Happy New Year: Copyright and Shipping Costs

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Yes, it’s only November.  But the new year will be here before you know it.  So just a couple of thoughts on annual site maintenance:

- Don’t forget to update the year on your website copyright notice.  Keeping this up to date shows you’re paying attention to your site.  That’s important to some of your visitors.

- If you have an e-commerce site which ships product be sure to check your shipping rates.  The major carriers are reworking how they calculate the shipping costs.  Be sure you get your shipping rates updated so you don’t end up paying for a share of the shipping you didn’t intend to.

Chamberfest 2010

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We had a great time at Chamberfest 2010.  To those of you who stopped by THANK YOU for saying Hello!

Put on by the LAX Coastal Area Chamber of Commerce, Chamberfest is an annual local business expo.  We always pick up a number of leads as well as finding out about other businesses in our area.

We also made June 3, 2010 our official launch of  Web-and-Media-Effects.com.

If you missed Chamberfest this year watch for it next year.  It’s a great event.

But you don’t need to wait another year to meet us.  Give us a call, and email or check our web site home page for a listing of other networking events we will be attending soon.

Email Signatures with Gmail

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UPDATE: July 8, 2010 – Gmail now supports Rich Text Formatting for email signatures

A month ago I was asked about a formatting signatures in Gmail.  At the time the only options were to be content with plain text or to use some script, plug-in or browser add-on to do it.  As of yesterday Google has added Rich Text Formatting for email signatures.  You can now format the text, add links and insert images.  The images have to be hosted somewhere but these days that’s not a problem.

For more information here’s the Gmail Blog HERE.

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Have you received emails with all the extra information at the bottom?  LinkedIn buttons, active links to websites, graphics in the signatures or even just some nice formatting like colors, bold and italics?

All of these are potentially useful features.

However, Gmail doesn’t support them.  So if you rely on Gmail for your business email and want to do a signature you will have to come up with a good, plain-text, version of what you want to do.  Perhaps Google will add the feature in the future.  It’s on their ‘suggestion list’.

For now if you want to add a plain-text signature to your Gmail account here’s a useful link: Adding a signature – Gmail Help.

My Clients See My Site Differently

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Occasionally website owners ask us to ‘fix’ a web page because someone told them it wasn’t displaying properly.  Sometimes the text is not wrapping correctly or a paragraph is running over the edge of a column or perhaps an image is in the wrong place, etc.

While it is possible that there could be a format or structural issue with the page there are also many reasons these apparent errors could be showing that are NOT the result of a problem with the page.

First, web browsers are NOT created equal.  They all Continue reading →

Development Journal

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On April 9, 2010 we ‘technically’ launched the new Web-and-Media-Effects.com site along with this blog.  The idea, of course, is to see what effects we have based on the various bits and pieces we put together and/or do to market the new brand.  This post will be a log of my observations and will be as complete as I can make it given other time constraints.

I hope it is eventually useful to you. Continue reading →

Keywords Are Dead

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Keywords are dead.  Search engines don’t use them anymore.

Okay, you got me.  Keywords are not dead, but how we use them to help our websites has dramatically changed over the years.  The “keywords” meta tag is no longer an item search engines give a lot of weight.

Google doesn’t look at the keywords meta tag at all.  They even have a blog post about it.  Yahoo! doesn’t even mention it in their Search Quality Content Guidelines, “Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page.”

My web site is up. Why aren’t people calling?

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(This article was previously posted on our old blog and has been moved here.)

I have had several people approach me lately concerned about a drop off in inquiries from their web site. Here’s a few things I suggested to them. Maybe they’re helpful to you too.

One of the first things I try to emphasize to people when we discuss their web site plans for their business is that a web site is NOT a set-and-forget project. Sooooo many people go into it thinking that once their web site is up the phone will start ringing off the hook.

My advice to folks is that Continue reading →

Who is responsible for viruses on web sites?

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(This article was previously posted on our old blog and has been moved here.)

We had a question recently about who is responsible for viruses on web sites:

The question: ‘I went to a website and my anti-virus software warned me that it had detected a number of viruses including a trojan. Who is responsible for that happening? Is it the fault of the host, designer?’

Of course, the obvious answer Continue reading →

Brand new site

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The Web-and-Media-Effects.com site is brand new…barely born yesterday.  In this section you will find notes about the process we go through as the site, and therefore our web design and development business, grows and evolves.

If you have comments, constructive feedback or even feature requests please let us know.