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Boldacious Digital Consultant

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Domain Name Registration – why you need control

Domain Name Registration serves 2 main purposes

  1. Registers ownership of the domain name
  2. Controls where the domain is hosted (where it lives)

In the past, some web designers and web-hosting companies (including my company) have looked after this for their customers.

Although this makes it easier for customers and web-hosting companies, it is a mistake.

You, as the domain name owner should always be the domain name registrant – this gives you legal ownership of the domain name.

There are 4 types of domain name contact types (sometimes called slightly different names):

  1. Registrant Contact
  2. Admin Contact
  3. Tech Contact
  4. Billing Contact

Fairly obvious what they mean, but the most important one is the Registrant Contact – this should always be the domain name owner, and indeed the Registrant Contact is the legal owner of the domain.

Usually it’s best to have your own name in all contacts, except possibly for the Tech Contact, who can transfer your domain to a new host.

This does mean, however, that you are responsible for renewing your domain, unless you add your accountant, bookkeeper, or accounts person to the Billing Contact

You can check your own domain name contacts in any whois url.
I use this one https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx but there are plenty of other ones around. MxToolbox is very comprehensive, so I’ve got a little how to video below.

 

After starting the video, click the little “full screen” icon on the bottom right hand corner to view more easily.
It is slightly hidden.

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Evernote Business – paperless office & team productivity

I ran an Evernote workshop with Startup Tablelands (of which I am a founding member) at The Table  in Atherton on Tuesday 29th Aug 2017.

We had 12 attendees from small businesses, and the local council in The Tablelands. They were a great crowd and very interested in Evernote and its capabilities.

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What is Evernote (and why you need it)

Evernote is your corporate memory.

Basically it’s a filing system of folders (called notebooks in Evernote) with notes inside them; and each note can have multiple tags that they can be searched under.

But … you don’t need a filing cabinet and filing clerk to organise everything; you don’t have a DRIVE x where all files are but no-one can find them; and you don’t have 17 versions of the same docs with different file names.

And it’s all available to anyone (with the correct access credentials) to access anytime, anywhere with any laptop/computer, smart phone or tablet.

And you can store audio, video, webpages, images, google docs, pdf’s, word docs hand written notes – anything that can be stored electronically.

For instance I have a Windows laptop, android phone and tablet, my partner, Cate, has the same except mac, and my daughter, Zoe the same but windows – we have various notebooks – some we all share and others just Cate and I share.

But we can all read them on any of our devices, anywhere. Cate is in Canberra at the moment with her new grandson, and she had to go to the bank today to discuss a loan she has –she needed some paperwork to show them – she had all the data she needed on her iPhone in Evernote.
And you can allow access to different notebooks to all employees, just some, or external people and give each of them the ability to edit or not.

WHY DO YOU NEED IT?
Studies now say that now very few people will stay in the same job for more than a year (or maybe 2).
High turnover is just a fact of life now which means that you need new people to be able to get up to speed with your company as quickly as possible. Also when people leave your business, you want their knowledge of your customers and products to stay with the company so their  replacement  can access that knowledge easily and quickly.

Research shows that  salespeople  spend 31%  of  their time searching for the correct information AND 81% of sales and marketing executives say that searching for the correct information is their number 1 area for improvement.

In the modern world people are connected online most of their lives – they need more than paper to be convinced of anything – they need videos, audio etc.

Recent studies have shown that in the workplace 80% of emails are a waste of time, and that emails take up 28% of workers’ time.
Evernote solves all of these issues and it is one of those programs that most people find easy and  intuitive  to use.

Now for some practical examples – say I am working on a project – I am collaborating with these people here. So I set Evernote up so they can see everything I’m doing. I can send one person a “workchat” which is an internal texting method, then we can look at the same image or text and discuss what   we need to discuss (no email) Or I can setup a tag so everyone on the team will see the tasks they need to do tomorrow morning. (no emails).

This team (management) over here don’t want to know how we got the project to work or how much work it took – they just want to see where we’re up to   on every Friday afternoon. Evernote will do that (no emails).

I’ve got some great ideas for the project that I  found  on facebook (it was for work – honest!) I can add a webpage to Evernote very  easily  and then annotate and share that with my working partner. We can both annotate the same page together.

And if another employee starts working on a similar project to mine (she’s not aware that our projects are similar) then Evernote will find what I’m doing and ask the employee if my work is worth her looking at.

This is just a very brief overview of how Evernote van help your business to succeed, grow and profit.
It takes some planning to setup efficiently but then is very easy and intuitive for your employees to use.

It is  relatively  cheap, extremely customisable and very robust.

evernote-pricing
Check it out here.
(there is a free version, and if you purchase a paid version, I do get a small commission)

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No more “forgotten password” meltdowns

These days we need to remember many passwords – they should be different for each website and be a random list of characters which, by definition, are almost impossible to remember.

So – what to do?

Password managers!

Wikipedia’s definition:
“A password manager is a software application that helps a user store and organize passwords. Password managers usually store passwords encrypted, requiring the user to create a master password; a single, ideally very strong password which grants the user access to their entire password database. Some password managers store passwords on the user’s computer (called offline password managers), whereas others store data in the provider’s cloud (often called online password managers). However offline password managers also offers data storage in users’s own cloud accounts rather than provider’s cloud. While the core functionality of a password manager is to securely store large collections of passwords, many provide additional features such as form filling[1] and password generation.[2]”

There are many password managers to choose from – I use and recommend Roboform (disclosure: this is an affiliate link – I get a small commission if you buy Roboform – but there is a free version)

I love Roboform – I have a single strong master password – then this opens up Roboform which then logs me into whatever site I want with it’s own strong password that Roboform kindly remembers for me.

It is very important that you have a strong master password. I have a long one which is a combination of nonsense phrases for my childhood (in random upper case and lower case) and a few numbers and symbols. This would be pretty hard to crack but is easy for me to remember.

As an extra precaution I do have a copy of it with another person just in case.

roboform_password_generaterRoboform also generates passwords for you – I get it to generate 40 character passwords for me now. And I never have to worry about remembering them.

I have a paid version plus an online backup and I use roboform on my phone and tablet.

Another feature that I love is that it can fill in forms for you – so I click on registration forms are done – this is such a fantastic time-saver.

My affiliate link gives a very good overview – and remember the free version is quite feature rich.

This is also extra protection against phishing sites as Roboform fills in your login and password from the correct originating site – so if you click on an email link and roboform does not popup – then you have probably clicked a phishing link.

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Task and app automation

Zapier and IFTTT are prime examples of a new class of clever software that allow your apps, programs, social media to “talk” to each behind the scenes. This is commonly called task or app automation.

Zapier (which is more business orientated than IFTTT) describes what it does this way: “Connect the apps you use, automate tasks, get more out of your data.”

Once set up you have an automated service that works seamlessly.

Some basic examples that I use are:

Utility email invoices:

  1. usually they are sent 2-3 weeks before their date due, so I have them “zapped” to an Evernote notebook with a tag of “to-do”
  2. I put a reminder in Evernote manually (some reminders I’ll put a few days in advance)
  3. then a “Zap” puts them on my google calendar.

This is a very simple example – much more complex automations can be fairly easily done.

What this means for me is – I don’t forget invoices, and the zaps save me probably 5 minutes of time.

Website examples:

  • Any new tweets are zapped to that website’s facebook account.
  • Any new facebook posts are zapped to a blog category in the website
  • Any new form submissions are zapped to a google spreadsheet (handy if you want some staff to be able to work on new form submissions and note what they have done on the spreadsheet so they don’t need access to the backend of the website
  • new form submissions can also be cc’ed to another person’s email or to their Slack account or made into a new Trello job