most junk e-mail is caught, but some regular mail may be caught as well. Check your Junk E-mail folder often.”
Then check the bottom item: “Don’t turn on links in messages that might connect to unsafe of fraudulent sites.”

Then click “OK” until you’re back to the main Outlook program.

Tip No. 4 is to use a spam filtering service. My favorites are PC-cillin and SpamWeed. PC-cillin is a complete anti-virus, anti-spam and firewall all wrapped up into one. If you already have an anti-virus program and just want to add some spam protection, SpamWeed is an add-on to Outlook that is very easy to implement. There’s a free 14-day trial so you can see exactly how it works.
Go visit Squidoo to read the other four tips!

If you would like to add more functions to your Google Toolbar, check out this nifty feature: custom buttons. You can create a custom button, sort of like a shortcut button, for any web page that has a search field. Watch how…