A Colorado Perspective on SOPA & PIPA

Posted on January 19, 2012 by bmac

How many times have you heard….”Call your Congressman”? Well we did just that. With all the focus and attention today about the proposed legislation in the House and Senate:

We decided to enact our civic duty and called our Congressman and Senators to voice our opinion and get their stance.

For Congressional District 5, the representative is:

The state’s Senators are:

Congressman Lamborn (R) – Currently Opposed. Website was down at the time of our call “due to large amount of email traffic to the site”. However, we were directed to his Facebook post : “While online piracy is a very real problem, and one that certainly needs to be addressed, it is equally important to maintain Americans’ right to an open
internet; therefore I am opposing SOPA.” - http://www.facebook.com/CongressmanDougLamborn?ref=ts&sk=wall

Senator Udall’s Position (D): Opposed. We were directed to Senator Udall’s website for his official statement on the bill: “Make no mistake, Congress must find ways to stop foreign theft and online distribution of illegal content to U.S. consumers. But, unfortunately, provisions in PIPA appear to create unintended consequences that could stifle U.S. innovation, limit Americans’ free speech rights, increase the risk of cyber-attacks, and undermine how the Internet functions. Such an impact would affect U.S. Internet consumers and entrepreneurs. We can’t allow this to occur.”

Senator Michael Bennet – CO-SPONSOR OF THE BILL. His staffers said Senator Bennet is aware of citizen’s concerns and hopes the bill can be changed. When asked for his official position on the bill as well as a link to the statement, we were directed to a Denver Post article written today which states: “Tuesday Bennet backed away from supporting it in its current form.”

It is clear that the politicians know these bills are bad news in their current state. Modifying the bills in their current state is not enough – they need to start over. The spin is that these bills are good for the economy and will create jobs by allowing the entertainment industry to grow and protect company who’s products are counterfeit and sold online. The government needs this bill to have the power to stop these websites – however, in November of 2011 the government seized 150 websites known for selling counterfeit goods or copyrighted materials.

Often it is hard to sift through the hype and excitement of the movements against or for legislation. For that very reason, here are links to official summaries, supporters, and opponents of these bills.

The official summaries of the bills can be found here:

Supporters and opponents of the bills can be found here:

Q2 Interactive Media is committed to an open internet! WE oppose the proposed SOPA and PIPA acts. WE will continue to stay on top of this legislation, actions for and against it, and keep our clients informed about what they can do to stay involved.

If you’re interested in Q2′s services please contact Michael Paxton at 719-266-2299 or visit our Website dedicated to design, development, hosting, web presence optimization, and above all – an excellent customer experience!

Posted in In The News, Mike's Corner, Search Engine, Social Media | Leave a comment

SOPA / PIPA – And the blackout protest

Posted on January 17, 2012 by bmac

If you’re like thousands of American’s that visit Wikipedia.com you’ve likely noticed the warning that Wikipedia will be down for 24 hours to protest SOPA and PIPA….just what are they talking about??

SOPA is referring to an proposed bill – Stop Online Piracy Act, which can be viewed here: H.R. 3261.

PIPA is the Senate’s version of the bill – Protect Intellectual Property Act.

SOPA is designed to provide intellectual property owners with an avenue to take down websites accused of infringing on copyrights – for example: hosting, streaming, or sharing movies and music; selling knock-off’s such as fake iPhones, iPads, etc.; and even those sites illegally selling prescription medications online.

On the surface that sounds great, right? So what’s the issue?

On the surface of the proposed legislation aims at foreign sites or “US Directed websites”, there is nothing protecting a U.S. website from being targeted. If a complaint is received by an ISP (Internet Service Provider), such as CenturyLink, Comcast, etc., the ISP would be required to take action against the site within 5 days of receiving the complaint – taking down the site. Search Engines would be required to do the same – remove links, ads, etc. Another concern is that the Act grants broad level powers to the Federal Government, which opponents of the bills are concerned it opens the doors for government censorship.

Imagine a competitor decides to report your website! What recourse do you have to keep it active? The bill permits the site’s owner 7 days to respond to the allegations or complaint. However, once you’ve been removed from the search engines, restoring ranking is an organic process – they will not just drop you back where you once were if the allegation is found to be false.

The Internet’s Response: Those of us who make a living through the internet have to protest this blanket legislation. Many websites are planning a “Blackout” on January 18th from 8am – 8pm EST, in response to the proposed legislation – a message to demonstrate what the web could be like, should these bills pass.

Opponents of these bills include just about every major website you’ve ever heard of Ebay, Paypal, Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, and many, many more.

Here’s a list of the proponents of the SOPA bill.

So, what does this mean for you?

Q2 Interactive Media will be participating in the Blackout. The www.q2im.com website will go dark for 12 hours on Wednesday, January 18th. We urge you to participate. This legislation has not been well thought out. It is wrong for the internet right now.

This bill has been brought about with pressure from Hollywood and the recording industry. Other bills have been proposed that would redefine the existing copyright infringement laws to include the illegal downloading or streaming of protected materials. That is a solution. SOPA and PIPA are not.

Q2 Interactive Media is a web presence optimization company specializing in web development, search engine optimization and marketing.  For more information about Q2 Interactive Media or this article, please contact Michael Paxton at 719-266-2299  x100 or Michael.paxton@q2im.com

Resources:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45501385#.TxX_629STEY

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/17/10175792-google-plans-home-page-protest-against-sopa

http://news.yahoo.com/wikipedia-blackout-websites-wikipedia-reddit-others-dark-wednesday-214444829–abc-news.html

http://marketingland.com/blackoutsopa-a-look-at-the-social-media-movement-that-helped-stall-the-sopa-legislation-3453?utm_campaign=mainfeed&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Posted in In The News | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Search Engine Optimization

Posted on September 9, 2011 by bmac

So, you want to see your website rank number one in the search engine results? How are you going to get there? Are you able to do it on your own? Should you hire a company to do it for you? Are there short-cuts or an easy way to do it?

These are questions business owners and marketing directors are asking themselves more and more often these days. The answer is relative to the results you want – long term results or short term results.

We can all admit Google is the number one, most widely used search engine in the world. So a primary focus on Google is appropriate.

Google is constantly updating their search engine algorithm, so do not believe anyone that tells you they can offer a guarantee for search engine results! Google even specifically warns against such a guarantee in their general guidelines for SEO: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”. Google’s algorithm is a secret, the best we can do is test, pay attention to what Google says, and roll with the punches.

According to Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz, the annual salary for a full-time, in-house SEO “worker” will cost you between $45,000 – $80,000 per year. You provide the direction, content, an HTML coder, etc. Not to mention the cost of tools to manage and monitor activity, rankings, links, trends, etc.

Many people try SEO on their own – the cost is too much to afford to hire someone in-house and how can you trust some random company to do SEO for you? Some folks are successful! That is until the competition steps it up and buries you. The primary reason is that effective SEO is a full time job. If you cannot spend the time researching, learning the techniques and tactics, and keeping up on algorithm and industry changes. So, the door is open for the competition to sneak up on you outperform the work you’re doing.

Hiring a firm to handle SEO for you is the least expensive route to go. But, which company to hire? Some firms charge as much as $5000/mo per keyword, others claim to charge as little $500/mo for unlimited keywords. There are sneaky tactics that some companies use that do not result in long term results! SEO is an ongoing, natural process of building your online reputation – as an individual, a brand, a company, etc.

Q2 Interactive Media is a website design company first. We build websites with SEO in mind. Recently, we began offering SEO services because our clients asked us to and we were not comfortable referring our  clients to another firm. We manually edit for on-page optimization, monitor rankings, submit to relevant directories,  build relevant back-links, and manage your overall web presence.

Posted in Search Engine | Leave a comment

Website Redesign

Posted on August 1, 2011 by bmac

In this day and age, if you are not on the Web you simply do not exist. That said, it is not just being on the Web that is important for any business, in any market, it is having an up to date website that means something to your customers. Today, for businesses, the Web is all about providing value to your customers. All businesses, small or large, need to ask themselves: what is our website providing to our customers? If a business has problems answering that question, maybe it is time for a website redesign.

A Web redesign does not mean a business needs to trash the site already in existence and start from scratch. Often, a website redesign company can offer new, cutting edge ideas to a businesses no matter what the market is or what market conditions prevail. An example of new thinking a website redesign company can bring to the table are new social media tools which will allow visitors of a website to share the information they find on the site with their friends on popular social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

A good website redesign company will also help ensure visitors to any site will have a pleasurable experience when visiting the site. Most people know what it is like to be frustrated on the Web. It can be something as simple as not figuring out how to operate the site, to simple things such as navigating the site and finding the information needed as quickly as possible. A good website redesign company will do a complete evaluation of any existing site and offer ideas on how to better improve user experiences.

Today, the culture and style on the Web changes monthly, if not weekly. It is vital to any business to stay on top of trends to achieve maximum return on investment on the Web.

Posted in Web Design | 3 Comments

Using Fonts on the Web

Posted on April 15, 2011 by dburgess

One of the biggest issue we face on the web is making a site look good and still maintain functionality.

The area I’m going to focus on today is font usage. There are 18 “web safe” fonts available to us, but sometimes they don’t work with the designs the way we’d like them to.

There are a few different ways we can change font are as follows:

We can create images in our favorite graphics program such as Paint, Illustrator or Photoshop. This gives us the ability to create whatever we want, but it has its limitations as well. Even with proper “alt” and “title” tags, search engines can’t read the text. If a search engine can’t read the text on your site, you won’t get indexed correctly.

Another approach is to upload the fonts you want to use to a folder in your website directory and embed them into your code. While this is effective, it’s tedious and not all browsers read embed codes the same way, so this means writing more code to make your site cross-browser compatible.

A popular alternative to these is called Cufón. It’s a javascript method of embedding fonts and works well. It renders well, makes your site easily editable and is cross-browser compatible (as long as you make sure to use the most current version of the Cufón javascript file on your site). The problem with it is that it renders in your browser as an image which raises the question as to how well your site can be indexed by search engines.

There is a newer way to do things that is searchable, editable and cross-browser compatible. There are a couple of services that I’ve tried. One of them is called Kernest. The other service is called Typekit.

They’ve both got free and paid plans and they’ve both got a similar method of font embed. There are some key differences, though:

While Kernest is geared more toward the “average” user, it’s slow, finicky and unreadable. Also, any time you want to add more than one font to your site, you have to add more and more embed scripts (one per font style).  I only bring is up as a point of reference about why I prefer Typekit as a method of embedding fonts.

Typekit lets you build font kits to be used across your site. The idea being that you build your kit on their website and then it generates a single embed script. It also tells you how big that script is and whether or not it will load quickly. They give you everything you need (regarding fonts) to have a great looking, fast loading, cross-browser compatible site.

If you’ve got other ways or services that you like to use to embed fonts, let us know in the comments section below.

Posted in Development | Leave a comment