Top 10 Tech Web Tips

Research Your Market to Target Your Website

Before you launch a website, you need to perform some initial market research. These days it’s very easy to throw up a blog or a website that looks terrific, however it’s important to know the niche that you’re jumping into.

As an example top 10 Tech covers technology at a high level. However we also break down technology into several sub niche areas. Currently we’re looking at starting up a section to cover music technology. Our future section will likely cover anything that is used in technology by bands or artists to generate music, fine tune music, or deliver a better experience to the audience. I’m sure will also touch on the delivery process and much more but that’s the general idea.

The thing is that can cover everything from the musical instruments, to the computers that makes the recordings, to the mixer boards, to the cables and stands and software and the Web tools used to share that great song with millions of people at a time.

Plus for our tech site it will tie in very nicely with with podcasting, our computers section and our software section too.

Regardless if you’re setting up a website you need to know your market. You need research whose operating in that realm today as they will be your future competitors and possibly her partners too. For a website you need to understand how cluttered up the search engine rankings are for that particular topic. If you see gaps in the search engine results, or if you perform research and you can’t find the information you’re looking for online odds are there could be a market for that information. The second question is how big is the market. Someone may need that information someday, but how many “someone’s” are out there that will come visit your site and on a regular basis.

Ask yourself these questions before you begin, and spend some time putting together the answers to those questions so that she’ll have a solid game plan to achieve your goals.

When Original Web Services Go Bad - Yahoo Bill Pay and CheckFree

I have been a Yahoo! Bill Pay customer for years. Yahoo Bill Pay is basically a service provided by a separate customer, CheckFree, under the Yahoo! Bill Pay name.

I wrote about the combination and the ‘new online bill payment technology’ about a decade ago and signed up to try the service at the same time. For years I have been a very happy customer, only experiencing major difficulties every 2-3 years (like when a transaction just completely disappears either due to user error or who knows what?).

All Good Things Must Come to an End

This combination proves that all good things must come to an end. Over the last two to three years the service has been getting worse month by month. Reliability is about the same as far as payments actually making it there once you have them uploaded into the system goes.

When I say the service is getting worse I mean that it’s getting more difficult to process a transaction online. Since that’s the entire purpose of online bill payment you would think that the two companies would focus on keeping that working well. Unfortunately that concept can be further from the truth.

As far as I can tell both companies have completely abandoned the product. Every time that I intend to make a transaction, simply entering the amount the date and hitting him to pay this button is, as soon as the server start to process the transaction with a timeout, or the error out, or I get a stupid message that states that they are sorry they cannot process the transaction due to technical difficulties. It’s the Yahoo equivalent of the blue screen of death.

Today for example,I had to pay three simple bills. I had to pay one small credit card bill, a student loan,and my gas bill.

I received the problem processing payment screen he no less than 20 timesas I attempted to submit paymentsfor these three bills. I have learned over the last two or three yearsat this screen is basically bogus. He their servers are not down, they’re not really having technical difficulties, it’s just not working.

Lik Charles Barkley trying to shoot a free throw,you just have to keep throwing it out ther until it works no matter how many times that takes him.

Now I have tried other services, and I have found them wanting as well. There are problemstend to revolve around their ability to get a payment to a destinationon the date they promised that they will. Yahoo has a little bit of a problem with this with CheckFree but it’s not as severe as most other online bill payment services.

So while it is extremely frustrating to have to resubmit a paymen tover and over and over again,because there’s almost nothing worse than having to be reminded that you’re paying a bill 20 times when you just want to pay it and get it over with, it is actually a little worse when you think you sense a payment in the payment doesn’t get there.

Power Supply’s for Road Warriors

I learned a thing about being a road tech warrior while watching Nacho Libre at the drive in.

That may sound like an unlikely event, and it probably is. Last summer we went to a little remote drive-in movie theater is playing a double feature of Nacho libre and the movie Cars. It was a fun little of outing even though Cars was a little long and Nacho Libre was terrible. While we were there, I ran my DC converter power supply out of the back of my minivan so we can keep cooler running.

Something blue fuse in the van in the power supply stopped working. Now as a road warrior I use that power supply to keep my computer running when it so I was little perturbed that I may have lost it. And one of the other families in our party that brought the actual cooler and have the same model of van that we do even though it was a couple years newer had mentioned earlier in the evening that their DC inverter power supply wasn’t working anymore either.

The signs were there for me to read up front but I missed them.

Will a few weeks later I finally got around to figuring out what was wrong with the power supply. I tend to the little power supply repair session, and quickly learned that wasn’t my power supply. Instead it was the van, the cooler it sucked too much juice through the DC inverter and blown a fuse, a main fuse at that in her minivan.

So I took a quick trip to the auto repair store and picked up a new fuse and replaced it, and my power supply was back up and running again.

Lesson learned be careful when you volunteer up your tech tools for non-tech events there MacGyver.