The Business Web – How We Use the Web for Business

As a lot of webmasters create more and more pages for their website(s), pages gets move around and sometimes people forget to make a redirect. So search engine spiders would craw through your website(s) and see certain broken links within their website. There is a great way for webmasters to check their website(s) for broken links on www.dead-links.com. It craws through all the pages that are linked together and from a search engine stand point. This can help you find where search engines are not going to and help prevent certain SEO effort that you are putting forth onto those pages. The spider also goes through to tell you how many out-going links it finds on each page. If you’ve linked to another domain it’ll check whichever page you’ve linked to and that’s it. So you don’t have to worried that it’ll just auto follow any links it find. Right now since there is a lot of development on our website, I tend to use this once per month to check. It only takes a couple of minutes and you can always let it run int he background and come back to it later.

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Is there really a Free CRM Software package worth my time to check out? Here’s what we found.

Zoho CRM - we’ve decided after looking at Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and a bunch of other companies that Zoho CRM was the one we should use. It’s got most of the features, although not necessarily exactly the way we want, that we need to manage our sales, order entry, and account management features. And the best thing about Zoho CRM, it’s FREE. You got it. It’s free for up to 3 users with 100 MB of storage. This should last us a few months until we have to upgrade to more users. It’s a slick little tool that packs a lot of features including ajax-driven UI. I highly recommend small businesses to take a look.

Here are some other providers with free CRM software that I feel are not quite as good as Zoho:

1. Salesforce.com Personal Edition – limited functionality
2. FreeCRM – looks rather amateurish

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We had the unfortunate disaster where our backup external drive died. It was horrific and a ton of data was lost. So the obvious solution was to look for an online backup alternative so I wouldn’t have to worry if my hardware would fail again. I looked at 2 vendors:

1) Carbonite
2) Mozy

We have setup both Carbonite and Mozy on some of our PCs and with 320GB hard drives half filled, it took about 2 weeks to get everything backed up. We made the decision to choose Mozy over Carbonite primarily because Carbonite does not allow you to backup external drives attached to your PC. I

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Microsoft Office is probably the most widely used business productivity software. However, it’s relatively expensive and for most people they use probably less than 10% of the feature. Here are a few alternatives for those looking for a cheaper solution.

1. OpenOffice.org (FREE)
2. Google Apps (FREE)

I recommend any small business take a look at these as alternatives to purchase Microsoft Office. In our office, we did purchase a couple copies of Microsoft Office but we also use both OpenOffice.org and Google apps.

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So you all know that we got new computers last month from the last post.  So I did not know this the week prior and when I got into the office, I find that the new computers did not have Microsoft Office on it, but everything I do is on Excel spreadsheet.  The problem here was that for some reason, I cannot locate the Microsoft Office key.  So since everything I do is on spreadsheet, I tried out the Google Docs & Spreadsheets (FREE of course from Google).  The first reaction to it was that it seem very simple.  There isn’t 500 buttons on the top, or the paperclip that pops up to remind you of certain things.  It was just clean and simple.  Since I don’t have MS Office at the time, I had to make due with what I had.  To my surprised, it was actually really easy to use for all of my basic needs.  I think this is a great tool to have while your on the go or you don’t have access to a spreadsheet reader.  The best thing of all is that all you need is a google account and it all comes free.  What don’t they make?

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There are a lot of emails and websites out there that is just waiting for people to click on them so they can get their virus out to infect either business or personal computer.  In these days, a retail version of a virus protector are pretty expensive and the thing with them is that they don’t actually protect you from new viruses, they just prevent what has already been out.  So what I don’t get is that why pay such a high price for such virus protector/scanner when you can get one for free.  If you actually look around on google for free virus protector, you’ll eventually come across a program call AVG. 

AVG has almost everything you need from a regular virus protector for your everyday need.  It has an email scanner that you can set up, it automatically updates on a regular basis, and of course, you can set a regular schedule to scan your computer for viruses.  I too went into the phase when I thought, that maybe Norton and McAfee would do a better job.  I tried Norton awhile back and it ate all my system resources like crazy.  Everytime I tried to run some applications, everything would slow down by like 3 folds.  Not everybody has a great computer and while you are working especially, they don’t see a reason why you need to have something top of the line since you are only running MS Office all day doing word processing.  But since I’ve had AVG, I’ve set the timer to scan in the morning around midnight so it can run however long it does and by the time I get to work, everything is all done.  AVG doesn’t take a lot of resources and really, do I need the other extra features that the expensive software gives you vs something that you can get for free.  Yeah, I thought not.

 Free AVG Anti-virus Software

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Download the Free PDF Writer from CutePDF. You can create PDF documents from most applications.

Unless you need the features to directly edit PDF files, this is a great tool that you gotta have for your business.

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PHPRunner is a great tool for businesses that need to build custom database-driven forms but do not have the deep technical expertise of programming. It’s got a drag-n-drop user interface and you can in minutes create and customize a form to fit your need.

Update (3/10/07): Although this application can generate code without any programming, if you need to heavily customize the look & feel of the pages it does have some limitations. I am looking at a couple of other applications right now and will write up a more thorough review of these php code generation programs.

Update (3/12/07): We’ve decided to go with PHPMaker instead of PHPRunner. I personally thought PHPRunner was much easier to use and is probably better for someone who does not know how to program or know HTML. However, PHPmaker is great and now it takes us 1/10 of the time to build simple web-based applications. Also, PHPMakder is cost about 1/3 of the cost of PHPMaker. Both have ree trials so give them a try.

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We found Pico while doing a search on Google. We needed a search engine for our websites so our visitors can more easily find information as the amount of content is increasing so ever rapidly. It’s a sweet(Free) deal for small sites with less than 250 pages. You can also index up to 3000 pages for less than $250/year. This is a nice deal.

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So last month, my boss got a few new computers at work and decided that we should use one as a back-up server.  There was a problem though because he goes on business trips often and find himself unable to access some of his files at work.  So he found this online solution call LogMeIn which lets you remotely access your computers.  People would think that it would be hard to configure your computer to do such a thing but LogMeIn is really easy to use.  You simply sign up, installed their software on your computer and thats all there is to it.  There isn’t really any configuration that you need to go through, only just signing into your computer.  You can also add multiple computers onto one account.  I find myself adding this sort of thing onto my personal PC since it is free and I can log myself on from any computer.  The only bad thing about this program is that it requires you to have your computer on(of course) and lag issues if you’re not running on a DSL/Cable line.

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