SERVICE NOTES

Happy new year!  I appreciate your continued business and look forward to serving you in 2008!

Please take a moment to read about a few updates to our service effective January 1, 2008:                       

1. NO CHANGE IN PRICING for all web, email, DNS, disk storage, network traffic, and other hosting services!  Note: in the Spring of 2008, we will be dropping our least popular, low-end service plans by upgrading customers to the next level. Very few are affected and will receive more details.
2. MONTHLY FINANCE CHARGE (late fee) on overdue balances is 1.75% or $5.00, whichever is greater.  As always, we grant 30 days from the date of your last statement before assessing late fees.
3. HOURLY FEE is $125 for all professional services, consulting, design and programming, billed in 15-minute increments.
4. ONE-TIME FEE for POP3 mailbox setup/change is $10 per mailbox.

After five years of unchanged services and pricing, these adjustments allow us to continue providing the high-quality work that you have come to expect from DTL Networx.  If you have any questions, please let me know.

I hope you are blessed with much peace, joy, prosperity and contentment this year.

Morgan Davis

With the release of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft removed the extremely handy “drag and drop” FTP feature that was seamlessly integrated in IE6.

You used to be able create shortcuts on the desktop that would directly open a remote folder via FTP with no intervention. With an open FTP folder window, remote file management was a breeze because it acted like a folder on your hard drive.  This article shows you how to recover this helpful feature.

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The Law Offices of Donald Detisch needed reliable email service and a place to host their existing web site. A recommendation sent them to DTL.  Soon, the time came for simple web updates, which I agreed to do. That’s when I first saw red.

Literally, I saw tons of red, and bright yellow and white mixed in for that ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise look. (Put on your peril-sensitive sunglasses and check out the original site.) For a professional law firm, this wasn’t just cheesey. It was cheeseburger! 

Junk food ingredients, not the packaging, are what kill you, and the innards of this site were in bad shape. When I discovered that the original designer used Microsoft Word, a tool for cooking up indigestible, fat-ladden pages, I really began to see red. If you build sites by hand, like I do, simple changes to sites like this become a supersized job.

Clearly, this was a site that Ronald McDonald built.  But being the (Burger) King of Perfection, I needed to have it my way. So I made a decision to spend those same hours redoing the entire site. The original “condiment scheme” gave way to a richer-looking design.  Plus, it’s built on DTL’s standards-compliant PageWorx foundation.  So it’s accessible, efficient, and easy to extend and maintain.

The result: The client loves the new look, and I know it’s good for you.  Pretty tasty for short-order cooking, and proof that not all fast food is junk food, even on the web.

These DTL email tips can keep you, your computer, and your mailbox happy. Ignore them at your own peril.

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I was amazed to discover that people routinely buy and drive million-dollar recreational vehicles. Aside from the obvious sticker shock, I’d be a wreck if I had to drive one. Taking a million-dollar RV out into heavy traffic could be pretty stressful. But, if I did have one of these rolling palaces, and it got a scratch or dent, I would immediately take it to Mike Eidsmoe’s San Diego RV Center for care and repair. While building their new web site, I learned that these people really know their stuff.

Their improved, standards-compliant site leverages design elements produced by Ras Graphics, and was the final piece in the company’s total identity makeover. But what was most important for San Diego RV Center team was the ability to easily make simple changes to the site’s content. So DTL built a content management system. They also needed a way to list RVs on consignment, so we built a self-service tool for easily managing vehicles, descriptions, and photos using an ordinary web browser. The web site consistently presents the information as if a professional web designer built the pages. San Diego RV Center found that when you’re steering megabuck RVs onto the information superhighway, having a custom-tailored, “no stress” content management system is the only way to avoid design accidents.

Travel safely. Travel in style.

This month’s website showcase is for Allcare Design/Build – a remodeling contractor with a distinctive way of doing business. We created a great look on a small budget that captures the quality, craftsmanship, and service Allcare offers.

The site features a series of representative project photos on the home page using a non-Flash transition effect, photo galleries, custom contact forms for clients and general contractors, a mailing list form that rewards subscribers with a valuable downloadable booklet of tips, and more.

The entire site is, of course, fully web standards-compliant using valid XHTML 1.1, CSS, and is based on DTL’s PageWorx page-generation system that simplifies maintenance and updates.

If you’ve noticed that the web has recently gone wacky when using Internet Explorer, you can blame litigious companies, software patent lawyers, and even Microsoft for ruining a good portion of the web overnight.

I’ll explain what happened and why in a minute. It has a bearing on the design of your web site, and is one more reason to avoid using Flash and Flash-based navigation if possible.

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Ten performance-boosters you should use

1. Compression. By adding these lines to the .htaccess file in your web directory, you can save 50% to 80% of the time and bandwidth needed to deliver your pages:
   

   AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html
   php_flag zlib.output_compression On

   This causes the server to compress HTML content as it is sent. Check your results using this compression tester.

2. Optimize Images. Use a good graphics program like Adobe Photoshop or ImageReady. Size your images appropriately, then use the Save For Web feature. Depending on the image, certain image formats will yield better size vs. quality ratios, so try them all, reducing colors or quality levels as needed.

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This month’s website showcase is for National Police Supply, owned by Sean and Debra DePriest. With 15 years in local law enforcement, Sean recognized the need to bring modern police equipment to a worldwide market that, since 9/11, demands faster access to the latest security gear.

“We have a lot of hands-on knowledge and experience with our products, but we were out of our league in bringing it all to the web,” says DePriest. “We selected DTL and Ras Graphics to develop our corporate identity and design a site that was easy to use without all the typical noise you find on most shopping sites. These guys really came through.”

Although some products are restricted to police and military, most are available to the general public. The site had to present an engaging style, copy that expresses NPS’s unsurpassed customer service, and provide a broad selection at competitive prices.

NPS’s extensive ecommerce site is built using an integration of custom pages designed by DTL and an open source ecommerce engine. The entire site is fully web standards-compliant using valid XHTML 1.1, CSS, and is based on DTL’s PageWorx page-generation system that simplifies maintenance and updates.  DTL also created automated mechanisms for inserting, sizing and optimizing product images.

“We’re adding dozens of new products and variations every day,” says Debra DePriest, who does most of the online catalog management. “DTL’s tools give us a huge time and quality advantage over our competitors.”

With a new web site or a redesign, the typical order of topics between most web designers and their clients follows this course: price, page counts, visual layout, artwork, text, search engine optimization, increasing traffic, revisions, maintenance, and the need to get more value from the web site.  This, of course, is completely backwards.

A move in the right direction

Before we can talk about money, either initial production costs or, ultimately, web-generated sales revenue, we need to turn things around. Let’s start with your site’s purpose so we can select the right content and presentation methods to achieve worthy and measurable goals.

Understanding your web requirements, desired execution level, and budget, begins with a simple planning exercise . . .

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