Has this happened to you?  A business card with an e-mail scratched out or a label stuck on it over the old e-mail/website?

As we tell our clients, your e-mail and domain shoud be as consistent as as your business.

As I was speaking to that nice couple I asked how much this was going to cost them. After they told me the price of new business cards I asked how much to change newspaper ads, yellow page ads as well as notify their existing customers & vendors that send them e-mail as well. Their eyes grew big as it became obvious that they did not consider the cost of these factors in changing ISPs.

I also reminded them that the reason I was there was to do a presentation on SPAM prevention and one of my points in my presentation/handouts was if the e-mail was different from the promoted website to consider the sender a possible spammer.

So I ask the question…how many of you have a website and use a hotmail, gmail, AOL, or yahoo e-mail on our business card? If it’s a matter of not wanting to change mail service (and frankly, thanks to today’s technology you should not have to), then how about setting up a forwarding e-mail account from your web domain?

A forwarding account is very simple to setup and is not a real e-mail account that you need to manage/check. It would be a special e-mail address that simply forwards to another e-mail account.

This would create a consistent e-mail address (you@yourbusinesswebsite.dom) that no matter what you change in regards to your services (mail, hosting, ISP, etc.) your customers/vendors could always gain access to you regardless of the change.

It would also save reprinting of business cards, updating your website, changing yellowpage (and other printed) ads, and validating online directories for inconsistent data.

Oh…did I mention that you’re probably going to be mislabeled on major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN for months afterward?

Lastly, why would you want a single “catchall” e-mail for personal and business mail? Do you have USPS mail from your business come to your home? Keeping track of what’s business vs. personal as well as managing spam would be a nightmare!

So here are some tips for e-mail consistency:

1. If you can keep the old e-mail address forwarding for at least a year. It will take about a year for people to remove old phone books alone, not to mention outdate vendors or customes you have infrequent dealings with.
2. Keep your old domain(s). Even if you change businesses keep you old domains if you have not sold them as they can be good leads for further and future business. Have them forward to your current/new website.
3. Have a consitent prefix (the part before the @) for e-mails. If you maintain the same prefix (jobob@) for every domain you have, then no matter where you end up e-mail wise…people shold still be able to reach you.
4. Keep your business and personal e-mail seperate. Most mail clients allow you to have mail from different accounts delivered to different mail storage points keeping the business mail records seperate.

A consitent e-mail address just makes sense. If you are moving across town you try to keep the same phone number so people can continue to reach you…why should e-mail be different?

What is a blog and more importantly…what can it do for my business?

First let’s define a blog. A blog is short for web log – a frequently updated journal or diary that is instantly published on the internet. Lately blogs have come into mainstream fashion in the news and political arenas, but there are blogs for practically anything, so much so that even Google has now built a specialty blog site (http://blogsearch.google.com/).

Compared to a regular website, a blog has several advantages, most notably:

• Easy to maintain – no special tools like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, nor do you need to FTP anything. All the necessary tools to publish content are built in.
• Easy to create & setup – most blogging tolls are very easy to setup on your existing website and there are a wealth of free blogging services such as blogspot (https://www.blogger.com/start).
• SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY – That’s correct…blogs have lots of SEO features built in (i.e. each post is typically it’s own URL, categories and/or tags, and updated content make them more likely to be indexed if the search engines find lots of fresh content each time).
• Interactivity with customers – It’s a great way to interact with your existing and potential customers. If you make widget cast molds and blog about the various methods of “care and cleaning of widget molds” then you have now added value for existing customers as well as a forum for feedback (via blog comments).

Best of all, blogs aren’t tied to a location! If you’re at a conference, you can blog from your hotel about the great things you’ve learned that will enhance your product/service. If it’s a matter of typing, you can even blog by phone (http://www.phoneblogz.com/)!!!

Blogging for business allows you to do more than just plug your product or service, it personalizes your business with the customer allowing you to share your points of view and create a lasting relationship…not just with the people who walk in your door (assuming you have a brick and mortar shop), but the customers a half a world away.

Right now there is no real reason to upgrade.  There aren’t security fixes, or the like in 2.3.  The changes between 2.2 and 2.3 are the following:

• Canonical URLs.  Our number one reason for you to move to 2.3. If your WP is in a subdirectory (www.myawesomesite.com/wp) then you’re OK search engine wise…however if your blog is the root (www.myawesomesite.com) or a subdomain (subdomain.myawesomesite.com), you will be penalized by search engines for having duplicate content!!!!  Basically…in earlier versions of wordpress, http://www and http:// are not canonical so that in the eyes of the search engines, you have TWO websites with duplicate content which will have you removed (right now you need to load a plugin, or set your .htacces to correct it)!
• Links and posts are finally separated (if you use the blogroll it was considered a post and searchable as such).
• Pending review for content, allowing the site owner to have contributing authors but maintain editorial control.
• Housekeeping was another big one. Code formatting and style were also cleaned up.
• Several bundled libraries were updated to their latest versions at time of release (i.e. TinyMCE – the core visual input tool now has spell check).
• Post and page management was also improved. Managing your draft and private posts and pages is now much easier.
• Plugin maintenance. If the plugin is registered, the plugin admin screen will alert you to updates.
• Native tagging support which has been significantly lacking and required one to three plugins to incorporate.

In making some of these changes, the developers had to restructure the database and this is where the problems come in.  If your theme or plugin isn’t 2.3 compatible it could cause you MAJOR headaches.

Luckily WP is listing the compatible (and incompatible) plugins for 2.3: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Plugin_Compatibility/2.3. For the most part, your theme should not cause problems, but here is a list of compatibles: http://codex.wordpress.org/Themes/Theme_Compatibility/2.3, especially if you want to implement tags.

However the lists above are as people alert the codex, so to still be sure we recommend you load and run this amazing plugin: http://smithsrus.com/downloads/wordpress-upgrade-preflight-check/.  We can tell you, if we had found this first…it’d have saved us several hours of headaches.

So…here is what we recommend now after all our experiences with upgrading:

Backup your database (you are backing up your database regularly right?!?)!  If not or you can’t with your hosting service, there are two plugins that do this VERY well from within WP: http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/ and if you want more control (as well as some db maintenance abilities): http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php (WP-DBmanager).

With a little preplanning the migration should be fairly smooth.  Just remember to have a good backup of your WP files and database in case you need to revert.