https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/feed Short how-to articles for better websites (c) 2018 en https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/adding-google-contacts-the-easy-way If you are a GMail user, keeping a Google Contact list is essential and having all your contacts easily available makes life much easier. You can always open Google Contacts and manually add a contact, but there are much easier ways. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/adding-google-contacts-the-easy-way Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/chatgpt If you have not yet heard of ChatGPT, where have you been!! ChatGPT is an advanced bot that interacts with us in a conversational way and can either answer questions or generate almost any kind of text. We are hearing everywhere how ChatGPT will complement the skills we have as humans or, in some cases, even replace us. You may groan at another bot, but if ChatGPT can be as good as a human, I welcome it. Not all human help desk people have met my expectations. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/chatgpt Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/mirror-with-roku Screen mirroring might be one of those handy computer tricks that are convenient but that you just never got around to trying. But mirroring, meaning where you duplicate what is on one screen to another screen, is probably a lot easier than your thought. If you have a ROKU device connected to your TV or built-in Roku for your TV, screen mirroring is not at all difficult. And with millions of ROKU devices in the wild, you may already have what you need. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/mirror-with-roku Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/is-alexa-a-failure I love my Amazon Echo. Somehow I can never find my phone. "Alexa, Find my phone" always comes to the rescue. When I am not driving, "Alexa, play KWMU," , KABC, KDEF, KXYZ, etc. is the only way I listen to the radio . However, Amazon has announced mass layoffs of 10,000 people with a large share coming from the Worldwide Digital division that houses Alexa. Although the Echo device line is one of the best selling items on Amazon and Amazon reports a billion with a "B" interactions per week on Alexa, Amazon is losing serious money in this division. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/is-alexa-a-failure Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/google-filters-keep-clean-inbox If your inbox has dozens, if not hundreds of emails, this is usually a sign that you are using your inbox as a to-do list. Resist the temptation and use a real task manager. Task or to-do list managers abound, paid or free. Free up your inbox and archive emails as they arrive to the proper task category and let your own priorities take the lead. Leaving those emails in your inbox is just a constant non-welcome reminder of things undone. Use your task manager to choose your own priorities and to not neglect important tasks just because there is an email in your inbox representing someone else's hot project. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/google-filters-keep-clean-inbox Tue, 11 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/google-drive-tips There are many choices for virtual drives, but Google Drive gets an A+ rating from me and it is free, up to 15GB. Your computer probably has a C drive and a D drive. Open File Explorer to see your drives and folders. If you connect a thumb drive, also called a flash drive, File Explorer will show you that drive too. If you also install the Google Drive app on your computer, you now have a G drive in addition to the others. The G drive is virtual meaning that it is completely in the cloud. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/google-drive-tips Thu, 08 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/fake-reviews According to stats, fewer than 10% of us write reviews for products, although almost all of us read reviews. Because reviews sell products, Amazon often follows up my purchases with an email asking me to rate my experience with a seller. Not just a 1-5 star rating, but a headline, an essay on how I liked or disliked the product, and a further dissertation on how I used it. Amazon suggests that I upload a photo or video presumably showing myself delighting in the product. Really, Amazon! That's a big ask. Just give me some Facebook options: I like it. I love it. It brought me to tears. What a joke! Unfortunately, A 2020 study found that 42% of the reviews on Amazon were fake or unreliable, causing consumers to buy shoddier products. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/fake-reviews Mon, 08 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/bots-everywhere-twitter-google More than 2/3 of internet traffic is now bots - those little software bits that handle gazillions of repetitive tasks and live on the internet. Many bots are for good purposes and many bots have less than good, even malicious intentions. Google bots crawl your website looking for new material to index its search engine thus performing a valuable service for us. This is one of the good ones. The kind of bots that simulate real people are sometimes malicious bots. For example, multiple countries have accused Russia of using bots to influence elections and spread lies about candidates. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/bots-everywhere-twitter-google Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/google-screenings-guarantees When you need a plumber, do you want more from your search than just a listing? Google has you covered. It offers Google Screened and Google Guaranteed for service providers who can make the grade and who sign up with Local Service Ads (LSAs). Unlike Google My Business free listings, LSA's are not free to the service provider. The service provider pays per lead where a lead is usually a phone call made through the LSA. My first search sample was for "real estate agent." ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/google-screenings-guarantees Mon, 16 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/youtube-clips Sometimes you want to share a YouTube video, but only the funny part or the part you found most useful. It's now a piece of cake. YouTube shows a "Clip" icon next to the "Share" icon allowing you to clip out up to 60 seconds and share it on social media. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/youtube-clips Fri, 15 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/google-descriptions When your business publishes a webpage, you want people to see it. If by art or luck, you got your webpage near the front page of a Google search, users still have to choose your page over all the others they find there. They will pick your page - or not - based on the title and the mini description underneath. These descriptions represent Google's best attempt to tell people what this page is about and how it can help them. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/google-descriptions Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/Gmail-smart-compose Smart Compose arrived at Gmail in 2018, but despite its promising moniker has not yet composed a single paragraph for me. But as an autocomplete system, it works surprisingly well. Type "How" and gmail will add the words in dimmer type "are you?" Click the tab to accept or just keep typing what you really meant, such as "How was the game?" We are all familiar with "predictive text" everywhere these days, not to mention "autocorrect," on which hinge many priceless texts. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/Gmail-smart-compose Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/look-better-on-zoom Lots of us are disappointed when we see ourselves on Zoom. Especially during nighttime Zooms, we see dark shadows across our faces and the background can turn black. Adding a ring light costs little and is a nice improvement. A decent sized ring light placed directly in front of you is ideal and will help to light up your face, making your zoom presence more appealing. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/look-better-on-zoom Sat, 15 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/multiple-copy-paste Some of us get so used to the old ways of doing things in Windows that we don't check out the newer ways. I am that person. However, copy/paste is so fundamental in everything we do on our computers that we really need to start using the clipboard history tool found in Windows 10 and Windows 11 to let us "copy" and "paste" multiple items. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/multiple-copy-paste Wed, 15 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/image-copy-paste-problems Have you ever copied an image from a website, but could not paste it into an email? You right click the image and select copy, but when you paste it, you just see a blank placeholder. The problem may be your email client. Your email client is the app that you use to compose, read, and send email. Some popular email clients are GMail, Apple iPhone, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/image-copy-paste-problems Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/new-google-drive If you had been using Google's backup and sync, you recently - October, 2021, have been forced to move to the new Google Drive for Desktop that combines features of previous Google products. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/new-google-drive Mon, 11 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/add-video-to-website If you don't have a full-time professional website team, you might think it is too hard to add custom video to your website. But it is easily done with Windows10 video editor and Youtube. Video howtos improve sales, software products benefit from screen recordings that capture the steps to use the software, and videos always attract attention. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/add-video-to-website Sat, 11 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/most-popular-brower If you are a typical web user, you are using Chrome. Worldwide and on all platforms, Chrome captures 65% of the market. On desktop, that number rises to 69%, and on mobile, it descends a point to 64%. On desktops, there hardly is a second place with Safari, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and Internet Explorer all in single digits. For mobile, Safari comes in at a respectable second place with 24% of users, representing the world's iPhone users.... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/most-popular-brower Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/voice-to-text Voice commands are not just for Alexa, Cortana or Siri. Have you noticed receiving a lot of very long texts without all the shortcuts - for example "u" instead of "you"? It's possible that your text sender was using voice to text. On your phone's virtual keyboard, click the microphone icon to start dictating your text message and click again to stop. When you reach the end of a sentence, just say "period" to add that punctuation mark. Or you may want to say "question mark" or even "exclamation point"! ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/voice-to-text Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/search-old-emails-on-gmail Gmail has an easy, intuitive interface, but people often have difficulty finding that email from six months ago where you only remember a certain word. Also, there are a few "gotchas" in searching. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/search-old-emails-on-gmail Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/tips-for-google-drive Sending attachments by email has been problematic for a long time now. Not only is it often risky to open attachments, but attachments can be too large or too many to send. .It doesn't make sense to send an album of photos or a collection of spread sheets by email when you can easily copy them to the "cloud" and share the link.... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/tips-for-google-drive Wed, 14 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/pin-websites-in-browser Modern browsers have so much power these days that a lot of that capability slips right past us, unnoticed. Do you begin your morning opening up your go-to tabs and lining them up on the left side? There is an easier way, whether you are using Chrome, Firefox or Edge. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/pin-websites-in-browser Thu, 11 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/facebook-features Facebook decorates your newsfeed with stars and checkboxes and offers opportunities to take more actions by clicking horizontal elllpses, also known as dot-dot-dots. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/facebook-features Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/Google-searches-in-2020 Google has published a compilation of the year in search for 2020. As you can imagine, three of the top 5 searches in the United States included the word "coronavirus" with the top result being "election results" and the top person search was "Joe Biden." The top "how to" was " how to cut men's hair at home" and the top "near me" was "covid testing near me." Could anything be more predictable? What a change from 2019 when the most vital thing we had to search for was " Disney Plus" and on the top " Where is" was "Where is the Super Bowl this year." ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/Google-searches-in-2020 Sun, 27 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/comparing-collections-bookmarks You probably have noticed that Firefox and Chrome show you "bookmarks" and the various Microsoft browsers, including Microsoft Edge,  show you "favorites." Confusingly, Safari allows you to choose either to bookmark a site or to mark it as a favorite. Adding to these systems, we also have "collections," which can be confused with the previous two schemes. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/comparing-collections-bookmarks Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/ideas-for-website-content Are you running dry for ideas on adding content to your website? News always makes great content and a headline of "Special Savings" is a winner. If these don't work for your website, you might find it harder to come up with good content to keep your site fresh. But there is a surefire solution and it always includes a number or a superlative. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/ideas-for-website-content Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/does-your-company-need-a-mobile-app It seems that every website you visit on your phone also has an app. On your computer, you open your web browser and navigate to amazon.com, walmart.com, facebook.com, or whereever you want to go. You don't have separate apps for Amazon, Walmart, Facebook,and every other company or service you might ever want to visit. However, on your phone, it's just the opposite. The browser is not enough, you need a different app for each service. Or do you? In most cases, probably not. I am perfectly able to buy anything I want on amazon.com using a browser, either on my phone or on my laptop. A well-designed website will detect the size of your screen and adjust the layout accordingly. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/does-your-company-need-a-mobile-app Sun, 13 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/gmail-tips If you are that person with 300 emails in your inbox, you are probably using your inbox as your to-do list. In general, this is a bad idea. However, there are ways to bring email clutter under control. Since 2004, Gmail has been an important email provider and there are more than 1.5 billion Gmail accounts.If you use one of those accounts, these tips can help. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/gmail-tips Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/market-with-podcasts For many small service businesses, straight-out advertising does little to attract customers because people don't buy services from strangers. People ask around. They look for recommendations. People are looking for someone who is authoritative.... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/market-with-podcasts Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/generic-TLDs-alternative-top-level-domains The internet has moved beyond .com, .net, .org, and .gov. Now, we have a bunch of Top Level Domains (TLDs) to choose from. When choosing a domain name, should you choose one of the new generic TLDs? ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/generic-TLDs-alternative-top-level-domains Thu, 04 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/reinforce-marketing-with-content Embedding the right keywords will help propel customers to your website. But where to put all those keywords? Good content provides the niches to tuck in those keywords and make your site and your company visible to a wider audience. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/reinforce-marketing-with-content Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/covid-19-Google-Place Now is a good time to update your Google Place to let your customers know if your services have changed due to COVID-19. Google Places for Business are those extra search results that appear on a Google map when you do any Google search. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/covid-19-Google-Place Thu, 02 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/search-bar-features On February 5, this year, Microsoft experienced a snafu that caused the search bar, one of Window's core features, to literally go blank.  ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/search-bar-features Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/zero-click-google-searches If you find yourself clicking less often on google searches, you are not alone. A fan of the St. Louis ice hockey team need only search the term "St. Louis Blues" to get a panel showing a schedule of upcoming games and has no need to click the Blues website. A traveler need only search for "convert dollars" to directly get a form to convert dollars to Euros, Rupees, Mexican Pesos, or any other currency he might want. Google's search is becoming more like a walled garden and less like a gateway. If your business is in certain fields, Google is certainly shrinking your marketing opportunities. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/zero-click-google-searches Mon, 27 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/using-gmail-offline If you are a regular user of Gmail on a laptop, you normally need an internet connection to use it. However, Gmail has a little known Offline option. This allows you to continue to read and compose emails without an internet connection. When you finish composing and send the email, the email goes to a newly visible Outbox folder that stores your new emails until you regain internet access. Also, all your recent archived emails will now be accessible to you. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/using-gmail-offline Thu, 26 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/signoff-sleep-lock If you are a Windows 10 user, you have a number of choices of what to do when you step away from your PC. If you work in a busy office and go for some coffee, you want to be sure that no one passing by stops to view your work-- or modify it. If you are working from home, you may need to ensure that young family members don't mangle or delete your important Word documents. In most cases, the solution is to trigger the Sleep function to hide your applications. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/signoff-sleep-lock Mon, 25 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/google-mixed-content Keeping websites up-to-date can be harder than creating them in the first place. Things change on our side and things change on Google's side. We now spend 90% of our time browsing on secure websites, but there often remain non-secure images, charts, videos, and other pieces here and there where the link still starts with "http://", instead of "https://." ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/google-mixed-content Mon, 07 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/synchronizing-files You need access to your files no matter where you are - at your office computer, your home computer, your phone, or your tablet. When you need to finish work at home, you don't have to carry your laptop home or email a file to yourself before leaving the office. You don't need to send it to Dropbox. You don't have to use web based applications. Instead, there are easy free options for synchronizing folders. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/synchronizing-files Thu, 05 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/progressive-web-apps Most websites are now "responsive" websites. That is, the sites are equally usable no matter on which device you view them. You can view them whether you have a phone, a tablet, or a full sized monitor. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/progressive-web-apps Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/google-search-changes Google search results used to be so simple. Sponsored results at the top and then organic, that is, non-paid, results following. If you weren't paying attention, you probably didn't even notice the changes as they crept into the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). As a web page owner, you worked on your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to get to the top of the organic results and may have also bid on some keywords to get listed at the top. But now organic results can get pushed way, way, way down the page and paid results have to compete with Google itself. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/google-search-changes Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/visualize-with-word-cloud Sometimes, we just need a fresh look of our website. Maybe it's time to flash back to word clouds. A word cloud will give you a visual representation of all the text on your homepage. It makes text bigger or smaller depending on how often the text appears and presents it in a colorful format. You will quickly see your keywords. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/visualize-with-word-cloud Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/how-does-voice-search-affect-you By 2020, 30% of all website sessions will be conducted without a screen. This includes questions asked to Google Assistant, Cortana, Siri, and Alexa. Even direct Google searches are more and more often being made with a voice search. Just click the microphone icon in the search box and speak into your computer or device. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/how-does-voice-search-affect-you Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/windows-7-support-ends If you are one of the 40% of PC users still running Windows 7, time is running out. As of January 14, 2020, all free security updates will end, although Microsoft will offer a subscription plan for security updates for a short period of time. Without security updates, your PC will become vulnerable to viruses and other security risks. Once a PC vulnerability becomes known, agile, malevolent hackers quickly take advantage of the situation. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/windows-7-support-ends Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/how-to-use-video-on-website You can increase your SEO with videos because good videos increase the time visitors stay on your website. "Time on site" is an important ranking factor for Google. However, video can be expensive and not always a panacea. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/how-to-use-video-on-website Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/why-move-to-ssl Even if you are not accepting credit cards on your website, you now need SSL. SSL means that you have installed an SSL certificate on your website and that all information transferred between a browser and your web server is secure. It cannot be intercepted. In the browser, you should see "https" instead of "http" on the address bar of your browser. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/why-move-to-ssl Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/using-feedly-for-competitor-research Competitor research is always useful. Do you "friend" your competitors' Facebook pages? Do you take an occasional look at competitors' websites? We can learn a lot by listening to our competitors using online tools and one of the best tools is still the news reader. Feedly is an example of a popular news reader. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/using-feedly-for-competitor-research Wed, 31 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/speed-up-your-site-with-compression Does your website load quickly, or does it hang before displaying? Slow load time is the fastest way to lose visitors to your site. Big image files could be the problem, but other files can also be slow to load, especially if you use popular toolkits like Bootstrap. There are many ways to reduce file size, but one of the easiest to implement is "compression". ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/speed-up-your-site-with-compression Tue, 25 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/adding-favicons-to-your-site When you open multiple tabs in your browser, you notice that each tab is identified by its favicon. Favicon = Favorites icon. Here is the icon for walmart.com. @*... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/adding-favicons-to-your-site Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/mobile-first Mobile First affects anyone who has a website. Mobile First has two meanings. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/mobile-first Sat, 14 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/how-to-text-from-your-computer Some of our customers just respond better to texts than to emails. But sometimes typing that text on a computer would be just so much easier and here's how to do it. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/how-to-text-from-your-computer Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/tracking-click-events We track page views to know if our website is reaching our audience. It's good to know which pages are getting traffic. But do you wonder if people are clicking your links that don't take them to another page on your site? For example, are they clicking on links to external pages? ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/tracking-click-events Sun, 29 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/get-a-quick-seo-score Here is a quick method to score your website on SEO. First install the Chrome Lighthouse extension and then navigate to your home page. Choose the SEO option and run. The Lighthouse extension will run your page through a series of audits and give you a score with 100 being the best possible score. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/get-a-quick-seo-score Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/is-your-website-accessible The Americans with Disabilities Act aims to ensure that persons with disabilities have full access to public accommodations. Does your website also accommodate persons with disabilities? In particular, does your website accommodate users who are blind or have limited vision? ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/is-your-website-accessible Sun, 25 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/should-you-advertise-on-facebook Social media are a major force in the world that can provide us with much advertising benefit. And Facebook is the king of social media. Not only that, but Facebook ads are impressively cheap. Yes, many of us, including your customers, spend an absurd amount of time on Facebook and this is a marketing opportunity for you. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/should-you-advertise-on-facebook Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/easiest-way-to-manage-an-email-contact-list There are so many ways to send group emails now that we sometimes forget about the older, simpler ways to do it. Email sent using Mail Chimp, and similar services is a great way to contact customers and potential customers who have subscribed to your mailing list. And, of course, who needs email when we can communicate through social media like Facebook and Twitter? Yahoo Groups and Google Groups came before Facebook and Twitter and are still very effective. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/easiest-way-to-manage-an-email-contact-list Tue, 05 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/customer-call-and-no-Internet-a-solution We often need to display our website pages to customers using our laptops. Are we stuck if our internet connection fails or if there is no internet connection? Definitely not. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/customer-call-and-no-Internet-a-solution Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/quickly-snip-content-for-any-use Suppose you want to email a friend about an author event. You could copy and paste the text, but it is so much faster, cleaner, and readable to just grab a snippet and have a nice, formatted message. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/quickly-snip-content-for-any-use Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/copy-from-your-website-directly-to-your-powerpoint You don't need to recreate content that is already on your website to make wonderful PowerPoint presentations for your customers. Skip making screenshots and doing special editing in Photoshop or some editor you would rather not take the time to learn. Do it in one easy step with PowerPoint. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/copy-from-your-website-directly-to-your-powerpoint Tue, 22 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/does-your-brochure-website-need-more-hits What websites do you visit most often? I'll bet it's for sites that you can "use". You go to Google Maps to get directions, to Facebook and Twitter to communicate with your friends and followers, to Amazon to buy something. You probably also go to several news sites like CNN, the Huffington Post, or the Wall Street Journal websites to read general news content and you probably go to some specialty sites for business or personal reasons. For example, maybe you read the Car and Driver blog for car news or the Motley Fool for investing news. Probably the last thing you do is to go to a site that just lists its services. These are sometimes referred to as "brochure sites". ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/does-your-brochure-website-need-more-hits Tue, 18 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/contact-form-or-email-link How do your website users contact you? Experts used to recommend, and sometimes still do recommend, a contact form to avoid exposing your email to spam. However, with today's better spam filters, we are free to worry less about spam and more about the easier way for our customers to contact us. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/contact-form-or-email-link Sat, 10 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/help-google-index-your-website-with-structured-data The problem with search engines is that they are not human. Well, almost, but not really. Why not give them a little help with structured data markup? Here is an example. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/help-google-index-your-website-with-structured-data Sat, 22 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/how-does-my-site-look-on-a-tablet-or-phone Did you know it is easy to see how your site looks on other devices? Here's how you do it using a Chrome browser on your computer. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/how-does-my-site-look-on-a-tablet-or-phone Sat, 11 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/understanding-google-tools-and-ghost-traffic ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/understanding-google-tools-and-ghost-traffic Mon, 09 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/tips-on-getting-your-site-noticed Most website owners have heard of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. SEO is a process of getting your website to appear at the top of the free or organic listings of Google Search, Bing Search, and other search engines. There are several steps you can take to improve your ranking on the Search Engine Results Page, also known as SERP. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/tips-on-getting-your-site-noticed Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT https://todaydata.com/images/icon_as_png.pnghttps://todaydata.com/images/favicon.icohttps://todaydata.com https://todaydata.com/story/when-to-update Check these three items to see if now is the time. ... info@todaydata.com (Cheryl Hammond) https://todaydata.com/story/when-to-update Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT