It's football season, and there is now better way to celebrate than with launch of a new website dedicated to high school and college football. Hootens.com is an expert on Arkansas high school football. This website features up-to-date video on high school recruiting and in-depth articles about the Arkansas Razorbacks, ASU Red Wolfs, and other Arkansas college football teams.

Google is looking for test communities to deliver ultra-high speed Internet service.  Through March 26th they are accepting nominations from government officials as well as the general public.

Help us make sure this initiative comes to Arkansas communities.  Use the nomination link below to nominate your community with Google.

Here’s a video from Google about the project, http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/

Here’s the nomination site, http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/public/options

Here’s an article THV recently wrote about the project, http://www.todaysthv.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=99751&catid=2

Here’s the site for Connect Arkansas, who will be an integral part of all this for Arkansas, http://connect-arkansas.org/.

According to TechCruch, Yelp recently walked away in the last hour from nearly selling its business profile website to Google over half a billion dollars.

Nearly everyone is aware of Google, or possible Google addict such as myself. Yet, many of you may not be aware of Yelp. Yelp was founded in 2004 and is a local search and business review site. It is a local reviews website that is driven by local consumers that sign up and rate their favorite hole in the wall or businesses in their communities. Yelp uses social networking features to let people write reviews and share their reviews with friends.

This year was a first for Heisman Voting. Nissan, the corporate sponsor of the Heisman Trophy Trust, will be giving its vote via results of their online poll. What effect will this have in the 75 year tradition? Maybe the trust will consider letting its voters submit its 2010 votes online.

In years past it has always been the issue of the ballots being mailed in. This causes some writers to have to submit the ballot before the league championship games are played. So, if their vote did not live up to hype in the final week, it may have skewed the vote. This online option would allow the voters to consider the players whole body of work.

This year was one of the closets votes in the history of Heisman voting. Alabama's Mark Ingram may have slipped past Colt McCoy of Texas and Tim Tebow of Florida due to this advance in this online technology.

It is a sign of the times. Little Rock National Airport adds a online booking system to replace the old static website. In their attempt to provide options to Expedia.com and Travelocity.com, they have come out with fly-lr.com using a professional firm to build the site to provide convenience to their customers in hopes to win friends, and make more money.

As a small business owner you need to consider redesigning your site to provide the same convenience to your customers. If you feel your site is underperforming or causing frustration to your visitors, let 1011 Web Solutions remodel your site to increase usability, conversions, and sales.

Google Wave is being hyped as the next incarnation of email. It is currently only available to a select group of 100,000 people, but will be available for mass use after further testing. 

This video will give you more information about Google Wave.

After over a year of negotiations, Microsoft and Yahoo! have settled on a deal to combine their search engine capabilities to compete with Google.  Microsoft now has control over Yahoo's search engine platform and all of the future consumer search data that comes with it, while Yahoo continues to profit off of ad sales. 

What does this mean to you? Before this merger, Google dominated the search engine market receiving about 60-70% of the market share of searches. Yahoo hovered around 20% and Microsoft's rebranded engine, Bing, about 10%. This meant that if you had to choose a platform to invest in advertising, you would reach more viewers advertising in Google. Now with 30% of the market, and the only viable competitor to Google, Bing may be a more attractive platform to advertise in. However, this could also lead to price wars for ads now that there are fewer search engines to advertise in.

We will stay tuned to this story to learn more about how this merger will affect your online marketing efforts.

Additional Reading: Business Week, NPR.org

You've realized the importance and value of your business having a great online presence. Now you're faced with the question of how best to make that a reality.

You want to keep costs down but you need to present a professional, credible image to your prospects and customers. In general you have two options. Hire a custom web design company or use an out-of-the-box website template. Below are some pros and cons of both options that can help you make the best decision for your particular situation and needs.

Custom web design and development pros:

1. Unique design. A professional web design company will create a design specifically for you. Your website will be different from anyone else's.
2. Built search engine friendly. Most professional web designers not only understand aesthics but also what actually makes the Internet and search engines work. Using a custom web design company should improve your chances of success in the search engines.
3. Adaptability. By definition, a custom developed website will be fitted and targeted for your company's specific needs and goals.
4. Compatibility. Your website should look and work just fine in any of the several most popular web browsers.
5. Scalability. Not everyone gets everything they want right away. A professional web design company can help you create a plan for starting on time and within budget but still add version 2 and 3 features down the road without starting all over again.
6. Customizable. They should be able to build whatever you can dream as far as your website's functionality.
7. Technology. Professional web designers use programming software that will be around and supported for many years to come instead of using less costly but uncertain platforms.
8. Ownership. Typically using a professional web design company is a contract for hire relationship, which means when they're done you should own everything outright.
9. Experience. They didn't become professionals overnight and have usually completed many different types of projects. You can benefit from this experience by asking quesitons about options and their opinions on how best to accomplish certain goals.

The downfalls of using a custom web design company are:

1. The overall price will probably be more than using template software
2. It may take a little longer to get your site from concept to live online
3. You're dealing with people. This means personalities and customer service will come into play (although this could exactly be a positive thing as well)

Website templates can be useful for:

1. Cost. You have a very minimal budget but for some reason just have to have something, anything online
2. Time. Your website needed to be up yesterday and you can't wait another day.
3. DIY. You like to do whatever you can yourself but just can't code. Templates can let you do it yourself without the need to know any programming languages.

The negatives to using website templates are:

1. Lots of other people will have the same look and feel
2. You will be limited in what you can customize and the features and functionality you can add to your site
3. Some website templates are not built search engine friendly
4. Some website templates are not build compatible with all the popular web browsers
5. Do it yourself means just that. So if you ever get too busy to make necessary changes or updates to your website then they just never get done
6. Most websites templates require their smaller fees to be paid forever. You may own the domain name but in essence you just rent your website from them. If you ever stop paying their monthly or annual fee then you'll no longer have a website online.

The right choice between these two options really depends upon your business needs and goals. As with most things, you get what you pay for. But regardless which method you choose, a great online presence that gets found in the search engines, stands out from the crowd to your prospects and customers, and allows them to interact with your company like they and you want is a great asset that really adds value to your business. 

One thing I detest more than anything else online is when I have to decipher squiggly lines and distorted words to verify that I am indeed a human being.

Yes, captcha not only drives me crazy because I never seem to get it right the first time, but it waste my time.

In fact, the inventor of captcha, Carnegie Melon professor Luis Von Ahn, says during a recent interview on PBS Nova that it wastes around 10 seconds per person . He further estimates this is around 500,000 hours of human time every day. Well, he has found a way to make use of these valuable manhours. reCaptcha!

reCaptcha is an effort to use everyone who enters captcha as a typist in the internet book digitization project. One of the problems of digitizing old books written before 1900 occurs during the scanning process. Many of these old books can't be deciphered by current OCR technology because the fonts used in old books are unrecognizable.  Further compounding the problem is language variations and words that are no longer used today. Computers simply don't understand these words.

Von Ahn has combined the human ability to decipher these words with captcha programs in order to digitize old books, and he estimates this massive workforce "unknowingly" involved can translate 125-150 books per day...word by word.

This is an amazing undertaking that has made me have a change of heart about captcha. Yes, I still can never seem to get captcha right the first time, but now I know it's not only fighting merciless spammers, but it's helping to preserve ancient books for future generations and that I'm actually doing something that will benefit humanity centuries from now. Weird enough, but I'm actually looking forward to the next time I get to enter captcha.