MMS Blog

Many people have the misconception that blogs are for kids, politicos, sports/news junkies and Goths. Why do we need a blog for metalworking and manufacturing professionals? Who in our world has the time to leisurely visit any site every day just to see what’s what?

We’ve retooled our MMS On The Web (OTW) column (www.mmsonline.com/otw) in blog format because we think there is room for blogs in business, and that they can help serve your diverse needs for information. Blogs are also emerging as a familiar format for, well, emerging machining professionals.

The MMS Blog will continue to bring you suggestions and information that can help you use the Internet more effectively to support your business—whether you’re using the Internet for research or as a marketing tool in the form of your Web site.

We’ll also continue to offer e-mail notifications about what’s relevant to you, Web-wise. If you’d like to subscribe to our e-mail alerts, then visit www.mmsonline.com/newsletter/ and enter your e-mail address. It’s as simple as that.

SiteAdvisor
Have you heard of SiteAdvisor (www.siteadvisor.com)? It’s a plug-in that sends out its agents (or bots) to browse Web sites and checks them for unwanted downloads, spam and spyware. The plug-in even signs up for e-mail newsletters and monitors their frequency and contents.

When you download SiteAdvisor, you see its magic on the SERPs of Google, Yahoo and MSN, as the utility adds red, yellow or green badges next to each listing for sites its bots have visited. Sites that are bad news—those that force downloads to your system, spam your brains out or abuse you in some other way—are marked with the red icon. Sites that aren’t dangerous but are suspect are marked yellow. Green denotes that everything checks out and the site is safe.

SiteAdvisor may be just the thing to keep your work or home computers clean.

Job Shop Site Of The Month 
This month, our hat goes off to Pendarvis Manufacturing of Anaheim, California. Its Web site (www.pendarvismanufacturing. com) does a fine job of portraying the company’s strengths through graphics. However, the strategy is as much a part of this recognition as the site itself. Brian Pendarvis says of his company’s site: “I cannot tell you how many people call me because they see a picture on my site that is in the scale or the scope of what they need done. Research has shown that more and more today, buyers are pressed for time. They use the Internet to pre-qualify vendors . . . Then they get on the phone.” The Pendarvis site may not win any awards for advanced Web site design, but its strategies are winning the company work—which would you rather have? Congrats, Pendarvis, for a job well done.

OTW Infoletter

Want to get the online metalworking scoop via e-mail from metalworking's preferred information source? Subscribe to MMS' OTW (On The Web) Infoletter at www.mmsonline.com/newsletter/.