Online Pros and Cons

Late last week I got a phone call from Integrity Glassworks owner Linda Medine warning me that she’d twice this month been contacted by e-mail scammers. Here at USGlass we’ve been focusing so much lately on the positives of the Internet that this was the perfect reminder that there are a lot of things out there to be cautious of. If you haven’t read that story, I’d encourage you to check it out, and let me know if you’ve run into any request from scammers in the last few months so that we can let others in the industry what to watch out for.

Speaking of those positives, I want to take a second once again to congratulate those winners of the Best of the Web contest we held for the August issue of USGlass. (Those winners were announced as part of our July USGNN.com Newscast.) This is the second year we’ve run this contest and I was pleased not only at the large number of entries we received but the fact that some of those sites that were nominated last year had already been updated for this year’s contest. Today, more than ever, a web page is a first point-of-contact for consumers and an unattractive, difficult-to-navigate page might as well be a “closed” sign for many consumers. Personally, I spend a ton of time online and one of my biggest pet peeves is a slow-to-load web page. A search for glass on yahoo.com brings up 953,000,000 returns, so if your site is slow to load due to flashy graphics, then I’m going elsewhere for the information I need.

It was also interesting to note the number of sites that are branching out into other forms of online communications—including blogs, Facebook pages, tweets, video and more. We have a few updates in that area as well. I have offered my first tweets in the last week and I’m hoping that this will be just one more way in which to encourage you readers out there to get involved. I’ll try and keep this line of communication flowing with reminders about upcoming editorial focuses and deadlines, upcoming events and major announcements. You can start following us at twitter.com/usglass – and I hope you do so I have some new tweets of my own to follow.