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It’s been around for a little while now but yours truly just came across it and thought it deserved a mention. In this crazy world of social media it’s easy to forget that you are pumping a lot of information into your Online social tools and all in all, if your online data is important to you, Backupify is an easy way to get it back should anything go wrong. Backupify works with Twitter, Google Docs, Wordpress, Gmail, Facebook, Zoho, Delicious, Flickr, Basecamp, Photobucket, Blogger, FriendFeed and more. Obviously data you generate today is not stored on your computer. Granted, it is unlikely that an Online service will simply lose your data, just as it is unlikely that your hard drive will crash if you are good at up keep etc. however it can and does happen all the time. Hackers target these social mediums obviously and so it might be worth considering using something like Backupify. Backupify uses the Amazon cloud to backup your data and the nice thing about this is that should Backupify prove to be a flash in the pan (which seems unlikely) then your data has been stored on a titan of the Internet … and we’d have to hope they make their own backups .

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

You can make a difference even just by making Google code available on your site On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. It's easy to sit back and almost ignore the news reports. In most cases neither you nor people you know have been directly affected, however, as of this moment, estimates of the numbers killed in the Haitian earthquake range from 50,000 to 200,000. Did you know that's about the population of Richmond, VA? It might be a cliche at this stage but even $1 can help and might be the difference in saving another Life. You can join recovery efforts mobilizing around the world to assist earthquake victims and your donation will help disaster victims rebuild their lives and their communities.

Years ago, the internet was kind of this untapped void that we were all excited about. As industry, business, and culture have absorbed more and more of the internet into our daily life and processes, we have a better sense of what the internet might be able to do for us.

So much of our work these days is conducted by remote that it is very useful to be able to capture an image from a computer screen, make annotations, then send it to a client or colleague. TechSmith recently released Snagit in beta for the Mac. This tool is already available for those on Windows platforms, and it is quite useful in doing these tasks. Those using Macs probably are familiar with the built in screen capture using the Cmd-Shift-4 key combination, but I have found Snagit to have a couple of advantages. For one, it allows you to capture all of a window, not just what is showing on the screen. This is useful for long web pages that extend past the confines of your screen, for example. The other advantage is the variety of annotations available. You can use speech bubbles in addition to more standard fare such as lines and arrows, and easily adjust sizes, arc contours, etc. When trying to convey an idea to a client, or get markups out to a project team, the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words is true. Perhaps even more important, it takes time to write those thousand words, so being able to convey your thoughts efficiently can result in improved project deliveries and economics.

Here are 7 tips small business owners can consider when working on search engine optimization (seo) for their websites.

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

Does not being able to measure your ROI for a given investment make other, more accountable advertising options the smarter choice? You would think so, but there is a reason why businesses have been investing in traditional methods of advertising for decades (and still do). Maybe it’s because it was the only thing available years ago, but in today’s world understanding your own personal tolerance for risk is the greater issue.

As data capturing tools advance and web analysts get smarter, the depth and breadth of search engine marketing becomes more complex while the potential for reward becomes greater. Website visits have long been regarded as the primary measure of website success, popularity, and influence. Likewise in the SEO world, keyword rankings have historically been a cornerstone for measuring search marketing success. Here are six reasons I believe this should no longer the case.

It’s certainly a joke that I personally could seriously consider myself the “numero uno” in the business in my own fair city. I imagine there are folks that have been involved in Web Design processes in one way or another since they were babies. Web Design is however a constant learning curve as things change so quickly, we all have to keep up with the latest and greatest. In our daily interactions with other developers and designers, one hears about how practices used by one particular designer differ from those of another. Although end clients seem satisfied by the site produced, some questions still remain about some of these differences in practices from a processes point of view: