Many people with websites ask someone else to take care of the issue of domain registration. If this is you, be careful who you trust this information too. You are giving them a lot of power. A person with access to this information can ultimate control of your website. They can

• Prevent you from moving your domain name to a new website host (a small problem if want to move because of poor hosting services.)
• Take your site down by telling the world that your files are on a different or non-existent computer

They can do this because each domain registration includes vital information that tells the internet where the actual files that make your website are located. Without this information, nothing on the internet works.

There are still good reasons to let someone else handle your domain registration. Domain names come up for renewal every so often. If you neglect to renew the domain, someone else can register it and take it away from you. Other deviants so that they can charge you $100 or more to get it back. If you often overlook such 5 minute details, you should have someone keep track of your domain names for you.

You just need to be able trust the person you have maintaining your domain name.

Hellotxt and Facebook are very nicely integrated. If you have Facebook and other social networking applications such as twitter, Flikr, Plaxo, etc, you can integrate Facebook and Hellotxt and make virtually all of your status updates from Facebook. To set this up.

If you have not already done so, create a Hellotxt.com account. They have a usual account creation process that starts at http://hellotxt.com. Once you have created your Hellotxt acoucnt you can integrate with a variety social networks.

Getting Facebook setup on Hellotxt.

There are two ways to get to the page that allows you to set-up Facebook.
1) From your homepage after you have logged in to hellotxt there is a link on the right hand side labeled “Facebook App.” (See the screen shot on the right.) (click on the words Facebook App)
2) You can also click on the settings for your facebook account and arrive at the screen on the right. (Click on the blue “facebook” icon.

Authorizing the Application.

Both routes take to the following screen, which begins a multi-stage process in which they double check (at least) that you really want to do this. (You should click allow in the following screen example–it is your only choice.)

(click on the image below to see a larger version.)

From here you will need to choose whether to use an existing Hellotxt account to create a new one. (This version of the instructions assumes you already have a Hellotxt account.

After entering your login information and clicking login (on the left side of the screen) you should see the following screen. You should probably click the Enable button below (I did anyway) to avoid being constantly asked for login information.

They want to make sure that you really want to authorize the contact, so they ask again.

Now you have to give hellotxt permission to access your facebook account. (Seems a bit redundant to me, but …)

Yeah, they like the double confirmation system. Click allow publishing.

At this point you should be finished. You can find the application in your facebook “Applications” area. (see the small icon on the very bottom left of your screen.) You may be required to provide an “user key.” If so, you can get it from the hellotxt setting screen. (I had to redo the process to create this blog entry to make sure I included all the reasonable steps and it did not ask me for this on the redo.)

It is not how many of your checks have rubberized and are getting returned for insufficient funds.

It is the number that tells you how many people came to your site and looked at only one page–Meaning they probably did not find anything terribly useful or interesting there (or they saw your number on the homepage and made an immediate call).  A good bounce rate is probably less than 30 percent on a homepage.

If you install Google Analytics on your site you will have this information.  (We install Analytics on all of the site that we do.)  Some of the other tools probably also create these statistics.

Generally speaking, people have to get comfortable with you, before they pick up the phone and call you or buy a product.  Therefore, you want people to explore your site and get to know you. Once you start watching your bounce rate, you can adjust your content and improve your relationship building through the website.

That is actually a trick question.

Content without Visibility Does not Create Many Leads

That is, if no one finds you, then no one can respond to the great calls to action that you have created.  However, good content improves your rankings in the search engines, so that people can find you easier.

Visibility without Content is Costly

Many of the things that you can do to drive traffic to your website costs you time or money.  It costs a lot of money to optimize a page for search engines.  Link campaigns to improve your search engine rankings are also costly.  Pay per click campaigns usually start at around $400/month.  (Google AdWords is an example of a Pay Per Click campaign.  These are advertisements that get displayed whenever someone does a search.)

Every time someone comes to your site because of a program you paid for to get them their has a cost.  Every person that leaves your site without taking the action you want drives the cost of converting that traffic into sales up.

Example 1:  You spend $100 to get 10 visitors and 9 of them “bounce” and you get one sales call.  Then you have spent $100 per sales call from your website.

Example 2: You spend $100 to get 10 visitors and only 5 of them bounce and 5 of them call you.  Then you you have spent only $20 per sales call.

What Do We Recommend?

We suggest you work on your content first, then on your visibility.  It is the more cost effective solution.  Good content will get ranked well in Google and Yahoo eventually.  So it does a better job of accomplishing both objectives if you are short on money.

Our Next Post will have some suggestions to improve your content.

This year was again a different experience.  I decided to go back because I really enjoy the spiritual part of this journey.  It is really good for us mainline protestants to grapple with the question “Where Did You See God Today.”  Consequently, I decided to devote most of my time to helping the mission center build a better website.  You can see the results of this work at “www.wheredidyouseegodtoday.com.”  We did not spend a lot of time on the design.  The main focus was to create a structure that would allow participants could share their stories and create a better idea of what happens, than we could creating fixed promotional pages.  Of course the mission center wanted to make sure that they could easily ensure that posts were appropriate to the subject at hand and that they did not contain profanity. You know, all those things you open yourself up to when you let the public make comments.

Nevertheless, I got to see some of the city.

The first year we went to the lower 9th, I saw the bright red roof of an older pizza hut.  I thought, surely they must be open.  It looks clean.  When we drove by, I was sad to see that one of my favorite chains, was indeed minus location.  This year that same Pizza Hut sits there, unused, and apparently uncared for.  A few blocks away I could see termite damage from the street in selected buildings.

Pocked throughout the neighborhoods stretching alongside the interstate from near Slidell to the West Bank bridge are homes that that look like they could fall over at any time.  They can probably stand there for 30 years, but they are still uncared for.  Even on the West Bank, where the levees did not break from Katrina, there are building sitting blackened eyes instead of windows.

In comparison, the at least one Vietnamese Community was well on its way to being re-established during our first visit, 3 years ago.  They had a specific rebuilding plan and moved back in stages.  Each stage brought back only the people that were necessary for the task of that stage.  Each stage laid a foundation on which the following stages could build.  (1. Clean out enough of a place for a small group to live.  2. make that space more habitable, so that a few more can come back.  3) When a few more comeback, they can start re-building in the cleaned spaces while the original crew moves on to clean another space.

Where is the leadership for the Community of New Orleans to make this sort of re-birth possible?  Obviously, the French Quarter is back.  Harrah’s Casino is back.  The piles of debris have been cleaned.  The street signs are back in the Lower 9th.  The government says the levees are repaired.  How much more of the city could be fully functional, if the city had been proactive enough to layout specific rebuilding plans starting with the main arteries and then branching out to the communities?  The process would be much like the way an electric company gets power pack after on after inclimate weather.

Maybe, then, instead of feeling like we are rebuilding homes for the elderly so that they can come home to die in dignity, we could sense more completely that a community was truly being reborn. Maybe the job would be much closer to done.

The faith of many of the people rebuilding in New Orleans is much greater than my faith.  When you are in its precense, it is heartening to see what these individuals have accomplished with God’s help.  Just don’t step back and look at what could have been or look to hard at what still needs to be done.  You just have to do it.

Allison (my wife) and I have made three trips to New Orleans.  Each time for New Years to help rebuild the city.  In all honesty, it is like recycling.  The small part we do really does not matter until you add it up with the “insignficant” efforts of the other thousands of volunteers.

The first year was shocking.  During our tour of the city, we would see armed Humvees patrolling the streets.  It was one thing to hear about the searches on TV, it was another to see piles of rubble and each house visible marked.  The devastation and the horrible bureaucratic nightmares affected rich and poor equally.

The second year was surprising in its own way.  The Lower 9th Ward was mostly a field, where there should have been rows of houses.  Brad Pitt had not yet arrived.  You could see recovery happening and traffic jams coming back but the people that were rebuilding their own homes were often pouring in their life savings just to rebuild.  It seemed that if New Orleans flooded again they would truly lose it all.  Nevertheless, the property speculators were moving in.  It was heart breaking to see the banners hanging in a gymnasium, touting the the former private school’s statewide athletic success and to know that less than 50 people of the church sponsoring the school had returned.  They were selling the property because 50 people could not possibly service the same debt as a the pre-Katrina congregtion of at least 1000.

More about this year in the next post.