Computers are cheap, and it's easy to get on-site servers for web and email. It's not a good idea, though. Read on to see why.
Everyone's office has an Internet connection, and it's usually underutilized. A 5Mbps upstream connection (about 3 times as fast as a T1) is under $100/month, and a relatively robust server can be purchased for under $500. So why pay hundreds per month for hosting when you can host your web site and email in your own office?
The answer is simple: reliability. Right now, the Great Matter office does not have power due to a windstorm in the area. Despite this, our web services are still running. We use an offsite hosting company, Rackspace, to handle our hosting. It's expensive, but it works. They have multiple levels of redundancy, backups, and support. If the server fails, they can have it back up within minutes. Chances are that most customer will not notice the down time. Power, too. Their speed is better, as well; with 1000Mbps connections, they can handle more traffic than your office.
Does your office have multiple internet connections? Power backups? Backup hardware? On-site hosting is just too expensive and unreliable.

Have you ever been browsing a web site, and seen a small lock in the corner of your browser? Or have you wondered what the "https://" means? SSL stands for "Secure Socket Layer", and it means that the traffic going to and from the web site you are visiting is encrypted. You might wonder why this is important: the short answer is, "man in the middle" attacks. Imagine that you are connected to a web site, ready to give your login, credit card, social security number, or any other sensitive information. When you submit the form, you are sending information over the Internet to the web site. While this may seem innocuous, if someone manages to "sniff" your connection, they will be able to see your data. There are a wide variety of ways that this could happen, the most common is a fake access point in a public place. You may THINK you're connected to the real Starbucks WiFi, but it's really a hacker reading your information as it's going from your computer to the Internet.

SSL protects your data by encrypting it from your computer, all the way to the server. Any "man in the middle" cannot read the information. The same goes for the information coming back to the server.

If you have sensitive data on your web site, it's important to protect your users, intellectual property, and yourself by having SSL enabled.

Forms online often have goofy obscured text that, if you do not copy it properly, prevents you from submitting the form. It's called a CAPTCHA, and this is what it's all about. Normally, forms online are filled out by people. Whether it's a contact, login, or comment form, they are generally designed for a person to fill in their information and submit. Spammers, however, know that most of these forms are sent to an email address, so they use an automated system to fill out these forms. As a result, it became necessary to create a "Turing Test", a test designed to help determine whether or not a submission is from a human being or a computer. A "CAPTCHA" is a type of Turing test. It uses distorted text that only people can read to prevent a computer from automatically sending these forms. While they might be obnoxious, these CAPTCHAs prevent thousands of unnecessary form submissions.

Sure, we might be a web development company, but that doesn't stop us from dabbling in IT a bit... Do your software updates! Whether you're on a Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, it's very important to regularly perform software updates. While Macs are generally not targeted by viruses, it's still a good idea to keep on top of the updates. Today, Apple released a small software update designed to prevent the MacDefender virus.

PCs, of course, have many vulnerabilities, and should be kept up to date as well; don't forget your anti-virus software and its definitions.

Companies looking to expand their mobile presence look to Mobile Apps, like those one would run on their iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or Palm phones. Often, those apps are intended to mirror functionality of the firm's web site, and provide little more than an icon on the phone. Apps easily cost north of $10,000, and because their functionality is limited to information only, it's a surprise that more firms don't look into optimizing their web sites to work on mobile devices rather than creating a completely new app.
Consider this: it takes between one and ten hours to modify an existing web site to have a mobile version, but hundreds of hours to create an app that essentially mirrors the same look. Before making an app, try making your web site mobile-friendly, and push users to add the icon to their home screen. It's faster, more cost effective, and doesn't respond to the fickle swings of app approval.

Drupal, the content management system (CMS) that we use at Great Matter, is a highly flexible, powerful, and complex system. Our clients LOVE it; it's simple and straight-forward. From a development standpoint, every developer goes through "The Five Stages of Drupal" first:

1. Denial - "This is a simple system."; "It can't be that hard to make a module."; "I'll just modify core or contrib" (that last one is an inside-joke for us Drupal developers)
2. Anger - "Why am I the one doing this?"; "Can't someone else figure this out?"; "Who came up with this way of doing it?"
3. Bargaining - "I'll give up video games forever if I can just get this script to work"; "I'll never code after midnight again..."; "I'll feed my pets on time."
4. Depression - "Why finish this project?"; "I'll never get this done."; "I'm going to give up."
5. Acceptance - "Oh my gosh--that was genius how they did it!"; "Why didn't I think of that before?"; "This is the best CMS ever!"

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, has jumped considerably in popularity over the last year or so. Many more people have websites that do the same thing as others, and as a result, when someone searches for a keyword, tons of results are returned, many of which are not necessarily applicable, or not YOUR company.

Enter SEO. It tries to increase your site's spot on the web so that more people see you faster. If you Google search for "greatmatter", this site shows up at the top of the list. But if I search for "Adam Weiss", I'm not visible until the fourth page, and it's not even this web site, it's my Friendster profile.

Companies out there want their pages to be visible. An attorney practicing immigration law wants to show up near the top, not lost amongst hundreds of other attorneys.

SEO is designed to "hack" the search system, to make the result show up higher. Here's how it's supposed to work-and why it doesn't. I'll take the focus of Google, the company with the largest search volume. Mind you, their algorithm is proprietary, but this is pretty much the system as I've come to understand it:

Back when Google started, it was simply a spider–it would roam the web, looking for links. It would then follow these links, storing the words from the pages it came across. When you searched for "attorney", it would find pages with the word "attorney" on it, including the meta-tags–keywords hidden within the web site to help search engines categorize content. Well, something interesting happened. People would start to add irrelevant keywords to their web sites to bring in more traffic. As a response, Google began to focus more on content. But people began to add more irrelevant words there. So they counted the number of times a word was present on the page. The SEO guys figured that out, and simply added keywords multiple times.

So Google took a different approach–they increased the weight of a website based on how many pages link to it, the idea being that the more people link to a site, the more relevant it must be. Well, as cool as an idea this is, more and more sites accept comments from anonymous users–and nefarious users began adding spam comments that link to their own sites. Google geniuses got that, and began a system of figuring out what web sites are legit and which ones aren't.

SEO firms still charge an arm and a leg to produce "real" content that links to their client's web sites. It's more difficult to determine which listing is legit! Google and the other search engines have been catching up to these firms, and in the last few months, have been tweaking their algorithym to "de-rank" those pages. Really, this is a great opportunity for the search engines to just go nuts and charge people to have higher organic listings.

So what should you take from this? Update your site regularly with interesting, engaging content. If you're a personal trainer, write a paragraph a day about a new exercise or routine. Don't think of it as much as a blog as it is news. Pay for advertising--when you're they only shop in town, you don't need to let people know who you are--but when you're one of hundreds, you have to stick out.