Helpdesk Archive


Below is the full list of questions that we've answered.

'I've heard that Open Source software could save my business money. How do I find out what is available to me ?'

It's a good question as there are some truly outstanding Open Source projects out there and some quite poor ones !  One of the best places to look is a website called Hotscripts.com.  This is directory of Open Source software but does include some paid for (but low cost) software.  Locating packages is straightforward as you can either browse the various categories or search by keyword.  Many packages have been reviewed by their users so you can get feel for how good they are before you visit the developers site to download them.

'I have a website which consists of about 40 pages. It's looking a bit dated now so I'm planning on updating it.  A web developer friend of mine will do the work but is recommending that I use a Content Management System. Do I really need one ?'

A Content Management System (CMS) would almost certainly help you but it might not be necessary depending on what you do with your website.  If you add new pages or update existing pages very infrequently then it might be better to get it redesigned using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).  All pages link to the main sylesheet and get their formating information from it so editing just one file on your website will change the look of all pages on your site.

On the otherhand if you add or update pages on your website on a frequent basis then a Content Management System (CMS) will save you a great deal of time.  Most CMS packages suport templates so you can change the look of the site by editing one file in a similar way to using Cascading Style Sheets.  The CMS also takes care of maintaining the links between pages.  Basic CMS's can cost anything from nothing (if you use an Open Source solution) to thousands of pounds.  For Open Source solutions check out Hotscripts.com or OpenSourceCMS.com where you can try out a range of solutions before you install them.

'We've just purchased a wireless broadband router since it cost no more than a non-wireless one. We're nervous about using the wireless connection as we are not sure what security settings we need.  Is it safe ?'

Unless you want to share your broadband connection with anyone within range of it then you need to switch on encryption.  Simply put this will prevent anyone without the correct password from connecting to your router by scrambling the communications between it and your computers.  The are different types and levels of encryption - 64 bit WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is the least secure and WPA (WifI Protected Access) is the most secure.   As WPA is a new standard not all devices currently support it.  As well as using encryption it is also worth restricting connections only to computers that you physically know by specifying their MAC addresses.

'I'm browsing the website of one of my suppliers copying pictures of their products to put on my own website.  When I right click the images in Internet Explorer to save them I can only save them as bitmaps.  What’s going on ?  And is there a better of doing this ?'

This is a fairly common problem in Internet Explorer which is caused believe it or not by a corrupted browser cache.  To fix it simply clear your Browsers cache (goto Tools | Internet Options and click Delete Files followed by OK).

Rather than manually copying the files, contact your supplier to see if they could send them to you on CD as they may be have higher quality versions that you could use.  Failing that you might be able to download their website to your computer using a website copying program (search on Download.com for programs that can do this) but be sure to ask the webmaster beforehand as they probably won't want you doing this during the day when their site is busy.

'Blogging seems to be The Big Thing at the moment.  Is there a way that I could use a blog to help boost my business ?'

It depends what your business does but there is a good chance that a blog will be of use.  A blog, or weblog, is a Website or section of a Website that is updated on a regular basis where entries are listed in chronological order (our weblog is a good example).  Since the weblog is backed by a rudimentary Content Management System it's very easy to update the Website, usually from a Web browser in just a few minutes.

Weblogs work well for several reasons.  Most commercal websites don't go out of their way to reveal the people behind the site.  Whilst there may be an 'About Us' page that's usually as far as it goes.  A weblog allows the people behind the site to interact directly with the site visitors by posting news, comments and stories.  Because of the ease with which content can be added weblogs are often updated daily.  They also attract lots of inbound links which the search engines love.  You can get your blog on-line in a number of ways.  You or your web developer could upload a weblog package to your website (check Hotscripts.com for some), alternatively you could sign up for  hosted service such as TypePad or Blogger.

'As I've been surfing the web lately I've noticed a lot of webpages sport a natty little RSS icon on them.  When I click this I just get a page full of gibberish.  What is this ?'

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  It's a technology that allows visitors to subscribe to your website so that rather than keep checking back for updates they can be notified when you add a new article.  To subscribe to an RSS feed you'll need a suitable RSS reader (search Download.com for 'RSS reader' to find some suitable ones).  Then you simply point the reader at the news feed and it will keep an eye on it looking for changes.

However, whilst RSS is used mainly for bloggers to contact their readers some switched on companies are using it to announce new additions to their on-line catalogues whilst others, such as Opportunity Wales use it to allow people to keep up to date with content.  (The RSS feed for our weblog is: http://www.opportunitywales.co.uk/apps/rss1.xml).

'I'm in the process of upgrading my website from a static site to one managed by a Content Management System.  My existing Web host won't be able to host the new Website so I'll have to move it to a new server.  How difficult is this to do ?'

In theory it's a fairly straight-forward process but it's not quick !  When a user types your domain name into their browser, this is converted into an IP address which uniquely identifies your Web server.  This conversion is not done by your browser but by a network of computers called Domain Name Servers.  Once the browser knows the IP address of your web server it will route the page requests as required.  When you move your website you'll simply need to update the DNS servers will the new address address.  This can either be done from your web hosting control panel or from the control panel of the company that you used to register the domain.  Be aware that the change can take 24-48 hours to take effect as DNS conversions are not done by just one computer but a whole network spread around the world in order to make the process immune to attack.  Because of this delay it's best to make the change over at the start of a quiet period and to announce it to your existing customers in advance.

'Whilst looking around for a new Web Host I've noticed that there are two basic options: Windows hosting or Linux hosting.  What's the difference ?'

The two options that you mention relate to the operating system loaded onto the Web server.  The two main choices are Microsoft Windows and some form of Linux.  In terms of performance, they perform about the same so your decision might be more down to the extras that you get such as PHP, MySQL or ASP as well as the cost.  Since Linux is a free Open Source product it's usually the case that Linux based hosting will cost a little less than Windows hosting.

'I've just received an email from a company offering to list my website at the top of Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.  I've never contacted them before but I've looked at their website and they seem to be good.  Should I use them ?'

You say that you've never contacted them before so it sounds like this an unsolicited or spam email.  On those grounds alone we would recommend that you avoid them simply because the good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts don't need to advertise their services by spamming people.  On the other hand, they may be a legitimate business in which case you should ask for testimonials from their clients and the contact details of those clients so that you can call them to chat about their experiences of the company.

Either way, make sure you ask the SEO company about their techniques - if they are at all vague, walk away.  The last thing that you want is for a shady company to 'optimise' your site - whilst you might initially get good results, if they've used techniques that the search engines take a dim view of, such as making multiple doorway pages, you could get your site removed from the search results.

'I've just finished a 10 week long web design course using Dreamweaver.  I'm about to put together a website for my new business and, although I'd like to buy Dreamweaver, I can't afford to buy it.  Is there a cheaper alternative ?'

With Macromedia Dreamweaver costing around £260 (excl VAT) you're wise to look around for alternatives.  Microsoft Frontpage is a good alternative, although if you've learnt on Dreamweaver you may find it's way of working a little different.  However, since Frontpage costs around £110 (excl. VAT) a few hours learning a new way of working could be worth it !

Macromedia and Microsoft don't have the market for web design software all to themselves though and there are many other packages that you could use - a quick look at Download.com should turn up quite a few more, some of which are free to try.

However, there is another option: be sure to check out Nvu which is an Open Source package which rivals both Dreamweaver and Frontpage for features.  You can download versions for Windows, Linux and Mac from www.nvu.com.

'I've got a website which acts as an on-line brochure for my business.  Is there a way to find out how many people visit my site each month ?'

Most web hosts will allow you to access your web statistics but the way in which you do it will vary from host to host.  Some provide access via your control panel whilst others provide you with the raw log files.  To make sense of these you'll need to use a log analysis package such as Sawmill.  If your web host doesn't provide you with any statistical information don't despair because there are free services that allow you to insert a small 'image' into your web pages.  This image isn't an image at all but a 'web bug' that gathers information about your visitors and stores it in a database for you to query at a later date.  StatCounter offer such a service.

'A few months ago I changed my email address and updated by web pages to reflect this because I was getting deluged by spam.  Now the new address is also getting loads of spam - is there anything that I can do to stop it ?'

It sounds like your email address is getting harvested by 'spambots'.  These crawl web pages looking for email addresses which they then add to a database.  The people behind the email harvesters then sell the email addresses to unsuspecting folks who then spam people on the list.  The best way to prevent your email address from getting harvested is not to put it on your web pages.  But how will your customers contact you ?  Well, the best way is to provide a 'Contact Us' form which users fill in and then the contents are then emailed to you.

Another popular method is to put some additional text into your email address eg philip.lee@NOSPAM-opportunitywales.co.uk - the theory is that the robots will be flumoxed by this - but they're not.  It's extremely easy to check each email address and to remove any additional words so we recommend that you avoid this.

If you must put your email address on Web pages we suggest that you wrap it up in a piece of Javascript which is a Web programming language.  When viewed by a human user your email address will appear correctly but to an emailbot it'll be completely hidden.  Advice on how to implement this can be found here

'We have a Website that ranks quite highly in Google.  Just lately we've had a number of emails from people who want to buy links from our site to theirs.  We've worked hard to get our site to list well in the search engines and don't want to do anything that will harm our position.  Should we sell them links ?'

Ever since Google released the first version of its toolbar which allowed Webmasters to see how much importance (or PageRank) Google placed on a site, people have been trying to to gain links from sites that have a higher PageRank than their own.  The theory behind this is simple: if you have inbound links from higher ranked sites than yours then some of their PageRank will be transferred to your site.

This certainly used to be true but there is increasing evidence to suggest that whilst Google does indeed transfer some PageRank from other sites, this only happens if the sites that link to yours are relevant and are about a related topic.  In other words if a highly-ranked Website about cycling was to sell a link to an industrial clothing distributor then Google would work out that they are not related and wouldn't pass on the PageRank.  However, should the cycling site sell links to another cycling related site then the PageRank would get carried over.

At the end of the day, you need to determine whether the site that wants to buy links is relevant, related and trustworthy.  You also need to bear in mind that Google frowns on people who sell links with the direct intention of boosting PageRank.

'I've been playing with a VPN so that I can do some of my work from home but I'm running into problems connecting to my office network.  Whilst Windows tells me that I've connected, I can't access any of the network shares that I can normally see when I'm in the office.  Any ideas what I'm doing wrong ?'

We recently had a very similar problem to this ourselves !  It sounds like your home network is using the same address range as your office network.  Whilst Windows should take care of the routing of data between the two via the VPN it does sometimes get confused.  This means that requests for data from your office network just go round in circles.

To check, ask your system administrator what the address range of your office network is.  Then at home, open a Windows Command prompt and type 'ipconfig'.  If your home address address is in the same range then you'll need to make some changes.  How you do this depends on the make and model of your broadband router so you'll need to look in the manual.

As an example our office network is 192.168.0.x where x is a number between 1 and 254.  Our home office network was on the same range but moving it to 192.168.1.x solved the problem.

'I've heard a lot about Open Source software and think that it could benefit my business.  However, formatting my computer to install Linux just so that I can try it out is not an option.  Is there another way ?'

There are a number of ways that you can try out Open Source software.  Probably the easiest way is to check the authors Website as most have demo versions of their software on-line.  The downside is that many of these are limited in some way to prevent hackers exploiting them.

If the software that you are interested in is not Web based, then it's probably available on one of the major Linux distributions.  Many of these offer a what they call 'Live' versions that run directly off of a DVD and thus do not need to be installed on your computer.  Such distributions turn up from time-to-time on the cover discs of computer magazines.

If the package that you are looking at requires PHP and MySQL another solution is install them on your Windows machine, then install your Open Source application.  The downside to this approach is that installing Apache, PHP and MySQL on Winows used to be far from easy.  However, we've started using a package called Sokkit which takes the pain out of this process.

'Following your articles on Voice over IP I've started to use it.  Overall I'm impressed but whilst I can hear the people that I'm talking to quite clearly, they sometimes complain that my voice is quite broken.  Is there anything that I can do to improve the situation ?'

It sounds like your VoIP traffic is fighting for space with your other network traffic.  Unless you're on a symmetric broadband connection where the upload and download speeds are the same you're upload speed will be a fraction of your download speed.  If other users on your network are making heavy use of the uplink, perhaps by sharing files over a P2P network, or FTP'ing files to a server, then you're VoIP traffic will get delayed.

Try temporarily stopping all other traffic on your network and see if you get the same problem.  If you don't then it's a bandwidth issue.  Many recent broadband routers support VoIP and allow you to set a priority (called the Quality of Service) that allows you to give priority to VoIP traffic.  Check your router manual for details on how to configure this.

If stopping all other traffic on the network doesn't work, then the problem almost certainly is to do with your microphone.  Try swapping the microphone to see if that solves the problem as some so-called 'noise-cancelling' microphones cancel out very little noise at all.

'We're about to get Broadband but we're confused about the hardware options offered by our supplier.  The choices are: 'Wires only', an ADSL modem or a router.  What do these mean in plain English ?'

Connecting to the Internet via Broadband will require some new hardware and many suppliers will include this in your annual fee.  If you already have the hardware, perhaps from a previous supplier, then you should chose a 'Wires only' package where you're only paying for the actual connection rather than equipment that you don't need.

If this is your first Broadband connection then you'll need a modem of some kind.  USB modems are inexpensive and are usually included in your start-up pack but we'd recommend that you avoid these.  This is because it's difficult to use a USB modem to share your connection with other computers on your network.  USB modems also require that you run a software firewall on your computer as well in order to keep hackers out.

Routers consist of a modem, network switch and usually a firewall all in one unit.  These allow you to share your connection with other computers on your network whilst keeping hackers out.  In addition, the address of each of the computers on your network are hidden behind the address of the router by a process known as Network Address Translation.  This has the effect of making your network more secure.

'Following our recent eCommerce review we've now got a brand new website.  However, in order to bring in visitors to the site we'd like to get lots of inbound links but have no idea where to start.  What would you suggest ?''

You're right to want to cultivate inbound links as they can be an important source of quality traffic.  There are two reasons for this: firstly, as long as the links are from other sites that are relevant to yours then they can bring very targeted traffic to your site.  Secondly, the search engines look at inbound links to your site as votes - the more you have the better, although they have to be from sites whose content is similar to yours.

So, how do you go about locating suitable search partners ?  The easiest way to start is to use a Search Engine such as Google to search for websites about the same topic as your own site that will accept links.  You can do this by adding "add your url" in the search box making sure that you keep the quotes.  You should also look for "add your site" too.

This should provide you with a list of sites related to your to which you can add your site.  If you haven't already done so, download and install the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) as this will allow you to see how much ranking Google applies to each site that you find.  Work your way down the list and submit your site to the higher ranked ones initially.  If you're lucky you can do this from a form on their website otherwise you'll need to send each webmaster an email.  Avoid any that require you to place a banner or graphic on your site as you don't want to dilute your brand.  Text links are fine because you can put these on your own links page.

We'd also recommend using the Teoma search engine (http://www.teoma.com).  If you enter the same search phrases as you used in Google you should see at the bottom right a list of related sites that accept links.  Work your way through these as well.

It's best to keep your results in a spreadsheet, that way you can track those sites that you've submitted to and whether they have published your link.  If all this sounds like too much work it is possible to buy software that automates the process for you - we've had good experiences with IBP8 from Axandra Software in the past.

'I'd like to start selling my products on-line.  What do I need in order to start ?'

In order to sell on-line you need a website and some means of accepting payments.  Whilst it's entirely possible to take payment for your goods by cheque most users to expect to be able to pay on-line using their credit or debit cards.  In order to accept such payments you'll need a Merchant Account from your bank.  If you're an existing business then you've probably already got one of these otherwise you'll need to apply.

In order to take and process payments in realtime you'll need to use a payment processor but these can be costly if you're only selling a few items.  An alternative that many people use is to obtain the customers card details and then process these through a card terminal although this is an area of significant fraud and may be in breach of your Terms and Conditions.

If you don't have a Merchant Account consider using Paypal or NoChex instead.  Both allow you to accept credit card payments and can be cheaper than using a Merchant Account.  The downside is that they don't integrate into your website quite so seamlessly as a proper credit card processing solution but as a way of testing the water they are hard to beat.

'We've received a formal looking invoice from an Internet Listing Service requesting that we pay £65 so that our website will continue to be listed in the search engines.  We've not had any dealings with them before - should we pay them ?'

This sounds like a scam that is doing the rounds at the moment.  There are some less than scrupulous companies out there that send what appear to be invoices to the person named on your domain record requesting payment for a search engine submission service.  In fact, this is not an invoice (even though it looks like one) but an offer of a service (it usually says this on the back in very, very small writing).

What they are hoping is that you'll just send them the money - whether you get anything in return is questionable.  If you're sure that you've not dealt with them before, then ignore the 'invoice'.  If you want to improve the position of your website in the search engines you should concentrate on getting inbound links from other relevant sites as we've described above.