There are many annoyances on the web, and one which really winds me up is email chain letters.

I received one last month which was sent to me (and nine other people) from a friend of ours. The letter sounded authentic enough, and spoke about a boy suffering from cancer who wanted to be in the Guinness Book of Records for having the largest collection of compliment slips in the world. There was a London address included to send your compliment slip to, and you were also asked to pass on the email to ten of your friends.

Unbelievably this hoax is now twenty years old, and the ‘little boy’ has been declared clear of cancer for the last eighteen of them. Goodness knows how many letters have been sent to the address in London. There’s more info on this hoax, and variations derived from it at the Guardian’s website - click here to take a look.

There have been some classics over the years, here’s a few of my personal favourites:

• Bill Gates is sharing his fortune
• Good Luck
• Bloody Mary Curse (my favourite – forward this email OR YOU WILL DIE!! Nice!)
• Irish Friendship

So what’s so bad about them? Well, for a start along with spam mail they simply clog up the internet and slow everything down. It’s the classic, tell two friends, they tell two of their friends situation, and before you know it you’ve been personally responsible for a few thousand pointless emails flying around the web for no reason. Most importantly, what you have just done is added your email address to an ever expanding list which is just waiting to be collected and used to send you information about online casinos and viagra.

Generally, the best bet is to avoid them and don’t add to the already huge amount of internet traffic which is basically useless. If you are not sure then use Google and search for the title of the letter. It will more than likely turn up as a scam, and you won’t feel half as daft as you would when your friends tell you you’ve been fooled!

I receive around 50-100 legitimate emails every day. My server’s junk filters do a pretty good job of filtering out the undesirable ones.

However, a few pretty convincing ‘phishing’ emails always make their way through, and normally I can spot them pretty quickly. The one I received earlier today though had me fooled for a couple of seconds before common sense quickly prevailed and the delete key was hit.

It looked convincing enough. It was apparently from HM Revenue & Customs and it was great news! Out of the goodness of their hearts they had emailed me to tell me that I was entitled to an income tax repayment of £1500, and I should log in to my account by following the link and submit a repayment request. The reason that this scam was a particularly effective one was that it combined a number of features which all worked together and on first impression just made sense.

Firstly, the timing was right. Anyone who fills in a tax return generally needs to make a payment on account by the end of July. This email arrived in the middle of August, just a fortnight after deadline. The email looked official, it was sent to the same email address that I have registered with HMRC, and it was possible that I had made a mistake with my return and the tax office had picked up on it, right?

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth I quickly noticed the holes in the scheme. The first thing I thought was that surely HMRC couldn’t possibly know that based on the information I had sent them I was owed money. Their online system works the whole lot out for you, so saying I was entitled to a refund effectively is the same as telling me that the online system doesn’t work! Highly unlikely! I’m also not entirely convinced that the HMRC would be particularly quick to tell me that they wanted to give me money back.

You also tend to find that email scams have imperfect grammar. This one told me “Click here to submit you tax refund request”, and “A refund can be delayed a variety of reasons”. So, a ‘you’ instead of a ‘your’ and the word ‘by’ missing from the second sentence. Small things maybe, but a legitimate email probably wouldn’t contain basic errors like this.

But the clincher had to be when I hovered the mouse over the ‘click here to submit your tax refund request’. I right clicked the link and copied it to the Mac’s ‘Text Edit’ application. The url was a completely different one to that which the email claimed to be sent from. So, unfortunately it was all a hoax, but for a second or two I was having a really good day!

So what do the people who send these emails out have to gain from it all? I imagine that on following the link I would be asked to enter the details of the bank account I wished the reimbursed funds to be deposited in. You can probably guess what would happen after that!

I’ve seen a lot of this kind of thing throughout my years spent online. Most of them are fake emails from banks saying that my account has been suspended and I must act within 48 hours or it will be closed down. This scam adds in a time element to try to make you act quickly. Emails from PayPal are also commonly imitated, where you are told about alleged security breaches and how you must log in and authorise your account – of course on a fake website.

So what’s the best defence? Well, a good rule to start with is the classic “If it’s too good to be true then it probably is!”. Next, if it appears to be from a bank or institution informing you of a security breach and a requirement for you to verify your account then never log in to your account via the link on the email. Go to the company website direct and log in there, or call customer support and speak to a human (get the number from the website, not the suspect email).

Finally, for suspected scams then Google can be your friend. Type in a phrase from the email and you can be sure that if it’s a hoax then it will be reported on the web somewhere. Just make sure that you look it up on a reputable site, as sometimes the dubious website that is returned in search results is what can infect the unwary users PC.

The web can be a dangerous place, even for those who are familiar with it and have been using it for years, but generally by following a few simple rules and applying common sense in all situations you shouldn’t go too far wrong.

I’ve finally accepted that I’m getting older. I realised this when I heard myself saying “It wasn’t like this when I was a lad”.

It happened just a couple of weeks ago. A friend of mine is currently travelling around Australia, and regularly updates friends and family via their mobile phone and facebook. I travelled around Australia nearly fifteen years ago and spent just under a year on the road, but I didn’t have the luxury of the technology (and the reasonable price of this technology) that is available today.

When I crossed the 1200km of semi desert known as the Nullarbor Plain in my 20 year old station wagon I was out of contact from civilisation for three days. No mobile phones for emergency use back then, or if there was it was well beyond my budget at the time. Contacting the folks back home every couple of weeks was either by air mail letter, or if I had just been paid I would drop dollar after dollar into the thirsty ‘Telstra’ payphones and call home for a very brief few minutes. I think that the internet was only just beginning to make an appearance into peoples homes. Looking back I’m pleased that this is how it was – it seemed much more of an adventure! I recently re-read a letter that I wrote in Australia and sent to my father, and I laughed when I read the part about asking him if he had an “email number”! I had no idea what the internet was, how it worked, and certainly had no idea that it would play such an important part later in life, for both a career and for personal use.

So, this got me thinking about how my father used to always talk about the things they didn’t have back in his day. I think that we often take technology for granted, so I’ve had a look back through the years and made a very quick list of the things I use now, and the equivalent that I had when I was younger.

So, where to start? Why not with computers. My first computer was a ZX Spectrum+. This had a ‘massive’ 48kb memory, a 3.5MHz processor, no hard disk, software that needed to be loaded in from a cassette recorder and cost the princely sum of £129 back in the mid 1980′s.

To put that in perspective, 20 years later I use an Apple Mac Pro with four 2800MHz processors, 10,000,000 kb of memory and four internal hard disks. When I was a kid the Spectrum was just amazing, but I recently dug out the old games and installed an emulator on the Mac, and for the sake of prosperity played them again for the first time in a decade. And boy they were awful!

Now, on to cameras. I had a couple of manual focus SLR’s before this, but my first autofocus SLR was a Nikon F401.  And it wasn’t at all bad to be honest! The big difference between this camera and the one I use now is that the F401 used this strange thing called ‘film’.

You had to buy a roll of this ‘film’ and pop it in the camera. You then had either 24 or 36 exposures, and you had to wait until you had the film developed before you could see your images! The big advantage in film though is that a lot of the technology is in the film itself. A Nikon F401 (retailing at around £300 in the 90′s) loaded with the same film and with the same Nikon lens as the F4s (retailing at nearer £1200) would take the same image in the same circumstances. With digital cameras a larger, higher resolution sensor is the key, so a more expensive camera generally takes a technically better image.

It’s difficult to compare the actual technology here as film and digital are so different, but what is important is the end result. There have been some simply magnificent images taken on film, and I really believe that ultimately you shouldn’t be able to tell whether an image has been taken on film or digital, it should stand up on its own merit and simply be an outstanding photograph. It’s not really that important how it is taken so long as you get the end result you wanted.

The last item I want to look at isn’t work related, but it still plays an important part in my life. It’s my first proper bike! It was a Raleigh Strika, it had no gears, no suspension, but was built like a tank.

I wasn’t big enough to have the ‘Grifter’ with it’s bigger wheels and three gears, but the Strika fitted me well and was a load of fun.

Things change though, my current equivalent steed is a Commencal mountain bike, with its 27 gears, hydraulic disk brakes, suspension and high quality aluminium frame.

So, to conclude this increasingly long trip down memory lane I guess that what I’m saying is that the important part is the experience at the time. ‘When I was a lad’ this was all cutting edge technology, and we were as proud to own it and as impressed with its capabilities just the same as we are now with the latest gizmos that appear in the stores every year. Kids are increasingly comfortable with technology, and we now have the first generation who have never experienced life without the internet, mobile phones or HD TV. So what’s next?

I imagine that the day where our grand children talk about how they didn’t have teleportation and time travel when they were kids will eventually be upon us!

People have a fascination with Google. The most common question we’re asked is “Will my new site appear in Google?”.

We agree that a good ranking in Google certainly helps things along, but it’s really only a part of a bigger campaign. It’s all got to be backed up with a bit of advertising, some networking (both in person and online with social networking applications) and, most importantly in our opinion, a database of relevant email addresses.

Email marketing, when carried out properly, is an extremely effective form of marketing. The difficult part is getting the list of contacts. You can purchase a mailing list of 10,000 addresses from a reputable company, but that’s really just the same as printing 10,000 leaflets and sending them around the doors. A typical response rate for this is around the 1% mark, so if you send enough out then you may actually do alright, but we think there’s a better way of doing this.

For the most effective long term strategy you need to begin collecting email addresses from interested customers now. You need to have a ‘subscribe to our mailing list’ function on your site, you need to be able to add addresses manually, and you need a way of managing these contacts and communicating with them via some form of mass mailing system. It’s a slow burner, we have a customer who we advised to start building a database of contacts around 5 years ago. Today they have over 11,000 contacts, every one of which actually asked to be kept up to date with news and special offers. We can expect a far better response from this than from the 1% response rate from a leaflet drop!

The best systems include features like auto-responders where a specific email is automatically sent out after a user subscribes, and link tracking where you can view which hyperlinks within the email a subscriber followed. You can then target an additional email to specific subscribers based on this. One company who is particularly good at this is Dabs (http://www.dabs.com) who sell computers and IT equipment online. They continuously profile their customers depending on the links followed in previous newsletters, so that when new newsletters are sent to you they contain all the items that you are more than likely going to be interested in. Have you followed a link to the ‘monitors’ section of their website from their email newsletter? If you have then you can bet that a relevant email telling you about monitor special offers will be on it’s way to you very soon!

So, what packages are on the market? We can recommend a very good third party system that does all of this, and we can install it for you if you’re not sure about doing it yourself. It’s not cheap at around £300, but it’s very, very good. Alternatively, we could custom build an email marketing application to integrate into your existing content management system. If you don’t need the system to do absolutely everything but have a specific list of requirements then this can be a cost effective way of getting started. At the other end of the spectrum are the basic systems that allow you to collect email addresses via your website, send out an email to all these contacts, and that’s it! There’s no link tracking, no autoresponders, nothing custom coded and nothing fancy, but it works. Every elmnet web hosting customer has access to a system that does this as part of their hosting plan – there’s no additional charge for this.

Whichever way you decide to go we think it’s vital that email marketing to a targeted database of interested contacts is something that you simply cannot overlook. We really think that it’s more valuable than a Google number 1.

Databases are not very glamourous. They are the domain of techno geeks and nerds who spend more time writing queries and testing them than doing anything else. I like them!

In it’s raw form, a database is just a collection of tables, almost like a spreadsheet really, but for a database to be really useful there needs to be a relationship between these tables. All elmnet customers who have a content management system have a relational database in the background running the show. In brief, whenever they update their content they are in effect updating a database, and the changes that they make are instantly reflected in their website.

A database table may contain fields such as ‘title’, ‘section’, ‘content’ and ‘date’. These fields may contain entries such as ‘Welcome to my site’, ’1′, ‘My site content goes in here’ and ’29th July 2009′. The clever bit is that the entry under ‘section’ relates to another table in the database, so although the value of ’1′ means very little by itself, when the database looks into the table called ‘sections’ and finds that the section with the ID number of ’1′ is called ‘About Me’ it all starts to come together. And because this section is referenced by a number we can change the name of the section if we like. We could rename it to ‘Who We Are’ for example, but as it still has the ID number of ’1′ the database integrity remains intact.

The purpose of this post though is to consider the more traditional database, and it’s potential to be held online rather than in a database application such as Microsoft Access. We’ve recently converted an MS Access database with over 18,500 entries into an online version for a customer of ours. The database contains information on previous and current visitors to events, and all the things that could be carried out in Access such as searches, filtering, exporting, updating, inserting and deleting can all be actioned using the online version. It’s been converted from an .mdb file to a mySQL database and it’s all queried using a custom coded, very user friendly web based management system, rather than the far more complex MS Access procedures.

Any set of results can be exported in a format that Word can use for mailing list labels, and as the system is stored online and backed up automatically it’s safer. There is also no problem with multiple users accessing the system at once from any location in the world, and it’s easily extendible – an email marketing system has been added on which talks directly to the email address field of the table that contains the customers personal details. It’s all password protected, and all access is logged.

So, when you think of the internet it’s worth remembering that it’s basically one big network used for sharing information. It doesn’t have to be a trendy website, it can be a complex database application made very simple.

It can streamline your operation and present you with information in a far more effective manner than you may have thought.

A couple of things have got me thinking about inspiration and where it comes from. I’m sure it works differently for different people. Some are inspired by nature, some by science, but for me it’s always specific individuals and their actions or achievements. People inspire me, and in many different ways.

People who know me know that I’m a keen cyclist, so naturally I’ve been watching the Tour de France lots over the last three weeks. I’m continually amazed by the physical condition of these guys, and after watching each stage I’m all fired up to get out on the bike and give it that little bit extra. It got me thinking that these athletes are an inspiration to many people like me, but who inspires them? They are at the top of their sport, no-one is better than them, there is no-one really for them to look up to. What they possess is the most incredible inner strength and drive, and that’s what makes them the best at what they do.

But it’s not just these super human athletes that give me inspiration. I’m also continuously impressed by many others, and quite often these people are our own customers. It was Richard of Engleby Associates who inspired me to start writing a blog after I saw the excellent job he was making of his – click here to take a look. I’m inspired every month by Rhys at Urban Cafe and his constant ability to come up with new ideas for pushing his business forward. David Taylor (of David Taylor Photography) impresses me consistently as he just doesn’t seem to be capable of taking a bad photograph, and Brian Reid of Aurora Creative Arts deserves a medal for his daily contribution to the arts and crafts scene, often with the odds heavily against him as funding is now just about non existant.

So, to our customers – sometimes it seems like a hard slog, but you’re not going unnoticed by us, and therefore we can only assume that you are making a difference to others to!

At elmnet we’ve been putting together a website for a primary school. It’s an interesting situation – the old school is being knocked down and a new one being built, and a website is being produced to tell the story.

Over the last few months a mixture of people have been to the school and have spent time with the kids telling them about their profession, and in some cases helping them produce something to go on the website. There’s been an illustrator, a sound artist, a photographer, a creative writer and a web developer (that’ll be us!).

Our job has been to bring this all together in a web site which showcases the work the children have produced along with their thoughts about moving schools. There are animations, songs, interviews, photo galleries, a book, all sorts – and as soon as it has all been approved in September I’ll update this post with the link.

It’s almost been like being back at school! We’ve had a week to complete the task, and there have been loads of different subjects involved. We’ve built a database driven ‘Facebook’ style wall for the children to post their comments on. We’ve got some sections driven by Flash, others static HTML and others database driven PHP. We’ve got embedded MP3 players, a print ready PDF of the book that was written and also a Flash version for the web with animated turning pages.

“So what did you learn at school this week?”

Content Management Systems – the perfect option for a business?

On paper at least, probably! A Content Management System (or CMS) is in it’s most simplistic terms a web based system that allows an authorised user to log in and make changes to their own website without needing to pay a web designer to do so.

We like them for two reasons. The first being that we think it’s important that a business is empowered with control over their main marketing tool so they can react appropriately as business activity demands. The second is that from a business point of view we find that we are more productive if our energies are spent on business activities other than entering content to websites, something which can be easily achieved by our customers with a little training, saving them money in the long run.

At elmnet we don’t use a third party content management system. Each one is written specifically for the customer we are working with. We find that each customer has their own individual requirements in a CMS, and these vary considerably. We’ve had customers who have needed a full sales database system with automatic emailing of delivery notes and order tracking, right through to those who need one click multiple image uploads with automatic resize and thumbnail generation. No two are the same and we think that commercially available CMS systems, good as they are, are never really a substitute for a custom coded job.

Simplicity is always the key. We’ve actually tested our CMS systems on a variety of age ranges, from an eight year old to right up to the ‘Silver Surfer’. Our guinea pigs managed to create sections, add pages and upload images, and to be honest they did a pretty good job of the whole thing! It’s all very ‘point and click’ – if you want to add a new page you click the link titled ‘Add a New Page’. If you want to upload a gallery image you click the link titled ‘Upload a Gallery Image’. Get the idea? It’s all pretty intuitive stuff – I mean if an eight year old can do it surely you can?

So, often the question isn’t ‘how difficult is it?’, it’s more ‘how much time do I have?’. As web designers we have to always bear in mind that most of our customers don’t have the luxury of sitting at a desk in front of a computer all day working on websites. It’s tough to get the right balance, but the first thing to consider isn’t necessarily what you want your content management system to do, more how much time you have to update it. We’ve had customers come to us before asking for the full works, but in reality they simply can’t find the time in their business lives to give the attention they need to their website on a week to week basis.

It’s always a balance between what you want to say, and how much time you have to tell people about it. If you’re pushed for time we can build you a low maintenance site that you’ll be able to keep up to date with the minimum of effort. If you run an office with the staff available to update a site as often as you like then of course we can build a system that will give you this facility.

And if you’re the busiest person on the planet then of course we can maintain your site for you – but wouldn’t you rather be in control?

Today I discovered the importance of having an up to date backup. I actually managed to delete a mySQL database which held all of the content of this website.

Rather that than delete a mySQL database that held all the content of a customers website, but I was very upset for a few seconds – until I realised that sitting on my desktop was a full backup of the database taken that very morning. Within a minute it was all restored back to how it was. If I didn’t have the backup I would probably still be trying to remember what all the pages consisted of and entering all the information back in manually.

So, that’s what this post is all about. Backing up! It’s said that there are two types of computer user – those who backup regularly and those who haven’t lost anything yet. The day that hard drive fails and you lose those irreplaceable baby photographs is the day that backups all of a sudden become important.

Apple’s OSX operating system has an amazing backup system built in called Time Machine. You simply buy a big external hard disk, tell Time Machine that you want to use it for backup and that’s it! OSX then takes an hourly backup until the disk is full. It then overwrites the oldest backup so you always have a good number of recent backups to choose from. You can go back and find versions of a file anywhere from how it was an hour ago to how it was last month. And it works – it really is amazing!

Working on the web makes things a little easier as the files are then on the Mac, on the external hard disk via the Time Machine backup, and also on the web server down on Canary Wharf. This is another rapidy growing service – that of ‘cloud computing’. Backups are all carried out online, your files are all synced with a server so all your precious files are held safely off your own premises. This is perfect for home users, but at Elmnet we have huge high resolution files that would take ages to upload – even on the fastest of broadband connections.

Whichever way you decide to do it, if you’re not backing up now then you really should think seriously about starting to do so very soon. The way to look at it is to consider what you would do if your computer was destroyed right now. Where would that leave you?

At Elmnet, we will shortly be introducing the facility for customers to login to their account via the web and take a full backup of their entire site and any associated databases. It’s such an important thing we think that customers data should be safe – and they should have the facility to look after it themselves.

Social networking – the internet buzz words of the moment! So what exactly is it, and how can it work for you?

I must admit that as a web developer I knew little about social networking until recently. I saw it as ‘something that the kids did’, and so that meant that as a self confessed grumpy old man there was little there for me to be bothered about. But then I heard so much about Facebook from friends that I thought I should at least see what all the fuss is about.

Facebook is addictive, there’s no doubt about that! Once you manage to find a few friends it’s good fun, and you can quickly and easily see what your friends are doing. It’s also dead easy to quickly write a message on your ‘wall’ so that they know what you are up to. You can be as distant or as involved as you like really. There are some people on Facebook who have literally hundreds of friends. I’ve got around 50, and I don’t think I would want any more as they simply wouldn’t really be my friends, more people that I’ve just met along the way. Facebook used in this way is aimed to be used by people who are already friends, and not those you who haven’t met yet.

There is another way of using Facebook though, and that is to set up a ‘Facebook Group’. Any user can subscribe to a Facebook Group, and when you write a post on your Facebook wall it will appear on the wall of everyone who is subscribed to your group. That’s a pretty powerful tool! The best example I can think of is also my favourite marketing campaign of the last ten years. It’s genuis, and it involves a small furry animal called a meerkat. Of course it’s comparethemeerkat.com which is a superb spin off from ‘Compare the Market’.

Quite brilliant really, set up an alternative marketing campaign which is far more interesting that the business activities of the real organisation (car insurance) and use social networking sites like Facebook to spread the message. Aleksandr Orlov – founder of “Compare the Meerkat” currently has nearly half a million fans on Facebook. Absolutely amazing, that’s half a million! So twice a week half a million people receive a funny message from Aleksandr on their Facebook wall and it doesn’t cost the company a penny – and all the time they are being drip fed the branding. When they want car insurance where are they going to go first? So there you go, Facebook – not just kids stuff.

The next social networking application I began to experiment with was this one. The blog. Today it’s dead easy to set a blog up. If you are a web developer you can write your own blog program. If you are a web developer with little time then you can install a WordPress blog (host your site with Elmnet and we’ll do it for you for free!). This blog is run by WordPress, and I’m very impressed with it’s simplicity and flexibility.

A blog gives a website owner the opportunity to discuss a subject online. There are two important factors though, the first is that they can invite the world to leave a comment and become engaged in the debate. The second is that they can do this in the framework of the blog, leaving their site to do the job of the site. Rather than have all of my rants and ravings in my site (cluttering up the main message) I can put it all safely to one side in the blog which is specifically designed to hold lots of text. There is also a search engine benefit to a blog. Google likes lots of text and keyword rich environments, and where better to put it all than a blog. I’m enjoying writing the blog too, so even if nobody reads it (though I hope they do) I find it quite therapeutic.

The final application I’ve tried is Twitter. I’ll be honest, at first I just didn’t get Twitter. It just didn’t make sense. One question, “What are you doing”, and 140 characters to tell the world. After using it though the penny has dropped. It’s been said that the developers of Twitter quite happily admit that it’s a rip off of the Facebook “What’s on your mind’ question which appears at the top of everyone’s Facebook page. I’ve found that this is what I read the most of on Facebook. I’m not too interested in the squillions of photographs that friends upload, or all of the comments that they make on each others baby photographs. Twitter condenses the whole lot beautifully.

With Twitter you are not limited to following friends, but can follow anyone you like provided they don’t block you. I’m currently following Lance Armstrong and Stephen Fry, and it’s actually quite cool to take a quick look and just see what they are up to. So the same opportunities exist for Twitter as for Facebook. Stephen Fry has 572,000 followers, and Lance Armstrong over a million. Everytime they ‘tweet’ a combined one and a half million people get the message.

So, clearly social networking is something that has to be explored. I’m not saying it’s the answer to everything and that it will work for all businesses, but it will probably do more good than harm.

If you want to follow elmnet you can follow our tweets by clicking here.