ELWsoftware.com

Everyone knows that too many websites have too much advertising.  How often do you just want to read a few paragraphs without some strobe light animated spam gif flashing in your peripheral vision?  I know, it sucks!  I understand that this is how websites pay the bills, but you have got to be kidding me.  Dailymotion used to be one of my favorite sites to watch a video, but now it has far too much advertising.  If you haven’t visited recently, you probably haven’t noticed that most of the time you have to sit through a 30 second ad at the beginning of most new videos.  Even the short ones that are only a few minutes long themselves! You will probably notice, unless this article has been scraped, that ELWsoftware.com also has ads on the blog pages.  Sorry.

The truth, if you want to hear it, is that ads don’t make very much money for small web sites.  Relatively speaking ads won’t make you much money on big websites either.  Everyone likes the Madmen show and how it portrays a golden age where advertising actually worked well.  Where are we now?  Google makes a huge amount of money on advertising, but that only shows that advertisers are paying.  This doesn’t mean that you, as an intelligent human being, are watching.  In my opinion, Google sells higher positions in search results, not ads.  The fact that they put the results off to the side doesn’t fool too many.  By the way, does anyone wonder why so many major companies pay for Google advertising for their own name?  Why would Godaddy buy the keyword godaddy?  This doesn’t make any sense to me.  Of course they make money on it, but it seems more like they are paying for some kind of mob protection scheme.

What can be done about this over-advertising problem?  People trying to make money will always be willing to beg for attention through whatever means necessary.  Sooner or later they will discover how little they money is buying.  What if there was a new search engine that heavily weighted results that have very little advertising?  That could work.  Until then, I suggest replacing the ads on small websites with this simple promotional message:

This is where the advertising would have been if we wanted to annoy you.  You’re welcome.

When I wrote an article about the Yahoo compliance guide for law enforcement, I had no idea it would get the response that it did.  One of the more interesting side effects is that the article shows up in searches for the Google compliance guide for law enforcement.  This is interesting because there apparently is no Google equivalent to this document at Yahoo!  This means that many of those people looking for such a document actually find and visit my Yahoo article.  I don’t care too much about the increased site traffic.  The really interesting side effect is that the tracking software we developed shows some pretty cool behavior when law enforcement starts snooping around!

If any of you out there actually trust Google or any of the other search engines with your privacy, maybe you should reconsider your beliefs.  You may think that preserving their reputation (Don’t be evil) is enough to motivate them to keep your searches private.  You were wrong!  When you search for something using Google, then visit the results, the sites you visit know what search queries you used to find them! I can hope that intelligent police officers and other law enforcement show some discretion with their searches.  The trouble is that I already know that they don’t!  The tracking software we developed at ELW tells us what you were searching for when you found us.  It tells us what you looked at.  It also tells us your IP address, and ISP which gives us a very good idea of who you are.  Sometimes it tells us exactly who you are if you are silly enough to use a government computer!  Have I said enough to give you the picture?  The information you are so desperate to obtain from search engines, with or without a warrant, is usually right there in plain sight on some other web site.

If you are involved in law enforcement, you need to understand what is going on.  Cops who search for criminals using search engines may actually find them!  The problem is that the criminals can see cops coming too, and they don’t need a warrant.  This website doesn’t need a warrant to see who visits us.  Google doesn’t need a warrant to see what people search for.  Yahoo doesn’t need one either.  This begs the question:  Can law enforcement set up a fake web site to obtain this information too?  I’ll bet many of them actually have.  In fact, I’ll bet the present infiltration of the internet would boggle your mind.

If you are involved with law enforcement and need some help in this arena, I strongly suggest you seek the advice of a professional.  It isn’t helping your reputation to be searching the internet like amateur private investigators.  ELW is willing to help set up websites, give training, and develop strategies for obtaining information through the internet.

The web site idea for today seeks to replicate the money-making venture done by Adam Sandler’s character in the movie Punch Drunk Love.  If you haven’t seen it, there is a coupon for some free airline miles when you buy certain food products.  The character notices that some of the products are very inexpensive, and cost much less than the value of the miles.  From what I can gather from the movie, the coupon was designed for some kind of microwaveable dinner, but also works for little pudding cups that are individually scanned.

I’m still researching, but I hear that the scheme is actually based on a true story!

Wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of web site to help find opportunities like this?  Sure there are many web sites out there with coupon codes for all sorts of things, but this could be about more than saving money.  This site could use the latest in artificial intelligence to detect coupon and discount opportunities that actually make money.

In the movie, the character ends up with thousands of dollars worth of pudding.  If the opportunity for profit was not so spectacular, this might end up being a problem.  What if the profit margin was only a few cents per item you purchased?  You might end up with a warehouse full of stuff you don’t want before you make any money!  So, if you incorporate some sort of process to get rid of the goods, this might vastly increase the number of money making opportunities.  Every time I see some interview with a super-shopping housewife, they talk about how with coupons and rebates, something in their cart ends up being free.  So, why do they only buy 1 or two of them?  If there exists a way to get something for free, you should be cleaning out every store you can find!

If you are interested in making this web site idea into a real working moneymaker, contact ELW and we will help you get it started.

Why doesn’t your website use ads that can’t be blocked?  There was a huge whining session on Slashdot today about blocking ads.  Some major nerd site didn’t let users see content for a while if they used ad blocking software.  I don’t understand the big deal about it.  ELW has a solution for all of the websites out there that are upset about visitors blocking ads:

ELW designed an ad system where users can’t block your ads!

That is correct, unless you have some artificially intelligent browser that can actually see what you see like some modern day equivalent of a food taster.  ELW can install this system on your website with very little trouble.  We can also have your ads shown on the websites of our customers!

Do you understand what this means?  Unless you have a computer smart enough to tell the difference between ads and real content, an ELW ad will get through!  I suppose if you turn off all images, you won’t see a picture ad.  If you turn off all text, you won’t see a text ad.  If that is how you want to browse the internet, be our guest.

If you want to present unblockable ads on your website, contact ELW today! You will have full editorial control over the ads shown on your site.  You can even choose whether you want the ad links to be followed or nofollow.

If you are interested in really making money these days, you must have heard of outsourcing.  I love to come up with ideas for websites that could make someone money if they are interested.  Today that website idea deals with help desk outsourcing.  When people have problems with their computers, software, or other products, it is nice to have a human being to help you solve the problem.  Problems always show up that nobody could have anticipated, so often it is the case that there is no official solution available.  It is so nice to have professionals on the front lines who are familiar with what is going on.

Depending on what your opinions are on outsourcing, you might think this is a good or bad idea for a website.  I’m asking you to have an open mind and read further.  Very often the products we all use were built with little or no input from American manufacturers.  It doesn’t make any sense to hire someone in the United States to work at a help desk.  You might get annoyed with accents when you are on the phone, but I also remember when it was common for people to call during dinner and read a script like a robot.  Thank goodness those days are over!

What would an ideal help desk outsourcing web site do?  I’ll leave the details to whoever is lucky enough to ask ELW about this idea, but I’ll share some thoughts.  Even with the low cost of labor, it is quite expensive to set up an outsourced help desk.  I believe that more small businesses would be willing to test an outsourced helpdesk strategy if the startup costs were more affordable.  On the other side of the coin, I think many foreign workers would be willing to get a help desk started if money was made available.  So, the obvious idea is to organize the process of setting up an off shore help desk operation.  This web site would do that.

If you are interested in implementing this web site idea with help from ELW software, we would be glad to give you a free consultation and share some ideas.

The cool website idea of the day is to make a link stock exchange.  This website would allow webmasters who run a successful website to sell links on their website to the highest bidder, or to anyone they choose.  The website would also allow those of you looking to improve your search engine rankings to find affordable sites to get a link.  I know that similar sites exist, but sometimes success depends on careful execution.  Feel free to discuss this idea in comments, since the possibilities are endless.

If you are interested in having ELW design this website for you, we would be glad to help out.  Contact ELW for a free consultation about this website idea or an other ideas you might have!

Today I read an article about how bad cheating is in computer science courses.  While I am glad that the problem was not limited to the school where I was a TA, it doesn’t make it any easier to accept.  The fact is that many students in college these days cheat as a habit.  This habit only grows when they find out how easy it is to get away with it.  I don’t mean they don’t get caught, since it is so easy to detect cheating.  I mean that cheaters get caught, and the punishment is meaningless.  Students cheat, get caught, and maybe lose some points on an assignment.

The real problem is that most cheaters will graduate!  Do you ever wonder why your computer doesn’t work?  It might be because a cheater designed some little part of it.  Part of my brain says that karma will do its work, and everything will get straightened out.  We all know this isn’t the case.  Cheaters graduate, get jobs, do “work”, and cause damage.

The cool website idea of the day is to get some cheaters justice.  Anybody who has dealt with a cheater in a card game will probably agree that cheating doesn’t stop when you get caught.  Cheating stops when cheating stops working.  Cheaters at college are doing it to get a good job.  The cool website idea is to put up a website to unmask cheaters.  I know about FERPA, and how it is probably a federal crime to release academic information of this sort.  There must be a solution that is legal!

This cool website idea would be a place where employers would look to see if the applicant had a history of cheating in his/her college coursework.  Get the consent! I think a non-cheater would love to have a list of certifications from his instructors saying that they hadn’t cheated.  This system would probably get abused too.  ELW might need some help on this ideas from you on this one.  This problem could be too big to solve with a simple website without the help of some extra creative input.

After exhausting all available help available on Google about my Dreamweaver crashing, I finally did a complete reinstall today.  I want to emphasize that there was no solution to this problem available anywhere on the internet, including Adobe’s support forums.  I went through and eliminated every possible problem listed on Adobe’s tech support checklist.  There is only one conclusion to make: This is a poorly written piece of software!

Let me go over a few things for my loyal readers:

1. Installation of software really only requires reading from a disk, decompressing files in some cases, and saving them on the hard drive.  There are no magic elves behind the scenes doing anything else!  Installations of software requiring significantly more time than copying the files are broken.  No exceptions.
2. The difference between your computer after installing software, and before installing software, is the presence of files on the hard drive.  The files come off the disk, and are placed on the hard drive. That is it!
3. Why can’t any decent software company produce an accurate progress indicator?  How is it that the installation progress can be at 95% for the majority of the time during installation?  What monkey programs this stuff?

Dreamweaver is the best software available for web design, but that doesn’t mean it is good.  Good software doesn’t have the following problems I discovered while looking for a solution:

• Dreamweaver contains a bug that forces it to crash due to daylight savings time.
• Dreamweaver contains a bug that renders the entire program useless if a file has exactly 8k of data.  The official solution to this problem is actually to edit the file using a different program, and to add or remove a few bytes of data.  I’m not kidding.
• Uninstalling Dreamweaver software doesn’t uninstall anything.  Try it if you don’t believe me!  After you uninstall it, the files are still there!  The settings must get removed when you uninstall, right?  Wrong again!  Adobe has a special adobe clean program that you are supposed to download, and run to make sure everything is ready to reinstall.  This doesn’t remove all the files either!

The whole episode reminded me of the dark ages when I still used Windows.  At least the Adobe tech support checklist didn’t ask me to check if the computer was plugged in.  It did however get to a point in the checklist where it started telling me I had a hardware problem.

I have some advice for Adobe, and any other software developers out there.  If uninstalling and reinstalling software isn’t enough to fix the problem, then your software is broken. Think about that when you are deciding to charge thousands of dollars for upgrades.

The free website idea for today is to create a site that allows users to search the internet for anyone out there stealing their hard work and present it as their own.  This can really be a problem since these content thieves often generate enough spam links to the stolen content that it actually outranks your originals.  What makes this site better than using a search engine is that everything could be automated!  You wouldn’t need to do the same search over and over, nor would you need to manually check for unique phrases.  It could all be handled for you automatically with a paid subscription.

Contact ELWsoftware.com if you are interested in making this website idea a reality.

Another free website idea?  ELW must be crazy to give this stuff away!  The fact is that ideas are rarely worth much of anything at all unless you are ready to build them into something real.  ELW is glad to help you build any website idea posted on this blog, and you will never pay for the idea or for any kind of finders fee.

The free website idea of the day is to use crowdsourcing to get SEO for websites!

Crowdsourcing means that you ask for help, and the crowd volunteers their efforts.   This website would allow users to post their site to be evaluated by any SEO out there to give their advice.  You know, that “advice” that they usually charge money for.  Why would a SEO give away free advice?  Most of their SEO advice isn’t worth much anyway, just like a free website idea.  The secret is in how the advice is put into practice.  I think SEO providers would gladly give free ideas if it meant that they would be first in line to get paid to do the work!