While many small business owners have that nagging voice in the back of their heads telling them to build a website so they'll get more customers, it takes a little more effort than just building it. One of my clients had a book he had authored, with a couple thousand copies sitting in his garage waiting to be sold. He wanted a website to sell his book. The site turned out well, promoting the book appropriately, with excerpts and videos of how to use the book in an educational setting. The domain name was perfectly suited, matching the title of the book and also the subject matter. Google ranked it number one for a variety of searches. But the books didn't sell. Oh, he had a few sales from the Internet, but he refused to put in any more effort. He would go into schools and demonstrate his book, but wouldn't remember to tell them the web address. He had flyers and business cards, but he didn't want to spend the money to get the URL on it, not even hand-writing it on them. Despite all our conversations about it, not once did he ever make any effort to tell his customers his website existed. How are they to know they can buy his books online if he doesn't tell them? He eventually gave up on the website entirely, frustrated because although it looked good, functioned properly, advertised it appropriately and even ranked #1 in Google, it didn't succeed.

It is a common misconception to rely on search engines alone. Search engines are fabulous, they have their place, and they are necessary to the success of a website. But in reality, it's generally not what is going to drive your customers to your website. YOU need to do that. But it doesn't take much effort to make it a success; your customers want to see your website, you just need to let them know where it is. Put your website address (domain name) on:

• Business cards
• Invoices and receipts
• Printed materials (flyers, brochures, pamphlets)
• Free bookmarks or other give-aways
• A sign by your cash register
• A sign or banner on your wall
• Your store window
• The yellow pages
• Newspaper ads
• Shopping bags
• Press releases, magazine articles
• Use your imagination: t-shirts, mugs, dog leashes, Christmas cards...

Any time you mention your business name you should always have your web address listed. Every time a potential customer sees your name, you need to give them the opportunity to find your business online. To counter the above story, here's a success story from a very small effort. Winter months can be slow months for any business, so I decided to create a Facebook Fan Page for one of my retail clients. I even included it as a Facebook Fan Box Widget right on his website so people could see it. For the first two weeks he had four "fans" that were strictly friends and family (the only ones we had told). Last Friday afternoon he put a sign by his cash register that mentioned you could find him on Facebook, and by Monday morning he had 15 additional fans, and that number is steadily increasing. One little sign by the cash register is all it took to get people looking at his website. Do this yourselves!

I promised to report back after The Mac Shack repaired my computer. Unfortunately, even though it's been a full week since I dropped it off for my 3-5 day repair, it's still not repaired. I left it there on Monday. I waited until Thursday to call, and they were just opening it at that point to see what might be wrong. I called Friday and they said they had ordered a new Logic Board from Apple, but Apple hadn't shipped it and it hadn't arrived Friday morning like they expected. Today is Monday, I called again and they said they had ordered the piece on Friday (not Thursday like they said before), but Apple didn't ship it. Apple's website doesn't say it's on backorder, so they don't know why it hasn't arrived yet. But I shouldn't worry, "Apple takes good care of their customers." Well, maybe some of their customers somewhere, but certainly not me!

What a complete and total waste of over $2000. I'll never make that mistake again. This was supposed to be my business computer, yet in the 6 weeks I've owned it, it's spent two weeks getting repaired, and I've spent numerous more wasted days either on the phone with AppleCare trying to fix the problems on it, or trying to find ways to make it do what the salesman said it would do. At this point, I've done just enough work on it to make my clients want more from it (the videos with iMovie), but then it's been broken long enough that my clients are upset I can't finish their projects. Apple's crap is making me look bad to my own clients and hurting my business, financially and my reputation.

DPI. A common question among many small business owners is how to tell if their picture is the right size for reproducing on a flyer, business card or brochure. The term "dpi" stands for "dots per inch", and is a term that has been around for a long time for printers. It refers to the number of ink dots a printer puts on a piece of paper. Unfortunately due to its legacy, it's often mis-used in communications, for instance when your printer or designer asks for an image that will print at 200 dpi. Your image is a digital image, so you don't have a printer's "dpi" to measure.

PPI. The term you're really looking for is "ppi," which stands for "pixels per inch." If you look at an image on a website, you can typically right-click on the image and it will tell you the dimensions in pixels. For instance, the image to the right is 200 pixels wide by 240 pixels tall. So what's the ppi? Well, that depends on where you'll be using it. A typical monitor displays 72 ppi, so this image has been re-sampled down from a big image to the size (200x240) and a ppi of 72 pixels per inch. This gives you the best quality at the lowest file size, making it load quickly on the page. But let's say you copy that image and try to print it on your local color printer. What appears to be about 2 x 2.5 inches and sharp detail on the screen will print differently on your printer.

If you print the image at 72 pixels per inch on your printer, it will be about the same size. However, it will have a pretty poor quality, very pixelated (jagged edges). If you print it at the recommended resolution for your printer, let's say 200ppi, it will have a better quality producing a sharper image, but it's going to drop down to less than half the size you see it on the screen. That's because you still have the same total number of pixels in your image (200x240), but you're cramming them into a smaller space to produce a sharper image.

How to tell if your image is big enough to produce a sharp image with the quality you want: First check with your printer or designer, find out what size it's going to be on the printed document, and at what resolution they want it. Most printers will want a minimum of 200 ppi, but 300 ppi will produce a sharper image. So let's say your image will be 3x4 inches on the brochure, printed at a sharp 300 ppi. That means you need 300 pixels per each inch: 3 inches times 300 pixels per inch means your image needs to be at least 900 pixels wide; 4 inches in height times 300 pixels per inch equals 1200 pixels tall. Next, verify the size of your image (right click on it to see the properties). Is your image at least 900x1200 pixels? If yes, it's large enough. If it's less in either dimension, it will either be printed with poor quality, smaller size, or both.

This is the new "kidspeak," from one of those children that knows more about computers than adults do.

The adult was having problems with her computer so she asked the neighbor kid to repair it. In a couple of keystrokes it was all fixed. When the adult asked what was wrong, the child replied it was an ID Ten T error. What is that? Write it out:

I D 1 0 T

What a brat!

What is a website host, and why do you have to pay hosting fees for your website? Website hosting is essentially renting a home on the Internet Freeway. The files used to build your website need a place to live on the Internet, so we rent lodging from a website "host." Just as some people prefer a one-bedroom apartment to a 4 bedroom house, depending on what functionality your site may need (streaming media files, shopping carts, etc.), we select a host and service package that offers the technologies to meet your site needs.

Your actual Internet Freeway address provided by the host is a long series of numbers called your IP address. It comes in a form similar to "123.4.56.789". Since that series of numbers and dots is difficult to remember, we use domain names, e.g. www.yourname.com. When you purchase your domain name and your web hosting, your webmaster will configure the nameservers. Those nameservers are big databases that associate your domain name to your IP address, allowing you to advertise your website address as www.yourname.com instead of 123.4.56.789.

You can read more about domain names here.

Your domain name is your presence on the Internet. My domain name is "ReevesDigital.com". No, the capitalization doesn't make a difference, but it does make it easier to read when it's written. Your domain name can be used for both your web address (www.reevesdigital.com) and your email address (info@reevesdigital.com).

Your domain name needs to be registered, and registration terms are annual. Domain names cost $10-$20 per year depending on where they are registered. If your website and your email both suddenly stop working, it's likely your domain name has expired. Never fear, most registrars will hold your domain name for an extended period of time, giving you a grace period to renew it before they offer it up for sale. Once it goes up for sale, it will most likely be purchased by someone else immediately, so you really don't want to let your registration lag. If someone else buys your domain name because you didn't keep it renewed, they become the new legal owners of it.

You can purchase your domain name for multiple years at a time. In addition to the cost savings (the cost of domain names will begin increasing this July and will continue to gradually increase for the forseeable future), there is another significant advantage to longer term registrations: The longer you have your domain name registered, the higher your rankings in search engines appear.

Curious about your domain name? You can view what information is publicly available about your domain name, including its expiration date, using the Internic WhoIs tool: http://www.internic.net/whois.html  Contact your webmaster if you have any questions about it.

If I have registered or renewed your domain name for you, I will continue to manage this for you until you ask me to stop, so you don't need to worry about it. As I wrote in an earlier post, there are many companies that will contact you to register your domain name for you. It's a lucrative business for them with minimal investment, preying on the ill-informed. Please contact me if anyone wants to renew your domain name for you, as not all of them are legitimate.

The AppleCare support staff (phone support) have been very knowledgeable and helpful, except for not knowing about the authorized service center in northern Colorado (see previous post). Eli helped me yesterday with 2 useful tools I thought I'd share today for anyone else having problems with their Mac.

The first tool is the standard Apple Hardware Test (AHT). He had me get to it by inserting the Applications disk that came with the iMac, then restarting the computer. As soon as it turns to a black screen press and hold the "d" key. It will eventually bring up the Apple Hardware Test. If it fails, it will return an error code the Apple service people can decode, in my case a "hard drive sensor mis-reporting". You can learn more about this on the Apple site: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509

The second tool is actually not an Apple-authored piece of software although it is found on their website, and it's quite useful. It's a Dashboard Widget called iStat Pro. This handy little app displays such useful things as the temperature of your computer, your fan speeds (mine were increasing constantly), CPU and Memory resources and more. http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/istatpro.html

Remember my favorite friends at the Apple Store at Flatiron Crossing? The ones who told me a bunch of incorrect things about the iMac and its software when selling it to me, who sold me a computer with a bad hard drive, who gave me attitude when I returned it for repair, who told me I should change the way I do things rather than make the computer work for me, and who theoretically fixed my broken computer? They broke it in the process of "repairing" it. Not only were they a day late in getting it fixed, according to an AppleCare Support diagnosis they either didn't replace my hardware sensor as they should when they replaced the hard drive, or they didn't hook it back up securely. There's a small chance that they simply replaced the bad hard drive with a hard drive that has a bad sensor, but that's "unlikely".

One good piece of news I can confirm for people living in northern Colorado - unbeknownst to the majority of AppleCare support folks, as helpful as they are, there is indeed an Authorized Apple Service Center (reseller too) in Fort Collins, Colorado. They're The Mac Shack, at 157 N College, on the west side between Mountain and Laporte Aves. I'll report back on their service when I get my iMac back from them. No more trucking all the way to Boulder or Broomfield! http://www.themacshack.net/

One other good piece of news I can in all honesty credit Apple with: the box the iMac comes in is nice and sturdy, and has withstood all this traveling around northern Colorado. Maybe that's what the $2000 was for, the hardware is crap but at least you can cart it around in a sturdy box to get it repaired frequently!

Are you hearing a clicking sound from your computer or an external hard drive? Clicking sounds are not good. My iMac hard drive clicked for the first month I had it. It reminded me of a miniature Irish step-dancing troupe inside the computer, dancing up a storm. Now that I have a new hard drive in it, I haven't heard the step-dancers at all. That's good, right? If only the fans were working properly...

More to the point, when talking to Apple support they acknowledged that when you hear clicking sounds, that typically means the hard drive is failing. She described it as sounding like a gerbil running around inside the computer.

To top it all off, my external Seagate hard drive has been clicking as well. It hasn't clicked a lot and it is also brand new, so I didn't worry much about it. Turns out that one shouldn't be clicking either. When I tried to re-install my iMac from my Time Machine hard drive, thankfully it did recover completely. It counts down how many minutes are left to restore from the backup, and whenever the hard drive started clicking, the minutes would increase. Clicking stops, minutes decrease. Clicking starts, minutes increase. Direct correlation between the two. I'm grateful that I could actually recover my system, but now I get to go back to Dell and complain about the hard drive they sold me, and hopefully get that replaced before I need a complete recovery and my backup fails.

I cannot believe their incompetence. Exactly one month and three days ago I first visited this store as a then-strictly-pc-user. I already blogged about my experience there, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But it doesn't end there. I picked up my iMac from repair this morning (a day later than they promised), brought it home and started it up. It had a new hard drive, no data. They were going to charge me for putting all my data back on there even though they're the ones that sold me a bad hard drive in the first place, but I was too quiet of a mouse to argue so I decided to try it myself. Time Machine recovery worked flawlessly, except for the new clicking sound now emitting from my external backup drive. Thankfully it didn't die in the middle of the process, so I have my computer restored.

The fan is noticeably louder, but I figured if that's the worst of my problems, I'll deal with it. Guess what, it's not the worst of my problems. My iMac now goes into sleep mode as it should, but won't come out of it. Moving the mouse, tapping keys on the keyboard, tapping the power button, none of it brings it back. I have to hold the power button in until it eventually powers off.

I called the store and was told, "Gosh, that doesn't sound right." I can either A) call AppleCare Support, or B) make another appointment with the idiots who sold me a bad computer and then broke it while repairing it, she recommends B. Not on your life, I'm never stepping foot back in that store again!