Sonet Journal

In May 2008 myJournal.com will go live with the major release of its online business and personal networking system that is based on Wordpress MU. The system promises to feature a number of online applications that will enhance a users networking experience and aid in promoting companies and businesses online.

By now most of us seen, used or had some kind of contact with social network systems such as MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. These systems have proven quite valuable when it comes to keeping in touch with family members, college mates, and meeting new friends. Social networking systems were designed to create an atmosphere of fun, communication, and the airing of personal opinion and views. For anyone running a business and focusing on their careers it can prove quite time consuming. The time spent chatting online with family members or uploading their favourite pics could have been spent writing the latest project, analyzing data, or even brushing up on invoices. What has been needed is a network system that focuses on the communication between businesses and the individual.

myJournal.com

Last year My Journal went into development mode with the sole idea of filling this gap in the market. Utilizing Wordpress MU and pushing it to limits with cutting edge ideas it is almost out of its beta phase and ready for first public review on May 1st 2008. The system will provide the following features:

• Profile page – Displaying data about you and your company

• The Wire – Communication tool for leaving live messages

• Networks – The ability to create company networks for public or private use, social networks and private meeting areas.

• Showroom – Featuring an online showroom where company products can be viewed by category and industry, with areas for adding pricing and detailed information about each product.

• Journal – Extensive blogging system that allows for latest news, press releases, and discussion about products, and events.

• Headlines – attached to the profile and expendable by one click to the latest headlines to what your friends and colleagues are doing at myJournal.

• Messaging – Internal email messaging facility. Contacts – A full list of members contacts with thumbnail images and arranged by category.

• Developers – an area for developers to share ideas and build onto myJournal tools that will enhance business life.

• Video - Products video features with ability to upload and show video footage.

And much more – myJournal is built to be scalable and will be adding new applications as it grows. The thinking behind My Journal is that businesses and individuals will be more apt to utilize it if they felt they were getting something more substantial from the system such as Return on Investment for their companies. In this case ROI is the time they will put into their area to enhance their companies’ products and services.

I had mentioned earlier in the year that Southbourne Internet was closing down and we were rebranding to Sonet Digital. I knew it was a going to take a while as we have been really busy this year non-stop and at times ‘burning the candle at both ends’ – it has not given me the time to start the migration and move I wanted.
A couple of weeks I decided to make a start and put the together architecture for the new site which will be at www.sonetdigital.com We are quite excited about the new site and it will feature a very neat design – hopefully that right combination of new media and business – integrated blog – white paper resource etc.
One of the main reasons we are re-branding and starting afresh is besides growing we have moved on with thoughts and attitudes and what we feel we should be providing our clients. Southbourne.com was always a smaller company even before we had our original hometown URL of Southbourne.com we were Southbourne Internet and smaller still.
Long Term VS. Short Term Web Projects
When we started it was almost overnight that Southbourne got plunged into a couple of big projects consulting – it then steadied out and since then we have built many smaller sites and a few larger ones. Some of our successes have been consulting on SEO and re-branding for various companies. Our philosophy regarding SEO has never been to take a short term project. We have always maintained that the best SEO projects should be over a longer period of time working to:
Establish partnerships and relations with our clients

• Taking the time to understand the clients market and its customer base

• Educating the client in the best sues of the web and compliancy

• Building a trust factor

The above is just some of many points that we feel aid in success for a Search engine marketing campaign.

Static Web Designers vs. Quality
The new company will emphasize this more. Besides SEO, design and development will be core for Sonet Digital. I have never been completely happy with using static designers that stay with one company. I am off the belief that each project is individual and should take on the most appropriate designer for the project. Besides having a static designer also stymies the versatility of a new media agency and the designs all start to become to identifiable. Sonet Digital will work with many designers from various agencies to freelances. It’s not about picking the best but the most appropriate for the job. To do this equitably we will share in the credit and profit for the design jobs. We will however, keep a static designer for updating sites. There will also be a static developer on board.

Food for Thought and Implementation

Two really neat blog post that had dropped down to my mail-feeds this morning both deal with URl, redirects and the debate for underscores or dashes.

Underscores vs. Dashes
First feed I had was from Google’s Matt Cutts with some good tips for Whitehat bloggers, Matt states that:

But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your URL’s over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.

This reaffirmed our internal debates about this matter. It’s always one of those niggling issues whether to use dashes or underscores. Dashes it is then.

301 vs. 302 Redirects
Secondly a really good Whiteboard Friday session from Jeff Pollard at SEOMOZ. Jeff’s video about page redirection deals with the tricky issue of 301 redirects and moving those old pages to a new area. This is good stuff and though it’s fairly well know it certainly reaffirms why you should use a 301 redirect instead of a 302. A 302 will tell a search engine that it is only a temporary move. A 301 redirect will say that it’s a permanent move to the new page and the search engine will then transfer all its information about the page to the new area including link juice.

Both really good post and worth a read and to keep in mind when developing or redesigning new sites that change their URL structure.