Business Internet Presence:- Your Domain Name.

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Every Web Site has its own unique location on the Internet. This is true whether you host your Web Site using Free or Paid hosting. The Web Site Address or Universal Resource Locator (URL) will take the form of http://www.yourwebsitename.co.za/. This is the Cyber equivalent of a Street Address in the Real World.

A Domain needs to be registered and is usually valid for 12 months, and can be renewed when it expires. Domain Names end in a variety of Suffixes such as: .com (Commercial) or .co.za (country South Africa). The DOT Com is the most popular and therefore the most difficult to find a suitable Domain Name for your business. DOT COZA is usually the most practical for South African Companies. There are other possibilities like DOT ME (.me) which is suitable for personal Web Sites, or DOT BIZ (.biz) for a business.

When choosing a name, you should use your business name or the name that it is known by, but this may not be possible and they you may need to look at different suffixes or even a Domain Name that best describes your business.

My Domain Name is http://www.solutionsweb.co.za, the same name that I trade under – Solutions Web. It is a DOT CO ZA, of course, I coulded have registered a DOT COM (Commercial) name, if available but I chose the South African Suffix because I am based and do business mainly in South Africa.

If you use free hosting, you may have to use the name they supply with you. It will often be a Sub Domain like http://yourusername.freewebsite.com. Free sounds like a good idea and often when you start out in business, you have to keep costs low. But Domain Names and Professional Hosting is not expensive. (Solutions Web will quote you according to your needs)

Business Internet Presence:- What are your Web Site Objectives?

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In Business, you have to be able to justify any expense. This is the same for your Business Web Site – you cannot have a Web Site, “Because every other Business has one.” Your Web Site must have a purpose that benefits your Business.

Even before you start to to design your Web Site, you need to start looking at your objectives for your Web Site. You need to list your objectives and then start prioritising them. My objectives for le Blog are:

My ultimate objective is to get hired – to achieve this, I must;

• To share quality information on subjects on le Blog that are relevant to Small Business   Internet Presence,
• create a following for le Blog,
• to create a conversation with readers of le Blog, and
• send them to my Web Site, where they can learn more about the Products and services that Solutions Web has

I have listed my objectives above in order of priority – you will see that I list creating a Quality Blog before finding my readers, what is the point of finding an audience and when they look at at earlier material before dicing whether to subscribe or not.

Your objectives are important, your ultimate aim may be to increase your business, but there will be incremental steps that need to be taken in order to get there.

Business Internet Presence:- The Web Site

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South Africa has seen an increase in the Bandwidth available for use. This has lead to a price war that has changed how we use the Internet. One of the most important products to emerge from this price has been Uncapped Broadband. This a allows a business to accurately budget how much to spend on Internet connectivity. Now they can connect anyone whose job requires it to the Internet.

Suddenly South Africa has gone from being Internet shy because of high cost of connecting to a country that now can compete globally. At the same time, Smart Phones have also come down in price, making them more popular. Suddenly, people ate able to connect anywhere at any time.

Now more that ever, your Business needs a Web Site to anchor your presence in Cyberspace. A Web Site represents your Business and may take the form of a Shop, or a Catalogue. But, more importantly, a Web Site will help to make your Business visble on the Internet.

For a Web Site to really effective, it needs to be easy to find – we cover Search Engine Optimisation later – it has to be able to open on any size screen, without having to scroll sideways and finally, the layout needs to make the Web Site easy to use.

A good design is only the start – a Web Site is your Hub around which you will build your Presence on the Internet. Everything else you do on the Internet should be aimed at sending traffic to your Web Site.

Your Content on the Web Site is important – after all you want them buy from you. You can have the best product in the world, but unless it is available to your consumers in a easy to read and find they will go elsewhere.

Good Open Source Alternative for Paid Software, that are Free.

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No matter what you use your computer for, one of the most valuable programs on it will be an Office Suite. You can use it to write letters, catalogue your recipe collection, draw up a spreadsheet and even as an electronic diary. An the most popular off office suite is Microsoft Office. But even the least expensive version will cost you just under R1000 (Microsoft Office 2013 Home and Student Edition – 1 User R949.95 on Kalahari.com) and the cheapest business version is R2400.00. Keep in mind, that the software licence will only allow you to load it on one PC, so if you have two PCs, you must buy two copies. Then you have the fact that you will need to upgrade every few years.

Expensive, especially if you only use it every so often. But, there is a solution that is FREE (your favourite new word!)

Libre Office gives you all the features that Microsoft Office provides allowing you to save files in the same formats as you would using Microsoft Office, making it cross compatible. Libre Office was created using the source code from Open Office, a very successful open source office suite. Libre Office is the choice of many Linux distributions and has gained wide acceptance in the Linux community.

Outlook is very popular as an email clients and as planner. It comes bundled with Microsoft Office. Three good and free alternatives are;

Google
Google Mail or Gmail together with Google Calendar allow you to access your mail and calendar online from any computer or mobile device anywhere. But it I also possible to download your mail to your computer.

Zimbra
Yahoo’s Zimbra is described as”

The free Zimbra Desktop client delivers a consistent user experience off-line, so email, voice, social, calendar, contacts, files and documents are synchronized and locally accessible when on the road. Zimbra Desktop aggregates information across accounts (Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) and social networks (Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.) to help make communicating and sharing information easier than ever.

Thunderbird
Thunderbird together with the Lighting calendar add-on make a very nice replacement to Outlook. Thunderbird is cross operating system, so if you ever migrate to Linux, you can take your email with you.

File Compression.come in handy when you need to email large files. Winzip, has been around just about forever, will set you back 30 dollars -7Zip will do he same job for free. 7Zip also supports different compression extensions and and words across operating systems

My Favourite Linux Distributions

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I have used various Linux distributions, that I have liked and enjoyed using before settling on one particular distribution. Each one of this distros is community driven and a perfect replacement for Microsoft Windows.

The distributions are:
SUSE
Mandriva
Fedora
Ubuntu

The advantages of this distributions are;

  • They are free*
  • You are allowed to legally copy it from a friend
  • There is a huge community of users willing to assist you with any problem you may encounter
  • They are easy to use
  • If you are able to use Microsoft Windows, you can use these distros and will hardly notice the difference
  • They came bundled with free software for just about anything you want to use your PC for, it is not necessary to buy additional expensive software,
  • They can operate alongside Microsoft Windows on the same PC,

and did I mention that they are FREE

SUSE
SUSE was not the first version of Linux that I used, but was the first one that I did not struggle to use. At this time, Windows was still my main operating system, but I would switch to SUSE whenever I had time to spare and within days become comfortable using it. Soon, I found myself doing more and more of my work in Linux rather that Windows. The switch from Windows to Linux was less painful than I had first imagined.

Mandriva
Because there are such a huge variety of Linux distribution available , I decided to experiment and loaded Mandriva on to my PC. I was very impressed with it. Even though I really liked SUSE, I found Mandriva even more to my personal taste.

Ubuntu
I was not too keen on Ubuntu at first. I had previously experimented with a live version and found it too slow. But because of the South African connection, I decided to give a another try. The second time around I was completely blown away. It was easy to use, loaded fast and had everything I needed. It quickly became my operating system of choice.

Fedora.
I bought myself a new laptop which came preloaded with Fedora. I was impressed, it was a very simple and easy to use distro. But I had been spoilt and and quickly loaded Ubuntu to the new PC.

I still use Ubuntu and have not been tempted to change. A distro that has come close to tempting me to change is Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu. Close but no, I have stuck to Ubuntu.

These are the distributions, I recommend. They are easy to use and really at the end of the day, you will have to make your choice based on personal preference. You can set your PC to dual boot and thus keep you Microsoft Window on the same machine. But you could just as easy ditch Windows and use Linux and not notice the difference..

Linux

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Microsoft Windows has changed the way we work forever. It is by far the most popular computer operating system and in fact, is so popular that there are many people who are unaware that they have a choice to use a different operating system.

Windows has some very serious faults. For a start the cost, secondly you need to replace it every few years. Being the most popular operating system, it is also the one targeted by the criminal element. So you also need to buy extra security software. Security updates may be released by Microsoft once a month.

I cannot comment on the latest version Windows 8, as I have not used it. Vista, was a total disaster. The situation was so bad Microsoft have had to extend the life of Windows XP, the previous version. Windows 7 followed and I found it stable and easy to work with, and I do use it sometimes to test Web Sites I have created, but use Ubuntu Linux to do the bulk of my work.

Linux is very different to Windows. For a start there are several different versions, both commercial and free. Linux is also open source and this is the one of the greatest advantages that Linux has over Windows (and Apple). Open source does not necessarily mean free , it means that the source code is published so that anybody may take and use it. Maybe they improve on it and publish their own version. In fact one of the most popular and in my opinion the best Linux is Ubuntu, which was built using source code from Debian, another version of Linux.

Linux has come a long way and is definitely more user friendly than it was originally. Whilst there are still versions better suited to geeks, SUSE, Madriva, Fedora Core and Ubuntu are very user friendly and make the change from windows quite painless. SUSE produce a commercial version but also have free version that is community maintained. Red Hat, another commercial version is responsible for a free version – Fedora Core. And Mark Shuttleworth’s company produces Ubuntu which is also free.

Another important feature of Linux is the software. Each distribution of Linux comes bundled with software. It usually includes a full office suite such as Open Office, something you are expected to purchase separately in Windows. Fair enough, Windows does come with a fair amount of software, but not with a office suite. There is also a great deal of free, open source software that can be downloaded and used with your Linux distro.

By doing things differently, Linux is more secure that Windows. You sign at the beginning of a session, just as you would with Windows. But here is the difference comes in, you can not make any administrative changes or load any new software without signing on as the System Administrator. In windows any software you download is ready to run, not so in Linux, it first needs to be complied, a simple process but again only the system administrator can do it.

Just that one step, not allowing software to install without permission from the system administrator gives you a great deal of protection not available in windows.

Linux normally does not ship with a firewall or anti virus. Whilst this may seem arrogant, they have good reason to do this. Microsoft became the biggest and most powerful computer operating system. The Internet and computers are perfect tools for anarchists. They targeted Microsoft mainly because of its “in your face” marketing and attitude. Microsoft releases patches maybe once a month and not when a problem is found. The Linux community release a patch for download the minute a problem is found.

So when you need to upgrade your software, instead of paying to do so, why not try Linux for free.

The Internet

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Wikipedia defines the Internet as:
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks…
but the ordinary man in the street will perceive the Internet based on how he uses it.

  • Some use the Internet for Entertainment, playing games online or possibly watch videos from YouTube or similar sites.
  • Some use the Internet to Communicate with family and friends using Facebook or even eMail
  • Some use the Internet to Write and Publish their work through Web Sites or Blogs
  • Some use the Internet to Sell their Services or Products through online Shops

The Internet is not easy to define because there is so much that you can do. It has evolved from a source of information to an interactive platform for both business and entertainment. It has changed how we communicate and stay in tough with Family and Friends. progress is inevitable and the Internet is bound to evolve further still.

South African Small Business and the Internet

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The Internet provides business with an inexpensive marketing platform. Whilst this is true for both Big and Small Business, it is in fact Small Business that will benefit more.

A chain store such as Edgars is well known and can be found in every major shopping mall in South Africa. Either you buy from them or you don’t buy from them. Their presence on the Internet serves to keep you aware of them and also allows you to communicate with them. If they has no presence on the Internet, they could still survive. by being visible on TV, billboards, fliers and print advertisement (all of which they use.)

But a Small Business, even if it has more than one location, does not have the luxury of being so visible. It will use the same tools to promote itself as Big Business, but it does not have the same marketing budget. And, this is where the Internet comes in. A Web Site can be seen by anyone even those outside of the area where the business is located. This is ideal for specialist operations as well as price comparisons.

The cost of a Web Site will differ according to what is included and depending on who creates it. Once you have a Web Site in place, you can enhance you you Interent Presence hrough the use of Social Media, such as Facebook or Twitter. These will help you to build a community around your service or product, as well as promote your product or service.

Lets look at the big picture. Almost every business is run by computer. And every business man or woman is likely to to the following every day using either a computer, smart phone or a tablet:- check their eMail (several times a day.) And eMail requires an Internet connection, which means he or she will take it a step further and check their Facebook or read some tweets. So, no matter how computer illiterate a businessman may be, they are starting to see the value of computers and the Internet, which means their staff are connected.

The value of the Internet to Small Business goes beyond eMail. During the course of any day, staff working at a business are likely to interact with several Web Sites related to their business. they will read industry related news on Blogs, check the news feed on their Facebook for anything business related. This is no different to the way things were done twenty years ago, you would check your (snail) mall, and read the trade papers to keep up with industry news.

The Internet gives Small Business the tools to compete against Big Business on an even footing.

Want to compete with Big Business on an even footing – Solutions Web has the Solution to your problem.

Open Source is free, right?

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There is a misconception, that Open Source is free – not so. Open Source refers to the code of a program that is available to other programmers to use and improve on. The program itself may not be free.

Wikipedia describes it as;

Generally, open source refers to a program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design.

Open source code is typically created as a collaborative effort in which programmers improve upon the code and share the changes within the community.

Open source sprouted in the technological community as a response to proprietary software owned by corporations.

Linux is a example of Open Source. Ubuntu is a very popular Linux operating system that has been created using Debian’s Source Code. Mint, another popular Linux Operating System is based on Ubuntu. These operating systems are free but there other Linux systems such as SUSE and Redhat that are not

Microsoft Windows is not open source. They have the right to protect their products from competition (which is normal for business.) So why do some companies and programmers chose to release their work as open source.

Open Source is a community effort – an individual can turn to the community for help when faced with a problem. Software is open released with bugs (no not the crawling type) and the community usually are quick to help solve these. Software that is released for general use, may be adapted for specialised use. An example would be an accounting package adapted for use by hospitals.

Most open source software is given away free and add to that that the source code is given away, how do you make money with open source. The most obvious way is to charge for support and training. Other ways would be to have a paid product for business and free product for individuals (SUSE do this with SUSE Enterprise and OpenSuse).

At this point you are ask how can an open Source Product compete with products made by companies with large teams available ad who have varied skills? Actually, even if an open source product is released by an individual, here is a large community that enjoy sharing (or is it show off) their skills and together that can get things done quickly.

I use open source, the Operating System on my PC is the latest version of Ubuntu (a World class South African Product), I use a variety of Open Source software to do my work and you cannot tell the difference between what I produce and something produced on a PC with Proprietary Software.

It just cost me less.

Honey, I shrunk the … the Internet!

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LG-P970

Everything … and the kitchen sink!

The picture on the left is a mobile telephone, In fact. this is the LG P970, an Android smart phone. I have one and can tell you that it is the best thing since sliced bread. OK so maybe I exaggerated in my description – there is no kitchen sink. But, nevertheless it is very versatile. I can send and receive email on every account I have (I open a Webmaster email account as well as a Google email account for every project and Web Site that I manage.)

I use the phone to find out information when I am out of the office, I use it to send text messages and I even use it to make phone calls!

Because phones can connect to the Internet using both WIFI and 3G – they replace the personal computer for many. This places a burden on Web Site Designers – Web Sites that are designed to open on a big screen monitor may not scale well on the small screen of a phone. So either we design sites to be very plain with no photos or we need to create a second site for mobile phones and small screen tablets.

Depending on the size of the Web Site, you may use a Responsive that will scale scale down to adapt to the size of the screen, One of my Projects – Social Review, is done using responsive design, open in using your PC and your phone to see it in action.

But when you get a large site such as News24 you will need to reduce the size, so you need to build a separate mobile site.  If you visit the mobile site you will see a very distinct difference.

At Solutions Web, I will always make sure that my client’s Web Site open in mobile by using either Responsive design or a separate Mobi site, depending on the size of he project. So yes - I did shrink the Internet!

 

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