Internet
Mobile-Friendly Website
In our series Promoting your business online, we have talked about building a website and website structure. We as well posted a general article about online marketing and hope each of those articles were helpful. Today we want to inform you about a very important change from Google. We are sure you are well aware that Google is the most used search engine today. It is therefore important to get your website listed via Google and to make sure you are building your site based on the latest Google standards. To help users to get the best possible search experience Google had changed their search engine over the years many times. Certain standards are required to secure that your website is in good standing with Google and it is advisable to check them out if you are going to build a website.
One of the latest and very important changes is related to the increasing use of mobile devices. In the last couple years users have changed their behaviour when searching for information. Many are suing their mobile phones instead of their desktop computer to look up information. With this in mind Google has announced to change their algorithm in a way that would benefit those website that are mobile friendly compare to those that aren’t.
What does that mean for you?
Based on the information we have, mobile friendly websites will benefit from this change, if users are searching via mobile devices. Apparently the desktop search is not effected. However we have noticed a significant traffic increase to one of our websites in the last couple weeks. It is of course possible that this increase is due to the fact that Google is testing their system. We also would like to mention that we have not noticed the same change on other websites we maintain.
How to check if your site is mobile friendly?
It is very easy to check if your website is mobile friendly. Google is providing a tool to check your site for free. If you want to try it just follow this link:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
What to do to get a mobile friendly website?
If you are working with a professional website developer we are confident you will be in good hands. Especially if your website was build in the last couple months, we are sure your developer team has taken care of it. If your site is a little older you may want to talk to your developer. It is possible that simple changes can improve your site and if they are easy to implement it is very likely you will get them for an affordable price. In case you have build your website yourself and don’t know how to get it mobile friendly, we can offer you to take a look and to give you an estimate. If you are planing on building a new website we would be happy to take care of your project.
How much does a mobile friendly website cost?
The cost for a website depends on so many factors. We have build a tool to calculate the cost for a website which you can find here:
http://www.teccrab.com/index.php/website-development-cost-calculator
It is important to mention that the calculator was designed to help you to get an idea how much a website can cost. To get a real estimate you will have to talk to a developer about your project. A good developer will not only take the information and put them online, but will also advice you which elements are necessary and what you can add later.
We offer free consultations and work with many creative developer together. If you want to talk to us about your project we are happy to assist you. Hopefully this article was useful and if you like please feel free to share it. If you would like to learn more about us check out the links below.
http://teccrab.com – Web
http://blog.teccrab.com – Blog
http://twitter.com/teccrab – Twitter
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
http://plus.google.com/+teccrab – Google Plus
http://www.youtube.com/user/teccrab – YouTube
Promoting your business online: Website
In our opinion the first step to promote your business online should be a website. A website is like your store, but in the World Wide Web. You can showcase your products and services, can have contact details available and depending on the nature of your business maybe even a shopping cart system in place. There are a few questions you should ask yourself before getting started.
1st Question: Your Budget
The first question you should asked yourself is how much money you have available for your website project. Your available budget will help you answering the next questions.
2nd Question: Platform, Host, Domain Name
Depending on the product or service you have to offer you may want to go with a WordPress Blog, a Joomla website or maybe an online store build with Magento. There are many other platforms to choose from and some are more suited for your business than others. If you are not sure which one to choose you can contact us for a free consultation. Some platforms require to be setup proper so you should check which website host is offering them. Last but not least you will have to get a domain name preferable something that is also the name of your company. Depending on the Host and the kind of domain name the cost can vary and the cheapest you can get is under $10 per month.
3rd Question: Developer
You may feel comfortable to build your first site by yourself but maybe you need professional help. Picking the right developer is an important step. Consider how much money it will cost to build the site by yourself and compare that with the costs of a professional developer. We have created a tool to give you an idea how much a website can cost. The calculator is designed to give you a general idea, prizes can vary a lot and also depend very much on the project. But we hope it will give you at least an idea. So please feel free to follow this link. We suggest to “shop around” a bit to see if you can find a developer that fits your needs, budget and can earn your trust. Trust is a very important factor when picking a developer. We suggest not to go with the fist guy, check out other options and find the one that is the right fit for your project.
After you have asked yourself those 3 questions you can go to the next step which is building the website. You may have seen many one page websites and those are often a great way to get started. But keep in mind a good website is changing, a successful website is growing and you should always try to add new content. Think of your website like a real store where you change the decoration depending on the season or add new products to your shelfs. With the right platform you will be able to create new content easily and if you have the right developer on your site it won’t be a problem to keep your website fresh and interesting for your visitors.
You also want to consider Online Marketing options such as Online Advertisement and Social Media to increase the traffic to your site. We can help you with every single step and even if you decide to go ahead and try it on your own first, it might be a good idea to have the knowledge that a professional have pointed you into the right direction.
Battle For The Net
If you woke up tomorrow, and your internet looked like this, what would you do? Imagine all your favorite websites taking forever to load, while you get annoying notifications from your ISP suggesting you switch to one of their approved “Fast Lane” sites. Think about what we would lose: all the weird, alternative, interesting, and enlightening stuff that makes the Internet so much cooler than mainstream Cable TV. What if the only news sites you could reliably connect to were the ones that had deals with companies like Comcast and Verizon? On September 10th, just a few days before the FCC’s comment deadline, public interest organizations are issuing an open, international call for websites and internet users to unite for an “Internet Slowdown” to show the world what the web would be like if Team Cable gets their way and trashes net neutrality. Net neutrality is hard to explain, so our hope is that this action will help SHOW the world what’s really at stake if we lose the open Internet.If you’ve got a website, blog or tumblr, get the code to join the #InternetSlowdown here: https://battleforthenet.com/sept10th Everyone else, here’s a quick list of things you can do to help spread the word about the slowdown: http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/96020972118/be-a-part-of-the-great-internet-slowdown Get creative! Don’t let us tell you what to do. See you on the net September 10th!
via Battle For The Net.
List of effected websites #Heartbleed
We are sure you have already heard of the internet nightmare called “Heartbleed”, a bug that is effecting a lot of websites. It is strongly recommended to change the password of the sites that are listed as “vulnerable”. You can find this list here:
https://github.com/musalbas/heartbleed-masstest/blob/master/top10000.txt
Unfortunately remembering hundreds of passwords isn’t easy and many of us use the same password for different platforms, even if that is not recommended. We therefore advise to change your passwords not just for the sites listed but also for any other account you may have across the web. We also would like to give you some tips how to generate a password that is secure and easier to remember.
Before we generate our passwords you should sort your accounts into groups like Email, Bank, Social Media for example or go with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or also possible Business and Private.
The next step is to come up with a sentence you can remember. Like “My zip code as a child was 555″
Based on this sentence we generate now our basic password by using the first letters combined with the number. Our basic password looks like this “Mzcaacw555″ and now, to have slightly different passwords for different accounts, we add the group to it. Here some examples:
Facebook = “Mzcaacw555-FB”
Twitter = “Mzcaacw555-TW”
Email = “Mzcaacw555-EM”
To make it even more secure we can also group some of our accounts in categories and subcategories. In our example we used Business and Private as the one category and than by service provider as a second category:
Facebook = “Mzcaacw555-FB”
Twitter = “Mzcaacw555-TW”
Email (private) = “Mzcaacw555-EM_P”
Email (business) = “Mzcaacw555-EM_B”
- To keep your password safe we also recommend:
- Change your password frequently.
- Use different basic passwords for different groups.
- If you use a public computer always use the “Logout” button when you are done.
- If you speak another language, try to come up with a sentence in a different language instead of your mother tongue.
Some provider offer an Authenticator to protect your account. Blizzard and Google have for example an app you can download to your smart phone. The Authenticator generates a random number, which you need to enter when accessing your account.
If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact us.
Surf save
teccrab inc.
http://teccrab.com – Web
http://blog.teccrab.com – Blog
http://twitter.com/teccrab – Twitter
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
Introducing MyPoi (My Point of interest)
Today we would like to give you our first impression of an application called MyPoi. This application is at the moment in an early stage but still something we think you should check out. What you can do with MyPoi is saving your special places, your points of interest by pinpointing them to a map and adding tag(s) to it. You can share this place with your friends, family and colleagues or of course use MyPoi to find this special spot yourself again.
You can download MyPoi for free and creating an account is also free. When you start the application it will show you a list of your Poi’s sorted by the date you added them. Via the Plus button you can easily add another point of interest. The available fields at the moment are a Title and a Note Box. The Note Box can be used for tagging. Below them you will find a switch to either save your point of interest public or not. MyPoi is designed to work offline too, so you can add your Poi anywhere.
Below the fields where you can enter information about your new point of interest you will find a map and below that a little icon to add pictures.
To check your points of interest you can use the list icon in the top left corner. There you will have also the option to search for other Poi’s. Just enter a keyword or #hashtag and then click search. Your hits will be shown in a list form and selecting a location will provide you more information.
If you prefer to see your Poi on a bigger screen you can also go to the website and check out your story page. Ours is for example http://www.mypoiapp.com/story/teccrab and shows the points of interest we have saved so far. Another feature is the Tag map where you can find Poi’s around you based on a tag check http://www.mypoiapp.com/map/viewpoint as an example.
As mentioned earlier, the application is still in the development stage but shows already promising features. We had the chance to meet Clint Liang, the developer of MyPoi, and to talk to him about his application. He is very excited about the feedback he got so far and is working on implementing a web based interface for users to create POI’s online. He mentioned that it would be great to get even more users involved, because the feedback from them will help to develop an application they like. If you are interested to learn more about MyPoi please follow the links below:
Website – http://www.mypoiapp.com
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/mypoiapp
Twitter – http://twitter.com/lopifsoftware
MyPoi is a product of Lopif Software Inc. http://www.lopif.com developed by Clint Liang
We hope you will check out MyPoi and please feel free to share your experience and leave a comment here.
Google / YouTube Copyright controversy
This topic won’t be an easy one. Let us start with an important information. We are no copyright lawyers, we provide Public Relations and Marketing Services. We advise and remind our clients to create and use their own images, content, music, video footage and explain them the risks when using material from other sites. Our support and advise is based on our own experience and certainly not a legal advise.
In this post we will express our own opinion and we hope to support some healthy discussions that have already been started. For the purpose of this post we will refer to videos created by video content creators on YouTube. We also want to mention that we try to keep this post simple and advise that you should keep in mind that this topic is actually more complicated as expressed in this post. However we hope it will still help to get an idea what is happening at the moment on YouTube.
Let’s get started.
Introducing Anahita a social networking platform
If you have thought about building your own online community for your business or hobby, then Anahita might be the platform you were looking for. Anahita is a minimalist, customizable, and extendable social networking platform. Features can be enabled based on the community you would like to create. You can even build and integrate your own applications and the best is, it is open source, which means you can download it for free.
Joining the Anahita tribe gives you the chance to exchange ideas and experience with other developers. If you want to learn more about Anahita please follow this link:
http://www.getanahita.com
How to generate a more secure password?
You may have heard the news about Twitter and that many accounts got hacked. This may raises the question now, how YOU can protect your accounts and how to create a secure password? There are many tools available to generate a random password, but let’s be honest, who can remember those? It becomes even more complicated if you have a different random password for every single account. By the way, you most definitely should have different passwords for different accounts. So again the question, how to create a strong and secure password which you can also remember?
The answer isn’t as complicated as it may seems. One rule you should have is that each password should be at least 7 characters long, should include a number and should have one capital letter.
Before we now go and generate our passwords, sort your accounts into groups. Email, Bank, Social Media are some group examples, but you can also go with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or how about Business and Private?
The next step is to come up with a sentence you can remember. Like “My zip code as a child was 555”
Based on this sentence we generate now our basic password by using the first letters combined with the number. Our basic password looks now like this “Mzcaacw555” and now, to have slightly different passwords for our different accounts, we add the group to it. Here some examples:
Facebook = “Mzcaacw555-FB”
Twitter = “Mzcaacw555-TW”
Email = “Mzcaacw555-EM”
How can you check if your computer has been infected with DNS Changer malware?
You probably heard already the news about the DNS Changer and may wonder how you can secure that your system is safe. The easiest way to check your system is to go to this website:
But what is the DNS Changer? To answer this question please allow me to add an image from the FBI website to this post:
If you need more information please follow those links:
For Canada:
http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/prg/em/ccirc/2011/in11-002-eng.aspx
For the US:
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911
To check your Mac:
http://www.dcwg.org/detect/checking-osx-for-infections/
To check your Win 7 computer:
http://www.dcwg.org/detect/checking-windows-7-for-infections/
To check your Win XP computer:
http://www.dcwg.org/detect/checking-for-dns-changer-on-windows-xp/
teccrab inc. | Blog 