After having a bad experience with a previous designer who wouldn’t let go of their original domain name, a referral to us got the ball rolling on a new site. They wanted something eye-catching with generally earthy tones. As part of our services, we also provided an on-site photo shoot to ensure that we were all able to obtain the photos that would be most appropriate for their new site.

The Twin Oaks family wrote up some content and we populated the site for them. They are quite happy with the resulting website and it was a pleasure to serve them.

Through their membership in a local networking group called SalemPROs, DreamCraft discovered PowerCompass Business Solutions, who maintains an alliance with us here at Harness Technology. Together, we developed a robust website that allows DreamCraft staff to maintain on their own with little to no assistance from us. This helps them keep ongoing costs to a minimum while still having a professionally-constructed website.

We built the site to incorporate not just a blog, but a way of tracking her good news articles using Google Maps mashups, mailing lists, article voting and much more. In addition, Jodi needed a way to share via Facebook, Twitter and other social networks and we were able to make it all come together.

We happily obliged, much to their satisfaction as you’ll read in the testimonial they sent to us shortly after the project was completed.

Harness Technology provided an outstanding service and an excellent company to work with. Every question was answered quickly and they went above and beyond what we asked of them. The website they designed and launched for us is exactly what we want and their service made every step of the process simple.

I would recommend Harness Technology to any company wishing to create or update their website.

– Kurt Linn & Associates

Search Engine Optimization
The process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

Back in the mid-1990′s, webmaster and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines. The search engines were just emerging, but like any other new web technologies, there were a few techno-geeks riding the cutting edge. In those early days of SEO, a website owner would simply submit the site’s URL to the search engines, which would trigger them to send out a “spider” to “crawl” the submitted page and add it to an index. Soon, site owners began to realize the benefit of ranking high in search results, hence the birth of an entire SEO industry.

Search engines have evolved to a very sophisticated point, often dictating how a website is to be built and structured. There’s little reason to even submit new websites to the search engines for crawling due to automation. However, this also means that your website needs to be built, written and maintained in such a way that appeases the search giants (particularly Google).

Search engines continually tweak their algorithms, which often cause ripples throughout the internet. There is a balance of good versus bad SEO practices, which are very important to the visibility of your site in search results. For years, there have been some less-than-honest SEO “specialists” that would use underhanded techniques to achieve high search results. However, the search engines are getting smarter and will penalize sites that are using such nefarious methods to enhance page rank.

As you might surmise from the information above, walking a proper SEO line can be like walking a tightrope — balance is key. Here are the most critical aspects of SEO, not necessarily in order of importance:

Content, Content, Content

You must have good content that is updated regularly. Building a website with a few pages and then leaving it to die will achieve exactly that. The search spiders need a reason to index your site, so it is important that you write appropriate blog articles regularly.

Navigation/Structure

Good navigation is critical to good search ranking. Much like site loading speed, visitors need to be able to find what they want quickly and easily. Page structure, internal linking and menu layouts are more important than ever.

Speed

Your website needs to load quickly. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, so keeping the attention of your visitors is becoming very important. In fact, Google recently revised it’s algorithm to consider load speed when ranking the websites it indexes.

Sitemap

Every spider loves a good sitemap. It tells them what the site contains and where to find it. That sounds a lot like your visitors! But there’s a right way to accomplish a sitemap that spiders love. You can also submit your sitemaps to the top search engines, such as Google, which basically gives them a heads-up.

Other Considerations

You might have heard about the importance of keywords and meta tags at one time. While meta tags aren’t as critical as they once were, it doesn’t hurt to still make use of them. Keywords — in regards to keywords used in your content, not in meta tags — are still very important, but you have to be careful. One of the underhanded methods of SEO consists of purposely planting certain keywords and phrases in your site’s content in such a way that it severely affects quality and readability. New algorithms at Google can now identify “keyword stuffing” and will penalize you for using it.

SEO is not for the faint of heart. Make sure you are using proper techniques. The best way to do this is to hire someone who is respectful, ethical and knowledgeable about the proper methods of SEO.

The Update Checker will scan your computer for installed software, check the versions and then send this information to FileHippo.com to see if there are any newer releases.

This is a great service that helps keep your computer up-to-date. This is important because software developers will often release new versions of their software that fix problems and add new features. But even more importantly are the security holes that are patched in newer versions. So it is vital to system health and security that you stay on top of the latest versions of software installed on your computer. FileHippo makes this process very easy.

After you download and install Update Checker, you will notice a new icon in your Windows taskbar. From here, you can run it, review the results of a previous scan, change the settings or close it completely. We recommend that you right-click on the taskbar icon, select Settings and then uncheck the “Beta versions” checkbox. For most people, stable versions of software is highly recommended over beta versions, so you are better off just turning of those notifications. Also, if you don’t want it to run in the background, you can choose to not have it load when you boot up your computer. Instead, you can just run it from the Start menu whenever you like.

Now that you have your configured your settings, right-click on the taskbar icon and start a new scan (or run it from the Start menu). When Update Checker is done, it will open your default browser and display a page with a list of recommended updates. It even provides links to download each program, making it even easier. Just download and install each update.

We recommend including Update Checker into a weekly routine along with our other recommended maintenance software, such as CCleaner, Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, etc. Keeping your computer’s software updated is very important yet often neglected. Between Windows Update (with Microsoft Updates enabled) and FileHippo’s Update Checker, there’s no reason why you can’t keep your computer safe and up-to-date. It’s worth the marginal weekly effort to avoid costly and time-consuming repairs later. Of course, this is something we help our clients with all the time, so feel free to contact us if you need assistance.

Download the FileHippo Update Checker

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free utilizes Malwarebytes powerful technology to detect and remove all traces of malware including worms, trojans, rootkits, rogues, dialers, spyware and more.

While it’s good to have at least two different malware scanners installed on your system, we find Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware to be the most effective. It’s also the fastest scanner we’ve ever tested, which is in stark contrast to the humongous amount of time SpyBot Search & Destroy needs to perform scans (don’t get us wrong, SpyBot is also a great tool). Despite its speed, it finds threats that even the commercial software programs miss. What are we waiting for? Let’s get started.

Using Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware

This part of the article almost isn’t worth writing. Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware (MAM) is easy to use because it walks you through everything. Right from the get go, during MAM’s installation process, it asks you if you’d like to update the definitions. Later on, when you open it again, MAM will check to see if you’ve updated the definitions recently and ask if you’d like to update (of course you should click the Yes button).

When you arrive at the main screen, you are presented with three scan options:

1. Perform quick scan
2. Perform full scan
3. Perform flash scan

During your regular weekly housekeeping routine (you do that, right?), you really only need to use the Quick Scan option. The first time you ever run MAM, however, you should perform the Full Scan. After that, maybe just run the Full Scan once every month or two. The Flash Scan is for registered users of MAM only, but if you register, then you can use it to scan your computer’s memory and autorun objects.

Once you’ve made your selection, click the Scan button to get started. If you are using the Quick Scan option, you’ll find that the scan will complete in just a few minutes. The Full Scan takes significantly longer.

After scanning is finished, if MAM found any threats, you will be presented with a new button that allows you to review them. From there, you can choose to remove all selected items (they should all be selected by default). You’ve now removed all the threats that MAM found. Wasn’t that easy?

Conclusion

As stated above, Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware should be a part of your weekly housekeeping routine. You can proactively spend a few minutes scanning once per week or you can spend hours recovering from infection later, disrupting your work, browsing or even gaming activities on your computer. No tool can completely protect you from these threats, but having the right tools keeps the odds on well on your side.

Of course, if you ever want Harness Technology to install these tools for you and show you how to use them, we’re happy to do so if you live in the Salem, Oregon area.

Click here to download Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware

We’ve been installing CCleaner on client computers for years. In a nutshell, it keeps things running very smoothly and keeps your PC computer running efficiently. As Piriform, the developer of CCleaner, puts it:

CCleaner is the number-one tool for cleaning your Windows PC. It protects your privacy online and makes your computer faster and more secure. Easy to use and a small, fast download.

We concur.

Maintaining your computer means more than just blasting out the dust with compressed air in a can (although that’s also a great thing to do from time-to-time). It means taking care of it from a software standpoint as well. That’s where CCleaner comes in. We use it for the initial cleanup of client computers because it will hammer out many issues before we even get into the malware and virus scanning.

Cleaning Up Unnecessary Files and Caches

When you first open CCleaner, you’ll see a long checklist of items. For most people, leaving them at the default settings is sufficient. If you want to make any changes, be sure to examine the options under both the Windows and Applications tabs. Some people like to uncheck the Cookies checkbox because it retains their settings on various websites. It’s a safer bet to let CCleaner clear them out, but if you are really stuck on saving your cookies, we highly recommend that you do some serious spy/mal/adware checking after running CCleaner. Check out Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware and SpyBot Search & Destroy to handle those tasks for you. Also, if you don’t want to lose any saved passwords, you might want to uncheck the Saved Passwords checkbox for each browser you regularly use. It’s more secure to let CCleaner delete them and just remember them yourself, but not everyone is comfortable with that.

Clicking the Analyze button starts CCleaner on its way to examining your system for things that can be removed safely. After it shows you what it wants to remove, you can decide if there’s anything you want to keep. Then click the Run Cleaner button and let CCleaner do its magic.

Registry Cleaner

CCleaner has its own built-in registry cleaner. Just click the Registry icon on the left vertical menu, then click the Scan for Issues button. After it shows you all the problems it finds, click the Fix Selected Issues button. CCleaner will ask if you want to backup the changes — please do it! Tampering with the Windows Registry is not something to take lightly, so do yourself a favor and back it up when CCleaner asks. That said, we’ve never had a problem after running the Registry cleaner in CCleaner.

Startup Review

Under the Tools section, you’ll find a Startup button. Click that to see what programs are loading when you first start Windows. You may be surprised when you see how many programs are there. Disabling unnecessary programs from this list can increase your boot-up speed significantly. But be careful not to disable anything critical! A good rule of thumb is to not change anything you don’t recognize or can’t identify. However, when in doubt or if you just want to satisfy your curiosity, you can search for items in the startup list at Bleeping Computer.

Generally safe items to disable in this list usually have to do with preloading software, like Adobe updaters, Quicktime Task loaders and the like. As stated previously, however, don’t remove anything you might actually use or anything that is important.

Other Features

Check out the other sections of CCleaner to find more useful tools. We particularly like the Settings in the Options area, where you can specify how many passes to make during file deletion (the more passes, the better security), which drives to include, whether or not to wipe free space and other miscellaneous settings.

In Conclusion

No PC computer should be without CCleaner. However, in order for it to be effective, you need to update and run it occasionally. We recommend putting your computer on a weekly maintenance routine that includes CCleaner, among other things. As part of our IT Services, we install CCleaner as a crucial step in our “5-Step Maintenance Program”.

Click here to download CCleaner

Here are four popular services we use regularly, listed in descending order of our preference.

Google Apps

If you have your own domain(s) and would like free email, calendar, document collaboration, online storage, message groups, contact management and oh, so much more, you need Google Apps. In fact, we love it so much that we offer free Google Apps setup and configuration for any and all of our website clients. You can have up to 10 users for free and you may just find that you never open a Microsoft Office program ever again.

Find out more about Google Apps

iDrive

Unlike other services like Minus and Dropbox, iDrive also has a nice backup utility you can download and install on your Windows computer. You can schedule backups and specify exactly what folders you want to send to your iDrive account. It’s actually very painless. We use it in addition to local backups, so we always have a backup somewhere just in case we have a worst case scenario type of day. Of course, you can also selectively store specific files there, too.

Find out more about iDrive

Minus

We’ve just gotten started with Minus after having used Dropbox since about the time they launched. So far, we prefer the Minus website, downloadable utility and overall usability. You start with 10GB for free and you get an additional 1GB for each referral who signs up for the free service (Dropbox only gives you 256MB per referral).

Find out more about Minus

Dropbox

The similarities between Dropbox and Minus are mostly cosmetic, although our experience has shown that uploads to Minus is a bit faster. Otherwise, however, it’s just a matter of getting used to the interface. Even though we’ve placed Dropbox in the fourth position in this article, we still love it and highly recommend it.

Find out more about Dropbox