BNI 60 Seconds - A Testimonial

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because we don't sell packaged websites at a fixed cost – just bespoke solutions tailored to the needs of your business, either for an agreed fee or at an hourly rate of £35.

"Yesterday I got a call from a chap called David who I've worked for many times but has recently got a new job at a recruitment agency. He was having big trouble with their website. There was a problem with the software for updating the vacancies and the company that made it told him they couldn't fix it because it was too old and offered to design him a new site instead.

"When he told me about the problem, I guessed immediately what was wrong and I was able to fix it in five minutes. Five minutes later, he emailed to tell me that everyone there was very impressed by my service and they want to talk to me about doing a complete redesign.

"So this week I'd like you refer someone to me whose current design agency is as incompetent and unhelpful as David's, because they really make me look very good.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

Taking Control of Your Website

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because we don't sell packaged websites at a fixed cost – just bespoke solutions tailored to the needs of your business, either for an agreed fee or at an hourly rate of £35.

"This week I spent an hour with one of the new employees at the offices of one of our long-term clients giving him an initiation into using the content management system we built for them about five years ago.

"For those that don't know, a content management system allows people within an organisation to publish pages of text, pictures and so on to their website, often without any technical knowledge other than the ability to use a web browser. We designed the system precisely to the client's needs and it took about a week to develop and deploy, costing around £1,200. Since then I've lost count of the number of employees who have used this software week-in-week out to keep the site up-to-date over the years.

"So this week I'd like you refer someone to me who wants to take control of their website away from their web design agency so that they can expand and update their website themselves every day.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

How Keep Off Hotmail's Greylist

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because I offer a reliable, friendly and personal service at the competitive rate of just £35 per hour.

"This week we've been working with a client on data purification.

"In a nutshell this means making sure that you're not sending emails to addresses that have been defunct for years or never existed to begin with. And while you might think this isn't necessary – email being ostensibly free to send – it's becoming more and more important because services like Hotmail and Google Mail and well as ISPs and corporate network administrators are increasingly greylisting (which is to say banning) senders who persistently send email to non-existent addresses. Which means that you might find yourself cut off from all of your Hotmail customers just because you sent a mailout to a handful of out-of-date Hotmail accounts.

"So this week I'd like you refer someone to me who has been building an email database for two years or more but doesn't have a policy to remove old data and avoid greylisting.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

More on This Subject

1. Read This
To find out what greylisting really means, visit www.greylisting.org

2. Create an SPF Record
Depending on how much control you've got over your domain's DNS settings, you may be able to create an SPF Record or, if you use Micorosft Exchange, a Sender ID. These help to legitimise your email. How? Well, spammers very often spoof the originating address of their email messages to make it seem like you've got mail from HSBC or eBay or Facebook, for example. But if your mail server checks the SPF record for every email that arrives, you will stand a much better chance of weeding out malicious spam from authentic email. The email's header contains details of the server where it originated and the SPF record will tell your mail server whether that server really does belong to the domain in purports to come from. And if all of that sounds too technical, don't worry. The important thing is that creating an SPF Record or Sender ID will help keep you out of Hotmail's bad books.

3. Join the Junk Mail Reporting Programme
If you have your own mail server, you may be able to join Hotmail's junk mail reporting programme. If you meet Hotmail's criteria, they will begin notifying you whenever an email from you is marked as junk so that you can delete that address from your database. Read more about the junk mail reporting programme here.

4. Remove Hard Boucebacks
It should go without saying that you must have a method for allowing people on your database to unsubscribe themselves. In addition, it's important to have a process for removing email messages that result in a "hard bounce", which is to say the email address does not exist, as opposed to a "soft bounce", which might result from a full mailbox. If your mailing list is small enough, you can do this manually, by checking bounce-backs. To an extent this can be partially-automated by using something like Mail Grab, which strips addresses out of email messages or other files. But if you are getting more bounce-backs than you can manage manually, you'll need software that can check your email as it comes in and unsubscribe the recipients automatically. Precisely what that software is will depend on your other systems (ie. mail server, customer database etc) so give us a ring or send us an email and we can talk about your options.

5. Use a Double-Opt-in Subscription Model
In some cases, you might be sending email to addresses that never existed in the first place, simply because the subscriber made a typo when he or she entered the email address. To get around this - and if you have ever opted into mailing lists yourself, you've doubtless encountered this yourself - there should be two stages to your sign-up process:
(a) the initial sign-up, which generates a single, unique email message and
(b) the click-through from that unique email to activate the subscription
Using this method, you ensure from the beginning that the address is real. And it has the positive side-effect of stopping malicious or mischievous people from signing up other people without their knowledge.

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.

BNI 60 Seconds - Changes to Blogger

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I am from inframes.com ltd, a website design and development company from Reading established more than ten years ago.

"You should refer business to me because I offer a reliable, friendly and personal service at the competitive rate of just £35 per hour.

"Last week I talked about setting up a blog for one of my clients and since then I've heard about a change to the running of the free, Google-owned Blogger system that is going to affect the way some of my clients run their websites starting at the end of March. So I've been taking steps to pre-empt any problems and make sure the transition is as smooth as possible.

"So this week I'd like you to refer someone to me who has a website and doesn't have anyone looking after it full time but might find it useful to have a member of the team they can call on at any time who knows their website inside out and can spot potential problems long before they start to cost them money.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

More on this topic

For years, Blogger has allowed you to store your website's FTP hostname, username and password as part of your account so that you could write your blog page on blogger.com and then click "Publish" to copy that page to your own site. As a consequence, you could create blog pages for your own website without any technical know-how.

But from the end of March, you won't be able to do that any more.

It seems that Blogger's owners, Google, are fed up with providing technical support for this free service and rather than making it a premium subscription service, they've decided to scrap it altogether. Instead, Blogger blogs will have to move to a Blogger-hosted service, where the pages appear on Blogger's server instead of yours.

The good news is that you can carry on using Blogger and still make your blog pages seem much the same as always, plus you can still keep your usual domain name, as long as you know your way around your domain's DNS management.

The best way to do this, assuming your domain registrar provides you with a DNS management console, is to create a subdomain (aka vanity domain).

We've done this with www.allanstewart.com to create the new subdomain blog.allanstewart.com.

You do this by creating a CNAME.

It's pretty simple. You don't need to know any IP addresses or anything, just create a new CNAME in the format "whatever.yourdomain.com" and associate that domain with "ghs.google.com."

It might take anything from a few minutes to 48 hours for the new DNS record to filter through and the Blogger publishing settings page will tell you if your domain is or isn't ready yet.

IMPORTANT NOTE: There's a full stop (dot) at the end of "ghs.google.com." - it's important, so don't leave it out. Do leave out the double quotes, though - they're not part of it!

ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE: Google suggests it is "important" to "create a 'A' NAME records for your naked domain". No it isn't! In fact if you're using a subdomain, you absolutely must not do this.

Allan Stewart's news page used to be www.allanstewart.com/news.asp but now that he can't publish his blog to his own webserver, that page is now found at blog.allanstewart.com

What's BNI?

I am one of half-a-dozen people who have started a new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.