Professional Domain Management Services

Over the last decade or so I've been providing domain name management and hosting solutions (see www.OMIS.ca), I've come across quite a few odd situations from new clients and their domain name experiences. The most common being "I forgot to renew my domain name and now I can't!" Other clients mentioned they registered their domain names with a certain email which they no longer use (See, before you register your domain www.acme.com to have myemail@acme.com, you need to open an account and register with another email address, since you don't own www.acme.com upon signing up!) and come renewal time, the clock slowly ticks down without many options to renew the domain.

These days you can visit domain name registration website like GoDaddy.com and register a domain name for a relatively low price ($11.99 at the date of this blog post). However, there is a reason big registration companies can offer domain prices that low. Quite simply, registering a domain and "publishing" to the internet is a fairly resource-free service that doesn't require much attention on an annual basis. So by signing up with one of these companies you really agree to fully manage your domain name and everything associated with it (adding DNS, renewal, locking, contact information and security).

The fact that your online business rests on your domain name, I'm surprised there isn't a greater public awareness made about how to properly manage a domain. Imagine for example that facebook.com failed to renew their domain and was re-registered by someone else? (of course, a very lax example but you get the idea). That entire business and branding would technically no longer be yours!

Another concern in this day and age of hackers, phishing and scamming to be concerned with is malicious attempts to "renew" your domain name with a company that isn't your current one or with a legitimite company but at ridiculously high prices.

As an example, I recently received an email marked "important" with scary words like "THIS IS YOUR FINAL NOTICE" asking me to renew my domain for $75/year or a lifetime fee of $499! Although perfectly legal in its nature, personally I feel that paying $75/year for a domain is like paying $30k for a Hyunday Accent. Car dealers are free to price their vehicles as they wish just like domain name registrars are, however that false sense of urgency and that look of legitimacy (meaning, presenting themselves to your email assuming they were your current registrar) is what I really find indecent and deceiving.

An experienced and professional web developer or domain services provider will be familiar with everything required to keep your domain safe, renewed and always pointing to your website at a reasonable cost. Often they will charge a small premium on top of the "traditional prices" simply to ensure the safety and proper operation of your domain name.

As an example, at OMIS.ca, the price our customers pay for the domain name includes the renewal fee, the services to point the domain to your website, any domain-related services such as creating emails and passwords and ensuring the security of the domain to prevent theft, hacking and phishing.

Carlos Vilchez
Web Consultant
OMIS.ca
www.omis.ca
info@omis.ca
Twitter

Found A Funny Picture Of You!

If you found this blog post through a search engine result, the odds are it might have been too late and you were an unfortunate victim of a recent phishing attempt on popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. For the rest of you, hopefully you were forwarded this link and were advised of the the potential harm this can do to your social media account(s).

The phishing attempt is quite sneaky. On Twitter, it's usually a friend/follower that sends you a direct message that says something along the lines of "Found a funny picture of you" or "Saw this nasty blog about you" followed by a link. What happens when you click the link is that you get prompted to login again on an interface/website that looks just like Twitter's login page, however, it's NOT! It's a re-creation of the login page in hopes of luring you to sign in with your username and password, which then gets delivered to the "hacker" in question.

What happens next really depends on the hacker's intentions. Some simply do it to spread a link, get a deep click-base on a URL and as many page views as possible. Others - and this is the worse case scenario - use your Twitter password to try and get deeper into your social network or related sites. Since most of us like to use 1 password, they then go to Facebook and login with your password or try other important websites like banking or Ebay.

In some situations, your password might get changed right away, making your account useless and technically not yours anymore! Of course, there is always the password reset feature on Twitter that sends your password details to your email address, so hopefully you catch this before your email address is changed.

As a best practice across the web, NEVER click on a link you receive via email, Facebook, Twitter or any other site to login. Most of the banks and websites like Paypal and Ebay have put this practice in place and simply ask you to login, without any links. Forcing you to go to your browser and type in the address rather than clicking on a phony link.

Carlos Vilchez
Web Consultant
OMIS.ca
www.omis.ca
info@omis.ca
Twitter

Changing Your Twitter Profile Image

Twitter has definitely seen some exponential growth over the past year. A recent study showed that Twitter usage is rising more among adults (18 years and old) so this is no longer a teenage social tool but also one that older adults are using for social and business purposes.

One trend I've noticed is how often some people change their profile picture. So is this a good thing? Does it matter? Well, let me lay out the 2 different sides and see for yourself which one is more beneficial.
1. Change Your Profile Pic Like You Do Underwear:
A profile picture can be an extension of who you are - especially your "Twitter Persona" and since everyone changes with the times, changing your profile image is like changing your desktop wallpaper, the skin on your mobile device or whatever fashionable garment is in style. It shows you're current with the times and you want your viewers to feel the same way about you. Your profile pic can be marked by an event and enhanced with service like @PicBadges where you can add a little badge to the corner of your profile pic. (A great example was Mo'vember's campaign where many added that brown 'stache to their profile pic!).

2. Set In Stone Profile Pic:
Others see their profile pic as a "company logo" or a brand that should remain as constant as possible for everyone to recognize. Using this approach, you find your best glamor shot or that picture that everyone says your look great in and regardless of how old it is, you stick through with it. This takes the stress away from having to find the "next" profile pic and your efforts can be strictly on tweeting and #hashtagging.

Only time will tell which approach works best (and for what reasons). Personally I have always kept my profile picture the same. From a user's point of view, as I scroll through the list of tweets on my streams, I often "pick" out tweets based on who tweets them and often, those tweets are chosen from people (and profile pics) I recognize. Almost like a reassurance that the content will be enjoyable or worth reading.

Twitting from a business' perspective, I feel the brand recognition is something I strive for in all types of media I do - whether it be print or web.

So what do you do with your profile pic?

Carlos Vilchez
Web Consultant
OMIS.ca
www.omis.ca
info@omis.ca
Twitter

QR Codes

The buzz has been quickly growing about QR Codes (see wiki on it here). In a nutshell, a QR code is like your typical bar code seen on products you buy at the grocery store but instead of pulling up a price and the product's detail, you can pull up a link, a phone number, text or an SMS. Manufacturers have been using QR codes for various development processes but the interesting part is how this can be applied to the internet.

Some creative advertisers have been putting QR codes on billboards, magazines, car bumpers and pretty much anywhere else that would allow anyone to see and scan for additional information. An example would be a billboard for a new digital camera. Since you can only put so much on a billboard, you'd put the QR code in the corner and when scanned, it would pull up a commercial for that product... like the ones you see on TV. Another interesting use would be an ad in a magazine that once scanned, takes you directly to the product's "buy now" page online. Once on your device, the QR reader stores the information and you're on your way! No need to stop and jot down phone numbers, URL's or details from the ad.

Contrary to what most people might believe, reading QR codes is easier than you might think. These days most smart phones and mobile devices either have a QR reader built in or have access to an "app" to allow you to scan and read QR codes. Personally I have Red Laser installed on my iPhone as I use it for "traditional" bar code scanning. For those of you with a Blackberry, QR Scanner Pro is a pretty good application to achieve the purpose.

I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now, that square "pixel" barcode became mainstream on everything from real estate agent's for sale signs to newspaper flyers, TV commercials, business cards or even tattoos! It's simply an easy way to deliver effective information and allow for maximum retention in a neatly packaged method.

One thing I like about QR Code is how easily they can be scanned. Since they are fairly simple in design, your QR reader can scan them for far away, if the image is blurred (or if you move while scanning) and a scan nearly never fails. This is quite powerful, especially if you're on the road and see something interesting.

As a plug for my local bike shop, here's another interesting way to use QR codes:
As always, feel free to email me about ways of integrating QR codes on your website or with your advertising!

Carlos Vilchez
Web Consultant
OMIS.ca
www.omis.ca
info@omis.ca
Twitter

That Company Newsletter

Lately I've been getting a lot of emails and questions surrounding email newsletters. For the past 15 years, this has been something I have always recommended to clients without question - a frequent email newsletter sent to a customer/user list updating them on company news, events, sales and/or promotions.

Upon considering client/customer communication on a current project, I took a step back and realized the approach should be dealt with a little differently. Mainly, due to the growth of social media and how people choose to view their news.

Let me back track a little and talk about my experience with the traditional newsletter. Personally, I'm signed up to receive a few dozen newsletters from all kinds of businesses that I've shopped for, news and sales/promotions from online shopping. The reality is that I rarely read these newsletters and as I look in my delete bin, 95% of them are still unread. However, if I look at my Twitter followers, Facebook groups I've "liked" or that I follow or list of blogs I follow, I am also plugged in to these companies/businesses receiving the same information I do via newsletter.

Enter the new age of social media and how you should reconsider your communication strategy with your customers/clients. Although this post might suggest otherwise, I don't recommend discarding the traditional email newsletter. Not only is there a demographic out there who still expects this kind of communication but there are also some who simply don't want to be plugged in to social media and are happy to receive company news via email.

What I recommend to clients is to first come up with the content of the newsletter. Forget about "how" you'll communicate your message and focus on "what" your content will be. Once you have the content, then it's just a matter of formatting. Format an email newsletter or a word document converted to a PDF and link that PDF on your website or as an attachment in an email. Next, create a blog with the same content or summarize it with a link to the document in question. I would lean towards re-creating the entire newsletter for a blog since you can now use it for extra content for search engine ranking and giving your users less work than to link to a document.

Once you've got the blog up and running, your options really open up. Facebook allows you to import a blog to your profile so this Facebook update will be done automatically once your blog is published. One of the advantages of most blog services is that you can have a "share" widget on every blog post to allow you or any viewer to push that blog post to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz or good old fashioned email; giving you and your viewers the ability to spread the content.

So although newsletter membership does continue to grow, it's not uncommon for me to receive a "remove" email for a newsletter and have that user appear as a follower/fan on another social media service.

Carlos Vilchez
Web Consultant
OMIS.ca
www.omis.ca
info@omis.ca
Twitter

Managing Social Media

I thought I was the only social media "junkie" out there with multiple social media accounts (and by multiple I mean: 4 Twitter accounts, 5 blogs, facebook, flickr etc...) but it turns out I am not. While chatting with a client, he mentioned he found it frustrating managing all his social media accounts (after I highly recommended its use for exposure of content, visibility and search engine ranking!). The light went off in my head when he mentioned he hated logging in and out of one account and into the other. I realized that I'd done a poor job setting him up to prevent these headaches.

Not surprisingly, with the birth of social media came a heap of tools to help manage, organize, dissect and analyze more than you can imagine. One tool in my arsenal that's been extremely helpful has been Tweetdeck - essentially, a single logon tool to manage multiple Twitter accounts and your Facebook account.

90% of the social media work I do (whether business or pleasure) is done on Twitter and Facebook so for me, this application was ideal. When it comes to the remaining 10%, I simply login directly to the site in question and work directly on that platform. There are other apps/tools like Seesmic, Hootsuite or Twhirl that can be installed directly on your desktop or on your mobile device and offer different ways to manage your social media accounts, depending on what you use most and how often you publish content.

For the sake of this post, I'll stick to Tweetdeck to show how easy it is to plug in all your Twitter and Facebook accounts and easily view, reply and post from your desired account, without having to login and out!

Since I'm out and about quite a bit, I installed Tweetdeck on my iPhone, however a desktop version is also available. As soon as you install the app/software you can see in the settings section how to add accounts for Twitter/Facebook and multiple accounts for Twitter.

This will be the hardest part of the process! Once all the accounts are plugged it, it's just a matter of scrolling through the "columns" of content. The best part is that when you reply to a tweet or update a Facebook status, it does it from the account in question. So if I'm looking at my @OmisCanada Twitter stream and reply, it sends from my @OmisCanada stream.

I should rephrase the word "junkie" as sometimes, a properly set up social media platform calls for various instances of social media accounts. For the socialites, yes, 1 Twitter account will do the trick, however, from a business stand-point, separating your work-related tweets with your personal tweets is a must in order to keep things organized and "presentable." Another benefit of separating accounts is for relevance and to increase exposure. Quite often, those who tweet for business-related reason, look to fill their list of followers (and follow) people who are within the industry. This could be to receive industry-related information, expose themselves to a more targeted audience and/or to clutter out the non-essential or irrelevant tweets. For example, it doesn't do any good to my OMIS clients to see my tweets about my latest race or training session via my triathlon "pseudo-self" account at @Carlos_el_Toro and my tria-peops couldn't really care about a blog post on how to manage social media accounts!!

Quite often people will screen the latest tweets and see if what people are talking about are along the lines of what they would like to have "fall" in their stream of content.

Carlos Vilchez
Web Consultant
OMIS.ca
www.omis.ca
info@omis.ca
Twitter

The Shoe Maker Finally Has New Shoes!

I can't believe I let things come to this! It's been almost 2 years since my last blog post! Here I am preaching to my clients the importance of blogging as much as possible and keeping up with their social media requirements, yet, I don't practice what I preach!!

In all honesty, The past couple of years have been extremely successful for OMIS and being the small firm we are, many of my "personal" projects have been put on the back burner to create more time for my client's needs.

Hopefully this doesn't make my clients say "WTF" but it took me 3 days to come up with the concept, design, develop and launch! I still have a few back-end technical bugs to sort out but will definitely be up and running by the end of the week.

So be on the lookout for the new version of our website. Follow me on Twitter or find me on Facebook for interesting case studies, project inspiration as well as status updates on websites I'll be doing for my clients!

Carlos Vilchez
Web Consultant
OMIS.ca
www.omis.ca
info@omis.ca
Twitter