The full text of my the email I received:

From: “Mark Yang”
Date: August 1, 2012 3:23:40 AM EDT
Subject: Regarding ” jeffking” Dispute
Reply-To: mark.yang@cnnet-china.com

(If you are not in charge of this please transfer this email to your President or appropriate person, thanks)

Dear President,

We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in china, have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on July 31.2012. One company which self-styled “Mega Investment Co., Ltd” were applying to register “jeffking” as Network Brand and following domain names:

jeffking.asia
jeffking.cn
jeffking.com.cn
jeffking.com.tw
jeffking.hk
jeffking.in
jeffking.net.cn
jeffking.org.cn
jeffking.tw

After our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company’s, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for “Mega Investment Co., Ltd”.

Best Regards,

Mark Yang

Registration Dept.

Tel: +86 28 8315 5738 || Fax: +86 28 8315 5738
Address:21/F Dongcheng International No,98 XiAn Road,Jin Niu District,Chengdu City,China.

The health of a website — just like our personal health — is a system of systems that fluctuates over time in response to internal and environmental factors. With experience, we can learn how to tell when a website is sick or healthy.

Unfortunately, many websites are stuck in a “failure to thrive” mode and have never experienced a healthy cycle. Therefore, many business owners have not experienced their own websites in a healthy state. They might perceive the unhealthy state as being normal.

What does a website do when it’s in good health? How does it function?

It functions as an integral part of your overall business health. In other words, business would suffer if the website was not there. The website does not just sit there and do nothing. It does not merely point to your business like an ad, a business card or brochure.

You know you have a healthy, viable website when . . .

• You are not embarrassed to show your website to customers or prospects. You encourage people to visit your website because you know that it is current, relevant, and useful.

• You can trace new business and new customer inquiries back to your website. The website directly contributes to online or offline sales, new customers and new conversations. You know for a fact that these results come from the website because you have a tracking system in place. This can be as simple as asking customers how they found out about you while you’re still on the phone with them. Or before they walk out of your door. Or as part of your response to their email inquiry.

• You have inactive customers re-engaging with your business. Or you have current customers engaging more often as a direct result of your website and your online efforts, including email programs. Again, this can be traced directly back to your website because you have systems in place to measure those results.

• If you have a membership site or organization, it is easy to acquire and retain members because you have online systems that simplify customer service and member management.

• It is easy for customers to pay for products and services on your website. The website allows you to process more orders in less time.

• You spend less time on the telephone providing general information and explaining policies and procedures because that information is easily found on the website.

These are just a few indications that your website is healthy and viable. A healthy website is part of your business. It serves an important role in customer acquisition and creates income. It is not something that just consumes resources without making a discernable difference.

Is this a pipe dream or is it reality?

If you have not yet experienced this with your website, you can call me to find out why. I will ask some questions and provide concrete, actionable feedback. There is no obligation to work with me, but you will find out what needs to be done. In fact, you are free to hire someone else to act on the feedback I provide. My main concern is that you understand what would make your website healthy and viable and what it would take to get it there.

Your website is increasingly the first place that new prospects and customers experience your business. Your site visitors assume that your website represents your best effort. If your website is in a coma, they will assume your business is in a coma, too. They will move along without a second thought.

Fortunately, there are ways to jolt a website out of the coma state and into a viable, vibrant, healthy life. I have helped clients do everything I’ve described above. It’s work that I find to be incredibly rewarding.

Feel free to contact me with any questions or feedback. I enjoy hearing from you.

You should not spend more than one minute on this. I will explain why.

First, imagine your ideal client. . . the kind of client you could use more of. Think about what their needs are, why you are a good fit for them, and why they chose to work with you in the first place. Take one minute and visit your website from the perspective of that ideal client and ask yourself if it would connect with someone else just like them.

It’s very important to only spend one minute on this, because that’s a fairly long visit for a first-timer to your website. Most people who visit a new site for the first time only stay for a few seconds to a minute. By giving yourself only one minute to look at your website, you can get a better idea of what the typical experience is for your first-time site visitors.

Remember, you want to ask yourself if your website connects with the kind of person you would love to work with.

Take a minute and do it now . . .

OK, so now you’ve spent one minute on your website. It’s not a lot of time, and you may have noticed a few things that you want to fix.

If there is nothing there to grab your ideal client on the first visit, you may have missed your only chance to connect with them.

Recently a client looked at their site this way and realized they needed more photos. Their products and services are often sold on the basis of their visual appeal, and their website was largely missing the important element of product photos.

If you can’t find anything obvious to improve after the one minute exercise, ask yourself this question: what does your website ask your ideal client to do? Does it make any specific requests?

One way to immediately improve the performance of your website is to figure out something that you want your site visitors to do and then simply ask them to do it.

Possible calls to action include:

• Download our worksheet.
• Fill out this contact form.
• Sign up for our newsletter.
• Visit our physical location.
• Call for more information.
• Sign up for this free trial offer.
• Read this article.
• Email for info about our gift certificates.
• Print out our coupon.
• Call for personal assistance.

People are visiting your website to learn what they need to know and to find out how they can work with you. Does your website connect effectively with them, provide clear guidance and a simple next step?

It only takes one minute to find out. . .

You can do it yourself as explained in this email, but if you really want to receive some valuable feedback, you can ask someone else to spend one minute (and one minute only) on your website.

What to do next . . .

Visit your own website for one minute only. Send me a quick email letting me know what you discovered.

Free online photo editors

One of the main tasks of preparing content for the web is photo editing, resizing and formatting. Photoshop is the industry standard software package used to edit graphics. However, there are simpler and less expensive options if all you need are basic tools to resize and crop images for your website or email newsletter.

The editors discussed below are all free to use. These tools work for personal emails, too. Before sending those family photos, run them through webresizer.com in order to reduce the file size. Or upload them to Pixlr Express so you can add captions.

Why do we need to resize images? Because it helps our pages and emails load faster. It standardizes the appearance of the image across browsers, platforms and devices. It saves space if your online storage provider enforces a disk quota. And it saves time for both you and your recipients. Large files take time to upload, download and open. There is no need to send 7MB photos via email when a 45kb image would suffice.

WebResizer.com

Webresizer.com provides a simple user interface allowing you to perform basic edits including cropping, rotating and resizing. If you are new to photo editing, this is what I would recommend. Merely uploading and then saving your image will reduce the file size. (You do not need to change any of the settings.)

Pixlr Express

When you are ready for something more advanced, Pixlr Express allows you not only to adjust your images, but also to add text, stylized borders and other effects. You can upload an image from your computer, type in the URL of an image you want to edit, or even capture an image from your webcam. After your image is loaded into Pixlr Express, you can add text and make your adjustments before saving as a new file.

Pixlr Editor

Pixlr Editor is a full-featured photo editor similar to Photoshop. It gives you many tools to edit images or create them from scratch. This is a good choice if you need the ability to make precise adjustments.

Years ago when the web was taking off and many businesses were creating their first websites there was a lot of talk about establishing a “web presence.” The idea was that businesses were gathering in this new space and you needed to be there, too. Many people thought of the internet as a virtual town square or shopping mall. For the most part, just showing up was considered good enough. The typical website was little more than a brochure.

Because a website was thought of as a glorified brochure, you might have familiarized potential customers with your business in person or on the telephone and then referred them to your website for more information. The website served its purpose if it merely helped to establish credibility.

Even if you haven’t been paying a lot of attention to your website, your prospective customers assume that what they find there is your best effort.

Fast forward to the present, where a completely different paradigm exists. Today your website is often the location of your business’s first interaction with a potential customer. Rather than engaging in a personal conversation with you, your customers conduct research and make purchasing decisions based on what they find online. This means your website is a critical part of the sales process. Even if you haven’t been paying a lot of attention to your website, your prospective customers assume that what they find there is your best effort.

This is just one reason why it is crucial for your website to accurately represent your uniqueness and to make potential customers feel good about doing business with you. In the past, you could connect personally through a warm smile or a friendly voice. Today, many of your potential customers want to keep personal interaction to a minimum. They would rather look at your website first and then decide whether or not to increase their level of engagement with you.

Does your website connect with busy people who want to keep personal contact to a minimum?

Can you depend on your website to bring in new business?

For most of us, there is tremendous opportunity to strengthen our businesses simply by making our websites more accessible and useful to our ideal customers. They are out there searching for us. We need to demonstrate that we can help them.

I enjoy helping my clients figure out how to do this. Clients have said that after working with me the web (and their place in it) finally starts making sense. Call or email to find out how we can work together to make your website not just a brochure, but a relevant and useful tool that attracts your ideal customers.

These “experts” argue that you have to have amazing content on your site because amazing content is what will bring people to your site, encourage them to stick around or come back, and motivate them to tell their friends about you.

I disagree. The reality is that your content does not need to be amazing. It just needs to be useful. When I am searching for something I am not looking to be amazed. Nor is your prospect. They just want their question to be answered. They want their problem to be solved. They want to find that piece of information they need in order to proceed with their plans. They want to find someone who is qualified to help them.

Prospects don’t care about your “amazing” site design. They are not looking for amazing. They are looking for useful. Finding what they need on your site might be amazing to them. But only because of its immediate usefulness. Perhaps it was the precise answer they were looking for. Or it solved their exact problem. Maybe it gave them clarity and confidence on whom to contact for help.

Rather than worrying about being “amazing” or impressing people, I help my clients focus on the creation of value for their customers. Value is intrinsically understood and immediately useful. Trying to constantly amaze or wow people gets old quickly. In fact, it creates boredom.

Creating an interesting and useful website is not a matter of rocket science or show business. It may simply require changing your thinking about a few things.

To be continued . . .

Changing WordPress directory name

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/changing-directory-name-1

Changing WordPress location

http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress#Moving_WordPress_Within_Your_Site

http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-move-wordpress-blog-to-new-domain-or-location/

Giving WordPress its own directory but keeping site in root directory

A related task is placing all WordPress files in their own directory but having the site’s index page in the root directory. This keeps the root directory much more organized, especially if you need to manage files on the server via FTP — outside the WordPress interface.

This is also useful when converting a static html/css site over to WordPress. You can develop the WordPress redesign in its own directory without interfering with the current site. When the redesign is finished, you just follow these steps to make the WordPress version of the site live.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory

Bonus: because sometimes you’re working late with reduced cognitive ability . . .

Here is a sample track. In addition to the keyboards I also recorded the guitar solo for this song:

Believer “Mindsteps” by Metal Blade Records

I may write about this project in more detail in the future. We wrapped up the music end of things last fall. After finishing the actual writing and recording process, a great deal of work is needed to set up the marketing and promotion phase. That’s why there is typically several months between the end of production and the release of an album.

Our label, Metal Blade Records has been great to work with. We are in frequent communication with their office in Los Angeles and when it comes to press and interviews we also work with their offices in the U.K. and Europe. The band’s website will have links to some of the press and interviews for this album as they are published.

Website redesigns have become a standard component of an album release. Because the Believer website needs to be updated frequently by multiple users I moved it over to the WordPress platform.  In keeping with the overall artistic theme of the album art, the site is clean and mainly black and white. The body painting was created by Michael Rosner of Eye Level Studio.

Visit the Believer Website

Last year when I first began to dabble with designing apps it seemed like I was a little late to the party. However, there are still many people out there — just like I was — who would like to get started in mobile development but don’t know how. I thought I would share some of my experiences moving into this area of business in the hope that it would be of some value to my clients and anyone else who might be interested in developing for mobile.

There are lots of resources out there for getting started, along with lots of hype. Here is the essence of what I’ve found thus far:

Getting Started Creating Mobile Websites

Anyone who can create websites can also create mobile sites using the exact same tools. It’s really that simple. Whether you code by hand or use a WYSIWYG like Dreamweaver, you already have what you need.

Getting Started Creating Mobile Apps

There are several options for getting started with mobile apps. I am only including those pertaining to cross-platform development for at least Android and iOS devices, because that’s what I’m interested in.

1. Learn to code natively for Android and iOS operating systems. You can do a couple simple google searches to see what that involves.
2. Use web-based app template services. These offer ease of use but are not very flexible in terms of design.
3. PhoneGap allows you to develop apps using HTML, CSS and Javascript. It offers incredible flexibility but still requires some knowledge of native OS programming.
4. AppMobi runs on top of PhoneGap and completely does away with the need for native programming. You can stick with HTML, CSS and Javascript. This page has more technical info about the differences between PhoneGap and AppMobi.

Although each of these options vary in price and value, the bottom line is that there is an extremely low barrier to entry from the developer side. I am using AppMobi because they offer the best solution for someone like myself who is experienced with web design and development but is just starting out with mobile development. It promises the best of both worlds — complete flexibility in developing cross-platform mobile sites and mobile apps without the need to learn new programming languages. This will allow me to utilize the skills that I currently have and that currently exist in my network while I expand into mobile development.