Aldebaran Web Design's Blog

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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I’ve written several articles on SEO scams, and wanted to share with you a chart that one of my SEO clients sent to me today. It’s such an amazing SEO success story - and unlike all of the various and sundry false claims that SEO companies may make, I wanted to show you actual results. My client is Luis Periera, who is an attorney in Costa Rica, and we’ve been working on his website since August of 2008. Take a look at his wonderful stats!

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One of the many reasons I like using DreamHost as a hosting company, is their WordPress “one-click installer” program that makes adding a WordPress blog to a website fast and simple. This article lists directions on how to set up a blog on DreamHost, assuming that you’ve already purchased a domain name and set up a hosting account with DreamHost. These instructions also assume that you’ve already got a good understanding of how WordPress works.

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Every once in a while, I run into an issue and get ready to bang my head on my desk. But today, just before I did that, I Googled a problem I was having and was so very delighted with the solution I found, I wanted to give them a link with thanks. Read the rest of this entry »

Like many of my blog articles, this one is written based on one of my client’s experiences that I’m hoping others won’t repeat. She has an online real estate tools website that helps real estate agents improve their marketing. She decided to outsource her search engine optimization (SEO) to a company she found on Biznik. After paying money to this company and waiting a month for the work to occur, she asked me to review what they had done. This article will focus on the link building portion of that work. Based on my investigation, I believe this is an excellent example of a link building scam.

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I had a prospective client ask me the following question: “Should I trademark my domain name?”. I had no idea. But I knew who to ask: my local Seattle trademark attorney, Jefferson Coulter.

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I ran into an issue the other day with one of the browsers that I use to check websites I develop. I had installed Internet Explorer 6 (yes, my web stats shows that 8% of my visitors use IE 6) and it stopped working. On this particular operating system, I hadn’t installed another web browser. So I was stuck. I needed to reinstall IE6, but without a working browser to download it again, I was faced with the icky task of reinstalling the entire operating system. But then I found a solution.

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How safe is it to store private and sensitive information in an online database?

Well, I’m no security expert, not by a longshot.

But I wanted to share a recent experience with a prospective client who was using an online database to store some of his business information and hopefully it might help you avoid some very unpleasant consequences. In this case, no harm was done and the sensitive information was destroyed - but it could have been much, much worse.

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One of my fabulous clients forwarded me an spam SEO email she received the other day from a company and in the course of investigating it, I found some amazing things I wanted to share with you small business website owners who are looking to hire someone to do SEO for your website.

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My website clients often want to be able to send out newsletters to their customers. Sending out newsletters without being labeled a spammer is tricky business. Many folks opt to use a monthly fee-based service like Constant Contact or My Emma, which send out emails using their own mail servers. But if you have an ECT online store, you can utilize a “mod” from ECT Modifications called Advanced News Letter that costs around $25 (one time charge). It sends out emails from your website using your ECT online store program. This article explains how to send out email using this particular mod.

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