LANcom Technology Blog

If you’re interesting in finding out how to create a website with WordPress, MakeUseOf.com currently has a great free PDF guide available on their site. This guide is 34 pages long and covers everything you need to know to get your site off the ground.

To visit the MakeUseOf site and get this guide click here.

Here’s a really easy tip from the Sentenc.es website:

Treat all email responses like they are an SMS text message and have a set length that you can’t go over. Since it’s hard to count letters, count sentences instead. For example, you could choose to write all your email responses in three sentences or less.

To read more about this tip click here.

Hat tip to Seth’s blog for the idea for this post.

Looking for a little inspiration or a new perspective? Here are three sites that could help.

1. TED - TED is a non profit organisation devoted to spreading ideas worth spreading. Each year they hold a conference in Long Beach which brings together prominent thinkers and challenges them to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
   The great thing about the TED website is that it has videos from all best talks from their conferences. These talks range from being informative, to funny, to inspiring. So if you would like to hear some ideas worth spreading click here.

    

2. ChangeThis – ChangeThis is a website that publishes manifestoes (a reasoned, rational call to action, supported by logic and facts) as short PDF documents which anyone can download, print, or email to others. ChangeThis is a great way to learn about emerging business ideas and includes manifestoes by many influential business thinkers such as Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and Chris Anderson. To visit ChangeThis click here.

    

3. Seth’s blog – Seth Godin is a best selling author and writes the most popular marketing blog in the world. On Seth’s blog he frequently helps his readers to think about business in new ways. To check out Seth’s Blog click here.

If you’ve got any sites you would like to add to this list please leave them in the comments.

Last week Google released a new feature called Social Search, which was previously only available in Google Labs, to everyone on Google.com. What Social Search allows you to do is easily see content that people within your social circle have posted online regarding what you are searching for.

How does this work?
For example, say you are searching for information about a particular holiday destination. With Social Search you will be able to see any photos or blog posts your friends and family have added to the web to do with that destination in the results. These results will appear under a heading Results from your social circle.

The great thing about Social Search is that it allows you to quickly find information from people you trust.

Here is the video from Google explaining this new feature

 

To read more about Social Search from the Google blog click here.

We know we have a lot of great information on this blog, but we recently came to realise that the categories we were using did not exactly make it easy to find our older content. We really want you to get the most out of this blog so we have updated our categories.

Here are the new categories we have added, if any of these interest you just click on them to view the content we have available on the topic.

Latest free tools
How-to articles
Popular posts

Google Translate, a great tool that allows you to translate text and whole web pages, is now even better. Just last week Google announced three new features to this service.

1. Translate instantly – There is now no need to press the translate button when you are translating text from one language to another. Google Translate now translates instantly as you type.
2. See the phonetic spelling for not roman languages – If you would like to learn how to say sometime out loud in a language that does not use roman characters you can now click ‘Show romanization’. This means that you will be able to see both how the word is written in that language as well as how the word is spelt phonetically in English.
3. Text to speech – If English is not your first language Google Translate now allows you to hear out loud how your translation into English sounds.

To visit the Google Translate website and try out these and other features click here.

To read more about Google Translate’s new features from the official Google Blog click here

If you’re thinking about upgrading to Windows 7, but you’re not sure if your computer will be able to run it, then Microsoft has a free tool you can download. The Windows 7 Upgrade Adviser scans your PC for any issues with your hardware, devices, and installed programs and lets you know if there is anything you need to do before upgrading.

As a general rule most PCs that can run Vista should be able to run Windows 7, but it may still be a good idea to check.

To visit the Microsoft website and download the Windows 7 Upgrade Adviser click here.

To learn more about the new features of Windows 7 click here.

Can’t remember the name of that movie you wanted to see? Bing is currently trying out a new feature called visual search, which helps you find what you’re looking for even when you can’t remember what it’s called.

Instead of displaying links, visual search show row of images which you can scroll through. Below you can see a search for ‘Movies in theatres’. This search displays movie covers and to the left there are options for narrowing your search by genre, rating, and 3D.

Visual search is currently only available for 39 popular categories like Popular books, Top songs, and Digital cameras.

If you would like to try out visual search then you can go to www.bing.com/visualsearch, but you may need to set your country to United States in the top left of the screen for it to work.

Looking for just the right picture for your website, PowerPoint presentation, or marketing material? Freerange Stock is a website that provides quality stock photos that are free to use for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

To download pictures from Freerange Stock all you need to do is register with an email address, user name, and password. All the pictures on this site are in JPG format and are around 1mb to download.

To give you some idea of the types of photos available I’ve included some in this post.

To visit the Freerange Stock website and start searching click here.

Hat tip to MakeUseof.com for the idea for this post

Looking for a free and easy way to set up an email newsletter? MailChimp is an email newsletter sending service which allows you to send newsletters to up to 500 subscribers for free. It even allows you to create great looking Html newsletters without you needing to know any code.

So what else is great about MailChimp?

• Plain text or Html – With MailChimp you can create plain text emails, upload your own Html email design, or use the MailChimp editor to easily create great looking Html emails based off one of their templates.
• Track what is happening to your emails – MailChimp will track the emails you send and let you know things like how many were opened, how many bounced (could not be sent due to incorrect email address), how many unsubscribed, and the click through rate of any links you have within your emails.
• Easy list management – MailChimp allows you to import your email send out lists from Excel, Salesforce, or Highrise and automatically handles duplicates, bounces, and unsubscribers.
• Free subscribe forms – MailChimp also provides you with free subscription forms for you to embed in your website. All you have to do is cut and paste the code into your website and MailChimp will automatically manage subscriptions for you.

At LANcom we send out our newsletter through our customer relationship management system, but if you don’t have a system capable of doing this for you then you should definitely take a look at MailChimp. To visit the MailChimp website click here.

Important Note: Before you send out any electronic commercial messages don’t forget that under New Zealand Law you must gain consent, include your business name and contact information, and offer an unsubscribe option. To find out more about the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 click here.