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Tips & Advice
The short answer to this question is: no.
Background
In the ‘old’ days of the internet there was definitely benefit in having blueshoes.com as your domain name if you sold (you guessed it) blue shoes. Search engines ranked you higher if your domain name matched a term someone searched for.
As you can imagine this was very easily rorted – someone owning blueshoes.com didn’t have to have a particularly useful or popular blue shoes website to come up at the top of the search results when people were looking for blue shoes (their website didn’t need to have anything to do with blue shoes). So people ran out and registered domain names related to their product or service. Many businesses created exact duplicates of their websites and launched them using these types of domains alongside their existing websites.
As search engines evolved and got better at giving people relevant results – in the early 200s -they tweaked the way they calculated their rankings and started paying little or no attention to the domain name. Google – who were starting to leave the older search engines eating their dust – then started penalising people for having duplicate content. Penalising as in drastically dropping the ranking for …
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You receive an invoice in the mail. It’s something to do with your domain name and you know it’s important not to let this expire so you reach for the cheque book/credit card… STOP!
For many years unscrupulous organisations have been sending misleading invoices to people offering to take over managing their domain name or to register additional domain names they don’t need. It works like this…
- They use a freely available lookup service (called a WHOIS) to find the names and addresses of domain name owners, including you
- They create a nice professional looking invoice for either your domain name, or a domain name that’s very similar to yours (for example yoursite.net.au when you use yoursite.com.au)
- …and pop it in the mail to you
- You receive it and if you’re not careful you end up paying an inflated price for a domain name that you don’t need.
What to do if you receive an invoice for a domain name and you’re not sure if it’s legit
- Check who the invoice is from (these companies are often called something legitimate sounding) and
- Check if it’s actually for your domain name, not something similar (remember .com.au is different to .com)
- Check the fine print (these often say things like ‘domain
…
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In the past month a number of high profile organisations have had their websites hacked or customer data systems compromised. In early April the customer email database of Dell (and several other companies) was exposed when email services provider Epsilon’s systems were breached. Not longer after that Monash University’s homepage was hacked, and now we hear that the account details – including credit card numbers – of more than 70 million of Sony’s PlayStation Network members have been accessed by “malicious forces”.
These are all large organisations with massive resources at their disposal and – we would assume – serious security regimes.
The lesson? If they can be compromised then so can you.
Here are some extremely simple things you can do to lessen the risk…
Use strong passwords
You’ve heard this before but I’ll say it again: the easiest way for someone to access your website (or email or Facebook or…) is by guessing your password. Studies have shown that lots of people use ridiculously guessable passwords (with 12345 and 12456789 the most common, followed closely by people’s names). If your content management system’s password is one of these log in and change it now.
Keep passwords safe and and don’t save them on
…
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If you want to integrate your social media accounts with your website there are a growing number of different techniques you can use that work quite differently. We’re often asked about this so here’s a quick overview…
Contents
1. Directly linking from your website to your Facebook or Twitter page
2. Allowing others to share/like/tweet things on your website with their social media networks
3. Pushing feeds from your website onto your Facebook or Twitter account
4. Pulling feeds from your Facebook or Twitter account onto your website
1. Directly linking from your website to your Facebook or Twitter page
This is one of the simplest and most commonly used techniques across the web. We add a Find us on Facebook and Follow us on Twitter button somewhere on your site (usually in the sidebar or the footer area) that links directly to your Facebook or Twitter page.
Nothing fancy going on here but you give your customers a super easy way to find your social media accounts.
Live examples: Enchanted Maze Garden (Facebook), St Kilda Boat Sales (Facebook and Twitter), GXY Search (Facebook and Twitter)
2. Allowing
…
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Got five minutes? Here’s my number one super easy tip to help people contact you:
Create an email signature that puts your contact details at the bottom of your emails.
Why?
At least once every day when I’m at work I read an email from someone, pick up the phone to call them and realise that I don’t have their phone number. It must be at the bottom of their email, right?
Well, as often as not, no. I then hang up the phone, dig through my contacts to find the number, call the person back and… by this stage more likely than not I forget what I was calling for.
A quick and very unscientific survey of my inbox right now shows about a 50/50 split between people who include their contact details on their emails and people who don’t. That’s crazy.
It’s so easy to create an email signature. Do it now!
How to create an email signature in Microsoft Outlook
- Open Outlook
- Choose Tools → Options
- Choose the Mail Format tab then click the Signatures button
- Make sure you’re on the E-mail Signature tab
- Click the New button
- Type a name (eg ‘work signature’ – this is just for
…
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I know it’s not cool but I’m a bit of a sceptic regarding the currently very popular view that all businesses should be using Twitter and that if they’re not they’re somehow missing out.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Twitter is a great tool, if used in the appropriate context. We have several customers who use Twitter and/or have added Twitter feeds to their primary websites (see examples below) and see benefits from this.
However, for each of these there are truckloads of businesses who set up Twitter accounts because of the hype and then either
- don’t use them
- use them for a honeymoon period of a couple of weeks then lose interest, or
- post occasional updates that are completely irrelevant (going to the shop for a sandwich, hooray it’s Friday)
The Chaser team seized on this with glee when they started looking at politicians’ Twitter accounts on ABC TV’s Yes We Canberra leading up to the 2010 Australian federal election, as illlustrated in the short clip below.
When Twitter is useful for business
The organisations that get the most from Twitter are usually successful …
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RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. Using RSS feeds is a way of keeping track of updates to a frequently updated website or part of a website, showing when new articles or comments have been added.
For example if you regularly read 20 different blogs or sites you could subscribe to RSS feeds from each of these sites and then use a feedreader to easily check a digest of all new articles each day without having to visit all of the sites one by one.
Should I have an RSS feed from my website?
If you have a website and publish regular updates, like news or blog posts, you should offer your visitors the chance to subscribe to your website’s RSS feed.
How do I do this?
If we build you a website using WordPress you’ll automatically have an RSS feed from your site. The address of your feed will be http://www.yourdomainname.com/feed/. If you have different types or categories of content that you regularly update you can also offer people category-specific feeds.
For example the Go4 website’s main RSS feed is here: http://www.go4.com.au/feed/ – this shows alls new posts we add to our site. The RSS feed for our blog is available at …
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Social networking. Facebook. The words on everyone’s lips right now.
Here are two easy ways to use Facebook to help promote your business website that won’t require much extra work for you.
1. Let people to be good sharers
Building in the ability for your visitors to quickly share something they see and like on your site with their network of friends on Facebook (or other social networks) is a simple and effective way to getting your content spreading through those networks.
It works like this
- We set up the ability for people to share your content on your site – this adds some little icons to the bottom of your pages and posts
- A visitor to your site sees a page or post they like on your site, clicks a ‘Share on Facebook’ icon and is taken to their Facebook page where your link and a summary is prepopulated for them . They hit the button and you’re shared across their network.
2. Publish in two places at the same time
It’s pretty easy to to set up a Facebook page for your business. But how do you integrate this with your existing website without making …
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