Blog

 

Feb17
 

Content Management Systems

Here we are discussing the various types of content managements systems available to you. There are several others out there, but these four are the more popular ones with a pretty large public support. Read the rest of this entry »
 

February 17, 2010 No Comments

CMS Part I: Do you need a CMS?

Feb04
 
First of all, what is a CMS, anyway? CMS stands for content management system. It is a system used to support the development, management, distribution and publishing of content on your website. But is it CMS suitable for your website? Like any system, CMS has its pros and cons. Let’s run them down before we come into conclusion if a CMS is for you.

Content Management Systems Pros & Cons

Read the rest of this entry »
 

February 04, 2010 Tags: , , No Comments

Google Local

Jan20
 

Google Local: Make sure your customers can find you on the map!

As part of your ongoing effort to increase your website’s visitors stats, it is important to include your business to Google Local. If anything, it helps your current customers find you quickly after typing your company name, but it is FREE! Be sure you include all of your locations. Here is how: Read the rest of this entry »
 

January 20, 2010 Tags: , No Comments

Social Media Resources

Jan12
 
There are so many social media tools and websites out there that as a resource, I thought I’d create a nice list of them to help my customers and you.

Social Media Websites:

Read the rest of this entry »
 

January 12, 2010 Tags: , , No Comments

Speeding up Websites, Part 2

Jan07
 
As promised in my previous post, I am including the code we use to cache our website. (I got this from a Google Group discussion.) Further explanation can be found from Google’s help page: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/caching.html.
Most web pages include resources that change infrequently, such as CSS files, image files, JavaScript files, and so on. These resources take time to download over the network, which increases the time it takes to load a web page. HTTP caching allows these resources to be saved, or cached, by a browser or proxy. Once a resource is cached, a browser or proxy can refer to the locally cached copy instead of having to download it again on subsequent visits to the web page. Thus caching is a double win: you reduce round-trip time by eliminating numerous HTTP requests for the required resources, and you substantially reduce the total payload size of the responses. Besides leading to a dramatic reduction in page load time for subsequent user visits, enabling caching can also significantly reduce the bandwidth and hosting costs for your site.
Basically, the .htaccess file is telling the bots to cache certain files at various times for returning visitors. ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault A0 <FilesMatch “.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$”> ExpiresDefault A29030400 Header append Cache-Control “public” </FilesMatch> <FilesMatch “.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$”> ExpiresDefault A604800 Header append Cache-Control “public” </FilesMatch> <FilesMatch “.(xml|txt|html|js|css)$”> ExpiresDefault A7200 Header append Cache-Control “proxy-revalidate” </FilesMatch> <FilesMatch “.(php|cgi|pl|htm)$”> ExpiresActive Off Header set Cache-Control “private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform” Header set Pragma “no-cache” </FilesMatch>
 

January 07, 2010 No Comments

Speeding up Websites, Part 1

Dec18
 
As many are learning, Google has announced that one of the factors that will improve your SEO performance and, naturally, your user’s experience, is by speeding up your website. At GlobalSpex, we’ve always been cognizant of this but more for our customer’s and their target market rather than search engines. By using CSS, alt tags, image compression in our web design for speed, style, and 509 disability compliance, it seems this might be helpful for optimization as well. But, as always, we are always learning. So, we are taking additional steps in improving our website’s speed as well as our customer’s. Google suggests installing their speed tool, Page Speed, to help diagnose and suggest ways to compress the site and speed it up.  Below are the areas that Page Speed will review:
  1. Browser Caching – to help with the browser by instructing it to load previously downloaded resources (images, css, html, etc.) from your local disk rather than over the network.
  2. CSS compression – Removing CSS from documents, compression external CSS and removing unused.
  3. JavaScript compression -  minimizing and combining javascript code.
  4. Images – Optimizing and setting dimensions.
So far I’ve compressed our website’s CSS file by removing spaces and extraneous styles. The next suggestion was installing in our .htaccess file with the recommended caching code. (My next post will include this code)
 

December 18, 2009 Tags: , No Comments

Stuck Print Jobs on Windows

Nov30
 
Sometimes your various print jobs might get stuck in the printer’s queue. If you’ve tried deleting the job in the printer’s job list (right-click and select delete). Below are the steps I follow: If you are on Vista, Windows XP or Windows 7, go through the following steps to restart the printer spooled files.
  1. Go to Control Panel
  2. Select System and Maintenance (skip this step for Windows 7)
  3. Select Administrative Tools
  4. Double-click on Services
  5. In the list of services, scroll down until you find one called “Print Spooler”
  6. Right-click on “Print Spooler” and select “Restart”
  7. The “deleted” jobs will disappear and any queued jobs in your print queue will print

These are other print spool solutions from Windows as well.

 

November 30, 2009 Tags: , No Comments

Outlook: Syncing your email on more than one computer

Nov11
 
As there are several ways to get your email, I am often asked by my customers about getting their email downloaded to their desktop, laptop, and even a mobile device. POP3: The problem with POP3 sharing is that you are essentially downloading the same email 2 or 3 times; and these are being marked as ‘unread.’ This means you will have to wade through your email each time on each machine. Therefore, this is not truly syncing but rather sharing. The only way to truly sync your email is with Exchange Server (for Windows) or utilize Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). IMAP allows for two-way communication between your e-mail account and your devices. That means whatever software or computer you use to access your e-mail, they will sync. But this requires that the email remain on your email server. If you are like me, I have over 2GB of emails and many hosting accounts limit your web and email space. If you go over this amount, your website can go down for going over the limit. If you choose this, be sure that you have enough email space and bandwidth to account for this traffic. Exchange Server: For my business this was the best solution. All my emails are truly synced on all of my devices. The downside is the Exchange Server can get expensive if you require several email accounts (on a hosted solution) or intend to host your own email at your business. They generally run between $8 – $25 per month per account. Having said that, how much will you save in frustration and time reviewing the same emails. We recommend Apptix for Hosted Exchange Service

Setup POP3 on several devices

By default, when you download new messages from a POP3 e-mail account, the messages are deleted from the POP3 mail server. If you check your POP3 e-mail account from different computers by using the default Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 POP3 settings, the computer that downloads a new e-mail message is the only location where the message is stored. The message is no longer on the POP3 mail server when you connect from another computer. – Microsoft.com (read more)

To setup your POP3 with your Outlook on your PC and laptop, here are the steps:

  1. Click Tools | Account Settings
  2. Under Name, select the POP3 e-mail account that you want to change, and then click Change.
  3. Click More Settings.
  4. Click the Advanced tab, and then under Delivery, select the Leave a copy of messages on the server check box.
  5. Then be sure to select the number of days to remove older messages from your server. These settings might help prevent you from exceeding the maximum mailbox size set by your Internet service provider (ISP) or web host.
 

November 11, 2009 Tags: , , 1 Comment

New Website :: Yellow Rose Reception Hall

Nov10
 
yellowrose-receptionhall_com1 Announcing our latest website, Yellow Rose Reception Hall in New Caney, TX. This website was custom designed and built for the Wordpress content management (CMS) platform. The owner has complete control over the website’s content and can edit pages when they wish using any web browser.
 

November 10, 2009 No Comments

What is LinkedIn?

Nov01
 
 

November 01, 2009 Tags: , No Comments

« Older Entries