Articles Archive

How To Code HTML Email Newsletters (All New Version)

Please note a version of this article is published at SitePoint which includes links to related articles on their site. This article has been online since 2004. Changes to this article are noted at the... 
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How to Pick an Online ECommerce Shopping Cart: 6 Carts Reviewed

A more recent version of this article has been posted at SitePoint, which also has links to related articles that might be of interest. The SitePoint article also has a review of Google Checkout. Selling... 
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How To Do Basic Search Engine Optimization for Web Pages

When a prospect or customer uses Google to find a product or service you offer, ideally you want your web pages to appear in the top 10 search results. There are many excellent articles online that describe... 
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How to Make New Year’s Resolutions You Can Keep

New Year’s resolutions are cliched. Many people make them. Few people remember them months later. However, clear resolutions can be a powerful way to boost your business. And January, after the hectic... 
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How To Build a Basic Email Marketing Capability

Please note that I’ve written a companion article to this one, How To Code HTML Email Newsletters, that describes the subtleties of coding html email to work beautifully across almost all email reading... 
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How to Protect Your Website Images

If your business offers unique products, and you have a website, you may have wondered how to prevent competitors from copying your images to their computer. What made the web so popular so fast, the ability... 
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Use Online Surveys To Support Business Decisions: An Interview With Vivek Bhaskaran

Run your business without customer feedback and you might as well burn your money. How do you dig out customer ideas that make a huge difference to all your customers? Lately online surveys appear to be... 
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How To Evaluate Programmers, Without Being A Programmer

Updates to this article are noted at the bottom of this page. You are a business person. You know customers, products, competitors, pricing, and how to make them make money. You do not have time to learn... 
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How To Create An Editorial Process To Publish Web Content

Recently I read an article online that complained about the poor quality of content on internet and intranet websites. The upshot: too many web authors think getting their authoring technology right will... 
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How To Easily Edit DNS Zone Files To Configure Email Servers

Earlier this year, and again this week, I had to configure a client’s email once they moved to a new web hosting vendor. In both cases, they had old webhosting contracts that cost too much, around... 
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One Hit Wonders: How To Manage Your Search Engine Traffic

This website was recently relaunched in part to make all 600 plus pages searchable by the Google search engine. If you do not know, Google will not crawl and index pages that have id= in their URL, for... 
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Visitors and Conversions and Page Views, Oh My: Website Activity Reporting Tools

“Dirt bag soap” surely is an odd phrase. So is “My dog Mundi.” What do they both have in common? They showed up in my website log files recently. At least six visitors have used... 
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Web Page Layout 101

With millions of websites on the internet, you might think that there are almost as many ways to design and layout content on a website. In fact, so far there are no more than four styles of web pages... 
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Are Websites Over-rated? A $500 website and email strategy (Part 2)

Last time, I wrote about a website and email strategy that would allow almost any business, especially small businesses like florists, heating oil companies, law firms, and hardware stores, use the internet... 
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Are Websites Over-rated? A $500 website and email strategy (Part 1)

Three years after the internet boom, many businesses have not ventured past the brochure website phase. Even fewer use email to reach their customers and prospects. The question these companies face is... 
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Penny Ha’ Penny: Too Foolish To Fail?

Last time, I wrote about my goals for this twice a month column. This week I want to write about a business whose internet experiences provide a terrific example of how a business can use the internet... 
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Crossing The Internet Chasm

Today, on my wife’s birthday, I took our daughter to shop for a gift. We wound up at Cannondale Crossing, a local shopping area of sleepy Civil War era buildings. As we drove out of Cannondale Crossing,... 
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Do-It-Yourself Email Newsletters For Businesses

Please note this article is a general interest piece that describes how a few small businesses have used no and low-cost email newsletter software to reach their customers. I’ve written how-to articles... 
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How to tell if your website is broken (and how to fix it)

See how many of these questions you can answer about your website:Where is your website hosted? What do you pay per month for webhosting? Can you change content on your website easily (within minutes)?... 
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How I eat my own dog food: Behind the scenes of this website.

If you don’t know, “eat your own dog food” is American slang for using a product you sell. In this case, if I tell you that businesses can use internet tools for no or low cost to find... 
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