Aldebaran Web Design's Blog

Sometimes clients see things in a certain way in their browsers that I’m unable to see. Often the fastest way to clear up the confusion, is for them to send me a screenshot. Send a screenshot of something on the web is easy to do once you know the steps.

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I often have people contact me who are in various stages of breaking up with their current web designers. Sometimes the termination is friendly, sometimes it’s not. Here’s what you should know BEFORE you attempt to fire, or otherwise end your working relationship with your web designer.

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Many of my readers may be familiar with a very popular article I wrote in May of 2008 about the then new Washington State Destination Based Sales Tax. Today I received news from one of my readers that alerted me to a new development: SB5113.

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Phone Spam: A client of mine just received a cold call from a Washington state SEO company, who offered a free website review to see if his website “would be negatively impacted by an upcoming Google Platform Change”. Scary huh?

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I learned of a new feature in PayPal today by complete accident. I normally login and move money from my PayPal business account to my business checking account. A few days ago, I forgot I logged in, and this morning noticed funds had moved out. When I called PayPal, they confirmed that indeed it was me (embarrassing), but they told me that PayPal has an auto-sweep feature that would do this. They enabled it on my account so it shows up under the Financial section of my Profile. I never knew PayPal had this ability, and wanted to share my belated discovery!

All of us hate spam, those unsolicited emails we get from individuals or businesses who want something from us. But if you get spam from someone who is using a professional service, like MyEmma or Constant Contact, there’s something you can do about it.

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I was contacted recently by WebHostingSearch.com and asked if I would be interviewed about my hosting company. Loving DreamHost.com like I do, I said “of course!” and you can go here to read my interview on DreamHost, my favorite hosting company.

Updated: I have left DreamHost after 6 years because they fail to communicate changes that severely impacted my business, and the businesses of my clients - I now recommend BlueHost.

One of my clients recently received several email spam messages that she wanted me to pass along. These email spam messages were a little different from the ones that I usually receive, in that they specifically mentioned products and services that she offered. In other words, they were a little harder to recognize as spam than other generic email spam.

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Recently my life has been full of redirects. I have a client who had another web developer change her website pages from one naming convention to another, like “?p=123” to “how to file dog fingernails”. I had another client that I did the redesign for, but her old page names had blank spaces in them, like “old page.html”. Both of these situations required creation of special files called “.htaccess” that map the old pages to the new ones. I wanted to give folks an overview of why creating redirects every single time they change a page name/page URL is so important to SEO (search engine optimization).

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It seems like all my blog article ideas lately come from my clients, so here’s another one. A client got an invitation to try out DreamHost PS (Private Servers) and wanted to know whether he should sign up.

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