A Digital Marketing Agency
Using the popular WordPress Platform that has over 71 Million sites hosted with it, Ogawa Design Agency created a new website for this Fort Lauderdale, Florida Industrial Products Supplier. As a Full Service Digital Agency, the website graphics and other print material were created for them. The Website includes a widely adopted and used layout and design that minimizes browser issues. An industry leading contact form was added for lead generation.
Using BigCommerce for Your Online Store
As E-commerce Web Designers, we have worked with many of the e-commerce software platforms and their third party developed software-based shopping carts that use time intensive development resources to update and maintain. We we decided to look at the new emerging Ecommerce Software AS A Service (SaaS) or Cloud-based Computing e-Commerce Platforms. Many of our clients have been familiar with services like SalesForce.com that was the first SaaS App. These services run in your web browser and the software is accessed via the Internet and maintained by the Software Vendor.
One of the vendors we selected was BigCommere.com that has offices in Austin, Texas and Australia. We selected them because of their Enterprise Features which means the online store customer’s experience is very similar to buying at Amazon.com. BigCommerce provides excellent service and support for setting up your credit card merchant, shipping, tax codes and other mandatory online shopping features. Their store design templates are very good which enabled our clients to be up and running very quickly, sometimes in less than one week. And finally, their online marketing features including SEO (Google indexes your store quickly), newsletters and eBay integration is unmatched in the e-commerce industry.
If you are interested in launching a new Online Store for your business or migrating your existing store, call Ogawa Design Agency at 786-220-1295. We’re located in Miami, Florida in the Brickell area.
Do you need to Synchronize or Sync your iPhone Calendar?
Many of our clients have asked us about synchronizing their calendar with their iPhone. We really like Google Calendar, Apple iCal (the native Calendar on Macs) and the iPhone Calendar. Also, being in Miami, many of our clients are Miami Heat fans and want to add their team’s NBA schedule to their calendar. Here are instructions for synchronizing these calendars. When using these instructions, the user is able to add, modify and delete events on all three calendars.
Google Calendar Sync and Apple iCal Sync
1. To set up CalDAV support for Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal, follow these steps:
Source: http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical
Google Calendar and iPhone Sync
1. Open the Settings application on your device’s home screen.
2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
3. Press Add Account….
4. Select Microsoft Exchange. iOS 4.0+ allows multiple Exchange accounts.
5. In the Email field, enter your full Google Account email address. If you use an @googlemail.com address, you may see an “Unable to verify certificate” warning when you proceed to the next step.
6. Leave the Domain field blank.
7. Enter your full Google Account email address as the Username.
8. Enter your Google Account password as the Password. (If you are a 2-step verification user, please use an application-specific password instead.)
9. Tap Next at the top of your screen.
9a. Choose Cancel if the Unable to Verify Certificate dialog appears.
10. When the new Server field appears, enter m.google.com
11. Press Next at the top of your screen again.
Enabling the iPhone Calendar Sync – Use Your Browser
12. Choosing which calendars to sync – Google Sync can sync up to 25 Google Calendars with the Calendar app on your iOS device (your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch).
a) To select which calendars to sync to your Apple device, follow these steps:
b) If you use Google Apps, follow these steps:
13. Go to your iPhone Calendar and check to see if your Google Calendar events are displayed.
Source: http://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=14252&answer=138740
Calendar – Importing an iCal or .CSV file
14. In our case, our clients wanted to import their team’s schedule from the NBA.com team site. You can import the file the NBA Schedule into either a Google Calendar or your Apple iCal calendar.
a) Google Calendar – Import events from iCal or CSV files
To import events from iCalendar or CSV files, just follow these steps:
Source: http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=37118
b) Apple iCal – Import iCal file to Apple iCal
Source: http://www.nba.com/heat/schedule/import_heat_schedule.html
Other Notes
15) Transfer Calendar Items between Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Google Calendar
16) Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar Synchronization
http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=98563
The great thing about Google Plus now is that very few users are hiding their Google Plus Circles. This is allowing the number of G+ users to quickly expand their list of friends in their Circles. Today, I stumbled on a user that had completely disabled the viewing of people In His Circles and that have Him in his Circles. Here is information on the Circles Privacy Setting.
How to Hide Your Google Plus Circles
1. From your G+ User Name, click Privacy
2. Under Sharing, click Edit network visibility.
3. Under In your circles, the following box will appear.
Google Plus Circles Default Privacy Settings
Google Plus Circles - Default Privacy Setting
Google Plus Circles Recommended Privacy Setting
Google Plus Circles - Recommended Privacy Setting - Uncheck selected Circles
Google Plus Circles – Highest Privacy Setting
Google Plus Circles - Highest Privacy Setting
Google Plus Circles – Least Private Setting
Google Plus Circles - Lowest Privacy Setting
Google+ just went to Beta and if you are the type of business that is an Early Adopter and wants to have the latest and the greatest, you should signup for Google+ (Google Plus or G+). Google+ might be categorized as Google’s competitive service to Facebook. It’s currently an Invite Only beta but unlike some Google Betas, existing Google+ users appear to have an unlimited number of invites.
Here are some observations:
Installation
Adding Friends
Google Plus Extensions
Impact on Businesses
If you are interested in a Google + Invite, please let me know.
Most clients have questions about Merchant Account Vendors. Most ask, which one would you recommend? Many are not aware that PayPal Website Standard and PayPal Express Checkout have no monthly fee. Some do not have a Secondary or Backup Merchant Account Vendor. Others feel, if it’s not broken yet, then don’t try and fix it. The fact of the matter is that switching Merchant Account Vendors or enabling a Secondary Vendor such as PayPal Express Checkout is far easier than it was when most companies initially launched their websites. Many of these Merchant Accounts can be enabled with a single user name and password.
List of Merchant Account / Payment Providers
In the last year, we have setup our clients with Authorize.net, Google Checkout, Interspire, Payleap, PayPal and Quickbooks Merchant. For questions, you can contact us at 786-220-1295.
Google is lowering the limit of 50 users to 10 users in its Free Google Apps Standard Edition as of May 10, 2011 according to a notice received from the Google Apps Team. They will grandfather existing Google Apps Standard Edition accounts so it will affect only new accounts created after May 10, 2011. The yearly cost for a 50 user package has now gone from $0 to $2,500. Google Apps Standard Edition is an excellent Small Business Email solution. If you are considering to switch but haven’t done so, you should do so before May 10, 2011.
We recently setup an online store for a client using BigCommerce.com. We evaluated several e-commerce stores and went with BigCommerce. See the link below for more information.
Twitter is Still Hot
LeBron James’ Twitter account@KingJames had 350,000 followers on the evening he announced he was playing the NBA 2010-2011 season in South Beach as a part of the Miami Thrice (Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, Chris Bosh), Wade County, LeBroward County, Bosh Beach County, the Tres Amigos in South Beach or whatever name you want to call them. LeBron opened his Twitter account account only a few days earlier so in 2 or 3 days, he had 350,000 followers. It sounds like despite the volume of spam on Twitter, there are still people using Twitter. I think the NBA 2010 Free Agency in which you had a large community of users interested in rapidly changing information such as “Where is LeBron, Wade or Bosh playing next season?” made Twitter the perfect social media tool for this event. In fact it was another NBA Player Chris Paul that tweeted LeBron James Twitter account and before LeBron posted his first message, he had 25K+ users. In addition, both Dwyane Wade @DwadeOfficial and Chris Bosh @ChrisBosh announced their newsconference on ESPN, just 30 minutes before it aired.
If you are a small business, you should consider using Twitter as a social media tool. At the very least, you should claim your brand or domain on Twitter. It may not be the social media tool for your business right now, but in the future, that might change.
Company Email for your business should be easy to setup and configure for new and existing employees, especially for mobile devices and employees working from home without requiring a large cost to support.
Google Apps Standard Edition
Here is a summary of Google Standard Edition features and some tips on setting it up for your company.
* User Accounts: You can setup 50 user accounts or 50 email addresses with the Google Apps Standard Edition.
* Nick Names: The 50 email addresses does not include Nick Names or email alias for each user. For example a user can have firstname@domain.com, firstname.lastname@domain.com etc.
* Email Forwarding: A user can forward a copy of the Google Apps or company email address to another address using the Google Apps email interface which is the same as the Gmail interface.
* Email Storage: You get 7.3 GB of email storage per account.
* POP / IMAP Mail Protocols: Both Pop Download and IMAP email protocols are supported. (The default is off so you will need to turn them on.)
* Web Access: With Google Apps Standard Edition, you have Web access to your company email at http://mail.google.com/a/companydomain or http://mail.companydomain.com (you will need to add a CNAME record for this to work).
* Spam: If your current company email contains many spam messages, Google Apps Standard Edition uses the same high-quality spam filters as Google Gmail. You will notice a significant decline in the number of spam emails received. In addition, you can setup the Positini Spam Application for greater control.
* Mail Client: The Google Apps Setup Guide contains excellent documentation for setting up Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007, Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Apple Mail and other clients for both IMAP and POP Support.
* Support: The Google Apps Setup Guide is an excellent piece of documentation.
* Mobile Devices: The Google Apps Setup Guide contains excellent documentation for setting up a Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android and other devices.
* Mail Service Setup: The initial mail server setup requires two major steps: 1) Adding a Google Validation HTML file to the root directory of your server, the same process required by Google Analytics 2) Pointing your MX Record to Google. There is an extensive list of specific MX record records.
For more information:
http://www.ogawadesign.com/services/concierge-webmaster/google-apps-standard-edition
Google Standard Edition Sign-Up (Free Edition)
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
