Web help and advice - Comment archive

Return to comment archive index
 

May 2008

Check out the competition

One of the amazing things about the internet is how much 'market intelligence' you can gain by simply visiting your competitors' web sites. This includes the details of the services/products they are offering, pricing, specialisations, the direction they are pushing their business forward in, special offers, p&p rates etc.

Don't let such an amazing opportunity go to waste. Make a list of your top competitors (if you don't have one then search for them on the web by pretending to be a prospective customer for your products or services) and then review their websites thoroughly. This will give you hints on how to evolve your business to be more competitive, or - as it most often the case - simply how to present your own strengths more clearly on your own website.

Check out the competition... because they'll probably be doing the same to you!  

Spam and how to avoid it

According to some sources (and we can well believe them) over 90% of email is now Spam. Spam is unsolicited email ranging from trying to sell you stuff (mostly drugs or online pornography) to trying to infect your machine with viruses. Pretty nasty stuff - so what can you do to try to protect yourself?

If you use a quality website hosting provider (we wouldn't recommend anything else) they should have a variety of services to help. Products, such as Spam Assassin, filter out spam emails by looking for patterns that they recognise as spam. Having this set up helps the situation greatly, but if you have a particularly bad problem then other email verification checks can be turned on to help cut the numbers further.

You should also try to guard against spam by stopping it from happening in the first place. Email harvesting programs crawl the net 24x7 gathering email addresses they find on web pages, so one option for some websites is to simply not give out an email address: instead, ask people to contact you via a form on your website. Other options exist - seek professional advice about your individual circumstances.

SPAM is a modern phenomenon driven by greed - so it is never going to go away - but with a bit of thought, careful planning and some tools to help out you can certainly reduce it to just a minor inconvenience.

Never open spam and - if you do - never click on any links within it!