More thoughts on computer management

I often go to people's homes to help them either learn a program or to repair a problem with their computer. I can't tell you how often I ask them where some software that they need for their printer or operating system is and they have no idea. I'm reminded of this because of my recent switch over to a new computer.

If you aren't organised now, make it a priority. Get yourself a shoe box, if you have quite a bit of software, or a box large enough to hold the cd cases that you get your software in. Place every program on cd or dvd that you own in this box. If their are serial numbers involved, make sure that it is written on a piece of paper and kept with that software. Every time you purchase a program online (which is common now a days) keep the .exe file and back it up to a cd and make note of what the website was where you downloaded it from and again a copy of the serial number. You will be so happy you did these things when your computer crashes or you want to upgrade. Put all the pamphlets that you get together in a folder or another small box.

Then when you also back up your computer from time to time to a cd or dvd (what? you haven't done that for ages?) put each copy of that in the box as well. Most people now a days haven't got hard copies of any of the hundreds of digital photographs that they take. They reside on their hard drives. Would you like to lose any of it?

Doing this will save you a lot of time and heartache should anything happen to your computer.

Upgrading a new Computer

My husband and I went to Future shop a couple of months ago to pick up a repaired DVD recorder. While we were there he decided to "look" at the computers and what was on offer. Always an expensive exercise. We ended up leaving the shop with a brand spanking new computer for me with Vista installed. My husband was right, my five year old computer has been showing signs of imminent death. First my dvd burner died, then one by one my usb ports wouldn't work (or work reliably). And as my business is using my computer, he did have a point that a new computer was in the cards.

However, I was adamant that I didn't want Vista. For a number of reasons. I object to the Big Brother approach of Microsoft. I hate the mentality in any business of bringing out a new model of something in order to have people feel the need to stay up to date. (don't get me started on the cell phone and adapter issue) But from a practical point of view I knew that certain programs and peripherals I own were not going to work. First, my pda made by Casio is no longer supported by Windows, nor was Casio doing any further updates to it. It is fairly big and clunky compared to the lovely slim-lined pda's that are out there today, but I use it, it works and if it ain't broke, why replace it? (okay, I get an error with Outlook every time I close down that program, but I can still put in my contacts and diary dates so that's no big deal) I've had it since 1999 I think, and in computer years that is pretty ancient, but I wasn't prepared to go out and spend a few more hundred dollars replacing it. Second, I am doing more and more websites with cascading style sheets. These are supported in different browsers to varying degrees and there was no way I could have Internet Explorer 6 on a new computer. And I need it as I'm pretty sure more than 60% of people are still using that version. Heck, most of the clients I see have only in the last year switched over to XP from Windows 98! So I was really concerned that I wasn't going to be able to see any issues as I worked on new websites.

So for the past two/three months my husband has been loading on programs on this new computer and I've been putting off switching over. Gerry has loved Vista's look and playing some of the neat games that come bundled with it. And I did like the look of the cute clock on the right hand side of the screen, but honestly, it just wasn't enough for me to get over my issues with it.

Finally we decided that the deed would be done over the holidays when no one would be asking me for updates or other work. And I asked him nicely if he would be terribly upset if we took off Vista and loaded on my paid for XP operating system. With good grace, he backed up Vista so I have it paid for when and if I'm ready for it, and I now have a computer that is running twice as fast as my old one, has twice the memory and still is able to use my pda and all the versions of software that I use.

But I'm not alone in my decision to keep with the old and put off new technology. According to a pair of surveys in ComputerWorld magazine, about 43% of all U.S. businesses in Dec 2006 were planning to upgrade to Vista. Eleven months later (after Vista's debut) that number had dropped to 10%. Apparently, people complained that Vista took longer to do some tasks than it had with XP and the security features were more trouble than they were worth.

On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog

There have been a few articles in the news lately about how careful we should all be about who we deal with or talk to online. These come up from time to time. Older men who lure young girls into a meeting while portraying themselves as someone the same age. But the recent one about the suicide death of a young girl due to a friendship she formed on Facebook, is particularly nasty. A young girl formed a friendship on Facebook with a boy called Josh Evans. He communicated with her for some time (sorry, I can't remember if it was a couple of weeks or months) but then suddenly turned nasty and told her that the world would be a better place without her. She was devastated and hung herself. Now this is tragic but all the more because Josh Evans was really a 47 old mother who was trying to hurt this girl because she had moved on and left her daughter out of her old life. Unfortunately, no charges can be laid against this woman.

Another article I read was very bizarre. A 48 year old man was posing as an 18 year old marine in a chat group. He struck up a friendship with an 18 year old student. But she wasn't 18 either, but a 50 year old woman! The woman was also friends with a 22 year old (who was really 22). Eighteen months into the relationship, the 48 year old's wife read the emails from the 18 year old girl (really 50 year old) and emailed her and told her he was a married man with two teenaged girls. The 50 year old dropped him because of this and turned all her attentions to the 22 year old. So the dumped man hunted down the 22 year old (the only one telling the truth here) and killed him.

Which all goes to show you that unless you know who you are dealing with, then be very careful. The delightful cartoon left by Peter Steiner says it all.

Paypal & self help

A few weeks ago a client asked me if I would help him sell a new product on-line. I said I knew about Paypal, but didn't know any other shopping cart programs. It took us a week or so of chatting about his current credit card service, shipping and taxes. And it was amazingly complicated. His own bank had a service, but it would add over $100 a month to his banking bill and frankly, he has no idea how quickly his product will take off and I felt it was just too expensive. He agreed. I was given the name of another service which was supposed to be very easy to use. It had a separate website to deal with all the information on how to set it up! It was not overly easy. Our biggest issue was with shipping. He uses UPS. And wants to ship throughout all of Canada (not the US). But the costs for this were so vastly different. They ranged from $18 within Ontario to $30 to Northern Ontario with the East and West Coasts being slightly lower. So we couldn't use a sliding scale as he would be over charging some people and under charging others. Paypal had what I thought was an integrated system with UPS but after two phone calls at an hour long (one long distance), I concluded that this wasn't what they offered at all. If you had a UPS account, it would deduct the shipping from your account, but there wasn't any way to calculate it as you went on where the items were going. And shipping isn't as straightforward for shipping companies as it would have been for Canada Post (who couldn't do the boxes our size). If you sent one carton at $30, to send two didn't mean it was double that. they have their own sliding scale. So I couldn't add the shipping to the buttons in case the customer bought two and was horrified to see the shipping costs!
I also contacted UPS to see if they had a payment system that integrated with their service and they recommended that I talk to my own tech. Oops, that is me. Sometimes it is hard to get a foot in.
In the end the client decided to do what he had thought at the beginning. We used Paypal and he stated quite clearly on the site that he would charge shipping COD and we gave a chart of the approximate costs to all of the provinces below the list of items for sale.
My final problem was with Paypal's tech support. I finally, after being promised three times, was put through to an expert at coding rather than the general help desk. I was beginning to believe that this elusive team didn't exist. This tech was very helpful with a few things that weren't working. But Paypal has changed their button coding since I used this service before. It was opening a new window when you clicked on a "add to shopping cart" button. I was sure that it never did that before, plus I didn't want customers to be confused. I found a great site called The Online Merchant Network that had the answer to the code I needed to fix the problem. It is so nice when people are happy to share what they have learned. Rather than saying something vague (which the Paypal support was saying), a lovely fellow at the forum above actually copied the code and highlighted the changes you needed to make it open in the current window. Top Class.
If you ever have a problem with something in your computer, I often find things for my clients by typing the problem in Google. I very seldom fail to find that someone else has had that problem and found a solution that we can all use.

need to creat a pdf? - but not in a hurry

I just found a neat site that will create a pdf document for you. The site is at www.koolwire.com but you don't even need to go there. Send a message to pdf@koolwire.com with the document you want converted and send it off. They send you an email back with the pdf document attached. They say that it will take 60 - 90 seconds to get your return email. But make sure that you have their address allowed in your inbox.

Now I tested it on a Sunday. It says that they work 24/7 as I imagine that it is an automated service rather than a bunch of people having to churn out these conversions. Rather than the 60-90 seconds, both of my tests came back at 4 in the morning, 6 - 9 hours after I sent my email off. So it does work, but just don't sit patiently at your computer waiting, as it may take a bit longer than you expected. Also, don't send them any emails from addresses like info@ or admin@. They won't reply to those for some reason.

Track your progress

Here is a cute little freebie that you can use on your websites to show your progress on something. Perhaps a fundraiser, or other goals. It is really mostly a personal thing, but for some fun sites that have goals, it could be used. It's called Ticker Factory. You create an account, choose what your ticker looks like and what the counter looks like and it creates one for you. Gives you the html for you to put on your site and you don't have to change that, but can just enter information into the site to update it.

The things that are available for Free!

I was sent a survey today by the local business development office. They were asking questions about what caused me to go self-employed and other things related to that topic. When the survey was finished I was taken to a site called Survey Monkey. This is another site where you can get a service for free! This one is free if you only ask ten questions, but they still send you the results of the answers that are sent back. You can pay for a more complete service, but if you are starting out and surveys are something that you need to do, then here is a free platform to do it with!

Style vs Function

I belong to a potter's group and along with learning new techniques for using clay, we often discuss form and function. What we are talking about is the fact that you can learn to throw quite competently, but what is the pot's use? It has to be of a size and a shape that is functional as well as attractive, otherwise it is just a dust collector.

I was looking at a person's site for them last week. He was asking if I would re-create the site so that he could do the updates on it. At first glance, I wondered what he wasn't happy about. However, although I knew the web address, I still gave it a search in Google. And this is where the style of the site and the function didn't work. The site was lovely with a flash image of a leave tumbling down in the header of each page. However, the site didn't come up in the first five pages that I looked. And I was putting in the name of the company. Not what they sold, but their actual name. It should have come up right away.

Flash on a site can be quite attractive and does have it's place, but it won't help your customers find you. This site had a few problems with it, which were keeping it from coming up in the first page or two of Google. Firstly, the flash was on all the navigation buttons and the header. There were no Alt descriptions on any of these buttons, so the search engines wouldn't be able to read these buttons, but neither would a blind user. A look at the source code revealed that the person who put the site together managed to misspell the company name every time when adding the meta tags. That might work if you know your business is one that is commonly misspelled, but it is usual practise to put in the correct spelling to!

You can easily help your site become more visual by having navigation buttons that are words rather than images. If you really want the images, then include the Alt tags so they are readable to the search engines. All images on your site should be labelled to indicate what they are and if you can be creative, you can sneak in your company name or the product you sell as well. For example a Farm equipment site may label a picture of a tractor with "this John Deere is available at Downey's Farm Equipment". Someone who can't see the images now knows that it is an image of a John Deere Tractor and the store that is selling it.

PDF documents are also completely available to be scanned by the search engines. Although to your site visitor they are similar to an image with words, to the search engines they are another page with information on your site.

So, as you can see, the site I looked at was attractive, but it's real function was to attract visitors and this is where it was let down by it's design. You can have both, but the real function of a website is to give information about your company/subject and you want people who don't already have your web address to find you.

Calendars for your website

I was in a forum recently and someone asked if anyone knew of a calendar that they could put on their site. One fellow said that what he did was he created a page with a table and he used that to fill in the schedule that he wanted. However another suggestion was a site called Spongecell. It's a free calendar that you can customize and fill with your events and you copy the HTML code to your page, and you have a calendar. The colours of the calendar are all customizable, so you can make it match your site. The good thing about it is that it doesn't take you to a different site, but makes it look (with a little credit on the bottom) like it is your own calendar. I tried the code in Dreamweaver and it doesn't show up in the design pages, but when you preview it in a browser, there it is.
Google also has a calendar, but it has "Google" all over it and I'm pretty sure that it takes you away from your site to a site within Google (but to be honest, I didn't go any further with this one. But check out the tour and you will see the Google logo everywhere). You can create calendars with PHP (don't ask) or other fancy coding, but the above program is free and actually, pretty easy!

Avoid Spam from your email address

I used to recommend that clients use forms on their website to try to avoid their email address from getting lots of spam. There are searches that are done that look at websites, much in the way that seach engines look at websites, but these searches are for any email address as a potential place to send their spam. So forms used to allieviate this. However, then I, as well as some clients, were starting to get the forms back but filled with rubbish.
I was reading a blog by Stepanie Sullivan (no relation) about a site that you can use that scrambles your email address on your site so these scurilous wags can't use it. The site is called reCaptcha and what you do is type in your email address and reCaptcha will give you some code to insert into your site. Your viewers will see an incomplete email address with a link. When they click on your email address a new window opens and you have to type the text you see (you've seen this before). Once you have done this, it allows you to send an email address. I'm sure that anyone who is plagued by spam will not mind the extra few steps in order to send an email.

Welcome to blogging!

Welcome. I've been promoting the idea of a blog to a few of my clients now, and it seemed a bit ironic that I didn't have one to promote my own website and business. Blog is short for "web log" which is kind of an online diary. However, there are a lot of different kinds of blogs now, and most writers have one that they post to daily.

Blogs are now so commonplace, that I saw an article just today that a group of blogging journalists are trying to form themselves into a union to protect themselves and get health care! This is how mainstream blogs now are. As a person who owns a business you may think "I pay my web designer to do that sort of work". However, there are a lot of reasons why you should still consider adding the component of a blog to compliment your site.
In a conference I went to a few months ago, the presenter writes in his blog at least a couple of times a month. This created interest for people who want to know what he is up to and what specials his business - travel - are promoting. But I was searching the web last week for some information and found another radio broadcast from Australia and these guys are professional designers who were saying the same thing!
The fellow I listened to said that there were a few reasons why having a blog increased site traffic.

1. The structures of blogs are search engine friendly (they are often written in HTML with CSS (cascading style sheets), which cuts out a lot of design code to get to the meat of your message.
2. It uses basic HTML. (the language that websites are written in) A lot of sites have Flash, lots of images etc. and they aren't picked up as pure information.
3. Each post has an individual title page. These title pages are what the search engines use in their searches. And rank them as important.
   
4. Most blogs have links to other sites, and as I've mentioned before, that means site popularity.
5. Your content is FRESH! I have clients that I did sites for three years ago, and they do not feel it important to update their sites at all. Not even when they don't necessarily sell the same things any longer. Your customers will be bored and the search engines will be too.

To give you an example of what you would put in your blog would be a friend of mine who has a perennial business. It is a large farm and she is promoting it all the time. But if you know anything about the garden trade, people stock up on all their plants pretty early in the spring and summer and later on in the year her place is pretty quiet. But she has beautiful perennials that come into their own later in the season, that so many people are missing! With her blog, she can write about and include photographs of all the flowers that are blooming right now! Pictures of how her gardens are looking later in the seaon and even photographs of the animals that come to drink from her pond or just pass by. This is pretty handy for you, the customer, as you can keep an eye on her blog and not have to drive out there every couple of weeks. And she doesn't have to pay me to add more pictures each time, as a blog is straightforward to add messages and images to. Think email. It's not difficult.
You can give advice about the product or industry that you are in. Any news that may affect your business or may have your customers worried. It is a personal touch. The blog entry doesn't have to be long either, just a paragraph at least once a week. You'll see your traffic start to improve. So you can learn along with me, I'll let you know what improvements I see to my site traffic now that the cobbler has finally made shoes for his children! (you know what I mean).