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Article:
The Top 20 Web Mistakes Small Businesses Make by: Karl Groves My parents made a monster. Little did they know 30 years ago that they would get exactly what they wished for. Like W.W. Jacobs' tale of "The Monkey's Paw", they got what they wanted, for better and maybe even for worse. See, my father is a virtuous man. Never cursing, never doing drugs, always honest and hard working, he is of the fiber that idealists say America is built upon. He taught me many things - some of which have yet to sink in, and others, although my teenage rebelliousness attempted to distract me, have become ingrained into my very being. "If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right" he would say (ad nauseum, I might add). When I began working in music in 1996 I had what I now feel was a personal foresight into the power of the Internet and the ways in which it could be used to help me generate public awareness for the live music events I was promoting and the artists I represented as a talent agent. Some people seem to think that the Internet has been around forever, but in 1996 it was in its infancy compared to the Internet of today. Web pages in 1996 generally revolved around mostly educational sites and vanity pages. Then, the Internet more resembled an Information Superhighway in that most of its content was informative. Heck, I remember downloading whole Philosophy books back then. At that time, I decided that I could utilize the Internet's power to help me advertise the events I promoted by keeping a diligent schedule online and also by using the power of e-mail, chat, and IM in order to communicate to fans and bands and make things more efficient and less expensive than using the telephone and postage stamps. The problem I was faced with was a simple one - I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Regardless, I made an extremely simplistic and unattractive website and put it up on the web. Over the next few years, I had the privilege of getting to know a small handful of knowledgeable people who were eager to help me by making my websites. In the end, a variety of factors both external and internal made reliance on others simply something I did not feel comfortable with doing. Like a lot of people, I decided to go back to doing it myself. Like before though, I was faced with not knowing what I was doing. My father's words "If its worth doing, its worth doing right" kept ringing in my head. So I decided that what I really needed to do was learn how to do it right. As you now know, I've progressed to the point of being a CIW Certified Professional Site Designer. But, it didn't come overnight. I've prepared this list, 'The Top 20 Mistakes That Small Businesses Make
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