A website today is essential to market your business and ideas. Practically everyone has Internet access these days so you can reach many many people. If you have a message, you can send it out through your website.

There is a lot of competition however and people can easily leave your site (especially if it’s overbloated with slow loading Flash) and go elsewhere. Slow loading sites are now being penalized by Google, so now this is even more crucial.
Web usability is essential and interoperation with Web Standards cannot be ignored. Your website must be tested with different operating systems and browsers.

Nowadays practically everyone uses Facebook and other social networks, so it is important to connect your site to these networks as they are quickly becoming the way people find your site. This has become an important part of optimizing your site besides the classical search engine optimization process. Who better can optimize your site but someone who has written their own search engine, after all?

I like to call RSS the “Glue” of Web 2.0.

The origins of RSS take us back in time when both Microsoft and Netscape looked at the web as a static entity that could be catalogued, defined and fixed in “channels” (eg Microsoft’s Channel Definition Format – CDF). Traces of the “channel” terminology can still be found in the RSS protocol.
Similarly Netscape devised RDF Site Summary, later renamed as “Rich Site Summary” (RSS), picking up elements from Winer’s ScriptingNews format.

After Netscape dropped RSS support, Dave Winer renamed it into Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a method to be informed of changes.
This made it the ideal way to be informed when a site publishes an update. All modern websites these days incorporate an orange RSS button, which allows subscription to a feed (the dynamic equivalent of the old “channel”). There are many ways to subscribe, such as using special software, or simply using Google’s igoogle service in your own browser. Then, when an update is posted on a site you are following, you can easily be aware of it, and can easily get to it.