Computer Solutions in the greater brisbane area.
Author archive
Author archive
Why we don’t use Google
I just read an interesting post by John Jonas about how he lost all his google stuff recently. He describes how one evening he found that his entire Google account had disspeared; When you tried the usual password recovery, Google told him there was no account matching his email address! As John uses Google for just about everything, he was pretty worried, seeing as every email, every document, his whole business, had just dissapeared!
John goes on to describe a whole bunch of steps that Google users should take to safeguard against such a time, but really, is there a case for risking your business like this? Google have, as John puts it, a ZERO policy, meaning you get zero communication from them. They can delete your account on a whim, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Personally, I would never trust any part of my business to a company for which there is zero support. A business needs someone on the other end of the phone, so when things inevitably go wrong, they can be fixed quickly and without fuss. Even better, when i can actually meet a representative of the business in person, then I know what kind of attitude they have, and can make a judgment on using their services or not.
My advice; Don’t use Google for your email and documents. There are many better solutions that don’t see all your important data locked up in a black box you can’t always get access to.
Top SEO Tips for WordPress Websites
Bringing traffic to a website is the most important goal of every internet marketer. In order to realise this goal, it is essential that the website should be placed on the first page of each search results in every major search engine such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing to fully maximise the site’s earning potential. Setting your site on the first page of search engine results can be made possible through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques. SEO consists of different strategies that, if followed consistently, will bring the site to the top of search engine results. If you have a WordPress website that is not showing good performance in search engine results, then perhaps the following techniques below can help you.
1. Create A Great Content. Nobody wants to visit a site with nonsense articles. Well-crafted contents will surely increase your site’s visitors and will keep them coming back for more. Because of your good content and good volume of visitors, asking for a link from a successful webmaster to his site would not be difficult.
2. Create Backlinks For Your Site. Visit forums and other blogs which are related to your niche and post helpful opinions or ideas and don’t forget to include a link to your site in your profile or signature. You can also ask other webmasters if they allow guest posting on their website. Guest posting is also a way of getting backlinks for your site.
3. Be Mindful of Your Keyword Density. Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears, in proportion with other words used in an article. Keywords should be used for a few times within the article; otherwise, search engines will likely give you a red flag for keyword stuffing.
4. Place the Keywords In the Title. Use the keywords in the article title if possible; but don’t force it. It would be confusing to your readers to have a title with incorrect grammar structure. Properly place the keywords throughout the article. Well-placed keywords will surely drive traffic to your website.
5. Enable Pretty Permalinks. The WordPress default permalink format is short, ugly and it’s meaningless to anybody and even to search engine.
(Default permalink format: http://www.yourwebsite.com/?p=507 )
“Pretty permalinks” are more user-friendly and search engine friendly because they provide more information about the page to the search engine.
(Pretty permalink format: http://www.yourwebsite.com/title_of_your_article)
Your internet marketing success depends on how persistent you perform your search engine optimization tasks. These tasks may be small but doing them correctly will help your business to stay on top of the competition.
Choosing an ISP for your business.
Whether you’ve been in business for a while, are just starting out, or planning on moving your business, you should take a good look at your internet service provider (ISP), and see if you are getting the most from your provider. Most businesses choose an ISP based on one of two things; Either they go with Bigpond because it seems easier, or they shop on price. More considering needs to be given to both the choice of ISP, and the choice of plan;
Support IS important
There will come a day when you need to call your ISP for help figuring out why your connection has stopped working. You need to consider how good the call centre is for a given ISP. Believe it or not, it’s possible to get your internet connection from a company with a local australian call centre staffed with trained engineers. We can tell you from a load of experience that his makes a big difference to how fast problems get resolved.
Network Quality
You should also think about the quality of the ISP’s network. Some ISP’s have very basic networks, and many many customers, and that means each of their customers gets a substandard connection. What they don’t tell you, is that the data YOU want to get at has to come down the same wires that every other customer of that ISP uses, so if they don’t have very many connections to the rest of the internet, and if their connections are small, it doesn’t matter what speed your local connection is, you will be shackled by the poor quality network further up the chain.
Email is critical
Nobody does, but you should read the acceptable use policy of your chosen ISP. There are often serious gotcha’s in these conditions, than can impact your business. A good example is Optus, who have this as part of their acceptable use policy;
7. (a) You must not use the service to spam, send bulk and/or unsolicited messages. This includes, but is not limited to commercial advertising, informational announcements, charity requests, petitions for signatures, chain letters and political or religious messages. You must only send such a message to those individuals who have explicitly requested it.
Clauses like these are a red flag, because once they publish it, they have to find some way to enforce it. In the case of Optus, they simply monitor your email volume, and if you send too many emails, they cut off email service, and more recently, cut off the internet connection completely.
As business owners will always need to communicate with their clients, ISP’s who are not email friendly like Optus must be avoided.
Uploads should be free
Many ISP’s now charge for both data you recieve, and data you SEND. This never used to be the case, but many ISP’s see this as an easy way to improve their bottom line. You should make sure your ISP, and the plan you choose, does NOT penalise you for the data you send.
The price should be fixed
The other trick some ISP’s use is to give you a cheap monthly rate, and charge you a very high rate for usage. Make sure your chosen plan is a flat rate plan, with no extra charges for data. These plans might seem more expensive, but are not, because the rate for excess usage is extremely high and will be many times more than the monthly fee.
Contracts should be avoided
Most ISP’s will lock you into a 2 year contract, but if you can find one you are happy with that give you the option of month to month, you should take it. Being locked into a contract for any communications product means you will likely be stuck paying too much later on, and you lose a lot of flexibility.
The hardware matters
As part of the 2 year contract, most ISP’s will give you the router you need to get online. You should consider getting your router from your IT Support provider, because you will almost always get a better unit with more features, and you will also benefit from the support of your IT provider, which is almost always going to be better than the ISP, even great ISP’s like Internode.
Computers for flooded families
The recent devastation wrought by the flooding in Ipswich and Brisbane was a great tragedy, with loss of life, and many people losing their homes.
As a local business, based at Redbank Plains, we are looking for ways we can help the local community. We’ve been doing a lot of work helping local business owners setup temporary offices, replace equipment destroyed by flood waters and recover data from machines.
We’ve come up with a way we think we can help a lot of local families too. It’s estimated that over 600 homes were flooded in Goodna alone, so we think there are many families who will be starting from scratch.
We are collecting computers that people have replaced with new units, and plan to refurbish them, building them into complete working systems, which we can then give to families who have lost everything. A great friend of ours, Trevor Hold (freecollect.com.au) has offered us around 30 computers he has to kickstart the effort. We’ve got a few machines in the office we are adding to the collection, and from there, it’s over to you!
You can help by donating equipment you no longer need. We are after computers and monitors, and we’ll take them in any condition; Even non working machines may have a part we can use to get another one up and running.
We will also need some help identifying people who would benefit from a computer, so if you think you can help in this regard, please get in touch.
Contact Mathew Taylor, either via email – mathew@shiftsolutions.com.au or by phone on 0419 688 266.
Your New Website’s Number 1 Feature
Are you ready to get started with a new website for your business? There’s plenty to figure out, but the funny thing is how many business owners miss the most obvious, and most important feature of their new site.
When you get the first draft for your new site, have a look at the top. Do you see your main contact details featured prominently? If not, it’s probably time to consider a new designer, because unless you feature your most important contact details right at the top of EVERY page on your site, you are wasting time and money.
What do I mean by “most important contact details”? These would be the ways you MOST want visitors to get in touch with you when they are ready. For most small businesses, this is your phone number. Email address is good to, and if you are more of a retail store that you want people to come and visit, make sure your address is up there too.
Your website is about answering the questions of your prospects, and when they have enough answers, make it super easy for them to get in touch, and buy your product or service!
In App Purchases and your Kids.
Many of our clients have children, and these days, most of them end up with the iPods or iPhones as they move through their teenage years. One of the traps we are seeing is kids racking up huge bills via what is known as in app.
Many games available for devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch take advantage of a model where they sell you things to use in the game, after giving you the game for free. In many cases, it’s not obvious to the user that they are buying things with real money, as the purchases are often couched in fictional currency.
To get an idea, read about how a four year old playing smurfs started costing his mum money.
The best way to avoid the problem, is to disable the ability to purchase things within an app, and here’s how you do it;
Go to the SETTINGS section of your iOS device, and choose GENERAL
Next, tap on ENABLE RESTRICTIONS. The device will them ask you to enter a four digit pin code, which you will need later to turn this off again if you want to. As long as your children don’t know the code, they cannot enable in app purchases.
Once thats done, just scroll down to IN APP PURCHASES, and turn them off!
That’s it! Now your safe from surprise charges.
A good surge board will save you money
I read an article at PCMag recently that really made me wonder; The writers summary suggested that surge protection was a waste of time and that you should buy a good UPS instead.
This is utterly wrong.
First off, the only people who need a UPS are those who’s machines are often doing critical work and where a cut in power would trash valuable data. If that’s not you, you probably do not need one.
The problem the writer experienced is one that many people do. It’s called a cheap surge protector. By cheap, I don’t really mean the price either, because I have seen plenty of $200 surge boards that are no better than $30 ones. Let me explain what makes a good one.
The first thing to concern yourself with is the ability of the board to absorb surges. This is usually measured in joules, which is a measure of energy. The way a surge protector works is by absorbing the extra power, a bit like a sponge absorbs water. Just like a sponge, there is a limit to how much it can absorb. Take a look at most, and you will find many of them only take around 500 joules, whereas a good one will absorb over 4000 joules.
The next thing to check is what happens when the board reaches this limit. In the case of nearly every board on the market, the surge protection simply stops working, and the board turns into a regular power strip. You have no idea it’s past its use by date, unless you happen to look at it and see a warning indicator, which some have. You have to ask yourself, how often do you crawl under the desk to check it?
A good surge protector will actually stop working entirely when it reaches this limit. No power to your equipment means no chance of a surge sneaking through once the board has done its job, and it also means that should you get hit with a massive surge or series of surges, your equipment will still be protected.
So go out and buy yourself a new surge board, and ask how many joules it will absorb, and what happens when it reaches that limit.
When to create a second MYOB file
While we are not MYOB consultants, because many of our clients know that Mathew has a great deal of experience with MYOB, we do get a few calls about it from all over Brisbane. One question we were faced with recently was to do with creating a second MYOB company file.
The client in question had just won a large contract, and this would represent a significant portion of their business going forward. They wanted to track this contract specifically, and ensure that it was producing profit.
When we talked to the client, we found that the business was still a single business entity; The new contract would be performed by the existing business, and no special arrangements were being made, beyond the need to track this segment of the business separately.
The client had proposed to create a whole new MYOB company file for this purpose. In this example, we suggested this was a bad idea; Because the new contract would be fulfilled within the scope of the existing business, creating another file would mean costly data integration later, in order to perform company wide reporting functions, such as completing the BAS. This would also pollute one set of data with the other, and in general, lead to a lot of headache!
In situations like this, there are plenty of ways to break things down within MYOB, so that you can see the separate business unit. This can be as simple as having different income and expense codes for each business segment, and in some versions of MYOB, you can also use Job Costing to product profit and loss reports for individual segments or jobs.
Where you are creating an entirely separate business to operate what is in reality a segment of your overall business, then a separate file is called for. Total separate in this case means that the new business entity will have it’s own ABN, bank account and be operated independently.
To learn more about getting the most out of MYOB, we don’t reccomend you do a MYOB Course, but rather look for a quality MYOB consultant who can advise you on the use of MYOB accounting software in your business.
Virus Removal
These days, we see a lot of machines infected with all kinds of nasties. Spyware, adware, malware and viruses are everywhere, and millions of computers are infected every month. Many users are becoming more aware of the problem and able to identify when they have a problem with infection, but the challenge they then face is what to do about virus removal?
We saw a case just this week where a computer owner quickly realised her machine was compromised. Knowing a little about computers, she proceeded to try and reload the computer herself, and after spending a few hours working on it, realised she couldn’t get the machine back up and running, and then brought it into our office.
She is one of the lucky ones; The problem with trying to remove virus infections yourself is that you don’t really know if you have cleaned the computer 100%. There are virus removal tools you can download and run, but they do not guarantee a 100% clean machine, because it’s simply not possible to be sure. Once your machine is infected, the malware agents can mask themselves, and even intercept your attempts to clean them.
The answer is always to completely wipe your computer clean and start from scratch. I’m sure the client I mentioned above thought the same thing, but again, it’s not always that simple. Putting the disk that came with your computer into the machine and following the instructions might work, but it might also leave the data on the hard drive, and you could waste hours only to be right back where you started.
If you know what you’re doing, reformatting your drive and reinstalling Windows, your programs and data files is the way to go. Just make sure you backup your computer first, so you don’t lose any files, photos or music you have on the computer.
If you aren’t sure of how to go about that, the best solution is to have a professional take care of it for you. Shift Computer Solutions, for example, can format, reload and configure your computer quickly, and effectively. Plus, we know all the tricks for configuring your computer so that when you get it back, it’s hardened against reinfection.
The Final Word: Do what you can to avoid infection in the first place. Don’t visit dodgy websites, make sure you are using OpenDNS on your home network, have a good quality anti virus solution (we suggest ESET), and keep your computer up to date.
Clearly Glass Website
When we were approached by Clearly Glass, we were excited to have the chance to build a website for a company that creates such visually stunning products as frameless shower screens, and glass pool fences.
We produced a site built around their three key product offerings, shower screens, pool fences and balustrades. As they offer quite a range of shower screens, we have a sub product level for the site enabling them to add / remove products in a given category.
As all our sites do, the Clearly Glass site incorporates full content management, allowing them to update the content as required, a full news platform so they can post regular articles and updates for their clients, and a great call to action, so that visitors who are ready to buy are left in no doubt what to do next.
Having seen their business up close and personal, we can say if you are in the market for some glass work at your place, give Clearly Glass a call!
