Casual Articles - Internet and Businesses Online

Web Branding: Nobody's Perfect – and That's Good
Web branding is antithetical to the notion of perfection. Sometimes the best web branding advice is to let your humanity leak onto the web page. Life’s messy and perfection is not a trait known to mankind.If you make a mistake admit it, laugh about it, make fun of it, allow others to comment on it – in the process you will find prospects looking at your website or blog with an appreciation for the voice of common humanity.So many businesses rely on a level of perfection they can never attain and hope to sell the idea of a perfect company to prospects. If that’s what you’re doing you have a commodity nobody is buying.Web branding is about being creative, inventive and sometimes taking your prospect off guard. If you can work on these elements you may find that your website is connecting with customers in a brave new way.Google provides an example of this approach that has spread to other parts of the web. They have taken their logo and revamped it for almost every holiday and special event. Sometimes it’s fun just to go to their site to see how their logo has changed since the last visit. It’s a bit like the window dressings of yesteryear when your favorite store would redress their windows on a regular basis to

can be done via the built-in search bar which offers instant searching via your search engine of choice. If you're serious about search, Firefox delivers the goods. Yet another huge time saver for the Internet Marketer.

Bookmark Manager - With this feature, it is easy to import your IE favorites, manage and sort bookmarks into groups, and even sort bookmarks by keyword. Live bookmarks dynamically deliver updated content, such as news headlines, directly within your bookmarks list.

Smart Keywords - Now this feature rocks! In addition to creating quick bookmarks, you can also create quick URL links using keywords. For example, let's use my site. First I create a bookmark for my site from the Bookmark menu. I then right-click my new bookmark to open it's properties. In the keyword field I enter "RB". Now instead of typing www.RianBrooklyn.com to open my site, I just hit Ctrl+L to go to the Location Bar, and then type "RB". Instantly I'm taken to my website. Now that's a cool feature!

Web Syndication - RSS web feeds (Really Simple Syndication) makes it easy to stay up to date with your favorite websites from one location. Now the content comes to you without effort. I personally love this feature as an easy way to stay updated with my favorite Internet Marketing blogs.

Reason #5: Can You Say Customization? Custom addons, plugins, themes, and toolbars; Firefox has it all. If you love personalization, you'll have plenty of options too keep you busy with the 1000's of add-ons that are available for Firefox.

Networking Your Way to Business Success
Running a successful business used to be dependent on what you knew. Then, who you knew became important. In today's economy, it is far more critical to what extent you know someone. So it's not what you know or who you know, but how well you know them that really determines the amount of business that can be generated by a contact.Networking is the process of meeting people (also known as contacts), either through a contact that you initiate or through an introduction by a third party. Networking allows you to meet, and establish a relationship with, people who may not have heard of your business through any other means.Like the name implies, this is work! It's not called Net-sit, Net- talk, or Net-eat. It's Net-work!! In order to make it productive for you, you need to learn the proper way to do it. There are some important steps to follow for successful networking:Pick Your Functions To AttendBusiness people like to associate with other business people, so attend functions where these types of people will be. Pick those functions carefully. Make sure that the purpose of the function is to promote business and not just to socialize. Chambers of Commerce gatherings, trade shows

Reason #1: An SEO Friendly Web Browser As SEO (Search Engine Optimization) becomes part of your new Internet marketing vocabulary, it should also become part of your business. Firefox is no punk when it comes to SEO. Even if you have no intention of becoming an SEO expert, the SEO plugin support for Firefox is top notch. Integrated SEO allows for a quick glance at where your website ranks with Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Alexa, helping you to evaluate your own marketing strategy and that of your competition. This is a killer time saving feature for your Internet business. My SEO plugin of choice is called SEO for Firefox, which can easily be found by doing a Google search.

Reason #2: The Perfect Webmaster's Companion From the serious web developer or Internet marketer, to the part-time website hobbyist, Firefox is a feature rich browser that can help make your job much simpler. Firefox supports many W3C standards including XML, PHP, CSS, XHTML, etc.

Websites that often fall apart in other browsers due to lack of dynamic page support are preserved and functional in Firefox. For the Internet marketer looking to learn HTML or PHP coding, viewing source code and page info is made simple with a right-click of your mouse. Page info even provides a great way to find the destinations of all links on a page. What a great marketing research feature!

Also, Firefox is Open Source. What's Open Source? Well, it basically means that you can look under the hood and tinker with the engine. Not in a million years would you be able to "look inside" of Internet Explorer to see how it ticks. The Firefox source code is open to development by programmers worldwide, which means features and updates are constantly being added. Quick tech support is often available through the many Open Source web forums or from Mozilla's Support Page.

Reason #3: Security: The Fort Knox of Web Browsers Let's face it, as an Internet marketer, you're on the Internet a good percentage of your day. After all, the Internet is your lifeblood. Security and privacy should be on your list of "must haves", as identity theft is on the rise. If you're portal to the web is lost due to a virus, spyware, or a application crash, this could mean lost productivity, lost customers, or even lost profits. Not to mention increased frustration and the occasional broken keyboard that often results from anger directed at the computer. (Of course I'm not speaking from personal experience)

Overall, the security in Firefox is one of the main reasons more and more people are making the switch from Internet Explorer. In addition to enhanced stability, Firefox is far less prone to the many vulnerability exploits common in IE. Open Source code allows for teams of programmers from around the world to jump on the first news of a security exploit and to close the hole before it causes havoc. This is simply not the case with Internet Explorer. Trust me on this; I worked intimately with IE for many years as a network administrator. It wasn't fun. Firefox is a welcomed breath of fresh air!

Here are just a few of the security features available in the latest version of Firefox: (2.0 at the time of this writing)

Firefox 2.0 weighs in at a small 5.7mb installation; where as IE7 is almost 15mb. The Firefox installation is quick and simple, and doesn't require a huge amount of bandwidth to download updates and addons. Firefox is responsive, loading quickly into memory, with page loads much faster than any other browser I've used. Long gone are the days of getting a cup of coffee while your web browser loads. Enhanced features such as an integrated search engine, download manager, tabbed browsing, built-in spell checking, web feeds, and smart keywords are just a few of the reasons why you many want to consider switching to Firefox.

Firefox is also a cross platform browser, meaning you don't need to be using Microsoft Windows to install it. In addition to Windows, Firefox is also available for many versions of both Macintosh and Linux. And if you need additional language support, Firefox is available in over 40 different languages. Some my favorite Firefox features:

Performance Appraisal - Ten Stupid Things Managers Do To Screw It Up
Performance appraisals aren't fun. But a lot of the time they are agonizing because managers do really dumb things, ending up destroying a process that is important to everyone (or should be). Appraisals are always going to be a little bit stressful for everyone, but these errors guarantee that the point of appraisals -- improving performance, is lost in the shuffle.Stupid Thing #1: Spending more time on performance appraisal than performance PLANNING, or ongoing performance communication.Performance appraisal is the end of a process that goes on all the time - a process that is based on good communication between manager and employee. So,more time should be spent preventing performance problems than evaluating at the end of the year. When managers do good things during the year, the appraisal is easy to do and comfortable, because there won't be any surprises.Stupid Thing #2: Comparing employees with each other.Want to create bad feelings, damage morale, get staff to compete so badly they will not work as a team? Then rank staff or compare staff. A guaranteed technique. And heck, not only can a manager create friction among staff, but the manager can become a great target for that hostility too. A

Here are just a few of the security features available in the latest version of Firefox: (2.0 at the time of this writing)

Tags

Links

Casual Articles - Top 5 Reasons Internet Marketers Should Use Firefox

Related Articles: