What has your website done for you lately? If it’s not supporting your bottom line, a simple mind shift can make a world of difference.

Regardless of the industry, most business owners fail to take full advantage of the Web. It’s unfortunate when you consider a website’s ability to cost-effectively promote a business 365, 24/7.

Hiring employees at $30 an hour to market your business every hour in the year would equate to 8,760 hours or $262,800. Alternatively, a well written, properly designed and fully optimized website costs just a fraction of that. Additionally, you don’t have to deal with several other human resources costs and issues.

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Web design and development firm Raincity Studios today acquired Bryght.

The companies, both based in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, are pioneers of “Web 2.0” and open-source software communities. In fact, this acquisition is hailed as another success story from Vancouver B.C.’s new media technology industry, which has launched companies like Flickr, Dabbledb, Now Public and nitobi.

“This announcement is exciting for the local tech industry as Raincity Studios and Bryght are perfect examples of the rapid success achievable in the Vancouver new media sector with a good plan, talented team and hard work,” said Adam Gooch of New Media BC.

The expanded company will continue to create custom web applications and community websites, and offer hosting and infrastructure support and services to clients globally.

Kris Krug, renowned Web 2.0 expert and former head of Bryght, is the newly appointed President of Raincity Studios.

IT search engine start-up Paglo launched beta software Nov. 19 that’s designed to help IT personnel stay on top of their companies’ computer, network and security systems.

The Paglo search engine, which the company is billing as “Google for IT,” is said to be an answer to increasingly complex hardware devices, software programs and other technologies.

The Web-based Paglo application will crawl a company’s IT infrastructure and report on a wide range of queries about the hardware and software within the systems. It will run on IE7, Firefox and Safari browsers.

The platform includes the Paglo Crawler, an open-source discovery spider that businesses download on one computer to gather IT information from all devices and software.

Users can register for Paglo’s private beta, which is slated to go live later this month.

I just finished editing a media advisory for an IT firm, and had to strike out a few lines of hyped-up, unsubstantiated statements followed by exclamation marks.

The U.S.-based company is reputable and there was no intention to mislead. The in-house marketing team simply meant to create excitement within the industry.

The problem is when you overstate, online visitors instantly become wary of your web copy. That doesn’t do you any favours when you consider most people are already suspect about the Internet.

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Traditional media can’t simply emulate their products onscreen.

That reflects the message put forth by Times Online editor Anne Spackman at a Society of Editors conference in Manchester this month.

“Digital evolves extremely fast, it wasn’t that long ago that our websites represented our newspapers on the computer screen,” said Spackman, who was appointed to her position last year and has expedited Times Online’s integration of print and website operations.

In fact, she likened the current pace of change to the Wild West. Indeed, given the fact that newspapers compete with thousands of websites around the globe, they need to progress with the rapidly evolving digital world.

The pressure is intensified by the content-driven nature of Web 2.0, which creates armies of public reporters. To stay relevant, major media groups need to deliver quality news that’s accurate, objective and up to date — and fully embrace the power of the Web.

Otherwise this new wave of “citizen journalists” will make today’s media giants obsolete.

The Globe and Mail’s Small Business Report recently featured an article on Webcopyplus, which discusses how we take an active approach to networking and resource sharing.

One of the many benefits Webcopyplus provides clients is direct access to an extensive network of talented and dependable web types. Ironically, the article prompted several new potential partners to reach out, possibly expanding our already broad range of contacts.

That’s valuable for clients, plus it helps our business. As the article mentioned, it’s unrealistic to stay on top of every emerging Internet and software technology. Hence, we lean on various web experts when called for and they call on us when the issues surround web copy.

Special thanks to Business consultant Mark Wardell and the Globe.

When considering the best font for your website, look at the two most common options:

• Serif – they have cross-lines at the tips of each letter.
• Sans serif — no lines, they’re plain.

While studies show people read serif text faster in print, people actually read sans serif quicker onscreen.

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What you write is what you are, especially on the Web.

Yet many business owners only relate their online brands to logos and design, discounting the power of the written word.

Your business communicates its brand with every word you use on your website. Through language, we conceive a personality, set a tone and create expectations — for better or worse.

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Internet users who don’t speak languages that are written using the Roman alphabet can now test web addresses in their native language.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — which is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers, such as domain names — has created a test that allows users to visit web pages with URLs in 11 additional languages.

“This is one of the most exciting times yet in the development of IDNs,” said Dr. Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “Internet users who speak the 11 languages of the test can play a key role in testing how IDNs operate, and help us move toward full implementation for all the languages of the world.”

Internet users around the globe can now access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in the 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their own subpages with their own names in their own language — one suggestion is: example.test/yourname.

The wiki pages can be accessed by typing example.test in the characters of one of the 11 languages, or by going to http://idn.icann.org.

“These wikipages are key to the test. We want to know how the URL displays in the Internet browser, if it works when you cut and paste it into the body of an email to a friend, and how all of this impacts the root zone,” Dr. Twomey added.

The 11 evaluation wikis will remain online until IDNs are fully implemented and the first top-level domain is introduced in the evaluation language.

The full introduction of IDNs will mean that people can write the whole of a domain name in the characters used to write their own language. Presently you can only use these characters before the dot, so .com, .net, .org and the like can only be written in characters from basic Latin. IDNs will change this so literally tens of thousands of characters will be available to the world.

Good business web writers write for the market, not for themselves.

That’s the point I tried to get across to a former colleague, who has a long history of reporting for various publications. He took exception to my most recent blog entry about ‘plain talk’, in which I stated, it’s important for web writers to put the flowery terms and egos away, and genuinely cater to websites’ audiences.

“Why dummy down my copywriting and limit my prose for others?” was the point he repeatedly made. To churn out his best work, he insisted, he must write for himself.

I respect his points, but speaking specifically about web writing for business, I don’t agree with his approach.

When you’re writing web copy for business, you are assembling the right words and messages to:

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