Archive | Customer Education
Merchant Account Websites – Providing Value for Businesses
If your business is all about selling products on the web, you should look for effective ways that help you accept credit cards on your site. In this, merchant account websites can help you in more than just a way.
One of the best ways for an online business to generate leads, close sales deals, and enhance customer satisfaction is by opting for merchant services. By creating a merchant account, a business can benefit from secured sales besides saving a fortune. This also means that credit card processing solutions are easier than ever regardless of business type, size, or processing volume.
If you want to derive enhanced value from merchant services, you can surely trust Advanced Merchant Services, one of the most eminent merchant account websites in today’s web-dominated world. This able provider has been in the business for the last 9 years and boasts of 100 per cent customer satisfaction rate, which is unique to say the least. Termed as electronic processing experts, the merchant services provided by this company are second to none when it comes to quality and perfection. This is the reason why it is trusted by customers as the number#1 choice for credit card acceptance in the United States. After all, perfection is admired by one and all and merchant account websites are no exceptions.
All about PageRank
In this educative article, we would be reading about the concept of PageRank to create and maintain a clear, complete understanding.
PageRank can be described as an algorithm about link analysis that is used by the search engine, Google, for assigning a numerical weightage or relative importance to every single element to web site on the World Wide Web. It is important to note here that the PageRank results are defined on a recursive basis and dependent upon the number and related metrics of all pages linking to a web page as a vote of support.
The award of ranks is dependent upon the uniqueness and relevance of the site and its content, its usefulness for site visitors, quality and quantity of inbound and outbound links, web site age, and actual visits to the page as reported by the Google Toolbar. It is worth noting here that one-way links from a quality directory such as DMOZ or the Google Directory assume high significance while the page rankings are awarded. This is because directories follow some predefined standards and allow a link only after a website has satisfactorily passed those standards.
For a business, a high PageRank of it site can open the doors of success and recognition as customers, investors, and other parties consider PageRank as a symbol of credibility and success. The business can even promote its prospects further by requesting links from an eminent business web directory such as the Business directory.
The rankings are assigned from 0-10 and the higher the rank, the higher is the importance of a site in the eyes of Google, the number one search engine. While PageRank may not completely reveal the usefulness of a site, it is often considered as an estimate and the best criteria of judging success of a website in today’s web-dominated world.
We hope that this article on PageRank was useful to you in more than just a way.
Why should I have a website?
Why should I have a website?
After all the talks about domain and hosting over the last 8 days, now lets address a very vital question. Why should you or your business have a website? Do you need a website just because your competitor has one or are there other reasons for you to have a website? I explain some of the very basic reasons why YOUR business needs a web presence in today’s world.
1. Having a website helps establish the credibility of your business. Having your own company domain reinforces your legitimacy as a serious business. In today’s times, can you afford not to look serious / legitimate?
2. Having a website is probably the easiest way for your customers to locate you. Most of the people today dont really store postal addresses. They either store your phone numbers or your website address. If a potential customer wishes to visit your office / store, his natural recourse would be to go to your website and find your address from there. With the advances in mapping tools like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps you can now even provide directions to your office from popular destinations like the airport or railway station.
3. A website makes information available about your company to your customers 24×7. Assume you are based in India and a potential customer in the US needs information about your company. It is 4PM in the US and about 2 in the morning in India. What do you think is the best way for this potential customer to find information about your company. Calling you at that hour? Writing an email to you? or just visiting your website?
4. A website really helps in lowering your costs. As a businessman you would obviously know the costs involved in printing physical brochures. And then when you introduce new products your old brochures would just be wasted. Your website helps you provide up-to-date information about your company, its products and services without the need for wasting paper and money on brochures. Your website is thus eco-friendly too 
.
5. It is the most cost effective way of selling your products and services to customers worldwide. No need to have big sales teams with their associated costs and headaches. Since you ship directly to your customers you can offer the same product at discounted prices because there are no distributors, stockists and retailers in between.
6. One of the biggest advantages of having a website is the ability to make unlimited number updates to the same to reflect the latest and up-to-date information. You can make updates to your website any time of the day or night.
7. Your website is the best way to obtain genuine feedback from your customers. Depending on the need, you can obtain feedback from your customers in the form of customer satisfaction surveys or a simple feedback form on your website. One of the best examples of this is “rating” facility available at the end of each article in this customer education series wherein I ask you to rate how useful or informative you found the current article and also give you an open ended box to provide your candid feedback about the same.
To summarise, a website is no longer optional, it is a necessity. The benefits that a website has outweighs its development costs several times. It is an investment IN your business, FOR your business.
My last article in this series will give some extremely useful tips that should be kept in mind while designing your website.
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Securing your Online Identity
Securing your Online Identity
Now that you’ve done everything viz. registering a domain, designing your website, hosting your website, it is now time to talk about some advise on how to secure your online identity.
THUMB RULE – Security starts with you.
When I say security from your perspective in the context of the Internet I essentially imply your “Password Policy”. Broadly speaking this consists of 3 things:
1. Password Generation Policy
2. Password Storage Policy
3. Password Management Policy
Sounds hi-fi . Let me explain the above in simple terms.
Password Generation Policy
Essentially this means what your passwords should be or rather what they should NOT be. If you could just come up with one password, something nice and easy like your last name, and use it for every web site and application, life would be much simpler.
Unfortunately, the nature of computer and Internet security is such that you can’t do that. When generating your passwords keep the following things in mind:
1. DO NOT use personal information like your name, your wife’s name, your children’s name, your date of birth or other such personal information.
2. DO NOT use real words. With today’s computing power, it doesn’t take very long to try every word in the dictionary and find your password. It is best if you do not use real words for your passwords.
3. Mix different character types. A good strong password should ideally be a minimum of 8 characters. It should be a combination of the following:
Contain both uppercase (capital) and lowercase (non-capital) letters
Contain numbers
Contain symbols, such as ` ! ” ? $ ? % ^ & * ( ) _ – + = { [ } ] : ; @ ‘ ~ # | \ < , > . ? /
Not resemble any of your previous passwords
A good website that you could use for generating your passwords is http://strongpasswordgenerator.com/
Once you shift to the method of generating strong passwords, in all likelihood I don’t see the possibility of your remembering all those passwords, unless, of course, you have photographic memory. 
. So you would now need a password storage policy.
Password Storage Policy
Put in simple terms this means that you need something to store your strong unique passwords. Now this something SHOULD NOT be scraps of paper, post-it slips or your personal diary. If you are doing this then you are actually locking the door of your home and keeping the keys under the doormat.
I would suggest using a safe and secure password management tool. Even if this means shelling out a few bucks. You should not risk your passwords by storing them using manual methods. 4 such tools that come to my mind are:
Now that you generated secure passwords and stored them, what other things should you keep in mind regarding your passwords.
Password Management Policy
1. Use different passwords. It is a good idea to generate unique passwords for each application, website or login you are trying to protect. Normally people have 1 or 2 patent passwords and they use it across everything. This is good for convenience but very bad for security
2. Change your passwords. There is no point if you generated a strong password for your website, email or anything else for that matter and keep on using it till eternity. Change your password once every 30 days. You should also not re-use a password for at least a year. Make this a habit.
When it comes to the computer world or the Internet you cannot be 100% sure of anything. In fact, why only the computer world. Even otherwise you can’t be 100% sure of anything. LOL. Jokes apart, but at least you should take all possible precautions and steps to ensure that you have done your part in protecting your computer, website, domain, email account or whatever that you chose a password for.
My next article will be focussing on the various application choices that are available to you while developing the website for your company.
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Web Hosting Demystified
Web Hosting Demystified
We’ve talked a lot about domain names till now. Let’s leave the world of domains for a while and enter the mystic world of Web Hosting. If I were to explain everything about Web Hosting, probably we’ll need a whole education series about that separately. So I will limit myself to the very basic understanding of Web Hosting in this article.
One thing I have been noticing since the time we started and even today is that people aren’t able to differentiate between a domain and web hosting. So let’s just understand that first.
As you must have known by now your domain name is JUST the name by which your online presence is recognised. Thats all, nothing more. Now why did you register this domain in the first place. Because you wanted a website for your company / yourself showcasing your products / services. So you would typically hire a company which would make the website for your company. This website would have some files, images, documents, animations, etc. etc. Now comes the BIG question of putting everything together.
Let’s assume you got your domain registered with DirectI and you choose XYZ Web Design company for making your website. Now how would you bind your domain name with the files that have been produced / made by XYZ Company, so that when somebody types www.yourdomainname.com in the browser it would actually show up your files. This is the bonding that is established by “Web Hosting” and the company which would provides this service to you is the “Web Host”. So let’s say you go to www.google.com and do a search for “web hosting companies India”. You would get 10000s of results for it. One of those is for Tradebooster. So you decide to give us a call and all goes well and you make the final decision of actually “hosting” your website with us. Now there are two more parties involved in the entire deal.
1. DirectI – your domain registrar
2. XYZ Company – the one who made your website.
From the article “The domain record” you would recollect that Item No.6 was something called the Name Server Information. I briefly mentioned that the name server information tells the registry WHERE the domain is hosted. So all you need to do is ask us for our Name Server information, then go to your domain control panel, login there and update the Name Servers to what we told you. This would update your domain record and tell the registry that your domain now points to the server of Tradebooster. This update process normally takes about 24-48 hours (actually takes less, but it’s always better to be on the safer side of things ) to reflect across various parts of the world. In about maximum 48 hours from the time you update the Name Server information, requests for www.yourdomainname.com would be redirected to the server of Tradebooster.
When you ordered the hosting account with us, you would have received an email containing technical information about your hosting account. Keep this email safely and DO NOT delete it. Since XYZ company has made your website, you would need to pass this information to them so that they put the files for your website on the server where your hosting account is setup. Once those files are transferred to the server successfully, all requests for www.yourdomainname.com would start showing the homepage (simply said, the first page) for your website. Thats it. Everything is now setup and you are ready to start advertising your brand new website. Congratulations!
There are actually a lot of technical things involved in the entire process, however, I am a firm believer of simplicity and wanted to keep this article as non-technical as possible. The above, I believe, is the simplest explanation for web hosting.
I would be doing an exclusive video to actually explain what happens in the background when somebody types www.yourdomainname.com in the browser. This would ONLY be available as a video and NOT as an article.
The next article teaches you some tips on securing your online identity.
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The Domain Record – An Explanation
The Domain Record
In the last article, I had mentioned a very important tip that you should ALWAYS provide valid registration details while registering your domain name. So let’s take a look at the Domain Record (the registration contact details for your domain name as maintained by the registry) and understand the significance of its various components.
Take a look at the image below. I did a WHOIS search for “tradebooster.com” at www.drwhois.com (hmm… you should know what WHOIS is by now ). The image shows the domain record for tradebooster.com as maintained by the registry.
Now lets understand the meaning and significance of each of the components of the domain record.
Item nos. 1 and 2 give information about where your domain is registered. Item no. 1 indicates the registrar where your domain is registered and Item no. 2 indicates, most likely, the local contact / company that helped you with the domain registration. In most cases this an authorised reseller of the services of the registrar who is your local contact / company. In case you got this registered directly with the registrar, this would show the registrar information.
Item No.3 is the registrant company / person of the domain. The registrant is the legal owner of the domain. You must make sure that the registrant details is the accurate contact information for your company.
Item No.4 shows the date when the domain record was created. In simpler terms it shows the date when you first registered the domain name.
Item No.5 shows the next date of expiry of the domain name. In case you do not renew your domain before its next expiry date, the domain would expire. A detailed explanation on the process of expiry is provided in another article later in the series.
Item No. 6 is technically known as the “Name Server Information“. To put it simply, it tells the registry about the server / computer in the world actually hosts your domain. Hmmmm…’host‘, another technical term. Don’t worry, I will explain in detail in the next article what hosting is all about. As for now, let this be the explanation and a bit of grey area.
Item No.7 is the contact details for the Administrative Contact (Admin Contact) for the domain. The admin contact for the domain is the most important part of the domain record as all correspondence from the registrar / registry pertaining to the domain name is ALWAYS sent to the admin contact. You must therefore make sure that these details correctly represent the contact details of the person who would be in-charge of your domain. You should always avoid using person specific email address if the admin contact is one of your staff members. Preferably specify an email address that you are sure would exist over the next 1 year.
You must also ensure that you update the contact details of the admin contact if there is any change in the same.
Item No.8 is the billing contact of the domain. Issues pertaining to invoicing / payments regarding the domain are sent to the billing contact. These would also be sent to the Admin Contact.
Item no. 9 is the technical contact of the domain. Techinical issues regarding the domain are notified to the technical contact. As above, the admin contact would also be notified about the same.
In almost all of the cases we have seen, the admin, technical and billing contacts are usually the same. However, this is not a thumb rule and you can always specify three different contact details for these items of the domain record.
Item No.10 is status of the domain in the registry. This should always be active. If this set to anything other than active then you should consult your local contact / registry on how to set the status to active.
Now two important tips, specially when you have got your domain name registered through a local contact.
- ALWAYS, ALWAYS and ALWAYS ask the local contact to put YOUR contact details while registering the domain name. A lot of intermediaries DO NOT do so because they think that they would lose you as a customer if they are transparent. However, what they do not realise is that transparency in business transactions is the foundation of a long term relationship.
- ALWAYS ask your local contact to give you the username and password for your domain control panel. Well, in simpler terms, the domain control panel is nothing but a facility wherein you can manage the domain record i.e update the details of your domain record as and when required. Once again the intermediaries are very hesitant to reveal this information for the reason mentioned above.
You should always keep the above two tips in mind and act accordingly since they are required if you wish to change your service provider / intermediary / local contact. Remember, YOU are the customer and you hold the exclusive right of choosing your preferred web partner.
The last 4 articles have covered a lot of ground on domain names. Now that we’ve understood some bits about domain names, the next article would give you some insight on the mystic world of web hosting .
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What and How of Domain Name Registration
What and How of Domain Name Registation
So now that you’ve understood (I am hoping, at least ) the basics of domain names and who manages them, lets proceed further to understand what domain name(s) you should register for your business / personal use and some tips on domain registration.
If the target audience for your service / product is global and you feel that maximum visitors to your potential website would come from Google, Yahoo, Bing (by the way these are called Search Engines) then you should think about WHAT your target customer would search for when he is looking for businesses /services of YOUR TYPE. In such a case I would highly recommend that you register a domain name that contains your most important keyword (keyword = what your target customer would search for) instead of your company name.
One such example that comes immediately to my mind is that of a customer of ours offering Treks in the Himalayas. The name of his company is Wayfarer Adventures while the domain name for his website is www.trekkinginhimalayas.com. This is because NOBODY would ever search for “Wayfarer Adventures” when looking for Trekking information in the Himalayas.
And it is for this reason that his website has been No.1 on www.google.com for the last 5 years when somebody searches for “trekking in himalayas”.
Of course, you can still list your company name on your web site, but your domain name should include the most important keyword that you think a potential customer would use while looking for companies like you.
Now, as always, there are exceptions…
If your business operations are specific to an area or they are localised then in my opinion it would make more sense to build brand awareness and register a domain name with your company name. Like, in the above example it would be www.wayfareradventures.com.
Now that you have decided on your preferred domain name(s), you should start looking for their availability. To check the availability of your domain name(s), you would use a service called “WHOIS” lookup. There are 1000s of WHOIS websites, but I normally use www.drwhois.com. Plain, simple and to the point. Just go to the website and type your first choice in the box.
IMPORTANT: You would recollect from Part 1 of our series, www. is NOT part of your domain name. So while searching for availability JUST PUT IN example.com or whatever your first choice is.
After you click the Whois button on the page:
- If the domain is available, the results would show as “NOT FOUND” or “No Record Found”.
- If somebody has already registered your chosen domain name, the results would show the registration details of the person who registered this domain.
After you’ve found your perfect domain name, you can proceed to actually register the same at our website http://domains.tradebooster.com.
USEFUL TIPS FOR REGISTERING YOUR DOMAIN NAME(s)
1) Don’t register domain names that are too long and have too many syllables if possible. Domain Names can be upto 63 characters long, but that doesn’t mean you have to use all 63 characters .
2) Use hyphens / dashes ONLY if your name is more than 3 words long (unless your name includes 3 short words). A name like buyingdomains.com doesn’t really need a hyphen because it’s already readable the way it is.
However a name like buying-domains-for-sale.com looks better than buyingsdomainsforsales.com since there are so many words in the name.
3) If you are serious about your Internet Presence, protect your domain name by registering multiple extensions for the same domain name (.net, .org, , biz, .info, .in, etc.), of course subject to their availability. For example, we have registered ALL useful domain extensions for tradebooster (except .biz. Somebody registered it before we woke up )
MOST IMPORTANT TIP
Your domain is your online business. So please do not jeopardise your own business in the hands of either your staff or your vendor. Give complete and correct registration details for your company / yourself while registering your domain name(s).
OOOhhhhh! This was a long article… right? But it had to be, because this is the first and important step in establishing your presence in the World of Internet.
In the next article I would talk about the registration details and the domain record.
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Domain Extensions and Registries
Domain Extensions and Registries
In the last article I had talked about different domain extensions like .com, .net,.org, .biz, .info, .in, .us and the like. These different domain extensions give the users a better choice for choosing their domain name.
The comprehensive list (referred as database) of the domain names registered under a particular extension is maintained centrally by a company known as “Registry”. This control had to be centralised otherwise there would be duplicacy of domain names. And this would not possible otherwise when you type www.google.com in Internet Explorer (referred as Browser) on your computer, your computer wouldn’t know which google.com to go to.
Each domain extension is managed by a separate Registry. Given below are some of the domain extensions and their corresponding registries.
|
Domain Extension
|
Name of Registry
|
Website
|
| .com, .net | Verisign | www.verisign.com |
| .org | Public Interest Registry | www.pir.org |
| .biz | Neustar | www.neustarregistry.biz |
| .info | Afilias | www.afilias.info |
| .asia | Asia Registry | www.asiaregistry.com |
| .in | IN Registry | www.registry.in |
There is another company called ICANN (Internet Coporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) that has overall responsibility for managing the domain name system. ICANN in turn has delegated control of each Domain Extension to the registry.
The registries DO NOT sell to end consumers directly. The registry sells domain names through companies known as “Registrars”. Some of the popular registrars that some of you might have heard of are:
- GoDaddy (www.godaddy.com)
- eNom (www.enom.com)
- Tucows (www.tucows.com)
- Network Solutions (www.networksolutions.com)
- DirectI (www.directi.com)
If you as a customer need to register a new domain name for your business or for your personal use you would typically follow the steps below:
1. Go to the website of the registrar
2. Search for your preferred domain name(s).
3. If available, register the domain name. That’s right, you can only register a particular domain name only if the same has not already been booked / purchased by another person / company.
Once you have registered your domain name, you have successfully taken the first step towards establishing your Internet identity.
The next article would tell you more about what domain name(s) you should register for your business.
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What is a Domain Name?
This is the first article in the Customer Education Series brought to you by www.tradebooster.com preparing you for the “Internet Simplified” Webinar on 31st July, 2009. This article starts at the very basic of explaining what a domain name is.
What is a domain name?
If you search for definitions of “domain name” on Google, the results would be fairly complex and most likely you would give up pretty soon. However, the purpose of this Customer Education Series is to make you understand the Internet as a layman and not as a technician. So lets start by understanding what a domain name actually is.
Lets assume I am a professor in a University and taking a class on this subject. I have my students seated in front of me in a 10 x 6 matrix i.e. 10 rows with 6 students in each row. Now during the course of the session I need to ask a particular student a question. I can refer to him as the student seated in row 5, 3rd seat from the left or I can refer to him as “James” which is his name. In both scenarios I am referring to the same person. His name however, is a more convenient way of referring to him rather than the first method. Specially so, because I need to remember the names of 60 students in my class.
This is exactly how the Internet or for that matter any network works. The real location of a server / machine on the network is identified by something called the “IP Address” (IP = Internet Protocol). A typical IP address looks like 122.160.156.225. Now imagine 60 students in my class, each having a specific IP address (his seat location). How difficult or almost impossible would it be for me to remember that. Isnt remembering names much much easier?
So the name of the student is like the domain name and the seat location of the student is his IP address. Now imagine day 2 of the same class. James, the student in question, is now seated in row 7, 2nd seat from the right. Today, if I need to refer James by his location I would call him as the student on row 7, 2nd from the right. However, if I need to refer him by his name, I would still call him as James. And this is exactly why names are better than IP addresses.
A domain name is practically an easier way to refer to your Internet Business, though the actual location is always the IP address.
A domain name looks like:
www.example.com
Now, let’s break this up:
example – this is the domain name
.com – this is the domain extension
For those of you who have used the Internet for years now, you would recollect that the domain names began with 3 possible extensions viz. .com, .net and .org.
However, for those who were late in catching up with the Internet, their preferred domains were gone by that time. Hence, today you would see multiple domain extenions like .biz, .info and country specific extensions like .in, .us, .uk. This has given an opportunity to the late entrants to get a domain name of their choice to establish their presence in the World of Internet.
To summarise, a domain name is just a name for referring to your Internet identity. The actual process however works on IP addresses. Just like James could shift from 1 seat to another class after class, you can also choose to shift from one provider to another, but the name still remains the same and hence easier for all to remember.
The next article would cover more details on domain extensions and registries. Stay tuned!!
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