Traditionally small business people have set up email applications such as Outlook to access the mailserver on their hosting account using the POP3 protocol. In simple terms this means that when Outlook connects to the mailserver it downloads the emails onto the PC on which Outlook is installed and then deletes them from the server. When this is done  none of the emails are then available for viewing on any other device (e.g. smartphone, home PC etc). Or to put it another way, they become captive on the device they were downloaded to.

These days with the availability of high quality, low cost hosted email services, there is a better way that involves  two important steps:

1. Setting up an email service that stores all your emails permanently online.
2. Setting up each of your decices to connect to the service using the IMAP protoc0l.

Step 1: Take your mail services online

Many people will be familiar with Hotmail or GMail. These are actually quite good services, but not ones I would recommend for business for two reasons: they do nothing to assist with your branding and if you are ever unfortunate enough to run foul of their terms and conditions you run the risk of your account being suspended with the loss of all emails. Sound unlikely? – unfortunately,  it happens!

A better way is to take out a paid account with a dedicated business email services provider such as Fusemail. Accounts are cheap as chips, storage is huge, reliability is excellent and support is first class.

Click to watch a one minute video for a quick overview.

Step 2: Setting up devices for IMAP connection

For emails stored on an online server to be constantly available to any device that connects to them, those devices (PCs and mobiles) must be set up with an IMAP protocol connection. The reason for this is that the IMAP protocol does not download the emails and store them on a  local device. Rather, it ‘views’ the emails on the  mailserver.

In operation this is all quite seamless. Reading, creating, replying and forwarding emails is done in exactly the same way and with the same applications  you are used to (Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird etc as well as smartphones can all be set to use IMAP).

The result? Regardless of what device connects to the mailbox they will all see the same thing. Because none of the devices actually download the emails, they will always be there waiting for the next device that connects.

Once again, because Fusemail is a business grade service, excellent support is available to help you set up your  desktop and mobile devices to work with their system.

If you would like to know more about setting up such a service watch this video on how Fusemail accounts are set up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Still not confident about switching over?

Ask TOSD Web Design to set it up for you. We have been using the system for years!

But wait, there’s more . . . one of the things I really like about using an online email service and not downloading emails to a local PC is that if you ever need to swap that PC, or simply like to try out a new email application, you don’t need to muck around importing vast amounts of emails. You just connect to your online service and go!

1. Select, resize and compress images for the web.
2. Upload the images to the /uploads directory using GetSimple’s file manager.
3. Create a new image gallery
4. Add selected images from the /uploads directory to the newly created gallery
5. Insert the tag that calls the gallery into a page

And here are a few more details . . .

Step1: Select, resize and compress images for the web

If you are familiar with preparing images for display on web pages then simply use whatever methods are familiar to you. If not I suggest you use Pixlr (www.pixlr.com) This online image editor is free and simple to use. Regardless of the method used to prepare images for display in the Simple Image Gallery I suggest you consider the following:

• Simple Image Editor will create thumbnails for display in grid form on the web page. These will present better if they are all the same size. One way to achieve this is to create a common background (e.g. 600px wide x 600px high) and then re-size and paste each image onto the background before saving it .
• Images straight out of a modern digital camera will be far, far too big, both in terms of actual size and file size. I suggest that finished images have a maximum dimension of 600px and all images should be saved at 96ppi resolution for the web.
• Common image formats would be png or jpg. If you are unsure I suggest you save the images in jpg format with the quality set to about 80. This will give a significant reduction in file size while still producing a nice image.

Step 2: Upload images to GetSimple’s /uploads directory

• In admin, click the ‘Files’ tab then click the ‘Upload files and/or images’ button

• A pop-up window will appear. Browse you PC, select the required image and click the ‘Open’ button. The image will be automatically uploaded and displayed in the files list.
• Repeat for all the images that are required for the image gallery.

Step 3: Create a new image gallery

• In admin, click the ‘Image Gallery’ tab then click the ‘Add New Gallery’ button

• Give the gallery a name then go down the list ticking those images that are required for the Gallery

Step 4: Add selected images

• When you have completed the selections scroll to the bottom of the file list and click ‘Save Gallery’

Step 5: Add the gallery to a page

• The gallery list will now be displayed. Highlight the tag code for the gallery just created and copy it.

• Go to the page where you want the gallery to be inserted and paste the code that you just copied and save the page.

That’s it! You should now be able to go to your website and view your new image gallery. Click on any thumbnail to pop up a larger version and scroll through the images.

If you would like to see a working version you can see one here.

Accessing the administration panel

Go to www.’yourdomain’.com.au/admin and enter your Username and Password as provided by TOSD.

Note: Replace ‘yourdomain’ in the above link with your own domain name ?

Main administration tabs

The diagram above shows the general administration layout. There are six main menu tabs across the top. Pages and Files are the only ones we will concern ourselves with in this Quick Start Guide. Notice that when you click on any of the main tabs a secondary set of options appears in the right hand sidebar, with the currently selected option shown in orange.

Pages

View All Pages

Selecting ‘Pages’ (from the tabs) then ‘View All Pages’ (from the sidebar secondary menu) displays a list of all the pages in the website.

Clicking on any of the page title links will enable you to edit that page.

Clicking on the ‘Create New Page’ button in the secondary menu will enable you to create a new page.

Creating a new page

• Click the ‘Create a New Page’ button
• Click the ‘Page Options+’ button to expose the options for your new page
• Give the page a ‘Title’ (preferaby one that contains a keyword, or keyword phrase that is relevant to the page content). Do not make the title too long, or, apart from anything else, it may take up too much room in the menu.
• Slug/URL: you can leave this empty. It will be automatically created from the page title when your page is saved. However if you do want something a little different from the title use lowercase letters only and dashes to separate words (no spaces). E.g. daffodil-varieties
• Select the parent page. If the page is to be at the top level of the menu, select ‘index’ from the pull down list.
• Add keywords (I suggest no more that 6 words) and make sure that any keywords are also contained in the general page content.
• Add a meta description (I suggest no more that about 140 characters (including spaces). The title and meta description are both displayed in the search engine results. They must be relevant to the page content and written in such a way that they will encourage people doing searches to want to click them.
• Template: in general leave as ‘Default Template’. Contact TOSD if you are in doubt.
• If the page is to be added to the menu (this would be the normal situation but you may not want to do it until you have finished working on the page) tick the ‘Add to menu’ box.
• Use the editor to enter and format your text, images and hyeprlinks. If you hover over any of the menu icons a text label will appear to tell you what it is. As shown below, icons are available for all common formatting functions.

Adding Content

Images:

These should be uploaded first using the ‘Files’ tab. All images should be set to their final size in pixels before uploading and have a resolution of 96ppi. Images straight out of a digital camera will be far too big, both in terms of their physical dimensions and file size. If you don’t have software to do this go to http://pixlr.com/ , click “Open Photo Editor” and click the ‘Open Image from computer’ link. This will enable you to resize your image and save it at the correct resolution.

Images are added after the text paragraphs have been set up.

• Click on the start of the paragraph the image is the be associated with to set the cursor then click the image icon.
• In the popup window click the ‘Browse Server’ button and select your image from the uploads list.
• Add a brief description in the ‘Alternative text’ box (using keywords if possible) set the alignment to’ Left’ or ‘Right’ and the HSpace to 10px to allow for a little padding around the image. Click OK to save.

Hyperlinks (links)

Highlight the words that will form the link and click the link icon. A popup window will appear.

• If you are linking to another page of your own website set the link type to ‘Link to local page’ and select the page.
• If you are linking to a page on another website set the link type to ‘URL’ and enter the URL e.g. www.anotherwebsite.com.au/pagewhatever
• If you are linking to a pdf (uploaded previously using the ‘Files’ tab) set the Link Type to ‘URL’, click the browse server button and select the file from the uploads list.

Presentation tips

• Leave the main body text of the page at the default size and colour. In other words: just type!
• Best to avoid pasting text from another application but if you must always strip pre-existing formatting by papsting it into a completely plain text editor (e.g. Notepad) first
• Getting the order right will help. Here is what I suggest . . .
• Add the main text content first.
• Format the headings and sub-headings by clicking on the icon with the drop down arrow labelled ‘Normal’ and selecting the required heading size. Note that Heading 1 (H1) should not be used as it is reserved by the system. Note also that the colours of the headings will not show up in the editor. They will appear correctly when the page is viewed, though.
• Add any images
• Add any hyperlinks
• Do any final adjustments to formatting e.g. bold, italic etc

Creating a News Article

If your website has a News facility configured click the Pages Tab then the News Manager button on the secondary menu. The existing News articles will be listed. Click on one to edit, or click the ‘Create New Article’ button to create a new one. Creation is very simple. Just type the article and add images or links as required. An Excerpt (summary / intro) may be added if required but is not necessary.

Uploading Files

• Select the ‘Files’ tab from the top menu – existing files will be listed under the Uploads directory
• Click the ‘Upload files and/or images’ button in the secondary menu to upload a file from your PC, taking note of my comments above in the Page Content/Images section regarding correct image preparation.
• This facility can be used to either upload images for insertion into a page or news article, or documents (preferrably pdfs) that you want to link to.

To create a News article:

• In admin go to Articles / News
• Fill in the relevant fields to suit – taking particular care to use the keyword phrase in those sections mentioned above.
• Click [Add New] to save.

As a long term strategy try and post effective news articles on a regular basis. Once a week would be good, but whatever it is, make it a habit. It is a great way to help move your eCommerce site away from just codes and prices to meaningful content that Search Engines and customers can relate to.

On this occasion it was fortunate for those involved that their web facilities were not actually destroyed, which meant that I was as able to remove the scripts and re-enable their websites. The outcomes could have been very different however, as I don’t think either client had a current backup.

To manage this situation I suggest that clients do one (or both) of the following:

1. Ask TOSD to change your hosting account’s password to something more complex and secure. It’s FREE – just submit a Support ticket.
2. Take out a Support Agreement with TOSD for just $5.00/month (payable annually). As well as ongoing help and advice with your website applications, a Support Agreement includes automatic, scheduled, monthly offsite backups so that in the event of a catastrophic failure of your web facilities a recent backup will be at hand. And restoration can take as little as 15minutes. Compare that to having to re-create you website and all its content from scratch