Email TIp: Add Hotmail Account to Thunderbird, the easy way

There IS an addon called webmail that will do the trick but I wanted to set it up without.  After an hour of trying, (including searching all over the internet), I have found the solution of how to set up hotmail on thunderbird.  Enjoy:

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Web Design and Turkey Day

So, we finally took a break for web design yesterday to celebrate Thanksgiving. Instead of doing the traditional turkey day feast at home or a family member's house, we went to a place called "Harbor Docks" in Destin, Florida. The Habitat For Humanity did an excellent job of providing great food for everyone and did not charge a set fee, just accepted donations.

I think this was a great idea for multiple reasons. First of all it helped raise money for a good cause. Secondly we had no mess to clean up, that's a big change from the normal Thanksgiving routine! Even though this sort of breaks away from tradition, sometimes it is time for a change.

We have several things to be thankful for in our lives and yesterday was a great day to reflect on that. Of course, we should constantly give thanks for our blessings, not just one day a year. Most of us in this country are blessed with so many things that we take for granted. Even those with lower incomes have much more than some people in other countries.

We at Teknek hope that everyone has a great holiday weekend. We are work-a-holics here and it is hard to even take a break from website design for one day, but that is because it is our passion. When you are passionate about something, it shows in your work. When you work for yourself or run a business you pretty much never get a day off. However, we are very thankful for everything that we have been blessed with.

Scott
Pensacola Website Design

Estimate Value Of Website

So today I messed around with trying to find a site to evaluate the true value of a website. I found several different tools to help calculate this value. What I found is that these tools are nice in theory, but there are just too many factors that are not being taken into consideration on each tool that I tried. This makes for a very bad or inaccurate estimate on the value of the site.

Other than the tools, I found a couple of formulas that seem to beat out each tool that I tried. The basic info that I found to be the most helpful and correct in determining value was to take an average of the last three years profit and multiply that number by 3. So for example, let's say your average profit for the past three years was $31,000 per year. Your business or website's potential value is $93,000. A potential investor could make their money back in about 3 years, or most likely sooner if the business is improved and 'tweaked' to perfection.

Another few sources use the average profit multiplied by 2.5, or even up to ten times (10X) the gross profit! Check out this site for a few examples: Entrepreneurs-Journey. This site contains a very good article, as well as several good points about before, during, and after the sale of your website. It talks about additional things to consider such as web hosting, training the new owners, the financial transaction ( I recommend Escrow.com), and other information about the website sale.

Evaluating the value of a website that actually makes profit is similar to evaluating the price of a brick and mortar business. Cash flow and profit are the most important things. Nobody wants to buy a business in debt or without positive cash-flow. People want to buy a business that works. Of course, who would want to buy a job?

I found myself determining the value of one of my websites today for a potential buyer and in the process discovered a few things. One of those things is that I found that I am more emotionally attached to that website than I ever realized. While the money is enticing, it is hard to put a monetary value on the blood, sweat, and tears put into something. But sometimes you have to know when to let go and the time seems right for me on this particular site that I'm talking about. Sorry for being so cryptic here, I just want to keep the identity of the site I'm referring to hush-hush for now.

Those so-called website evaluation tools that I found are mainly based on Alexa rank and back-links, but take into consideration sales from products or ebooks, or anything like ad revenue from Google Adsense. This flaw provides for huge discrepancies in either under-valuing or over-valuing websites. But, they can be fun tools to mess with.

If you are trying to discover the true value of a website, you need to crunch the numbers yourself and you need to cold hard facts to do so. Even that formula is slightly flawed, especially when using the prior two years numbers when the economy has gone down so much. I expect the sales for next few years to climb back up and beyond they were back in 2006 & 2007. If you need help determining the value of a website, feel free to contact us.

Scott
Pensacola Website Design

Website Design Tip: Firebug is awesome

I somehow stumbled on to an amazing firefox addon called firebug.   This addon is a web designers dream!  I have not yet unlocked all of its amazing features, however, there are a couple/few features that have already saved me time and headache!

Once it is installed, you can pull it up with the F12 key.  Although it is useful for inspecting code on other peoples websites, I have so far found its usefulness in inspecting websites that I am designing.

With firebug open you can press Ctrl + Shift + C.  This is where magical things happen.  Highlight any part of your website, and firebug automatically highlights the corresponding code!  If you click on a part of the webpage, firebug will keep the corresponding code highlighted, until you activate Ctrl + Shift + C again (I believe its technically called the "Inspect Element" tool).

This is especially useful for troubleshooting.  Once a piece of code is highlighted, you can easily view which parts of your style sheet are affecting it!  I had some fonts that were not behaving properly on a website.  I was easily able to see that this was because of an inherited style from a parent element!  It also shows you which rules are canceled out from nested divs and such.

You can also mouse over divs within your code and the webpage highlights the corresponding section, showing padding as well as margins!   Dang I can't wait to unlock more of this addons features....

Fritz
Pensacola Website Design

SEO Friendly Shopping Cart Software

What do you think the most seo friendly shopping cart software is? There are a ton of choices out there, but we've found only two that match up to our rigid quality criteria. They are Volusion.com and Sunshop by Turnkey Web Tools. Both of these software programs are geared toward friendly search engine optimization, something that not all programs of this type have taken into consideration.

PHP is a very good programming language for shopping cart software and allows for great flexibility and options when running any kind of e-commerce website. Sure, there are a ton of other software programs out there for you to choose from and there may be some that even match up to the capability and user-friendly feel of these two programs, but we have not found them yet.

When selecting a shopping cart software to use for your website you want to make sure that you have flexibility in payment options. You want to make sure that you can connect to Internet Payment Gateways that allow you to accept all credit card, debit card, and ACH bank draft payments, along with Paypal as well. Many people use Paypal because they don't want to expose their credit card number to multiple sites and they feel secure with Paypal because of their reputation.

No matter how you look at it, you need to make sure that your web pages are designed so that they can be picked up and found by the search engines, basically seo-friendly. If you don't you may find yourself spending a ton of money and time for a fancy site that nobody can find. There are other marketing methods other than seo, but a customer finding your site through the search engines is one of the best ways to gain a person who is ready to buy.


Scott
Pensacola Website Design