New Portfolio Items
We recently added several new projects to our portfolio. They will be on the website in the near future, but for now have a sneak peak at them on our Flickr page and find links to them on Delicious.
Could your business benefit from a website or email marketing?
Snowed In and Productive
You may be snowed in today, but you can still evaluate, decide, and take steps toward improving your future and your business’ success. Read a self-improvement book by one of the greats such as Anthony Robbins
Then take the time to evaluate your personal or business use of the Internet and electronic marketing. Are you maximizing your use of websites, e-mail, e-commerce, and social media? Most of us could benefit from taking a step back, using our own websites (both business and personal marketing) and noting how they could be improved. Relax with a cup of hot tea, take notes, and once you’ve decided that it could improve, contact us at BTS to discuss how we can help.
Does it cost anything to make your own website?
Our team members are active Internet users, helping others, sharing notes and information, and pretty well anything you could imagine. Recently someone posed this question on Yahoo! Answers, “Does it cost anything to make your own website?” We thought the response from one of our team members that was voted “Best Answer” was worth sharing.
(don’t mind his capitalization and punctuation; he has his own ideas of how it should be done)
it really depends on what you want from the site.
for a business site, probably yes, you will want professional backed up hosting and a site designed by a reputable company and email at the domain (.com, .net, .org, etc) that you own.
if you just want a free personal website to have a few pages and put stuff on, you might check out freewebs.com, weebly.com or pages.google.com.
for a blog, no, you don’t need to pay anything to have a blog site. Take a look at wordpress.com or blogger.com, both are really good free blog sites that let you set up an account, do some customizations and have a free personal blog website. (note: blogger also lets you use a domain you own)
if you want a community type website, say for you and your friends or for you family to share info, you can do that real easy for free too. They will let you share pictures, music, messages, and more. You might look at facebook.com, multiply.com, bebo.com
Check out Billy Alexander’s fantastic work!
Drop It to Keep It Safe
It sounds contrary at first glance, and I will explain, but dropping your important files may be the best way to save them. We all know that computers don’t live forever and no matter how technical or non-technical you are, you know something is bound to break sometime. With a little know-how you can recover from most failures. The one that becomes more tricky is the harddrive and that is why you just might want to drop your important files.
The harddrive is what stores information on your computer. They are built to last, but since they contain moving parts, they do eventually stop working. When it stops working, what happens to you important data? You might be able to pay large amounts to a specialized company to try and recover it, but most likely it’s just gone, unless you have a backup.
The concept of a backup is simple; keep a second copy of all you important data somewhere other than on your computer. But how? You could manually copy everything to another networked computer, or an external harddrive, or USB drive. You could use software that comes with your external harddrive to do an “automatic” backup, but when it compresses and manipulates your data into it’s own format that you cannot directly read, how will you know it really did what it claims to “automatically” do? Better yet, you could use some of the fantastic open source software that is available to automatically synchronize you data to the external drive, this leaves it readable and usable. That is a good solution, but you need to be a little bit tech savy for that. Just talking about it in this paragraph is ugly enough, much less actually reading the tech stuff to do it.
So what’s a regular non-tech to do? Now we’re getting to the punchline; drop the files! The online site GetDropbox.com offers up to 3 gigs of free online storage space. While 3g is not huge, it is most likely enough to backup your critical files. They have both a desktop program for your computer and an Internet interface so you can access your files from any computer connected to the Internet.
Their process is easy, even for non-technical users. Go to GetDropbox.com and click to download their software, install it and it will walk you through creating an account and setting everything up. It will create a folder called dropbox in your My Documents folder. Simply “drop” your important files into the dropbox folder and that’s it, the software will do the rest and keep a copy safely and securely stored on their remote computer. No worries for you.
They have a good tutorial and some documents to help explain what is going on. If you want to get a little more advanced you can use the public folder to share with everybody, create public photo galleries, or share with specific people to collaborate on work.
They have versions of their software for Windows, MAC, and Linux so everyone can take advantage of their service. All told GetDropbox is a wonderful experience and a great way to keep a safe copy of important files outside of your business or office. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s useful! For me that is a winning combination, so why not give it a try and drop some files.
Check out Billy Alexander’s fantastic work!
Need one of the more robust backup solutions mentioned above?
Contact BTS
