Category: technology

8 Tips for Your Facebook Fan Page

Posted on by Sue L Canfield

8 Tips for Your Facebook Fan Page1. Interaction with fans will increase the likelihood of your posts showing up in that fan’s newsfeed.

2. Encourage people to:

  •  Like your posts
  •  Comment on your posts
  •  Share your posts

3. End your post asking your readers to comment and share with their network.

4. Ask fans to “Tell me how you feel…”

5. Share something about yourself and ask your fans to share something about themselves as well.

6. Encourage fans to ask questions and then be sure to answer them.

7. Ask your fans questions. Questions that ask ‘where,’ ‘when,’ and ‘should’ are more successful at engaging readers than asking ‘why.’

8. Use images to attract your reader’s eye and compel them to read your post.

Don’t Ask Technicians to Build on a Non-Technical Foundation

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

It happens all the time in my web business; someone comes to me with ‘everything ready’—they have a domain name, hosting, email, content; it’s all ready to go. This will be the easiest website you’ve ever done, they say.

Wrong.

Invariably, they’ve registered the domain name with a service which is, well, limited. They’ve chosen user-friendly hosting, which means that it’s not geek friendly. They have Yahoo email. They have all their content in a Word document, neatly formatted, with images precisely positioned.

The first step, in this case, is to start over.

The choice of hosting has to come after the choice of development technology. My platform of choice these days is WordPress, which means I need hosting on Linux or some other flavor of UNIX. Not Windows. I also need true FTP access for direct access to the files. Not an online file manager.

Email should be you@yourdomain.com, not yourdomain@yahoo.com. I can’t ‘move’ that email, or work with it in any way, without costing you lots and lots of money.

Microsoft Word is not a web development tool. The beautiful formatting in your document will not transfer to the web automatically. It may transfer, partially, to WordPress, but the cleanup will take longer than starting over.

The images embedded in a Word document may very well be useless. Word is not an image management or editing tool. The images may be too small or at too low a resolution to be usable for your site. At the very least, extracting them from Word is going to cost, because it’s a tedious process I don’t enjoy.

This only covers web development, but the principle applies to choosing a cell phone, your next computer or printer, your internet service . . . any technology—and the people who’ll be working with it on your behalf:

Step One is always, always to ask for professional advice from someone you trust.

Shower of Choice

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

I just took a shower. For most of you, this is not fascinating. Unfortunately, the shower itself was not that great.

A shower needs to be a great experience, especially since it’s already a poor substitute for a nice long soak in a tub big enough for such a soak. Instead, the makers of this shower’s plumbing made it one step worse by designing a faucet which inextricably links the water’s temperature with its pressure.

In order to get hot water, you simply turn the faucet farther. Of course, this results in more pressure. Turn it up high enough to have a nice hot shower, and needles tear at your flesh. Turn it down to a gently stimulating spray, and the frigid chill stimulates goosebumps.

How does it make sense to link water pressure with water temperature?

Do you provide any packaged services in your business which make as little sense?

Do you require a client to take Service B when they sign up for Service A? Do you place restrictions which make life easier for you, not your client? Are there ways you can let suspects, prospects and clients have more choice, more control, over the degree and kind of services you provide them?

A cold brisk shower might not be your thing; nor might a gentle hot shower. It’s not about you! Don’t suffer from BLM (Be Like Me.) Unless the packages you’ve assembled are required by your very best professional advice, don’t insist that the people who provide your livelihood think like you.

Shower the people you serve with choice.

Trust Trumps Tech

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

Watching a great series of how-to videos which address all kinds of technical hurdles in really simple ways.

However, some recommendations in the segment on websites got me fired up a little bit. They said:

  • You must register your own domain name; if someone else registered it for you, insist on being given complete control
  • Build your own website
  • Or, if you hire a professional, make sure they use a template in order to save time and money

As I mentioned in my comments at the presenter’s blog, having control of your domain name is only an issue if you don’t have a solid trust relationship with the person who registers it on your behalf. If you trust them, your domain name is in no danger. If you don’t, why, may I ask, are you doing business with them?

All other things being equal, shouldn’t your technical tasks be outsourced to a technical person? Do you really want to manage your own DNS settings, configure your own email accounts, and do all the little tedious things involved in managing a domain name?

Building your own website is a first-rate top-notch recipe for disaster.

The following may sound a bit like a pitch; like I’m bragging. Probably.

I have hand-coded websites from scratch, with built-in organic search engine optimisation, a spam-resistant contact form, good user-interface engineering and usability, in under an hour. Yeah; 59 minutes.

Fifty-nine minutes.

Cost? $300.

If you build your own website using some site builder tool, guess what it will cost to have a professional web developer take it over when you reach the point that you can’t manage it anymore?

More than $300, I’ll tell you that.

Really; why would you make your web presence a homemade non-professional not-standards-compliant invisible to the search engines hard-to-use thing, when I can hand-code a custom site (using your existing images and content) which meets all the technical and human criteria of excellence, in under an hour, for $300?

Oh; templates? Asking me to work with a template is like asking a brain surgeon to work with mittens on. Sure, I could do it. But you’ll pay extra in order to have a site that came out of a box, instead of being completely custom-made.

Warning: the Following is Geek Stuff That Only Applies to Skype Users

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

I’m testing the Pamela Call Recording tool for my new Skype account. Problem is, I get an error every time I try to start it. The error says, more or less, this:

Unable to initialize Skype connection library, or Skype is not running

I found an answer at the Skype fora (isn’t that the plural of ‘forum’ ? No? Oh; okay) but it had errors in it. I posted my comments, which you can read right here if you log in with your Skype account: http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=352421&st=0&p=1756661&#entry1756661

The short version is, if you’re comfortable with this arcane command, it should fix it:

regsvr32.exe "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Skype\Skype4COM.dll"