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September 01, 2010Websites Uptimes for AugustWe've now completed moving all remaining websites onto our dedicated servers, and it shows in the uptimes. Our average up-time for our premium hosting website clients, for August was 99.997%, or an average of only 1 minute outage for the entire month. No website experienced more than 25 minutes downtime total. No website has had ANY downtime since we completed the moves. You're welcome. August 01, 2010Website Hosting - Up-Times for JulyWe've continued to work to improve the quality of our hosting services provided to our clients. We're almost complete moving all websites off of shared hosting plans with our old provider, which we have not been happy with. That will be completed in the next two weeks. We now have a full dedicated server for our online stores and super-premium hosting. That is a Tampa Bay based company that specializes in the Miva Merchant shopping carts, and in an extremely high level of customer service and technical support. Our other servers are located in a data center in Phoenix. Our premium hosting services include an independent monitoring service that checks them every five minutes and notifies us by email and text messages of any outages. So we are usually aware of outages before anyone else (including our hosting providers). Even if they occur in the middle of the night. Our average up-time for our premium hosting website clients, for July was 99.98%, or an average of only 9 minutes outage for the entire month. No website experienced more than 50 minutes downtime total. No super-premium or online store premium hosting service experienced more than 5 minutes outage for the entire month. July 01, 2010Website UptimesOur premium website hosting plan includes a guaranteed uptime of 99.7% or the next month is free. It's rare for us to ever fail meeting that target. For June, none of our clients experienced more than 0.13% downtime. April 18, 2010SSL Certificates"SSL" stands for "Secure Socket Layer" - this is the technology for securing connections when you transmit confidential information to a website. As when a purchase is made online. Any time the website address you are looking at starts with "https" rather than "http", you are looking at a secure, encrypted connection. The "s" stands for secure. Typically your browser indicates this by a lock symbol in the lower right corner of the screen. Part of the process is the website having an "SSL certificate" - which is an electronic certification that the company is who it says it is. There are usually two ways you can get an SSL cert for your website. Most website hosting services will provide a "shared" certificate as part of your hosting fee (or may charge a small yearly fee for this). The difference is on secured screens (https) during the checkout process, with a shared cert, the URL would not be your own domain, but is based on the hosting company's domain, for example, frogsales.hostingcompany.com. instead of www.frogsales.com. This has nothing to do with the look of the site, it is just the page address. Most hosting companies will sell you your own cert, but there are other certificate authorities you can buy a cert from. The most well known (and expensive) is Verisign. SSL certs vary in features and vary widely in cost. If you do get your own cert, part of the process is varying degrees of proof of who you are. More expensive certs also usually involve more definite proof of your company's legal existence and physical location. In most cases there is little value in purchasing a high end cert. March 31, 2010Better Business BureauFast Forward Marketing is an accredited member of the Better Business Bureau.
August 12, 2009Picture SizesClients frequently need to send us photos, or to pick photos as from iStockPhoto for us to use. An issue that comes up is whether the picture is large enough for what we are going to use it for? Or how large does an image need to be for the web, print, or for a trade show display or billboard. Here's a short rundown. First of all, this applies mainly to photographic images. Logos and illustrations are normally in "vector" format where size doesn't usually matter. Photo image sizes are in terms of "pixels" which is one little dot of a particular color, that the image is built up from. The first thing you need to know is that different resolutions - pixels (px) per inch , or dots per inch (dpi) - are required for different applications. For the web, it is 72 dpi. Of course that depends on the screen size but if you are working on a website that is 1000 pixels (px) wide, that is the largest an image file could possibly need to be. For most print applications it is 300dpi. That includes everything from postcards to letterhead to magazine ads. For large format printing such as trade show displays or billboards, it is usually 100 to 150dpi. The formula then for how large an image needs to be is the required dpi times the size in inches. Both height and width need to be considered. So the orientation (portrait versus landscape) comes into play. So, for an image to be used on an 11 by 6 inch postcard, the maximum image size needed would be 11x300 by 6x300 or 3300 by 1800 pixels. In choosing an image you need to consider if it will be used ONLY on the web. If it is also going to be used in print, it needs to be large enough to be used in that situation as well. We always prefer the original, unedited image file. Any sort of editing usually reduces the amount of detail. And often, a picture needs to be cropped (a piece of it cut out for use) so that requires a larger file to start with. We do have tools that can artificially increase a picture size and sharpen it up - but there are limits. Hope that helps clear up this subject. April 25, 2009Colors
In case you ever want to describe a color to us but don't have the words, the ideal scene is to use the Pantone Matching System. You may have heard of PMS colors. These are numbered color chips. We have Pantone sets with over 1000 different colors so if you're physically in the area or can get access to a Pantone set, we can use them to identify a color, or at least approximate it. One caution is the appearance of a color chip depends on lighting. Colors look very different under daylight and indoor fluorescent lighting, for example! You can also use one of these two websites to help define a color: http://tx4.us/nbs-iscc.htm accesses the 267 colors of the Munsell naming system - or color sphere, which you may have heard of. That gives definition to names like "vivid purple" and "light brown." http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/ matches some 1500 color names with their appearance and their hex or RGB values (two ways of precisely defining color for use on the web). One major caution. How these colors look depends on your computer monitor! Monitors don't necessarily accurately reproduce colors. There will be significant variations from one monitor to another. When it comes to print design, if color is critical, you specify a Pantone color or specify the values of CMYK (the 4 colors of full-color printing - cyan, magenta, yellow and black). Even with all that, if it MUST look right, there's no substitute for print proofs as the exact appearance can depend on the paper, the order in which the ink colors are laid down and other factors. This is one reason printing costs can vary widely. Inexpensive printing provides no guarantee on the faithfulness of color reproduction. But it can be "good enough" for many uses. January 19, 2009Password SecurityThere are bad people out there. All passwords should be of sufficient strength so as to make it hard on hackers to crack into your website or email accounts. Our recommendations: 7 or 8 characters long (can be longer but 7 is long enough unless your situation makes you a tempting target). Of course, you also have to keep your passwords secure so no one unauthorized can get their hands on them. Also change relevant passwords in event of a suspected hacking or if personnel leave the company.
January 17, 2009Logo Formats
We need to be able to place it into the design as large or small as it needs to be, and still have it remain crisp and sharp. This requirement rarely applies to images other than logos and sometimes illustrations. Most images are supplied in .jpg format, which is a so-called "raster" or "pixel" format. Logos need to be in .eps or .ai which are "vector" formats. This enables us to scale the image up or down in size without any loss of clarity, without it becoming fuzzy or developing jagged edges. Here's a short video that explains the difference. January 08, 2009Web Safe FontsThere are a very limited number of fonts that are "web safe." When a web page (or formatted email) contains text, it is the visitor’s computer that is controlling the display. It is being told “display the following text in the following font.” So it depends on the font being installed on the computer on which the visitor is trying to view the website or email. The alternative is to display text in the form of a graphic (image), which provides exact control. There are liabilities to that which dictate limited use. It adds a lot of work. For web pages it adversely affects SEO (Search Engine Optimization). And for emails it means the text in question won’t be visible until or unless someone chooses to download pictures. We use a variety of fonts in headlines, banners and the like to focus attention, fit the clients' logo, match the flavor of their business etc. The bulk of the text will then be in one or two of the few web safe fonts. Since not all computers have the same fonts installed, we often specify a series of font choices, so that in most cases the copy will be displayed close to as intended. For example “Arial, Helvetica, san-serif” meaning use Arial if installed on the computer, if not, Helvetica, if that fails, use any san-serif font you have. Arial and Helvetica are very similar fonts, but PCs have Arial and Mac’s Helvetica. So text won't look exactly the same on a Mac as on a PC. Following is our list of safe fonts: January 06, 2009Proofreading
It is common to catch typos in websites months later. We try hard to catch any errors. We also ask you to look the site or print item over carefully. You may catch things we missed, especially where technical terms are involved that we may not be familiar with. This is one more reason to try and avoid "rush" projects. Before we print something, we require the client to sign off on it as being accurate. In particular, that website addresses, phone numbers and email addresses are correct. January 01, 2009Rush ProjectsAny project that has to be completed by a deadline, when that means faster than usual delivery, is considered a rush project. Usual time for completion of a project varies. If you have a deadline, let us know right away when we are first discussing the project. We'll let you know if it falls into rush territory. We can when necessary complete projects amazingly fast. We've done an entire online store in 10 days, start to launch. A brochure, from initial concept to printed and in client's hands, in less than two weeks. We do try to avoid them as they are disruptive and often mean delays to other clients' work. Also, rush projects do carry additional charges. December 12, 2008Testimonials, Good to BestSome testimonials are better than others. All testimonials are good. In the interest of improving the quality and effectiveness of testimonials in marketing, the following is the "good to best" list: February 09, 2007Website StatisticsWe provide a sophisticated web statistics package as a feature of our premium hosting service (no additional charge up to 25000 page views per month or if we are providing Internet Marketing services). You can access these statistics at: www.hitslink.com. Please contact us for your login. To ensure your own visits don’t count in Hitslink, for each of your computers, on the menu on the left go to
setup / ignore this browser / "Yes, this is what I want to do." If you use more than one browser on your computer, such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, you need to do this separately for each browser. If you have a number of computers on one or more servers, with one or more unique IP addresses or ranges of IP addresses, those can be set to be ignored by selecting “Exclude IP Ranges From Tracking” from the setup menu. Notes: 1. If you try to login to hitslink and it tells you cookies are turned off, it is probably being blocked as spyware on your computer, probably by Spybot S&D, or by a high security setting in your browser. You will need to manually allow Hitslink as an exception. 2. Note: If you clear cookies at some time you will need to re-do this. That includes if it is done by maintenance software such as System Mechanic! 3. If you are on our basic hosting plan, you still have access to statistics. However, this is a less sophisticated and less accurate set of stats. The basic stats for sites we are hosting, are accessible by logging in to [yourdomain]/stats, using your FTP login and password. 4. If you would like access to statistics through hitslink, but we are not hosting your website, or you have more than 25000 page views per month, please contact us for more information. Please contact Customer Service if you need any further assistance with this. |
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