Our client needed to migrate a website from aspx to WordPress. Ease of use and a lot of custom coding make it easier for the clients imagination of a new easy to use website a reality. This was one of the best clients I have personally worked with. Clear and concise and patient we worked together to make a directory website to help people find a transmission repair facility. Version 1 includes a lot of really cool features! From concept to execution we worked 1 on 1 with the client to deliver a product that would help their team accomplish their jobs efficiently.  For this site round 1 is just the beginning in developing directory and advertising membership websites using WordPress.

This article is for those who are trying to find out when they should use what types of social media. I wanted to give an introduction for both clients and consumers on when they should use social media for as well as a definition of what the different types are.

What is Twitter

Twitter is used to send out tweets or “texts” that are 140 characters or less. This will allow you to update a bunch of people at once. This is usually good for a company or brand that wants to be in constant contact with its followers. Usually when there is an issue with a product consumers will complain through twitter and the issue can be resolved or the person can be redirected to the proper place to get help.
This is also great for individuals who are their brand. For example musicians, artists and more. Follow your favorite rock star for a week and see how entertaining that can be, you will be surprised. Apparently there is no restriction on content.

Click the link to find out more information on What is Twitter.

What is Facebook

Facebook is a private club of friends. You can post pictures, rantings and ravings but be careful. Security on Facebook is tricky and changes day to day. Did you know that someone who is a friend of yours can see photos and information about you even though you are not friends with them? be sure to check the privacy settings. Also, be careful what you say on Facebook. If you don’t want it on the cover of Time then you might not want to say it on facebook. Even to your private friends, as this might get to your not-so-private friends. Just imagine sending a nasty update about someone you don’t like. Your friend gets the update and the person you don’t like is sitting right there and reads it. I mean, you have to have some respect for other people even if it is your status update.

 

Please remember Facebook was designed with college students in mind, not children. (Let’s not argue about that). Facebook has age restrictions and if you see a spammer someone who is not real, or an underage person you should hit the report button. Let’s keep this above PG13 but below Rated R. Facebook does have strong policies against adult content. They also have a “no bullying” policy. We believe everyone has a right to say what they want to say on the internet. If you cannot say something nice. Just be quiet. You will save yourself some grief. Unless you have a valid consumer complaint. In that case you should subscribe to my blog and find out how to file a complaint with the BBB.

Click the link to find out more information on What is facebook.

 

What is a Facebook Fanpage

Anyone can become a “fan” of a fanpage. You can have your own personal account and then create a fanpage for your business, band, or whatever else comes to mind. A fanpage is great because it allows you to separate your business and personal life on facebook. You can also create a fanpage for a celebrity or anything that you favor in pop culture, How many fans can you get ?

What is Foursquare

Foursquare is a location detection service that allows you to “check-in” into venues. Say you want to meet a few friends at Starbucks, as I do. I check in in the morning and let them know through the description field how long ill be there say 12-3pm. If anyone checks in they will see i have been there or I might still be there. Foursquare also has tips that let you know what others thought was interesting. Say you go to a new restaurant and want to know if there are any impressive dishes, well previous foursquare users may have left you a surprise tip. Good and bad information is posted there and is not checked for quality control.

Click the link to find out more information on What is foursquare.

What is linkedin

Linkedin.com is a business networking service. You can post your resume, link to other social media sources and connect with people in your industry. You can join industry specific groups. Unlike facebook there is a lot of moderation involved. This keeps things nice and clean Be careful what you connect from linkedin to other social media networks. You might not want everyone to have access to all of your private life.

For more information about what is Linkedin

Please register to be notified when we have new articles. Or if you want to add a comment, we will be adding a list of connectivity services to one of our next articles.

For prospective clients, if you need help setting social media up, or advice on how to manage it all please feel free to use the contact us form

Internet Security

Be careful what you say on the internet. Your information is yours alone. Please protect it. If you are using social media for personal or business uses please read the documentation about security, if you do not understand it just let me know and I can help you out. Remember the information you publish on the internet, once published is no longer yours. It belongs to the owner of the website. Even after content is deleted it is still kept in the cloud somewhere.

Web Hosting Business: Slow Summer Syndrome

I love hearing every summer how the web hosting industry is slow. Yes, I do understand that the summer is slow for new sales. But, when running a web hosting company this is the best time to get things under control. There are three things you can do to improve the bottom line and now is the best time to work on them.

1. Are your receivables under control ?

Most likely, not. If you have clients who are over 30 days late on payment and you have not suspended their services, now is the time. Do an audit on all clients and make sure their domains are still active and their hosting is still active and call anyone 90 days or less overdue. Anyone over 90 days start a mass suspension on your slowest call volume day. I prefer 15 day blocks depending how many clients you have overdue. I try to stay under $100,000 in suspensions a day. Try this on for size.

a. Day 1 call accounts 0-90 days overdue

b. Day 2 suspend accounts 90 to about 120 days overdue. Just imagine if all those accounts called at one time will you be able to handle the call volume.  Do suspensions as early as possible during the week. Train your staff on how to suspend and unsuspend accounts. If someone calls how will you give them a 7 day grace to come up with funds ? I put these clients on a temp list and have the billing manager work this list to get these accounts paid asap.

c. Day 2 Suspend everyone over 120 days. ALL OF THEM. Why ? You need the revenue and the servers don’t pay for themselves. You have staff, overhead, servers, equipment and you need to improve your bottom line so that if you do get busy again you can afford to hire staff accordingly. Think of 10% of that revenue. What would you do with it if it came in all at once ?

d. By now it should be Thursday and your staff are complaining about doing their new tasks. We will give them a break and let them know this is the best time to handle invoice and retrain them to handle them before they become this problem next year.

e. Review with all your managers how they think the week went. Get advice from all department heads and find out what you can do to help them streamline the process of unsuspending accounts. How can you retrain the billing staff to remind clients of open invoices before they become a problem. Retrain yourself on looking at the age of open invoices and $ how much you could have made on time if you can get your staff all on the same page.

A few words of advice. If you do not have the staff to handle this influx of invoices and get this situation under control you will need some temporary outside help. You will need to monitor this group of staff members as they will have direct impact on your brand. The will also be handling sensitive data such as credit card numbers, email addresses, access to your billing system, and much more.

Is there a program your team can create to make sure these things can stay under control ? I wrote a few scripts that would run through the servers and suspend everyone 31 days over due. I make sure to run this program only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Why ? Monday should be your busiest new sales day. You should never suspend a client over the weekend. You should never suspend a client on the end of the week because your weekend staff might not be trained well enough to deal with an influx in billing calls.

 

Last but not least. You should let your web hosting company know that billing is everyone’s job. Not just the billing department. If clients are not billed how do you pay for tech support. Clients should recieve tech support until they are suspended after that they should be redirected to billing to resolve their issue before providing them further technical support.Our next article will deal with ticket management

 

Web Hosting Business: Improving The Customer Experience with Comments

As a Billing Manager at Midphase.com there were a lot of calls that needed to be escalated to a manager. When the calls got to me I had the task of getting the same information that the employee next to me already got. Well, you would think technology could solve this issue with some retraining. And it did. To be a better manager and improve the customer experience it can be as simple as one word repeatedly to your employees until they got it. “COMMENTS, COMMENTS, COMMENTS”. You need to instill this policy and consequences into your employees as soon as possible and in a very professional manner. My billing department learned how to talk to a customer,  comment on an account, and resolve their issue if it was billing at the same time. If it was not a billing issue they found a free tech support agent and let them know a call was coming to them directly. This gave the tech time to get ready for the particular call and resolution or research that needed to be done.

 

Most calls that come into a billing department are really not about billing at all. I made it another policy to listen to the customer even if the issue had nothing to do with billing, comment the account, and transfer the call. When you tell a customer “I am going to transfer you to the technical support department.” The first response from the customer is mostly “NOW I got to repeat this all over again ?” Response: “No [client name], I have commented your account with the new information you have given me. Our tech support person[employee name] is ready to take your call and help you with your issue. My name is [employee name]. Here is your client id [clientid] So that when I transfer you, that is the only information you need to give them for them to pull up your account and be on the same page. If you keep that number every time you call it will help us find your account quickly. Is there anything else I can personally assist you with in the billing department, before I transfer you ?” Now, if that doesn’t put a smile on someones face.

 

 

Webhosting Business : Attracting More Canadian Clients

As a Billing Manager for Midphase.com one of the biggest complaints from international clients was the lack of a toll free number they could call from to get their issues resolved. When your international clients need to wait forever to get a call answered, then wait another 20 minutes on average to get their issues resolved, they get impatient. They have a very good reason to be, the United States consumers are getting a free call to most hosting companies and most Canadians are paying the service fees to get help. Shouldn’t they get a toll free number, or the ability for your phone system to prioritize calls long distance calls ?

 

There are a few solutions to this issue depending on your budget. A toll free number for Canadian clients, or the for the country the majority of your clients are from that is not the United States. You should already have a toll free number for United States Clients if you are a hosting company doing business in the United States. RingCentral.com has some affordable and creative solutions that can be implemented easily into most small web hosting businesses.

 

Another solution is call prioritization. There are a couple of ways that I know of to achieve this one would be through you phone system directly. You would need to contact your network administrator and review those options with them. IF anyone would like to chime in on those options, please register and comment.

 

The second way of call prioritization that I have come with is a human intervention. Changing the social behavior of your employees is the responsibility of the Manager. For Example: I had four employees, each one was given a different priority task above their normal duties. One of them was required to call back anyone that left an email response and were outside of the country. I am sorry but sometimes its just easier to address a complicated ticket with a phone call. Logging the entire call is the responsibility of anyone taking the call. That is another issue we will get into in another blog article. The bottom line is that international clients are very happy when you call them back on your dime, and you solve their issue, and you send them an email response with the conversation as well as the solution. :-p

 

Hope that gives web hosting companies an idea on how to help out their international clients Have a great day! Thanks for reading.

When it comes to social media, the easier to use for a client the better. I don’t like to micro-manage my clients websites. I like to give them great ideas, a great theme the right plugins and get them on their way. Here are a few wordpress plugins to help you with social media.

1. ShareThis

Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites. We use this easy to implement plugin on just about all of our websites. Why have a great site with great content if your browsers cannot share it with their friends ?

2. Simple Facebook Connect by Otto

This bundle of easy to use social media plugins for twitter and facebook is another great plugin from Otto. What can I say this guy writes great plugins, takes feedback from end users and keeps them updated. I love his plugins and use his solutions above and beyond anyone else’ for my clients. use the SFC – Publish portion of the plugin to automatically publish to facebook.

This plugin has about 26 plugins to activate in total. Everything you need for facebook and twitter integration Using the “Facebook Connect Foundation” and “Twitter Connect Foundation” You have everything you need to integrate your website with facebook.

3. (( WP Twitter ))

Easily show your tweets in your widgetized sidebar. Twitter in recent months has updated its API call system. This has made it harder to integrate tweets into wordpress for your everyday user as well as theme developers. This plugin makes the integration as simple as possible.Install, activate, go to your widgets drag it to your sidebar, fill out the info and your done! Also publish new posts on twitter from within wordpress. After you write your content on the right hand side will be the option to publish to twitter. Too easy right ?

Did you need more choices for other social media ? Register and comment today to be heard

 

Today we are going to review a few plugins that will help you with traffic analysis. If you have some good ones you would like us to review please register and comment. Thanks!

Avoid traffic tools that require you to register. I don’t want anyone knowing about my traffic besides me and Google. Google already knows about your traffic even if you don’t have an account with them, they monitor everything on the internet is how I see it.

1. post-views By Suny Tse
Record how many times the post have been views and show it. The perfect plugin to track without leaving wordpress dashboard to show you what pages/posts are the most popular. Easy to install and use. We have been looking for a wordpress dashboard tool that isn’t out of date or require registration and after playing with about 20 of them to no avail this is what we got to finally do what we want to do. See posts/pages hits without too much complication. Thanks Suny Tse

2. Google Analytics
Still the best resource for drill down reports. This will show you all of your properties (once configured). The Google Analytics report will show you more information then you will ever need about your website. What country your visitors are from, language, computer and browser information, ad well as traffic source, campaign information for Google Adwords. The great thing about Google Analytics is that you can link multiple website properties into one easy to use interface. In fact, they have just updated their dashboard!

3. Crazyegg.com
I personally love crazyegg the most. It provides an overlay of hotspots. This will allow you to see what users are actually clicking on in a visual format allowing you to optimize your website. Crazyegg has a new report called “Scrollmap” This tells you the percentage of visitors that scroll down your website to see additional content. this will tell you how well your website is designed. More information about scrolling in our next article.

4. AWStats
If you have CPanel the most information you will find for your website will be with awstats. An oldie but still goodie. You need cpanel hosting at this time. Go to your cpanel control panel to verify awstats is active and save the link to your stats. There are a few WordPress plugins that attempt to provide the same information within the wordpress dashboard but we have not found one that is as easy to use as the original. The Awstats is a little hard to get to if you have a ton of sites to check. This is why you should bookmark the link to the report. This will require a cpanel username and password to access on a regular basis.

I have been working in small businesses since I was 19. I have come up with quite a few creative approaches to problems that businesses face everyday. Today, I would like to discuss how to reduce Web hosting Chargebacks. Call after call in a web hosting billing department will get these types of comments: “I think my husband (or other close relative) used my credit card to purchase a service from your company.”, “I thought this service was going to cancel after the first year.”, “My credit card has expired and I still see a charge for your service”, “I no longer wanted the service and was hoping to cancel before this renewal.”, “My website made no money and I didn’t want the service any longer.”and finally “Who are you and why are you charging me ?” Now, being in the webhosting industry I know there are more colorful ways that this has been presented to you on an everyday basis. You as the company need to think about the issues that are at hand, not that fact that the client is on the line complaining. They have a ligitimate complaint. How can you as a hosting company proactively solve this issue BEFORE it becomes a customer service and experience issue ?

 

1. Let’s look at chargebacks. I know a lot of bigger hosting companies will say “We can afford chargebacks.” Can you? Look at the overhead time and effort it takes to process a chargeback. I can guarantee that a lot of hosting companies cannot process a chargeback in less than five minutes. If you cannot do that with all the legal documentation and evidence that goes with it you are already losing money. Let alone the fees generated by just Having a chargeback.  That’s right consumers, just filing a chargeback generates a fee to the hosting company, even if they win. Your first task is to automate the chargeback process.

2. How can someone who has a credit card charge from you quickly reach a manager to resolve the issue ? Your website is typically not designed to help people with credit card issues, why not ? Most companies would like to hide behind their homepage design and order process and neglect the fact that there are customer service issues that cost them a lot of money to resolve.

Think like this type of consumer. If you saw a charge from a company on your credit card statement what action would you take ? Pretend you are a resendential user not a business users. They chargeback the most. How can you funnel those customers into the billing department faster to resolve their question about the charge ? Can your billing system find that customer with the information provided ? If someone else in the household with a different last name called and the person complaining only has the last 4 digits of the credit card on file, can you resolve the issue over the phone in less than 5 minutes? If not you have a chargeback, in which later you will still need to be able to find the information in less than 5 minutes. Contact me if you need more information on how to make this procedure more efficient.

3.  What does Visa and Mastercard say about renewals ? If you have not read the information provided by VISA and MASTERCARD then you should not be a Billing Manager. Bottom line.  You are responsible for knowing what the business side and repercussions are as well as what you are allowed to do, and how much time you have to legally do it.

4. What happens to the client domain when there is a chargeback case ? What happens if this case is won by the hosting company? You would be surprised to find out that the client, in most cases is still legally entitled to the domain.

5. How do you resolve an existing chargeback if the client agrees the charge is legitimate ? Can you get your processing fee back ?

I have implemented some very creative solutions for multiple web hosting companies on how to reduce chargebacks, get a credit card holder to proactively call you before a chargeback, and how to expedite and organize the chargeback procedure.

If your web hosting company management is unable to answer any of these questions you need some web hosting consultation. Contact me if you need more information about these procedures, policies and ideas on how you can prevent, reduce and win chargebacks.

Why Your Static Website could use some WordPress Love
I know who you are. You have a website, and a designer you try calling everyday for simple changes. I know how to make your life easier. If you have a static html website (a quick email and I can tell you if you do), you’ll want to migrate your website to WordPress for its many advantages.

Ease Of Use
One of the biggest features small business clients and people with personal websites such as portfolios and resumes like is WordPress’ Ease of Use.  From finding plugins, writing posts, adding images and videos WordPress simply put, makes your life easier. You hire a developer to get the site up and running, hire a graphic designer to create the perfect theme for your new website or buy a theme already built. Most of my clients like to install a free theme or cheap theme, play around with worpdress for a bit and then have a custom theme created for them. This gives them the opportunity to learn what WordPress can do for them, then they generate ideas on what they would like added to their website. The sky is the limit, Just check out our portfolio of wordpress themes to see what wordpress can do for you!

Easy to Update with a new theme
Once you site matures you might want to have a new theme developed. From wordpress management, installation SEO configuration and Theme development we have you covered. We can create a theme from scratch, install and configure a theme you purchase from another vendor, or you can have a graphic designer create the perfect one of a kind website PSD and we can convert this to wordpress for you. Check out our portfolio of awesome wordpress themes created by our graphic designer and some have been created by our clients themselves in photoshop. We do the hard work!

SEO Configuration
Wordpress Permalinks are the easiest to use if you know what your doing, and the help your SEO right out of installation. We have a few tricks up our sleeves to help you out further with SEO. Such as plugins for internal linking, plugins for meta data required by search engines and more. We can help you get started with your SEO campaign send us over your keywords and we will configure your website for best results. After we are done all you have to do is follow our simple rules for creating content on your website. 

Migrations and Themes by Solarblu.net
Have an HTML site that needs to be migrated to wordpress ? We can do that too. Your one stop shop for everything WordPress. If you have a static website with cpanel hosting it makes the job easier for us but we have been known to get into a website and do the hard work required to make your life easier. Over 300 websites can’t be wrong can they ? Here’s what one of our client had to say after we migrated two membership websites into one, and gave them a better way to add video to their website.

“Solarblu.net contracted to redesigned our web site Traderoutlook.com. The goal was a complete revamp of the front and back end systems, as well as a site consolidation of two subscription based domains. He designed the WordPress theme based off of the business requirements and added his personal touches and ideas to increase usability. The site layout was designed to be SEO friendly early on during the project lifecycle. He created a custom Worpdress plugin to handle much of the site updates and changes within a centralized tool. The rebuild was done on a tight schedule and delivered onetime.”

Well, even the short weeks can seem like long ones. Still recovering from a long holiday weekend a few weeks ago. I have updated a lot of things throughout our brand of sites. Excited to see whats in store next week. Attracting new clients, please let me know if you need wordpress development for your website. We provide wordpress plugin development to enhance functionality on your website, search engine optimization plugins and configuration, wordpress themes and template integration. We also offer WordPress management, this allows you to purchase an hour of our time. We can answer your questions, update your site, help you with a few things to make your website better. Just let us know how we can help.