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The first thing to ask is, why? Web sites have lots of reasons for existence, but for business purposes, we tend to see some combination of four motivations:

Josh over at Web 1 Marketing writes about using www versus leaving it off. What’s wrong with no-www:

Several others have listed the applications they use on a daily basis. I've been using Linux for my desktop environment for several years, and thought I would share what I use constantly.

Marc Andreesson, one of the authors of Mosaic, the original web browser, has taken up blogging, and in his first week he's got some thought-provoking posts.

Quick quiz:

1. Your computer has been infected with a virus, and it deleted everything on the server. What would you do?

   1. Send the server hard drive to a data forensic/analysis firm to see if they can recover your project data.

   2. Recreate all your marketing material from scratch, scanning your logo and everything else.

   3. File a law suit against Microsoft, Symantec, and Dell for letting this happen.

   4. Call your friendly computer technician who disinfects your computers and then restores your previously backed up data from the Internet.

At Freelock Computing, we've helped a few dozen companies get started with a content management system to manage their web sites. We've done a lot of work with the popular Joomla package, but have kept an eye on Drupal for customers with more sophisticated needs.

Search engines are crucial to marketing your business online, and Google is the most important of all. However, be careful what you do to try to get better search results--there's a difference between getting organic search results and trying to game the system.

All businesses need a web site these days to be in business. It's more important than a yellow pages ad. But it can be much more expensive and take much more knowledge to create than a yellow pages ad.

Anyone still using SQL Ledger should be aware that new versions are no longer released under the GPL. When I wrote the book, and for several years afterward, SQL Ledger was the only game in town, and it's been the only viable open source financial web application for quite some time.

Seen on Rocketboom: There's a new documentary film in production about Wikipedia. It's a non-profit project, and they're looking for donations.

Happy New Year! Here's a quick story about why Linux is the future:

Windows screwup forces Ubuntu shift

We've needed this sort of thing for a while:
Openoffice.org Label Templates for Ooo Writer free