With all the SEO talk lately I rarely see a post that gets back to the basics of web design and the old but true ways of making your site “sticky.” Almost all the talk is of how to get more traffic and many articles talk about content and how important content is to keeping your visitors on your site, they rarely focus on how to get them to come back. I mean if you are doing all that work to get them there in the first place to me it seems illogical not to mention ways to get them to come back. So I thought I would do something about it.
First part in this series: the favicon.
I am willing to bet you don’t have one. I hardly see any custom favicons except the stock ones that come with Internet Exploder or Firefox. Why do I bother with such a little thing? Well for starters name one professional website that doesn’t have its own custom favicon. Stumped huh? But I bet you never even think about this little thing and yet all the big sites have them. You want a professional site right? Then why doesn’t your “professional” site have one of these?
I won’t get into how to make them because it’s pretty easy and here are some links to do it.
So if that didn’t explain it then just click on that Google search. Also it’s really easy you just need to make an image file that is 16×16 and then draw your little logo. I made mine in about 30 minutes and you can see what it looks like by going to my Eau Claire Real Estate website here.
So now you have a favicon but you need a call to action! Huh?
Part 2….
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Ok. An article came out about this a couple days ago but I was waiting for my invite to come through and it just came through! The new program is called FairShare and it does a lot. Basically it lets you attribute your work and it’s pretty simple to use. First you need an invite. You can try to be one of the first 1000 beta testers and you can read the original article here. Sorry, I meant to get the word out to let more people in on this but I didn’t have much to say unless I could try it out. They might allow more than 1000 people too, it’s hard to say.
Ok, like I said this is about attribution of your work. You can learn more about licensing your work here. (I do want to say one thing first. I think all information should be shared freely. I don’t think anyone should be able to turn a profit off someone else’s work but in the digital age we need to find some middle ground. I am sick and tired of seeing people suing other people for so called copy infringement. They are some people who are preying on others who simply don’t know any better. I think it’s ok to ask someone not to copy your work and if they refuse, sure take some recourse. But this isn’t open hunting season either. There are photographers who are taking crappy pictures and basically waiting to pounce on the next person who uses them on the web. This is sick and wrong. Art is meant to be shared freely. The same goes with information.)
It’s up to you to decide what license you choose. I am sticking to my guns. If someone draws upon my ideas then they have created their own idea in my opinion.
Ok the plan was to show it in action but apparently it takes 12 hours to populate the list. Please stay tuned for part 2.
The other big reason why this thing is so great is you can track who is linking to your articles and who is publishing your content. It’s not always a bad thing for your content to be republished and it’s why I am giving my stuff away as long as they send me a link!
If you have been seeing interesting articles about the upcoming Windows 7 or if you haven’t ( I apologize because I haven’t covered it much) you might want to check it out. Anyways, I came across this article and it made me think a lot about media coverage and what an impact it can have. Basically the author writes that Windows 7 does look interesting but it may have been as simple as media coverage why Windows 7 seems so appealing while Vista got such a bad rap. As he points out after using Vista from the start, what the media covered and what was actually true were two very distinct things. I can attest to that as well.
I was one of the first early adopters of Vista. I installed it on 3 machines, 2 desktops and 1 laptop, the very first week it was officially released. Guess how many of those machines I have had to fix or reload windows in the past two years? (It was released January 30th, 2007) None. It was the first operating system I have ever installed on a computer that lasted this long. Usually after only a few months of having XP on a machine you were stuck reloading it and formatting your drive to fix all the bugs and get it up to speed again.
But how could that be true? Vista is full of bugs, everything I read says so!
Yup, everything you read probably did say that, and the majority were “testers” or people who didn’t use it for an everyday OS. Some people installed this on an older machine thinking it wouldn’t matter. Now some argue that an OS shouldn’t need a lot of resources to run, but how many software products release new software that doesn’t require faster system specs to run? Its rare. So expecting an OS to behave differently is hardly fair. Likewise installing Vista on a 5 year old Dell that is outdated by almost every standard and expecting all the bells and whistles is unfair.
The other big stink I always heard about Vista was drivers were hard to come by and that all your hardware would cease to be if you updated to Vista.
Well this was just completely untrue. Some manufacturers failed to have fully tested drivers in time for the release of Vista, but is this the fault of Microsoft? I don’t think so. And when I say some, how many manufacturers did this really happen to? I bet you cant even remember a single one. I installed it on 3 machines like I said and I never had an issue with any hardware. One of the machines was a 64 bit version and finding drivers for that used to be hard but I never had a problem even with that. Honestly for how many articles I saw repeating this same bad information, it really just wasn’t fair. I just saw the other day someone still worrying if they could update or not! Come on media get it right. Don’t say a problem is widespread or affects everyone or even hint that it does. It might make for good ratings but its really unfair.
Did you know that the wonderful XP that everyone praises so highly, upon release, was perhaps one of the most hated OS’s to ever come out? Every person I ran into back then told me what an idiot I was for installing XP. I got a free copy so I figured why not try it? Everyone told me it was unstable and I was stupid. “Wait until the first service pack comes out”, thats what everyone said! Compared to Windows 2000 and its famous stability maybe it was crazy switching. But for me it was night and day between the two. Installing was a breeze and it was so easy to get drivers working. Which is also one of the things so great about Vista. I have never had to manually install a driver, not once. Out of the box it is so much easier to install than XP its crazy to think back. You used to have to install a display or graphics driver even to see the desktop good when you first installed XP!!! Yet people say Windows 2000 was better than XP and XP is better than Vista. Maybe everyone should install Windows 2000 to get some perspective?
So windows 7 is coming sometime probably in fall of this year. Will I install it? Maybe. Price will be an issue. Plus my Vista is rather great. I still cant complain about it. It handles all new hardware really well and can handle every geeky gadget I plug into it. If I come across something that it doesn’t handle well maybe I will upgrade. But the tech geek in me really wants to try out the new Windows.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
If you haven’t heard we are in a recession. Is that news? I think you would probably have to be living in a hole not to know that. What should we know about the recession?
When did things change?
Knowing when something is happening is important. Being on top of every change is vital because the thing about change is that its always changing!
How does it affect the consumer?
With every major market shift people make changes. If their level of income drops off they are forced to adapt and spend less. This is just common sense. I came across this article about Wal-Mart and what they have seen. I am not going to pretend I like their business model, because I think it stinks, but they probably know a thing or two about consumers. But the thing about Wal-Mart is that they change the consumer and the consumer changes Wal-Mart. People are eating out less, ask any restaurant. Roll with the punches, right?
What have you done to adapt?
The million dollar question. If you haven’t made significant changes in the way you do business then I bet the biggest change that has happened to you is that you are out of business. Personally I have cut out every single expense I have in my business other than my $4.99 per month hosting fee for my website. Every other aspect of my business I do for free and I do it myself. I don’t think I have any more “free” time than I did earlier in the year but I don’t need any unnecessary expenses either. Now is not the time to be cutting into your advertising budget but there has to be areas where you can trim the fat. If you don’t get lean and mean you are going to be eaten by the wolves. Trust me, someone else in your area of business is getting hungry.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
I just came across an article and thought it might have an impact on you or your business. Apparently “Office Depot Inc. will close about 9 percent of its North American stores and cut 2,200 jobs over the next three months while planning to open fewer locations next year in an effort to cut costs.”
It certainly doesn’t look good for the company in general. I think they are trying to head off bankruptcy but I don’t know if it will help. I am sure there is stiff competition with Staples and Officemax. I just wonder about the relative stability of the company if it only took a small decline in sales to potentially drive it out of business. Why are so many companies on the financial “edge” so to speak? It seems crazy to me the pace at which these companies try to grow and yet its all based on potential growth and sales rather than paying off what you owe and then growing.
I know they closed the store in my town but to me it seemed inevitable. Officemax had built one across the street and Officedepot came a few months later. Why pit each other head to head like that? Doesn’t one have to fail?
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
I remember a few years ago hearing about this and it interested me a lot. I love literature. When I was in college my Major was English Literature and I Minored in Creative Writing. Everyone always asked “and you’re in real estate??!!” I sure am! And the skills I learned pay off each and every day.
Well now Google Books should be coming soon. The basic premise is to put out of print or hard to find books online. It will act as a way of preserving them and offer otherwise unattainable access. There has been a huge trend to put everything in print online. I for one cant wait. I don’t like reading e-books but I know a lot of people do. I guess I am old fashioned and like them in my hand!
By John Timmer | Published: October 28, 2008 – 10:47AM CT
Google’s long-running legal battle with the US publishing industry came to an unexpected screeching halt this morning, as the parties announced a settlement that, pending approval by a US District Court, will see the two sides cooperate on online access to copyrighted books. The settlement contains a number of provisions that clarify how libraries can access works that remain within the copyright period, and will see the formation of a group dedicated to identifying current copyright holders. But the most striking aspect of the agreement is that it turns Google into a bookseller, peddling online access to out-of-print, but still-in-copyright works.
The copyright holders’ lawsuit targeted Google Books for its use of material from copyrighted works. At the time of the settlement, they were represented by The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, while Google consulted many of the university libraries it is cooperating with when crafting the agreement. Not surprisingly, then, the settlement seems to have something for nearly everyone.
The agreement doesn’t cover books that are currently in print and therefore making money for publishers. Those books can still be marketed through the book search via Google’s Partners program. Books that have had their copyrights expire are likewise unaffected. What it does cover is what Google’s Chief Legal Counsel, David Drummond, calls “the vast majority of books in existence”: those that are in copyright, but out-of-print.
For those books, the agreement will see libraries in the US get free and unfettered access to the entire contents of the book. Large organizations, such as university libraries, can get access to the full collection by paying a subscription fee. Perhaps the most striking feature of the program, however, is that individual users can pay a fee to get online access to individual books that are no longer in print. Not only is this a boon for book lovers, who can now get access to books that might be otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain, it appears to have the potential to turn Google into a major book retailer.
The publishers are clearly not coming away empty-handed. Revenue from sales of books that they aren’t even printing—books the publishers did their best to ensure weren’t digitized in the first place—will now start flowing into their balance sheets. But the agreement goes beyond that; Google will pay $125 million to establish a Book Rights Registry which will try to determine who owns the copyright to out-of-print books so that they can be paid for any sales. As publishers have merged, gone out of business, and sold off properties over the years, this ownership may be pretty obscure, so the new Registry may play an essential function in ensuring that the right party cashes the checks.
All the parties, while mentioning their own vested interests that were served by the agreement, rightly tipped a hat to the big winners: readers, who might otherwise not be able to access some of this material. Roy Blount, head of the Authors Guild, stated, “As a reader and researcher, I’ll be delighted to stop by my local library to browse the stacks of some of the world’s great libraries.” Sergey Brin of Google concurred: “While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers.
Details are a bit sparse on some implementation aspects right now, but it’s hard to find fault with the spirit of the agreement. The primary limit from a reader’s perspective may be fact that Google’s book viewing interface can be a bit clunky and leaves a reader tethered to a computer. The alternative is for Google to negotiate some sort of DRM scheme for their scans, but that would appear to go against the company’s principles.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
If you have been following my blog at all I have been keeping up with many of the new developments regarding the upcoming Mac Books. I had previously reported some of the rumors regarding the designs etc.
The buildup to a new Apple product release is usually accompanied by anxious anticipation from the Mac community along with continuous speculations from news outlets around the world. Over the past few years, actual product leaks leading up to an Apple product launch of have been few and far between. This changed somewhat with lead up to the iPod nano 4G and iPod touch 2G.
As I have previously said I am not a fan of Mac’s. I think they are way overpriced for what they do. An equivalent priced PC will smoke a Mac and thats a fact Jack!
By Nate Anderson | Published: October 08, 2008 – 05:15AM CT
E-mail spam is bad, but phone spam is worse—and it used to be downright awful. How many of us in the US remember the incessant telemarketing calls that made picking up the phone a dicey proposition, back in the dark days before the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call list largely put an end to the practice of commercial telemarketing? But that action—arguably the most popular government decision of the decade—didn’t put a total end to the problem, and that’s where CallerComplaints.com comes to the rescue.
The site launched earlier this year and has seen phenomenal, organic growth of 15-20 percent a month. 350,000 unique visitors a month now drop by to file complaints about phone calls and to figure out what company is behind them. Caller Complaints just picked up the FTC’s internal Do Not Call complaints database as well, merging those three million complaints with its own user-generated complaints to create a massive, searchable database of phone numbers.
User complaints are fairly typical. “Just like everyone else, it starts out with $1,000,000 loan offer,” says one. “They hang up when you ask questions or ask to be taken off their list. Has called my business 12 straight days. Shows up as different numbers, but all with the same message. Now I push #1, wait to talk to a person and then say ‘F–k You’ repeatedly until they hang up. Nothing else to do but get down and dirty.”
It really can be frustrating. I know. Unfortunately people in my business must be public. I have to publish my phone number, email, website etc. there is no end to the spam that I receive and the number of calls I get a day. It is astonishing. But at least this website might offer some hope and some help.
I was originally intending to write a post about the new release but there is a bit of a snag. It seems the release has become so overwhelmingly popular that their website keeps crashing. I am unable to download a copy and unable to find an official press release for the software. I have been testing different release candidates and I can say that you are safe installing Microsoft Office for good. I have no intention of ever installing that software again.
The OpenOffice.org servers have crashed, apparently under the weight of demand for the latest version of the open-source office productivity suite.
OpenOffice 3.0 was uploaded to the organisation’s servers at 10am BST on Monday. According to OpenOffice.org’s marketing lead, John McCreesh, “the servers seem to have collapsed under the load” of download requests.
McCreesh pointed out that the “vast majority” of downloads of the suite take place through local mirrors, but said “the fact that our central site can’t even run the bouncer [to divert requests to those local mirrors] must mean it’s… our biggest-ever download”.
“We’ve never had this kind of outage before,” McCreesh added. At the time of writing (mid-afternoon Monday), the servers were still not back up.
OpenOffice 3.0 is a significant update to the suite, which includes free, community-led alternatives to Microsoft Office products such as Word and Excel. The new version includes native Mac OS X support for the first time, and is also the first iteration of OpenOffice to be able to read the .docx Office Open XML (OOXML) documents that are created in Office 2007. OOXML is the chief rival to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) specification that has been used in OpenOffice for some time.
As you can see the biggest news is that it is Mac compatible and Office 2007 compatible! So you can use this on any platform. It was funny seeing the server crash because the first article I read today warned of the crash and was wondering why they would host the software themselves. I guess hindsight is 20/20.
Then scroll down to the comments to see the early speculation. It is no wonder because many people in the industry have been patiently waiting this release for years. It is the first time that I am aware of that a free product could truly replace Microsoft Office and not only replace, be better. It took me 30 seconds to switch from using Word to Writer. Give it a try, I promise you wont be sorry!
