FAQ
Online Marketing (incl. SEO/SEM & Social Media)
What's the difference between Social Media marketing and other kinds of marketing?
You can buy attention (advertising); you can beg for attention from the media (PR); you can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales); or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an ebook, a Facebook page. (via Randy)
Web Hosting
- Do I need to backup my website?
- Can I access my email online?
- Will you purchase a domain name for me?
- My ISP (i.e. Shaw, Telus, Rogers, or Imagen) provides web hosting along with my internet access. Can I use that for my web site?
- How do I access statistics information (web stats) for my site?
Do I need to backup my website?
Our servers are backed up automatically every night. Also, each server is mirrored in real time by another one in a different data center, so if there's a problem with one, the other takes over.
If you wish to keep a copy of your site, you can use the tools in the cPanel site control panel to download a local backup.
Yes! Visit the address in this form: http://yourdomain.com/webmail
This way you can check your email from a friend's computer, at the library, on your smartphone, and other ways.
Log in using your email address as your username, and your email password.
You will have 3 different webmail viewers from which to choose. I prefer Squirrel Mail, but you may wish to try all 3 to see what works for you.
Will you purchase a domain name for me?
I recommend that businesses and organizations directly own their own domain names. Your domain name is an essential asset, like a business name, and I think you want direct control over it.
It's easy and quick to purchase and renew domain names with a service like v2reg.com.
Yes, you can use it... but ask yourself, first: do you want to depend on the customer service from them when there is an issue with your site? Would you want to leave your site there if you switch service providers? And can you easily connect a custom domain name to this site?
The answers to these questions are often an unequivocal "No!"
Hosting with a separate, dedicated service more than offsets the nominal fees, and brings personalized, responsive, flexible service. Ask us about hosting with us, or about the several other good, local hosting providers.
How do I access statistics information (web stats) for my site?
Access stats via the cPanel account control panel:
- Access your cPanel control panel at an address in this form: http://yourdomain.com/cpanel
- Enter your username and password. (They are the same ones you use for FTP access. If you don't have them, please ask.)
- (Feel free to use any and all of the cPanel tools, but please ask or do your research if you are not familiar with them, as you can disable, erase or corrupt your site with several of them.)
- Select "Web/FTP Stats".
- Select a stats package. I recommend Awstats.
- Note that you can view the current month or previous months, or years.
- I suggest you pay particular attention to the following stats:
- number of unique visitors
- Pages-URL (the most popular pages on your site)
- Connect to site from (links to your site from other sites)
- Search Keyphrases (phrases visitors are using to find your site)
An alternative would be to insert Google Analytics code (or similar tools) into your pages, and then use their online tracking tools.
WordPress
What are the differences between WordPress categories, tags and slugs?
Categories only apply to posts. For example, you might have a "News" category, "Products" category, and/or a "Press Releases" category, etc. Tags are a sort of freeform category system… just another way to organize your info and for visitors to access your site. Although you may not have a formal category called "Canada", you could have tags for Canada, France, Germany, etc., and tag your posts accordingly. Then visitors/users could find posts that pertain to those (regional) subjects. Slugs are just a way to fine tune URL's for pages and posts. Unless you are working on some detailed SEO, or you tend to have very long article titles, you can probably safely ignore them.