Monday Meh

Posted On: 2008-11-10

Yes it's Monday and yes, I still wish it was Saturday morning but seeing that I have not yet invented time travel I'm just going to have to deal with the fact that there's no going back. I've just got to face the week ahead.

Now if I lived on insects, nectar and a few odd nuts and didn't mind wearing feathers I'd be as happy and carefree as the noisy and colorful birds outside my window. Unfortunately though I have this strange desire to wear clothes and have a much broader diet than those birds so for me this week .... it's going to be all about work.

High on our agenda for this week is a move to a new server. The one that most of our sites and those of our clients are on is at least four years old. Even though the server has been rocking along with hardly a glitch in all that time we've reached the point where we need to upgrade before problems do begin to appear so it's definitely going to happen this week.

While most of the hard work associated with the move is going to be handled by Mike and Chris at Phatservers we need to go through everything on the server and do database back ups (yes I know Phatservers will do back ups too but there's nothing like having a little peace of mind here), clean out all the email rubbish (it's amazing how many email addresses you can accumulate and then forget about in four years) and reorganize our IP addresses.

Then once the move has been made we're going to have to go through all the sites to make sure that everything is working properly. Hmmm .... that is really going to be the fun part .... NOT!

And speaking of backups, how often do you back up all your files. I know that it's a recurring theme with me but it really is important to keep all your important server files backed up off-site and it's also important to keep all the important files on your office and home computers backed up too so that's something else that we'll be doing today.

Another job Steve has on his agenda for today is to start working his way through most of our sites' sitemaps and updating them. I know there are many who suggest that simple sites don't need XML sitemaps because Google will be able to crawl your site without a sitemap but ....

While I'm not going to go into details it's our experience that getting your site listed in Google's Webmaster Tools and providing an XML sitemap .... even for simple sites .... seems to encourage Google to crawl and list websites much faster than those that don't point Google to a sitemap that Googlebot can crawl.

Mobile Phones
I know that last week I was suggesting that in tough economic times like these we should be doing less work out on the edge and concentrating more on whatever it is in this industry that makes us money but at the same time you shouldn't lose sight of the future.

Right now we really are in an exciting period when cell phone/mobile phone (call it whatever you want) is growing at an incredible rate. Many users are spending lots of time online on their mobile phones and phone usage is not just restricted to young people. Many older people are using their mobile phones to surf the Net too.

A recent survey showed that 33 percent of those surveyed spend 10 hours or more talking on their mobile phones. 50 percent of those surveyed access their emails from their mobile phones and 52 percent were accessing the web and the largest age group that used their mobile phones to access the web were those between 35 and 44.

And an amazing 25 percent of people surveyed were using their mobile phones to access social networks. So if you're not yet thinking about how you can take your online marketing to mobile phone users then you're going to be way behind the curve when the economy begins to improve.

Now when people think of mobile phones these days so many of us seem to think of the iPhone as the only one that really matters .... I guess that's a testament to just how good Apple is at marketing their products. However, the iPhone is definitely not the leading mobile phone out there in the market place. It seems that Nokia sells more mobile phones in a week than the total number of iPhones sold to the present time.

So don't get hung up on the iPhone when you're looking at screen sizes etc, the iPhone is just one of many different phones your marketing should be designed for.

And now I cannot procrastinate any longer .... it's time to jump into the week and see if I can make it to the other end.