Customer service and help desk for web designers

Posted on August 7, 2009 by admin

: Image via Wikipedia

SmarterTrack 4.x is a powerful help desk application built for tracking, managing, and reporting on customer service and communications, including sales and support issues. Businesses can manage employees and company communications at distributed locations around the world from a Web browser—increasing the efficiency of virtual offices, mobile agents, and companies with multiple locations. Features include:

* A world-class Ticket solution that transforms service, sales, and support emails into a powerful information distribution system
* Live Chat, which gives businesses the ability to reduce phone calls, capture information on website visitors, and assist more customers
* WhosOn, which gives businesses real-time tracking of customers as they navigate websites, providing the opportunity to increase sales, expedite customer service, and gather information on site visitors
* A portal interface that is optimized for search engines and functions as the central hub for all communication channels
* Self-service resources, such as a Knowledge Base and news items, that allow customers to research and resolve questions and issues
* A Web-based interface that provides accessibility wherever an Internet connection is available
* An integrated survey system that can be triggered upon events
* More than 70 summary and trend reports with many levels of customization and filtering
* Support for multiple brands within a company

And, there is a free version (without as many features, obviously)

TenderApp.com – A New Helpdesk Application (killerstartups.com)

Link checking

Posted on July 13, 2009 by admin

You should keep your web site up to date. One task, which I have just completed, is to check that all your external (and internal) links are still alive. There’s nothing more unprofessional looking than clicking on a link to see it go to a 404 page.

The other task is to check how your affiliates are doing. There are a lot of mergers of affiliate programs and many disappear. They don’t let you know this necessarily. I’m having to go through many of my links on ozwebhub to delete old ones and to change code for affiliates I recommend.

I use Xenu Sleuth as a link checker. Often makes mistakes, but that’s easy to check. Link checkers are not much good for blogs which are ‘no folllow’ however, as all those blogs will show up as ‘not found’.

What social networking sites will survive the financial crisis?

Posted on March 22, 2009 by admin

I haven’t done a real study of this, but I watch as some networking sites in my demographic become more and more popular and others decline.

Firstly, there are those people who have jobs and are not that interested in making money from the internet. More and more of them appear to be joining Facebook. My age group isn’t going for Myspace. My friends are using it for advertising social events and it seems to work quite well. Then again there are still those real life friends of mine who would never join Facebook because they don’t want their information anywhere on the net. A natural fear, but one which doesn’t have to be frightening if one is very clear about what one writes down and shares in terms of their lives.

These sort of people would probably use Skype as well. Skype has improved a lot with video and webcams so that you can see your companion. Skype too is used by people who do actually find people in the world who they would like to become more familiar with in real life. There are at least two people I know who have created romances using this form of communication.

Blogging is really for those who hope to make money from the internet. Well, I don’t know about you, but my Google cheques are really drying up and I’ve heard the same is so for other bloggers and web site owners.

Twitter is really taking off and there are so many applications for Twitter. It combines well with Facebook.

There’s been at least one traffic generator I know of which has closed down – BlogRush. So there must be more.

Here’s a list of social networking sites from wikipedia

Do contribute with your thoughts about who will survive and who won’t and what is happening out there right now.

Google's page rank is not so secret

Posted on October 17, 2008 by abcxenony

I thought it worth repeating this article from Marketing tools and resources

Google’s Maile Ohye said recently;

“One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.”

“Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”

“As many of you know, relevant, quality inbound links can affect your PageRank (one of many factors in our ranking algorithm). And quality links often come naturally to sites with compelling content or offering a unique service.”

He also said;

Start a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you’re passionate about your site’s topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.
Teach readers new things, uncover new news, be entertaining or insightful, show your expertise, interview different personalities in your industry and highlight their interesting side. Make your site worthwhile.
Participate thoughtfully in blogs and user reviews related to your topic of interest. Offer your knowledgeable perspective to the community.
Provide a useful product or service. If visitors to your site get value from what you provide, they’re more likely to link to you.

Google's New Custom 404 Page Creator

Posted on October 6, 2008 by abcxenony

Google has launched a new tool in their Webmaster Tools suite that allows website owners to create custom 404 pages. 404 pages are those that don’t exist and therefore return a “not found” error when users try to view them in their web browser.

Visitors can stumble on to a 404 page for many reasons including:

• The URL they are entering has been miss spelt.

• They have followed an old link to content that has been moved or deleted.

• The link they are following has been truncated in an email message etc.

When visitors land on these pages, it’s very likely that many of them may just leave because they can’t be bothered searching through your website to find the correct URL. To combat this, instead of returning a “File not found” error page, try using Google’s “Enhance 404 pages” tool to create a much more useful 404 error page.

The first step is to configure your web server to display your new 404 page. This is usually quite simple but varies for each hosting setup, so please check your server or web host documentation on how to do this.

Once this has been done, visit the “Enhance 404 pages” section in Webmaster tools and copy and paste a javascript snippet into your page. Because this page is designed in HTML, you can also customize the look of the page to match your sites overall design.

Google says the feature is currently experimental and they will work on improving it in the meantime.

How to protect your HTML

Posted on September 19, 2008 by abcxenony

How to protect your web site from thieves.

Is it possible? Is it advisable?

Yes it is advisable for security reasons, but then there is the philosophy that the internet should be open source and free. Right click blocking codes don’t really do the job as people can just look at your source and write it down.
I’ll leave it up to you. Here is what HTML-Protector says about their product, and it is pretty cheap, besides. You don’t need to use it on every web page where you want people to download something, but it will help stop that most annoying spam.

HTML-Protector.com
is incredibly simple to use. Within seconds, you can:

Completely hide all your HTML!

Encrypt every single e-mail link, ensuring spam “spiders” can’t snatch your address!

Securely encrypt every single PayPal “return” link!

Lock your pages, so they only display on your site!

Disable right-clicking, offline browsing, text highlighting and printing!

Stop URLs being shown in the status bar!

Cancel any clipboard copying or screenshots from being taken!

Prevent dragging-and-dropping and Adobe Acrobat Web capture!

Automatically break out of frames!

Some useful keyword tools

Posted on August 30, 2008 by abcxenony

1. Good Keywords v2.01 (595 KB) finds the best keywords for your web pages. Features include Keyword Suggestions, Phrase Builder, Keyword Organizer, Misspelled Words, and Site and Link Popularity Finder. For Windows 95/ 98/ 2000/ NT/ XP.

2. Golden Phrases 1.0.3 (391 KB) is a analyzing utility that scans specified log files to retrieve all search phrases used by your visitors to find your website through search engines. It gathers search phrase statistics and determines the position of your site on search engines for every phrase. Its unique “Perspectivity rating” technology also allows you to find which keyphrases were not used. For Windows Windows 95/ 98/ Me/ NT/ 2000/ XP/ 2003.

3. PPC Keyword Generator (1.1 MB) is a powerful keyphrase permutator/generator. Generate 100s of keyphrases in seconds, remove duplicate keyphrases automatically, define per-keyphrase custom CPC/URLs and import/export. For Windows 98 and above.

4. Hixus Keyword Inventor 1.0 (679 KB) is a SEO and keyword popularity analysis front-end for the the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Speeds up the process of finding popular keywords. For Windows 98/ ME/ NT4.x/ XP/ 2000.

5. e3KWDCheck 2.5b (920 KB) is a lightweight and fast SEO tool for analyzing keyword density within text documents. It can also retrieve and analyze online web documents using the built-in address bar. For Windows 95/ 98/ 2000/ NT/ ME/ XP.

6. Get Keywords 1.0 (289 KB) is a small program that finds keywords in files and then creates an optimized web page using selected keywords. Features include automatic words search, add/remove keywords options, web page creation and preview, etc. For Windows 98 and above.

7. Keyword Digger 1.0 (50 KB) is a simple tool designed to search Overture for all keywords people entered during the previous month. Provides the number of times a keyword was searched and up to 100 different variations for that term. For Windows 9x/ Me/ NT/ 2000/ XP.

8. AnalogX Keyword Extractor v1.03 (214 KB) extracts keywords from a webpage, and then sorts and indexes them based on their usage and position. Once indexed, you can adjust search-engine specific weighting factors and keyword criteria to get the best possible view of how a search engine sees your site. An older program but still useful. For Windows 95/ 98/ 2000/ NT/ XP.

Everything the web designer needs

Posted on August 27, 2008 by abcxenony

I came across a web site which performs a similar function to my own but lists so many more things. It’s a simple site design with links under categories such as web design, web site maintenance, tutorials, css generators, colours, affiliates, web site validation and much much more.

It’s called agency tool

Great site even though it is in competition to mine.

multifarious mushrooms

an extension of www.ozwebhub.com

Category Archives: web design