Calendars

Have you ever been sitting on your computer and wanted to know what day of the week next June 6th is? I've actually gone to my clock on my computer and fiddled with it to see what day a certain date falls on because I don't have a calendar for next year yet.

Here is a site I found at Time and Date.com

You can put in your own country, and it tells you what holidays occur there, and you can use these calendars to print out for your own use. There is a lot of other information on this site, time zone calculators, countdowns to a particular date. Could be useful.

Email Etiquette

Millions of emails are sent every day, and sometimes it feels like we are getting all of them! If you want to annoy your friends less, here are a few ways to make sending emails to your friends a less stressful event for both them and yourself!

1.File sizes. If you are sending images to people of your dog, cat or your latest artwork, don’t forget that some people are still on dial up and it takes a long time to download each attachment they receive. Photos or other files shouldn’t be any larger than 500kb if you can help it, and if you reduce an image to 72dpi (dots per inch) and 6 x 8” in size, it will often be under 100KB. Most camera programs will allow you to resize your images. If they are only for your friends to look at and not print, then 72dpi is fine to look at on your screen. And if you are in the position that one email seems to be blocking the rest from coming through, you can go to www.mail2web.com and type in your email address and password and see all of your emails that are still on your ISP’s server and look at and delete the offending email. Nothing worse than spending half an hour downloading something only to find out it was a silly movie that you didn’t want anyway! See Photoxels for more details.

2.Sending to groups of people. Do you get emails from your friends that include 300 email addresses that you have to scroll through to get to the point of the message? Isn’t it annoying? It can also be dangerous if you or your friends get a virus, it can spread to all those people as well, not to mention that your email address is now broadcast to all and sundry. It is always best when sending an email to lots of people to put your own email address in the To: section, and all of the other emails in the BCC (Blind carbon copy) section. You can get to the BCC by clicking on the CC in your emails if you use Outlook Express. In a lot of mail programs you can also organize your friends and families into groups so you can click on a group and it sends to all in the group at once. But still send them as a blind carbon copy.

3.Dire warnings! I have to say that the Neiman Marcus store never billed any woman $500 for a cookie recipe, the police won’t come if you put your pin number in backwards (you’ll just get shot for your trouble) and Bill Gates is definitely not going to give any of us money by sending on a message. If you get an email about some virus warning or other, the best thing to do is to google the main idea of it. For example put in pin number + reverse and you will get up pages with the helpful names like urbandegends.com and snopes.com. All pages that debunk all of these emails that seem to last for years! It’s an easy way to see if the email warning is for real and save thousands of emails being sent out as a result of you blindly sending it to all of your friends. Plus, some of those sites are pretty funny reading!

4.Finally, the jokes, and those emails that are the equivalent of the chain letter. You know, the one that if you don’t send it on to six more people you will have bad luck/you won’t get good luck/you may die etc. They are just annoying. If you get one just delete it. I’m pretty sure your friends will thank you for not sending it on to them, I know I will!

Common Website Mistakes

There are a lot of websites out there, some really fancy, some very basic. But there are a lot that have some basic problems that can hurt business and cause people not to be able to find out what your business does!

Poor Navigation
Have you ever visited a website and clicked on a few pages only to have trouble getting back to the page you started with? There are no consistent links and no single navigation bar. This isn't good site practise. A website is like a house with many doors. Through search engines, a visitor may enter your site through many different pages, depending on what they were looking for. You want them to be able to find your home page or "front door" easily, should they need to.

• a single menu bar should be on every page of your site, in the same place so it is easy to find
• links to all your pages should be listed on that menu bar, not inside certain pages, visitors may never find it again!
• call your link what it is, so it is easily understood
  

Too many fancy features
Flash, blinking lights, music that blares out at you may make you laugh, but will be annoying to your visitors. Also, you want your visitor to be able to find what they are looking for easily and quickly, and not be confused by a jumble of confusing information.
Don't forget as well, that these things take time to download onto your visitor's computer and not everyone has a high speed connection. You don't want people to skip your site because it is too confusing, too loud or just too much trouble.

Poor Writing
The quality of your website reflects your business, but it will be a poor reflection if there are spelling or grammar mistakes. Make sure your writing reflects what you want to project to your clients.

Not enough information
Why have a website if you are going to give little away? You need to tell people exactly what your business is about in clear descriptive words. Not only does this help people find out what you can do for them, it also helps your website come up in search engines as well. Search engines use the first few sentences in your site to determine where your site will rank, so you need to be specific.

Legible
It makes sense that it should be very easy to read the text on your site. However, there are many sites out there in wild colours that are difficult to read. Text that is too small, too fancy, too faint or with too little contract from the background will be hard to read.

Out of Date Information
I create websites for clients and offer the service of updates. I am not trying to make a lot of money for myself when I say that updating your site on a regular basis is important. Your viewers and search engines will stop visiting/listing your sites after a few months with no changes. This is especially true of information that is obviously out of date by years! It should be a constantly evolving "brochure" of what you offer and should be changed and checked regularly to make sure what it says is still relevant.

Different colours and styles on different pages
If you have a site where you have tried out a new "theme" for each page, you will confuse people and they will wonder if they are still at the same site. A site should have similar styles on each page (and the navigation we mentioned early will help tie it in together) to help create a professional look.

Search Engine Optimization
There are a lot of myths about search engines and how they work. Now adays, search engines are more interested in the content of a site, than it's meta tags (keywords) because they soon learned that people put in meta tags that had little to do with their business, but were words that they thought would draw the search engines and customers to their site. They also put in the same word over and over again.

It is important through your text to have words that reflect your business, page names that reflect what is on that page (and don't say "page1") and descriptive tags (or Alt tags) on every image. It is also important to have links to related businesses and any associations that you belong to listed within your site. This helps with optimization as well as giving potential clients a feeling that your business is more legitimate.