I opted for Ubuntu. It seemed to have a decent level of user friendliness, plenty of documentation, and an active community should I need any help. Without further thought, I ordered a new hard drive, popped it in the machine, and installed Ubuntu 7.10 – Gutsy Gibbon.

Installation was not without hiccups, but then it never is. My major mistake was to not have my computer connected to the internet during installation. When Ubuntu installs it automatically connects to the internet to download the latest versions of everything. Without these it did not work, and without it working I could not connect to the internet to get it working. Quite a dilemma. I figured it out with the help of my house mates’ PC and some quick Google searches. The Ubuntu community is very helpful.

My only other problem was configuring my two sound cards. I like this set up so I can have speakers running through one and then headphones and microphone through another for Skype. Again, some tinkering and all done.

First impressions
Ubuntu is very pretty. It is quite intuitive to use. You have to accept that it will take time to become used to a Linux environment, and will at times test your patience. Things are just in different places and have slightly different names. We are working against over 10 years of using Windows, so things will take time. I do not beleive I would have had any more or less problems than if I was moving onto a Mac.

The add and remove applications system is very simple. There are no end of pieces of software available to do all kinds of things. Remember the internet is mostly powered off linux so there are tonnes of applications and names we have heard of before such as Apache and MySql.

I used Firefox and OpenOffice on Windows too, so very little has changed there. I started off using Thunderbird on Ubuntu, which I used on Windows and it all transferred no problem. Now I am using Google Mail which is webmail based and do not feel the need for a stand alone application.

I will reveal more details as the test goes on.

How do we track?

If we are asking this sort of basic question, then I would suggest we look at some basic solutions. The first option is to use the statistics provided by your web host. These are typically part of a package such as Awstats or Webalizer and can be found under Web/FTP Stats on your hosting control panel. Different packages will provide more or less detailed reports and some will be more graphic than others. Most people prefer the simple, prettier, more graphic option as it is easier on the eyes. One thing about analytics is that it can be as detailed and complex as you are willing to go. More about that later.

Another great option for tracking stats is using Google’s free tool called Google Analytics. This is my choice. It works by placing a small piece of JavaScript on the bottom of your page then it produces very pretty stats. This tool can be used to monitor basic stats with very little effort, but it also has the power to monitor more complex stats. It can be used to see conversion rates and also integrates with Google Adwords. There are many different analytics packages out there, some are free some are not.

What to track – the basics

Visits – This is the total number of visits
Visitors – This is the number of unique visitors. It is the number of visits adjusted for repeat visitors.
Page views – This is the total number of pages your visitors have viewed. In advertising terms, this would be the number of impressions.
Pages/Visit – This is how many pages the average visitor looks at. If this is close to one, it means people are not exploring your site much. It is the number ofpage views divided by the number of visits.
Bounce rate – The percentage of visitors who leave without visiting another page.
Average time on site – Pretty self explanatory. If this is low then maybe you need to rework your site design. Make it easier for visitors to find something of interest in order to keep them on your site.
% new visits – This one is an interesting one. On the one hand, new visits represents growth, and new people discovering you, on the other hand, you want a loyal number of repeat visitors.
Traffic sources – Where is your traffic from. This is great for seeing which advertising campaigns or links are providing you with the most traffic. If your paying for a campaign and getting little or no traffic, you need to work out what is wrong.
Content overview – What is popular? Some content fairs a lot better than others. Can you see any patterns? If you are working with social media, finding a format which works well, then replicating it can be a very powerful way of gaining traffic.

What else can we do?

Analytics can provide you with a lot of data which may be useful or useless depending on your site. It is possible to see the country of origin, the operating system and the Internet browser your visitors are using. The country of origin is useful for determining what kind of adverts would work on your website. If your readership is from the US, adverts targeted towards Americans will do better than those targeted towards your home country. If your website is about cooking and recipe sharing, information on browsers and operating systems is of no use whatsoever.

For more complex uses of Google Analytics I suggest you read Patrick Altoft’s guide to Advanced Analytics . Here he explains how to track exit clicks, downloads, sales and other valuable data. You can see how these things would be beneficial.

Conclusion

Businesses love measuring performance and in many cases it is hard to create useful data which can measure performance in a meaningful way. Online we do not have this problem. The only problem is the limited knowledge of the power of analytics and how to use them. A little time invested in setting up these systems could result in great benefits.

Think how hard it must be for companies to measure the response to an advert in a traditional medium such as print, radio or event TV. Online we have easy access to this data. Take advantage of it!

How many times have you been told it is not what you know but who you know? We all hit technical difficulties at some point. Even the most seasoned IT pro does. It is impossible to know everything so it is essential to network and make valuable contacts who you can call on. You could just make friends with one tech guru, but everyone is busy, and you need to think ahead. How many times can you call on someone for favours? Can I offer them something of equal value in return? You should always pay your contacts for any services, even if they do not ask for payment. Let them know you value their time.

2 Investigate the problem

So your having technical issues. Do not just give up immediately and call in back up. Phoning a contact, and just saying “it is broken” is very unhelpful and does not let them assess how much time they will need to dedicate to you. If you let them know exactly what the issue is then they could help you on the spot over the phone, or know to bring spares etc. A quick search online using the error message or describing the nature of your problem can often provide valuable answers. Many experts write excellent solutions and post them free of charge online. Take advantage of this.

3 Invest in support

If you have no one who works in the business who can troubleshoot your IT problems, then it is probably wise to invest in an IT support contract. Almost all business’ are reliant upon IT in this day and age and it can be tragic when systems go down. Whilst IT support contracts may seem pricey, think of the lost revenue and time wasted when your IT systems are not working. Really it is a no brainer. Relying on favours from contacts is not the way to go. When it is a favour you have little control and it is hard to demand urgent service and even harder to ask for compensation when the work done causes further damage. Keep business relationships as formal as possible
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4 Learn from your mistakes

If you do have a technical problem, do not just get it fixed. Make sure you are fully aware of what the problem was, what caused it and how it was fixed. This way next time you will be able to either fix it yourself or know exactly what needs to be done. Providing this information will often lead to a considerably less expensive repair bill. Having a good idea of your support history can help save time and money by enabling you to predict what equipment needs replacing, and what is reliable.

Conclusion 

Ask any IT guy and they will have no end of stories about people forgetting to plug something in, or not turning a machine on. Please do not be another one of these stories and make sure you have at least tried the basics. You want your contacts to value your relationship, and not regret ever meeting you. Be respectful of their time.

Do you have an IT guy or several? Is your relationship more about taking than giving?

Most sites can benefit from video

Blogs can benefit greatly from video. Watching a 5 minute video is less taxing than reading a post for sure. It depends very much on the content but Mark from 45n5, Jim Kukral and Shawn Collins all post videos daily pretty much. As someone who follows a number of blogs I enjoy these because they are a nice break for me. Your eyes get tired from reading constantly. Hearing someones voice makes you feel somehow more connected.

Product sites can benefit hugely from videos. Videos featuring products so that the reader can see them more closely, and how big they are and what they look like. On top of this you can identify features for the reader, and show the product in action. This extra more detailed coverage could very easily help boost sales. An educated customer is more likely to buy and less likely to be dissatisfied once they have made their purchase. I have noticed mobile phone companies do this a lot, but the retailers not so much.

Review sites were some of the early adopters of video on the Internet. Particularly video game review sites such as IGN. Remember video does not just mean someone sat in front of a camera talking. You can have screen grab footage demonstrating software or games too! Voice overs pointing out features and potential shortcomings. People like to know more about things. Imagine if Amazon offered a video of the author discussing his book on the same page as they have the book’s details and customer reviews. This is an area that has not been explored so much yet.

Personal sites are by definition about a person. What better way to put across who you are than video? There is plenty of scope for creativity here. It very much depends what you are and what you want to promote. A budding musician can create videos of them playing gigs, or exclusive videos of new songs. A consultant could produce small bite sized videos of them offering free advice. A budding movie director might release small clips offering tips to other budding directors, or even short films. Again, the possibilities are endless.

Corporate sites are late adopters of video. In this new media web 2.0 age companies need to present a more human image. They need to stop being faceless and start to show they care. A video is a great way of adding some humanity.

Online TV show

Want to produce a small niche TV show? Online is the way to go. People are spending much more time in front of their computers than in front of the television anyway. The expense of broadcasting is very prohibitive to smaller niches. Dealing with a big network is a lot of trouble. They have to cater for big audiences, andunfortunately that means small niches get very little airtime.

So online is the way to go – what next? The cost of hosting a sizable video and streaming it to a sizable audience is not small. There are loads of free sites which can help you out with this. Once you gain some momentum and start to attract some money, then you can look into hosting yourself. The key benefit to online is that it allows you to start small and keep your expenses low, then scale relatively easily. On of my other projects is a very niche online video magazine. We have enjoyed success with this format, and generated a lot of buzz. This is a new and rapidly rising concept. If you want to get in – now is the time.

Editing

This is a time consuming process. Depending on what you hope to produce, this could be done yourself on a simple piece of software, or it could take many hours and be very expensive. The choice is yours. If you are a blogger wanting to produce a quick daily video, then by all means piece it together roughly yourself. Over time you will learn to do things more cleanly and look more professional. If you are producing a film, or a corporate video you will need to make sure the editing is of a high standard. Anything else will do your image no favours whatsoever.

A quick tip

Thanks to Mark from 45n5 for this great tip for distributing your videos. If you are a blogger looking to create some video content, sign up to tubemogul.com – this is a quick and easy way of managing all your accounts to the main video sites like youtube, blip, google, revver etc. With one click it will automatically upload your video to all of these sites, and track the views for you. A big time saver.

The downsides

• Editing software can be expensive. Very basic productions can use bundled software, but anything needing to look professional will need a more expensive suite.
• Video cameras for high quality productions are not cheap. A blogger can get away with a small camcorder, a film maker or a corporation cannot.
• The hardware used to produce and render the video will need to be fairly high end. Editing is very tough on your computer. Working on a slow computer can be veryfrustrating and severely effect your productivity and enjoyment of the process.
• Compared to writing, filming, editing and tweaking video is very time consuming.
• Video files are not small. Streaming or even downloading will hit your servers performance quite severely and use up bandwidth quickly.

Conclusion

I say video is the future and go for it. Will I be producing video for this site? Not for now. The reason is that I have plenty to write about and at this point in time, I am doing video in one of my other projects. I have already mentioned how time consuming this is. One key reason many people will not use video is quite simply that they love writing. Writing at length about a subject is very healthy and a great activity to do. This is why I do it and love doing it.

Do you use video on your websites? Have you noticed improved traffic or sales because of it? Do you have future plans to include video? What problems have you encountered?

If you were to set up the same business today you could do it online for next to nothing. You could buy computers for next to nothing, use free open source operating systems and publishing software. Working virtually would mean no rents to pay. Domain registration is no more than a few dollars a year, and web hosting is no more than a few dollars a month. To start with, a free blogging platform such as Wordpress, (used for this blog), with a modified theme would be very low cost and effective. There is no printing cost which is a massive money saver.

Marketing would be one area which would benefit from spending some money. In fact it is where you should spend most of your money as without readers you have no business. Online advertising is nowhere near as expensive as a mass mail campaign and can be very effective in today’s world where people are spending so much time online. It is possible to target your marketing efforts more closely to those who are most likely to be interested therefore improving your return on investment. Technology such as RSS and email newsletters can keep your readers up to date and interested in your business.

This radical change has led to an increase in the number of niche publications which would never have been able to gather the readership to be viable before the web.

As mentioned the publishing industry really has changed in recent times and the risk involved with starting up can be minimised. The only catch is that the online publishing world is very competitive and you will have to work hard to stand out and build your readership. As with offline publishing, securing a loyal readership can lead to great financial rewards.

Can you think of another industry that has changed as drastically?

The concept of technology actually refers to anything that has been crafted by something or someone to achieve some particular purpose. The earliest man made technological inventions include things like tools made from wood and rocks to assist with simple tasks crucial to survival, such as hunting and keeping warm. Over time the range of technology used by mankind has increased however the fundamental aims remain almost unchanged, (to survive and to make our lives easier). We now live in houses rather than caves and use guns rather than sharp sticks to hunt and fight amongst ourselves.

With the development of modern technology have we forgotten how to use some of the earliest forms of human technology? How many of us could actually use a spear to catch a fish or kill a wild boar? In truth probably not many of us. Do you think this is purely due to lack of practice rather than a disregard for older technologies or in truth have we completely lost these basic instincts?

Maybe it’s in our nature to drop and forget about one form of technology when we devise a newer seemingly better one, but is this always wise? In the current age of capitalism where someone is always trying to sell you something new, it makes sense to be technologically savvy and gain an understanding of what new technology can do for you. You can then decide if you need to buy into a certain new technologies and be aware that there may be alternative, already existent products or methods that are just as suitable, maybe even more so depending on the desired purpose.

Do you always buy the latest most lavish feature packed gadgets, or do you stick to more modest products?