Website Designers and Webmasters

My fiance and I went to see Rascal Flatts in Concert in Spokane Washington for our two-year Anniversary. Jason Aldean Opened.

It’s a three hour drive to get there.

Unfortunately, we were like 8 rows from the top of the colusium. =( We were sitting next two these two girls from Coeur D’Alene. We were talking when they saw two of their friends walking on the ground floor. (I have no idea how they saw them… they were specks.) We followed the specks as they moved towards the stage.

The closer they got to the stage, the more hyped those two girls got. “What are they doing?” “How’d they get down there?” “Where are they going?”

The two specks just kep walking. They walked around the side of the stage, into a small hole between the stage “board walks.”

To make a long story short, for $20/each we joined the Rascal Flatts Fan Club, and got to go into the “Dog Pound.” Where we stood right infront of the stage, with walkways all around us, so almost no matter where the band members went, we were right next to them. It was great! The bands also did a very good job.

*Picture Coming soon*

Oh yea, and another small note, this was the first concert I’ve ever been to. What a computer nerd I am.

-Good times
-Ashton Sanders

BlackList: If your website (or IP) address is on an email provider’s (like AOL) blacklist, that provider will automatically block any email coming from your IP Address.

WhiteList: You guessed it… the exact opposite of being blacklisted. That provider has recognized you as a legitimate company, and allows your mail to go through to their email clients.

Feedback Loop: When you get feedback from an email provider when your email has been marked as spam by that provider’s customers.

Problem: Email newsletters are not getting opened or, seen.
I had to get a clients IP address whitelisted on the major email providers. Unfortunately, when I got to AOL, too many subscribers had recently marked his newsletters as spam, so my request had been denied. What I did manage to do is get a “Feedback Loop” initiated.

AOL Feedback Loop
A Feedback Loop is very simple: Whenever an AOL member marks your newsletter as spam, scomp@aol.net sends you an email with a copy of the email that was marked as spam. This will allow you to remove the complainers from your subscriber base.

Note: The email you receive has the headers removed, so you will have to customize your email newsletters so that you can tell who you sent the newsletter to from the body of the newsletter. This is simply done by propagating information to the bottom of every email newsletter before you send it out.

Here is an Example of a footer:

This email was sent to:
*****@****.com at 1:32:56AM.

Then when you receive the complaint, you will be able to see that when you send emails to *****@****.com, they will get marked as spam. And now you can remove them.

Why don’t people use the unsubscribe link?

I can tell you why I don’t use the unsubscribe link on what I think is spam: Some email spammers would prefer to send out spam to random email addresses to see if they will respond. And that unsubscribe link could just send a “I use the email address, spam me!” to the email spammers, and then it’s all over.

How to Get an AOL Feedback Loop Started:

Go to http://www.postmaster.aol.com/fbl/fblinfo.html and read up on how the Feedback loop works. Then fill out and submit the Feedback Loop Request Form.

That should get you started on the road to being whitelisted at AOL!

-Good Luck
-Ashton Sanders

This is always an interesting topic because there are at least a million web hosts out there. If you do a search on Google for “web hosting,” it brings up 208,000,000 sites. (Granted, not all of those sites do web hosting, but that is still a lot of sites.) In this mess of web hosting sites, it’s actually very easy to end up with an expensive provider who provides less than others. Here are some web hosting providers that I’ve had a lot of success with:

GoDaddy: These guys have a very comprehensive website, and they are always updating it. Their website makes it very easy to do just about anything to your site. You won’t have to call tech support ever, as long as you know how to use a FAQ. Everything is there, and if you do have to call tech support, they will quickly handle your problem. They are also very cheap: Web hosting $4/month and domains $10/year. I have used Godaddy for a very long time, and have not had any major problem with them.

1and1.com: I was just introduced to this company, and they seem to have the sweetest deal on the internet. Their web hosting program allows you to host many (25 for the beginner) websites on the same hosting account. Which is amazing if you are a web designer and you have a lot of websites. To top it off that beginner account is only $3/month!! Domains are also the cheapest I’ve seen at $6/year.

It really seems too good to be true. And if it is, I’ll update this post very soon.

-Until then,
-Ashton Sanders

Click for an Updated Service Review on 1and1.com

On the topic of Search Engine Optimization, there are many ways to “Cheat” the Search engines. (Most of these ways are very detectable and you will get penalized for it today, but it was a “good idea” back in the day.)

White Text on White Background: This will alow you put lots of heavy keyword content on your page without having to bother your visitors with them.

Hard to find links: This is where you link a space ” ” or a couple letters and force it to not underline. This way you can direct the search engines to a content heavy page without showing your visitors.

All of these “cheats” will get your site penalized on the Search Engines. This is Google’s first “Quality guidelines – basic principles“:

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

(Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/…)

But what about link farms?

A link farm is a system or program that links thousands of sites to your website. Since number of links to your site is one of the main things that Google and other search engines look for, It probably isnt’ a bad idea.

But note, if you get 10,000 links from sites that all have pagerank of 0, your website’s going to have the page rank of 0. So you have to be careful about which program you choose.

I would recommend Link Farms for today, but keep an eye on your page rank, and if it disappears one day, it may because google devised a way to detect link farms.

-Enjoy,
-Ashton Sanders

Synopsis: Asian kid grows up with his father raising elephants. Elephants get stolen. Asian kid kills a lot of bad guys in computer game format. Asian kid gets one elephant back, because the other was killed and skeletonized. But that’s okay because the elephant bones helped to beat the final bosses.

Pros: This Asian kid is really good at beating up bad guys. Very unique bad guys; like the “extremely large guy,” “The Cool Punk” and “The Crooked Cop.” The unique bad guys use very innovative weapons; like iridescent light bulbs and large dirt clods that look like statues.

Cons: The movie wasn’t long enough.

Plot Twists Include:
The Cool Kid’s gang is full of acrobatic, light-bulb-swinging punks who are good at street sports.
Crooked Cop is on the same team as the evil woman.
The elephant is dead.

But Seriously: Don’t watch it for the story line. Very entertaining if you like fight scenes and some amazing acrobatics. Good movie for a dumb date or very very late at night.

-Good Times,
-Ashton Sanders