Meet the author: Jill Olkoski
Jill has a MA in Clinical Psychology, a BS in Computer Science, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering.
She currently owns Aldebaran Web Design in Edmonds (near Seattle WA) and enjoys educating her clients on topics related to small business website design.
In Jill's previous life, she spent 17 years in the engineering and quality organizations of a Fortune 100 tech company.
Jill’s tennis team, hailing from Robinswood Tennis Center in Bellevue Washington, has won the women’s doubles 2.5 National title! Many thanks to all of Jill’s clients who have been patient with her delays due to her commuting 50 miles round trip from Edmonds to Bellevue. It was worth every single gallon of gas!
In mid August of this year, 2012, I moved my website to a new hosting company BlueHost.com. I moved away from DreamHost.com. While I made the move for mostly customer service reasons, I can now see the difference in my website’s downtime and response time. Downtime is the percentage of time your website is unavailable. Response time is the length of time it takes your home page to fully load. Both of these metrics are tracked by my website traffic tool, Web-Stat.
I read this really touching story today in the news about Fiona Apple. She’s cancelling her tours to stay home and care for her dying pit bull who is almost 14 years old, that she’s had since she was a puppy. Her letter to her fans explaining the cancellations will be sure to bring a tear to your eye, especially if you’ve ever called a dog your friend, and especially if it’s been a bully dog. Here’s the article: Fiona Apple Cancels Tour: Singer Stays Home To Be With Her Dying Dog.
Posted in Tidbits | Comments Off on Be Thankful for Our Dogs, Especially the Bully Ones
Sometimes it becomes necessary to move your website from one hosting company to another. As a small business website owner you may wonder what is involved in this process so that you can judge the benefits versus the cost of moving to a new website hosting company. I recently moved several dozen of my clients, including my own website, from one hosting company to another, in search of better customer service, and wanted to give others who may be contemplating such a move an idea of what’s involved.
If you have your website hosted with DreamHost and have gotten an email from them that starts off with “This is just a note to let you know that we have moved your account to a new server!”, you may be confused (as some of my clients are) as to what this means and whether you should do anything.
I recently listened in on an online internet marketing webinar - and one of the participants asked the person hosting the event what the best content management system was to use for a small business website that was search engine friendly and easy to use. Their answer might surprise you.
What’s the most important mission of your small business website? To direct people to your contact page, fill out your contact form, hit submit. But how do you know your contact form is actually functioning properly?
After being with DreamHost for over six years, I’ve moved my website and nearly 50 clients to BlueHost. Even though I had been a loyal DreamHost customer, and sent them many new hosting clients, they were not so supportive after they made a change that disabled many of my clients’ contact forms. Their response was simply unacceptable, and so the exodus began. The story is below:
