Filed under: Business, Design, Open Source, Search

No more excuses: let’s get your small business Website whipped into shape. People who are moderately online use the Web as their first search source. Phone books are dead trees; if your business isn’t on the web with an easy-to-find phone number, I’m clicking elsewhere. People spend money in browser-based shopping sprees and your Web site has to compete.

Let’s whip your site into shape. We’ve already discussed how you can grade your own site; offered tips for upgrading your site; and suggested ways to increase your search-engine ranking. Let’s take the next step and whip your small business Website into first-class shape.

What do your site visitors want most of all from your site?

LET ME SEARCH!
I want a search box, plain and visible, preferably at the top of every page but definitely at the top of the homepage. If you don’t have a site search, you can get a great free search tool in phpDig but you’ll probably have to pay someone to make it work. It’s worth your money. Put it at the top of your list.

TALK TO ME!
Company contact information belongs on each page, preferably in the footer. The footer area should also tell me a mailing address, a fax number and not merely supply a link to a contact page. Think: single-clicking! One click to get where you most want to go should be a navigation goal.

HELP ME!
You can add online help to your site through volusion’s Live Chat (free edition) or through the Open Source PHP Lively at Sourceforge (the holy grail of Open Source apps to try). Of course, you’ve to make an employee available to respond, even if only a few visitors click the icon. Surely, someone sits at a desk during the day. Think how important they’ll feel!

FEED ME!
I want to know what your company is up to and what new products you’ve that’ll benefit me. Send out an RSS feed of new information or products. The nitty-gritty of RSS is here and if you’re not into coding, try one of several free Open Source apps to generate RSS from your Web site.

Pheeder claims to be easy to implement and has loads of documentation. RSS Genesis works on any type of server and is PHP4/5 compatible and RSS Feed Creator claims simply to generate RSS feed.

While you’re at it, how about offering RSS feeds for companion products that might interest me? There are some free RSS services that enable adding feeds to your site relatively easy and, of course, FeedRoll.

While you’re RSS’ing, you can create a feed of any Web page that interests you. Feedity is a free service that’ll create a feed for any page and alert you to changes or updates to any site’s page. Keep on eye on the competition or sites of businesses that impact what you sell through easy RSS reading.

WHOLE PACKAGE ME!
Robert Scoble, an on the web evangelist, lists his ideal practices for your business cards. Why not incorporate these ideas into your small business Web site?

1. Begin the conversation - make your site engage the visitor.
2. Make it a standard size and shape but be different - that’s why you need a Web development firm with creative builds in their portfolio.
3. Make sure the basics are easy to find.
4. Tell us what you do. Unless your business is globally recognized, we need to see what you’re selling in clear language on the home page.
5. Break some rules but stay on the good side of obnoxious.
6. Highlight your corporate tag line. Don’t have one yet? Get one.
7. Use language options if appropriate.

Use the rest of 2008 to build a plan for your small business Web site to move toward as many best practices as possible. A site re-design isn’t free and is also not a silver bullet that’ll increase sales dramatically in the first week. You still have to market your Web site. Stay tuned.

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Filed under: Business, Windows, Productivity, Microsoft, Commercial, Freeware

Ever created a PowerPoint that everyone in your organization wanted a copy of? Sure you could go ahead and clog up your corporate email server with the 200MB + file or you could just convert your PowerPoint to a smaller flash file with iSpring and publish it to an internal or external website (slideboom account required) for others to view.

Converting your PowerPoint presentation to a flash motion picture couldn’t be any easier as the iSpring installation puts the conversion buttons right in your PowerPoint menu bar. In addition to the one click conversion iSpring also grants for some customization such as generating HTML codes, looped and automatic playback, slide advance via mouse click as well as changing the duration of the slide.

iSpring comes in 3 flavors ranging from the free version which we tested on up to the Ultra version which allows the creation of E-learning content to additional playback controls. In our testing we found the free version more than sufficient for most PowerPoint presentations.

So before you send that PowerPoint thru your company email, try converting it with iSpring instead.

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Filed under: Business, News, Windows, Microsoft

Windows 7 can’t come fast enough! The New York Times is reporting that Intel has decided against upgrading its 80,000 employees to Windows Vista. An Intel spokesperson told the Times that Vista is being tested and deployed in certain departments, but not company-wide.

Although the enterprise push to upgrade to Vista has fallen short of expectations, this is a particularly brutal blow. Intel is one of Microsoft’s oldest and most important partners; both companies became industry leaders in huge part because of that partnership.

Even though the Times’ Intel source made efforts to say that the decision wasn’t about “dissing Microsoft,” we doubt that’ll make Steve Ballmer feel any better. Can you envision what that conversation is going to sound like?

Despite the lack of widespread corporate adoption, the install base for Windows Vista is 140 million worldwide — hardly peanuts. Still, with huge corporations declining to upgrade their systems, Microsoft has had to extend support for Windows XP through 2014.

Thanks Mike!

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Filed under: Business, World wide web, Utilities

meOwns is a site designed to grant you to showcase the stuff you own. You can list items that you actually own, or items that you would like to own on the site and add photos to those lists so people can see what you’re talking about. The lists you create on meOwns can then be put into a widget that you can embed on your website or MySpace profile, or you can add a Facebook widget to display your items for your Facebook friends.

According to the site, the idea is is to bring people together through “the one thing that connects us all - the yearn to own!” While we’re not so sure any normal person anyone would want to upload all the stuff they own to the site, the site could have some use in getting rid of the stuff you already own and don’t want anymore. The widget could be an easy way to showcase your old movies, CDs, computer monitors, clothing, etc. for your friends, and mention things that they might own you’d be interested in taking off their hands in exchange.

One large downside is that right now the site requires you to upload pics from your computer for each item you add. It would be nice to see them add automatic photos for things like DVDs and CDs that are going to always look the same so you don’t have to upload a new picture for each individual item which gets annoying pretty quickly particularly if you have that crazy “yearn to own” they were talking about.

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Video

Netflix users are in an uproar, and rightfully so.

If you’re not familiar with what Netflix is, then sorry…please move along.

Kidding…you can rent movies on the web, and you can create a queue of what you want to see, and they’ll mail them to your home as they’re available. It’s like an autopilot feature and it frakkin rocks.

A few months ago the company put out an even cooler feature that let Netflix account holders create multiple queues under one account. So basically your baby daughter, mom, uncle Steve, and your parrot Whiskers could have their own queue of movies that they want to see.

Such a time saver, such a great function that really reminds you why you use and love (and pay for) Netflix.

Don’t go and try to sign up just for that feature though, because Netflix just announced that they’re taking it away.

Continue reading We think we just saw Ashton Kutcher, cuz you just got Netflix’d!

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Filed under: Business, World wide web, Security

We’re talking part one, the one with the hot version of Jennifer Love Hewitt. And oh yeah, that’s who you were downloading last week, and we know alllllll about it.

A recent study by Cyber-Ark, who asked 300 IT Professionals about the topic of System Admins checking out what you’re doing on the internet at work, states that 1 in 3 IT professionals snoop on their co-workers surfing habits and stats.

I mean why not, right…all the info is right there! They’re just “protecting the company from harmful usage”.

Sheah, right.

IT Professionals download more pr0n than the entire say of Texas.

Even scarier? 47% of those surveyed said that they accessed info about you that had nothing to do with their job.

No wonder most SysAdmins have the password g0d. Oy!

What might be even worse, is that the other 2 in 3 surveyed lied out of fear that someone was snooping on them while they were taking the survey, thus uncovering the fact that they snoop on us. OMS our heads injured!

SysAdmins, do you snoop? Worker folk, are you snooped upon?

You can hiphopanonymously write a comment here and let us know about it.

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Filed under: Business, Finance, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, the concepts are pretty much the same. You follow someone with interests that intrigues you, see what their doing, what their saying and sometimes you do what they say. Now what if they told you where to spend your money, would you? Covestor thinks so.

Covestor takes the social networking formula and applies it to the stock market in a 2 part system. The first requires members with some sort of investment background (we’ll call them experts) to build portfolios. The second has average users reviewing these members and if they like what they see, they follow them.

If these experts buy or sell a certain stocks, users get to see that and select if they would like to buy or sell along side their experts. Covestor is currently working on a fully automated system as well. You’ll just be able to put down a bunch of cash and the system will invest your money as your experts invest. Of course as an expert you get a percentage of the action, since people are following your advise.

So is this the next step in social networking? We already take advice on what to wear, where to go and what to eat. Why not take it a step further with having strangers tell you what to do with your money?

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Filed under: Business, World wide web, Web services, Social Software

A few years ago a ton of sites started popping up for you to review local businesses and services in your area. The idea behind the sites such as JudysBook was that reviews were written by average everyday people like you, therefore they could be trusted more than a review you read on another site. Sites granted you to create a profile, upload a picture, and invite all your friends to join as well so you can share information.

GigPark works under the same principal, except the company assumes to some extent that the people you’re friends with on the site are your actual friends, not just people who happened to find you on the site. You can import addresses from your yahoo, hotmail, or gmail account onto the site to find people you know who are already using the service, and invite those who are not.

GigPark also has a Facebook application, so you could pose questions like “Who know a great eye doctor” on facebook and solicit responses from your friends directly on Facebook. Of course your friends would also have to add the application in order for all this magic to happen, which given the multitude of annoying facebook applications kicking around these days, is probably unlikely. You can make your suggestions public however, so even without adding the application your friends can read how excited you’re about your new plumber.

What do you consider sites like this? Would you use it to solicit suggestions, or would you rather just call a friend and ask?

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Filed under: Business, World wide web, Blogging, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Today, OneSpot has formally announced the commerical availability of its OneSpot publishing-as-a-service[TM] platform. This subscription service grants publishers and businesses to deliver relevant content from across the internet to a targeted audience. Think of OneSpot as a white-label Techmeme, Sphere Netvibes and Digg solution.

For instance, if you publish a site about social media, OneSpot will provide related content from relevant sources that you can feature alongside your original content, in sidebars, headline widgets, RSS feeds and more, giving full credit to the original author and source. Thus, instead of having to populate an entire site with news stories and haphazzard links, you can focus on creating quality original content, while still linking to the biggest stories in your particular area.

OneSpot tracks over 200,000 web feeds to find content in a specific area; these feeds are from trusted sources and the user has full control over which stories are featured, approved or blocked. How content is displayed and how frequently it is published is all determined by the user. The net result is something similar to the New York Times BlogRunner service, with the additional capability to have a branded “Meme” tracker and the ability to enable user-voting a la Digg or Reddit.

We think that OneSpot is an interesting approach to content aggregation and syndication. Looking at their site, the way related articles are collected and aggregated appears both efficient and timely — a problem with many related-content engines is that the sources are sometimes old or out of date.

For businesses or publishers looking to add extra value to their sites, OneSpot might be a viable solution.

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Need to keep track of the time you’re spending on a project, but don’t feel like keeping a web browser window open all day just to use an on the internet stopwatch time tracking app? Last year we discovered Toggl, an on the web tool that makes it easy to track the time you’re spending on various projects, which makes it simple to figure out how many hours to bill to which project or boss. And this day when we were looking for a good desktop tool that does the same thing, we noticed that Toggle had released a public beta of a desktop time tracker for Windows.

Toggle Desktop is tightly integrated with Toggl’s on the web service. On the one hand that means you can’t use the desktop application if you haven’t signed up for a free account on the internet. On the other hand, it means you can easily choose from a list of tasks that you’ve already set up. And you can access your reports from any personal with a web browser. You can also use Toggl Desktop on multiple personal, safe in the knowledge that all of your hours will be logged and stored on the web.

The desktop program will begin counting your time as soon as you hit a task. Just click the huge red button to pause a task, or if you need to switch gears and work on something else, you can always hit another task. If you accidentally log a few seconds or hours that you didn’t actually work, you can always edit or delete a task from the Toggl Desktop interface.

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