MaconMacGuy.com:

Putting the tech pieces together
for Macon & Middle Georgia
for "a good while now"

If you have a website, your hosting account probably already has email accounts – so DON’T USE gmail or hotmail or yahoo etc. for your primary business account. Use an account tied to your domain – this will seriously boost your brand awareness and make you seem more official in the eyes of potential clients/customers.

For example, all of the hosting accounts – from the very cheapest all the way to the most expensive Dedicated hosting package – available at MidGaHosting.com come with multiple email accounts. You can access your email via the traditional route – using an email client like outlook or Thunderbird – or you can use Webmail.

The advantage here is that using you@yourbiz.com as your business email is that is reminds people of our business, of your domain, of your website – thus boosting your brand.

While we’re on the subject of boosting your business through small changes, here’s another tip: Make sure your email signature is worth reading. It should include a link to your webpage, your email address, and your basic contact info. Why? Again – to boost your brand.

This has the side effect of making you look more professional and more businesslike.

But what do you do if you just can’t let go of gmail/yahoo/hotmail/etc.?

I have one client who just loves using Gmail – so we set his Gmail account to fetch lal of the mail from the biz account so that he receives all of his mail in one spot. Yet people are emailing him at HIS domain, so this still reinforces the brand.

So start using your domain to the fullest! You paid for it!

…and if your hosting account doesn’t have sufficient email options to suit you, check out the packages over at MidGaHosting.com – [it's another MaconMacGuy.com production!]

Sometimes technology changes, even when we don’t want it to.

One of my clients is blind, and runs a computer-based recording studio (that is verrrry nice, let me tell you….). There’s a constant dance we have to do to keep his machines running, because not only do you have the inherent complexities of dealing with Windows (XP pro in his case), PLUS the weirdnesses of audio on Windows, you have JAWS, a screenreader fropm Freedom Scientific to boot.

It can get hairy keeping things running.

My client has depended on Outlook Express for years for his email – primarily because Jaws didn’t play well with the full Outlook, and webmail isn’t an option (for the same reason). Summer 2009 Microsoft stopped supporting Outlook Express on Hotmail because they moved to “Windows Live”, which uses a fundamentally different technology for email fetching.

Now, I understand the technical and business reason for Microsoft’s decision – after all, this is a FREE product they’re offering. I also understand my client SHOULD have moved off of using MSN for his primary email a long time ago, and moved it onto his own domain – but generally you don’t fix what’s broken, especially when you have a memorize what is onscreen because you can’t see it!

But this means my client can do NO business online, because email is how he conducts a good part of his studio work.

A tough situation – one he didn’t ask for. In the next installment I’ll describe what we decided on after much discussion – and let you know how it all came out.

As I type this I’m waiting to find out myself!