Digital Web extends the FREE Business Web Builder Program

As of Friday October 15th Digital Web announced that the "Free Small Business Web Builder Program" will extend until March 1, 2011. In doing this Digital Web will be able to offer the "FREE Website Programs" to more Orlando and Tampa Bay area business's needing web development. Dave Ripley, President and CEO states that "The program has been so successful we just couldn't let it go right now" The program is designed for small business to obtain a professional custom website and be relevant in today's internet market. Mr. Ripley states " for years small business has been getting the shaft when it comes to designing and maintaining a website by developers, over pricing and price gouging is what I call it!". When so many web development company's are charging in the range of $3000 to $5000 for generic websites, it seems like the right thing to do in these economic times. Most small business owners just can't afford that kind of money right now. Digital Web's philosophy is give a deep discounted price now to help small business owners survive, and they will be customers for life. It does us no good to charge $4000 for a website and have to take it down in 6 months because the owner has gone out of business.

Most of the business owners we talk to don't really understand how important a web presence on the internet is. After we meet with them the realize they have missed the largest opportunity to establish a considerable amount of new customers. With social media and other website marketing, its is not uncommon for small businesses to start seeing an increase in business right away.

“Again and again we encounter hesitation and frustration by small business owners who know they need to tap the power of the internet, “Invariably they either end up with a website that does nothing for their business or no website at all."  Steve Ballmer-CEO Microsoft Corp.


Digital Media is really investing a considerable amount of time and energy in new Social Media Development. We believe it will be, if not already is the biggest and most significant change in modern day society. Please watch the video below and you will understand what we are talking about.




Social Media will enable business owners, like never before to reach out and touch customers in their back yard. With print media like newspapers and magazines on the biggest decline in history, the internet and websites have never played a bigger part in today's business advertising and marketing campaigns. A small business can't afford not to have a website and become relevant in today's internet society.

Microsoft Buying Adobe Would Solve ‘The Apple Problem’ For Both Read More!

The most obvious, immediate thing that the two companies can do is to get Flash ported to Windows Phone 7. Early signs are that Windows Phone 7’s web browser is surprisingly fast and capable, but one thing it isn’t is HTML5-aware. If the phone operating system is successful, there will be a substantial growth in smartphones that are, at least for the time being, not HTML5-capable.

Such phones are crying out for Flash compatibility. There are certainly hurdles to achieving this—not least of which is the current requirement that all Windows Phone 7 software be written using .NET code—but they are by no means insurmountable. For example, Microsoft could simply bundle Flash with the phone operating system, and in so doing obviate the need for Flash to be written in C#.

The two companies could even go for something more exotic: make it possible to create Windows Phone 7 programs directly in Flash. The latest Flash version, CS 5, has the ability to produce iPhone applications. Apple originally planned to ban such applications, but has since relented. A similar capability could be readily built to produce Windows Phone 7 software.

Microsoft is already doing its best to court developers to attract them to its phone platform, with high-quality development tools that leverage the .NET technology that’s already familiar to many. Flash development would similarly open the platform up to a large number of developers, letting them use technology they’re already familiar and comfortable with.

There are technical things that the companies can work on, too, to improve the use of plugins in the desktop browsers. Google and Adobe are already cooperating to produce a better plugin interface to enable greater performance and stability for Flash in Chrome, and Chrome now bundles Flash. Taking a similar tack with Internet Explorer would further strengthen Flash’s position on the desktop, again countering the forces of HTML5.

Or an outright purchase

Microsoft could afford Adobe, no doubt about that. Hell, Microsoft could afford to buy Adobe with petty cash; we’re only talking $15 billion here. The relative size of the two companies means that the offer doesn’t even have to appeal to Adobe, particularly: Microsoft can buy the company whether it likes it or not; as such, the question is not what Microsoft has to offer Adobe, only what Adobe has to offer Microsoft. Such a purchase would significantly strengthen Microsoft’s software line-up. Redmond has virtually no creative/artistic software; though the company has dabbled in this area in the past, its only real creative software is the Expression Design vector graphics package.

The corporate cultures of the two companies are likely to be radically different, a product of their vastly different target audiences. As such, it’s hard to see Adobe being anything other than a wholly-owned subsidiary, at least initially. Attempting to integrate it into the broader Microsoft organization would likely be no more successful than Microsoft’s Danger purchase.

Software…

Apple has had a lot of success with its creative software, both at the high end (Final Cut Studio, Aperture, Logic Studio) and the low end (iMovie, iPhoto, GarageBand). An Adobe purchase would let Microsoft tackle these markets in the same way; Adobe’s technology would provide a substantial upgrade to programs like Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Movie Maker, as well as opening up the possibility of upsells to the full products like Lightroom and Premiere. A hypothetical “Windows Live Photoshop Elements” would be a great addition to the line-up, too.

Microsoft could afford Adobe, no doubt about that. Hell, Microsoft could afford to buy Adobe with petty cash

Bolstering the Windows Live line-up makes Windows a much nicer platform. The iLife suite is a tough act to follow, and though Windows Live Essentials is trying to compete in this area, the iLife applications are quite a bit more polished. Buying Adobe would let Microsoft simultaneously broaden the appeal of the Essentials with new programs, and raise the quality bar.

Software with more of an overlap with existing products may be a little more difficult to deal with. Adobe’s Dreamweaver Web authoring software is on balance better than Expression Web, so it would seem natural to replace the latter with the former. ColdFusion would be tricky, and it’s hard to see how it would survive such an acquisition; though it has its fans, and offers features that ASP.NET does not, it’s probably too similar to justify continuing to develop and support both products; one can imagine it would be cut loose in such a purchase.

Though the same would in some senses be true of Flash (and related technologies, Flex and AIR)—it has massive overlap with Silverlight—it’s too important to be let go in this way. Instead, consolidation—allowing the Flash software to produce applications that will run on Silverlight or Windows Phone 7—would be the way to go.

It would also be good to see Microsoft’s secure coding practices applied to Adobe’s software. If nothing else, the teams developing Reader and Flash need a bit of help.

… and Style

Beyond the software, Adobe would bring a very different kind of customer to Microsoft. Adobe has strong links with the creative and design communities, communities that have, frankly, reviled Microsoft for decades. I would argue that the current generation of Adobe software shows a stronger sense of aesthetics than is generally true of Microsoft’s output, and that’s in no small part down to the community that Adobe serves—giving designers a suite of ugly, clunky software is not a winning move. It would be nice for this sense of aesthetics to permeate Microsoft.

Microsoft traditionally has been very good at producing software for developers, but its efforts to appeal to designers have been less effective. It has started making moves in the right direction with Expression Blend, but it’s still in many ways a developer-oriented company. The Expression range of software does have some interoperability with Adobe software (Expression Blend can open Adobe Photoshop mockups, for example), as an acknowledgement of the importance of Adobe’s software in the design world.

By bringing this design-oriented, creative software in-house, Redmond would be able to offer an end-to-end solution for designing great-looking applications, from Illustrator and Photoshop mock-ups, to Expression Blend or Expression Web/Dreamweaver designs, to Visual Studio application development. If the company could make this kind of workflow work better—without alienating designers—it could prove to be extremely attractive to both Web and phone developers.

Microsoft hasn’t cared too much about design in the past, but that’s no longer the case with Windows Phone 7. Strong design is key to the new platform; it ties it together to make it feel like a coherent whole, in a way that simply doesn’t happen on desktop Windows. Appealing to designers hasn’t mattered in the past. These days, it does.