Valencia, CA
Renowned financial organization retains eSolutions to create new Estate Management Group site.

In our last article we focused on protecting your domain name. If you are listed as the registrant, if the contact email is up to date, and if you have access to your domain account, and if you have your domains set to auto-renew you should be covered.

Now we’re going to focus on protecting your website. Websites are nothing more than a collection of files. Some files contain instructions about how the site should look, some files contain instructions about what the site should do, some files contain information about what content the site should display, and some files are images that are displayed on the site.

Most sites are hosted on an external web hosting server. This is the server that is contacted and that “serves up” your web pages when someone visits your site. The files that comprise your website are stored on the server. In order to protect your site, it’s important that you have copies of all of these files.

If you’re technically savvy you can download the site files yourself. You’ll want all of the web files, and in some cases, you’ll also have database files that are a part of your site, and you’ll want them too. Make a copy of all your files on a CD or DVD for safe keeping. If your site content changes regularly, you should make new copies of your files regularly as well.

If you’re not the technical type, ask your webmaster, website developer or web hosting company to make a copy of your site files for you. There is usually only a small fee involved, and once you have a copy of your files you’ll have taken the second and final step in protecting your website investment.

At eSolutions, we provide web development, hosting, marketing services to businesses worldwide. We invite you to contact us for a free consultation to learn how we can help you succeed with your Internet presence.

Santa Clarita, CA
eSolutions has been retained by Loop Aerospace to develop an online app to manage the ordering, manufacturing and delivery process.

Sure…we love the Internet. We make our living helping people get the most out of it to help build their customer base and reinforce their brand. But let’s face it…sometimes the Internet just SUCKS.

First and foremost, it’s becoming more and more difficult to actually find any content of value…for free. I tried to lookup somebody’s snail mail address the other day, and FORGET IT! Every option turned out to be a come-on for a one-time or monthly fee in order to get the information. What happened to the phone book??? It used to be on the Internet along with some for-pay options, but lately all you seem to find is the pay me now sites.

On top of that, for many searches these days Google has become nothing but a collection of dead ends. I guess they were so busy indexing every single page on the Internet that they forgot about checking them frequently to make sure they were still active pages. And you can often forget about relevency, since many of the pages returned these days are nothing more than “landing” pages that include links to other “landing” pages, with no real content on any of them. These pages exist for the sole purpose of trying to attract your clicks so they can collect money from Google and the other search companies.

Even long time stalwarts of dependability are falling victim to “progress.” Yesterday I tried to generate directions for a trip I was planning. I went to my trusty friend MapQuest because they have long offered a great “send to cell” service. But this time that wonderful service seemed to be down and out. The “send to cell” link was gone, and in its place was a generic “send” option. There WAS a “cell” option, but instead of sending my directions it sent me an advertising link to some crappy game site. I was astonished!

So I decided to give the fairly new Microsoft product Bing a run for it’s money. I thought that surely the ol’ Redmond dinosaur would have a “send to cell” option on the product they’ve spent so much money and time developing and promoting. And so they did! Unfortunately, although the Bing system SAID it had sent a text message to my phone, nothing ever arrived. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this small “bug” and their intention of providing this valuable service will come to pass. But alas, that thought was of no use for this trip!

After doing a Google search for “send directions to cell phone” I found a site call TripIt which looked promising. It SAID it offered this service, but after playing around with their offering for over 15 minutes I still could not figure out how to accomplish said task, assuming it’s really even possible at all and not just another advertising come-on.

So once again, it all comes down to content and usability, two areas that seem to be falling behind the ongoing effort to turn the Internet into the next source of excessive advertising, confusion and hyperbole. Yahoo’s original idea of having a DIRECTORY that was assembled and supervised by REAL PEOPLE (as opposed to a search engine that is supervised by a computer) is turning out to be a pretty smart idea after all. The more that companies look to the Internet solely as another source of revenue and overlook the concepts of content and usability, the more valuable a directory that returns only valid results will become.

Now if we could only get websites to simplify their offerings on sites that ARE valuable so you could easily find what you’re looking for…but that’s a whole other story!

 Culver City, CA
Tender Greens Food, an organic restaurant chain with locations throughout California, has selected eSolutions to build their new online ordering system.

Oakdale, CA
Burchell Nursery, one of the country’s leading commercial nurseries, selects eSolutions to develop their extensive new website.

Santa Clarita, CA  Recorder Charts & Pens chooses eSolutions to strengthen their search performance.

These days, most companies have at least a decent investment in their website, if not a sizeable one. So it’s important to make sure that your investment is protected from potential loss.

Over the years, one of the most common ways we’ve seen companies run into trouble with their website is to allow the contact information for their domain name to become outdated. If your domain registrar doesn’t have a valid email address on file you could have some problems down the line.

The best case scenario is that your domain expires because you didn’t receive your renewal notices, and your website goes down temporarily until it is renewed. Depending on your registrar, your domain could already be considered to be in the “redemption period” by the time you realize it is down, which could cost you hundreds of dollars to recover it. The worst case scenario is that you don’t realize your site is down (maybe you don’t use it for email) and your domain is actually deleted. If that happens your domain could be registered by someone else and you would lose all the marketing time and money that went into promoting it.

There are a few simple things you can do to avoid any problems with your domain:

1. Update the email address that your registrar has on file any time you change your email address.
2. Set your domain to auto-renew using a credit card that your registrar will keep on file.
3. Make sure that you are listed as the registrant for the domain, not your webmaster or your hosting company.

You have a lot invested in your domain name and website, so take a few minutes to follow these simple steps to protect your investment!

Santa Clarita, CA – eSolutions unveils its new website.

Glendale, CA  Schreiners Fine Sausages selects eSolutions to develop their new website.