Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Wow I must be crazy ... the sun isn't even up and yet here I am getting a start on the day with this week's column.

Actually I've been awake since before 3am with a whole lot of thoughts about one of our own websites whirling about in my head. I did try to go back to sleep but in the end I just had to get up and get those thoughts out of my head and onto paper.

But of course, as soon as I sat down and picked up my pen, all those thoughts disappeared and what was so concrete in my head now looks like vague ramblings on my notepad.

Oh well ... I'm sure they will all come back to me at some inappropriate time today ... probably while I'm trying to put together a quote for a client. Just the time when you really don't want to be thinking of anything else.

Screenfly
It's hardly a name that tells you much about the product but if you're building sites in WordPress, or responsive websites outside of WordPress, then this is one little freebie that is going to be worth a whole lot more to you than what you paid for it.

Of course, if you are building sites in WordPress, then you are building responsive sites aren't you? Well ... at least the themes you're using say that they are responsive don't they?

Sadly, as my partner found out today, some parts of themes that claim to be responsive may not be as responsive as other parts. In Steve's case the body of the site looks good on a mobile phone but the header ... well ... it looked like a postage stamp and he didn't notice that till he took a look at the site with Screenfly.

This online tool will let you see your sites as mobile and desktop users would see them. You can choose from a variety of phones and tablets just with a click of a button so in just a few minutes you can cycle through a range of cell phone screens, tablet sizes and desktop monitors too.

You can find this neat tool at quirktools.com/screenfly and they've got some other interesting tools there too.

Colour boxes, buttons and popups.
Another handy little tool if you're using WordPress is the Standout Color Boxes and Buttons plugin.

This plugin allows you to create colored buttons and colored content boxes so that you can easily add bright highlights to text that you really want your surfers to see. And of course you will find it in the Plugin Directory at WordPress.

Have you got a site where you are free to use popups? If you do have a few of those sites ... and you should ... then there's an interesting little freebie over at SumoMe.com that they call a Scroll Box that should work for you.

There's a whole bunch of other interesting freebies there that I'm sure you will find quite useful.

Backups
Finally let's talk about backups. Ok so this isn't so much a useful tool as a nagging reminder ... when was the last time you did a back up? And I don't only mean a backup of your websites that are up online ... I also mean a back up of all the important data that you have on your computer or computers.

It's just as vital that you have a backup of all your important files on your business computers as it is to have a backup of everything you have online.

I was surprised the other day to find that my partner was really stressing because there was a problem with the main PC he uses. Now I thought that Steve was absolutely anal about doing backups.

Some of his important files are backed up to a cloud host several times a day and at least once a week he does a complete backup of all his business files to a separate hard drive in his office so what was the problem?

When his main PC started to have operating issues it looked as though the root cause might have been the main hard drive in the machine and Steve suddenly realised that while he had been backing up heaps of stuff on a regular basis he hadn't put any backup system in place for our photos.

There are gigs of our family and travel photos on the hard drive that appeared to be having problems and not one kilobyte of it was backed up. Fortunately the issue wasn't with the hard drive and Steve is now backing up all those photos but for a while things did not look so good.

So when was the last time you did a backup of your important files and are you including all your important files in those backups or have you forgotten about some of them?