Archive for the ‘advice’ Category

When you install WordPress for your blog, they automatically put what is known as a “trackback file” in the main section of your blog folder. The actual file shows up in your blog folder as “wp-trackback.php”, and has no use except to send you an email pertaining to changes in your WordPress. This file is used to reference comments made on your blog and post changes you may have made in the backend admin, then send you an email with a notification.

When you upgrade your WordPress to the latest versions, WordPress automatically installs the trackback file again. Therefore in order to prevent the trackback messages from clogging up your email, you may want to delete the file each time you have a new update. The file has no purpose that affects the functionality of your blog, so deleting it won’t have any adverse effects.

Keep posted on my blog and website for news, tips and advice concerning internet related topics. Contact me today for ideas related to starting up your own small business website, and inquire about my blog writing services to keep your blog full of fresh new content on a regular basis.

A clean computer is the key to an efficiently running system. In order to keep your computer running smoothly and speedy, follow these cleanup tips and advice.

One of the most common problems for a computer is the accumulation of dust around the internal fans. It is very important to eliminate any dust because it could be blocking fans, shorting out your circuit board or even be a potential fire hazard. If you don’t keep up on the physical maintenance of your computer you could be forcing it to work harder than it needs to, and risk damaging it in the process.

Before cleaning your computer from dust, be sure to unplug the system from power sources. The last thing you want is to get electrocuted or fry your system by touching the wrong components.

Don’t ever work on an electronic device while it is plugged into the wall.

Opening the tower should be easy in most cases, using a screwdriver and simply sliding the case off. You should see that the majority of dust will be found around the fans inside. Clumps of dust can be easily grabbed with tweezers, and you should wipe down the flat surfaces with a dry rag where needed. Blowing the dust out with a canned air duster works great to do detailed job, but remember to protect yourself from breathing any dust in.

Not only does your computer need physical care, but maximizing free memory is important as well. Your computer can run faster if you delete unnecessary files, including temporary files and cookies. A registry cleaner is particularly helpful with deleting temporary files and cookies your computer’s desk cleanup options just won’t catch. Follow the instructions I provide on the page.

I suggest having a look through Useful Computer Maintenance Tools for more options to keep your system in great shape such as a registry cleaner and desktop cleanup tips. Contact me today for any website design project ideas or more ideas to keep your website content fresh.

To keep your customers involved in your business online, simple website navigation is an important factor. Imagine a natural flowing positive website experience, and consider these tips for a web design that is easy to navigate your way through.

The sections of your small business website that you want your websurfers to naturally land on should stick out like a sore thumb. Think about which parts of your website you want visitors to be sure not to miss. When someone cannot locate their particular topic of interest, chances are they could bounce off to another website. The object is to keep them digging for more, and eventually bookmark you and refer you to others.

In order for your website visitors to navigate easily, it may be a good idea to add a sitemap to sections with numerous pages. When a single tab grows large enough you may even want to make a short guide list for reference. On my website I created a Resources Sitemap which covers everything under my “Resources” tab on one page.

Consider having tabs across the top so your potential customers can find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Make the custom website design intended for function so everything is simple to find.

Group your most important links together on a sidebar at the left or right. Highlighting the links you think are the most important and using bold appropriately can easily guide your website visitors where they need to go as well.

Visit my blog and website on a regular basis for web design related tips, news and advice, and contact me by email to discuss your own small business custom website design.

Lunascape’s new internet browser is supposedly faster than Internet Explorer and even Mozilla Firefox. Obviously the look is a bit different and takes some getting used to, but there were a few features I found rather useful.

Near the top right is a dropdown menu that allows you to keep updated on news from The New York Times, CNN, BBC and many other sources. The topics show one by one and if you are interested in the headline, simply click on it.

Lunascape6 allows the user to browse in many different versions with what’s known as a “triple search engine”. The three formats offered by Lunascape6 are the Trident (Internet Explorer), Gecko (Firefox), and Webkit themes (Lunascape’s own).

If you are used to Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, Lunascape allows you to import your add-ons and plug-ins from your current browser.

As the world’s first and only triple engine browser, Lunascape6 has been downloaded over 20 million times and is available in 12 languages worldwide. For a new kind of speed and versatility try it yourself today!

Keep posted on my blog and website for news, tips and advice in the world of web design and internet related topics. Contact me today for ways to get a website or blog set up for your own small business.

I recently discovered a pleasant trend occurring in the statcounter statistics for the traffic on one of the websites I monitor and write for. From the graph on the left, (click to enlarge by the way) we notice the trend remained flat until shortly after I started writing for the website in June.

Before June the number of unique visitors peaked at around 50 per day where now the minimum per day is around 200, even peaking at 1,184 hits on March 21st. The key to acquiring more customers is building website traffic, and in this case I provide proof that blogging on a regular basis does just that.

Add content to your website regularly to provide search engines with more incentive to direct websurfers to your site. Search engines prefer a website that grows, so by adding more pages with blog posts, you offer a healthier online presence. Blogging also offers you the opportunity to advertise your business for free. All you need is some time to write and some ideas to write about.

Do you want to get more traffic to your website online? Inquire about my blogging services for your small business website. Most small business owners who have a blog do not have the time to write on it. Writing about news, tips and advice in your business niche CAN bring you more potential customers. Don’t have a blog yet? I can offer help with that as well. Contact me today for more details.

When filtering spam comments on your blog, a few considerations need to be focused on. Identify whether you are looking at an actual comment by a human or a program designed to add comments for the purposes of gaining a backlink.

Besides some of the add ons and plugins that are offered with most blogs to filter spam, you may still have to delete some spam that gets through those defenses. When you notice a comment has nothing to do with the post you wrote, chances are you can delete it for being spam. Sometimes you can recoginze blog spam comments by the website it links back to.

A great way to filter a large portion of blog comment spam is with the WordPress Akismet and the SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plugins.

Here are some examples of some actual comments on my blog that I approved:

Dear Rog,
MUCH BETTER! I like the new vid much better.

I very much appreciate this update my computer has had some issues so this will definitely help

The tips provided by you are very good and useful.
Thanks

I really enjoyed flicking through this. Think I’m going to look through your other posts!

Spam has always been a problem, and seems to be getting worse every day. A good way to tell if a comment is spam is to see if it has anything to do with your blog post or if it is just a general comment. Spam comments usually say something like, “while the sites we link to below are completely unrelated to ours, we think they are worth a read, so have a look” or “we like to honor other sites on the internet, even if they aren’t related to us, by linking to them. Below are some websites worth checking out.”

Bookmark my blog and website for internet related tips and advice, and contact me by phone or email about a custom website design for your small business website.

Recently my computer did an automatic update from the old Beta version of Internet Explorer to the new Internet Explorer 9. I was happy with the Beta version that I had been using for the last couple months, and the upgrade was a very subtle difference.

With the Beta Internet Explorer there were some issues uploading photos to Yahoo, which still seems to be a problem. The photo upload to Yahoo works fine in Firefox, so this error isn’t due to server related or Yahoo updates.

There were no problems with YouTube’s compatibility with IE9 Beta or Tinypic.com, and as suspected this is still the case. I also noticed the IE9 Beta version would not allow the user to log into Tinychat.com or Stickam.com to group video chat and that issue seems to be resolved as well.

Overall everything seems fine with the update to Internet Explorer 9 and displays properly for all my websites concerning video and audio. Have a look at Internet Explorer 9 at beautyoftheweb.com

Visit my blog and website regularly for news, tips, advice and updates in the internet world as we know it. Contact me today about a custom website design for your small business by phone or email today!

Clickjacking is growing more and more in social media, specifically Facebook. I myself haven’t been affected by any of these bad links, but I also choose to avoid applications dealing with more than just communicating with friends on the website.

The trouble begins when you click on the link. You may be taken to a screen that asks whether you want to allow this application. When you click on one of these links, these malicious websites can make your browser take action without your knowledge or consent. They can even post the link on your wall, friend chat, and in personal messages. As you can imagine this can spread virally and quickly as well.

If you feel you have been infected by such a virus, there are steps to help you get your social media account back to normal. If you made the mistake of installing the application and passing it onto others, clean up your profile by removing references to the application. This is done by clicking the “X” at the top right corner of the post. Then remove the application from your list of approved Facebook applications in your privacy settings. Go into Account, Privacy Settings, then Applications and Websites at the bottom left.

You may find a great deal of applications that interact with your Facebook account, so even if you’re not infected, it may be a good idea to clean up some of those that aren’t necessary.

If you or your Facebook friends are falling for tricks like this, it’s time to get yourself informed of the latest threats. Facecrooks is a Facebook page you can visit that chronicles the seedy, unsavory and silly side of social media. They provide current news, educational resources and alerts on social media privacy, safety and scams, and provide relevant and current information on how to safely use social networking sites.

Bookmark my blog and website for tips and advice on the latest trends on the internet. If you have a small business, contact me today about a custom website of your own to advertise online.

The communication evolution began in primative times with smoke signals. Soon with the invention of electricity, morse code and telegraphs became our primary forms of communication. Letters in the mail took a very long time until the telephone’s invention in 1876.

The telephone’s become a mainstream way to talk to people so far away, even to this day. From the telephone we added electronic mail, or e mail replacing envelopes and postage, currently referred to as “snail mail”.

The way we communicate is constantly changing. The primary form or communication used to be the telephone, although it still is very popular, video chatting is the growing alternative. With video chat on instant messenger, Skype, and even chatrooms such as Stickam and Tinychat, we’re becoming more comfortable with seeing who we’re talking to.

Smartphones have video and microphone capabilities built right into them and give the user the option of video conferencing at any time of the day. We use social media like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to keep in touch with every detail about each other’s lives, up to the minute. Communication with people isn’t the only factor, but now we even have the need to communicate with robots and programs.

With online shopping, banking and even remotely controlling lights and appliances in your home, we’re seeing communication go beyond the realm of just people. We have gadgets to communicate with other gadgets around the home and office, from the TV remote to the bluetooth on your cell phone.

How many more hours will we spend on the phone with a computer voice prompting us through a neverending path of virtual menus just with the hope and intention to instead have someone to whom we can explain our needs? Our evolution in technology has taken away the personal touch of talking to an actual person in the customer service department.

Now anyone can get in touch with anyone else with ease. I see 5 year olds with cell phones and his grandpa is checking his hotmail online. Grandma’s bluetooth is connected to her iPhone and my older relatives are reuniting and connecting on Facebook. It’s a great time to grab the communication revolution by the horns and see what it has in store for you.

I do website design to the latest standards in either a custom CMS content management system, or smaller, static websites for small business. Whether your needs are simple or of epic proportions, I can help you get the web design you’re looking for. Bookmark my blog and website for tips and advice in the world of web design, and contact me by phone or email today to discuss any of your small business website design needs.

Google has recently launched a realtime search engine integrated into their search results showing information as it is posted online. The updates include information from sources such as news articles, Yahoo Answers, Twitter tweets, Facebook updates, MySpace announcements and much more. The Google realtime results can be paused, and there is even a scroll bar to review other recent results. You can even use real time search results on your mobile phone.

Google has linked partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace so that data can be streamed for any publicly available posts. This is in addition to the partnership they announced with Twitter in October 2010.

Google determines whether a search is worthy of having realtime results associated with it. When high quality information comes in, then Google will show it. In other words, if Google thinks something has some “realtime” component to it, the search engine will show the section. If Google sees a spike in information on a certain topic or queries on a topic, it assumes there is a realtime situation occurring.

You can even go to Google Realtime and set alerts for real time search results, allowing you to view up-to-the-second news articles, blog posts and social media updates about hot topics around the globe. Google’s real time search engine in coordination with Google Instant Results gives the user a simple experience searching online.

Bookmark my blog and website for web design news and updates, and visit often for new blog posts on a regular basis. Need a custom website? Contact me by phone or email to provide me with details on your expectations.