Business: November 2006 Archives
Thought I'd crosspost this as some of you are clients of ours but may not read our blog normally.
We've just upped the bandwidth limits on all our shared hosting plans (all existing clients have had theirs increased)
For full details read our blog
I'm heading up to Dublin shortly to attend the IIA Net Visionary Awards. As the company is sponsoring a category and I've been shortlisted for two awards it would be simply rude not to go :)
I've no idea who will walk away with awards this evening, but I intend to enjoy the evening.
Last year's event was really good fun and I didn't get to bed until around 5am! Of course last year was not without its drama.. Hopefully everyone will be on their best this year...
Webhost Automation have released Helm 4 but it's premature.
It's simply not ready for release.
Who in their right mind releases a hosting control panel that doesn't support MySQL?
What sane person would leave out modules that are so popular such as Awstats?
Want the answer? Simply click here
They seem to be going down the route that other software vendors have taken of late, namely:
- Announce major update
- Hype major update
- Change licensing
- Launch half-finished product
- Omit previously included modules
- Promise to include omissions when public get annoyed
Their marketing blurb is laughable if you actually know what is going on, like their article on how windows is cheaper than linux (??)
Don't get me wrong - the software is not bad, but what's bugging me is their harping on about how "wonderful" v4 is and then releasing it with basic functionality missing...
Earlier this week I got a newsletter from a company that we do business with. As is common with a lot of newsletters the body of the email did not contain all of the articles, so you were invited to click through to read the rest of it.
Unfortunately clicking on any of the links led me to the company's main page and not to the articles they were interested in readers seeing.
Why did this happen?
Putting it bluntly they presumed that we all used Internet Explorer as our primary browser!
What a wonderful assumption to make!
Imagine you have 20 thousand subscribers to a mailing list. If the mailing list is for a technical product then the percentage of users who have opted for a browser other than Internet Explorer is going to be quite high. Even if you were to conservatively estimate that 10% were users of Firefox, Opera, Safari or some other browser, then that means that 2 thousand readers won't see your content.
If they can't see your content they can't read it and be enticed by your special offers, so they won't buy!
It doesn't take much effort to check that a newsletter's redirect links work cross-browser (why they wouldn't is beyond me anyway..) and the 5 minutes of testing if it means not losing 10% of your potential customers is obviously worth it.
The shortlist for the 2006 Net Visionary Awards was announced earlier today.
We won't know who the winners will be until the night of the event, so it should be quite exciting.
I have been shortlisted in two categories, which I wasn't expecting - blogging and entrepeneur.
It's nice to see that there are so many familiar names on the list, though, as usual, there are also quite a few that I don't recognise at all!
I'm not sure when this happened, but I've just noticed that PayPal has suddenly expanded the number of currencies available.
You can now maintain your account using the following:
- Euro
- Australian Dollar
- Canadian Dollar
- Czech Koruna
- Danish Krone
- Hong Kong Dollar
- Hungarian Forint
- New Zealand Dollar
- Norwegian Krone
- Polish Zloty
- Pound Sterling
- Singapore Dollar
- Swedish Krona
- Swiss Franc
- U.S. Dollar
- Yen
