What makes your business or organization unique? What should people deal with you, rather than any of the other similar outfits? What makes you stand out from the crowd? This is the sort of information the home page of your site should convey. Some call this the unique value proposition. Another way of thinking about this is the answer to your prospect's question "Who are you and why should I care?" I thought about this again the other week when we lost a client. Yes, that does happen on occasion. This was a client who never updated their site, never wanted the site to a hub of business activity, wouldn't listen to any of our suggestions or proposals. They moved to a different service provider. I asked them the obvious question: "why?" This was his reply:

Probably half of our clients rarely, if ever, update their sites. We don't update our home page often, but we do blog semi-regularly. It's just become more important to all of us to update our web site's content regularly. Why? A post just appeared ont the official Google Blog (you didn't know they had one, did you?) entitled Giving you fresher, more recent search results, Google will now more heavily weight freshness of content. How heavily? They're rather vague about that, but the article seems to indicate that this will be a major shift for Google. My take-away from this is

Early next year, the next major release of Joomla will be released. It's currently slated to be called Joomla! 2.5. Don't ask me why, I didn't number it. Joomla 1.5 will thereafter hit end-of-live. Joomla 2.5 is scheduled to be supported for at least 18 months. Some of our client sites are Joomla 1.0, most are 1.5. We often get asked 'why should I have to upgrade my site? After all, it's working just fine.' And it may be, for the moment, but the sea is changing around it. When a piece of software reaches end-of-life, the developers quit maintaining it. This includes bug-fixes and security patches. Unfortunately, the bad guys don't lose interest in end-of-life software. In fact they actively start looking for vulnerabilities in older software, because they know the security holes won't be fixed. Along with this is

We rent two servers at 1and1.com to host our clients' websites. One of them just passed a major milestone: being up without reboot for over one year. Just a few minutes ago, it's uptime statistics were: 372 days, 12 hours, 39 minutes, the other reports being up 214 days, 22 hours, 17 minutes. So why aren't all our websites up 100% of the time? Well, this leads to a discussion of what parts of the digital pipeline between you and your website are reliable what percent of the time. We employ a monitoring service that checks the availablity of several of our sites from different places around the world. One of the sites we host, for instance, has a reported downtime of 5 minutes in this past month. But the server's been running along just fine for the past nine months? What went down?

The previous blog post about our websites being up 99%+ of the time leads to another discussion. We had a prospect who wanted to host with a different outfit. This group guaranteed 100% uptime. We can't guarantee that, so the prospect went with the 100% hosting provider. Why don't we use this '100% uptime' group?