Snoitulos Ten

There are so many unsavory people out there… occasionally we get a call from a client wondering if an email or letter is legit. When we get one ourselves, we try to post them here so you know to be on the look out – Here is an email we got a couple days ago:

Dear CEO,

We are a domain name registrar centre in HongKong which mainly deal with the domain name registration and dispute internationally, we have an important issue to confirm with you.

1. On the July 14,We received a formal application from a company named ” … Continue Reading

Our Data Center performed a physical move of our servers last night. The maintenance window was to be from 11 PM Pacific until 1 AM Pacific. With an expected down time of 20-30 minutes. Had all gone as planned this window is the lowest traffic window for our servers.

Unfortunately, all did not go well. And one the Windows Apps server did not reboot. Technicians are working on the problem but I do not yet have an ETA for the servers to be back on line. The contingency plan is to install a new server but that will take time … Continue Reading

NSNA CEO Bob Reynolds and I recently traveled to Nashville to take part in the CPrint Sales Summit. (Read the Press Release) We were pitching our ProFusion Dealer Program to these CPrinters which would essentially allow them to sell a technical product (websites, hosting, email marketing, etc.) to a non-technical audience. The printing industry has been hurting over the past several years with more and more companies opting not to print brochures and with more of them moving items they would traditionally print, to the web. So we saw the print industry as a natural fit to be resellers … Continue Reading

People often ask me what tools I use to make my life on a PC easier… well here is a list of some of my favs.

1. PixResizer (http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm) easily allows you to resize one or multiple images. Please, please use this or http://profusionproducts.com/resizer/ to resize your images before you load them onto your website.

2. TweetDeck – I manage a few Twitter and FaceBook accounts and TweetDeck makes this simple from one interface

3. Pixie – (http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php) ever wonder what the hex, RGB, or CMYK value of the color on your favorite website is? Well wonder no more, Pixie is a … Continue Reading

My degree in psychology does not qualify me to sell a technical product. When I first got in this industry (almost 6 years and 2,300 websites ago) I thought, boy, do I have a lot to learn. And that was true, and I almost let it cripple me.

Now, for those of you who do not know me directly, I am not short on confidence. My parents told me I could do anything, and I believed them. So when given the opportunity to start a company selling web solutions, I said why not and jumped in with both feet. Unfortunately, the … Continue Reading

Once upon a time in a land far far away, I attended in intensive 5 day marketing training in Texas. Seems like forever and 2 company start ups ago, so I kind of dismissed the things I learned there as old knowledge. Well, I was just cleaning out my desk and I found some of the materials that I took home from that class and I came across the idea of a hopper system. A hopper is a system that captures leads and automatically sends response pieces to them so they won’t “Fall Through The Cracks”. When I learned about … Continue Reading

I wrote this article back in 2004. I was going through my archives and found that the points I made 6 years ago still plague many websites today. For anyone who missed the article when it was first published, here it is again:

Why most websites don’t work…

The Internet is a huge opportunity for small and medium sized businesses for many reasons.

1. The Internet does not recognize size. If you are a small 2 person accounting firm, the Internet won’t know that, you can compete online with the larger firms and have a better chance of winning the business … Continue Reading

We’re currently working on a new Ultra Internet Solution version (watch out! – It’s got some great new features) and we’re interested in hearing ideas and suggestions from the experienced UIS Community on what we could do to facilitate creating, managing and maintaining websites as intuitively as possible for business users. As you probably know, we are currently on version 3.6 of the Ultra IS platform (it has been six years and thousands of websites have been launched since we delivered a web site on version 1.0) and it is beginning to show that it is time for an overhaul. … Continue Reading

I don’t consider myself a grammar expert by any stretch of the imagination; however, I am consistently shocked at how often some words get misused or misspelled. Many of the gems below came from Tweets over the past few weeks. I get that a tweet is 140 characters long and is basically a stream of consciousness. However, for most of you, your tweets are public. That means a potential client or employer could be reading what you are writing and it never hurts to sound intelligent. Some of the biggest offenders are:

• Lose vs. Loose – you are … Continue Reading
  

My dad (Bob Reynolds, CEO of Net Solutions) and I have shared an office since August of 2009. Not a big office, probably 12′ x 12′. At first this annoyed the crap out of me. He eavesdrops on my phone calls, he types loudly and we definitely operate with two different internal thermostats. After I got over the initial minor annoyances of sharing an office, I started to realize that there could be some real benefits to this new situation.

Bob has been in business forever. As far back as I can remember he and my mom have owned … Continue Reading