If you’re planning to build a website for your business, picking a good domain name (or names) is helpful. You’ll make it easier on your potential visitors if you have something that reflects your business (or you), is spellable, and can be typed fairly easily. If you manage to have a good search engine keyword in there, that’s a bonus. To illustrate, it’s often helpful to see the wrong way. Some examples that I see frequently:
Gratuitous Hyphenation
This one comes from good intentions. Let’s say you’re thinking of using the phrase “West Philly Cheese Steaks”, which is your company name. People are sitting in a meeting and somebody writes “westphillycheesesteaks.com” on a board. Someone says that “westphillycheesesteaks” is really long and doesn’t look like a word. Spaces in a URL don’t work, so they try “west-philly-cheese-steaks.com” instead. More readable! Just one little problem – if someone is trying to type that name, they will tend to have trouble.
Continue reading “Choosing Your Domain Name – Some Common Mistakes”
Posted in Web Development
I was very pleased to see that the decrepit web browser, IE6, is finally approaching its demise. We web developers have been suffering with coding for this Beleaguered Bucket of Bogusness for years now. Now the idea of dumping it has taken on more urgency, as its security flaws were a key element in cyberattacks (traced to Chinese sources) on several large sites, most notably Google. Now whole countries seem to be urging the removal of IE6, with England and Germany taking the lead. Web developers all over the world are celebrating!
There seem to be two groups that still use this slow, buggy, graphically-challenged, security-risk-riddled browser: poor innocent folks who have no idea they even have it, (Hi, Mom!) and corporate intranets who, sadly, built huge important company applications that won’t work on any other browser. For the first group, it’s fairly easy to get rid of IE6, you simply upgrade – users are generally prompted to do that . Even I will admit that IE8 is a pretty decent browser – though it’s not in the class of Firefox or Chrome, I’d say it’s about as good as Safari by now.
Continue reading “Two Silly Web Trends Seem to be Abating! IE6 and Flash Intros”
Posted in Web Development
I bought something a couple years ago from Sweetwater. They do offer good deals on a wide variety of music gear, and they have a wide selection. When I made my purchase, they dutifully assigned me a “Sales Engineer”. I began to receive regular emails from this person and Sweetwater, long after I had no more interest in hearing from them.
Spam emails are annoying enough, but then he started to phone me. I finally managed to speak to him and told him that I didn’t want phone calls. He fought me a bit – you know how salespeople can get – but he finally relented. Problem solved, or so I thought.
Just today I got an email from a fellow, let’s call him “T”, who was supposedly my new “Sales Engineer”. I simply deleted it. To a very small degree, I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Big mistake. After getting the email today, I noticed that I had a voicemail. It was the very same “T”, who lead his pitch with “I know you don’t want be called, but your email bounced..” That’s all I would listen to before deleting it, and I was very angry by this time.
Continue reading “Sweetwater Music: Does Their Sales Force Suck?”
Posted in General