Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

5 Signs Your Web Provider May Not Care About Your Business

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

In our age of digital opportunities there are a wide array of choices when it comes to not only information, but businesses we can work with. Due to the ease of setting up an online business, the doors have been swung open not only for entrepreneurs with good intentions who really do want to provide the best products and services that they can, but those who are out to score a quick buck with little regard for their customers. It is crucial that you be able to determine the difference between fly by night companies and those that have been established to provide the best quality hosting they can.

Here are five quick signs you can check for when you want to find a web host solution that’s worth your time, effort and the money you have put into your website:

5) Sluggish Communications – This can be one of the most frustrating aspects of a poor web host. The fact is, when you run a website, you need quality customer interaction in a short amount of time. Waiting a few hours or even a day for a response from a particularly large web hosting firm might make sense during certain parts of the year, but if you find that all of your emails end up coming back to only after several days of waiting? Then it is time to move on. As a webmaster, you deserve tech support, customer care and billing help that is rapid. There is no excuse for hosts that need to take up days of your life waiting for solutions. An automated receipt of your email is not real help so don’t be fooled into thinking that the “We have received your email and are looking into your problem” replies are anything other than a machine generated response.

4) Offering Discounts Only for First Time Customers – Any business worth its salt knows that long term, loyal customers are the heart of their business enterprise. This is especially true in the website hosting industry. The true professionals realize that their competition is only a click away and that when you want to leave them, all you have to do is sign up for one of their many competitors. If your web host only offers discounts to get people to sign up and then never rewards them with financial incentives to stay on board? Once again, it is time to take your business elsewhere. After being with any host for a year or more, you should receive at least a nominal discount that is proof the company appreciates your business. If you can’t find information on their site, why not send them an email asking if they offer discounts for long time customers? It never hurts to ask!

3) A Lack of Easy to Follow Online Help – Many webmasters prefer to at least try things on their own before they engage technical support. If you want to be able to set up your site with new software packages, particularly those that are industry standards, then you ought to be able to get custom help documents online in the form of guides or FAQs. Your web host wants your business, normally, so they should provide you with the help you need to get the most from the service they provide. They know that when you succeed with your website, you will be pleased with their performance. If they don’t offer you plenty of self help opportunities then you definitely need to find a host that is willing to put in the work to get these created for its user base.

2) Careless Billing Practices – Mistakes are bound to happen from time to time in any business. A small overcharge is not generally something nefarious and even double billing errors happen from time to time. However, if you continually get billing mistakes or wind up being charged huge amounts of money in bandwidth fees after having no warning from your web host? You guessed it! This is a sign your web host wants to gather the gold at all cost and isn’t concerned about driving you into debt through their efforts to maximize their own profits. You definitely need to jump ship and find a new host – quickly.

1) An Online Reputation in Shambles – This is the number one sign that your web hosting service doesn’t care about your business and it’s also the easiest thing to check before you ever sign up with a company. Do a quick search over the most popular search engines for the company’s name. If you find forum post after forum post, blogs posts and even tweets about the company doing bad business then stay away! A company that doesn’t research its own reputation online or does nothing to satisfy infuriated customers who take the time to complain about it in forums across the web is definitely a company you want to run from just as quickly as you can. Don’t be lured into thinking that you will be the exception to the rule because chances are good you’ll be joining those folks in outrage if you sign up for a company that cultivates an image of apathy.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share and Enjoy:

Posted in Business, Insider View | No Comments »

Create a Template for Joomla 1.5 – Getting Started

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Those who have looked over a Joomla 1.5 review likely already realize that this is quite a well established script for the making of websites with plenty of capabilities. While you can use the community builder Joomla 1.5 to create a membership site, a lot of times all we want is our own template over the basic installation. For those expanding the program with a Joomla 1.5 phpbb3 combination then having your own template can help you make your site flow together visually in a far more appealing way.

The basics of theme creation of Joomla are far more about graphic design and CSS experience than any sort of Joomla specific knowledge. There are Joomla 1.5 YouTube tutorials, but that is a bit of overkill when the proces is not that complex. Whether you’re working in English or Joomla 1.5 Spanish translation, it all functions the same way. Let’s check it out:

First off, head to your Joomla installation directory on your server and find the ‘templates’ directory. Inside there, create a ‘themetutorial’ sub directory. We’ll be using this to test out your knowledge and store what you’ve made with this tutorial.

Next, you’ve got to create some files. I use Notepad2 for this as it highlights both html and php in different color coding for easy and does not do troublesome word-wrapping the way the original Notepad does. In your ‘themetutorial’ directory create files named templateDetails.xml and index.php, as well as a folder named css in which you will create the template.css file. You don’t need to worry what’s in these files yet, you simply need their names and to have them in the right locations.

The index.php is the primary component of your template that organizes the positions of your module and gives the path to your stylesheet (CSS) file, or template.css as we named it earlier. The templateDetails.xml file is what will inform the Joomla script of what it needs to know about your template.

Now that this part is done, login to Joomla as admin and switch to your newly created theme. Don’t worry about whether or not it works at the moment because we will fix that soon. Go back to your index.php file on your server and let’s put this bit of code at the top:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”<?php echo $this->language; ?>” lang=”<?php echo $this->language; ?>” >
<head>
<jdoc:include type=”head” />
</head>

Then, the ‘body’ of index.php:

<body>

<jdoc:include type=”component” />

</body>
</html>

Save index.php and log out, then go to check your site after you have ensured that your ‘themetutorial’ template is the one currently used by the site. Since we’ve not changed much so far, you should see a painfully plain version of your site at this point which is functional, but incredibly basic. What you see now is what your site looks like with no stylings or mods, only articles.

Now, go back and open index.php again, placing this code between the <body> and </body> tags:

This piece of code in our example above:

<jdoc:include type=”modules” name=”left” />

Is designed to tell Joomla to put the modules published in the left position. We’ve just put in left, right, header and footer (top and bottom) positions to your template. That “container” bit in the code we just inserted lets us set these basic dimensions for your template.

Of course, you will want to go far beyond this, but this is how you get started on making your own Joomla 1.5 theme. At this point, you will likely want to log back into Admin and set the ‘themetutorial’ theme back off until you are ready to do more work, but now you have a very solid understanding of way in which a Joomla theme is created.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share and Enjoy:

Tags: community builder joomla 1.5, joomla 1.5 phpbb3, joomla 1.5 review, joomla 1.5 spanish, joomla 1.5 youtube
Posted in Business | No Comments »

Need to Limit PHPlist Outgoing Emails? Here’s How to Do It

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Have you been looking for a way to build a newsletter or other email marketing campaign, but you want to stay within the rules so that you don’t get flagged as a spammer? This is very intelligent thinking and you will find that there are a lot of reasons why the PHPlist alternative works for many people who want to communicate with a large base of customers by email. As large as your email base may get, you don’t want to offend folks by overdoing things and that’s why an important PHPlist attribute ends up being the ability to throttle (or limit) your email sending so that you don’t get yourself banned either from your webhost or anyone else on the internet in this day and age when many are so quick to call an email marketer a spammer.

If other emailing scripts have given you grief, why not let PHPlist import your existing customers and handle the work for you? The wide variety of options you have with the PHPlist attributes available to you are going to allow you a much finer level of control than you will find with other scripts and that is safe for you, plus it’s less obnoxious for your web host and customers, too. Always check with your host for their rules on mass emails to make sure you never violate any rules.

Let’s take a look at how you can limit the rate of speed at which your emails are sent out.

First, find this block of code within the config.php file of your PHPlist installation, using a text editor such as Notepad2:

# batch processing
# if you are on a shared host, it will probably be appreciated if you don’t send
# out loads of emails in one go. To do this, you can configure batch processing.
# Please note, the following two values can be overridden by your ISP by using
# a server wide configuration. So if you notice these values to be different
# in reality, that may be the case

# define the amount of emails you want to send per period. If 0, batch processing
# is disabled and messages are sent out as fast as possible
define(”MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,0);

# define the length of one batch processing period, in seconds (3600 is an hour)
define(”MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,3600);

# to avoid overloading the server that sends your email, you can add a little delay
# between messages that will spread the load of sending
# you will need to find a good value for your own server
# value is in seconds (or you can play with the autothrottle below)
define(’MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’,0);

Here you can see how easy it is to set up your limitations. All you need to do is consider what a respectful size of your MAILQUEUE BATCH SIZE might be and change that zero to a number such as 100 or even 500. Again, your web hosting provider will have solid advice for you in this regard so always ask them first.

When you define MAILQUEUE BATCH PERIOD, keep in mind that this is in seconds. The default is 3,600 seconds (ie, an hour) so that means one batch will get sent out each hour until all batches have been sent. Your batch size was configured in the section we just covered.

Finally, MAILQUEUE THROTTLE should be set to a number above zero. If you put 20 in this section, it means emails will be sent out at 20 second intervals. Check with your host and remember, the reason why you are trying to remain respectful is that you do not want to bog down the server for other people’s accounts that might be on the same server as you are.

This is all you need to do to get PHPlist to work for you at the rate you desire!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share and Enjoy:

Tags: phplist alternative, phplist attribute, phplist attributes, phplist import
Posted in Business, Insider View | No Comments »

The Easy Way to Install Support Services Manager

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Nearly all business websites these days have some form of support system set up to serve their customers better. Those that have not yet begun to offer support services with their products are definitely going to need to step out of the Dark Ages of the web and into this new era of extremely high customer service expectations. Since those who do business expect to have access to help nearly 24 hours a day, it is a sound business strategy to consider what a script such as Support Services Manager can offer your company. Whether you operate as an ecommerce site offering products or a service oriented business where customers might need technical support, your business can definitely please its customers better with the right kind of service level.

In today’s digital economy, meeting customer expectations is extremely important because with so many other choices out there, you need to give them a very solid reason to choose your site over all of the others available to them with a single click. If Google thinks this way, it seems that the strategy might be a wise one considering how far it’s brought that corporate juggernaut so far. When you install a script like Support Service Manager, you really are upgrading your business site and that’s going to give you sales and customer retention results you will be thrilled with. Once you find out how easy it is to install this online service solution, you won’t want to waste any time getting it onto your server.

First off, while you can install the Support Services Manager script without it, Fantastico makes the whole process much easier. These instructions are going to show you how to get the script up and running this way because it is the method most users prefer. That means you will want to log into your web hosting account, go into Fantastico and select Support Services Manager from the list along the left hand side. The script is normally in the Customer Relationship category.

After this, simply click the New Installation link and choose which of your domains you would like to install the Support Services Manager script. Below this, you will see a box asking you to type in a directory. You have two options here. You can either put the script in its own directory or you can leave it blank to have the script placed in your root directory. There is no difference in script performance no matter which way you choose, but some people prefer to have things organized a certain way so they may prefer to have the script in a specific directory they have already established through cpanel or their ftp client.

Next, your user name and password need to be input. Many people choose ‘admin’ as their user name, but you should be aware that your level of security will be stronger if you choose something harder for a potential intruder to guess. Under the Base Configuration you will input your site name which can be it’s dot com address or the name of the site itself, such as “Green Flower Shop”.

Finally, click Install Support Services Manager and you are good to go! After a brief configuration process that allows you to specify how you want to script to run, you will have your very own customer service tool running live on your site

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share and Enjoy:

Tags: support service manager, support services manager, support services with
Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Installing PhpWiki is Incredibly Simple

Friday, February 26th, 2010

One of the major battles that any site faces if it wishes to really become a truly relevant part of the web today is the struggle to gain visitor participation. This is a very core part of earning the loyalty of repeat visitors. It is no longer enough to simply slap a site online and wait for visitors, if you are serious about having a site with lasting importance, you need users who actively engage with the content of your site. When you install PhpWiki this is precisely what happens because the wiki (What I Know Is) format is a call to action in and of itself. It is so simple to take PhpWiki to the public, if you organize your site around a specific topic or theme, and let them add whatever they would like. This helps you build up content for your web site and that content, in turn, is a draw for the search engine spiders. The search engines send plenty of traffic to those sites that really do offer solid content and that is what a wiki is all about.

In this stage of the web’s development, the expectations that surfers have are beginning to shift more rapidly than ever before. Gone are the days when any website would do, the novelty is long gone. If you check out the phpwiki demo, you are going to see the utility of this script because it allows you to actually get a sense of what the software offers to visitors to any site. The nice thing about a wiki is that it can be run as a site itself, but it can also be integrated into a wide variety of site styles that could be further enhanced by this level of user participation. The PhpWiki download alone, once installed, can change the nature of a site’s visitors. A site that might otherwise be a quick read or a hit and run can be transformed into a thriving community of passionate users who all share their knowledge on a subject in order to get a better understanding of that topic.

The nice thing about PhpWiki is that you don’t have to be a pro at web work in order to get it installed easily onto your site. In the old days, the installation would have been done manually, but now with the advent of Fantastico, the process flies right by. All you need to do is use these steps to set the script up:

First off, log into your web host under your account and head to Fantastico which is going to do the bulk of the work for you. Once inside Fantastico, simply look to the left hand side at the column of scripts you can install and there should be a heading for Wiki. Beneath this, you will see PhpWiki as one of your options so go ahead and click that to be taken to a page that gives a brief description.

Here, you will click on New Installation in order to be taken to a new page with a drop down box. You will select the domain you want PhpWiki installed on here and then be asked to fill in a directory of your choice. If you want PhpWiki running as the only script on your page (ie, you want a site that is only a wiki) just leave the box blank. That way when your domain loads, it will only load the wiki. If you prefer to have PhpWiki as only part of your site, then enter a directory name and you will load PhpWiki like this:

http://www.YourDomainName.com/PhpWikiDirectory

Finally, enter a user name and password you will use to access your wiki and then an email address. Hit Finish Installation and that’s all there is to it!

Now, all you need to do is configure PhpWiki to perform the way you want it to and you’ve got a real wiki on your site at last.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share and Enjoy:

Tags: install phpwiki, phpwiki demo, phpwiki download, phpwiki to
Posted in Business | No Comments »

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

5 Signs Your Web Provider May Not Care About Your Business

Create a Template for Joomla 1.5 – Getting Started

Need to Limit PHPlist Outgoing Emails? Here’s How to Do It

The Easy Way to Install Support Services Manager

Installing PhpWiki is Incredibly Simple

Subscribe

Most Popular Post

Recent Posts

Links

Archives

Themes