In today's troubled economic times, your business is facing a singular challenge. You know that at the end of this downturn, there may be several proverbial 'empty spaces at the table' in your business service sector. And whether you are one of the companies that come out on top and are able to capitalize on your sector's new competitive playing field will be based on the decisions and actions you are taking today.

Every potential prospect for your business is valuable. Your future customers are looking for solid, reliable, and trustworthy companies to invest, spend, and fulfill their service needs with. Whether your company is in magnetic resonance imaging or fixing broken household plumbing, customers still make decisions on whom to give their business to based on what they see and hear. If your company is in a competitive market it's more important than ever to make certain you are putting the best face on your business. Whether that is your print marketing or your Internet site, what these things say about your business may well decide whether a prospective customer chooses you over your competitor.

With the year 2010 fast approaching, more people than ever are turning to the Internet for their basic information needs. Online retail sales, this past Christmas, were up when all other retail sales were down. Besides looking for low-cost purchasing options, people are also realizing that the Internet is where you can find information fast and easy. Is your business capitalizing on this new wave of Internet visitors?

Questions to ponder

One sure-fire way to build on or improve your sites effectiveness is to properly gauge its current traffic and usage. The following questions would be crucial to this.

• Are you tracking your site statistics and information about site visitors?
• Can you easily see a report showing how many people visited last month vs. this month? Or how about the same month the previous year?
• Do you know what percentage of your visitors come from search engines like Google? Do you know what these visitors search for to find you?
• Can you easily manage and add content to your Web site?
• Do these updates take longer than a day?
• Do you know if your Web site is creating any new business for you?

If you are unsure of these answers you should talk to us about simple and cost-effective solutions for gathering and managing data.

Not all Web sites are created equal

Digital Attic has been around long before the Internet bubble of the late nineties. Unlike many of our competitors who started up after this time, we learned valuable lessons about what makes a good Internet solution, and what does not. We have been very proud recently to unveil a new content management solution, which we call Foundation. Foundation is exactly what its name implies, a solid foundation from which to build a top-class Web site. Tired of re-inventing the wheel every time one of our clients needed a database-driven dynamic site, we took our best experiences and built a framework from which our clients could manage users, groups, site settings, and content. And from that point we developed more modules that would extend and broaden the solution to offer more features and functionality. Put simply, our clients can fully manage the day-to-day operations of their sites with as little (or as much) help as they need from us. Creating new menu categories and pages can be done in minutes, not hours or days. And for many this alone can mean the difference between a living, growing Web site or a stagnant, dying one. Your prospects want to learn about your company, your service offerings and your past performance. Are you going to trust this message to a hastily written bit of text that someone scribbled down in 1998, or do you want the power to be able to update and perfect this message yourself, over time and at your own pace? Foundation gives you that power and much more.