SmileyRose Web Solutions

• 01Dec

  State of the Union

  Uncategorized No Comments

  Hi Everybody!

  By now some of you have received statements and invoices from us saying that your account is not current. Others will be receiving their notifications in the mail in a few days. It seems that the Nevada Post Office is eating our mail!! We have exhausted all options with them in an attempt to recover this mail. We know this is not your fault. However, this is also not our fault. We know that you have remitted your payments in a timely fashion but they have not reached their intended destination.

  Please check your bank accounts to be sure that these payments have not cleared. If they have, it wasn’t by us!!  Please let us know if this is the case and we will try again to gain some headway with the PO. In the meantime, we ask that you bring your accounts current as soon as possible.  Please remit payments to the San Diego address you will find at the top of your most recent invoices and statements.   You may also pay online at our website,http://www.smileyrose.com/payments.php. If you have never used this feature before, please drop an email to billing@smileyrose.com and we will set you up with a user name and password so that you may log in. You may also set up an auto-debit plan with us. This requires either a credit card or debit card. We accept MasterCard, Visa, American Express and Discover.

  For Dial Up Customers Only:

  This is a reminder that we will discontinue offering dial up internet access in January 2010. If you are usually invoiced on the first of each month, your service will be discontinued Jan 1, 2010. If you are invoiced on the 15th of each month, your service will stop on Jan 15, 2010.  This also includes the email address you received with your account. This would be any address that ends in ptgonline.net or julianemail.com.  We have appreciated your business through the years and wish you all the best!!

  We’d also like to take this opportunity to wish every one Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for the upcoming New Year!!

  Kathy and Robin

• 02Jul

  Our newest site

  Miscellaneous No Comments

  

  Image via Wikipedia

  Please check out All About Dragonflies.  It’s been fun to develop, I hope you all enjoy learning more about dragonflies.  I thought it was especially interesting that the babies bite, but adults don’t.  hmmmmmmmm

  

  Tags: Dragonflies, Natural

• 18Jun

  And Yet Another New Site

  News, Uncategorized No Comments

  Be sure to check out our latest efforts at RamonaGolf.com! We will do our best to provide the visitor with all things golf in Ramona, CA including the latest tournaments, course information, local golf links, as well as selected training guides for the golfer out to improve their game.If you know of an upcoming tournament, help us spread the word to improve the attendance of the event. Charity tournaments are our favorites!

  Tags: charity, courses, golf, ramona, tournaments

• 08May

  Our latest site

  Uncategorized No Comments

  We’re excited to introduce our latest development project – Ohio Sports Teams – a social networking site dedicated to sports in the state of Ohio.  If the site goes over well, we will be expanding to add other large states such as Illinois, Texas, California, and New York.

  Feel free to drop by, sign up, comment, and become part of the community!

  

  Tags: development, Ohio, Social network service, sports, website

• 11Mar

  Announcement: A New Client, A Valuable Service

  Uncategorized No Comments

  We’d like to share with you our latest client: eDataLockDown.com. We are working with them to optimize their site for search engines as well as for useability.

  This company provides managed data backup and storage services. We will soon be partnering with them to offer our clients the same service.  Just think, never worry about if your data was backed up, never worry about how to store your backups –  your data will always be available to you, wherever you are.

  We will let you know more as we implement this service for our valued clients.

• 23Nov

  We’re slowly coming back

  Uncategorized 9 Comments

  Many apologies for our extended down time.  We expect to have all services up and running within the next 4 hours.

  An explanation of what has happened will be forthcoming at some point today or tomorrow.  I’d call it a comedy of errors, except that it’s not very funny, for us, or for our clients.

• 21Nov

  Why we’re migrating to a new server

  Server Migration No Comments

  As most of you know, we migrated to a new server earlier this year.  One of the reasons we did that was to bring our operating software (system, web, and email) up to current technology standards.  Our plan at that time was to migrate to a new server every two years.

  So why so soon?

  From the start, we have had problems with the server.  Despite literally spending hundreds of hours researching, pouring over logs, and discussing the subject with our upstream provider, we have never been able to resolve the issues.

  Additionally, late last week our server was hacked into and used to distribute thousands of illegal spam emails.  This, of course, caused many ISPs to block emails coming from our server.  Again, despite many hours of effort and discussions with our upstream provider, we have been unable to remedy the problem.

  The long and short of it

  It is our responsibility to provide our clients with a fast and reliable web and email server.  We felt we were not performing this task to our high standards, so we elected to make further technology investments in order to return our service to one of the best.

• 21Nov

  Anatomy of a Server Migration

  Server Migration No Comments

  We thought it might be helpful to briefly discuss what happens when we migrate to a new server.  There are many different things that need to happen behind the scenes in order to make the migration a success.  So here, in chronological order, are the steps that happen.

  1. Purchase a new web server.  In essence, a web server isn’t much different from a desktop PC.  They pretty much have the same components.  One of the primary differences is that there is no keyboard, mouse, or monitor hooked up to the server.  It’s simply a box, located in a huge facility alongside hundreds or thousands of similar boxes.  In our case, we’ve selected a server that is pretty much comparable to the newer desktop computers on the market – the primary difference being that the web server runs a version of Linux, while most desktop computers run Windows.
  2. Verify that all hardware and software on the new server are configured correctly.  This is more of a challenge than you might think, as a web server runs many different programs, including the web page serving software, the email software, anti-virus software, anti-spam software, database software, and a myriad of other components.  Sometimes we miss one, but we do our best to make sure everything is functioning correctly before the migration.
  3. Turn off email services.  The email server runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Although you may only check your email once every 5 or 10 or 30 minutes, the server is always available to receive email.  Because of this, we have to make it stop receiving email prior to the migration, because once the migration process begins, the old server will continue to receive email, but since the email accounts have already been migrated, incoming emails would never be received.
  4. Begin the migration process.  Essentially, the migration process takes all of the web sites, the databases, the user accounts, the FTP accounts, passwords, emails, and everything else on the old server and moves it to the new server.  This process can take anywhere from 4-12 hours, depending on variables such as network speed, amount of data to be transferred, etc.
  5. Tell the internet where to find the new server.  This is the most arduous task in the process.  We must go in to each domain record, and adjust them to show the address of the new server.  At the current time, that’s approximately 200 domains, with 3 records that need changing for each domain.  This is about an 8 hour task (for two people).  After these changes are made, it takes anywhere from 24-48 hours for the changes to show up on the Internet.
  6. Verify that data has been transferred completely.  This again requires us to validate each website to make sure everything converted correctly.
  7. Back up user accounts and databases on old server.  This is our safety net in case anything goes wrong.

  There are a few other tasks that need to be performed, but these are the highlights of the process.  If you have any questions, please feel free to make a post in the comments section, and we will try to answer them.

• 23Sep

  Website Marketing 101: Map Your Path

  Marketing Your Business, Website Marketing 101 No Comments

  Last week we discussed setting a SMART goal for your website.  This was a sample goal we created:

  I would like to increase traffic to my website by 10% and begin gaining 1 new client each month by the end of December, 2008.

  Once we know our goal, we can start to set out some strategies.  Marketing strategies are simply high-level thoughts on how to achieve the goal.  Here is a possible strategy we might devise in order to reach our goal:

  • Revise content on current site in order to educate site visitors, increase the trust factor, and help potential clients feel more comfortable about using our services.

  So this week, take 5 minutes to devise a new strategy to help you achieve your goal.  Don’t forget to write it down!

  We wish you great success.

• 16Sep

  Website Marketing 101: Too much input?

  Website Marketing 101 No Comments

  We will, at some point in the not-so-distant future, get around to discussing the recent restructuring within SmileyRose Web Solutions. One of the things we will be sharing with you is how we found an overwhelming need within our client base to help with your marketing efforts, especially online.

  One of the greatest points of discussion from our clients stems from the topic of “too much to do, I have no time to read all the information that’s available”. So we are going to start this series of “Website Marketing 101” articles, with the goal of publishing them weekly, and having them take no more than 5 minutes of your time (to read, anyway).

  If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

  Do you have a goal for your website? Does it go beyond “sell more products” or “get more customers”? Goals need to be SMART:

  Specific
  Measurable
  Attainable
  R download BloodRayne elevant
  Time-bound

  An example of a SMART goal for a website might be:

  I would like to increase traffic to my website by 10% and begin gaining 1 new client each month by the end of December, 2008.

  So take another 5 minutes, right now, and think about what a SMART goal for your website (or your business) would be. Write it down or type it in Word or Notepad or scribble it on the back of your hand. Next week we will start working on achieving your goal.

  Until then, we wish you all the best.

  Related articles:

  •  Plan Your Journey to Accomplishment
  • Checklist for a Successful Website
  • Techniques of Internet Marketing

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