It is a pet-peave of ours, sending out a mass email to everyone you know and handing everyone on the list my email address. It started out as a way to get information from a friend about upcoming events and such for a local organization. Then a few of the recipients of those emails started sending messages about their club to their huge list of people, now every has my email address sitting in their inbox waiting for a virus to pop-in and attack everyone in your address book or contact list.

I’m not the only one. Most people are reluctant to give out their email address because they don’t want to get a bunch of unwanted mail. Keep your friends and your customers happy by not distributing their email address to the world.

1. The simplest way of NOT disclosing the addresses of those you are mass emailing is to use the BCC or blind carbon copy field. It’s there. You just have to drop it down to see it.

2. Another option I recommend to my small business clients, who are required by law to keep personal information private, is to use an Email Campaign Manager. Not only is it incredibly simple to send professional looking emails that function on all platforms, it is a surefire solution to maintaining customer privacy. I often use MailChimp.com.

There are many, many different internet browsers out there. Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Opera just to name a few. Then there are different versions of each one. Internet Explorer 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9….. Every version of every internet browser has differences in the way it reads your website’s html code and in turn, displays your website to you. This is the biggest challenge to us, as your website designer, because the browser version that your visitors have is completely out of our control and we have to rely on bug reporting and cross-browser compatibility testing to make sure you site looks correct across all platforms.

If it were up to us, it would be required by law to update your browser to the latest possible version at all times.

As a client of WCDesign, if you ever notice some awry on your website, please contact us with the problem your are seeing, the browser and browser version you are using, and if possible, a screenshot. We can only fix it if we know about it!

Whenever I want to see the worst case scenario, I look at a website in good-ol’ Internet Explorer 4. Yes. I have kept a jurassic version of this explorer on my old MacBookPro just to see what might happen if someone views your website in this browser. Below are two screenshots with some notes about what is not rendering properly.

Temporary Fonts Problem

One question we often hear from people using older versions of Internet Explorer is in regards to a pop-up window that shows up on every webpage asking, “This page uses fonts that need to be temporarily installed. This is usually safe. Do you want to allow these fonts to be downloaded?” What this means is that your website uses a font that isn’t installed on the visitors computer. To view the website the way that the designer intended for it to look with this non-factory font, click “Yes.” To view the website without this special font, click “No.” I will let you make that decision.

You probably want to know why? Well, we can’t explain why we do everything we do, but just be aware, that most designers are obsessed with fonts. Typeface can make or break a piece no matter how savy the text or how beautiful the images. Fonts are important to us and the professional appearance of your website sometimes relies on fonts besides Times New Roman, George, Verdana, Tahoma and Arial. With that said, temporary fonts are to be used lightly as they increase the load time of your site.

If you are okay with allowing temporary fonts on ALL websites, there is a way to enable them and turn off this pop-up in your internet account settings. I suggest you search the topic and learn more about it before committing. I am not an internet security specialist.

Have you ever wondered how Google Analytics determines your website visitors’ locations? I often explain this one to clients.

Every device connected to the public Internet is assigned a unique number known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address. IP addresses consist of four numbers separated by periods (also called a ‘dotted-quad’) and look something like 127.0.0.1.

Since these numbers are usually assigned to internet service providers (i.e. Charter, Frontier, etc.) within region-based blocks, an IP address can often be used to identify the city, region or country from which a computer is connecting to the Internet. An IP address can sometimes be used to show the user’s general location. (http://whatismyipaddress.com/)

If you want to know what your IP address is,  check out this link. You will see your IP address, internet service provider, host name, type of connection (i.e. dial-up, satellite, etc.), country, state/region, city, latitude, longitude. area code and postal code. And many of the websites you visit track this information about you too!

Google Analytics tracking code is extremely comprehensive and in-depth way of keeping track of your visitors and uses IP addresses to record visitor location statistics. All new website projects have GA code installed in a non-visible region of every webpage. If you are a WCDesign client and you wish to change your statistics reportin or schedule a weekly or monthly report via email, contact Rebecca. You can also have full access to you GA dashboard with custom reporting with a Google account. We will set this up for you upon request.

Sources: What is my IP Address.com. March 30, 2012. http://whatismyipaddress.com/.