Jesus saves!………….(we hope you do too!)
May.29.2009 
How often do you back up your website?
We have updated our back up facility within your control panel so that larger sites can now backup their sites quickly and with the minimum of fuss. We would strongly recommend backing up your site at least once a week to ensure you are not susceptible to any data loss.
Using our CP to back up your site is so easy there really is no excuse not do it. All you have to do is log in to your INSTA Host Customer Center and access your control panel. Once you are in your CP click on “Backup/ restore” found in the “File” section. From here you can choose to create a full back up of your site of pick and choose from your list of directories with just a click of the mouse. This will download your website as a zip file to your computer. Job done!
Start your own social network with INSTAPRISE
Social networking is all the rage nowadays and Facebook has recently become the most searched for brand and 2nd most visited site in the UK (Source: Hitwise).
According to Hitwise, “Social networks now account for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits and 1 in every 5 page views. Only search engines receive more UK Internet visits than social networks.”
This is only set to continue as the social networks targeting specific niches explode on to the scene catering for the personal tastes and interests of users in a way the large generic social networks can’t. The niches within the niches of Music, cooking, travel, web design, sport, fashion, geographic locations, science… etc are all up for grabs.
Start your own social network
Always ones to make sure our customers are able to take advantage of the latest web developments you can now create your own social network, quickly and easily with only a few clicks.
Our recent addition to our already massive library of one click install programs is “Elgg”. Elgg allows you to take full advantage of the power of social technology with elegant, flexible solutions for organisations, groups and individuals.
This new addition joins an already impressive list (small selection below)…
- WordPress
- Joomla
- phpBB3 forums
- Sugar CRM
- Drupal CMS
- PHPcoin
- MediaWiki
- Openads
- Mambo CMS
- Coppermine Photo Gallery
- Form to Email
- osTicket
- dotProject
We also offer our INSTA Community – fully installed social community, ready to go! over at our Turnkey Installation Site INSTAsite.biz
The rise and rise (and rise) of social networking
Please take a look at our community software….http://www.instacommunity.co.uk which can be purchased at our INSTA turnkey store HERE
Following on from our recent post about Hitwise’s research in to social networking in the UK yet more research is pointing to social networks as being THE growth area online.
Nielson Online has released findings in to the use of social networking around the globe and from a virtual standing start a few years ago their category has exploded in to 4th place.
Grouped with blogs to create a category named “Member communities” they have now over taken email and are only behind search engines, portals and PC software (I’d argue ‘adult sites’ would be in there somewhere if they were not consciously excluded in this type of research).
Other stats that jump out are:
- 67% of their research panel use member community sites
- 1 in every 11 minutes online are spent on these sites
- The 35 – 49 age category saw the biggest increase in uptake
- UK mobile web users are the most likely to access these sites through a hand set than any other country
- 69% of the UK online audience visit a member community site
Social networking doesn’t really offer anything new in terms of what you can do (posting on a board, send a message, chat online, share images…) but what is different bringing all of these in to one handy place where our ‘friends’ can access them.
I wonder how it will be before we can search the internet from Facebook?
This looks like a great time to jump on to the social networking band wagon and our addition of social networking software Elgg to our CGI one-click Internet library of one click install programs lets you to take full advantage.
You can read Nielson’s press release summary here: http://www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090309.pdf (PDF)
PS, dont forget that we offer a fully installed INSTA community over at http://www.instasite.biz
Write an online survey
Surveys are great ways to collect data about pretty much anything to do with your website for example, how people use your website, what they think about your services, how they rate your products. However, writing a good survey with results you can analyse and data you can actually use is not as simple as many people think.
Below is some advice and a few tips on writing a survey for your website.
Keep it short
No one wants to be faced with dozens of questions especially online where attention spans continue to fall. To ensure as many questions are answered as possible and reduce the drop out rate aim for 10 questions or less. If you decide to split the questions in to multiple pages don’t create so many stages it feels like they are climbing a mountain and always let them know where they are in the process e.g. step 2 of 5.
Give them a reason to take part
Provide a strong incentive for the participant to complete the survey and give you their contact details. For example, if you are running a survey to benchmark your industry you could give them access to the results or if it is a survey about your service a competition is always popular e.g. Win a laptop.
Structuring the questions
How you structure your questions will make the difference between having data you can apply and having a large spreadsheet sitting untouched on your computer. Some tips include…
1. Don’t weigh the answers in favour of a certain answer e.g. Excellent, Very good, Good, Poor (3 positive and only 1 negative)
2. Don’t put “don’t know” or “NA” as an option in middle (e.g. 3 of 6), it will make statistical analysis a nightmare. Put it as a separate option at the end
3. Avoid leading questions e.g. “Do you agree that…?”
4. Keep the question specific e.g. don’t use words such as “Occasionally”, “Often”, “Regularly” etc. What they mean differs from person to person
5. What does average mean? Don’t use it for the sake of it
6. Don’t fall in to trap of asking two questions in one sentence. “Did you buy our red balloon and what did you think of it?”
Open and closed questions
Open questions allow the respondent to answer a question with no limitations on what they can say e.g. “What do you like about your current supplier?” A closed question has a limited number of responses to choose from e.g. “How would you rate our customer service?” Very Good, Good etc.
In theory open questions provide you with more qualitative data but they can be difficult to analyse. If you have thousands of responses you will have to go through each one grouping the answers to be able to spot any common themes. Closed questions make it very easy to analyse the data but you could miss out on some valuable feedback.
Piloting the survey
Good practise dictates you should run a pilot survey to test the questions amongst a limited sample before launching it to the general population. Doing this will highlight any problems with the questions and any in data collection and analysis.
Choosing the software
There are literally hundreds of software suppliers to choose from covering all the stages of planning, implementing, distributing and analysing your survey.
Suppliers include:
• http://www.zoomerang.com/
• http://www.keysurvey.co.uk/
Buy your .tel domain for only £9.99
We have just launched .tel on INSTA Host and you can get yours for only £14.95 per year. .tel domains are different to other TLDs as they have specifically been created for you to store, publish and update all your contact information online without the need for a website.
Why buy a .tel?
Bring all your information together: .tel acts as a one stop online directory to store, publish and search business and individual contact information such as phone, Email, IM address, social network details, and website URLs making it easier for people to find and contact you.
Connect with people from any Device: YourName.tel makes your website instantly accessible from any device connected to the internet. Your visitors simply type in YourName.tel into a browser, select a method of contact and click to initiate communication.
Gain an Effective Mobile Presence: YourName.tel is optimized for mobile devices since it uses small and fast DNS lookups rather than pulling traditional website and html content. It therefore enables you to be quickly and easily found on all mobile devices.
Increase Online Discoverability: YourName.tel increases your business’s discoverability online by allowing you to publish keywords. These keywords are indexed by leading search engines, which improves your online visibility.
