Are there benefits to using Captcha? Indeed there are. To Captcha or not to Captcha, that’s the question…and we’ll help you decide by giving you the pros and cons of Captcha.

Pros of Captcha: Why Use Captcha?

There are numerous benefits to using Captcha on your web forms:

• It’s commonplace, so most of your site visitors will understand immediately what they’re requested to do. So many websites use Captcha that it’s the rare individual who has never seen or used one of these forms protected by Captcha. Because it is so common, most users have no objection to using it.
• New software makes it easier to implement and use it. Newer versions of Captcha are making it easier to implement and use Captcha on multiple platforms.
• It’s effective. Captcha does indeed cut down on the amount of bogus contacts received through web forms. It’s still the standard for protecting web data and forms from harassment online.

Disadvantages of Using Captcha

Like most things in life, there are also disadvantages to using Captcha on your web forms.

• Although it’s common, Captcha does tend to annoy site visitors. There may be a decrease in the number of forms submitted or sign ups received once you implement Captcha.
• It can’t prevent all spam. Nothing can. Some will still leak through.
• Captcha can’t be seen by people with sight impairment, and many people with perfect vision can’t figure out some of the squashed characters in a Captcha presentation box.  Although audio messages can make Captcha useful for the sight impaired, it really can be a pain in the neck to decipher at times.

 Should You Use Captcha?

At Web Design of Palm Beach, we believe in using all the tools in your webmaster’s toolbox to prevent spam. We offer both Postini spam filtering and Captcha technology for your website at very reasonable rates. Both services can drastically cut down on the number of annoying, time wasting emails from spammers.

Captcha isn’t the end all and be all of spam prevention, but it can dramatically help you keep your peace of mind when dealing with unsolicited emails. Contact Web Design of Palm Beach today to implement these and other spam-busting measures intended to safeguard your email address and website from exploitation. Call us at 561.262.5886 to learn more or visit our website to test drive our Captcha services.

Five Simple Tips to Combat Spam

Unlike regular junk mail that arrives via your friendly mail carrier, spam ends up costing YOU time and money to deal with. It’s not as easy as throwing it into the recycle bin and forgetting about it. Fortunately, however, there are several steps you can take to combat the daily march of spam into your inbox.

Tip 1: Use disposable email addresses for questionable websites or forms.

Spammers often purchase email lists from companies or individuals who set up websites or landing pages to attract users into divulging their email addresses. Disposable email addresses  can be used once and then discarded. They forward email into your inbox but you can deactivate them without harming your formal email address. This stops spam in its tracks. Disposable email addresses are slightly inconvenient to use but are usually offered at no charge by several companies.

Tip 2: Do not post your email address online.

Posting your full email address online is like leaving a juicy steak on a plate on the floor of your kitchen alone with your dog and expecting it to be there when you return. For almost every canine in the world, the temptation is too great. Spammers are also tempted by the juicy steak of an unprotected email address left on a website. Use hyperlinks to cloak your website, since spammers love to run automated programs to harvest email addresses from the internet.

Tip 3: Install good spam filtering software.

Many email programs come with spam filters, but you can also purchase and install an additional filter to block unwanted emails. Talk to Web Design of Palm Beach about installing safeguards against spam in your company’s email account to decrease unwanted messages.

Tip 4: Opt out quickly from services that require an email address.

Be suspicious of websites that require you to divulge an email address in order to access their content. While some are legitimate, many are simply bait to attract suckers who divulge their email addresses for the use of spammers worldwide. If you must give out your email address, unsubscribe from any communications from the site owner as quickly as possible.

Tip 5: Don’t answer a spam email.

We’ve all been tempted to fire back a tart reply to an unsolicited email. Unfortunately, such a response tends to get our emails trapped in the spammer’s filter, and the number of spam emails arriving in your inbox may actually grow, rather than shrink. Sending threats, angry letters, or demands to remove you from an email list will only help spammers, not you. Instead, use Tip 4 and unsubscribe, or install software to block future emails from that domain or ISP.

Combating spam isn’t easy, and you may never have a completely “spam free” email experience. But with a good spam filter and a few tricks of the trade, you can greatly reduce the quantity of the unsolicited emails arriving in your inbox.

Getting slammed with spam? Contact Web Design of Palm Beach for help. We can help you combat spam, fix website problems or build a shiny new site for you. Hosting, web design and consulting available. Call us at 561.262.5886.

How Do Spammers Harvest Emails?

Spammers obtain email addresses in a variety of ways. The easiest way is for them to simply buy lists – and yes, many companies do indeed sell your data, including your email address, for profit. Spammers love to buy and sell email lists among themselves too, so unfortunately, once you get on one spam email list, you’re apt to be on many others.

Certain email addresses seem prone to spam. These include Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail and other free email services. Spammers simply try out various combinations of names, letters and numbers until they hit a valid email address. With millions of email addresses out there, it’s easier than you think for them to come up with at least one valid email address, and automated programs make it simple for them to spit emails out until one hits pay dirt. This form of attack, known as a directory or dictionary attack, is unfortunately very common.

Be very wary of sharing your email address with websites you’ve stumbled across online. Spammers often seed the internet with joke of the day, Bible quote of the day, free horoscopes and other daily emails in exchange for your email address. Once they obtain your email address, they’re quick to sell it to others. If you do sign up for a daily email or for an email list, make sure the service states they won’t sell or rent your email address. You can also use a disposable or throw-away email address  to ensure it’s not sold to spammers.

There are, of course, more sophisticated ways that spammers harvest emails, including hidden programs and such that collect emails from unsuspecting website visitors. That’s why it’s important to surf the web carefully and with awareness, and be very careful to whom you entrust your email address.

Prevent Email Harvesting

You probably can’t prevent email harvesting entirely, but you can put numerous roadblocks in place to make your email address more difficult to pick from the internet.

• Use human-readable email addresses on your website if you must publish your email address. Use (dot) instead of a ., and (at) instead of the @ symbol, for example, to make your email address harder for spammers to read automatically.
• Avoid using free email addresses from the big companies if you can since they are often subjected attacks.
• Use contact forms that do not use visible email addresses.
• Javascript and other forms of encryption can hide email addresses but note that if your site visitors have Java disabled, they won’t be able to see your web page accurately.

If you’re tired of receiving ads for dating services, drugs you don’t need or want, or spoof emails phishing for your credit card information, take a good look at how you’re sharing your email address. You may be making it too easy for spammers to harvest your emails.

 Web Design of Palm Beach can help you enact any of these strategies for cutting down on spam. We also provide expert website design and reliable web hosting.  Contact Web Design of Palm Beach for more information or call us at 561.262.5886

If you hate the thought of opening your email each day because of spam, here’s a simple method for reducing the volume of spam emails you receive: sign up for a throw-away email address.

 What Is a Throw-Away Email Address?

Throw-away or disposable email addresses are temporary email addresses that forward relevant emails to you but discard spam messages. Once you receive spam on a disposable address, you can disable it. Spammers who harvest throw-away or disposable email addresses end up with a useless email address that bounces back undeliverable messages. More importantly, you know exactly which website gave away your address, since throw-away or disposable emails are used once per website.

When Should You Use a Disposable Email Address?

You can use disposable or throw-away email addresses for any number of reasons, but some of the more common ones include:

• You’re leaving comments on a blog or website and don’t want to use your real email address on the form;
• You don’t want to post an actual email address on your blog or website, but a hyperlink won’t work;
• When a website requires you to enter an email address to access its contents.

Disposable email addresses forward messages into your real inbox. Turning off the disposable email address doesn’t affect your real email address, so that you’ll still receive messages sent to your actual address by colleagues, friends and anyone else who has your direct address.  You can set up numerous disposable email addresses, too; there’s no limit to how many you can have, and you can change them as often as you like.

 Where to Find Disposable Email Addresses

Many companies offer disposable email addresses. A few of the better known ones include:

• E4ward: E4ward offers free disposable email addresses at one convenient website. If you receive an unwanted email through their service, you can easily switch to a new throw-away email address.
• GishPuppy: A simple service that puts you in control of your email address. Create a new throw-away email address as often as you want.
• Mailinator: Mailinator works differently than the typical throw-away email. Your emails are sent to a web page, where you pick up the emails, rather than have them forwarded to your address. It’s sort of like the old-fashioned forwarding of snail mail to a general mail box or a post office; you have to actively pick up your mail, and it’s not private. Nevertheless, it can cut down on your spam emails.

Of course, there are many other disposable or throw-away email services out there. These are just a handful to show you what is available. Make sure you read each service’s terms of service before signing up, and take a look at their FAQs or other documentation so that you know exactly how your messages will be received and stored, just in case something comes through that’s not spam.

Cutting down on spam email is on everyone’s to-do list. Hopefully it just got a little easier for you with this advice.

Web Design of Palm Beach offers professional hosting and web design services. We can help you cut down on spam and improve your website. Contact Web Design of Palm Beach.  Call us at 561.262.5886

That is, there were few drawbacks until the company changed the way visitors view business posts (and personal posts from an individual page too, but that’s another story for another day.)

Reaching Only 5% of Your Followers – What?

One of the biggest drawbacks for businesses is the small amount of people reached with every post on your business pages. At first glance, you may think you have a thriving, healthy page with thousands of followers. Business page posts, however don’t reach every single follower. Instead, Facebook calculates who should see your post, and unless you pay to play, they share it with 5 to 10% of your followers. You can’t control who those followers are, so on any given day, you have no idea exactly who you are reaching and when you reach them.

Some companies have gotten around this low number by using a combination of email marketing and Facebook pages. Jen Clothing, for example, a trendy online fashion retailer of women’s clothing, combined an email outreach with a Facebook contest to boost both awareness of its fall dress collection and visits to its Facebook page. Boosting visits is thought to correlate with better visibility for a company’s Facebook page. Interaction with the contest through likes or shares is also thought to help the Facebook proprietary algorithm determine that your content is worthier of wider distribution, perhaps reaching 10% of your followers instead of 5%. Companies like Jen Clothing are experimenting with multi-channel marketing to reach as many customers as possible.

Pay to Play

Facebook, like any business, needs to make money to fund its activities and please its shareholders. The company offers “sponsored posts” which, like an advertisement, you have to pay to promote. You set a budget the way you do for online advertising and the company then shows your sponsored post to as many potential users as it deems relevant.

Many small business owners question whether the return on investment for Facebook sponsored posts is worth it. The site’s users often complain about the ads, finding many intrusive or poorly targeted. If you have a robust budget for online marketing and your core audience seems to use Facebook often, it might be worth a test.

Should You Give Up on a Facebook Business Page?

Given these drawbacks for businesses using Facebook, should you give up on your Facebook business page?  No, but diversify your social media resources instead. Don’t focus solely on Facebook, but test various social media platforms to find the one that seems to work best for your business needs.

Social media is here to stay, and Facebook is a platform that many people, your customers among them, may enjoy. Although it has many drawbacks, offering customers a choice of how to interact on social media with your business still remains the best option.

Web Design of Palm Beach offers reliable website hosting services, website design and more. Call us at 561.262.5886 for more information.

The Pluses of Google+: Benefits for Small Business Owners

As a small business owner, I’m always looking for free and low-cost ways to promote my business online. Social media provides great opportunities to network with potential customers and business partners.

Like many business owners, I first had a Facebook business page, with a growing community of followers. However as time went by and Facebook became a publicly traded company, it changed its free model to a pay-to-play model for business owners. Fair, perhaps, but now my businesses’ reach was limited as a free page.

Google+ offers no such restrictions to businesses or individuals. You can set up a page for yourself or for your business online. When you set up a business page, it also links to local search efforts, which boosts your website’s power to reach a local market – a plus for small business owners.

Google+ operates a little differently from similar social media sites. Instead of merely connecting with potential followers, you can add them to your “circles” and group circles by category. Friends, family, customers, clients, colleagues or other circles can be created so you can send customized messages to each circle rather than blast mass messages out to all.

Like most social media sites, Google+ enables users to share both links to web pages and articles as well as videos and photos. If your products are services benefit from visual marketing, that’s a plus.

Lastly, Google offers a neat feature called “hangouts.” Hangouts connect up to 10 people at a time in a sort of online video conference. You can share videos or even screen captures. Like the rest of the services offered by Google+, it’s free.

Drawbacks to Google+

For all of these wonderful features, are there are any negatives to using Google+? The two biggest drawbacks cited by users include slow adoption (also awareness) among their customers about Google+ itself, and the sheer amount of social media accounts most businesses juggle these days.

Google hasn’t done a lot to promote Google+. Sure, it’s online, and if you have gmail or other Google services you can’t help but notice it. Yet many people still don’t know what it is or why it’s a good idea to be on it. Until more of your friends, customers and acquaintances are using it, it can be hit or miss as to its effectiveness.

Many people are feeling social media burnout these days, and that feeling often extends to businesses. Small business owners juggling several social media profiles can feel overwhelmed posting, liking, sharing and managing their pages.

From a search engine perspective, anything Google does is worth noting – and participating in. While the company is mum about how much, if any, credence is given to companies using their platform for social media; most business owners are playing it safe and hedging their bets, setting up accounts on Google+ to cover their bases. Since it’s free, it’s a good idea to have a Google+ account. Be sure to manage it just as you would any other social media platform, and actively participate as often as you can to cultivate those all-important networking contacts.

Web Design of Palm Beach provides webhosting services, web design and more. Visit us online or call 561.262.5886.

Twitter’s reach is astounding. Since its incorporation in 2007, the company has ground by leaps and bounds.  Over 500 million tweets are sent daily.  Twitter recently added images and video to the things users can tweet, making it a great tool to share many types of media.

Although some people find the short burst-type messages more annoying than helpful, for those who get the hang of Twitter, it can become a valuable tool to promote a business or network with new people.

5 Ideas to Use Twitter Effectively to Promote Your Business

 If you’re confused by how to use Twitter as a business communications tool, these five ideas will help you get started. If you don’t already have a Twitter account, you can set one up at no charge. Connect with Web Design of Palm Beach as your first Twitter ‘friend’, and you’re well on your way to creating your own personal network of contacts on Twitter.

Once you’re ready to start using the social media site, these five ideas can help you use Twitter more effectively to promote your business.

1. Create a memorable profile page.  Twitter, like many social media platforms, gives each user their own personal profile page. Don’t just slap any old thing on the page and call it a day. This is your personal handshake, your business card online, your means of introducing yourself to potential customers, clients or partners. Choose a good-quality headshot of yourself or use your company logo for your profile. Write an engaging, enticing profile that showcases not just what you do, but how you can help your target customers solve problems. Such profiles aren’t easy to do, and you may need to revise it a few times until you’re satisfied with it. Don’t forget to link to your website.

2. Find and connect with the influencers in your industry. It’s fine to “follow” anyone on Twitter – you don’t need to ask their permission. Find and follow the thought leaders in your industry. Encourage colleagues, employees and others to connect with you as well.

3. Tweet regularly. Don’t let your account gather dust. Send out at least one or two Tweets daily. If that feels overwhelming, tools like Hoot Suite and other programs let you schedule your communications in advance, so you can load 14 messages on a Monday to send out automatically on your behalf for the week. You’ll miss potential interactions using only scheduling tools, but a blend of scheduling tools and spontaneous interactions leads to more frequent and authentic communications on Twitter.

4. Share the love by retweeting. Retweeting means sharing someone else’s post with your own network of followers. It’s a thoughtful way to help others, and they may return the favor, thus introducing your own content to new audiences online.

5. Don’t make it all about sales. Hard selling is frowned up on Twitter. Aim for a ratio of 80% informative, interesting content, whether original, shared links, or shared retweets. The remaining posts can be promotional. Try offering discounts or other incentives to your Twitter fans so that you can track the results.

Twitter offers great potential for many companies to engage with their customers, introduce their products and services to new customers, and build their brand. If you’d like help setting up your Twitter account or integrating it into your website, call Web Design of Palm Beach. We can get your website up and running quickly, host it for you, and get you tweeting in no time at all. Call us at 561.262.5886.

What Is Social Media?

You’re probably familiar with many of the more common social media websites. They’re mentioned on the news, they’re touted by all the latest marketing gurus, and they’re even on the stock market. Social media websites promote connections and networking via direct, personal links. Through your personal or business social media account, you share updates, links to relevant content and more. You can make connections with new acquaintances, rekindle old friendships, and keep up with family and friends.

Social media today has a broader definition than most people give it. Social media is more than websites like Twitter or Facebook. Social media encompasses any website where conversations and interactions are encouraged.

Examples of Social Media Social media includes:

• Social networks, such as Facebook, which enable users to create networks of friends, acquaintances and business contacts with which they can share updates and content;
• Question and Answer forums, such as Yahoo! Answers, which provide forums for individuals to post questions and others to respond;
• Content curation platforms such as Pinterest and Reddit that make it easy for users to share links to their favorite articles, images and more, and to curate groups of useful and relevant content;
• Photo-based social sites, such as Flickr, where images are the basis for communications, commentary and sharing;
• Video websites like YouTube that provide personal television channels to billions of people worldwide;
• Blogging, which provides platforms for individuals, companies and organizations to share their ideas, thoughts and content with the world;
• Business and networking sites like LinkedIn which focus on industry and business-specific topics;
• and many, many more.

Is Social Media Marketing Profitable or a Time Waster?

Business people often look askance at social media marketing as time-wasting, unprofitable communications. Social media, however, can provide profitable indeed. Let’s look at a few examples.

• Cadbury/Wispa: When chocolate company Cadbury announced it was retiring the Wispa candy bar, a popular treat in the United Kingdom, millions of fans petitioned via Twitter and Facebook for the company to keep the Wispa bar in production. Cadbury, reluctant at first to respond, finally sent 40 million Wispa bars to market. The bars were quickly snapped up by chocolate-hungry fans, and Cadbury kept the bars in production. Today, the company credits social media with both saving the iconic British chocolate bar and adding 30% to their annual profits.
• Coffee Groundz: Do you remember the days when door to door salesmen like the Fuller Brush Man knocked on your front door and sold items from a case? The days of a direct salesman traipsing around the suburbs may be over, but direct sales lives on today via social media. Coffee Groundz used a Twitter campaign to directly sell its products to consumers. The results netted them a 25% increase in both sales and profits. Not bad for using a ‘free’ advertising medium.
• Jimmy Choo: Shoe designer and retailer Jimmy Choo’s footwear commands prices as high as their platform heels, but that didn’t stop consumers from responding to their social media campaign. The company used a cleverly targeted campaign via Twitter to encourage visits to their retail stores and sell sneakers. The results speak for themselves; soaring store visits, positive Tweets shared among Choo fans, and 33% more sneaker sales.

Your company may not be as big as Cadbury or Jimmy Choo, but with creativity, persistence and knowledge, you too can harness the power of social media to boost sales, profits and site traffic. Get started today by exploring some of the popular social media platforms. Connect with Web Design of Palm Beach on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. Soon you’ll be tweeting, liking and commenting like a pro!

Web Design of Palm Beach offers website design, hosting and more. Call us at 561.262.5886 to learn more about our services today.

YouTube, the world’s largest video social sharing platform, was purchased by Google in 2006. Since then, it’s evolved as the world’s second largest search engine. It’s second only to Google. Mushroom Networks published an infographic with the following facts about YouTube:

• The site processes 3 billion searches a month – more than all other search engines combined, with the exception of Google itself.
• One out of every two internet users watch YouTube.
• The site greets 1 billion unique visitors each month.
• 100 hours of new videos are uploaded very minute!
• YouTube reaches more adults ages 18 to 34 than any cable network.

Whew! And there are more facts to support the assertion that YouTube may, in fact, be the world’s most widely used search engine – or if not the most widely used search engine, a very close second in the race to be the biggest.

So how can you use this to your online marketing advantage?

• Create a YouTube account, or channel, to start using the site.
• Create short, powerful, original videos about your product or service. If you have a webcam or video camera, you can create them yourself. If not, hire a professional.
• Work your website’s name and URL into the actual video using YouTube’s annotations feature.
• Make sure to tag your video with keywords.
• Create a hyperlink in the video description to your website, and make the link in the first sentence if you can.
• Use the channel description area on YouTube more like an ad or a sales piece than a plain old vanilla description. You want to sell your video just as you’d sell your services; it helps gain more traffic and click throughs.
• Make an original, customized background for your channel on YouTube, and include your website’s domain on the header.

YouTube may possibly be one of the biggest search engines available. It can certainly be used to harness traffic for your website, and that helps boost visits and possible sales.

Web Design of Palm Beach offers affordable, reliable website hosting, website design, search engine optimization consulting and much, much more.  We can help you harness the power of YouTube and other search engines to boost your site traffic. Call us at 561.262.5886 to learn more or speak with a web design expert today.

Important Meta Tags to Know

You don’t necessarily need to know how to write HTML code to create meta tags. When Web Design of Palm Beach creates your website, they will make sure that the important meta tags are completed in your site design to help you with your website traffic. But during the design and development process, you may be asked to provide certain pieces of key information to help us build a great website.

There are two important meta tags to know:

• Meta Description:  The meta description tag provides a brief description of what a web page is about. When someone searches for your site online, it provides the information for search engine results that describes the page. If it’s written well, users may be more inclined to click on the link.
• Meta Title or Title Tag: Although it’s not technically a meta tag, the title tag combines with the meta description field on a page to share the page’s title with website visitors and searchers.

There’s another field that’s still used by Yahoo! but abandoned by most of the other search engines called the meta keywords field. This field is usually populated with a string of keyword phrases separate by commas. Yahoo! still uses this field, but the other major search engines claim they no longer do. It’s a good idea just to include them to be on the safe side.

Basics of Meta Description Tags

There are several best practices for writing meta descriptions or page descriptions that are good to know.

• Write your meta description sentences like advertising copy. It should be specific to the page but juicy enough to entice someone to click the link.
• Avoid duplicating tags on your website. The same tag on every page won’t help, and may hurt, your pages and click throughs.
• Don’t use quotation marks – these cut off your sentence when the search engine displays them!
• Keep them between 150 and 160 characters. Anything longer gets cut off.

If you need help building your website, call us. Web Design of Palm Beach offers affordable, reliable website hosting, website design, search engine optimization consulting and much, much more.  Call us at 561.262.5886 to learn more or speak with a web design expert today.