Tag: The CW Corner

The CW Corner is the title of a series of articles. These articles appeared in the Monadnock Shopper newspaper starting in October 2018. The articles are provided by CharlesWorks in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The articles have been authored by Charles Oropallo, CharlesWorks owner.

Charles Tips – Email Etiquette

We’ve gone off the deep end attempting to communicate entirely via email. Are we saying what we mean so say?

The “Subject:” should reflect the current content – especially in replies where the original idea has changed.

To ensure questions are responded to, keep the message simple and stick to expecting one answer about one question. People generally do not answer multiple questions.

Use a courteous greeting and closing. Email does NOT have voice inflection. Words appear demanding when you USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS or numerous exclamation points – or terse when you treat email like text messages.

Including the previous message helps recipients understand your response. Generalities cause confusion and unnecessary back and forths.

It’s polite to include a “signature” with your name, your affiliation, your phone number and perhaps your address to enable easy followup.

Attachments are not meant to blast information to many. A giant file to a huge group is wasteful and rude. Large emails over phones is frustrating.

Messages requiring immediate attention are best dealt with via phone calls. Don’t assume people check email constantly.

Check the recipients list. Replying to ALL sends to ALL recipients. It might be shared with unexpected recipients.

Be careful what your message contains!

Charles Tips – Review your Website

Customers want specific info about products and services. If there have been no changes since your website launched, they’ll look somewhere else.

New info triggers search engines to re-scan your website and index it according to what it sees as current and popular, relative to other websites in your industry. Distinctive and useful content helps the search engines recognize what your site is about. Posting new content on a regular basis gives the search engines a reason to scan your site more often.

Updating depends on your industry and who your competition is. The important thing is to review your site on a regular basis. We recommend a website review at least once a month.

Ensure your contact information up to date – nothing is worse than nonworking phone numbers or wrong hours. Your navigation hyperlinks all need to work as well. Good testimonials are an absolute plus. Noteworthy news posted can also help broadcasting your latest and greatest developments.

If you’re website doesn’t allow you to easily change the text in it, you should consider updating to one that will.

Keeping your website material up to date will help keep your current clients as well as add new ones.

Charles Tips – Friends Helping

It’s great to have “a friend in the web business,” isn’t it? That’s usually what people think when friends offer to help with one’s website. Web development is very complex. Every situation doesn’t end badly but I can tell you from experience many do.

A major problem is the “one person show” issue. For about 6 years CharlesWorks was only Charles – limited by what one could do in finite weekly hours. Being constantly asked what happens during vacations or sickness. The first hire happened to gain time to focus more. Another person to focus on business and office management. That allowed us to handle far more clients.

Now with 9 people it was unimaginable then we’d ever handle thousands of websites. Or that the first hire would still be here as my General Manager and develop her graphic, web and marketing abilities to an expert level over that time.

We have many folks we’ve helped after having negative experiences with their friends helping them. Think of how badly it can end when you put your business presence in a single person’s hands whose main life’s focus may not even be web work. Especially if your business is your bread and butter!

Charles Tips – Passwords

In keeping with the basics, a common issue we see at CharlesWorks involving our web clients in general has to do with passwords.

A trick to remember with passwords is to keep them simple yet complex and different enough so they aren’t easily guessed. A very good way to have a secure password is to use words or combinations of words that mean something to you but not anyone else. It’s also more secure if you use a capital letter where one would not normally be expected. Here’s an example of making a typical word into a secure word just by changing which Letters within the word are capitalized:
PeteRborOugh

Or you could go a step further by using numbers in place of some of the letters so you have both numbers and capital letters:
Pet8Rbor0ugh

To really beef up security, in this example we’ll make it 2 words separated by a hyphen or a number:
hEll064bYe

Using a couple words in this manner will pass the security requirements for many systems. You can use a couple words that you can remember and therefore don’t have to write down anywhere.

Needless to say, post-its on your monitor should be avoided. Hopefully this CharlesWorks tip will help get you away from that habit!

Charles Oropallo (Charles@CharlesWorks.com) started CharlesWorks in Peterborough NH in 1998. His team does website design, hosting, search engine optimization (SEO) and related web services.