I love using Google Mail for my business.

A few months ago I converted from Outlook Exchange through Godaddy to Google Apps. What I didn’t know was that I could turn Gmail into a full email client for my business email accounts. This isn’t forwarding or POP download. My emails go strait to Google.

Anyway, I was just sending out an email and forgot to add the attachment and the following happened.

Google Apps read the body of my email and noticed that I mentioned an attachment but nothing was attached.

Don’t you hate it when you send an email and forget the attachment? It’s always so awkward to have to send an ‘oops’ email.

Let me know if anyone would like some training on how to convert over to Google Mail for your business. It’s not terribly difficult and we should be able to help you keep ALL your current emails. When I converted I had to move 15,000 emails from my Outlook account and Google has a great application that does this for  you.

Since doing a post about how anti-customer contact forms are I’ve been more conscious of the subject.

Today I decided to do a twitter search to see what is being talked about when it comes to contact forms. I think you might find this interesting.

Click here for the full twitter feed.


I think it’s interesting to see all the help out there for creating these forms. I can also see people who are excited that they’ve created a form. Here is my favorite tweet from the search.

” I completed ur contact form 3 weeks ago but haven’t received a reply.I’d like to use ur services.What’s the best way to contact u?”

My point to this post isn’t to just recycle past stories. I think my ultimate point is that you need to go to twitter right now and start an account and start using it to learn more about your customers and also give them other ways to contact you.

It’s so fun to set up a contact form using your web site building software. You get all of these cool options from inside your web site. You won’t get any spam. People think you have web hacking skills. Life’s good.

The problem is that as a customer they completely suck! Your customer can’t tell if the thing even worked. Your customer might not want to give you all the info you are asking for. Your customer has no record in their own email client on what they even said to you. It also makes it look like you don’t really want them to have your email address.

Nobody cares about how much spam you get. Quit doing stuff at your web site that makes your life easier and start doing stuff that makes your customer’s life easier.

(Photo by Dean Brittingham Photography)

I’m reading some blogs today and one of my big irritations has reared its ugly head again.

When you are writing and you give me a link it doesn’t automatically mean I want to leave your site, and you should want me to stay.

When adding links be sure to include the target “_blank” so your link will be opened in a new tab/window. This will keep you from losing your reader.

No, it’s not the same as forcing a popup on someone. They chose to click the link so they are asking to view something new. Don’t lose them off of your site. You may not get them back.

I’m not going into great detail on how to do this. If you are using WordPress for your site (and you should be) then there are lot of ways to make sure you do this.

The creation of links has a “_blank” option and when you are adding a link to a post in Visual mode there is a ‘Open link in new window’ option.

Use them, a lot!

Since I know a bunch of people who have never used iTunes I thought I would do a quick video.

You don’t need any kind of an mp3 player to use iTunes for listening to podcasts. It’s a great place to search through and find podcasts around subjects you enjoy.

Remember that iTunes doesn’t host any podcasts (that I know of) they just list shows that are user submitted to them using RSS Feeds. That also means that if a podcast isn’t working it’s the actual site that submitted the podcast that is messed up, not iTunes.