JayMcCormack.com

Every podcast I listen to that i profesional sounding has a great theme track or song at the beginning.  Now we all know that you can’t just rip your favorite music track and push it at the front of your podcast.  So without paying for anything how can you get something a little unique and just suited to you?

Here’s what we did for horoscopes at NewAgeStore.com:

1. Downloaded PhotoStory 3 from Microsoft
2. Build a new story and insert only 1 photo
3. Set the length of the photo display for about 20 seconds on the ‘Narrate your pictures…’ page
4. Towards the end of the wizard click on Create Music
5. Use this window to generate the style of music you are looking for
6. Save the story to WMV format

 

 

Having done this you will have a 20 second video with only one picture and the music you want.  Now we need to extract just the music from this video.

1. Go to http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Search/extract.html and pick one of the free extractors
2. Download/install/run

Now you have a nice soundtrack you can plug into your podcast to make it sound a little more professional.

If you use this technique, let me know by commenting.

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Until she made this shirt for me!

So i retaliated and made one for her too, but truth be known she has the better PR.  I had to lobby for days just to get a link from her site to mine on her homepage!

If you want to buy one, click here.

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Running a dedicated web server has taught me alot, especially about backup and redundancy.

In the process of working through the best backup routines I had to develop a way to conserve some disk space and automate the movement and renaming of files around the server.  Having had a VB background I expected that VBScript would be the best option.

So below I have outlined the process (and scripts) I get my server to run every day to make manage these backup files.

Out of interest, I am using the Win 2003 backup service to do the backups, which basically puts a single file with all the incremental changes into a single location on the disk.  My objective was to rename the file, zip it and then move it to where I actually wanted it stored, ready for download in another automated FTP process each night.

Here’s the script:

‘This script will:
‘ - Rename the latest backup file to format BYYYYMMDD.BAK
‘ - ZIP the above file to BYYYYMMDD.zip
‘ - Copy the file to /save
‘ - Delete the file from the current directory

dim strDate
dim fso
dim objShell
dim strCommand

strDate = Year(Date()) & month(date()) & Day(Date())

set fso = CreateObject(”SCRIPTING.FileSystemObject”)

fso.MoveFile “c:\backup\backup.bkf”, “c:\backup\B” & strDate & “.bkf”

set objShell = WScript.CreateObject(”Wscript.Shell”)
strCommand = “”"C:\program files\WinZip\wzzip.exe”" c:\backup\B” & strDate & “.ZIP c:\backup\B” & strDate & “.bkf”
objShell.run strCommand ,0 ,true

fso.MoveFile “c:\backup\B” & strDate & “.zip”, “c:\backup\save\B” & strdate & “.zip”
fso.DeleteFile “c:\backup\B” & strdate & “.bkf”

set fso = Nothing
set objShell = Nothing

Basically it does the following:

1. Initiates some variables
2. Puts today’s date into a formatted string (which becomes part of the file name)
3. Using a File System Object (FSO) it renames the backup’d file to a file with the date in it
4. It then executes a command line to zip the renamed file, and specifically waits until execution of this part is complete.
5. Finally it moves the ZIP file to the new location (save directory) and deleted the original backup file

Looking at this again now (I wrote this about 14 months ago) there are more efficient ways to do this, however it does the job and has never once failed on me.

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JenSense.com says AdSense is going rich media.  What a shame, AdSense to me has always been the mercedes benz of advertising on the web.  They do everything with subtlety, providing content sensitive advertising without annoying the reader.

I think this is going start a new swarm of annoying ads.  I must tell you that my wife run’s a great site NewAgeStore.com and if it wasn’t for the AdSense ads we would not be in a position to afford the hosting.  However under no circumstances will I let a pop-up flash audible ad hit the site.

You see, even though AdSense pays some bills it’s not why we build sites.  We build sites to provide users with the things they need at the time they need them, it is a consequence of this that we get paid for the advertising.

Hey, all you plug-in developers out there, start building a way to block these ads now so we have something to install when they go live.

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Seems to me to make sense that comments from the last couple of days all kinda work together.

Firstly, Yahoo! happy to be second in the search game.

Secondly, Yahoo! already buying up other social software.

And now this!  Yahoo! want to buy digg.  If it’s real that it.

Put yourself in digg’s shoes just for a second… You built a great tool, people love, it becomes a bit of a pain to run sometimes because you need to spend so much time managing infrastructure and then Yahoo! walks up and offers $30 mil?

If I was digg, i would take the money and start the next best thing, then wait for Yahoo! to want that as well.

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I sometimes assume too much, like I assume anyone can find what they are looking for on the web.  Or that people go looking for better and more efficient ways of doing things instead of just coasting along.

But… finding something on the web can be challenging, some might call it an art form?

So I though I would spend the next few posts talking about pieces of software I regularly use, and how I use them, to make me day easier.

To start with I wanted to talk about LookOut.  This is an amazing tool that integrates right into Outlook. It’s basically a file indexing and email indexing tool.

Now interestingly this tool has recently been bought by Miscrosoft, I guess with the view that the technology will be bought into the Office suite at some stage, regardless it is still available for download.

I know, I know, Google desktop does searching however I have a problem with this product (or a couple of problems).

Firtsly google works by adding a small webserver to your system.  You can see this when you search for something, the results pop ip in a browser window, the address line of which is your local computer and some strange port address.  This is an overhead that I can do without.  Additionally the Google search results window in Outlook is clunky, can’t be sorted well and is difficult to do complex filtering.

So what is Lookout.  Basically it’s a small service installed on your system that as scheduled by you goes and indexes the Outlook folders and file folders you want it to index.  It indexes the content of the messages and the content of the files.

In addition to this service it adds a new toolbar to Outlook to do rapid searching.  The interface for the search results is deceptive.  It looks really simple however there is a lot you can do in search results window to get to the message you need.

To demonstrate, let’s say I am looking for a message from Julie that relates to a flight I booked to Brisbane.  Specifically I am looking to reprint the confirmation I received (a PDF) that was attached to this message.

In the search toolbar I type “brisbane flight from:julie”

I then sort the results by date by clicking on the date column, and then filter the results by only showing those messages that had attachments.

In this way I can rapidly locate the message I am looking for.  If you are looking for a better way to find your messages then install this product, you will be amazed.

Update: I am pretty sure that this only works with Outlook, not Outlook Express.

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When making a decision to buy any piece of software there are a number of criteria typically evaluated. One of the most important elements in the decision process is the strength of the company that builds the software. In fact a survey of 19,000 customers has identified that company strength is the most important factor in choosing software, with the price of the software being the fifth most important element.

In evaluating a company’s strength I would suggest you ask the following 15 questions, the answers to which will provide invaluable information in determining the viability of the company, their processes and their commitment to the product you are reviewing.

1. How long have you been in business?

2. When was you last upgrade released? When is the next one planned?

3. What’s involved in doing an upgrade?

a. Can your customer’s do it?
b. Are upgrades included in your annual fee?
c. Are they downloadable from your website?
d. Is documentation (installation instructions etc) included with the upgrades?

4. Are manuals available for the software?

5. Does the software update cost include phone based tech support?

6. What percentage of customers are current with their annual support contract?

7. Where is the product heading? Technology/Functionality? When do you plan to get their?

8. When did you last put your prices up?

9. Are you planning for the next realease of Windows yet?

10. Can i build my own reports?

11. Why did you choose your current development platform?

12. What does it cost to have someone come onsite a fix a problem?

13. Who does the training, are there scheduled courses?

14. Can i talk to a customer who implemented in the last 6 months?

15. How much have you spent on research and development in the last 12 months?

Importantly there is no right or wrong answer to these questions, and the answers may vary greatly from one vendor to another. There are however some answers that should throw up a red flag:

Question 6 – This is generally a good guage of customer satisfaction. If the vendor can not provide this information, or is not willing to do so then you can anticipate a support issue or poor customer satisfaction with the product.

Question 10 – You should always have the ability to get to your own data. If you require a programmer to build new reports then you will consistently be biting into your ROI.

Question 14 – If the vendor skirts around this issue then they are uncomfortable letting you talk to a recent customer and therefore maybe hiding something from you, perhaps a difficiency in their product or in their implementation process.

Question 15 – The answer to this question identifies how ‘productised’ the software is. A vendor who regularly evaluates their customer’s future requirements and spends money on building these into their product is committed to it’s current customers. A vendor who spends money only ‘as required’ is probably not so committed to building a great product as they are to getting sales.

When getting answers to these questions please also consider that their may be legitmate commercial reasons as to why a question can not be answered, however at a bear minimum your vendor should be able to provide some background into their reasons for not answering.

There are another four important criteria upon which any experienced buyer will evaluate a software purchase which will be covered in future articles.

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My wife discovered a great little trick when doing some property research at realestate.com.au.

So many properties are listed for sale without any indication of the cost of the property, this frustrates no end.  Imagine the time estate agents would save if they didn’t have to answer the phone to questions like “How much is that property on Clyde Road�.  Come on… this is like sales qualification 101 isn’t it?

Anyway, there is a way to get a ball park price for a property!  Firstly you will need to create an account on the site, only takes a few minutes and is free.

After you have created your account, find the property that you want to see the ball park price for.  For the sake of this example, I picked this property.

On the right side of the page is a “Email me similar listings� link.  Click this and after confirmation you will be taken to a page listing all of your property alerts.

Property alerts are basically subscriptions that you sign up for based on the criteria that you set.  Now that you have a subscription to properties like this one, the description for the newly added subscription will actually indicate the price range.

So you know, when an agent enters a property into the realestate.com.au system (which I have seen) they are forced to enter a property value and given the option to show it on the listing.

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1. Your website is an electronic brochure
2. Can’t be found in Google
3. Was last updated when it was created
4. Is organised how you want it organised
5. Is missing what your audience wants
6. Is home grown, and looks like it!

You’ve invested money and time into making your website what it is today, but you’re just not seeing the results.  If any of the above applies to you then you need to fix it, and fast.

The six issues above require some explanation:

1. When someone comes to your website, they can only do one of four things.  They can act on something, buy something, click on something or view something. By only having an online brochure you are really only addressing 25% of the capability of your website.
2. Being found in Google is now the yard stick by which people judge the success of your site, in fact if you can appear in the top ten then your audience see this as an implicit recommendation by Google that you site is one of the best.
3. “Last Updated: 24 May 2001″ does not attract visitors and actually shows disrespect towards people visiting your site.  Are you telling me that absolutely nothing about your business/people/products has changed in over four years!
4. At first glance this issue might sound reversed, however building a site how YOU want it organised is flawed.  The issue you are dealing with is ‘organisational familiarity’.  You know how your business is organised, your customers do not, and they can’t be expected to know either.  You might have a sales department, a marketing department, a production department, and a research department.  The worst thing you could do is build a website with the main navigation consisting of Home, Sales, Marketing, Production, and Research.  Your audience shouldn’t have to know about your business structure just to buy something from you.
5. Over the years you have no doubt built a list (albeit in your head) of issues that your customers face, questions about your product/service, things you do better than your competition, or common objections to buying your product.  This is invaluable information that is typically completely missing from most sites, and it really is what your audience is looking for, especially if they are buying from you without ever having spoken to you in person.
6. FrontPage is a great tool; to be honest I use it sometimes too.  But I do not use it to make a decision on the look and feel for the sites that I build.  A FrontPage theme does not make a great website.  You need professional design, consistency in style, and a site conducive to getting your message across.

You can fix it by following these simple steps. Research, Restructure and Refine.

Research

This is one of the most overlooked steps in building a website and is incredibly important.  You can cover this off very quickly however by looking at what your competition is doing, thinking about what your customers are asking for, and finding out what the most common issues people are having with your product after purchasing from you.  During this process you should generate a list of the types of people that visit your website.  The automatic answer is of course “customers” but this is not correct.  You might home business owners, soccer moms, students, or an accountant who works for an SME just to name a few.  If you can create a list of about the top 5 then this is a great start.

Restructure

Restructuring sounds like a big job, however with a good content management system you should be fine.  Without a content management system then you are up for considerable effort, so be prepared.

Here’s the key to getting this right!  This is the BIG SECRET to building a great site that will actually help you achieve results.

Draw up a table with six columns, and put the following headings at the top of each column; Who, What, How, Why, When, Wake.
Who - this is generated from the list you developed in step 1.  Each row in your table should be started with one of audience types you identified above.
What - For each audience type you need to identify what they are actually looking for on your site.
How - How are they going to find your site?  Is this type of person someone who relies on referrals from friends, search engines, advertising or a notice at the local mall?
Why - This is an evaluation process that these type of people will go through.  What about your product/service will be important to them?  Price, geographic location, your reputation, or that you have a payment plan?
When - This is not a date or time, this has more to do with ‘under what circumstances will they buy’.  You need to establish what will actually move them to make the purchase.
Wake - After the sale (in the wake of the sale) how will you keep this type of person in touch with you?

Here’s an example
Who: Home business owner.
What: They need something cheap, practical and easy.
How: Referral and Local community bulletin boards.
Why: Price.
When: When they have confidence that the money they will spend will do the job.Â
Wake: Monthly Newsletter

Having completed this exercise you will now have a roadmap to follow when building the content for your site and how it should be structured by looking for commonality in your table.  If you find that you have a common ‘how’ or ‘why’ then you should probably target parts of your navigation to address this.

Refine

Remember the six key elements that I stated at the beginning of this article?  Here they are again:
1. Your website is an electronic brochure
2. Can’t be found in Google
3. Was last updated when it was created
4. Is organised how you want it organised
5. Is missing what your audience wants
6. Is home grown, and looks like it!

Refining is all about identifying how you measure the change in your website’s performance.  Having made many changes you want to make sure that it has not all been in vein, or more importantly you may still have issues to be addressed if you are not seeing the performance you might expect.

Your site should now be anything but an electronic brochure.  It should have rich captivating information that people actually want to read, and be targeted towards particular audiences that you know will visit your site.

You should be able to visit googlerankings.com to see whether you appear in Google.  Remember that one of the key elements Google uses to identify a good website is the depth and breadth of the content.  If you have valuable information in the right quantities then getting into Google should happen automatically.  If you still can’t be found using the keywords you want then I would suggest you visit the American Marketing Association’s website (marketingpower.com) and invest some time in their pre-recorded webcasts, they’re free!

You need to keep your site up to date; a week should not go by without some sort of modification to the content or structure.  This is another measure search engines use to evaluate the ranking your site gets in search results.

Finally I would suggest you need to make sure your site looks professional, and one of the best ways you can do this is by asking your customers for their honest opinion.  There are thousands of designers just waiting for the opportunity to give you a great looking site, however you can also get some exceptional designs from template sites (like templatemonster.com) for a reasonable fee.

Remember that there is no mystery to making a great website.  All you need is quality information that people are looking for and that is easy to find.

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My wife and I have been looking for the perfect family home for a while now.  We know what we want, however can’t always rely on the descriptions given in the newspaper or on the internet for property.

There are a few things to really annoy us about these descriptions, mostly however it is the distinct lack of mentioning anything about the power lines that cross over the property, or just next to the property, or the main road that’s just over the back fence.

So in an effort to come up with a better way of disqualifying properties before wasting our time actually walking through them I came up with a combination of things that will get me the information I am looking for without leaving my office.

Firstly, you’ll need the following:

• Google Earth installed
• Access to some tool that will give you longitude and lattitude for a street address.  In the US this is a little easier than in Australia.   Luckily however in both Victoria and New South Wales there are government websites that can give you this information.  No doubt the other stats have them too, for the example below I will be using Land Victoria

Here’s what we do:

1. Find the property you are interested on your favorite real estate website.  We use realestate.com.au almost exclusively, I’ll tell you why later.
2. Get the physical street address of the property.

 

 

3. Find this address in your land search tool.  At http://www.land.vic.gov.au/ you go to the “Interactive Map� and then do a search on the left side of the screen.
4. Having located the property find the longitude and lattitude coordinates.  In the example below the co-ordinates display on the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

 

 

5. Take these coordinates and put them into the search box in Google Earth.

 

 

The format that you enter the coordinates into Google Earth needs to be presice, it has very little tollerance for malformed searches.  In the above example the format was 38 3′ 29″ S, 145 20′ 0″ E

Google Earth will pinpoint the property location for you exactly.  Now that you have a marker you can even relable it and put some notes in so you hae it as a permanent reference.  Further if you want to you can also put in the original URL of the property back on your realestate search site.

Coming soon… find out how to get an overlay of the land boundaries in Google Earth and why it is that we always use realestate.com.au.

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