Aldebaran Web Design's Blog

Here’s what has worked for me:

RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^coolexample.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.coolexample.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Create .htaccess (text) file and put at root directory level.

Now if someone leaves out the “www”, it will be put in, which is good for search engines. They don’t like to find the non-www and the www version, they want one or the other.

I do many websites for therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors. One of the things that many really try to avoid is putting a photo or picture of themselves on their websites.

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My clients often ask me if and when they should upgrade their ECT or ECommerce Templates online stores. The ECT folks work quite hard to fix bugs and implement improvements and on average, will come out with a new version every month or two. So what’s a store owner to do?

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All bloggers should read this Reuters article “Judge in US defamation rules blogger not journalist“. Sorry if you’ve already heard of this, I’ve been on vacation and am just finding out now. 🙂

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An excellent TED Talk by Eli Pariser: Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles’. One of the really surprising things he claims, is that even if you’re not logged into Google, the search results are still being filtered for you. He ran a quick experiment, to show how different people got wildly different results for the same word, at the same time on the same day.

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I often have my small business website clients request images to be used in online advertising. Generally they place these ads on a website and are charged a monthly fee. When visitors click on the image, they are taken to my clients’ websites via a link. But how do my clients really know what kind of return on their advertising investment they are getting? My favorite website traffic tool is Web-Stat. This tutorial assumes you are using Web-Stat, but it should give you enough general information to help you regardless of the tool you’re using.

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I just noticed that my Feedburner counter shows zero readers. I went searching to see if anyone else has this issue and found this post: Feedburner Counter displays 0 readers on all blogs – so apparently it’s not just me. I agree with Vincent and am hoping Google hasn’t just decided to kill Feedburner services. Here’s a link to the official Feedburner Status Blog.

UPDATE: The number came back, magically, by itself. No idea why.

I use Web-Stat to track my website traffic and to warn me if my site is down. Whenever my websitesite goes down, I wonder to myself…how often do websites go down? My hosting company is DreamHost and whenever there’s an issue people rant and rave about downtime. But I wanted to share my actual downtime statistics with folks, who may be wondering: how much downtime is “normal” for a small business website?

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I’m on holiday as I write this. I picked the month of December to be on a holiday for several reasons. One of my reasons is that I can use Google Trends to see when searches for what I’m selling (small business website design) drops.

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