Many times I met people that ask me some advises to put their business idea online. At first glance, they were encouraged about doing their first steps online, facing the “e” market. Their ideas sounds terrific, and their planned earnings too. They usually start talking quietly, because they don’t want any spy in our conversation. Even we are at my office or at a bar, they start the conversation in a very quiet voice.

Sometimes they mention the whole business in our first meeting… Sometimes they don’t. But, I have to recognize than in more that 90% of the situations, they never mention a Business Plan. And that’s because it doesn’t exist any business plan. All the ideas are just that, ideas in their own minds.

If the potential business have partners, there are rigorous contract between them already signed, but, no Business Plan.

Business projects without business plans have high probability of fail. Yes, I know some exceptions, but believe me, they are only exceptions.

A well done Business Plan helps projects in their initial phase to go live. Sometimes also make them change their initial course.

Don’t doubt. If you really think in spend some resources in going online with your business (potential or not), spend some extra time before that and prepare a Business Plan. Maybe the Business Plan is only for you; maybe is for your angel investors or your partners. If your project succeed in the blueprints, maybe will succeed to in the real life.

Movie Masher is free software that can be installed on any web server to enable advanced video editing features for end users. Like other open source development projects, it benefits from ongoing community feedback and code contributions.

It’s a very nice application, and great for those that doesn’t know much about what and how to edit their videos. Anyway, in my opinion, a little improve of their interface is need.

From Plaxo you can centralize your contact information for multiple services as Outlook, Outlook Express, Google Calendar, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, Hotmail, Thunderbird and LinkedIn. When a friend of yours changes their contact info, you’ll see the change automatically (in case your friend is a Plaxo user).  Other features included birthday reminders and some more.

There’s a free basic service and some other premium services with some extra features such fixing duplicate contacts, sending unlimited ecards, getting assistance from Plaxo and many more.
It’s really a wonderful tool!. Get connected!.

PcNames brings us a very interesting tool. It shows the domains names availability while you type it in their search box. Developed in Ajax, it quickly shows if domain is taken or not, checking the following extensions: .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .us.

In case the domain is taken, it shows a whois button to know who registered our desired domain.

The people for LinkVendor developed LinkValue, an online tool that help us determinate the cost of a link in a website, based on the website popularity and traffic.

Of course, sometimes is very difficult to estimate the cost of advertising in a website and this value is only an estimation, but I thing is help to give us an idea, or al least, a comparison based on many indicators.

Following YouTube business strategy, Spymac shares their revenues with their users. This site is an online community where users can share their videos and pictures, and earn money when other visitors watch this media content.

It has some tricky rules: If you publish content on Monday, you’ll only receive credits for the same day visitors; so, it’s very important to publish content every day, so you have more chances to receive credits.

Up today, Spymac is a very small community, compared with YouTube, but it’s smoothly growing. This has many advantages -and disadvantages too-, depending how you analyze your business with this site. Go and take a look at it.

YouTube is one of the major network for sharing your videos. But, if you want to share presentations (powerpoints, for instance), SlideShare is a very good choice.

Even it has not many presentations up today, is a high growing network and very useful for find interesting information. Give it a chance!.

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). 
 
The site is sponsored by the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology. Even it has not all the existind diseases, it shows a very good representation for many of them. The data is collected automatically from many sources and displayed in the Google Map Api. It’s a very nice job and hope this helps many organizations.

If you really want to have success when creating your website, I recommend not making the following common mistakes:

1. Don’t have a main focus or objective
Many times, I get into a website and I don’t understand the site objective. It has not a common subject and it’s hard to understand what the site offers. Content? Products? Services? I once visited a website that sells perfumes and also offers soccer tickets. What for? Which was their relationship? Who knows… For me, it was a waste content. Even if your site is not ecommerce oriented, it’s very important to define the main objective of it, so every piece of content that you add will follow this goal.

2. Flash Made
I really like Flash and the things you can do with this wonderful application. Lot of great animations and creative designs can be created with Flash; however, not all internet connections are via CABLE / DSL, especially in not developed markets. Heavy Flash sites could be a problem when the visitor’s connection is not so fast and could invite your visitors to exit the site. In other hand, search engines could not successfully index flash content, so the site will become invisible for this great traffic sources. So, pay attention if you decide to go live with a website created 100% in Flash.

3. Give too many options for the site visitors
If your site has a main objective, you can simple guide your visitors to it. For instance, if your site objective is selling toys, it’s correct to generate content related to it, showing a toys catalogue, adding recommendations based on children age, instructions for play games, and many other contents that follows the same objective: sell toys. But, if the site content is not well organized, your visitors could become frustrated trying to follow your site links. So, pay attention in your site objective, focusing in how you organized your site content. A good strategy is show al the information in no more that three clicks.

4. No Follow Up
Many times I talked with clients that invested lot of time and money preparing their online business, and then, going online following their master plans. But, in many occasions, those people didn’t follow up the site’s meters. Maybe because their business became a complete success; maybe because they don’t. Follow up a website requires to control their site traffic, studying what your visitor did while they get into the web pages, knowing their preferences and the most popular information, as any other important information that help you take decisions about your business.

5. Very heavy pages
I already write about websites created 100% in Flash; another problem represent those websites that each page last to many time for loading; perhaps because their images; perhaps because the hosting service; the result is also an invitation to your visitor to exit your page. I recommend you to frequently check the average time that your page loads.

6. Rely on a static website
If your visitors found the same page each time they enter to your site, you have many chances to loose them as frequent users. You should renew your content in order to renew your website. Those websites that don’t add new content frequently are mainly classified as static pages; others are dynamic pages. A page with dynamic content invites the visitors to return more frequently and so helps your website to obtain more traffic and profits.

7. Don’t think on an easy way to manage your content
Once you go live with your webpage you’ll probably face the problem of how to update from now on, their content. You pay for a designer or programmer and they put your website online, but didn’t think an easy way for create or modify the site contents. That’s a common mistake that happen lot of time. Don’t having a content administrator will force you to ask again your designers and programmers to do this job for you, and results in lot of money spent for this simple task.

Very interesting engine created by PageBull. Instead of returning a text list of web pages after each search, it shows the web pages print screen, so you can also see their design and recognize the site for more that their title and description.

I tested this search engine a few months ago and I have to admit that it has dramatically improved: the searches are faster and the image quality is really good. Excellent job that I’d like to share with you!