How valuable is your domain name?

It never ceases to surprise me that we still get clients who suffer from domain name scams. I registered my first domain in 1994, they were costly at the time and back then the choice of provider was limited to reputable registrars and a few partners. With the increase in resellers we have seen the creation of just about every hoax you can imagine which is devised to transfer, steal domains or simply to take money for nothing. Anyone can sell domains but really what good can come of it?

My advice is to do your research well, choose a trusted partner and don’t try to save money. A domain is extremely important to your brand and therefore trying to pay the lowest price is as silly as buying a cheap lock for your front door.

We look after many domains for our clients, we don’t host millions and therefore we are not the cheapest. What we do offer though is security, through experience, maintaining standards and following recommended guidelines, to protect what is one of the most valuable assets in the world. It is simply not enough to pay the low-cost of a domain and hope for the best, the consideration should be how much are you willing to spend to look after it. In 1994 it was about £175 a year and in reality considering the online real-estate value for any organisation that would still be pretty cheap.

Concerned about your domains? Drop us a line and we will gladly give you some sound advice.

Google Wave, initial thoughts

So our team has been playing around with Google Wave over the last week since being invited to the preview. Technology wise it is quite remarkable, the Google developers have created a life-like conversation application that goes way beyond the standard messenger or email format. However through lack of documentation things can get confusing fast and also I am not convinced (yet) that the system is anywhere near ready. The writers of lifehacker.com have made the first attempt at clarity however with their excellent book completewaveguide.com and I recommend reading that before you start.

Time will tell if this is a workable solution, it may just be that Google has over-complicated something that didn’t need fixing. Replacing email is a big task and I am not sure in it’s current form Google Wave offers an alternative. It is entirely possible that the conversation style will make it hard to follow which will make the tool unproductive and a non-starter. They also have to convince everyone to have a Wave account to communicate and this is something that could seriously damage the rate of adoption. You can’t, after all, teach old dogs new tricks!

Quick Tip: Efficiently Manage Your Email

If you are anything like me you process most information through your email inbox. Reminders, tasks and requests flow into my mail client at an incredible rate and traditionally I’ve used an elloborate filing system to process it.

After reading (and then re-reading) David Allen’s Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity it dawned on me my futile attempt to manage it this way was utter madness.

Here is my simple email process as it now stands.

1. Do the action for anything that will take 2 mins or less.
2. Create a new task and define the next step (important!) from each email that needs action.
3. Create a new task as a reminder for anything that can be deferred until a suitable time.
4. Forward anything that needs someone else to action and delete it immediately (trust others).
5. File anything that you may want to pick up in the future but don’t have time for at the moment.
6. File anything else under clients or suppliers, don’t use sub folders as a good search tool will find any specific email you may need in the future.
7. Delete everything else.

Ongoing and this is important, review tasklists from no.2 and no.3 daily and do, file or delete as above. Monitor folder created from no.5 on a monthly basis.

I’ve not had an empty inbox since 1994 and now it is. I’ve even gone as far as archiving all email that is older than 6 months and I now have a happy, clean and manageable mailbox. Reducing stress of it being there and the backup requirements on our infrastructure.

I’m off to tell our clients.

New Website

Our ‘Why?’ section says it all. This site is an attempt to move away from the traditional ‘list our products and services with far too much technical detail included’ website that don’t really offer prospective clients any useful information and often go as far as confusing them.

We at Intelligenta do not really feel the need to dazzle you with the wonders of technology as we’ve found most of our clients just want it to work. So let’s keep this simple and hopefully the benefits will be proven. We may even be able to pass on some useful ideas, products or services to like-minded individuals along the way.

Please feel free to comment, question or indeed contact us if you are interested in anything we have to say.