By Robert Lockard

Twitter has come a long way since 2007. It exploded in popularity in 2009, though it still has yet to reach the heights of either Facebook or MySpace in terms of monthly visitors. You can read more about this in my Submit Solution blog entry, “MySpace is 3 times as popular as Twitter.”

Not only has Twitter gone from having less than 1 million visitors a month to nearly 20 million, it has also improved its downtime. Alas, just like its number of visitors, Twitter is far worse than every other major social-media site in its total amount of downtime per year. It’s getting better, but Twitter still suffers from frequent crashes. Remember the big one earlier this year?

I read some fascinating analyses of Twitter’s downtime in two Royal Pingdom articles: “Twitter growing pains cause lots of downtime in 2007” and “Social network downtime in 2008.” Check out this chart of the major social-media sites’ downtime, in hours:

The good news for Twitter, as these Royal Pingdom articles point out, is that the vast majority (84 percent) of its downtime took place in the first half of 2008. That means the second half of 2008 was a vast improvement and it could mean Twitter is well on its way to getting up to Facebook’s and MySpace’s level.

Even if you combine the total downtime of Facebook and MySpace, Twitter was seven times longer than them. That’s quite amazing. Maybe it’s like I said in my last blog entry on Twitter – the company could be on the verge of proving itself as a real contender in the fight for dominance of social media.

Twitter has never really been known for its reliability, but it could soon change that image. I look forward to seeing 2009’s numbers to see how Twitter is improving.

This blog entry is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post, “Twitter downtime worse than other social media.” The Social Network Downtime graph is the copyright of Royal Pingdom.

By Robert Lockard

Do you feel lost when it comes to Web design? You don’t need to be an expert on HTML, Ruby or other programming languages to end up with an effective design for your ecommerce website. You can use Submit Solution’s custom-design services to handle the actual design part.

But there are four steps you can take before you go to the experts to make sure your site does precisely what you want it to. These steps come from an Examiner article entitled, “Website design starter plan for clients.” That article has horrible spelling and grammar, but it has a few good ideas I want to share, so I’ll cut its author a little slack.

Anyway, here are the four steps you should take before requesting help from a Web designer:

1. Look at what your competitors are doing. Plagiarism is illegal, but finding good practices and Web-design ideas is perfectly legal. This will give you a good starting point to see which elements of a website you would like to use in your own. Try to stick to general ideas, such as navigation, structure and what subjects are covered in the text.

2. Once you have an idea of what others are doing, start mapping out your website’s outline. Start with the main pages, such as home, services, products, about us, etc. Then add subpages under the main pages to build on more specific topics. Fill in as much detail as you can about what information and messages you want those pages to contain. This will help the designers be more precise in meeting your needs.

3. Write down other tools you want to include in your website. If you want to add tutorials or other videos to your site, you should mention that you’ll need a media player in your site outline. Depending on your needs, you might consider adding any number of specialized tools to your site, such as forums, blogs, audio, etc. Make sure whatever you add actually helps visitors and doesn’t distract from your site’s overall theme.

4. Create an overall theme for your website. This includes color schemes, logo, content placement and more. Like a wedding, a website needs to have its colors chosen ahead of time to make sure everything matches and works well together. Having a strong logo is a good starting point in creating your design and, once again, Submit Solution’s logo-design services can come in handy.

When you’re armed with research and a plan, you can confidently approach a designer to begin building your website. Some of your plans might have to wait because of budget concerns or other reasons, but you will definitely have a much stronger final product than if you went into the design process with no preparation.

This is a complete version of the post on the eHarbor Blog: “What to do before you hire a Web designer.” The photo of the blue dog is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of lepiaf.geo.