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Browser Madness!

UNTIL RECENTLY, SURFING THE INTERNET MEANT TYPING in cryptic commands and wading through screens of monotonous text. The advent of the World Wide Web means the Net is no longer quite so frustrating and incomprehensible. With navigation as easy as pointing and clicking your mouse, you’ll find the Web’s individual electronic pages are filled with text, graphics, and even snazzy videos and sound files for downloading. Imagine taking a guided tour of the White House, searching a directory of 800 numbers, or checking your stock portfolio, all using the Web’s visual and intuitive navigation system. That’s how simple the Web is–just click on whatever interests you and you’re immediately transported to places all over the world, no computerese required.

mybrowseThere are two main

Keeping Your Data In Check

ktdicYOU’RE ON THE PHONE WITH A PROSPECTIVE CLIENT. IN the course of a few minutes you learn that she wants to see your brochure, she’d like you to call again in a few weeks, she just got a new e-mail address, and she’s expecting a baby in three months (and can’t wait to take the little tyke to his or her first Detroit Tigers game). A PIM (personal information manager) could leave you scrambling to find places to transcribe this vital information. A contact manager, on the other hand, will simply absorb the details into the client’s record in an instant. The results: a ready-made cover letter to accompany your brochure; a follow-up call you’ll be reminded to make; a record of

Keep Your Website Tight As A Drum

kywtadOther firms with e-commerce sites fail to provide any feedback mechanism to let them know how many hits they get or how effective their site is. And simply because they lack such a mechanism, it is not uncommon for companies to believe that their experiments in e-commerce and electronic marketing have failed.

Charles Nichols, marketing manager of STRO, says, “Looking at Web sites is now part of the procurement and decision-making process for some customers, but then they will go to a reseller or shop to actually make the purchase. But you need to know how many visit and are influenced by the Web site.”

He suggests one way of finding out is to give a unique phone number on the Web

Desktop Publishing Still Winning

Ever notice how even the simplest word processing or desktop publishing task takes longer than you planned? Sure, it takes only a few minutes to type your address and the date into a letter or to fill in a fax cover sheet. And it takes only a few minutes to set the line spacing, indent the paragraphs, change the fonts, calculate the number of pages…and suddenly, the morning’s gone. You can’t cut down on your correspondence. But if you find yourself repeating the same steps over and over when you create a document, it’s time for you to tackle templates.

An oft-overlooked but powerful feature of many programs, templates eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel each time you start a new document.

Managing Web Content Can Be Grueling

Publishing a few pages on the Web is embarrassingly easy. Getting a group of people to do so effectively is difficult. And getting many groups to create a combination of static and dynamic pages, tracking revisions, setting up workflow, and making the framework scalable and secure is nearly impossible without the right tools.

cmThis is illustrated only too well at Gannett Co. Inc., which publishes USA TODAY, USA Weekend and dozens of regional publications. Recently at Gannett headquarters in Arlington, Va., I examined Web content management packages that could enable easier and more consistent publishing and design of Gannett’s intranet content.

Gannett’s early experiments with designing and maintaining departmental intranet sites used readily available Web authoring software that lacked the ability

Shopping For Good Deals Takes Work

sfgdIf ads shouting “prices slashed!,” “year-end clearance!,” and “on sale for a limited time!” Kick your bargain-seeking radar into high gear, you’re in good company. Whether you’ve got money to burn or you run your home office on a shoestring budget, there’s something supremely satisfying in taking home an outstanding deal.

Though great buys abound on refurbished, returned, or slightly dated equipment, it’s also a cinch to score savings on brand-new, factory-sealed software and hardware. To help you do so, we asked five veteran home office shoppers to share their tips, tricks, and strategies for getting the good stuff–cheap. Plan your next equipment purchase with these insider secrets in mind, and you’ll be sure to save a bundle.

Best Bargain Ever

April 1997:

Knowing Your Help Desk

osOpen source help desk is one of the most effective tools for online businesses. Although putting the business online opens several opportunities, it is still challenging to maintain and attract more audiences. The online help desk helps customers’ concerns addressed properly, building trust on them and providing efficiency on the business’ services. It can be purchased online with a corresponding price. Business owners who want to save money can obtain this type of software and it works well. This source allows a website to have free of charge help desk software and install it for a long-term benefit.

Basically, it is important for online businesses to stand out among the rest and gain more audiences who could potentially use the product or …

Bumps In The Road And The Techies That Help Us

Don’t you absolutely hate it when you are just about once a website and you discover your hard drive clicking? I can’t believe the timing of things in life, sometimes. I was trying to get the site launched before I finished my thesis, but of course I had a massive hard drive crash in my raid array. I truly believe that this is one of those things that really make you think about disasters and how they can happen at any second. A lot of people talk about how you can be hit by a bus one day, and let’s just say that when you have a full on raid failure, is pretty much the technological equivalent of that.

funnyI think probably does scary part about the situation was that I was afraid I was going to lose what was really years of content. I’m talking about countless hours of research, development, and basic time writing and communicating with some of the friends of my block. The idea that all be gone in 10 seconds was actually something that caused a lot of stress in my life. My first move was to see if I could do anything with the hard drive itself, but after taking a look on the web I realized that if I actually opened the drive up, there was very little that I can do. I know that some people recommend changing drive head, but I think that is very important that you know when you are over your head. This was just a case where it was no chance in hell that I was going to be able to fix this thing.

After what was some pretty serious research, I decided on a company called Hard Drive Recovery Group. I know, a more generic name for a hard drive recovery company probably will never find. But sometimes it’s better to just get back to basics and certainly I’m a marketing person myself, so I put in a phone call them to figure out what kind of pricing I’m going to be dealing with. I loved their prices for hard drive recovery. I assumed that they get people with clicking hard drive every day and they probably know just about every kind of hard drive platform like the back of their hands. The hard drive that I was working (Continued)

When You Need Data Recovery, It Can Be Tough

spookedIf you have ever experienced a complete computer failure you understand just how frustrating this experience can be. First the computer is working just fine then all of a sudden simply processes such as opening a file becomes a five minute event. This can make life unbelievably complicated and sometimes even unbearable. There can be a multitude of different reasons why a computer will begin to crash. Sometimes the hard drive of the computer has experience some sort of physical abuse such as change in the temperature or maybe a chemical spill. Other times it is because of an virus, Trojan or other malware that has invaded the computer and is reeking havoc on it.

Hard Drive Crashes Happen, No Matter What

In the world of electronics there are types of different issues that can affect your laptop or RAID arrays. There is a whole host of ways that your computer’s system can be damaged. Your computer can be damaged through internal problems such as viruses and other types of malware. Malware is a type of software that was created for disturbing computers and stealing valuable information from computers. System can malfunction because of some physical damage done to it such as a burn and spilt liquids. Both of these issues can affect a computer or laptop on a daily basis.

It’s important to buy some back up device just in case your computer does crash. These devices include a flash drive that allows you to carry all of your information around on a small device that can be synced with any computer. You can also buy an external hard drive that will be connected to your computer. With a external hard drive you can place all your data on this hard drive. One sign to look out for when your computer is about to crash is the click of doom, which is a click sound that comes from your computer when its about to crash. Luckily there is RAID data recovery cheap enough to fit anyone’s budget. (Continued)

Getting Your Business Smokin’ On The Web

gsotwAs unlikely as it seems, Steve Seiller and his wife, Catherine, aren’t the only folks using the Internet to sell hay for pet rabbits. You can buy a mini-bale from the Web site they run out of their home in the Seattle area, and that scrumptious bundle of grass is a good buy at $3.99, Steve promises. But don’t think Bunny Bytes has no competition. The Seillers know of at least two other online outlets that serve up similar fodder.

All across the Web, businesses like Bunny Bytes are pushing home-business Web sites beyond the usual brochure-ware. Air-Fun Kites  is a family-run operation based in West Chester, Ohio, selling kites that are a whole lot fancier (and pricier) than paper kites of yore;

LAN Building Much Easier Than It Used To Be

lbmeMost people approach the installation of a local area network (LAN) with the same enthusiasm they reserve for IRS audits and root canals. First, there’s all that confusing terminology: Ethernet, 10BaseT, hub, router, and so on. Then there’s the labor: opening the computers to install special cards, running cables all over the place, messing with the operating system to enable its networking capabilities. Pretty daunting stuff, even to experts.

But no more. Today, new networking solutions and improvements to existing technologies have taken the ability to connect computers out of the hands of brainy geeks and into yours. You might think that setting up a LAN requires a lot of time and expertise, and you’d be right–if the year were 1995. But thanks

Personal Info Managers – Still Effective, After All This Time

AS YOU PROBABLY KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE, HARDLY anyone works from 9 to 5 anymore. The business day begins earlier, ends later, and runs into weekends, holidays, anniversaries, and birthdays. And during the course of a typical business day, you’re bombarded with information: names, dates, phone numbers, appointments, deadlines to beat, projects to start, and proposals to finish.

Now, think of how you handle all this critical information. Do you jot down lines on Post-it notes and stick them all over your office? Or do you fill the pages of a date book with hastily written scrawl and pray you’ll be able to decipher your own notes come crunch time? Well, there is a better way.

Whether you call them organizers, personal information managers

Why Do You Need IRS Tax Help

Failure to pay the taxes can result to a lot of serious problems. This is the reason why IRS tax help is created in order to provide solutions for the people who want to solve this issue. Some people pay their taxes through salary deductions while some voluntarily file tax returns in order to claim a credit, get a refund or avoid breaking a government law. However, regardless of the reasons for filing, any missed tax return will be recorded by the Internal Revenue System. As soon as it continues to accumulate, they will send a notice to this individual or even file a case for not paying the taxes.

Hence, if you are one of those individuals having this kind of tax …

Talking Scalability

In the deployment of a web content management system, scalability can be anything from a nonissue to a major concern.

On most corporate intranets, where as many as 1,000 simultaneous hits are rare, a single Web server running a content management application can easily serve the entire intranet, says Mike Connor, a former Mozilla Project engineer. In such a setting, the capacity of the Web content management application is generally a much smaller concern than its stability.

Scalability is a primary concern, however, when a firm deploys content management on a Web site, particularly an e-commerce site. I have seen several cases where sites either crashed completely or selectively lost content because of problems with their content management systems.

There are several