Minutes of the August Meeting

Mary Sheridan had her Windows SIG/open discussion session from 6:30 PM to 7:00 PM.

The representative from TBO (Tampa Bay Online), Debra Benoit, was the presenter. TBO.com is the online front door for the Tampa Tribune and WFLA. Debra works for the advertising department, and her talk was about ways to maximize traffic to your web site.

Debra explained that the Internet has changed a great deal in the last few years. In mid-1999 the most popular search engines were indexing 15% of web sites. That figure is down by 35% today. This means that it can be very difficult to get your web site "found" on the Internet. Debra stated that 68 million people made purchases on the internet in the first quarter of the year 2000, and that was up 53 million from 1999. Seventy two percent of all Internet users became online shoppers in the year 2000. This means that public confidence is changing and more people are starting to trust doing business on the Internet.

The first thing you need to do to promote your web site is to publicize it everywhere you go. Business cards, signs, stationary, ads, any place where you have your business name, you should also have the URL to your web site listed.

Many search engines index your web site by the number of links you have available. So the more links you have the more exposure you may be able to get.

It was a very interesting meeting, with lots of questions and answers. Debra was well-versed in her profession and was able to field all the questions with grace and good humor. u