Maybe it's just me but it seems like customer service has gotten a lot worse lately. Sure, we may have gotten used to being just a number to the cable, phone and internet companies - "the monopolies". But I'm specifically referring to what you might call "the little guys".

Recently we needed to have some work done around the house. For example, the landscaping company we were using for the last 4 years up and disappeared just as the grass in the yard was getting about knee high. After making a number of attempts and still unsuccessful with getting in touch with the company we called around looking for new quotes. We had one company say they weren't going to be able to do it which I can understand and I can even appreciate. However, a few said that they would come out but then never showed up. Some even apologized after we called them again and they reassured us that they would come out the next day. Guess what? No show again.

After a little while I started wondering if I was going crazy. Why would a company, given the recovering economy, not want to make some money? If their schedule is full and they can't take on any more work that's great. And good for them if they explain that to me when I call. But don't string me along and say you'll be out and then never show up. It doesn't make sense and you're only hurting yourself.

Not showing up when you say you will is probably worse than doing a bad job. If you do a bad job at least you showed up and tried. You might not get a great review on Yelp or Google Places but if you make efforts to correct your problems that will definitely come through in any review. But when you decide not to show up without calling then you've left me no choice but to leave you a very unfavorable review and I don't even have to do much. I just have to say "They said they would come out today so I took the day off from work and rearranged my schedule and they never showed up. No phone call no nothing. If I could give this review zero stars I would." With enough bad reviews like that you're not going to have to worry about calling people back because no one will be calling you asking you to do any work.

We take customer service very seriously. Our clients have given us some great testimonials and they have said some really nice things about us on Yelp and Google Places. We've received a number of inquires from people who have run into terrible customer service with their web developers. These are people that wanted to spend money and they couldn't even get a response from a company they already had a relationship with. Granted, we're not always the right fit for whatever reason but if that ever happens we'll let you know (and if you don't think we're the right fit for you let us know).

No matter what the job or service is if you're not getting the customer service you expect let them and the world know. On the flipside, if you love a product or if you're getting excellent service be sure to tell them, your friends, your family... and the world.

We're pretty active on Twitter so if you follow us (@TastyCMS) you've probably already seen these but if not here's a few of of our more recent, choice tweets. By the look of things it appears we have a fondness for type which is totally true.

We're very proud to be one of the 18 finalists selected as once of the Coolest Businesses on the Rackspace Cloud. You can view all 18 submissions through the Rackspace blog. We've embedded our submission below for you to watch. While it's nothing fancy it does explain why we love working with Rackspace so much. Be sure to vote for us for a chance to win two tickets to this year's Super Bowl.

It's the New Year which means it's time once again to think about making some important adjustments in your life. Typical personal resolutions can include losing weight, quit smoking, exercise more; generally speaking, living a better, healthier life. But have you ever thought about making professional changes? Maybe you've thought about getting that promotion, more pay, maybe even a new career. Old business or new business your presence offline and online plays a large part in how successful you can be. Without the right tools, without the right look and without the right support you're going to have a hard time convincing anyone, including yourself, that you deserve to succeed.

Personally, we can't tell you that getting new clothes or a haircut is going to get you what you want. However, professionally speaking, if you don't have a website or if your website is showing its age then you're going to have a harder time getting ahead. Do you want to search endlessly for opportunities or do you want opportunities to come to you? A great looking website is the easiest way to attract attention to yourself and to your business.

What do you want the look of your website to say about you? Are you forward thinking and professional? Are you a little eccentric and a social extrovert? Whatever your style, your website should reflect that look and leave no question about what type of person you are.

As a website is an extension of yourself it has to be more than just looks. It's got to have the brains and the personality. People want to know that you're more than just a pretty face, that you actually have a lot of bright thoughts and ideas. The voice of your website, the content in the web pages, says a lot about you. Good, rich content will let people know that you're intelligent and well spoken - leading indicators that you can be trusted. Gaining someone's trust online is huge and you only have one chance to make that first impression.

At the start of every new year people eat better and exercise and sleep more. But after a couple of weeks the enthusiasm and the desire begins to fade and before you know it it's December 31st all over again. The path to success is a hard one to travel alone so you shouldn't do it alone. People who work together have a higher chance of succeeding as they encourage and continuously push one another. With the best tools and strong support you'll be better equipped when you hit some rough times and challenging obstacles along the way. For your website you should have a team that can guide you and who can answer the tough questions. They should also be there in case something goes wrong whether it's Monday morning or Saturday night.

As we come to the close of the first of many weeks of 2010 be sure to set aside some time for your professional goals. If you're stuck because you can't update your website without calling someone every time consider making a call to Tasty CMS.  If you'd like to update your site's look we can help you with that too. Or if you're just looking to find more ways to enhance your web presence we can evaluate where you're currently at and let you know what you can do to make some improvements.

No matter what you decide we hope that 2010, personally and professionally, is a great, successful year for everyone.

Photo credit: expressmonorail via flickr

Google has just announced a new change to some search results that they hope will soon make it into many other results. Today, for each search result they show a green web address, or URL, at the bottom to let you know where you're headed. This can be good if the URL makes it clear what you can expect to find on that page and where it fits within the hierarchy of the site. But it can be downright useless if it's not clear.

When we design the way results appear on google.com, our goal is to get you to the information you're looking for as quickly as possible.

For example, if a site sold bananas the website might have a URL that looks like www.example.com/products/bananas.htm. If this URL appeared in green below a search on Google for the website it would be pretty clear to the person searching what is on that page and where it exists in the website. This page is about "bananas," under "products," which is on the "example.com" site.

Often, however, URLs are too long, too short, or too obscure to add useful information. What if the URL instead looked more like www.example.com/jsmith.htm? A search result wouldn't necessarily make it clear that this page is a part of the "staff" sub-section under the "about us" section which is on the "example.com" site.

The new text that Google is now introducing will provide useful information about the page. It will be easier to see that the example.com site has information about their company, including a whole section listing the people that work there.

This new change will definitely add a lot more value to your search results but more importantly it exposes the method that Google is using to correctly display this hierarchy: they are looking at the site's breadcrumbs.

By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we've been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

Breadcrumbs are the list of links at the top of a page which look something like "Home > About Us > Staff > John Smith". This list of links lets your visitors know where they are in your website and how the sections of your site relate to each other. Also, clicking on any one of the links in the breadcrumbs will take you directly to that section. So, they provide valuable information and make it easier for your visitors to get around.

For years we've known how important this information can be which is why every Tasty CMS website has a bread crumb trail at the top of every page. This trail is automatically created whenever you add, edit or move a page. So as Google begins to roll this change out to more search results our clients will be able to take full advantage of it without having to do anything.

As a final thought: do you know why they're called breadcrumbs? Here's a hint...

On September 21 Matt Cutts from Google's Search Quality Team posted a blog article that verified something that most developers have known for awhile now: Google does not use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking.

For the uninitiated, meta tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. In the code of the web page these elements go in the head tag. In the early days of the Internet and search engine development, meta tags were used to correctly classify a web page. Developers and so called search engine optimization (SEO) experts pushed meta tags to their limit by filling them with information that would propel their sites up higher for search results. Because these elements were designed to be used and seen only by search engines, human visitors to a web site would never see this content, the practice of "keyword stuffing" became popular.

Quickly the use of meta tags, and in particular meta keywords, became useless as the content that was entered into them devolved. People looking to game the search engine systems often filled them with information that had nothing to do with the actual content of the web page. Search engines thought the page was relevant to one thing when in reality it had to do with something completely different. Search engines, specifically Google, started to pay less and less attention to them to the point that as Mr. Cutts explains Google doesn't pay attention to meta keywords anymore. Other search engines may still use this information, but in his own words Google:

"...disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present."

Other meta information is still important today and Google readily admits that they use some of these other meta elements at least when it comes to displaying search results. For instance, if Google finds your meta description to be especially relevant and useful they might use it when displaying search results for your website. And of course any reputable search engine will honor the meta robots tag. This element is used to notify a search engine as to whether or not they can index a web page when they come across it. It can also used to let these engines know whether or not they are permitted to follow the links on that web page. Take a look at this page for a complete list of meta tags that Google understands.

And here's the video that Google released explaining their use, or otherwise, of some meta tags in greater detail.

With Tasty CMS we make use of the follow meta tags:

<meta name="description" content="..." />
<meta name="keywords" content="..." />
<meta name="robots" content="..., ..." />
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

MSSmartTagsPreventParsing is automatically set to TRUE for every web page. Microsoft's Smart Tags were a proposed feature of Windows XP that would allow Microsoft and its partners to insert their own links into any Web page viewed through its Internet Explorer browser. Setting this meta tag to TRUE prevents Internet Explorer from doing this as it's not a popular idea to allow a third party to control and select what is linked.

Content-Type defines the page's content type and character set. text/html means that the type of content being served is a web page. ISO-8859-1 means that the character enconding is Latin-1. It is generally intended for "Western European" languages such as English.

Our clients have complete control of the meta description, keywords and robots tags. Any values set for the home page will automatically be associated with every other page of the site. However, it's possible to override these values on a page-by-page basis to give specific control.