Inland Pacific Consulting
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Category Archives: General
5 Ways To Drive More Traffic To Your Website
“If you build it, they will come.”
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
If I’ve learned anything over the past few years, it’s that this old axiom doesn’t always apply, especially in this day and age. Simply putting together a website with the latest technology platforms on top of a semi-clever URL won’t do the trick. There are, however, five simple things that you can implement to move the traffic needle up and improve your metrics.
Search Engine Optimization: Search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO for short, is one of the hottest topics in website development today. Not in the know? Here’s a quick rundown. According to Wikipedia, it’s “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid search results as opposed to Search Engine Marketing (SEM).” It’s like tidying up your website and filling out all of the appropriate forms so that search engine crawlers will get the most context from your site and reward you with a higher page rank.
Why Do Online Shoppers Abandon Purchases?
A new survey released this past week revealed that nearly half of online shoppers have abandoned their carts multiple times in the past three weeks due to high shipping costs, security concerns and lack of convenience. The average cost of abandoned goods in U.S. shopping carts is $109. This data was supplied by PayPal.
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
High shipping costs was cited as the largest single reason for cart abandonment. While nothing could have prevented one-third of shoppers from abandoning purchases, the survey found that providing shipping costs up-front might have caused 40 percent to complete the purchase. To help merchants encourage shoppers to purchase, PayPal today announced a new Express Checkout feature – the PayPal Instant Update API. By integrating the new API, merchants can show order details earlier in the process including shipping options, insurance choices and tax totals.
“To get shoppers to buy, it’s critical merchants make the checkout experience easy and costs transparent,” said Eddie Davis, senior director of SMB merchant services, PayPal. “Our new PayPal Instant Update API will help merchants get customers the information they need up-front to drive sales.”
The survey also uncovered signs that the economy still has shoppers wary about clicking the “purchase” button. More than one-third of respondents abandoned checkout because they didn’t plan for all of the expenses; while more than 25 percent left the site to search for a coupon. However, one-third of shoppers later returned to the same site to buy. An additional 20 percent purchased the items at a brick and mortar store or competitor’s Web site.
Job Seekers Find New Rules Of Recruitment: NPR
It seems like the line between social networking and business is becoming even more blurred, especially in these tough times and high unemployment. But the trend is clear: Social Networking is becoming more important in the hiring process if not a requirement to even being considered.
Blogs and Facebook pages have gone from mere kids’ play to essential
for communicating with employers online. Someone applying for a job in
marketing, for example, will do much better in an interview if he or
she already commands an audience through a blog. People in sales look
better if they can prove they have a broad network of contacts in their
field.These new rules especially hold true in the high-tech
fields, where being up to the minute is considered essential. But even
other industries are following suit.
Job Seeker Faux PasHiring managers say they stay clear of candidates who make these digital job-seeking mistakes:
- Not having an updated profile, with recommendations, on sites like LinkedIn or similar sites relating to your line of work.
- Having a husband-and-wife e-mail address.
- Having an AOL address.
- Some executives say those are very outdated.
- Not doing extensive research about the company, its culture and the position you’re applying for.
- Not filing your resume digitally, even if you bring paper backups.
- “Cold” e-mailing executives with whom you’ve never made a prior connection, either online or in person.
- Asking an executive you’re hoping will hire you to be your “friend” on Facebook
Job Seekers Find New Rules Of Recruitment : NPR
Blogged with the Flock Browser
The Optimistic Marketer’s Guide to Recession Success
I ran across an interesting list of five suggestions of what you can do to actually grow and prosper during the current recession. It’s always nice to run across some positive thinkers among all the talk of doom and gloom. Someone tweeted this to me and I thought I’d share it with you.
- Re-evaluate the value you bring to your customer.
Simple ask yourself “What business am I in? List all of the potential answers then match it up with what your consumers need. Boil that down till you have a view of your business that is positioned for growth. Dunking Donut’s is in the “fuel that gets me though my day” business. The New York Times is in the “Information I need to know” business (there will always be a demand for “news” – it’s the “paper” part that is killing them). United Airlines is in the “get me there” business. New perspectives will open new possibilities.
SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements
Here is some advance info on what to expect with Microsoft’s release of SharePoint Server 2010. For our hosting clients, you have nothing to worry about, Inland Pacific Consulting is already running Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 64 bit editions, so the upgrade will be seamless when Microsoft releases SharePoint 2010. Below is the preliminary information from the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog regarding the release of SharePoint Server 2010:
We’ve heard loud and clear that you want system requirements information as early as possible to assist in your budgeting and planning, so today we’re happy to announce (and confirm) some preliminary system requirements for SharePoint Server 2010:
- SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64-bit only.
- SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2.
- SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005.
In addition to the requirements listed above we also wanted to share with you some preliminary detail about SharePoint Server 2010 browser compatibility.
To ensure the best possible experience across multiple browsers we’re focusing our SharePoint 2010 engineering efforts on targeting standards based browsers (XHTML 1.0 compliant) including Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.x. running on Windows Operating Systems. In addition we’re planning on an increased level of compatibility with Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x on non-Windows Operating Systems. Due to this focus Internet Explorer 6 will not be a supported browser for SharePoint Server 2010.
So, what can you do today to get into the best shape for SharePoint Server 2010?
- Start by ensuring new hardware is 64-bit. Deploying 64-bit is our current best practice recommendation for SharePoint 2007.
- Deploy Service Pack 2 and take a good look at the SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Checker that’s shipped as part of the update. The Upgrade Checker will scan your SharePoint Server 2007 deployment for many issues that could affect a future upgrade to SharePoint 2010.
- Get to know Windows Server 2008 with SharePoint 2007, this post is a great starting point.
- Consider your desktop browser strategy if you have large population of Internet Explorer 6 users.
- Continue to follow the Best Practices guidance for SharePoint Server 2007.
- Keep an eye on this blog for updates and more details in the coming months.
Below are a few common Q&A’s (which we’ll add to as required)
Bigger Is Not Always Better
Huge Web Hosting Company Begs Users To Adopt Gmail
This was a recent headline that caught my eye recently and started me thinking about web hosting and size and value and the appropriate web hosting service based on your business needs.
To my mind, this article emphasizes that one-size-fits all and cheap and bigger is really not better and again reminds me of that old saying “You get what you pay for”.
Does anyone that is in business for themselves that takes their business seriously really want the cheapest of anything they can buy?
Is your web site an after-thought–something that you think you ‘must’ have because everyone else has one, but you don’t really realize the importance of it so you try to do it on the cheap?
After seeing this article I went right to the company web site and the first thing I saw was the advertised rate of $5.95 per month with Gigabytes of data storage Terabytes of bandwidth and a whopping 90 day money back guarantee–seems you can’t go wrong with all they are giving you–and a money back warranty to boot.
And then you read the blog article, written by the owner of the company, requesting their clients switch to Google for their email service, one of the most important services to a small business, and you start to realize what they are all about.
First, their support is terrible because they have too many clients and not enough trained support staff. Second, they don’t have to support web sites because most people naive enough to opt for a five dollar a month hosting service don’t really know if their web site is up or down and do not treat their web presence an an integral part of their business. Consequently, they may be better off having no web site than a web site that is not available when a potential client tries to visit the site and receives an error message.
Netbooks becoming popular as IT budgets are cut
With the current state of the economy, businesses are cutting their IT budgets and looking for cost saving ways to perform necessary day to day tasks. With prices on the new netbooks under the $400.00 mark, they can be just right when replacing or adding notebook computers for company employees.
Netbooks are a class of laptop computers that are small, light, and inexpensive, with reduced specifications and processing power relative to larger laptops. Netbooks are well-suited for accessing web-based applications, cloud computing, and rich Internet applications, and are less appropriate for running complex or resource-intensive applications directly from the netbook itself.
While the devices’ screen sizes range in from below 5 inches to over 12 and weigh between 2 and 3 pounds, at the end of 2008 the typical netbook featured a 3-lb weight, a 9-inch screen, wireless Internet connectivity, Linux or Windows XP, an Intel chip, and a cost of less than US$400.
Netbooks represent a “greener” alternative to larger laptops “thanks to lower power demands, fewer toxic components, and a resource-efficient approach to computing.”
Site Builder Upgrade and Feature Enhancements
Site Builder is an easy to use on-line design tool that enables anyone to design their own web site quickly and easily. Inland Pacific Consulting has offered Site Builder as an option available with our web site hosting packages for many years. We are pleased to announce the following improvements and additions to Site Builder design tool:
- Analyze traffic with Google Analytics – users can now see how visitors interact using Google Analytics.
- New web site design templates have been added that provide more functionality and a new modern design theme.
- A new Image Replacement Wizard now allows you to automatically apply a range of image effects to any image that you upload and helps you pick the most suitable image effect option for your web site. All you have to do is to upload any image of your choice, choose an area of the image that you like and then pick from the available image effect options generated by the wizard.
- A new and improved Form Wizard helps you create simple or fully customized forms for your web site with an editable “mailto:” email address option as well as a provision for adding descriptive text above and below the form page.
- A series of improvements have been made to allow you to do things like add metatag information, edit page names, and create a site map to improve Search Engine Optimization. Additionally, to make it more search engine friendly, web sites will be published as pure HTML without JavaScript.
- You can now choose to align your web site to the left or the center of the browser window.
- A new Flash Wizard allows you to select from a wide range of flash intro movie templates for your web site. You can customize the color, image, sound, text and the messages that appear as part of the animation.
- A revamped WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor helps you create rich standards compliant HTML content without having to know HTML. You can add text, images, links etc. in a word processor-like mode. The feature rich editor includes a spell check, style sheet (CSS) support, HTML & XHTML editing modes, and more.
- You can now add stand-alone pages to your web site. Stand-alone pages are not listed as part of the regular site navigation links and can be accessed only through a direct link you provided to your site users.
Microsoft Office Top Tips for 2008
If you use Microsoft Office at work or at home, you may find this link to Microsoft's most popular, most downloaded and highest rated templates, training, columns and more, helpful–and it's all FREE! In the downloads category there is a link to the Office compatibility update that will allow you to read and save documents in the new Office 2007 format if you have not yet upgraded from an earlier edition of Office. If you don't use Office, you can also download viewers that will allow you to view Office Word and PowerPoint files.
There are also links to the most popular training demos such as improving productivity by using Wiki in SharePoint and Meeting Work Spaces in Outlook 2003. There's something there for everybody and I recommend you check it out!
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What Happened to FrontPage?
After nine years of being an award-winning Web authoring tool, FrontPage was discontinued in late 2006 and official support for FrontPage and FrontPage Server Extensions was discontinued in 2007. FrontPage is no longer offered with Microsoft operating systems stating with Windows 2008 Server products.
A third party Microsoft partner has developed a new set of FP Extensions that will work on both 32 and 64 bit systems running Windows 2008 Server to provide legacy support for people still using MS FrontPage. Inland Pacific Consulting has installed the extensions on our Windows 2008 servers and will continue to support FP Extensions and FrontPage, at least for the time being. However we are recommending that our clients migrate to one of the two new Microsoft design tools that have replaced FrontPage: Office SharePoint Designer 2007 for the enterprise information workers and Expression Web for the professional Web designer.
Microsoft Next Generation Web Authoring Tools Over-view
What are these new tools?
Microsoft Expression Web 2 Upgrade
Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007
Which tool is for you?
Use Office SharePoint Designer 2007 if you are a solution creator and content author working using SharePoint technologies. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 will enable information workers to develop applications and solutions on top of the SharePoint platform to enable organizational agility, business process automation, and get the full value of Microsoft Office applications on the SharePoint platform.
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