I’m not going to rant here about all the great clients, who understand that time is expensive, who listen, pay attention, and do their own research.

But what I do think is that there’s a significant chunk of people out there, with no clue as to the Web, what it’s for, and how it works, who currently seem to be desperate to jump onto the bandwagon. They sometimes actually have some pretty sound business ideas.

Thing is, they turn up at our office with these huge plans. And a budget of £250.

There then follows an awkward silence as we have to explain that £250, like in dentistry, doesn’t really buy you a great deal of cosmetic awe. Even if the underlying software is free, you still need someone with the ability and understanding to implement it correctly. And they’re in demand. Read more

One thing worth thinking about in 2008, is fixing the DNS entry to your website. Most here are probably set up just fine, but here’s one of the most common problems we see:

Go to a website – eg, http://www.marketsafeuk.com and it should all work fine.

But take out the www and go to http://marketsafeuk.com and it doesn’t.  You just get a time out as the DNS fails to resolve the request.

This happens on a remarkable number of sites, even those belonging to some web designers. And it’s poor because a lot of users have got used to not typing the www subdomain to many addresses. They expect the null subdomain to point to the normal website. How many customers would Amazon miss out on if going to amazon.co.uk didn’t work? Lots….

So – if your site experiences this problem go into your domain’s control panel and set up a new A record where the subdomain is left uncompleted. The ip address should be the same as your usual one. Most control panels should allow this.

Your webserver, in most cases, will be set up by default to serve a blank subdomain the same way as the www one. If not, you may need to talk to your hosts about resolving this.