Dear Friend,

Spring is in full swing in Washington DC and what better time to think about updating your website with a little "spring cleaning". Now's the time, while things may be a bit slow for your business, to take a careful look at the home page of your website to see if you need new photos, new information, or just a "freshen up" to keep clients and prospects interested.

Well, it's official, our new business name is McCord Web Services LLC. We're excited about our new name and will be introducing a new service on Press Release writing this next month and hopefully one for startup podcasting the month after as we work to add more helpful services to our offerings.

Best Regards,

Nancy McCord
President of McCord Web Services LLC

Moving Your Website | Effective Blogging Tips | How to Download Mail From Gmail

What to Know About Moving Your Website to a New Web Host

Moving to a new web host is never easy. In fact it can be downright hard and fraught with problems depending on the type of technology that your website is using behind the scenes. You should never feel that your website files are held hostage by your web host, but it is important to consider moving to a new host only to solve serious problems.

When Should You Consider Moving to a New Web Host?

Many of the reasons I have heard why a client wants to change web hosts typically have to do with issues that are truthfully not the original web host's fault. Here are a few tips when you should consider moving and when you should not.

You should move to a new web host if...

• Your IP address block is linked to a blacklisted spammer and all of your mail is blocked literally shutting down your business.
  
  
• If your web host does not offer the technology that you really need to run your website. For example if your host does not have Windows servers and your brand new website is all done in .asp, you will have to move.
  
  
• If your website or e-commerce store has suffered significant service outages due to either high server load and the use of older technology by your host and they cannot accommodate your website traffic.
  
  
• If your website has been taken down by a virus spread from another user on your shared server because your host did not have the proper security or firewalls in place causing your website files to be trashed.

You should NOT move to a new web host if...

• If you have had a spam problem in your inboxes. Unfortunately poor mailbox management is not your host's problem, but is rather an issue that you are not attending to that is impacting your mail delivery. You will continue to have these same problems where ever you go. You should change your procedures and not your host.
  
  
• If you think you can save money on hosting fees. You may eat up any savings from the money to bring your website or e-commerce store back online. Make sure to read the rest of this article for why.
  
  
• You have had one incident of poor customer service. Be patient when you have a problem, get another service rep to help you and try to be courteous in helping them to help you. There can always be a one time incident where someone (you or them) has simply had a bad day and not reacted well. Give support another go before you decide you must move.

Cautions About Moving Web Hosts

If you have decided that you absolutely must move to a new web host please be aware that you cannot simply set up a new account and upload your website files and everything will just magically work. In fact everything will break when you move to a new web host!

Database connections, if you have them for e-commerce, as well as the database itself will need to be reset up and the new connection code syntax embedded in all pages when you move to a new web host. Contact forms will need to be scripted again using the new hosts scripting and cgi-bin address, PHP websites will need to have PHP re-enabled and possibly PHP.ini settings updated on the new host to make the site work, and of course all email accounts will need to be set up again and passwords added.

Moving to a new web host is highly complicated for many sites. Even for a simple HTML website, new contact form scripting, and time to set up email accounts and then update the settings on your computers to be able to download your mail again takes time and creates an expense.

In fact, you may find that to move your site will cost you more in expenses for set up, reconfiguration and down time than you had ever even expected. If you feel that you really must move make sure that you are carefully analyzing what the costs actually will be.

Our Top Picks For Web Hosts

We have two recommendations for hosts and use both of them for our business websites and so have real world experience with both. Our top preferred host is Hostway. The majority of our business clients as well as our largest website (500+ pages), are hosted by Hostway. I like Hostway as their control panel is intuitive, easy for clients to use without my involvement, online performance is excellent, and they offer Urchin website statistics.

Our second choice is Network Solutions. (Get a free domain with annual hosting.) For some clients this may be the preferred solution however the control panel, and email application is more difficult to use and I do not consider their control panel intuitive. Unfortunately, they do not provide a good website statistics analytics package. However, they do have a WordPress auto installer that makes setting up a WordPress blog super easy and integrates easily onto your server. I have found website database integration to be more problematic at Network Solutions.

The bottom line is when it comes to wanting to change web hosts, make sure you are changing for the right reason and that you are selecting a new host that will be a better long term choice than your previous one.

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How To Be An Effective and Productive Blogger

We blog professionally for many clients and today I'd like to pass on the tips for effective blogging that I teach to my blog copywriters.

1. To build traffic on your site in 30 days blog religiously five days a week to see a marked increase.

2. To keep your readers subscribed and attract search engines blog a minimum of three days a week.

3. Keep your posts around 200 to 250 words and on one topic. Keep your posts keyword dense but written in proper English.

4. Craft your post title to contain your top keywords and in a phrase that may match a search engine query.

5. Look for interesting content to build readership. Never copy articles on the Web and post them on your blog create your own unique content and write with a distinctive point of view.

6. Stick with blogging and post even when you do not want to. To make it easy, I make a list of post titles and when I need help with an idea I pull a topic from my pre-prepared list.

7. If you are using WordPress blog ahead and set your blog to publish in the future. Many of my busy bloggers do their posts on the weekend and allow WordPress to auto-publish their posts.

8. Do not copy posts from Word directly into any blog control panel. Have you ever seen these characters in a blog post C$A or other characters that look like Russian text? These are apostrophes or dashes from a post that has been copied from Word directly in the blog post screen. We tell our bloggers to post in the control panel. If you feel that you MUST work in Word, copy your post into Notepad manually remove the curly apostrophes with find and replace and then recopy and paste your post from Notepad into the blog control panel.

9. If you want best search engine benefits consider WordPress and install the Meta Tag Plug-in and use it for every post!

10. Don't stress out over the fact that people typically will not post comments on your blog. This is not an indication that people are reading your blog. Also don't start blogging thinking that a blog is a forum. It really takes a hot topic for readers to leave a comment. Don't freak out if you don't get comments, people really are reading your blog!

If you like these tips, you'll want to follow our blog on blogging at Blog-World Watch. For tech and search engine marketing tips follow our Web-World Watch blog, and for web design tips follow our Design-World Watch blog.

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Bright Idea Tip: How to Download Gmail Into Outlook

I find it easier to get my mail through Outlook and now Gmail allows you to download your mail as either a POP3 account or IMAP account right into Outlook. Here's how:

1. Login to Gmail, click the "Settings" link at the top right of the page.

2. Click "Forwarding and POP/IMAP", click "Enable IMAP" in the "IMAP Access" section. You can either follow the rest of our tips for Outlook 2007 or visit this link to get the instructions for Thunderbird, Outlook 2003, Outlook Express and others.

3. Go to "Tools" then "Account Settings" and click "New". Select IMAP as your choice.

4. Complete the fields in the form with our email address and password. For incoming enter imap.gmail.com for outgoing enter smtp.gmail.com.

5. Click remember password and then the button "More Settings". Click the "Advanced" tab. For incoming server port enter 993 and for outgoing server enter 587.

6. Click the "Outgoing Server" tab and click the box "my outgoing server requires authentication". Click okay and then finish.

Next time you do a send and receive look for Gmail at the very bottom of your mail tree. Here you can review your Gmail right within Outlook. You can even leave the messages on the Gmail server or select to clean them out from within the Gmail control panel.