ReadWriteWeb

The Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation, an initiative of the Kauffman Foundation, is looking for entrepreneurs in the education market for its Kauffman Labs Education Ventures Program.

The hands-on program will give aspiring education entrepreneurs mentorship, training, and tools to help get their ideas to market. Applicants can be an individual entrepreneur or in a team of up to three people. They need to offer some educational product, service or resource, technology innovation or new learning model. (The program says it defines "education" very broadly.) Startups that apply can be at almost any stage - even if it's just an idea or an early product iteration - as long as you've been incorporated less than 18 months.

Even if you're not quite ready to show the public your product, you can still create a good website and a solid online presence for your startup. I want to sidestep the argument about whether or not it's good to be "stealth" or not, and work with the assumption that if you've purchased the domain name, you're going to put up some sort of website.

So here are a few of the things you should consider when building your startup's site:

I visit a lot of startup websites. A lot. And as a journalist, I am perhaps more prone than others to click on a company's "About Us" page. Of course, my motivations for doing so typically involve finding pertinent facts and figures, FAQs and anecdotes to round out a ReadWriteWeb story. But I don't think I'm alone in my desire for company websites to do more than just talk about the products they offer.

While it's well known that investors care a lot about the composition of your founding team, arguably visitors to your website - customers and potential customers - are also interested in reading more about who you are.

AddThis, one of the most popular bookmarking and sharing buttons on the Web, has today released a new version of its sharing menu for the Apple iPad, the iPhone and Google Android. Now, when you visit a site from one of these mobile devices, tapping the button will present a sharing menu that's been built to specifically work with the touch interface of your mobile device and better integrate with its functions, like the built-in email client.

Yahoo has announced that its website creation service GeoCities, which it acquired for $4.5 billion in 1999, will close later this year. Existing customers are being encouraged to "upgrade" to Yahoo! Web Hosting, which offers a site-building service and a personalized web address. The closing of GeoCities is the end of an era. Last June, we profiled the rise of "GeoCities 2.0" services, i.e. website creation tools for the Social Web. Many of them will attempt to pick up GeoCities' customers. Although, as Yahoo! itself indicated in its closure message, website building is mostly a 'feature' nowadays rather than a separate product. So, is this a viable business now for the likes of Weebly and Yola?

I'm going through an SEO overhaul of our company's website. There is definitely a combination of art and science that I never appreciated until having to do it. So, to save others some time, here are some very basic things that any business should do to optimize the ranking of its website in search engine results. Nothing explained here is necessarily a secret or difficult to find out. The trick is to find a good cookbook and a process that is easy to follow.