On all the websites I develop, I recommend that clients add a contact “form” to make it easier for prospective customers to contact them. My own experience seemed to indicate that folks are more likely to fill out a contact form that’s embedded in a website page, rather than clicking on an email address link that opens their mail application. I decided to actually gather some real data, and post the results to my blog – so here it is.

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I often have discussions with clients regarding their email accounts. When I develop a new website for them, I encourage  them to use a domain-based email address rather than using their pre-existing free email account. But once they’ve been convinced to use a domain-based email address, they are confused with how they will read this email and also still read their free email account.

The solution: use a desktop mail application.

Having a desktop mail application is like having your own personal delivery person whose job it is to go and retrieve all of your email from where ever it may be and delivery it right to your desktop.

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Prospective clients often don’t understand the difference between domain name registration and website hosting. It is a confusing system, and hopefully this article will remove some of the mystery of website design basics.

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Clients often have free emails accounts when they start a website design project, and one of the decisions they need to make is whether to stick with their free email account or whether to utilize an email account that’s based on their website domain name. This post will review the pros and cons associated with each.

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Tonight just for grins and giggles, I decided to see who owned Aldebaran.com – it redirected to another website, which meant to me that it wasn’t being used – so I figured I’d contact the owner and see if they wanted to sell it.

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This article is written for those of you who are in the process of looking for a website designer. One of the good things to do when you’re shopping, is to look through the web designer’s portfolio. Most folks looking through a portfolio of websites will notice the obvious, like what the websites look like. This article was written to hopefully help you notice something a big less obvious: whether the web designer is using “real” domains, creating “sub-domains”, or “directories” for his website clients.

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I had a client recently ask me whether or not his hosting company was backing up his website files. At first, I thought this was a silly question, because I thought the answer would be “of course!” I host my own website and have nearly all my website clients hosted with DreamHost (for a bunch of reasons listed here), and I have, on occasion, become overzealous and accidentally deleted something I shouldn’t have. Yes, even web designers make mistakes

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There are many decisions a new website owner must make, and one of them is selecting a font for the content of their website. Often clients ask me to try out different fonts to see how they look. I’ve now made this process easier by creating my very own font-selection tool.
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I recently had an experience working on a website that was created using an online website builder tool. My client had created the website herself using one of the many available do-it-yourself online template tools and wanted to integrate a shopping cart. After a few tests, it became clear that my work on the website would interfere with this website builder, and we had to abandon the builder altogether if we were to have a successful shopping cart integration. After working with the files that were generated with this website builder tool, I wanted to share the experience, because many of you might be contemplating doing websites yourself using an online website builder tool (free or otherwise).

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If you’re in the market for a website, selecting the right website designer for your particular project is crucial. Here are some things to keep in mind as you are shopping around and interviewing potential website designers:

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Selecting the best domain name for your new website is often the task that new website clients tackle first. Since there are a nearly infinite number of possible website domain names to choose from, how does a prospective website client go about choosing just the right domain name for his or her small business website or personal project?

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Selecting a good website hosting company is extremely important for the success of a website. If the hosting service isn’t reliable and doesn’t have good customer support, your website’s performance will be negatively impacted.

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I understand that to most folks, creating a website can be pretty scary and daunting. Several years ago I set about to design my own website, and I too was very intimidated at first – and I have degrees engineering and computer science!

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