I was cleaning up some old files the other day and came across a short article/tips document I had previously worked on. It was originally titled 10 things you didn’t know about business computing but you won’t be able to live without but I only got 5 done before I got side tracked. Since I went through the trouble of doing the first 5 here is
5 Things You Didn’t Know About Business Computing That You Won’t Be Able To Live Without From Now On!
In all the time I’ve been working with businesses and helping them to bring their business to the digital world I’ve seen a few mistakes made over and over again. In an effort to help you avoid these problems I’m putting together a short list of tips and tricks to help you in your business computing.
1. Email Verification Systems.
Don’t use them! This is one of my pet peeves. Business is about your customers, and the last thing you want to do is make it harder for you customers to get hold of you. The fact is that many people, myself included absolutely refuse to respond to them. I do make an exception if you’re my customer and trying to contact me but if I’m trying to become your customer and the first contact I receive from you is a hoop to jump through, it’s over, I’m calling your competitor. I am not alone in this. They might be alright for your personal account, but if you use your email to interact with customers leave these things out of it.
Instead of verifications systems get an email host that uses spam filtering techniques. They may allow some spam through but a well configured spam filter will catch MOST spam and your customers will never know it’s there. Personally I use spamassassin with Amavisd and Clamav along with bayesian filtering system. The result is that 10’s of 1000’s of spam, viruses and phishing scams don’t get to my customers on a daily basis. It may not catch as many spam as a verification system would but no one is losing any customers off of it.
2. Get a Domain NAME.
The most important purpose of this is for your business Email. Your customers need a consistent way of contacting you and you need flexibilty. It’s why you can port your phone number to a new company if you get tired of your current phone company.
Email addresses don’t and in fact can’t work that way. If you’re giving joescompany@internetcompany.net as your email and you get tired of using internetcompany for your internet connection you either have to keep paying them for your email service or take the risk that you’ll lose business when your customers try to email you at your old address.
There is a great alternative to this. For less than 30 dollars per year you can own your own domain name. For a few dollars more a month you can have just email hosted by a professional hosting company. The result is that instead of having joe@myisp.net you have joe@mycompany.net (or com or .org or whatever is appropriate). If you get tired of your ISP, you change with no worries about your email addresses, if you get tired of the company hosting your email you can change that too. The only thing you don’t ever have to change is your email address, your customers can always find you, no matter which service providers you do business with.
3. Search Engines.
If you’re going to be managing your own website, learn what they are, how they work and how to get the best spots in them. This takes a lot of work to do this so for many people it’s best to hire a professional designer to get the job done. Anyone with moderate computer skills can throw together a page that looks descent but without knowing the tricks of the trade you’re not getting the most out of your page. When discussing a new site with a designer, ask them if they consider search engines during the design phase of the site, ask to see the search engine position reports for other sites they’ve designed, ask them to take you to a search engine and enter some of the search terms for their sites and show you where they currently rank. If they can’t show you solid results, go ask someone else. WARNING. If they tell you that you’ll need to install extra software on your computer to get a good ranking it’s probably a scam. The extra software many times just inserts false results on the page for your site, the result is that you see yourself at the top, the rest of the world doesn’t.
4. Latest is not Greatest
Unless you’re an ubergeek and consider discovering undocumented bugs and flaws with your computer systems, the latest is not the greatest for you. The fact is that most software and hardware companies spend a lot of money to try and uncover flaws in their products, but we’re talking about the difference between thousands of testers (And that’s just the biggest companies like Microsoft, smaller ones might have as few as 5 or 10 testers) and Millions or hundreds of Millions of production deployments. The fact is that I have yet to see a major product deployed that didn’t have glitches, flaws and vulnerabilities discovered pretty quickly, some of them major and many fatal to the systems unless patched.
Let the geeks and the less wise be the guinea pigs. Give major upgrades at least a few months before committing your cash and more importantly your data to it. It’s bad to lose cash, but to lose your data can destroy a company. (Think about what you’d do if your quick books database was suddenly wiped out after an upgrade because of an undocumented glitch with the software and you didn’t have a backup).
Which brings us to number 5.
5. BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP.
As I said before for most companies, the most valuable thing you have is your
Data. We’re talking about financial records, customer lists, perhaps you’re in manufacturing and you have product schematics or other invaluable trade secrets in there. The point is that data loss can be fatal and you don’t want to learn the hard way that it can happen to you. Data loss can occur due to theft, system failure, fire or just plain maliciousness. (How would you feel if you got to the office in the morning and discovered that the guy you fired yesterday had gotten in and deleted your entire customer database before he left).
The simple solution is to backup on a regular basis. For many small companies you can backup all of your data to a single CD-R or DVD-R. The cost is relatively low. If you’ve got too much data for that, get a USB thumb drive or even a USB hard drive. The important part is that the system has to be portable, you have to be able to take your backup with you. The reason is if you backup everything to a CD, put the cd in the safe and leave for the night and the office burns down even a fireproof safe might get hot enough to damage the CD. TAKE THE BACKUP with you. Keep it at home, get a safe deposit box at the bank, just get your backup out of the same building with the original data. Do a google search for “remote backup service” and find out about online backup services. Most importantly on this topic, verify that you can read the backup data. Many a company has found out that the backup tapes they’ve been using were no good when trying to recover from them. The result can be disastrous.
The list of things you should really know about computers in your business goes WAY beyond this but these are a few of the basics. Check back periodically and perhaps I’ll post some more.
for assistance with your business computing needs contact Gateway Business Solutions. Visit us at http://www.gatewaybusinesssolutions.com
