Deverill

I'm curious what you folks here think about this. I've seen other places go on about it but honestly I value the opinion of you guys over almost everywhere else I've been for web-related things. There are two camps of thought about a single-employee web design business. One is that if you put "I" on the web site when talking about your web design business the potential clients will think you are small potatos and look elsewhere. The other is that if you say "we" and they end up only talking to one person then they will think you are a "scammer" or a "BS artist" which is probably worse than the first case. Also, the clients for a small business that's not yet "gone big" will probably be businesses that want small potatos and the prices they charge so there is another thing to consider. If I blow myself up to be a big company would the little fishing charter boats and small businesses of Key West think I'm outside their range and never contact me? (I'm not limiting myself to these types of clients but that is what I see being most prevalent for me now.) So what do you think? "WE" or "I"?

I don't think I'd split off for every variant of OSes that exist - there are a bunch and they have tiny followings but I think Linux is such a "big deal" that a forum for it would certainly be warranted and then maybe have a single section for "others"?

Not me. Have you done a helpdesk ticket? TCH has some pretty techy gurus that may be able to help. From my long-ago Un*x days I wonder if they could delete the sub-domain cgi-bin directories and make a symbolic link back to the main one and would that work? By the way, welcome to the forums and to the family!

$name and $age are variables that have to be filled elsewhere. It could be a form that asks you to input that info or even a cookie saved from when it asked you last time. Just to see what happens, after the <?php put $name="arvind"; $age=109; and it should work if I haven't made a stupid PHP mistake

Welcome home Jake!

I have added the advanced one to every page of my sites. This generates a bunch of mail but I'm not near a bandwidth problem and it gives me the extra advantage of seeing which pages Googlebot hits. I find it interesting when he focuses on certain sections of my site and which pages he almost always hits in a 24 hour period. Probably in about a month I'll get bored with it and scale it back, but for now it's fun to see what he's doing.

Did you create a member name and password? I believe that has to be created before you can actually hook up with it.

Great idea Mitch... these terms can be pretty confusing no matter which package you use. We have the head of the Internet Sales department where I work running around bragging to all the CEOs about all the hits he gets for our website but there's about 50 "things" on the main page. The CEO's don't know the difference and neither does this guy but we keep hearing how much money he's making the company. <sigh>

Hey Boss, I didn't list my server (#30) and I just sent email on port 26 so either I goofed up my settings or you went ahead and did them all. I think the line that says "Outgoing server port (SMTP)" is pretty clear but you never know.

Ok, a spy-guy type is running (after or from someone?) and he steps on a wooden platform seen from the side that has Windoze 2000 on it and he crashes through it, but he's ok... Then he jumps into a car with the license plate ERTHSTNK or ZERONET or something and as he starts it up and gets ready to floor it smoke comes out from under the hood and he has to get out and hoof it some more... Then he gets to a sleek, modern, high tech building that's immaculate and looks like it's from 100 years from now and the sign says "Total Choice Hosting Headquarters" and he goes inside the high tech Las Vegas-style control room and tracks his bad guy, releases the net over him at the flip of a switch and sits back to enjoy his martini while watching a screen flash to his website "Guy Bershard - Private Spy". Of course this could be a big-budget thing but it's some ideas for ya to play with -- afterall, you didn't say they had to be good!

Would it be animated or live-action? (A great animated start would be like the AOL commercial with the little guy running on the treadmill but then he goes flying back off the treadmill... but it seems you're more into live-action).

It's funny I give the example of the host down for several days on a DOS attack and in another thread here they just handled one in 1.5 hours. What timing! In all seriousness and honesty, gabulldog, I am sure that you will enjoy hosting here if you choose to do so. Regards

Similar to what Rob said, it could be someone you know innocently causing them. For instance, if I have your and Rob's email address in my Outlook address book and I get one of the email spreading viruses like sobig, it could create an email that looks like it's from tastewar to Critical Mass and if his system bounces it as having a virus or something then the bounce would come back to you, not me who actually sent it. These spammers are using viruses to spread spam and the virus writers are using spam to spread their viruses! Evil little men with evil little hearts.

Depending on the effects you wish the CSS to create you may be able to redo it in a server-interpreted way that only sends the results to the browser. For instance, I use a PHP script that tells me when Googlebot hits my sites. Google, nor the visitors, can read that because the server does the work and sends the browser nothing that can be read.

AOL, as far as I know, never has offered POP3 and probably never will. They don't want users going outside the "AOL Experience" and can't annoy you with that annoying "You've got mail" voice. (You have got mail? Nice grammar!) Now that they have the new "AOL Communicator" product I don't think there is any chance of getting POP3 out of them You can, however, get to the internet via AOL and set up Outlook to access POP3 mail on another service such as your TCH emails. Just point Outlook to the TCH email services as mentioned in your sign on email and it should work without a problem.

Anything to help! Count me in.

Are you sure *you* have the virus? I've been getting the emails from "Microsoft" at work also. We have software that blocks the attachment but I don't have it but it seems someone else has it and are sending it to me via their address book entry with my email address. I usually go to antivirus.com for help with these things. On their home page at the top right is a link to swen and a bunch of info of how to get rid of it.

For the record, from 4:33 PM 9/18 to 8:59 PM 9/21 is only 3 days, but as Bill said, it's the weekend and the forums are not the "official" best way to ask presales questions. As for TCH support, I was with a host who was down 4 days for a denial of service account. During that time he sent no messages to the users, denied they were down on a web-hosting forum, was able to do nothing about it, and finally, blamed his up-stream provider for the problem. At TCH when this happened recently, Bill was on the phone in a matter of minutes and within about 3 hours, as I remember it, was hooked up with a new provider who could do something about it. Now remember, this is my understanding of the situation and as a user I may have gotten the story wrong or made some incorrect assumptions, but the bottom line was that it was fixed in 3 hours. Also, feel free to compile a list of providers who publish the pager number of their top guy (i.e. CEO or the equivalent) in case of network problems. Finally, the few times there has been an issue I have been in the forums reading step by step how the problem was progressing and solved, usually in less than an hour at most, and never even noticed the problem myself. Anyway, this is a great place to host your small website. Any submitted help desk issues are solved at warp speed, the hosting is very reliable (just look at their uptimes) and the people who run it are top notch. Besides, the prices are the best I've seen for a site with all the tracking and stats, cpanel, click-and-play applications, etc. I believe the email will count against the bandwidth but I am not sure of that... I'm only guessing. As Bill alluded to, though, all it takes is for one of your customers to start spamming and you'll get shut down. They indeed have zero tolerance for spamming here. The best (only?) way to do the email would be a reseller plan. That way you can decide the bandwidth and disk usages for each and add/delete them using the tools that are available. You can use any POP3-compliant email client. The back end is generally irrelevant as long as it serves POP3. I have used Outlook, Eudora and Thunderbird email clients with zero problems. I think others here are using Blogger... and a quick search on the message board confirmed it. Hope some of this helps, but remember that if you need quick answers don't post an index card on the corkboard at the entrance to the grocery store - check out the help sites, search the forums or send an email... you'll get a faster response. Regards

This is great stuff guys! I hope that this whole thread can help others too, but it surely is helping me! I appreciate the thought put into your replies and think that by implementing most/all of them the site will do better. It is an excellent point about how many customers the guy can serve - US Coast Guard laws only permit 6 people (plus crew?) on his boat at a time so even half-days gives us no more than about 360 customers per month at full speed ahead so your point is a good one. Now to find out how to click into that niche! I have noticed that one of the keywords gets some hits I wouldn't have expected and that's "shark". Being such an uninterested angler as I am hurts in this case because I'd never have thought that would be a big draw but apparently it is a nice niche and one I want to take advantage of. In fact, I just tried "key west shark fishing" on Google and came up #5 so that's encouraging assuming the clientele is out there for such a thing. That's another thing, how many folks interested in shark fishing would put "Key West" in their search term - AFAIK, Key West is not well know as a shark hotbed. I believe it would be best to dedicate a page or two in the site to specifically shark fishing and tune all keywords and links to that, but also having a lead back to the main stuff. Another thing to decide is how much link sharing and advertising to recommend to my client. For instance, I have a link to a local hotel that I traded for one on their site. I figure what's the harm because they aren't competing with my boat guy. Afterall, if you sleep here you can fish and if you fish you need somewhere to sleep. I just wonder how many of these would be at the point of diminishing returns. I know if it ends up being a "link farm" it's a Bad Thing. Do I only advertise Key West stuff or do I go for fish-related sites outside Key West to get the relevancy up (hotels and boats aren't really related)? Or something entirely different? Of course I don't want to link to competitors to give the potential customer a chance to click away. Also, paid advertising is kinda new to me too for web promotion. I have been blessed with some good (very narrow) sites to promote before. I started with my church's website and there are only 2 other churches in town with websites that I know of so that's an easy thing. In fact, I've been able to keep the #1 (and several in the top 10) positions at Google for almost as long as the page has existed. The competition for "Key West fishing" is new to me and I am hesitant to spend my client's money on something that may not pan out well for him. I suppose we could pick a few to try, let them run a month or two, and see what results come from it and then switch out the bad ones... isn't that the normal thing to do in any business endeavor? Anyways, enough going on about it. Thanks for your help and I'm all ears for any other comments on this.

Thanks for the link/keyword help, Jack... and "ouch" on that script. I'll bet it's a missing line in .htaccess that's causing it to not parse php. I hate making stupid mistakes! I'll be looking at the rest in the next day or two. Thanks again!

Yeah, I got the Microsoft patch scam 3 times yesterday alone at work. Fortunately the email server filters .EXE files so there's no chance our users can run it. The funny thing is that the first letter of the first sentence is not capitalized and the bottom says the typical "all copyrights owned by their respective companies" but the only thing mentioned is Microsoft stuff! I bet if the virus folks put their brains and energy to good use we'd probably have a cure for cancer by now! As it is I just want to line them up on a wall and blast 'em!

Nat, You rule! No, seriously! An extremely talented artist that sings and writes songs that has taken the initiative to learn the business end of the business and also has jumped in with both feet into the web design arena is just awesome. The interview was very interesting too. Great info about the internet promotion you did early on and how you are using the tools available to promote yourself now. Kudos to Mitch too - great feature for TCH and nice job on putting the thing together! See, this is why TCH rocks!

I recently found a Javascript that has cut my spam mail down dramatically. Unfortunately I don't remember where I saw it (probably in a TCH forum!) but I thought it would be a good addition here in the tutorials section. The basic idea is that Javascript builds the link on the browser end in a way that spam searchers can't see it but regular folks can click on it and activate their normal email mechanisms just like with a mailto tag. Spam emails dropped a lot about 1-2 weeks after I implemented it. The code below is set for my email address "webmaster@jimscomputing.com" so make sure you edit it accordingly. To use it just go to a place in your website where you want an email link, or have one now, and replace the "<a href " with the script below. It will show up in your document as the actual email address and you can put text before and/or after the <script> and </script> tags to make the address show up in a sentence like "Contact us at..." ><script language="JavaScript"> user = "webmaster"; domain = "jimscomputing.com"; document.write('<a href=\"mailto:' + user + '@' + domain + '\">'); document.write(user + '@' + domain + '</a>'); </script>

How does your #1 app get those website forms? If it is a direct link to the database by some other web page then that web page would have to be able to access your PC and the mySQL you have set up there. That could get tricky if your business has firewalls and the like. An intranet is like the internet except they are usually blocked off from the "real world" by firewalls or IP numbering schemes that keeps it local - meaning that only people on your local network can get to them. (This is admittedly oversimplified but it's basically a sound description.) Unless your network has some of these things set up pretty strictly, others at your work could be allowed to access your apps or not as you choose when you set it up. Hope it helps!

Hi gang! I wanted to open this for comments because you guys always give me great answers when I ask for them. The site at www.grandslamkw.com is one of my commercial sites. I would like to hear any comments about SEO or promoting the site that you care to offer. I have asked for a website review in that forum so let's keep this thread to purely promotion. The situation is that this guy is a client, but also a close personal friend of mine. He has a great boat and does everything humanly possible to offer a great trip to his customers. He has a great business but sometimes not great results so he turned to me for help in the form of internet advertising. He has a clean boat and is very presentable so that's not the problem - it's just that he is on Charterboat Row which is about 20+ charter boats all like his... walkup traffic just has too many options so we want to catch them before they get here. I've been doing his site for over a year and he is getting customers, but not as many as I'd like to see. He's getting 15-20 visits per day but about half are robots and spiders which is not entirely bad, but they don't pay the bills. We have gotten over 60 page references from Google and another 60 or so from various others. I have flags on all my sites that tell me when Google visits and although this site is listed, the Googlebot hasn't visited it since I added the email notifier - even though he has visited my daycare and church page multiple times per day and every once in awhile he ends up at my web design pages. Another interesting fact is that 63% of the people that come to the site via search engines are there because of the page for his 1969 GTO - not many of them are interested in fishing charters. I've submitted the site to the TCH Family forum and am going right now to request a site review but would love to hear any ideas from my TCH Family on how to get this guy tapped into some of the revenue that is out there on the 'net... SEO or any other advertising ideas welcome! Thanks!