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Why does my business need a website? Even if you're not planning on selling online, a well-crafted site is essential for any business. Q: My business is very small, just me and two employees, and our product really can't be sold online....

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Insanity in Small Business Einstein’s Definition Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Think about this quote for a second...

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Web Design mini-site launch! We just launched a mini concept site for Sketchbook Web Design! This mini-site is more an experiment for us to use some new fun designs and nifty css stylings. Think of it as more of an online business...

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Web Design mini-site launch! We just launched a mini concept site for Sketchbook Web Design! This mini-site is more an experiment for us to use some new fun designs and nifty css stylings. Think of it as more of an online business...

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Communicate with your most important assets—your... Email Marketing by Constant Contact®, in association with Sketchbook Media Group, is the easy, effective, and highly affordable way to get your message out to your customers, clients, or members. You'll...

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Vps Is Growing

Posted on : 03-06-2010 | By : SMG Team | In : Business Strategy

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VPS, or Virtual private server, means hosting of different entities for various customers, but all-in-one server. It enables the service provider to make a partition of a single server into many host unlimited reseller servers. The customers would then share the server as a whole, which includes both the connection and the hardware. They would actually enjoy the same benefits as they would get in case of dedicated hosting like a file system and a private operating system, which gives them the freedom of safe access. So this sort of a configuration means a combination of a dedicated and a shared host web. In all, an enhanced performance with privacy will accrue to the company at a much lower cost than it would need to pay for dedicated hosting.

Customers would get certain controlling features as well, like the administrative tasks of changing the configuration of the server, installation of software, rebooting the server, etc. This kind of an account is good for those customers who invariably need safety and accessibility more than anything else. So you might easily opt for VPS hosting if you wish to switch over from a shared hosting to a dedicated one, without having the requirement to increase the costs for the purpose. Some service providers offer this service for a cheap cost of $10 a month, so investing in a VPS hosting environment is a very good idea for many online business owners. Given that the operating system and the file system are unique for every customer, the users can i believe portion of the server when you talk about CPU, network and the disk input and output.

If you’re planning to resell the host website, you’ll have a better control on those services which you can offer, so it would give you a competitive edge over the competitors. For those web developers who are planning to develop a social networking site or a blog full of functions, VPS hosting will be the idle choice to go for. Even for those webmasters who find it comfortable managing a shared hosting and wish to upgrade their technical know-how on server management, but do not wish to expose themselves to a dedicated server in totality, VPS hosting is a good option. The webmasters would be enabled to install some custom applications or even change modules for their servers. Besides, they would enjoy full security over all the websites under their management, because every single VPS environment is run by a unique software for its hosting, since they have their unique resources as well, intrusion possibilities are widely reduced.

VPS hosting bridges the gaps between the initial and the entry level web hosting plans and the co-location. While the former offers specified services like PHP/MySQL, etc., with limited disk space on a shared server, the latter lets you fully own and control the hardware, and just rent an internet connection and a rack space from the data center. A VPS will be the best option for you if you want to have a shared hosting plan, but your finances don’t permit you to opt for a co-location web hosting plan.

A dedicated web hosting plan is another alternative which you’ll consider, and it is pretty less costly than co-locating. It’s also becoming very competitively priced as compared to other web hosting plans. Though it certainly costs more than a VPS web hosting plan, a dedicated plan can be reasonably affordable to you as well. As the name implies, a dedicated host gives a dedicated server to you. It actually means renting the server from the host company, and not renting the rack space for the server, as is the situation in co-location.

Some of the advantages of a VPS web hosting plan are listed below:

o It provides you with a root access which allows you to install and even configure any program that you wish to

o Many websites can be hosted through the virtual hosts provided by Apache

o You get many other services as well, like an FTP server, a mail server, and any server that you may need

o These servers can be used for storing files, as backup, or as anything as it might suit you

Hosting Services That Help A Client Build Out A Website

Posted on : 07-04-2010 | By : SMG Team | In : Business Strategy

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Hosting services are helping clients in building and hosting their very own websites. By offering secure and reliable reseller web hosting, they provided a platform for online sale and purchase. They are one of the major contributors for increasing popularity of e-Business along with other web applications.

Based upon the private or business requirements of customers, companies provide a variety of services. Some of the most important services offered with a most respected company are as follows:

Linux reseller hosting- Companies offer numerous types of hosting services. Based upon the specific needs of client they offer different packages like personal, business, reseller hosting, virtual dedicated, dedicated server and managed hosting. Each one of these services concentrate on different business goals of individuals and corporates.

Domain Registration Providers – Domain registration is one of the most popular service offered with a reputed companies. So that you can commence a web site you need a domain name (unique identity over internet). Hosting services keep association with domain registrars to supply domain booking facilities for his or her customers.

SSL Certs – SSL certificates are utilized in e-Commerce websites. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is really a security technology that is common for encrypting information sent between users and e-commerce websites, thereby securing transactions. Nowadays, SSL may be the industry standard internet transaction security technology. To provide the mandatory amount of security and authenticity in the services of their customers, web hosting companies offer them SSL certs.

Email Services – Email is one of popular method of personal including business communication. To manage the email companies online, organizations often needs email hosting services. Companies offer premium email services (based on POP or IMAP) for their customers with enhanced features, custom configuration, and comparatively large number of accounts.

Website Development – A lot of companies also offer services for website design and development as an extension for their primary services. The facility is offered by them just to ensure their clients get one stop solutions to almost all their IT needs.

Afore mentioned services are one of the most popular services offered by any reputed web hosting domain company. As well as that they also offer shopping cart, image hosting, files, video or blog hosting services.

Most Hosting is a premier website hosting service provider, offering cheap Windows and Linux hosting results to worldwide customers. With a wide array of windows and Linux hosting and domain related services, they’ve emerged as favorite choice for customers.

When everything works fine there are no major differences between companies. But when the website is inaccessible it’s pretty easy to draw a line between good and common hosting. It’s not necessary to wait for your site to be offline–take some time, read reviews and choose proven and reliable company.

There Are A Variety Of Essential Steps To Choosing Your Webhost

Posted on : 06-04-2010 | By : SMG Team | In : Business Strategy

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There are a variety of essential steps that you should make the proper choice for affordable webhosting. Missing a step may cause untold problems sooner or later, so stick to the strategies closely.

Choose Carefully

Cost is, by far, not the most important consideration. Reliability is. The dirty little tactic among web hosts is once they acquire you, they have you. It is a huge pain for you to be able to move to another small business web host company. Which means you must to get it immediately. Avoid free sites. Do you really want competitive ads on your web pages? Would you like your business constrained by small allocated disk space and bandwidth? If you cannot manage to afford the unbelievably low website hosting costs these days, then you have a hobby, not best web hosting.

How do we confirm dependability? The very same way you are doing for any other purchase. You research and test. Do a Google hunt for web forums. You’ll uncover a lot of posters with clear strong opinions. Invest an hour and a half to discover a solid base of recommended host sites. If you have 5 or so potential prospects, the time is right to test. Make contact with their customer care. Verify their live support. Time it. Send them a message. If they don’t respond promptly now, it is possible to bet that when you have a concern, they will be nearly impossible to reach. You will want to learn about both web server dependability and mail server reliability.

Know What You are likely to Need

Have you got big plans for a online enterprise? It is better to pick a web host package accordingly. Two key measures are disk space and bandwidth. In the event you will host video or expect huge traffic, then bandwidth is the most essential thing. If you will host reams of pictures, disk space is key. Other points to consider are what leading edge applications are provided. Ask your friendly web geek if you’ll probably ever want such applications as Ruby on Rails or Fantastico.

Features To add

You will want to have these extra features from your website hosting. You will need a useful interface. Cpanel is typical. Beware of highly unique control panels. It’ll mean a learning curve for someone. You will want guaranteed up-time of over 99%. A lot of companies, these days, are promising 100% up-time, but the risk on their side is meager. A 1 day payback for a $7.95 monthly charge pales compared to you losing 50 orders because your site had gone dark. Investigate those forums for real-world experience! Do insist on daily backups and 24/7 free customer support. Check the tiny print for hidden service fees. Please becareful when choosing your next webhost or starting from scratch.

The Sole Of Your Business – Liferay

Posted on : 28-03-2010 | By : SMG Team | In : Business Strategy

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Liferay is one of the most famous Portal providing companies, famous for not only its ability to create wonderful websites but also for its Content Management System. The Enterprise edition of Liferay came into existence in 2004 due to huge amount of public demand of their softwares. Liferay provides you new opportunity in every aspect; Let it be performance, reliability or security.

The Enterprise edition of Liferay of Liferay Portal is for everyone; let it big corporate or a small business, even for those also who are facing a problem in deciding that if it will be good for them to for an open source software business solutions. The basic reason behind for Liferay’s success is that they offer subscription services with assured support and maintenance on long-term basis. For every release of their Community Edition, there is also a release of the Enterprise Edition of Liferay Portal (which comes with all the possible bug fixes, security updates and performance enhancements). Along with this, Liferay does have a five-year end of service life policy. This is a remarkable difference that has lead Liferay to where it is standing today. So, you don’t have to worry from the changes that take place in the market, just concentrate on your business and let Liferay handle the other problems for you.

For security too, Enterprise edition of Liferay was benchmark as one of the most secured one among the other portal providers. The subscribers of the enterprise edition of Liferay portal enjoyed additional security updates besides the security of industry standard, government grade encryption technologies. They also follow the ‘Top 10 recommended best practices’ which is published by the OWASP organization for browser security.

Liferay is configured for every situation. You could have your complete reliance on them for maximum uptime, failovers and load balancing. Though, for this issue you also have to rely on your web hosting company, since their VPS containers should be designed for supporting Liferay. GigaPros (http://gigapros.com) is in the trusted list of Liferay for hosting their enterprise edition. They have the Enterprise Edition of Liferay pre-installed in their VPS (Virtual Privet Server). Not only this, they also provide one click for many scripts and have wonderful support system both of chat and technical.

Beside the enterprise edition of Liferay Portal, they also have Liferay Social Office. The Social Office is a complete package for managing your office environment. It is not only a communication builder but also comes with collaboration and social networking technology. It its helps you to make your people focus on their respective jobs along with group work also and hence, it increases the total effort in the system. But it is also hard to imagine that Liferay could do all this for you, without having an experience of their softwares. Run a trial, and then, let them run your business for you

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Wholesale Dropshippers – A Must For Any Online Business!

Posted on : 22-03-2010 | By : SMG Team | In : Business Strategy

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Frankly, the drop shipping process promises to take care of so much of the nitty gritty parts of business that it can be tempting to forget to make sure certain requirements are in place before doing business with any wholesale dropshippers. Here are the top 5 must haves.

Top Notch Products
You must be certain to sell the highest quality products possible. It doesn’t matter that you won’t be dealing with anyone in person. Your products will be dealing for you. And you want those products to represent your business as being top notch. Find the best drop shipper with the best quality products. Don’t settle for second rate to get cheaper prices, because it will come back to haunt you later on.

The Best Companies in Your Country
It is much easier to solve legal issues, if they arise, when you deal with a company that is based in your own country. If you are planning to sell specialty, imported products, then do your international research before you start to sell those products. Buy some yourself, and see if the quality meets your standards. If not, no cheaper price is worth the poor reputation you bring to your business.

Quick Shipping Times
The drop shipper you deal with should have an excellent turn around time for getting orders back to your customers. If you are not certain, ask what they promise, and then do a few trial product runs to see if they can deliver as promised. Check the merchandise quality and packing yourself. If it is not the way you would do it yourself, then find the company that will do that. Fast is important, but fast and well done is best.

Excellent Customer Service
You simply must have a company with excellent customer service. You also want to be able to find them on the phone as well as the Internet. Emails are not good enough in all cases. You can depend on them when the need is not so urgent. But, when it is, you want to be able to speak to an intelligent voice in person on the phone.

Money Back Guarantee

Most reputable companies provide this to some degree. You want to know what you are getting and whether or not you can send it back if you don’t like it. You also want to know that if you are not getting the service promised, you can end your business relationship and get your money back. Find out exactly what the money back guarantee promises, and the timeline it is available. Exercise your right to the guarantee if you need to, and insist that they honor it. Working with wholesale dropshippers is good, just make sure you make the right steps in the beginning.

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Insanity in Small Business

Posted on : 04-09-2009 | By : Sketchbook Team | In : Blog, Business Strategy, Email Marketing, Internet Promotion, Social Media, Technology Tips, small business website

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Einstein’s Definition

Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Think about this quote for a second and ask yourself, does this quote apply to the way you run your company?

Have you been doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results? If so, then you might want to keep on reading. In a world where technology is becoming a key productivity tool to the success of any business, it simply comes down to, are you accepting and harnessing technology or rejecting it. Are you willing to change or will you do the same thing over and over again?

Here are two main reasons why I pose this question. First, many business owners today have trouble understanding how new technology, specifically the internet, websites, and social media, can become a major benefit to their business, and second, owners have trouble measuring the profits they are losing by rejecting this technological change. Have you ever rejected technology?

“If It Ain’t Broke Then Don’t Fix It!” Mentality

Are you expecting to increase profits by continuing the same business strategy year after year? If so, how long do you think the method will work?

Many small business owners simply do not see the need to update or change their current method. They believe that there is no need to invest in a new method when the old one still seems to work fine. This is the common, “If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it!” mentality. Well, I hate to be the one to say it, but just because something isn’t “broke” doesn’t mean you can’t make it work better. When new technology such as a website or social media, could save you large amounts of time & money, how can you not accept it?

In an industry where there is an increasing level of competitiveness, small business owners must take advantage of every method available to help them cut costs. Would a commercial printer looking to grow their business, limit their shop to just a one color press? Sure they can continue to operate with a one color press, but wouldn’t a two or four color press help expand their business into other areas more effectively. In this example the current method works, but a technological change would help increase the company’s ability to grow.

Exploring these other areas help companies to sustain and increase profits. Without accepting new technology, small business owners greatly limit their profit potential. By using the power of technology to make their business practices more efficient owners can continue to achieve their goals.

Are You Sacrificing?

A lot of small business owners that we talk with have a hard time visualizing the amount of money they are losing, or in actuality, the amount of money they are giving to their competition, due to outdated advertising and lack of constant communication with their customers. These small businesses feel they are doing well with the system they currently have in place and do not see the need to change to a new method. This lack of vision can cause owners to limit their future profits.

On the opposite side, the owners that do see a need for change begin to focus more attention on how much money it will cost to make the investment into these new technologies rather than how much they are losing. These owners become unsure and wonder if the investment today will pay off tomorrow. To those owners, how much will it cost you not to have a great looking company website with email marketing, or social media? Do you even know? Is it one, three, possibly five customers or jobs a day? Do the math. How much money is lost due to potential customers not finding you on search engines or never hearing about new specials and opportunities your business is offering?

Ask yourself, how long can a company continue to compete if they are not being as efficient as their competition? If companies choose to stay with the same system they have been using for years and reject change are they, in essence, choosing to sacrifice future profits?

It’s not Just Advertising

Companies are not just losing profits due to poor advertising; they’re also losing profits due to a lack of follow up, or customer relationship. When offering new services, special pricing or new products to potential clients, how often do companies remember to follow up with their existing customer base? With the constant chaos that small business owners experience on a daily basis, this follow up process can become an aspect that is quickly forgotten, especially if requires the owner or an employee to directly try to contact each individual existing customer.

A great website, along with Email Marketing and social media  makes it easy, effective, and highly affordable to connect with your audience and build strong, successful, lasting relationships with them.

Adapting to Change

By adapting to change, and accepting and harnessing technology, small business owners who use internet tools, such as company websites, email marketing, and social media, have become more efficient and profitable.