We’re often asked how to effectively rebrand an existing website. The biggest—and most common—oversight we see is that organizations begin their redesign without clear goals for the initiative. Most sites are redesigned for purely cosmetic reasons, overlooking the more crucial areas, and those that visitors actually interact with: content, site navigation, page layout, and of course search engine optimization. After all, your site has to be found, right?

Following are seven steps that can help ensure that the site you design today will be an effective investment for years to come.

1. Start with a plan. A properly executed wireframe—like a blueprint in architecture—shows you how the new Web site will function. Like building a house where it is far easier to move a wall’s placement during the planning stage than an actual wall during the construction phase, the same is true when designing a website's structure.
2. Don’t be sidetracked by the latest fads in gadgetry. A Web site that is well-thought-out and easily navigable will always outperform one that features the latest wiz-bang Flash element in the long run. Flash or other technological features should be integrated only if they serve the needs of the site's audience.
3. Get buy-in from all team members. If you fail to get buy-in from Ted in your accounting department, be prepared for Ted to unravel your plan in the eleven hour. Anyone worth getting feedback from should be involved during the planning stage.
4. Seek advice from people who will use your site. Seek feedback from clients about what is and is not working on your existing site. You can contact them by phone for a quick interview or prepare a web form that you email an invitation to them to visit and complete. Offer a drawing for all who complete the form for tickets to a movie … whatever it takes. You should hear what the people who use the site are saying.
5. Relavancy and freshness. Pull feeds from your blog into your home page and designate areas that can be updated often with news. Give visitors a reason to visit often or RSS your feeds.
6. Get top ranking on Google. Popular sites make effective use of search engine optimization practices.This vital component of any successful site is something that should be planned from the outset.
7. Hire a professional. Since your Web site will likely be your most important marketing tool, you should find the most qualified team to lead this initiative. The best way to evaluate various teams’ work is to review their sites and speak to their clients.

Following these steps will ensure that your investment of time and money is successful, generating traffic to your site and delivering valuable content to your audience.

We've recently been discussing adding a blog component to our CMS360 content management system. Right away the question came up as to whether it's better to incorporate your blog as part of your site, or host it on a separate domain. I had always assumed it was better to host it separately because then you'd have another quality site linking to yours. However, on further study, I discovered that Google seems to have wised up to that, and no longer considers subdomains to be separate websites, with some exceptions for very large, highly trafficked websites. For example a search for dell will show dell.com and support.dell.com, both sites with different goals and a lot of unique content. But for the average small/medium business website, only one result per domain will be listed.

I read a number of blogs on this topic and the opinions all seem to agree - in general, a blog should be listed in a subfolder, not on a subdomain. It's better to consolidate your content on a single domain for the maximum search engine impact.

Depending on your site structure, there may be a number of other advantages to keeping your blog in a subfolder. All of your images will be in a single location and you may be able to share files between your site and your blog, making updating easier. You may also save money on hosting and have a single login to manage.

For us, this was a good discovery, because it will make our integration to CMS360 simpler. We'll still have a single site and code to set up and manage, which also makes things easier for our clients.

We plan to provide this new blog component to our clients as soon as possible. We'll start with our own site, moving our current blog from Blogger to our own installation of CMS360. Then we'll analyze our analytics to see how it impacts our traffic and search engine rankings. We'll write up another blog post to let you know how it goes, so keep an eye out.

In the future, we'll also be integrating the Blogger API with CMS360, because we know some clients may still prefer to keep their blog separate from their website, or may have multiple blogs to maintain. Either way, we want our CMS360 users to be able to update their website, blog and other content from a single location. We know it's hard to keep up with all the things on the web these days, so we want to make it as easy as possible.

Further reading:
Here are some of the articles I read about subdomains vs. subfolders, if you'd like more in-depth information on this topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
http://www.seohawk.com/blog/subfolders-vs-subdomains-seo-analysis/
http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/seo/which-is-best-for-blog-seo-subdomain-or-subfolder/
http://www.pointit.com/blog/subdomain-or-subfolder-seo/

One of the great aspects of Firefox is the ability to add extensions. And there are plenty to choose from. Although some are made to do little more than entertain or alter the aesthetics, there are many more that really improve your browsing experience. No matter what your purpose in browsing, there is a likely an extension for you. Let’s take a look at 6 extensions we recommend.

#1: Morning Coffee

This extension allows you to set a group of Web sites that will open (each in its own tab) with the click of a button. This will save you from having to roam through your bookmarks (while drinking that first cup of wake-me-up in the morning) to view your favorite sites. You can even set sites up to open only on certain days (or every day).

#2: NoScript

This is one of the best tools for making sure your browsing experience is secure. With NoScript, you can disable active content from any site you don’t trust. Unless you configure it to allow JaveaScript, Java, and other executable scripting to run from a site, NoScript will completely block the script, keeping you browser safe from known and unknown exploits. Use this extension regardless of platform.

#3: ColorfulTabs

If you’re like me, you generally have a LOT of tabs open in Firefox. Sometimes this isn’t a problem. But there are times when the tabs can get a bit overwhelming and need a bit of organization. To help with this, ColorfulTabs gives each open tab a different color, making it easier to distinguish between them. With this simple extension, you can color-code tabs either randomly or according to URL. You can also set tabs to fade. Another fun feature is that you can set a background image for tabs.

#4: TimeTracker

Okay, this is not really a tool that will aid or better your browsing experience. In fact, this little extension will remind you how much time you spend browsing. I have found this little gem useful in a number of circumstances. Whether you are in need of a quick five-minute break from number crunching or you just need to know how much time you spend on a specific Web site, TimeTracker will keep track of how long you browse. What is nice about this is that the tool times across sessions. So when you close the browser, the timer stops, and when you open the browser back up, the timer starts again. You can reset the timer by right-clicking the status bar timer and selecting Reset.

#5: Fasterfox

This extension does one thing: It makes Firefox load pages faster. Speed of page loading can be increased by allowing simultaneous connections and prefetching. To install it, you have to log into a Firefox account to download. The extension is worth the hassle. The speed increase is noticeable.

#6: BlogRovR

We all read blogs. . And this takes time. Instead of wasting time going to the blogs, let this handy extension fetch them for you. You do have to sign up for an account using this extension (they promise they won’t spam you.) and you will be asked to install another sidebar (Stickies), which is not necessary. Once you have this installed, you just enter the blog URL, and BlogRovR will begin fetching the information for you. Warning: If you have NoScript installed, you have to allow the BlogRovR page to run scripts or it won’t be able to fetch pages for you.

So that’s my list of 6 extensions, from various categories, that will make your Firefox experience better. Some of these extensions are for power users and some are for everyone. What extensions have you found that make your daily browsing better?