It comes from “Domain Services” and the subject line is “Domain Notification – This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing” – and then your domain name in capital letters.

Inside is this alarming-looking message:

Note:

• It looks urgent.
• It looks official.

However, also note:

• They do use the word “solicitation”, which means that they are soliciting you for a new service, not for the renewal of your domain name.
• It does not come from your domain registrar.
• In the small print, it says “THIS IS NOT A BILL” – even though it looks like one.
• What they are actually offering to do is to submit your domain name to unnamed search engine(s) for $42 for one year, or $499 for a “lifetime”.

What you need to know to avoid getting scammed:

• Regular search engine submission is a thing of the past – a decade past, in fact. Once the search engines (with Google bringing about 90% of the traffic; the other major ones include Yahoo!, Bing, Search and AOL),  have found your domain, there is no need to resubmit.
• Your domain name registration is another thing altogether. That is something you must pay annually, or for up to 10 years at a time. It is an important asset of your business. (And it should be owned by YOU or your business, not your web designer, marketing consultant or advertising agency.)

If you want to make your site more visible in the search engines, there are things you can do that will help, including:

• Update your site regularly.
• Know which keywords people actually use to find what you offer.
• Make sure your site is properly optimized for search engines (SEO = Search Engine Optimization), which includes unique, keyword-rich and relevant Title tags, and descriptive and inviting Meta Description tags on your pages.
• Use social media to bring people to your site.  Comment on relevant blogs and forums, use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media as appropriate.
• Solicit links from other relevant sites, including directories that are specific to your business.
• Have a listing on Google Places.

This list is not exhaustive, but as you can see, it takes a bit of work to really make things happen. Much of this work you (or a knowledgeable employee on your behalf) can do yourself.

Rental cottages on Nova Scotia beach

The quick answer? Maybe you don’t really need one.

Why is a web designer telling you that? Shouldn’t I be trolling for your business?

Not at the expense of selling you something you may not need.

I love building vacation home websites. It’s almost as much fun as taking a vacation.

However, the cost of a custom website, with the quality and attention to detail that I bring to my work, is in the thousands of dollars, not in the hundreds.

Furthermore, if your budget is limited, a custom website is no longer the first place that you as a vacation rental owner should spend your advertising money.

The top positions in the search engines are typically occupied by large vacation rental sites that work hard to capture and maintain those positions. They have full-time search engine optimizers (“SEOs”) keeping them at the top, while competing with the other large vacation rental sites as well as with you.

You should list with one or more of them first.

HomeAway.com, one of the big players in the vacation rental world

An annual subscription with a large vacation rental site such as HomeAway.com, which has bought some of the other vacation rental sites, costs $300 or more. That price gives you a very extensive listing with excruciating detail about your property and the area, as well as a large number of photos. From the customer’s point of view, these rental sites help them compare apples to apples.

There are some other, more economical rental sites that you may discover doing well with search engines.

To decide which rental sites to list with, search Google for “vacation rentals your location” (replace your location with the town, region, province or state that you think people would most commonly use). “Vacation rental” has become one of the primary keywords in this business, but you can try some variations as well.

For example, there is only one Wolfville in the world, so when I search “vacation rentals Wolfville”, Google gives me (today, that is; your results may vary):

1. A paid ad (on a yellow background) for VacationHomeRentals.com, a smaller listing site that got to the top of the list only by paying for the position.
2. WolfvilleHouse.com – a site I created for a client five years ago and still maintain and do search engine optimization (SEO) for.
3. vrbo.com (VRBO=Vacation Rentals by Owner), now owned by HomeAway.
4. www.cottagesincanada.com – an inexpensive rental site that is obviously performing well in the search engines
5. Google Places listings for rentals in the area, with none actually in Wolfville. Bonus tip: Create a listing for your property with Google Places! (Note to self: do this for WolfvilleHouse.com!)
6. vacationsFRBO.com – another more inexpensive rental site
7. HomeAway.com itself
8. trails.com – an outdoor adventure site that doesn’t actually appear to have any relevant results for this area
9. VacationRentalDirect.com – a newer, inexpensive place to list
10. LowdenHouseFarm.com, another of my clients
11. TripAdvisor.com – a social networking travel site that is very useful site for customers with a different business model for owners; check it out. I know that for hotels and B&Bs they charge the owner only when someone books through their site.
12. NileGuide.com – another social networking travel site.

You can set up these listings yourself. The sites ask many detailed questions that only you can answer. I have helped clients who were not comfortable or capable of doing it by themselves create or edit listings over the phone.

For some properties, however, a website can be a good investment.

McCormack House page about Wolfville

These vacation rental sites do not allow you to portray the unique character of your property other than through the allowed photos and descriptions. With a good website, you can do much more:

• Describe the house on your own terms, visually and verbally.
• Show as many photos as you want.
• Portray the personality of the place.
• Provide a permanent address for incoming links, which build value to the website and thus to your rental business, for example from:
  • Tourism organizations;
  • Setting up packages or exchanging links with other local businesses.
• Advertise web address in print media.
• Have a business card for the property with the web address.
• Provide information on the history of an interesting old property.
• Provide more extensive information about the area.
• Anything you can think of!

Vacation by the Sea, rental homes in Nova Scotia

If you plan to own and rent out the property for many years, a website could be a very good investment.

Even if you do have a website, nowadays you must nonetheless list the property with some vacation rental sites to get the targeted traffic they can provide.

You can usually link to your website from your listing, though you should completely fill out the forms on the rental sites anyway. It takes time for a new website to get well positioned with the search engines.

Wolfville House vacation rental site

I have built websites for a number of vacation rental homes over the last 11 years or so. My clients have all been very happy with my work. Their customers rave about the websites. I have even survived ownership changes!

I endeavor to build each site to reflect the colour scheme and personality of the place. Photos predominate. I figure that the people who will like the house should be attracted by the website. The two should match.

Once built, the website needs minimal maintenance from year to year. Typically, I have updated dates and prices annually by request of the owner, adding or replacing a few photos from time to time, and done a big overhaul every 5 or 6 years to bring the site more in line with the state of the house and the look of the internet.

Herons Watch rental cottage near Mahone Bay

Here are some vacation rental websites I have built:

• Wolfville House
• Lowden House Farm
• Heron’s Watch
• Vacation by the Sea

The "at" sign is the trigger for the e-mail harvesting robots who bring you spam.

Any time you publish your e-mail address online, you risk getting spam as a result.

You can’t prevent people from manually copying down your e-mail address.  But that’s not how you usually end up on spammers’ lists.

Spammers acquire huge lists of e-mail addresses that have been automatically “harvested” by bots, automatic programs that surf the web looking for the “@” sign.

But don’t despair!  You can still be contacted by e-mail from your website and not be deluged by spam.   Several levels of protection from e-mail spam are available to you.

When putting an e-mail address on a website, I encode it using the best system I know, Dan Benjamin’s Hivelogic Enkoder, which is based on JavaScript. There is still nothing that can be done to stop someone from manually copying your e-mail address as presented on the screen, but the encoding prevents it from being seen by the evil bots.

There is even a WordPress plugin for the Hivelogic Enkoder (if your website or blog is built on WordPress) that automatically converts any e-mail address to encoded JavaScript. (It doesn’t seem to work for e-mail addresses contained in widgets, however.  Recently I had to insert the encoded script manually into an HTML box widget.)

The only real disadvantage of this system is that JavaScript must be enabled in the browser for the address to be seen.  It is rare that people browse with JavaScript turned off, but some high-security workplace firewalls may block JavaScript.

There is a less encrypted way to encode e-mails which replaces each letter with its numbered character entity, e.g. the letter “a” becomes “a”.  The browser will render these normally, and JavaScript is not an obstacle.  This is a method to consider if a lot of your site visitors are sitting behind firewalls in government or military establishments where security is high.  But I’m sure it is somewhat less secure for you and your inbox.

If the e-mail address you display is being forwarded to the e-mail address you get from your ISP (e.g. Sympatico, Eastlink, Aliant, Rogers) or to a Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail account, it will pass through filters set up by your provider. If you’re lucky, most of the spam heading your way will get caught. I’ve heard tales of sudden volumes of spam from people who had just switched providers, which tells me that some providers have more effective filters than others (particularly when switching from Sympatico to Eastlink in Nova Scotia. Please leave a comment if you have experience in this.  Hopefully spam filtering will improve for everyone as a result).

If the e-mail address you display is on your domain name and is not being forwarded but rather you access it directly with an e-mail client on your computer or online, you may have spam filters available through your hosting provider.  It depends on what they offer.  So log in and check your hosting account to see if you can improve your spam filters.

Guess which filter keywords this spammer was trying to avoid?

Spammers often design email to slip through filters, for example by inserting blanks or periods in the middle of words that typically trigger filters.  There is a constant cat and mouse game between the spammers and the filter designers.

I have been using the Hivelogic Enkoder to encode my e-mail address which is forwarded to a Sympatico account for about 10 years, using the same e-mail address. You would think that my address would be on all kinds of spam lists by now. But I only get a couple of spam e-mails a day at most. I consider this acceptable, compared to what some people get.  My conclusion is that Sympatico’s filters are pretty good, and that this encoding method works quite well.  I am also careful about how I give out that e-mail address – which I want to be able to use as my main contact e-mail indefinitely.  I’ll often use a different address when filling online forms, and I avoid having my e-mail listed on other people’s websites, referring them to my website instead, because most websites do not encode their e-mail addresses.  I don’t even display my e-mail address to friends on Facebook.

You can also hide your e-mail address by using a form for people to contact you.  However, form spam is very common, and imposes the cat and mouse game on the web designer.  “Captcha” gadgets on forms, which make you enter some fuzzy or scrambled letters before you can send your message, may frustrate the user but they work well to reduce form spam. I like the “Recaptcha” system, which Google has seen fit to buy, because it harnesses millions of form-fillers to help digitize books and audio in the public domain.  There is also WordPress Recaptcha plugin to add to your blog comment forms.

Since the trigger for the e-mail harvesting bots is the @ sign, you can write your e-mail address like this: “contactme – AT – mydomain.com”.  Do most people understand by now what to do with this?  You can’t, however, click on the address and go to your e-mail program; you have to copy it out correctly.  If you make a “mailto:” e-mail link behind it, the bots will be able to read it – unless you encode it using one of the methods mentioned above.

Likewise, some web designers put the e-mail address in an image that bots cannot read.  It works pretty well unless you add a link to the image  If you do this, be sure to encode the address in the HTML.  Beware also of adding your address to alt or title text behind the image.  Bots can read that, too, so use “at” instead of the @ sign.  You risk making your e-mail address invisible to visually-impaired people using readers, or people browsing with images off.

What is your experience?  How do you protect your e-mail address, and what have been your results?  Leave a comment below.

Heather Holm signing the "Nova Scotia - Come to life" Charter with Premier Darrell Dexter

Come to life is an effort to bring together Nova Scotian businesses and organizations to promote our beautiful province in a positive and unified way.

Not that anyone is ignoring the challenges facing a small province and an economy traditionally dependent on a resource base that has been dwindling noticeably for decades.

Rather, the initiative aims to bring together the positive elements of life and work in Nova Scotia, those factors that bring new residents and visitors here, that keep most Nova Scotians in the province, and that make many others want to come back.

This is the Old World of Canada.  Nova Scotia has given the country more than its share of movers and shakers in politics, the arts, science and industry.

Nova Scotia educates more than its share of university students, boasts an enviable quality of life and offers an unrivaled sense of place borne on rich heritage and natural beauty.

These are some of the ingredients that make people want to be here.  To keep them here, Nova Scotia needs to be perceived as a great place to work and do business; where people who are passionate about living here are creatively building our new economy.

It’s not surprising that many of last week’s Charter signers are involved in marketing: people who understand that perception and reality are two sides of the same coin.  Like me, I’m sure the others feel encouraged by being part of a larger initiative to promote the advantages of living, working, vacationing, studying, and doing business in Nova Scotia.

Screenshot of uscuttingchain.com homepage

I just finished a small website for a client’s mortise chain sales and servicing business.

• Custom header graphic
• Shopping cart
• Copy editing
• On-page SEO

The fonts that people see on a website (or blog) – or in an e-mail, for that matter, are the ones they have on their computer. It matters not which ones you have on yours.

“Browser-safe” fonts are very few in number, as they comprise those fonts that almost every computer has installed. They are declared in font-families such as “Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif” or “Times New Roman, Times, serif” so that PC and Mac users will see approximately the same thing.

Here is a list of the “browser-safe” font families that can be used.

Websites and blogs are usually designed with stylesheets that declare the fonts to be used.  Changing a font in the stylesheet creates an overall change on your whole site. To change the font of an individual selection of text on a page, you can create a “class” in the stylesheet or in the head section of the page to declare the new font, then tag the special text in order to tell the stylesheet where to apply the special font.  You can also add a style “inline” in the HTML directly, but this is tedious.  Styles are applied according to the rules of CSS (cascading style sheets).  If you aren’t ready to make a study of CSS, stick to the styles given in your stylesheet.

It’s considered poor design to have a lot of fonts on a page anyway, without some special reason. Usually, there is one font for headers, and maybe a different one for paragraphs.  You can use the variations of bold, italic and colour to achieve variety, even in WordPress.

In WordPress, when writing a post or page in Visual mode, you can easily tag your headings. To do this, click on the “Kitchen Sink”button (it looks like this:  ), then select from the Format drop-down list on the second line that appears.  The format you select will affect a whole paragraph, making it either “paragraph” or Heading1, Heading2 etc.

A “Preformatted” font is also available (see which is a typewriter-like monospaced font like Courier, and is usually used to quote computer code. You have to put in the line breaks yourself or it will just extend on forever.  You can experiment with those. They are defined in the stylesheet.

I’ve seen blogs get pretty messy-looking when people try to cut and paste from Word, for example, unintentionally carrying the formatting along with the text. It can be a mess to clean up.  But now WordPress has buttons that allow you to “Paste as Plain Text” or “Paste from “Word” that will strip the formatting from the text on your clipboard. They look like this: .  Please use one of them if you are copying from Word, from another website or from any application where the text may be formatted already.

It is possible to embed a font force your readers to download a font that you want to use on a webpage, but I don’t do it because:

1. It doesn’t work with all browsers,
2. It increases download time,
3. There can be copyright issues.

Fancy fonts can also be used by creating an image file of the text.  This practice is regularly seen in headers and logos.  The disadvantages of taking this approach with page text and headlines are:

1. Pages download more slowly because image files take longer to download than text, and
2. Search engines can’t read and index the text in an image file.

Search engines give extra weight to the text inside a heading tag. So you lose a lot of “google-juice” if you put your headers in image tags. That technique is best left for page header, logo etc. WordPress won’t allow you do it anyway – it requires a text headline, or will create one for you.

Save your unusual fonts for designing posters and things that you can print directly, or for your logo or header image.

So many choices

In the Frequently Given Advice department:

Suppose you register your domain with one company and host your site with the same business.  What happens if the company disappears? Even the big ones can fail.

It actually happened with one of the larger registrars a few years ago, leaving many people and businesses severely inconvenienced.  Their websites had disappeared, and they could not access the registrar to point their domain to another company.

Some hosting companies offer a free domain with their package. If you’re new to setting up a website, it may seem an attractive option. But for just $10/year (the approximate cost of owning a domain name), it makes more sense to have total control over your domain. After all, it will quickly become an essential asset of your business, carrying with it search engine visibility (“Google juice”), valuable inbound links from other websites, brand awareness and just plain old business goodwill.

If your domain registrar goes down but your website is still standing because it is hosted with a different company, you have time to transfer registration to another registrar. Likewise, If your web host goes down but you can still access your registration, you can find a new web host and point the domain to the new server.

Best practice: register your domain with one company and host your site with another.

Contract Furnishings' new homepage

I’ve finished redesigning a pair of websites for Valley Stationers Ltd, and its furniture division, Contract Furnishings.  Valley Stationers is a well-established, family-owned business operating since 1962.

The previous versions of the websites made extensive use of Flash and JavaScript. Some of their biggest customers, who operate behind a security wall that bans JavaScript, could not use the site or see any the links.  And neither site was getting much traffic.  Search engine robots cannot navigate JavaScript links either.

It is easy to forget that many people working in institutional environments do not have the latest in computer equipment. Some are stuck with older operating systems, obsolete browsers, and high levels of security. Reasons may include:

• organizational dependence on an intranet that was built to work with older software and hardware;
• the cost of upgrading a large network all at once;
• internet security concerns because of sensitive data on the network;
• to keep employees off Facebook;
• “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude – even when it isn’t working well for some employees.

Fortunately, cool graphics and interactivity are not exclusive to Flash and JavaScript.  HTML and CSS can provide interactivity and wow factor with faster download times, and better accessibility to search engines, to the visually impaired and others.

What is your experience?  Have you worked in an environment with old computer equipment and systems?  What factors prevented management from upgrading?

I can see many reasons why Facebook works for them:

Screenshot of Whitman Wharf House B&B's homepage with Facebook feed and fans on the right.

• A Facebook status update is quicker than a blog, and you don’t have a 140-character limit as in Twitter.
• It’s easy to add photos and videos to Facebook.
• Facebook has broken the technology barrier for a huge percentage of the population.  You probably already know how to do Facebook.
• If you don’t know Facebook yet, you’ll find that it’s as intuitive as any online medium can be, and the psychological rewards for learning it are immediate.
• Other people know Facebook too, and they’re more likely to interact with you on your Facebook Page than on a blog.
• You may already have a bunch of friends on Facebook who know what you do and will “Like” your page (the new equivalent of becoming a fan).
• Add a link to a webpage in your Facebook status update, and it instantly gives you the opportunity to choose a picture from that page.  This is cool and fun.
• You can check in on your Facebook friends while you’re pretending to work!
• You can check in on your Facebook business page while you’re interacting with your friends, and feel virtuous (if not virtual)!
• People who are not Facebook members can still see your Facebook page – it is public – although they can’t leave comments.

And now there’s another reason to have a Facebook Page for your business.  You can easily put a “Like Box” with either a news feed of your Facebook page updates, a set of random mini profile pictures of your “fans”, or both, on your own website.

I’ve just set up a Like Box for Whitman Wharf House Bed and Breakfast in Canso, NS.  I’m very pleased with how it looks over a semi-transparent background.

I’ve also added one to the homepage of Fireworks FX Inc.

Screenshot showing Like Box on the Nova Scotia Photo Album site, with "fans".

Inspired, I just set up a Facebook page for my own Nova Scotia Photo Album, and added a Like Box to the site.  Perhaps I’ll add a WordPress plugin that copies my blog posts to my Facebook page. Then everyone who “likes” my page will see my updates in their Facebook News Feed.  These updates are easily shared.  The viral power of Facebook is not to be underestimated.

Click here for the instructions and wizard for adding a Facebook Like Box to your website. You can customize a few parameters: width, whether to show the feed, and how many fans to show, if any.  Background colour is transparent by default, and can easily be set by css on your page or an external stylesheet.  Changing text colour is more complicated, however.

There are other cool tools that Facebook has made available and I’ll write about them as I gain experience with them.

There are disadvantages, however, to essentially having Facebook host your blog, rather than having a full-fledged WordPress blog on your website under your domain.

• You will probably be sending some people away from your site into a yummy, addictive,  warm and fuzzy place where they are likely to get lost for the next hour, and forget to come back to your website.
• You are missing out on the built-in search-engine-magnetic powers of WordPress.
• You are not adding content and value to your own site.
• Non-Facebook members cannot comment on your postings.

So it’s a tradeoff, and it’s up to each person to decide what works for them.  However, if it’s a difference between getting it done on Facebook and not getting it done on a blog, go for the path of least resistance.

Just don’t get lost!