Why You Should Host Your Own Web Sites I’ve always been of the opinion that it is important to host your own web site or sites, ever since I first started studying how search engines behave. At the moment there are lots of free and paid web site building services, aimed predominantly at the small business and personal user sectors. They have a
David Carter - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - 4:55
Dropping The Domainer – What Worked In 2011 As we approach the end of 2011 and get ready for the works Christmas party (tomorrow as it happens), I thought I’d take a quick look back at 2011 and see whether things got better or worse and define what worked. Two of the best pieces of software I have used this year have been
David Carter - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - 2:44
Playing With The Big Boys Last week, I had the pleasure and privilege of sitting with some very smart commercial property investment people from a specialist company that puts together and manages high-end commercial property investments such as industrial estates and shopping centres, usually worth several million pounds upwards. Part of their business is to...
David Carter - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - 2:59
Metamorphosis In Final Stage 2012 will be my 10th anniversary of quitting my full time career in the IT recruitment business, when I left to follow my interest in the Internet and domaining and work from home. Since the day I took that decision an awful lot has happened in my business life and most of it can be
David Carter - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - 4:10
Tracking Online Leads & Sales Technology has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years and one of the biggest issues I’ve had since I started my businesses online, has been tracking sales and enquiries. Back when I used to provide leads to other companies (something I no longer do – it’s more profitable to use them to feed
David Carter - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - 11:11
Recognising Opportunities & Choosing Partners Hardly a day passes by without somebody suggesting a new business idea to me or my partner – perhaps they think we’re a soft touch or something! Most times, we bat them away because we are totally focused on our own niche and don’t really want to get distracted by other people’s dreams. A few
David Carter - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 12:20
What’s Better – The Notebook or the iPad2? I finally succumbed to getting an iPad last month. The reason was simply that I wanted something light enough to carry around whilst on my travels, that could be used to browse the web, use Skype to phone home and to upload photographs from an SD card to my web server using FTP. Now, I
David Carter - Monday, October 3, 2011 - 3:33
What Goes On Tour… Have you seen the new Google Plus? If you visit Google, you won’t miss the big arrow pointing to the new tool bar. I tried it today and uploaded a bunch of photographs from our asbestos surveying tour in Kenya. They don’t show all we did, but it will give you an idea of what
David Carter - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - 10:57
Team Building In Kenya After a punishing work schedule of asbestos surveying in Kenya, our five-man team returned to the UK this weekend a full week earlier than scheduled. Although not the most profitable of contracts, it has certainly been the most enjoyable, both in terms of the work, the people we met and the stuff we did in
David Carter - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - 2:53
How Focus Aids Business Since declaring my departure from the domain industry to concentrate on developing our surveying practice, a lot has happened. Let me start by saying that it could all be coincidental, but the past month has seen a significant increase in the number of enquiries we have received and the number of sales we’ve closed. Turning
David Carter - Thursday, August 25, 2011 - 3:1
Just Say No Given the amount of time I have spent online over the years and the vast collection of software and tools I have collected and used during this period, I can hardly be considered a Luddite. In fact, there is virtually no aspect of my business life that I haven’t tried to automate in some way
David Carter - Sunday, August 7, 2011 - 3:0
Discarded Niche Web Site Comes Up Trumps A web site is a continual work in process that is rarely, if ever, completed. This fact was instrumental in my own recent business decisions to concentrate on one business alone, building surveying, though of course, within that subject, I have web sites in several sub-niches. It’s a decision that is now beginning to pay
David Carter - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - 3:5
Asbestos Surveys.com Lands New Contract In Kenya Confidentiality means I can’t identify the client, but let’s just say it’s as big as it gets in the contract world and following an initial click and some nifty tendering, we’ve just bveen awarded a nice little contract to conduct 200+ asbestos surveys in Kenya. The job will involve a lot of travelling around ...
David Carter - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 - 2:28
The Last Post – Goodbye Domaining. This is the final post I’ll make on the subject of domains, domaining and Internet Marketing in general. The time has come where I can finally walk in through my front door and not check available names, search for drops or look for domain bargains. In fact, I don’t even like having to look at
David Carter - Friday, July 8, 2011 - 14:5
Windows Security Warning – a problem solved! I bought a plugin (The Templateer) this week, to enhance the already brilliant features of Artisteer, the template software I use almost exclusively to build my various sites these days, but experienced difficulties when trying to unzip the new files. Even after turning off Windows Security and a host of other settings, I couldn̵...
David Carter - Friday, July 1, 2011 - 3:8
Windows Security Warning – a problem solved! I bought a plugin (The Templateer) this week, to enhance the already brilliant features of Artisteer, the template software I use almost exclusively to build my various sites these days, but experienced difficulties when trying to unzip the new files. Even after turning off Windows Security and a host of other settings, I couldn̵...
David Carter - Friday, July 1, 2011 - 3:8
Van Sales, The Online World And Service After a lot of messing around with dealerships, my business partner and I bought a van this week. There’s nothing special about that, plenty of businesses buy vans. I don’t know how people vans though, because the three dealerships were all incredibly useless in so many ways. The forst company we visited were advertising ...
David Carter - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - 3:31
Four Rooms – A Lesson In Value New series in which people who believe they have a valuable artefact get a chance to sell it to four of the country’s leading buyers. But, once they turn down an offer, there’s no going back… Quickly becoming my favourite TV programme, Four Rooms, broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK is an unlikely star
David Carter - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - 3:16
Trademarks, C&D’s and Chilling Effects Every heard of Chilling Effects? Neither had I until I saw something appearing at the bottom of a Google search yesterday that said a listing had been removed from Google’s database because of a C&D and when I looked I was eventually directed to the Chilling Effects web site. Expecting some kind of protest site,
David Carter - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - 3:58
Why Your Domain Values Suck Domain Values – From an End User’s Perspective Even now, in a piss-poor market, if a tumble-down, ramshackle house comes on to the market, the estate agents are quick to recognise the redevelopment value of the plot and substantially increase the asking price. Some may say that this is just business and that it’s al...
