- 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.

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.

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.

PREVIOUS POST:

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.

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 interpret the code provided to it slightly differently.  This can result in slightly different layouts from one browser to another or, worse, things are correct in some browsers and broken in others.

When I say ‘web browsers’ I mean the program you use to look at web sites.  For example, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and a number of others.

The browser version can also play a part in how a page is displayed.  A page built using today’s common methods with lots of CSS and that displays nicely in Internet Explorer 8.0 can be nearly unusable in Internet Explorer 6.0.  This is because with each new version the browser is updated to use the latest technologies.  Often these are not compatible with the technologies used on an older site.

Another item is font choices.  When you build a website you want to use common fonts.  When the browser assembles the web page for your visitor it usually uses the fonts installed on your visitors machine.  If you have chosen an unusual font the browser will do it’s best to find a similar alternative.  But the spacing is likely to be different than your original choice.  That can throw things off as well.

The best practice is to be sure your websites are as ‘Standards Compliant’ as possible so that they will be as similar as possible from one computer to the next and from one browser to the next.

The goal is a consistent display for the majority of your visitors.  But keep in mind that there will probably always be someone who doesn’t see your site the way you intended it.

I hope it is eventually useful to you.

6.2.10
- finished general template framework
- implemented contact form with captcha with new template
- added Domains, Hosting & Company links to site

4.24.10
- new interim home page posted; standards compliant
- load time is a bit slow, will need to rework the graphic backgrounds for better load times

4.22.10
- site and contact page is in Yahoo! index, add date not available
- not in Bing index yet
- Google: indexed for key phrase ‘media effects’, but positioned as page 3+ (in other words, we’re in the index for the phrase but not really ranking yet)
- Set up Bing Webmaster Center: submitted www.web-and-media-effects.com, no site map uploaded

4.20.10
- link from OurComputerTech.com picked up on Bing

4.18.10
- added site to Yahoo! Explorer (Yahoo! Explorer is supposed to allow you to see how your site is doing in Yahoo! Watch for posts on usability)

4.14.10
- Google stops by to index and cache web-and-media-effects.com and blog
- site is in the Google index
- Contact page added: email form with captcha

4.9.10
- set up web site and basic blog.  No real content yet, but the technical bare bones.
- added Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics
- added link to web site AND blog to our current main site, www.OurComputerTech.com

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.”

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 the web site is another tool in their overall marketing strategy. Just like other advertisements the web site needs to be promoted. List the address on your business card, letterhead, pens, pads, shirts…anything you can to get the word out.

Another thing is that sites need INBOUND links. That is, links from other sites to yours. You can think of them as referrals. The more referrals you have the more traffic you will get. More links also carries weight with the search engines. If a lot of people are willing to link TO you then there must be something to this site of yours…right? Just make sure your inbound links are relevant and legitimate. Don’t fall for the ‘if you link to this site for me I’ll link 2 sites to you’ scams. These kinds of things can actually hurt your web site ranking.

Developing a good set of Inbound links takes a lot of legwork. You need to watch for good matches and cultivate these links. Don’t forget to get listed in directories and don’t forget to check on reciprocal links every so often. If someone does a link exchange with you, i.e. you link to them, they link to you, then make sure they didn’t just put your link up on their site for just long enough to get you to put a link to them on your site. Sometimes people take links down after they think they got what they wanted.

Keep doing your regular networking! If you go to your local Chamber of Commerce events and networking group meetings don’t stop just because you started a web site. There’s NO SUBSTITUTE for solid, in-person business relationships. The web site just enhances that.

And don’t forget to update your site periodically. Give your visitors a reason to keep coming back. You can develop some serious word-of-mouth about your web site if you have something useful for them to go see every so often.

That’s just a few things. There are a lot more but hopefully this helps.

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 for those of you who enjoy technicalities is that the person who wrote the virus and/or put it on the web site is responsible.  But that’s not really the question here.

There are a number of ways this can happen but fundamentally it means that the site had a vulnerability of some kind that allowed someone to gain access and infect it.

Generally this would not be the host.  However, some hosts that are not good with their server configuration and maintenance could find themselves with unauthorized access.

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

More often it’s due to a vulnerability in the web site files.

If the site is using some kind of CMS (Content Management System) there might be a vulnerability in the system.  These systems need to be kept up to date with their security patches.  That’s a maintenance issue which could go with either the designer or the site owner…depending on whose responsible to keep it up and running.

If there was programming involved it could be a problem with the code.  That would go with the designer/programmer.

If the site owner tried to modify the site on their own they could have also introduced a vulnerability.

So it’s difficult to tell who is responsible without knowing the details of the site and it’s management.

It makes sense.  After all, how many times have you gone to a web site and wished it would load faster?

Site speed is a factor that we have always advised being conscious of.  Images should be optimized for the best web performance and HTML and other code should be as efficient as possible.  However, let me make two suggestions:

1) Do not jump too fast to make any changes to your web site based on this news.  It is a minor factor and does not merit a knee-jerk reaction.  Optimizing your site speed is a task to be integrated into your existing updating and standard maintenance routine.

2) Do not sacrifice your content solely for the sake of site speed.  If you have a video or some other component that is a little heavy or slow to load just follow best practices for implementing it.  Remember that usefulness for your visitors is the most important.  You just need to strike an appropriate balance between usability and usefulness.

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