I just finished the development work for the Hydrocephalus Association’s website.  Most of the site was already built by a 3rd party.  The association turned to Social Kind to get help for the most complex lingering problems.

It was critical to the association that people be encouraged to register for the site when they clicked on certain links, but they didn’t want to lose visitors with a complex registration process.

Social Kind helped Hydrocephalus Association build a new login page that featured all the registration information right away.  The page also helps prospective visitors subscribe to categories on the site that they would like to receive regular updates on.  One of the problems with the WordPress sign-up process is that it requires you to check your e-mail for a message, and only then can you login to the site.  The association was noticing that when users finally got this e-mail and clicked through to complete the sign-up process, they had forgotten what they originally wanted to download on the site.  Social Kind helped build a WordPress plug-in that remembers where you came from and takes you back after the registration process.

Congratulation to the Hydrocephalus Association on their updated site!  They are fighting for an important cause, and I am proud to be a small part of it.

You can read more from my teammate Shanti at http://perfwork.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/startup-weekend/.

Next week we are off to Paris, and we may get a chance to drop into another Startup Weekend that’s just before Le Web.

I just met with a new client who fell victim to this very problem. Fortunately for them, they reserved their domain months ago, but had yet to do anything with it. For small businesses that do business online, the effects could be chilling.

The client likely experienced this problem because of a keystroke logging piece of malware on one of their laptops. This problem is less rare than you think; there are millions of computers infected.  In a recent paper entitled Do Strong Web Passwords Accomplish Anything? researchers point out that phishing and key-logging schemes are the most likely culprits today. So by all means continue to use strong passwords, but this is useless if you allow malware onto computers that you use to update your website.

Many other businesses use FTP to update their website without knowing that the password they use to login is being sent across Internet in clear text for anyone to find. As Slashdot reports in a post R.I.P. FTP many attacks come from improper use of FTP to update sites. Instead, you should be using SFTP or FTP over SSH. If your hoster does not offer this service, find one that does.

If you are in the business of building your online presence, both of these tools matter.  Most of your customers don’t wake up in the morning and think about visiting your site.  In fact, most of them won’t think about it period unless they hear about it word-of-mouth from one of the sites they already visit.  Both digg and bit.ly are avenues for you to get the word out about your site, blog or press release.

I am rooting for bit.ly in this battle, because they help people that produce viral campaigns measure their effectiveness.  In my post linked to above I detail just how this works.  I have used digg before as well, and it’s a multi-step process I haven’t bothered to repeat in over a year.  Maybe this is why digg receives just 20,000 new links each day while bit.ly garners 2-3 million.

Social networking on the web started with teenagers sharing music on MySpace, but expect that this trend is here to stay.  Not only is that first generationg growing up and getting jobs, but their parents are also getting connected.

What itty-bitty thing would you put a display in?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

The good news is that if you are passionate about what you are writing about; there’s room for you to get an audience.

One way to avoid procrastinating is to drop blog ideas into WordPress as soon as you have them.  You don’t have to write out the full entry, just a stub to remimd you and maybe a link to something that inspired you.  The Quick Press feature is a great tool for this.  As soon as you dash off a few notes, just click Save Draft.  Then when you are bored on a Sunday night, log into WordPress and see which draft looks the most interesting to fill out.

Bit.ly is a great tool for figuring out what impact you have when you refer your friends, followers and site visitors to sites you don’t own. Even for your own site, where you can set up Google Analytics, you can figure out exactly which marketing helped you the most.

To get started, visit bit.ly and make sure to sign up for an account (otherwise, you cannot see usage data for URLs you shorten). Once you have an account, simply enter the URL you want to point friends to into the big textbox. The site even features a handy box to share your newly shortened URL on twitter.

The site doesn’t have a feature for sharing your most popular links itself, but here are a few of my best bits:

• Dear John, Thanks for the Layoff – BusinessWeek
• Life on Marrs: Last Minute Tea Party
• The Fragile Flight of the Twitterlings – BusinessWeek

Go ahead click on them and stroke my ego