Did you recently get an email about a “dispute” for your “trademarked domain” in another top level domain?

I have seen a lot of these types of notices received by our customers, boldly urging the owner of a .com domain about the “pending purchase” of a similar domain with another country’s extension – such as “mycompanyname.cn” (a China extension).  The verbiage is a bit sneaky, sounding as if someone is just on the edge of buying your domain if you don’t do something quick!

Be wary of these – they are scams.  Most likely, no one is on the verge of buying your domain name.  In fact, you probably have no interest in owning a domain name that is located in another country where you may not even do any business. A couple of my customers did attempt to reply to the message asking for more information, only to receive a more urgent and stern reply (in a threatening tone).  My recommendation is to ignore the email and delete it.

The trend of late is a revisit from “your account has been updated” emails.  These emails may be phrased to tell you that a recent security patch has been applied to your email service or website, or something similar.  Then you will be asked to open an attached file to remedy the problem or officially apply the “security” fix.  Beware – and definitely hesitate – before opening any attachment.

In most cases, your web hosting or email hosting provider will never ask you to open a file to deal with any sort of technical support issue.  If you are unsure, simply pick up the phone and call your tech support team, or email them directly in a fresh email message (not a reply to or forward of that suspicious message).  If you enjoy WEBii.net service, these emails are absolutely NOT from us – we will never ask you to open a file to address anything with your email services.

This is a recycled tactic used by hackers and spammers to gain some sort of control over your computer or your information.  The file is most likely a malicious software.  The message may even say it is “from” your own website domain.

A good rule of thumb is to only open attachments that you are expecting from parties that you know.

Sometimes a little bit of javascript is necessary to control certain features in a website, such as a simple slideshow element on a page, which was a better choice over the heavy Flash animation.  But as organic SEO becomes more prominent, we must learn to minimize the presence of javascript among our web page code, and strive for “clean” search-engine-friendly code.

Instead of including your javascript directly on the web page, link to it as a source.

In the head of the page, create the script tag, but instead of including the script code within the container of the script tags, link to an external javascript file.  For best organization, store your javascript file in a /js folder (or /scripts or something similar).  Your linked tag will appear in this format:

<script language=”javascript” src=”js/filename.js” /></script>

Now, as your page code is read, this is referenced on one line and the search engines (or other resources) do not need to wade through a long javascript to get to the important meat of your website – the content.

Are you asking yourself “Is my website down?”

There are many, many different things that can cause a connection error between between you and your website. Just because you can’t load your website, it doesn’t mean that your web hosting server is actually down.

If your web browser is displaying a connection error, try these things before calling your web hosting company:

1) Try connecting to a different website, and refreshing the page.

If you can load the other website correctly, skip to step 2. If not, you have a general internet connection issue, and should contact your internet service provider.

2) Check your domain name registration: www.whois.net

If your WHOIS record shows that your domain name registration is expired, you simply need to renew your registration with your Domain Name registrar, and your website will be back up shortly. If your domain name registration is NOT expired, skip to step 3.

3) Try connecting using your website’s IP address.

If it works, something is wrong with the DNS for your website. You will need to contact your Web Host and let them know that your Domain Name is not resolving correctly.

If you still cannot connect to your website, even using the IP address, you might be blocked by your hosting company’s firewall, and you will need to contact them.

The best way to tell if your website is actually down, or if your issue is specific to your network, computer, or web browser, is to have someone that is connected to the internet from a different network attempt to visit your website. If no one is available, you can visit your website via a proxy server. Connecting to your website via a proxy website will simulate connecting from a network outside your own.

Here is a link to a popular free proxy site:
www.megaproxy.com

If someone from a different network can connect to your website, then your website is functional, but there is a connection issue caused by either your network, computer, or browser. Your hosting company’s firewall might be preventing your computer from accessing their servers as well, so you should give them a quick call and let them know what is going on.

You don’t need to be intimidated by the internet. It’s merely a collection of interconnected websites, and websites are actually very simple things. They are files that people can access through Internet Browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome. See? It’s not so scary when you break it down to its simplest elements.

You will need to do 3 things to make a website and publish it online: Create your Website Files, Purchase Web Hosting Space and Register a Domain Name, and Upload Your Files to a Web Server.

1) Create Your Website Files:

The website files are what visitors see when they visit your website. Basic websites are constructed with HTML code, but if you don’t know how to code HTML, there are programs that build websites in an environment similar to word processors (I.E Microsoft Word) and can generate your HTML files for you. Adobe Dreamweaver is a popular program, but if you’re looking for a free solution, Mozilla has a free HTML editor named SeaMonkey. (You can use any program you want, these are just recommendations).
Download and install the SeaMonkey program on your computer, then open the program.

In the SeaMonkey program, go to File > New > Composer Page.

Starting a New Web Page in SeaMonkey

This is where you can build your web page. Once you’re finished with a page, make sure to Save it. It will automatically save as an HTML document, with the file extension “.html”.

Great! You’ve now created your website files, and they’re saved on your computer. Now you need to find a company to host your files on the internet.

2) Purchase Web Hosting Space and Register a Domain Name:

A Domain Name is the name that will point to your website, such as “example.com” or “example.net”. Web hosting companies have servers that specialize in storing websites for people to access over the internet. Purchase some web hosting space from a company that offers the domain name as well, because it will greatly simplify the process. Some hosts even offer free domain name registration with the purchase of web hosting space. Example: Webii.net

Once you’ve purchased hosting space and a domain name, make sure to ask the company for your “FTP connection information” so that you can move onto step 3.

3) Upload Your Files to your Web Server:

In order to upload the website files that you created in step 1 to the web hosting server space that you purchased in step 2, we’re going to use something called an FTP program. There is a great, free program called Filezilla (made by the brains behind the Firefox web browser), and you can download it here: Download Filezilla

Download the the appropriate file depending on your operating system, install Filezilla on your computer, and open up the program.

In order to connect to your web server, you’ll need the following information, available from your web host: FTP Hostname, User Name, and Password. You can enter this information into the fields at the top of the Filezilla program and click “quick connect”. You should now be connected to your web server.

Connecting to your Web Server

Once you’ve connected, you can use the left window pane to navigate your computer’s files, and you can upload files from your computer to the web server. Ask your web host which directory contains your website files. You will upload the HTML files that you created on your computer onto the web server, into that specific directory.

Now, try visiting your domain name in a web browser. You’re on the web! You see? Publishing a web site onto the internet is easy. Making a web site that looks good? Now that is a different story.

Having trouble deciding on a particular domain name to represent your business?  Keep in mind that you do not have to decide on just one – you can have more than one domain name pointing to the same web site presence.   Your primary domain is usually the one that you use to advertise on business cards and to host your email (bob@mysupergreatdomainname.com), but as you come across great ideas to sell your product (myproductname.com, myindustryname.com), we can set up those additional names to direct traffic to your site as well (and even forward email if you like).

Easy, just use Photoshop, right? Sure, that would be the easiest way. However, Adobe Photoshop can cost anywhere upwards of a thousand dollars, so this isn’t something that just anyone can use. Most likely, you would have to be at a company, or a school, or have amassed a golden empire not unlike the master of all that is funky, MC Hammer.

This piece is not targeted to that audience. This advice is for someone without a lot of photo editing experience who wants to turn their photo into black and white both quickly and easily (and for free). Fortunately, for people like this, there is a great free online photo editor at www.picnik.com. Let’s say you were MC Hammer, and you had a picture to which you had foolishly applied a golden tone, and now were taking a more artistic direction in your photography, so you wanted to convert it into a black and white photo. How could you do this quickly, easily (and free, most importantly) ?

First, go to the website (http://www.picnik.com). Click on “Get Started Now”. On the home screen, click “Upload a Photo” and choose the picture that you want to edit from your computer’s hard drive.

Under the “Edit” tab (it should be chosen by default) click on the “Colors” button. There should be a couple of sliding bar options that pop up. The one we’re interested in is on the top, and it’s labeled “Saturation.” Click on the slider, and move the bar all the way to the left. Voila! It’s that easy. Your picture should now be rid of any color that it previously had. Now just press “OK”.

Click on the “Save & Share” tab on the right side. Choose your file name and file size, image dimensions, and file format. If all of this is too confusing, just leave all the default options as they are, and click “Save photo.” This will download the newly created black and white version of your picture back to your computer.

It’s that easy, and quicker than slipping into a pair of Hammer Pants. There are a ton of other cool and free photo editing tools on www.picnik.com, so feel free to look around.

Chances are you’ve seen a link like www.example.com/vote that will link you somewhere, even if it is not on example.com.

If you own your own website, you’ve probably even wondered how to use this to your advantage.

You’re initial thought might be, “but, only an internet wizard of mythical proportions and years of studying the arcane could be powerful enough to wield such magics as to manipulate the interweb in this manner!!”

Actually, it’s about as easy as slipping into a pair of Hammer Pants.

There are a couple of different ways to accomplish this, but the one I’m going to show you is called a PHP 301 Redirect.

1. First, make a directory in your website that you will want to have the redirect named after. If you wanted to make a link to your favorite singer’s webpage, which is most likely MC Hammer, you would make a subdirectory called “mchammer” in the root directory of your website. This means your link will look like this: www.yourdomain.com/mchammer

2. Create a file called “index.php” in your “mchammer” directory, and insert this code (and only this code!) into the page:

<?

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.mchammer.com” );
?>

3. Replace the example URL (http://www.mchammer.com) with your destination of choice, and save or upload this change.  Now, every time you go to www.yourdomain.com/mchammer , you will be redirected to www.mchammer.com.

4. STOP–Hammer Time.

If you’re like most people, you probably use a mail client (Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, MacMail) to download your email from a POP server. By default, most mail clients download a copy of the mail message, and then instruct the server to delete the original message.

This is essential so that mail does not pile up on the server. However, it can be problematic when you want to check your email from several devices, like a home computer, a work computer, and a mobile phone or PDA.

You can accomplish this by enabling an option called “Leave a copy of the message on the server.” Like it says, when you enable this option, it will not delete your mail from the server upon downloading it. However, if you enable this option on all of your devices, your messages will never be deleted. You should probably leave one device without this option so that the messages will eventually be deleted.

Alternatively, you can usually specify a specific number of days before mail is deleted. If you allow yourself a one day buffer period, you should be able to download your mail onto many devices without worrying about using up all your storage space.

This option should be somewhere in the advanced area for server settings. A quick “help” search for “leave a copy of the message on server” should get you the specific instructions for your mail client.

As we have mentioned before, there are a lot of methods that deceptive domain registrars use to trick you into registering a domain with them. One trick we previously mentioned involved sending a final extension notice for a domain that you never even registered.

A new trick these companies are using involves sending an email that says you have a possible domain name dispute with someone trying to register your domain name with Chinese or Asian extensions (such as .cn and .asia). This email is a ruse intended to scare you into registering a foreign domain through their company—usually at a highly inflated price.

This is becoming an all too common tactic with some domain registrars. It works because they rely on your fear to keep you from rationally evaluating the situation. When you receive an unexpected notice ask yourself a few simple questions.

Do you trust the source of the information?
Do you do business in the countries the notice refers to?
Do you really care about yourdomainname.cn or yourdomainname.asia?

If you decide to purchase one of those domain names, make sure you shop around and get the best value for your money. The unscrupulous company that sent you the email will often charge a much higher price than their competitors.

Remember to do your research and always verify the source of unsolicited information.