8th Dec 2012 | General Information
I received some bad news today! Google Apps is no longer to offer its free product to new customers. Until now, it was possible, after the initial trial of Google Apps for Business to downgrade to Google Apps Standard, which was free.
At Cloud Genius we see great benefit in the Google Apps product – we use it ourselves.
This policy change at Google will affect our offerings – we can still set up Google Apps for you as part of one of our great website offerings. We will even set it up for you as a standalone product. Unfortunately, after the first month you would have to pay Google a fee. Currently that starts at £3.30 per user per month (less if you pay annually). It is still a great product.
Exact pricing details are at: Google Apps Pricing
1st Nov 2012 | Charity, Salesforce
Most charities need some way of keeping track of their donors and their volunteers.
Salesforce is a database that allows all of that.
Here is a video summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r6hxqg3PgRQ
Charities have many other needs, too.
How about setting up a website advertising for new volunteers?
You can easily set up a webpage, using Salesforce, that will allow you to accept that information straight into your Salesforce database. It will take about three minutes and require no programming. If you require it to fit in with your website’s theme, you may need to pass it by your web designer to smarten it up. (That should take them five minutes.)
Supposing you want to be notified every time a new person applies through that website and set a task to remind you to check up on the applicant within a set time?
Salesforce workflows make that a snap.
Perhaps you need to keep track of all your volunteers’ CRB (criminal records bureau) checks or their driving licences or some other check?
How about a report that automatically arrives in your inbox every month telling you of the checks that are due to expire in the following month? Very easy to set up. Once set up you can forget it.
You run courses and you need to keep track of delegates, facilitators and the people who referred your delegates… who attended which course. You want to associate the feedback from the courses with the relevant facilitators. With Salesforce that is all really easy to set up.
This is all done without any servers in your office. All you need are PCs (Windows, Macs or Linux will all work) with one of the common browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or Chrome) and an internet connection.
Training is simple, too. For your users it presents as a simple website.
Simple!
The entire system is upgraded and improved three times a year, free of charge. (Each upgrade takes up to five minutes.)
It is all maintained in top quality, secure, safe, reliable data centres.
And, as a charity (or non profit), you may well qualify for 10 user licences for free. (Check out the Salesforce Foundation.)
What is not to like? (This has only just scratched the surface of what Salesforce can do.)
No wonder Salesforce is now a top database for charities. Easy, reliable, intuitive.
What is there left to do? Tailor it so it perfectly fits your organisation’s needs. Cloud Genius are experts not only in Salesforce, but also customisations that are specific to charities. We will also provide training on your bespoke environment. Click on the Salesforce logo to request more information.
What is not to love?
Click here now to contact us for more information
23rd Oct 2012 | Defeating spam, General Information, Websites
In this article I will look at how you can prevent your email addresses being harvested from your website. It continues on from Defeating the Spammers pt1
The ‘traditional’ method was to put up a graphic instead of an email address. This may have prevented spammers from harvesting emails, but it also reduced the ease of use of the site. With a link the legitimate surfer could just click to open an email. With an image of the email address the surfer would have to type the email address into his/her email app. (If you linked the image to a mail address you would be back in situation where the harvester could gain your email address.)
Fortunately there is a WordPress plugin that addresses this exact problem.
CryptX
This will find anything on your WordPress post or page that looks like an email address and create an encrypted link. It can convert it to one of several different formats: john@cloud-genius.com can become:
- John[at]cloud-genius[dot]com – which is human readable, but cannot be clicked on.
- Can be replaced with a link that goes elsewhere.
- Can be replaced with an image of the email address
Or, my favourite
- Be replaced with a link that a robot cannot follow, but a human can. The text on the page is obfuscated so that a bot cannot read it.
If you need a page to not receive the Cryptx treatment, there is a tick box on the page editing screen that allows you to turn it off.
In total, it is easy to use Cryptx does it all for you. (Warning techie bit: you do not even have to put ‘mailto:’ links on your page.)
13th Oct 2012 | General Information
We have teamed up with our partners at webhost.cloud-genius.com to get you the best offers until the end of 31 October 2012.
For any purchase over £20, simply put in the code 5NC25 to get 5% off. (They actually price their services in dollars, so you might scrape through with a smaller purchase, depending on the exchange rate.)
Can’t get much fairer than that!
We use them for our hosting, so they must be good.
26th Sep 2012 | Defeating spam, General Information, Websites
One of the most disheartening things about having a new website is spam. It can attack in several ways:
1) The email addresses on the site are ‘harvested’ by spammers. All those email recipients then receive ever-increasing levels of unwanted emails.
2) The lovely form designed to receive information from interested customers starts to receive lots of spurious messages that appear to be meaningless drivel.
3) Comments are received on the blog that are completely meaningless, irrelevant and full of strange links.
Fortunately there are ways to defeat all of these problems, or at least get them down to manageable proportions.
This week I am going to look at getting rid of email link spam:
One of the reasons it happens is that email addresses are worth money. If a spammer can send out emails to lots of people and 1% of people buy something as a result then the more emails the spammer sends the more money he or she makes. A spammer sending 10 million emails will make 10 times as much as a spammer sending 1 million emails (all other things being equal). But, you say, these emails are not selling anything, how does the spammer make money? The links and pictures in the emails are there to test whether the email address is ‘live’ before selling it on!
The best way to stop this process from happening is to have the email addresses on your website unreadable by the harvesting program. Many people do this by putting up a picture of the email address rather than a real link. This causes inconvenience to your real visitors as they can no longer click on the link to send you an email, they have to type it themselves (and will inevitably make mistakes). This results in you receiving fewer legitimate emails and, if you are selling something, making fewer sales.
How about setting up links that are unreadable to the harvesting programs but are fully readable by humans and work properly as links?
Try this one: john@cloud-genius.com
If you hover your mouse over it you will notice (normally in the bottom left of your browser) that it produces gibberish. This is what a harvesting program (‘bot’) would see. It will look something like: javascript:DeCryptX(‘kpioAdmpve.hfojvt/dpn’). Click on it [the one that looks like an email address, not the javascript!] and it will open up an email to send to me.
Clever? In the next article I will explain how you can set this up.
Defeating the Spammers pt2
9th Sep 2012 | General Information
On the Contact Us page you may notice a web form.
When you put your information in it does three things:
1) Puts the information in my Salesforce database.
2) Sends me an email telling me that there is a new person interested in my services.
3) Thanks you for kindly giving me your information.
If you are interested in Salesforce and how it can help you be more responsive to customers, fill in the form!
Here is the form.
6th Sep 2012 | General Information
Yesterday Cloud Genius joined the Federation of Small Businesses. In honour of this, the whole website has had a re-vamp.
You will find more details of our products and services, including our incredible high-speed web set-up. It will cost less than you expect.
Request more information
30th Jun 2012 | General Information
Within charities, one of the big challenges is running the organisation. Everyone will tell you that all of the donations you receive should be spent on your charitable aims. To spend money on advertising, image and good old administration is almost seen as a betrayal of charitable aims. Yet without an efficient ‘back room’ it is likely that the money spent on the charitable aims is not as effective as it could be. Worse, with proper administration more money could be brought in to pursue the aims.
One such area of contention is ‘web presence’, which is a posh name for a good website. Using traditional methods it is easy to spend £10,000 on a relatively modest site. At the end you are left with something inflexible, difficult to maintain and a huge drain on the budget!
Supposing there was a way to set up the website so that:
- it was easy to update
- looked after the formatting, so your ‘corporate image’ was maintained
- cost less than £100 per year to host
That is where WordPress comes in. Originally designed to host ‘blogs’, it is now a great way to manage your website, host blogs, showcase your work, link it all up to Facebook and Twitter. It is possible to set this up yourself, but at Cloud Genius we could have it set up in less than one day of labour. We can source low-cost, reliable hosting. We can even purchase the domain name (ours is cloud-genius.com) for you. All at really low prices.
How do you know it is good? It’s what we use!
28th Jun 2012 | General Information
Many service providers have difficulty understanding the pressures that charities are under. Their finance may not be a constant stream, spending on administration has to be kept low, timescales may not be as important as getting the work done when the cash is available. Charities are often dependent upon volunteers. This can bring its own challenges to user adoption. (‘I don’t like it, so I’m not going to continue giving my time free.’) Large fundraising efforts tend to be for capital projects, rather than revenue. For this reason, solutions that fit the charitable sector are often high start-up cost/low running costs – the direct opposite of many projects supplied to companies. It is vital for charities to find suppliers that can work with them and their unique challenges.
At Cloud Genius we understand these issues – we have worked with them for many years. That expertise is available for you. Not only do we have a staff that understands the issues, but we also have novel solutions and extremely competitive rates.
