Maki & Brian DeLaet EduCyber founders

January 2006 EduNotes

Inside this edition of EduNotes: Start your year with (web site) style, stay abreast of the latest in technology trends and add another tool to fight spyware to your toolkit. Send feedback or questions to edunotes@educyber.com .

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

EduCyber is your technology partner. We partner with businesses, helping them solve problems and get more from their technology. Whether you need a web site, a web host, help with the search engines, or some kind of computer or network help, we partner with you to maximize your technology investment. Call EduCyber today at 720-275-4646.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Start With Style

We look at a lot of web sites. And a lot of web sites are, to put it politely, created by the design-challenged. So we offer some tips on how to start your year with style (for your web site).

Color with care. Choose the colors for your pages carefully. One of the worst things you can do is have the background color be too close to the text color, making the page unreadable. Also be sure that the colors you choose don't clash. If your page isn't visually pleasing to the eye, your visitors will go elsewhere. If you have a logo, use colors from it to help define the colors on your site as a whole.

Lay it (out) on the line. Designing for the web is different than designing for print. Don't be afraid to use hyperlinks to connect content. While you're not limited by page length as you are in print, some of the design elements do carry over. Information “above the fold” (on the first viewable screen) is still the most likely to be read. Put the good stuff there.

Font of Wisdom. Two things to keep in mind with fonts. First, the only way to control the exact font the end user sees is to put it in a graphic. If you define a font on a page and it looks great on your monitor but I don't have the same font, I'll see something very different. But if you put the font into a graphic you lose any search engine advantage. Second, fonts should be set to degrade gracefully. If your font of choice is a serif font, define it so that if your font isn't available (present on the computer of the web visitor), they will see Courier or Time Roman or Times New Roman instead. If the font is a sans serif, define it to degrade to Helvetica or Arial.

Screen Your Pages. You have very little control over the screen resolution of your web visitors. Today's screen sizes vary from 800 X 600 to 1280 X 1024 and higher. We frequently get questions like “Can we put something in this white space?” from clients. You have two choices when considering resolution. One is to make it absolute, in which case we recommend designing for an 800 X 600 resolution and centering your content. This will show white space on either side at higher resolutions but provides more control over positioning of elements. The second choice is to use percentages, allowing your page to expand or contract to fill the available space on the screen. You lose the ability for control over location of elements but it fills the page. Depending on what your page is displaying there are good reasons for choosing either of these options. The important thing is that you preview your web pages in several different resolutions so you know what your end users will see.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Technology Trends

Wireless has come into its own at last. Now you can connect to the Internet from anywhere. We've got a client in the mountains who gets near T1 internet speed through a wireless Internet company using line of sight technology. Another client is looking to beam their T1 across the street to enhance their business ability. We run a wireless network throughout our premises and in fact, I'm writing this newsletter while connected to the wireless network. In Denver , there is a company that only serves wireless internet connections, Ricochet. While they've gone through several ownerships, they continue to serve customers. And then the big wireless telephone companies like Verizon Wireless and Sprint also provide wireless broadband internet connections to their customers.

Google provides some of their best tools (toys?) bundled together in their latest offering – Google Pack . Google Pack offers five Google products in one free download. Included in the package: Google Toolbar for IE, Google Earth, Google Pack Screensaver (pulls your images into the screensaver), Google Desktop (search for files and information on your computer), and Picasa – a great photo organizing and sharing tool.

Last newsletter, we shared how Word of Mouth advertising is the latest buzz in Internet Marketing. That buzz continues. You can use your blog to help your business. You can use an RSS feed to share your hot information with anyone on the web. One of the hottest Word of Mouth techniques right now is creating an interactive game that people enjoy so much they not only keep playing it, they also tell all of their friends about it.

If you'd like some more ideas about how Wireless technology, Google Pack, Word of Mouth advertising or other technology trends can help you in your business, call EduCyber today at 720-275-4646.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Ewido to the Rescue!

Recently we added another great tool to our toolkit. The world of antivirus and antispyware grows increasingly complex with each passing day. Ewido has developed and anti-malware program that, working together with other great tools like SpyBot, Ad-Aware and Microsoft Antispyware, can stop the bad guys in their tracks. Just last week we faced a set of infections that we couldn't root out with the first three but when used in conjunction with Ewido, we successfully got all the spyware and Trojans removed from the system and returned it to its grateful owners.

For a free security check for your system, call EduCyber at 720-275-4646 or email us at info@educyber.com

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Quote of the Month

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

- Rich Cook

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Like what you just read? Send your friends a copy or direct them to our site so they can get it, too!

© 2006 EduCyber, Inc. This newsletter is brought to you by EduCyber, Inc. EduNotes can be viewed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week online at http://www.educyber.com/edunotes/ . Visit us on the web at http://www.educyber.com or call us at (720) 275-4646. Permission is hereby granted to redistribute all or part of this newsletter as long as this entire copyright message is included.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
For questions email us at info@educyber.com , or to be removed from this monthly newsletter distribution, send a blank message to newsletter-leave@educyber.com from the address you are subscribed to the newsletter as. To rejoin, send a blank message to newsletter-join@educyber.com