Do people still run Internet Explorer 6 (IE6)?

You betcha!

Recently created a site for client and I kept hearing "What's up with the blocks in the navigation menu?"

Grey blocks? What block?

Turns out they were in IE6 mode.

Could I convince them to upgrade to IE7?

Sure I could have, but their point was that if they are using IE6, then others must be using it as well!!!

Good point

Tool for developers, especially the CSS types

Test out your website on various versions of Internet Explorer (and FireFox too!)

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

If your site is not rendering well in ver7, you'll have more fun in ver6 - have fun!

Today I seriously started my *new* voip provider search

I've had enough of not being able to get inbound calls for weeks and being disconnected during calls from my current provider. At one time, the service was better. (No names please)

Some people claim that the quality of calls has gotten better ...
"Why wouldn't it, when there is no-one using the network!!!" was the comment I heard one time.

3 companies came up on my radar.

My prime objectives being able to call forward, conference call and have reliable voice-mail.

It was interesting to find some companies offering with some really *cool* online account management features. On this point alone I almost signed up.

Why voip?

It's pretty sweet knowing your call is being routed many different ways on the Internet to get to your calling destination.

It's about new technology and being able to say "Yeah I was there when it was in it's infancy!"

Technology aside, cost wise, it just makes sense.

Why pay for extras like voicemail, caller ID, call forwarding and more when in most cases it's all included.

The search begins

Let's do it the traditional way and weed through the hype and in-coherency of web site navigation, I've got some serious questions here:

- Can you port a number over?
- How about additional virtual numbers in other cities?
- Can I get a toll-free number because business is booming?
- What are the start-up costs & am I locked in a contract?

To answer these questions I pick up the phone and start calling

Company A:
Ring ring, push button 1, push button 2, wait, push button 1 again, placed on hold ...
You made me push all these buttons to be placed on hold?
Why not just tell me you're busy right up-front and call me back?
Click

Company B:
Sorry I don't understand you ingleesh

Company C:
You advertise VoIP in your ads but you don't provide voip service, hehehe, you only install voip equipment I've never heard of and I still need to find a voip provider?
Can you at least recommend someone you have set up service with recently?
Click

Company D wins because I was able talk to someone who was able to answer all my questions within 5 minutes of the call. "Yes we can do this, no we can not offer that". Services were outlined, prices were quoted and technical knowledge was there.

Best of all, there was no real push to sign up and grab my Corona-Cash.

Did I sign up?

Not quite yet, waiting on a few options, but you sure can guess who I remembered and talked about today and who more likely will get my business and future referrals.


Answering incoming calls is important for any business.

It's funny how some companies wonder why their sales are not increasing when there's no one really there to answer the calls coming in.

Coddle your leads, they'll bring you more if you treat them right

All eBay affiliate peddlers out there, change your lucrative Commission Junction eBay affiliate links immediately! Less than 30 days to migrate over with a 5% bonus commission for the month of April 2008

SAN JOSE, Calif.,– March 17, 2008 – Today eBay unveiled the eBay Partner Network, a new global affiliate program for publishers driving traffic to eBay. Officially launching on April 1st, 2008, the eBay Partner Network will be eBay’s new in-house affiliate network, designed to more fully align the programs across eBay’s global properties and give affiliates expanded access to revenue opportunities across its platforms.
http://affiliates.ebay.com/ns/Launch.htm

Registration not until April Fools Day!

Starting from March 17 through April 1 2008, it will no longer be possible to register through Commission Junction. Please check back on April 1 for more information on how to register on the new eBay Partner Network.

With an organization this big, it's almost nice to see them go in-house.
For site publishers, this will be a task in itself converting links, RSS feeds, widgets and such.
I'm curious to know if they'll be offering a 2-tier system, PayPal payments and sign-up incentives.

Additional resources
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/17/AR2008031701007.html
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/03/ebay-drops-commission-junction.html

Absolutely nothing!

If your domain name is up for renewal (usually within 3-7 months), some domain name holders will receive an offical looking letter from the Domain Registry of Canada indicating that it is time to re-new the domain name .... at a higher rate!

The actual form looks quite official, with it's brown envelope and 'governmental' look and feel

By actually submitting your cheque or credit card information, you are actually transferring from your existing domain registrar to this company.

A few related links:

http://www.twistimage.com/blog/archives/domain-registry-of-canada-scam-with-direct-mail-and-online/

http://www.domainhelp.com/who_is_the_domain_registry_of_america_or_canada

The Web Host Industry review recently came out with their 1st annual "Hottest Hosts" publication back in January (wow - it's already March!!!) titled 'Web hosting and hosted services buyer's guide'.

Various categories including Small Business hosting, Unix/Linx, database, enterprise, ecommerce and more.

What I found surprising was some of the host providers I work with that are not mentioned or included in the publication. It's not like these companies do not have an advertising budget or thrift on PPC ad campaigns.

For small business hosting needs, there are always options and you do not have to work locally, as one client recently thought they had to do. Host providers throughout USA and Canada are abundant, quality of service and level of support will always vary.

A steal for small business hosting:

A new promotion that recently came up offers
a whopping 10GB of server space,
300GB of monthly transfer (bandwidth),
500 email accounts (ok, I'll set those up right away!)
and 10 MySQL database (very sufficient for most business needs).

Best of all, plans start from $3.65 to $4.29 a month - a no brainer for a simple 5-5000 page website!

View more about this Web Hosting Special here ...

What's exciting is determining which framework to mass produce in little time for your nifty new sites.

Released just yesterday, BluePrintCSS 0.7 Framework

Yes I do like Yahoo's YUI CSS Grids, although from 1st impressions, BluePrint is showing less overhead, fewer files and simple enough to work with.

Based on developer/designer reviews, BluePrint is worth experimenting with.

Nifty WordPress BlueprintCSS theme to preview ...

Would you really need over 120 social bookmarking sites to bookmark to?
Not really, but it's nice to know what is really 'out there'!

"... social bookmarking can introduce a site to the search engines, as in some cases, people may find and bookmark a site or a site’s internal pages before a search engine can find those pages via another form of inbound link ..."

From the search engine journal ...

Benefits? Deeper indexing, indexed faster (yes if everyone is bookmarking & tagging it), categorization ...

What tool to use for your blog or website?

I've tried many, some in PHP where you build the bookmark links yourself ... who's got time?

Here's a nice little javascript one (with stats too!) that you simply copy & paste
http://www.addthis.com/
no obligations either

Implementation

Here's a simple example of how these buttons can be integrated in to a website
Post your articles here ...
Notice the variations in button types on the category and article pages!

Recent article in the National Post

"Putting up a good, well-designed Web site is probably the most critical thing a small or medium-sized business can do .... Everyone goes online first to do their research, regardless of whether they buy online. If you are not present on the Web, you are making a huge mistake. We simply no longer live in a time where we can say, eh, who needs the Web?"

a few additional excerpts:

Train users to keep coming back That means keeping the site active by offering fresh content with valuable information and insights. The more often you add new information, the more that raises your ranking among search engines and the easier it is for people to find you. "One way to do this is to start a newsletter campaign,"

affiliate programs:

"There are other people out there who may be able to sell your product/service better than you can," Mr. Joel says. "Contact them and make them an affiliate. They get a commission for whatever they sell from their site and all of a sudden, you have a lot of sales agents out there doing business in the digital world for you."

Full story here ...

Social bookmarking has become a major/minor strategy for some SEO optimizers.

Why do I need another bookmarking tool?!?

I already have IE & FireFox collectible all these things for me, plus URLs saved who knows where.

Del.icio.us has been around for ages (in internet terms), why create another password and such.
Once you get your head around it, it becomes a simple and easy to use tool that you can simply post from you browser.
Best of all for anyone getting creative with RSS feeds, tags can be created for groups of site and distributed who knows where ... potential here
Example:
Here are a few SEO links I have (more to come). Notice the RSS icon where one can feed out the entries to blog postings and such

Recent announcement from Joomla CMS (Jan 22/08) for Joomla 1.5.

Excellent templates for the 1.x version, but not much for ver 1.5 ... yet!

We'll see what examples come up in the DP Forums for Joomla 1.5 templates

Quick search in Google comes up with FREE templates from the following site:
http://www.siteground.com/joomla-hosting/joomla-templates.htm

Yahoo rejects Microsofts $44M bid - Yahoooo!

Yahoo's board is considering the radical move of outsourcing the company's search advertising business to Google

On to YABS (Yet another bookmarking service)

What if you could bookmark all your websites and provide an RSS feed for others to view? Potential here.
What if you could also 'TAG' the site with keyword related to the content - promising as well.
Various online social bookmarking service out there (we'll get to that later as well)
How about Yahoo MyWeb 2.0
- Save your bookmarks in one place
- Share and tag your bookmarks for others to see
- SEO potential?

A recent review from PCMagazine here ...
Technorati Profile

Tip - place your sitemap.xml file in your robots.txt file

All search crawlers recognize robots.txt, so it seemed like a good idea to use that mechanism to allow webmasters to share their Sitemaps. You agreed and encouraged us to allow robots.txt discovery of Sitemaps on our suggestion board. We took the idea to Google and Microsoft and are happy to announce today that you can now find your sitemaps in a uniform way across all participating engines. To do this, simply add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Learn more ...
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000437.html/