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4 solutions to avoid having a "Website under construction" forever

Written by Jean-Michel Marcotte | 2 May 2012 | 0

Ever seen a website showing “Under construction” during a couple of months ? Impossible to say no.

Company managers often have the reflex of creating a temporary page allowing potential visitors to get their contact information and to know that something will be up eventually.

A very simple tool should help in making the most of this situation by gathering contact information from potential customers and creating hype around the upcoming platform: the temporary registration page. It basically consists of temporary page to harvest email addresses of people interested in learning about future developments of the company.

We're proposing several interesting solutions that can solve this problem very quickly.

Launch Effect

A free solution to build beautiful temporary registration pages, Launch Effect provides a URL to share with your friends. The main problem is that their solution is based on Wordpress, so you have to download and install Wordpress before. If "Installing a Wordpress blog" is a phrase that scares you, you should rather opt for one of the next solutions.

KickoffLabs

KickoffLabs is another alternative to a simple “site under construction” page. This solution offers many different features and customization is available for non-technical people who want a simple solution. If you do not want see their company logo or create multiple pages, it however quickly falls into a paid solution. Their solution is also equipped with an API to further customize your page.

LaunchRock

LaunchRock also allows you to create nice temporary pages online. Their system is made to go online very quickly, by downloading a wallpaper image and adding some text. The customization possibilities are however limited. Lauchrock is also equipped with an API, can import your contacts for sending emails and has native viral sharing capabilities.

My Beta List

I would suggest opting for My Beta List but they are still in beta stage. So you can give them your name and email to stay tuned ;-)

 

Tags: landing page, outils web, page temporaire, site web en construction, website under construction,

Category: Web

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Google Apps : the go-to email solution for SMEs

Written by Jean-Michel Marcotte | 10 April 2012 | 0

All small and medium businesses should know about and consider using Google Apps for their email management. For up to 10 users, the solution is free and for more e-mail addresses, costs are very reasonable at around $5 per user per month.

What Google Apps is

In short, Google Apps is a cloud-based solution allowing business managers to create and delete email addresses for the company. It is one of many services offered by Google for businesses, after Adwords. It's extends to being an office application suite similar to Microsoft's Office but with emails as its central point.   Companies that want to register need to authenticate their domain name in order to send and receive from it, and eventually use the whole cloud-based application suite under the company's umbrella. It allows all the employees to use Gmail as an email client software without using an @gmail address. The migration process is not very complex and there are many benefits depending on the technological habits of the company switching.

Advantages

- Benefit from Gmail as the email client solution but still be able to use Outlook, Mail by Apple, Thunderbird or any other email client. Google Apps can work with POP or IMAP.  - Accessing the complete Google application suite with a company email: Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc. - Using the calendar is a definitive plus. It works impressively well and integrates with any device in a very simple way. - No need to manage a physical or remote server for emails, as is the case for Microsoft Exchange. 

Disadvantages

- Ads in your email client. As it is the case for the basic Gmail interface, Gmail under Google Apps is also filled with ads. It can still be eliminated by using Outlook or another client.  - The uncertain future for the service. Many signs show that Google will not make it a core component in their future growth strategy mainly since Larry Page stepped in as CEO.  - Data exposure to Google. If your very concerned about the location of your email data and do not trust Google much, the idea of sharing with them and having them hosting your data might not please you so much either. For Canadian companies, it's also worth noting that your customers, partners or perhaps even your company might not be legally comfortable with having sensitive data physically hosted in the US. 

Tags: Cloud, Email client, Google Apps , Logiciel de courriels, Outils, Outlook, PME,

Category: Free stuff

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The impact of Google + for you or your business

Written by Jean-Michel Marcotte | 16 January 2012 | 2

Last week, Google announced that results from Google+ will be more prominent in its search engine. This can have a significant impact on results when people type in your name or the name of your company.

 What is this about?
Google said on its official blog that its goal is to help users find the best results on the web, not just web pages, but the results published by people we know and with whom we already share other data. They therefore include three important elements: 1 - personal results: results that come from your own network on Google+ 2 - profiles: Google+ profiles of individuals who are part of your network will be increasingly present in the search results, and even in the 'auto-complete' search engine 3 - personal profiles and company profiles: profiles of individuals who are not in your network (and who are willing to publicly share their profile) will be increasingly present. The other important issue for business managers is that the pages on Google+ will also have a growing place in the search results. These pages are the Google+ equivalent of Facebook pages.

The response from the community
Reactions of the technology community are not very favorable. Inevitably, Twitter feels left out and considers it bad news for the Internet in general. The same tone was adopted by a journalist of the popular techno blog Gizmodo, who claims to have changed its default search engine to Bing. In addition, Google is under scrutiny from the FTC. The Commission would be accusing it of using its dominant position in the search market to advantage its own product and then close the door to other social networks.

What it means for you
1 –  No matter what the community says, this new functionality will be active from now on and will have a growing importance. It is therefore essential, if you want to appear correctly in search results that you have a profile on Google+.
2 - If you have a business or an organization/cause, you should seriously consider creating a page on the network. Your address, your website and your services will be found more easily in the most widely used search engine.
3 - If you want to benefit from this new tool and find it cool, it becomes even more important to have an account and interact on the new social network. On the other hand, if you are already on Facebook and Twitter, and would like to benefit from these features, I advise you to encourage Wajam, a growing Montreal-based company that developed an excellent application to show results from your other social networks directly in Google search results.

Some links:
The announcement on the Official Google Blog
Post on Gizmodo
Create a page on Google +
FTC concerns
Wajam  

Tags: Branding personnel, Google+, médias sociaux, Page Facebook, Page Google+, twitter,

Category: Web Marketing

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Calculateur de versements hypothécaires canadien

Written by David Grégoire | 16 November 2010 | 0

Voilà:

function paiements(AnnualIntRate, Period, Amount, PPay){
PrValue = Amount;
IntRate = (Math.pow((1+AnnualIntRate/2),(2/PPay)) - 1)

Pa = (PrValue * IntRate) / (1 - Math.pow (1 + IntRate, - (Period * PPay)))
return Pa;
}

aux deux semaines
console.log(paiements(0.045, 25, 325000, 24));

au mois
console.log(paiements(0.045, 25, 325000, 12));

accéléré deux semaines
console.log(paiements(0.045, 25, 325000, 26));

par semaine
console.log(paiements(0.045, 25, 325000, 52));

Tags: calculatrice hypothécaire, hypothèque, java, versements hypothécaires,

Category: Free stuff

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