Yesterday we talked about some common misnomers and misunderstandings when it comes to the internet, today I want to talk about what this means in a practical sense and what you need to do to cater to them. (more…)

As anyone who reads the technology blogs will know by now, a study conducted by the Online Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCooper has revealed that spending online has overtaken TV for the first time ever. On its own this is an impressive headline, but it gets even more so when you look even further into it. (more…)

In the old days it was easy. Any old entrepreneur was able to make money online through PPC marketing. In some industries all you had to do was set up a few generic broad match keywords and, even though your account was set up poorly, clicks would be cheap enough to make you a profit. Those days are gone. (more…)

#2: Formatting

Never forget that a solid block of text is a very easy thing to ignore. A way to make it less so is to take advantage of the myriad different formatting options available to you I’m talking about bullet points, bold, underlining. These options, when used sparingly, can break up big sections of text, drawing people’s eyes to the relevant parts within the message.
You can’t put every other word in bold, as obviously this will dilute the actual effect of the ploy, but three or four in every 500 words should be fine. Make sure they are evenly spaced throughout the text and highlight only your key messages. (more…)

Comment Spam tends to be an issue for any site that allows users to leave comments on articles or content. As anyone with a blog will know, message boards tend to be awash with fake comments, often in Pigeon English. These are not designed to add to the debate really, they’re basically just ways of getting a link to an external site onto a website. In fact, they’re often not even done by people, with a lot of comment spam coming from custom designed bots. (more…)

Cons

As Jenny articulated very well yesterday, blog and article comments can be very useful tools for a website, though I’m afraid there are most definitely downsides. All of which stem from one simple fact – you’re allowing people you cannot control to edit an element of your website. No matter how small that element might be, you cannot help but open yourself up to potential problems. (more…)

If you’re one of these people that has to register a lot of domain names for your job, or just likes to play the domain name lottery, then you’re likely to have heard about the ‘.cm’ domain name craze, especially if you’ve been anywhere near namejet.com. For the uninitiated, the aforementioned site was, up until today, taking pre orders on .cm domain names. .cm being the official URL ending for Cameroon… Of course. (more…)

Let’s say you run a business. Your SEO’s great, you’re ranking well for all your major keywords and doing well, well enough that you decide to expand your business to Canada. You immediately buy the web address www.examplecompany.ca and set about building your new website, but what about the SEO? How do you maintain your position now that you have a range of international domains? (more…)

For years now Firefox has been the web geek’s browser of choice, steadily growing its share of the market at Internet Explorer’s expense. Better customisability, a perceived superiority when it comes to web born viruses and the simple fact that it isn’t made by Microsoft have helped it gain a thoroughly respectable market share.
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Ever since he took the oath of office there’s been fevered speculation amongst the technology industry about what a Barack Obama presidency will mean for the tech sector and, in particular, for online and computer-based industries. Well, President Obama has made one of his first and boldest moves in this area with the appointment of Vivek Kundra as the federal government’s technology Czar.
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Amongst the readers of this blog I’ll wager that there are one or two people whose friends consider them computer experts, even geeks. If you come under this category then the chances are you get asked to fix desperate friends’ and relatives’ computers fairly regularly – fun isn’t it. Well, you’ll no doubt be delighted to hear that Symantec have developed an application to make it easier for you.
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A survey released yesterday has revealed some troubling statistics for companies, especially ones in the technology sector. It appears that, out of 950 recently laid off people asked, almost sixty percent admitted to taking confidential information with them when they left their employers. This information included client lists, contact lists and other information that presumably ended up in the hands o a competitor in that person’s next job.
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