Kid’s Party World  features a custom search and search result presentation that returns both product categories and individual products in the results list. Given the large number of themed party products they sell, this is a quick way to find “all things Batman” for a Batman-themed party, making party planning that much easier.

The DaVallia recently added the Profits Plus Sitemaps/Google Merchant Feed module to the site. This site offers beautiful things from furniture to jewelry to artwork to gifts – well worth a visit.

Panda Pencil  added three-color custom imprinting to some of its pencils. Select Carpenter Pencils to see how that works. My favorite thing on this site, though, is the Zoom Write Pen that looks like a car. The wheels really turn, the doors open, and it even self-propels. How cool is that?

The Music Zoo recently moved its site from a pair of dedicated servers with another hosting provider to a single Cirrus server with HTN. They report the site is much faster than it was and they are saving money, too.

Keep these in mind to help prevent unnecessary downtime and last minute emergencies:

SSL Certificate
Is your SSL Certificate about to expire? If it is, don’t forget to renew. Site visitors who find an expired SSL Certificate warning are less inclined to complete their on-line purchases.

Renew early and save yourself trouble (and lost sales) down the road.. While you’re at it, consider renewing your domain name at the same time. Keeping the dates synchronized will help you stay organized and you’ll have one less thing to think about!

If you host with HTN on a Cirrus plan, your primary domain name is included in your hosting and will be renewed automatically. Any extra domains you  have registered will need periodic renewal.

Keeping Kids Safe on the Internet

We love watching our kids play with cool toys while they explore the world, learning new things and making wonderful discoveries. More importantly, keeping our kids are safe while they expand their horizons gives us peace of mind.

We’ve put together a list of several best practices and recommendations that will help ensure your children’s’ safety while enjoying all that the Internet has to offer:

1.  Protect your devices with OpenDNS
   OpenDNS tops our list since it protects all of the devices on your network by operating at the DNS (Domain Name Service) level. As long as a tablet, smartphone or computer uses your WiFi connection, you can block access to sites hosting adult content, malware, etc.
   To use OpenDNS, all you need do is change the DNS settings in your cable modem or router to use OpenDNS instead of your ISP (Internet Service Provider). Though it sounds geeky and complicated, it’s not difficult. Best of all, it’s free. Go here to see how to get started.
2. Enable parental controls
   There are parental controls that are already built into your tablet or smartphone. If you have an iPhone or iPad, take a look at iOS: Understanding Restrictions on Apple’s web site.
   Android devices do not have as many capabilities built in, but How to Setup Parental Controls on Android will show you how to lock the Market app so that you can control which apps your children download and install.
3. Install a third party parental controls application
   No matter how hard we try, we can’t hover 24/7 to monitor what our kids are doing online. Parental Controls applications are there when we can’t be.
   There are a wealth of good ones available on the Android Market and via the iTunes store. A quick search query will yield many excellent choices in the lists of results. While none are foolproof, most do a pretty good job at keeping precocious junior hackers from visiting sites that they shouldn’t.
4. Talk about it
   Saving the best for last, talk to your children about online safety and create a set of rules and agreements together. These conversations will help them understand the importance of online safety, but also reinforces the responsible use of a smartphone or tablet.

Discussion topics

Approved websites:This is a great starting point for establishing initial boundaries as to what websites are ok for them to visit.

Online spending:Setting rules and agreements with your kids will help them develop a deeper understanding of budgeting and self-control when they shop in the iTunes Store, the Android Market or inside of a game.

Downloads: Just as you have rules about what your kids can bring into the house from the great outdoors, you can set rules for what apps your kids can download.

Location: You can also glean a lot of security by simply telling your children that the device must only be used in a communal part of the house, never in their bedroom and never with the door closed. This will let you casually see what is on the screen and hear what comes out of the speakers.

As a bonus, when you can see what your child is doing, you have the chance to join the fun, even if only for a moment. Share a smile or a joke about the game they are playing. Have fun poking fun at the baddie on the screen. Neither an iPad nor an Android can replace your love but both can open new opportunities for you to be with your kids.

P.S. I almost forgot to mention: Electronics do not make good bath toys.

Google Analytics is a free suite of tools that help you analyze your website’s traffic, write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing program, and create higher-converting websites. If you have an account, but haven’t logged into your account for a while, you might want to take a few minutes and take a look around. Google has made some remarkable improvements in the design and reporting features:

1. A redesigned and streamlined user interface makes it easier to navigate, which was a major complaint about previous versions.

2. You can now create up to 20 customized dashboards (which boggles the brain a bit), for creating reports, keeping them organized and making them easier to find.

3. New reporting options including Pivot Tables and both Term Clouds and Keyword Clouds help you understand how site visitors found your website.

4. Detailed mobile device reporting is now available. The screenshot below shows the report screen with the graph at the top and the detailed report by device type at the bottom. To view a larger version, click here.

5. Google has completely redesigned the old Funnel Reports and created features that now allow you to more clearly visualize how users experience your site. These new reports also help you better identify navigation and bounce issues on your site. To view a larger version,
click here.

6. They’ve also added easy-to-use Multi-channel Funnel Reports so you can track every method through which the user accessed your site – not just the most recent one. This is cool in itself and might yield some information on your users’ device preferences or on
your site’s usability with some devices.

7. Rounding out the new reporting features is the Social Engagement Report which tracks the social interactions that your visitors had while visiting your site. Did they like/send, +1 or Tweet your page? You can also read their comments and feedback that they shared with others.

8. And, lastly, for keeping a better handle on all your Google-based activities, Google Analytics now integrates with Google Webmaster Tools and AdSense and you can navigate among all three.

The best indicator that your site is doing well is, of course, sales if you do e-commerce, or traffic if you don’t sell. But knowing why it is doing well is enormously useful for making decisions on what effort to put into your website, and where.

Sometimes the truths the data reveal are surprising!

If the term, “high-availability website” makes you think of companies the size of Amazon.com, never fear: as a small-to-medium business, there are many ways to make your website highly available. Best of all, it is possible to do so without breaking the bank.

Just what does high availability mean? It means simply making your website available most of the time. Availability is usually measured in percentages so, for instance, a site which is guaranteed to be up 99.9% of the time (three nines in geek-speak) can be down for 8.76 hours per year. A site with guaranteed uptime of “four nines” (or 99.99%) of uptime can be down for 53 minutes per year. To your website’s visitors, it can occur virtually undetected. It is important that you notice that I wrote “most of the time” and not “all of the time.” Truly non-stop computing is virtually impossible to achieve, is very expensive, and is not justified for most websites.

Small to medium-sized businesses can make their websites highly-available by following these steps:

1. Choose a web hosting company which stresses service over low prices. In the unlikely event that your web server goes down, you will probably receive a better response from a service-oriented hosting company.  Ask hosting companies about how they handle emergency situations and how they will be able to assist you if their servers go down. If you can’t reach them by phone, you should be hesitant to trust them with your business.

2. Make backup copies of your entire website and databases from which you can recover individual files. The vast majority of website downtime results from individual files that are accidentally changed or deleted. Often, the fastest solution is to simply recover the file from the most recent backup. While you are checking on your backups, make sure that they cover more than just the previous night. If someone deletes a critical file on Friday afternoon but you do not discover it until Monday morning, can you still get it back?

3. Consider a cloud server instead of a dedicated server. By moving your web server into “the cloud,” you free yourself from dependence on a specific piece of hardware. If a computer fails or a disk drive fails, your web server can be magically moved to a new computer or a new disk drive. Such a migration usually takes just a few minutes and requires no additional work or cost to you.

4. Consider having a hot backup web server on stand-by. A hot backup contains copies of all of your files and databases and is kept in sync with the master database. If your primary server goes down, some manual intervention may be required (to update DNS records, for instance) but your site will be up and running again very quickly.

Finally, you may want to consider having multiple servers running 100% of the time, with load balancers on the front line. With this architecture, failures of any of the back-end servers are instantly alleviated by the load balancers which simply route all traffic to the servers which are still functioning.