This article will address a couple of web site payment options for your web site needs.

1. Pay Pal - I have had some clients complain about Pay Pal.  I have been using Pay Pal for years and they have gone through some growing pains but I think they have put together a low cost way for you to accept payments.   During the checkout process your clients now have 2 options for payment.  1.)  is to make a direct credit card payment without having to login to Pay Pal 2.) Pay Pal users may login to their account and pay with their account balance, credit card on file or their checking account. http://www.paypal.com
2. CCNow - offers credit card payment solutions for business owners to accept credit cards without having their own merchant account.  The processing fees are reasonable.  If you are in a hurry for payments you do have to wait for the 15th or the 30th of the month to receive payment. I do have clients who are extremely pleased with this service.  http://www.ccnow.com
3. Cool Cart - Do you have your own merchant account?  If so, Cool Cart provides the secure solution for receiving credit card payments.  This is another service that my clients are very happy with.

If you are thinking of merchant services and would like to talk further about these options please contact me.

Creating a great web site takes a little thought, this guideline will walk you through the steps of preparing information for your web site designer.

1. What is the purpose of your web site?  Information, sales, community site?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. Put yourself in the mind of your audience what type of content would you be looking for when visiting your site? Make a list of that content.
4. Develop a list of key words and phrases that accurately describe your business, product/service. These will be used for search terms for your web site.
5. Besides general information what type of content will you offer on your web site that will keep it fresh and entice visitors to come back to your site?  Examples here could include: blog, newsletters, updated products/services, contests, forum on a topic you can offer expertise in, etc.
6. Gather your contact information.  Also list the hours that the office is open for phone calls if you list a phone number as a contact.
7. Do you have a logo?  If not, prepare information about your company and how you would like it reflected in a logo.
8. Do you have a budget?  If so share it with the designer up front so they can tailor a web site and package to fit within your budget.

That should get you started on your way to a new web site.

Spam is a nuisance and causes great grief to those who have to sift through tons of spam. I am listing a couple of helpful solutions to reduce your spam.

1. Create a hotmail or yahoo mail account to be used strictly for fill in forms on the internet. Some sites (not all) sell your information to outside parties. This is one of the ways that spam comes your way.

2. After researching some information I have found that spammers use spiders to troll web sites and collect email addresses. By embedding your email into an image or a flash file they will not be able to capture your email address.

3. Finally if you are experiencing spam issues we can implement a spam assasin and spam box program. One thing to note about spam filters they are not fool proof and some of your wanted mail may end up in the spam box.

There is a reason why people aren’t visiting your site. It’s because it hasn’t changed since LAST time they saw it. Remedy this, with updates! Updated content, updated specials, updated photos.  The clients that get the most traffic to their web site are those that update often. 

Here are just a few examples of items that could help improve traffic

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Email comes in a couple of different formats and this article will describe the terminology and the uses of each type.

POP mail account - this is an account that is created using your domain name for example lori@mattawan.org To download you mail into a program such as Outlook you may configure it by following these steps:

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