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Welcome to the June 2009 issue of the CyberArtisans newsletter! Each month we try to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.
Thanks to a reported $100 million ad budget, many have heard about Microsoft's new search engine "Bing" and many will try it. Most of those folks won't realize that Bing is the new name for MS's "Live Search," a search engine almost nobody knew about and even fewer used. Of course Bing is lots more than a renamed Live Search. It has been getting fairly good reviews from the online reviewers, but the general conclusions are (1) it has to be at least 50% better than Google to best Google, (2) it isn't 50% better than Google, and (3) Microsoft doesn't expect to snatch the search engine crown from Google. So what is Microsoft up to? Simple: marketshare. The ad revenue from search engines from the US alone is expected to reach $16 billion this year. Last year Google had a 64% marketshare, Yahoo 20%. Live Search had an 8% share. So if Microsoft can wrest even 5% of that marketshare from Yahoo it will have earned a good return on its Bing advertising investment. And it will cost MS less than it was planning to spend to buy Yahoo. Market issues aside, how good is Bing? It's hard to evaluate a search engine in a short time. We will be using it alongside Google and report back when we have a considered opinion. Bing does have a few features that are ingenious and useful (and probably will be copied by Google before long). One that may be more glitz than substance is the ability to show a summary of a page in the search listing when you put your cursor to the right of the listing. This is fun for videos and occasionally useful for regular web pages, but whether users will consider it valuable remains to be seen. A feature with more substance is a "Table of Contents" on the left side, usually listing categories that the search results fit into. For example, if you put "Obama" into the search field you get a table of contents on the left with several categories: Images, Issues, Facts, Biography, Childhood, Speeches, Video. If you click Childhood for example, you get a set of links to pages that have some information pertaining to Obama's childhood. It's a nice touch and is an easy way to narrow down your search quickly. Does this add up to a better search engine? We'll see. Many people will be prompted to try it, but whether they adopt it as their default search engine only time and statistics will tell. 
MS Office is an expensive program, ranging from about $240 for Office 2007 Standard (upgrade) to a breathtaking $679 for Office Ultimate 2007 (no upgrade). Fortunately there are less-expensive alternatives. The cheapest alternative is OpenOffice, which is free. Some swear by it, others hate it. There are stories of files that MS Office couldn't open but OpenOffice could. There are other stories about files created in MS Office that OpenOffice can't open. We tried it a while ago and went back to MS Office but your mileage may vary. You may just have to try it yourself to There is a middle ground, however. A few years ago MS came under heavy criticism for the high price of Office. They really didn't want to lower the list price of Office because that would have messed up all their marketing to their corporate customers, who are convinced to buy hundreds of copies by dangling big discounts in front of them. Lowering the list price would give MS the unhappy choice of eliminating the discount or lowering the discounted price to ridiculous levels (ridiculous in MS's opinion, of course). So they kept the list price, kept the discounts, and eliminated the restrictions on the Academic editions. You can buy Office 2007 Standard/Academic edition for about $130 and nobody will ask to to see your student ID.
Have you looked enviously at websites with moving images? Have you wished for something like that on your website? Don't despair, it's not difficult or expensive. The animated images are created using Flash, a utility created by Adobe that manages to provide animation to the web while keeping the download file size reasonable. Some words of caution: The best Flash is subtle. Don't make it too interesting. Remember, you want visitors to come to your site for the content you have put there. Flash is best used to make that content more interesting without stealing the show. If you want to explore Flash, contact us. We'd be happy to explain what's involved and quote you a price you can afford.
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