I finally decided on an ISP—Digis High Speed Internet is a WISP with operations in Fort Collins, CO, Salt Lake City, UT, and Utah County, UT.

Speed

So far (most of August), our service has been really good. We get a consistent 1.5 Mbps download speed and a 600 Kbps upload.

How Much Digis Costs Us

Digis costs us $36.90 a month—$29.95 for month-to-month service (it would be $24.95 if we committed for a year) and $6.95 for equipment rental. We didn’t have to buy the equipment, and they had a new subscriber bonus that covered installation ($139.95) with mail-in rebates. $36.90 is more than DSL if you have a phone line—since we don’t, this is the cheapest service we could find in our area.

Free Month of Internet Service

If you sign up and mention a current Digis customer, you and that customer both get a free month! <shameless plug>My referral number is 9249! Sign up at Digis.net</shameless plug>

I took an Internet marketing course at BYU from Paul Allen last year. A good portion of what I know about Internet marketing I learned in his class, and it’s part of what helped me decide to go into Internet marketing as a career. Paul has helped me a great deal, and so I try to help him out when I can. That brings me to the purpose of this post: Paul recently asked the former students of his classes to do him a favor.

New Business Opportunity

Paul has leased the entire first floor of a new office building on Ninth East in Provo. He’s fitted the whole thing out for helping new businesses get started—for as little as $200 a month. He’s provided more than just square feet, too—it comes with a desk, a computer, a phone, fiber optic Internet, and membership in the Provo Labs Academy. Check out the academy here: Provo Labs Academy. If you, or anyone you know, needs cheap office space and some help getting started, you need to seriously consider this offer! Paul has successfully started up more than a dozen Internet-based firms and knows what he’s doing, and he can help you know what you’re doing!

New Internet Marketing Class

Also, for interested BYU students, Paul is teaching another Internet marketing course this fall. I highly recommend that you take this course, if you can. You’ll learn, or at least hone, many skills that are critical for the success of your online efforts.

Choosing the color palette for a site used to be entirely up to the graphic designer and maybe management, based on current fashion or a whim. Well, no longer—colors, and specifically the contrast between colors, is actually an accessibility issue. Graphic and web designers need to learn which color combinations are accessible and which are not as they work on sites.

Color Contrast Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has researched and established some recommendations that will help to ensure that the contrast between background and foreground (text) colors is enough to ensure legibility for the visually impaired. Its recommendations require that there be a sufficient color (hue) and brightness (lightness/saturation) difference between the text and the background. More about color contrast standards can be found here: W3C Color Recommendations.

A Tool That Helps You Meet Color Contrast Standards

Luckily, you don’t have to dive into the W3C’s recommendation on this issue. www.snook.ca has a tool that takes two colors as input and computes whether they are suitable for a background/foreground color combination: Snook Color Contrast Tool. Using this tool, you can quickly determine whether the color combinations of your next site design will be suitable for a general audience. For example, I discovered that the color of my links is too light against a white background to be legible to those who are visually impaired or using a greyscale monitor/device. Since I’m not 100% happy with the design as it currently is anyway, I will probably be changing the color of my links to improve legibility and accessibility, and I encourage you to follow the W3C’s recommendations as well.

What is the frequency of site redesign?

The Optimal Case

Assuming you’ve built a good looking site with solid content based on compliant code, how often do you redesign? There are many other factors involved, such as whether you are a design fanatic with a personal blog or a major corporation with a company site, but assuming that you were a company that didn’t enjoy redesigning, how often would a site redesign be necessary?

Chances are that the visual appearance of such a well constructed site would have to be updated to be current with modern design trends every 4 or 5 years. The hope is that only the visual appearance would be changed—the content would still be useful and the markup would still be valid.

Sub-par Cases

There are, of course, an infinite number of sub-par cases. Many of these involve low quality, inane, or incorrect content, invalid or inaccessible markup, all manner of proprietary scripts and features, or management whims.

It’s conceivable that, under such conditions, a site could be so bad as to force a redesign as often as every 9 to 12 months and could use a redesign every single month until someone finally got it right.

The Costs Involved

Clearly, redesigns that are 5 times as frequent and that require much more effort to perform are more than 5 times as expensive. Even if redesigns were skipped and the site limped along for five years in a broken state, the lost revenues would far exceed the cost of developing a better site. It would therefore be worth at least 5 times the up-front money to get a site right the first time.

The Smart But Realistic Case

The smartest thing to do, then, would obviously be to shoot for the optimal redesign case. Do everything you can to build a site that will require very little maintenance and virtually no redesigning for 4 years or more. Skimping on site design isn’t really a good idea—solid design may (or may not) cost you, but it will pay itself back in the end, whereas skimping will only hit you with redesign fees over and over.

Make sure to do your research—many fantastic, cutting-edge firms charge about the same as crappy, out-of-date firms in order to compete. You may need to learn a little bit about site design and web standards in order to distinguish between different firms. If you are a developer, be or become one of those good firms that builds sites the right way!

Because doo doo happens, however, be prepared for changes that can take place. If you’ve properly separated design from content, it should be much easier to make updates to layout and design than it would be otherwise.

What other tactics do you know of to mitigate the impact of or to remove the need for frequent site redesigns?

Now that Microsoft adCenter has been out for a few months and I have some data I can use for comparison purposes, I can finally give a brief review of adCenter.

Low Volume

For approximately the same list of keywords, my experience is that there is simply less traffic coming through MSN—anywhere from 3 to 5 times less than Yahoo and 5 to 10 times less than Google.

Sometimes-Clunky Interface

There are some neat things about adCenter, but the interface seems like it’s a little clunky. Some of the terminology is odd (since when was an ad with a group of keywords referred to as an “Order?”), and I found a couple situations where items were clickable but gave no indication of their ability—no underline, color difference, or hover effect. Reports and navigation can be a little less intuitive than Google’s.

Low Competition

There are still few, or occasionally no, competitors bidding on keywords in Microsoft adCenter. It is usually very easy to get a high or first placed ranking.

Decent Conversion Rates

Despite the lower numbers of impressions and clicks, the traffic from Microsoft adCenter is of good quality—it converts at similar percentages to Google and Yahoo.

Get Started with adCenter Right Away

The fact that there is little competition and that conversion rates are good means you should get into Microsoft adCenter right away. The interface may not be the easiest to learn ever, but you can figure it out, and traffic volumes are probably going to increase, if Microsoft has any money to throw at it. You can also access the base of users who don’t use Google’s services, which should widen your customer base, and beat your competition to the punch.

I recently moved to a new apartment, and so it is time to choose a new ISP.

I’m not looking for much—just the cheapest functional Internet service that I can get. I don’t care about speed if it’s going to cost me extra.

Research

I began looking online (during my breaks at work) for ISPs in my area and then making calls to see what the terms and conditions are, especially the equipment/installation/cancellation terms that tend to trick people.

Some of the web sites and sales people were quick and knowledgeable. Some were not. My best experience was with XMission. Its site has the most complete explanation, its staff was the most helpful, and its prices were among the very best.

My worst experience was with Comcast. Comcast’s site doesn’t have much in the way of information. Installation? Equipment fees? Length of trial periods? Cancellation? Good luck finding it on their site. I talked to a sales rep, and I kept bringing up things that he “failed to mention” to me that I found out from other sources.

Don’t try to trick me. Don’t try to talk past me. Don’t push for the sale so hard. I’m not going to recommend Comcast to anyone now. I don’t care if their actual Internet service is fast and works well. I don’t even care if their price is good. They refused to be transparent with me. I can’t trust them to be honest with me.

Results

Every service I looked into is going to cost me the same. I don’t have a landline telephone, so I can’t get dial-up or DSL without also signing up for a phone plan or a standalone DSL plan (which costs the same as a phone line). The cable that my apartment is wired for is with Comcast (fat chance). Orem’s fiber optic network (UTOPIA) isn’t wired into my complex, and they won’t wire it unless half the complex agrees to sign up.

I think that I’m going to try a WISP. I found several which had really low monthly rates, which compensated for the higher installation charges. Better yet, I can have it installed without being forced to get approval or sign a petition. If that doesn’t work out, I will sign up with a phone line and DSL, but I won’t be happy about it.

The Future

ISPs assume that you have a land line or cable or your own house or something. They also assume that you want the very best available service. Neither of these things is necessarily true. People have different needs, so different offerings are in order. Maybe with the exception of some startup WISP, no current ISP meets my needs as an apartment-dwelling, cell phone-carrying customer.

Some ISP company could make a killing simply by offering several tiers of complete, independent solutions and being honest about the terms and conditions.

Internet service is eventually going to be free to end consumers. So will the necessary equipment. Competition will be for our attention—for permission to be the firm that connects us to the Internet in the way we want to be connected. And that is a battle that will be won based on trust.