If you could only visit one website for the rest of the year, or just use one website the rest of your life, what website would it be?

This interesting question came from my wife this weekend as she exclaimed her love for AllRecipes.com. She commented that if she could only visit one website, it would be AllRecipes.com for all of the cooking ideas she gets from it.

This question really got me thinking about the value a website can have. That value is it’s content. Do you have the kind of value to be the only site a person would visit in your industry?

So how about you? If restricted to just one website, which one would it be? A news website? A sports website? A resource website?

Please comment and share your one website you can’t live without. Search engines don’t qualify so please don’t answer Google. If you want you can break down a site for each category or news, life, work.

My one website: I guess I would go with USAtoday.com

I look forward to your comments!

Let’s face it, you don’t dare build a website for your business without a content management system at the core of it these days. With many choices out there, what flavor is right for you to manage your website?

We obviously like the features and benefits of our CMS, the Site Management Console, so we thought we’d give you 5 good reasons to work with our web platform.

ONE: User Friendly Interface - The SMC interface was designed for the business owner to update website content, not the IT staff (like other CMS solutions). It’s very easy and intuitive to manage content and website features.

TWO: Scalable – Watch your website grow from 30 pages to 3,000 as your content and feature requirements increase. Road blocks for future business processes do not exist, as the SMC is fully customizable to integrate and evolve with your needs.

THREE: Software as a Service (SAAS) – The SMC software and hosting infrastructure are maintained and supported fully by our staff. No requirements to staff a technical crew who’s responsibility is to ensure your website is up and running 99.99% of the time, we cover that.

FOUR: SEO Friendly – Features built into the SMC will not guarantee you will be on the first page of Google for a competitive keyword, but it will ensure the basic SEO standards are easily implemented on your site. With properly designed layouts, the SEO basics such as Title Tags, Page Names, SEO URLs, Site Maps, Alt Tags, H Tags, etc. will all be taken care of when you add content.

FIVE: A Proven Platform – The SMC has been managing websites for over 10 years. The attrition rate on the SMC is amazing. The SMC is loved!

So there you have just 5 reasons of the hundreds we could list off (including fresh bacon, just ask). If you are having a tough time picking the right CMS for you, give us a shout and we can throw a great content management solution your way.

Over 1,000 people walked through the doors and 65 local businesses took part in the Buffalo, MN Community & Business Expo on February 7,th 2009.  Five Tech showed off our web design work and talked with expo attendees about our capabilities and offering. Below is a photo of me (Aaron Weiche)  manning our booth.

The expo is put on by the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce, a client of Five’s. It was a good time, a great way to brand ourselves locally and support the chamber. We’ll be putting together a photo and video recap for their website soon.

Local search & web design gurus Pat Sexton and David Mihm delivered simplicity and value in the launch of their new small business tool GetListed.Org. The website allows a business or their marketing partner to verify their main local search listings in Google, Yahoo, Best of the Web (BOTW) and MSN Live in one easy step. Just type in your business name and zip code to get your local search listing report.

The press release for the GetListed.org site offers a great quote from co-creator David Mihm.

“The search engines rely on so many different providers for their Local business data, it’s hard even for experts to keep track of where it’s all coming from,” said Mihm. “This tool really puts the power in the hands of the business owners and helps make sure the engines provide correct data to people searching for these businesses.”

Mihm shared with me that the site has already done over 10,000 business look-ups in just the first two weeks of being launched. They’ve also received very favorable feedback from users and other SEO consultants using the site.

Making the complexity of search a bit easier and empowering the root of correct business information, now thats a great thing.

As an Internet marketing professional this alleviates the multiple site checking and verifying we would normally do for a client. The site also offers tools to make our job easier with a Local Dashboard to track clients data.

Below I ran a report for one of my favorite Minneapolis pizza joints, Pizza Luce. As you can see they have not correctly completed their info in Google and Best of the Web.

The screenshot above shows you get the direct links to get your business listed if you are missing from any of them.

When you add on the value of their local search resource center and even a trusted listing of Local SEO professionals (we’re proud to be listed), the site offers so much more then just the tool.

The future for GetListed looks strong with improvements and additions coming for the site.

“We’re also going to be making it easier for small businesses to understand the transition between SEEING what search engines are returning about their business and actually CHANGING or VERIFYING that information–a couple of small, but important usability tweaks that we hope will solve that.” offered Mihm when asked on the next step for the tool.

Small businesses, I suggested you “get smart” for 2009 and work GetListed.org to the top of your websites to utilize.

If you want to follow David and Pat on Twitter you can find them at @davidmihm and @yummyman .

I came across a blog post recently that stated web analytics should be called business analytics (sorry I forgot where!) and I couldn’t agree more. Yes, the tool is producing statistical information from your website, but it truly is providing stats, behaviors, strengths and weaknesses of your business.

I’m still amazed at the number of conversations where a business is asking for help in improving search engine rankings, but has no idea if they even have an analytic tool on their site measuring their current efforts. Wow. Businesses that have had a website for 10 years, but not one number to provide any measure of success or failure.

I can write on and on about how silly it is to IGNORE the valuable data a website statistic tool can put out, but let’s just look at these features and benefits if you’re on the path to correcting this for your website and business.

Analytics – Reasons & Tips to Start Now

1. There are many tools out there. Your web host likely has a basic one, Google Analytics is free and their are many forms of paid services and tools out there to get you started. Here is a big list of them.

2. Go past just the number of visitors and stop talking “hits”. Most tools have over 100 filters to begin with, but make sure you take a look at where you traffic is coming from, keywords used to reach you by search engines, the pages your users visit most, the pages users leave most and trends in click paths (what path users take moving on your site.)

3. Have more than one person tasked with viewing or reporting on your web statistics. Get it out in the open for questions and discussions with your staff. If you have a web provider, engage them in meetings on it.

4. You can advance quickly. Most analytic tools have so many features it’s unreal. Tracking just about everything you can imagine. With one of the tools we use, we can even track the  companies visiting and revisiting the website because I have tagged their IP addresses. (No , you can’t see what person, whew!)

5. You can track process. As I stated in mentioning click paths, you can see the most used routes and where users are getting lost. While this is VERY important with e-commerce sites, it also works for service oriented websites. You can build a funnel/path and track it so you can improve it.

So here is your plain English takeaway: Business Analytics are a voice, start listening to them. You obviously don’t ignore your financial data, sales data or employees performance, so don’t shut out your analytics! Listen to them, they’ll tell you great things to help your business succeed.

+ If you need help, of course we’re here for you.