Copyright law seems to be poorly misunderstood by a great many people. I’m not an attorney, and I’m particularly not a copyright or intellectual property attorney, but I believe I have an informed layman’s understanding of copyright matters. Knowing the basics of copyright law and the legal issues surrounding the use of copyrighted material can help one stay out of trouble. I’ve had two recent copyright issues that might be helpful to discuss. [Read more…]
Archives for 2008
Com-Pac Yachts
Com-Pac needed a website that conveyed the company’s dedication to quality and attention to detail. They also needed to showcase videos of their boats and photo galleries for each boat.
Watch Out for Domain Registrar Phishing Attacks
Official-looking e-mails appear to be from prominent registrars — they’re really attempts to steal your domains
Both eNom and Network Solutions, two very large registrars that handle millions of domain registrations, are the target of a major phishing attack. It is believed that the perpetrators’ purpose is to acquire the login details for victims’ domain registrar accounts and thereby steal or otherwise compromise their domain registrations.
Maximize Your Return in Your Pay-Per-Click Real Estate Advertising
A good many of my clients are Realtors, and a good many Realtors throw away money on ineffective pay-per-click advertising because they haven’t taken the time to educate themselves on the tremendous opportunity afforded by this type of advertising. Pay-per-click advertising (a la Google AdWords) offers a type of advertising that has never before been available in the history of the world: Individualized mass-market advertising.
A Realtor may be an expert at marketing and selling real estate — but that Realtor may not be an expert at writing AdWords advertising copy or managing an online pay-per-click campaign. Pay-per-click is an easy way to get targeted traffic to your web site without waiting for the long-term results of organic search engine optimization. It’s also an easy way to throw away lots of money without seeing any return.
We’ve put together a few tips to help you fine-tune your PPC advertising to help you get the most bang for your buck. This article focuses primarily on real estate PPC advertising, but the concepts are applicable to most any type of service or product. [Read more…]
Didjoo Vote?
I voted. Had to hold my nose on some of my choices, but I did it. This would have been a good year to have NOTA as a choice.
Unbeknownst to me, my precinct moved since the last time I voted. I went to where I used to vote, but there was nothing there. Then I drove around aimlessly for a bit until I spotted the blue “Precinct 30” sign.
Here in Punta Gorda, we use old-fashioned pieces of paper and have to color in little ovals with a pen. I hate that — I never could color inside the lines. Also, I officially have middle-aged eyes, and I forgot to bring my reading glasses with me, so I had to squint painfully at the printing on the ballot to read it.
The election workers were, as always, pleasant and helpful. Around here, they’re always old, too. When I get old maybe I’ll have time to work elections.
NetBiz sez: “Get onto the first page of Google….”
Just in the past few days I’ve responded to several e-mails from clients asking my advice regarding e-mails that they’ve received from NetBiz. Here’s my take on NetBiz:
I’m not a fan of NetBiz. They’re not necessarily a scam, but they do seem to be at least somewhat misleading in how they represent themselves. [Read more…]
The Web: The Rules Are Different Here
Tonight we’re enjoying our first fire of the season in our fireplace. It’s quite a cheery little blaze.
The only thing is, since we live in south Florida, it’s really not cool enough yet for a fire. We had to open all the windows and turn on the ceiling fan to get the living room cool enough to have a fire. [Read more…]
Search vs. Direct Navigation
So I have a client I’m developing a website for. The client has been great to work with, and we’ve made good progress on the new site. But there was a problem: The client kept complaining that he couldn’t reach his site — he was getting “not found” error messages. He told me that he could, at one point, get to the site without the “www” — which was particularly strange because one of the first things I do on a new site is implement a 301 permanent redirect from the non-www to the www version of the URL. [Read more…]
A Face Lift in Cape Coral?
I received a well-written, but completely absurd, spam e-mail yesterday. It started out by saying:
“I was looking at websites under the keyword face lift cape coral and came across your site tropicalwebworks.com. I see that you’re ranked #1 on page 18 in google.
I am not sure if you are aware of why you’re ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is.”
WordPress Upgrade
WordPress version 2.6 just came out. I installed it from scratch on a new blog. The installation went beautifully, and I liked the new Admin interface. [Read more…]