The Web or Internet provides 6 Billion people with ways to connect, through text, audio or video communication.
With such a large audience and so many ways to communicate, the task of fully utilising the Internet can seem daunting, bearing this in mind, AuburnCom, your friendly San Francisco Mac Consultants bring you this series on Web technologies.
1. iChat
As soon as OSX is installed you'll have iChat in your dock and iChat is great, it provides text, audio and video chat using AIM (Aol Instant Messenger Network), because it uses AIM it means you can add all your existing contacts from your AOL buddy List to your iChat account, you can even keep using the AOL Buddy Name that you've used for years.
iChat also supports two other great Messaging systems, Bonjour (Apples Zero Configuration Chat implementation) and Jabber (An open Industry standard IM Protocol used most famously by Google in the Google Talk product).
By setting iChat to open automatically under Login Items in your System preferences, and enabling all three account types (AIM, Bonjour, Jabber) you are instantly able to communicate with friends and family using text, voice or video (if you're lucky enough to have an iSight camera on your Mac.
Put your iChat account name on your Blog or Businesses home page and allow your customers, clients and friends to easily find you when you're online.
2. Skype
iChat is wonderful for Audio and Video Chats with other folks who are using computers, but if you want to be able to dial regular phones around the world, you'll make Skype your second online Communication tool.
Skype is a proprietary piece of Software that installs, runs and operates on all three of the major operating systems in the world, OS X, Linux and Windows. Skype lets you quickly create an account that enables text, voice and video chat with other Skype users around the globe in a similar way to iChat, iChat is superior in several ways, however, Skype has one feature that iChat sorely lacks, dialing regular phone numbers.
Once you're set up on skype, try dialing a standard number like 1-800-moviefone, skype will sometimes provide free calling to or from the united states, or to specific countries like France on Bastille Day, but by default will ask you to be SkypeOut Credit before allowing you to dial standard Telephone Numbers.
Skype is a well established company with millions of users and was recently acquired by eBay, bearing this in mind, go ahead and buy $5 dollars of SkypeOut credit and try calling your Friend in Australia, you'll find the voice quality good, sometimes better than Cell Phone quality and your Call Costs low (averaging a cent per minute to most places).
Using Skype you can cost effectively communicate with family, friends and client's around the globe with little hassle.
Remember to put your skype username on your Blog or Website, Calls between Skype users are FREE, meaning clients reading your page can simply click or drag your skype name to be instantly connected to you (or your free voicemail that Skype also features!)
3. Email
You have iChat and Skype set up and added to your Login Items list under system preferences, meaning everytime your Mac wakes up you are available to your Family, Friends and Clients, whats the next step in communicating with the world?
An email address of your liking, by liking, we mean more than simply the address, we mean that it's a Email address with lots of Room, few restrictions, and, great features. Over the years of the internet, our local ISP's provided us with email addresses, resulting in auburn@indigo.ie, mary@att.net, and bill@bt.net, these email addresses were tied to our home/work computer and we all had computers in two or three locations, the solution to this was quite simple, some smart silicon valley boys created hotmail, where, anyone could make an account, and access or send their mail through a regular web-browser like Netscape or Internet Explorer. This method of accessing email is called 'Web-mail' and has become quite standard for folks when checking their mail, it's a good technique and most ISP's provide webmail access by default to the email accounts that they hand out, i'e Johndoe@sbcglobal.net has an email address with SBC Global but can also sign onto http://www.sbcglobal.com or http://webmail.sbcglobal.com and read and send emails that way.
The importance of explaining the difference between webmail and email is that not all webmail provides true email, wheras all email can be webmail.
Hotmail was bought by Microsoft and became a tamed down version of itself with restrictions that stop large attachments coming in or going out plus a rule that if mail is not checked within 30 days, the mailbox is emptied, such draconian rules that a competitor could easily steal customers, that competitor was Yahoo, who introduced a superior webmail service that has since become the largest email service in the world with 250 million users, yahoo's webmail service is truly great and integrates well with Yahoo's other services like Flickr and Delicious and Upcoming.
Gmail or Googlemail came online about two years ago and was an instant hit thanks to it's simplistic design, wonderous searchability (emails prior to gmail were searchable only by their subject line, Gmail added full text searching to their webmail service, a feature later duplicated by yahoo and most likely Hotmail/Microsoft), gmail is a fantastic email and webmail service, I specify email as Gmail provides full POP access to your mailbox on gmails servers, something that Yahoo and Hotmail do not do, the usefulness of this will become apparent over the course of your emailing adventures.
Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail all feature spam iltering of one kind or the other but I certainly find Gmails to be most useful for me and would recommend their service to anyone looking to upgrade or start a email account.
Gmail also provides the largest of all the services storage space with a whopping 3Gb versus 1Gb in Yahoo Mail and 250Mb with Hotmail, Large storage space means more room for large project or video files and less management issues.
The final method of handling email is also the best,, setting up your own domain, e.g. mywebsite.com or timswebsite.com and setting up you@yourdomain.com as your email address, this method of handling email gives you full power over how much space your mailbox has, for example Dreamhost offers space starting at 160Gb, as well as choice of filtering rules and Spam Protection, Best of all though, is the fact that your clients are fully aware of your awesome web powers and business prowess in securing your own domain, they're very likely to lookuo the website amazingbusiness.com if it comes from Joe@amazingbusiness.com, emails from Joe@gmail.com inspire little or no consumer awareness.
4. Website - Registering your Domain
A website is a fundamental part of a business marketing strategy, Websites provide advertising to 6 billion people around the globe, a scale of advertising inconcievable even in 1982, By setting up your website at a domain of your choice, KensSurfboards.com, you are taking the first step to bringing your company or self into the foreground. Having your website name registered is a good start, many families and individuals in America have signed up for the carterfamily.com or theoreillyfamily.com and thats a good place to be.
Registering your domain is a simple process and should never cost a penny over $9.17 dollars per year, I higly recommend Dreamhost for registering your domain, Godaddy does all the advertising but Dreamhost is a family owned and operated company on the Pacific coast and they provide great service.
5. Building your Website
Building a website nowadays is a dream come true, many years ago websites were built like tapestrires, with content and design interwoven, this worked fine for a while but everybody realised that if content and design were kept seperated, it would be much better, this evolution cam through the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), CSS allowed individual rules to be applied to specific areas of text on an array of individual pages, no longer did one have to specify that the header text on each page would be arial and blue, no all header text would be placed on the page with a simple identifier tag and in the global CSS file for the site, Blue Arial would be specifyed for that identifier tag, this revolutionized web design as designs could change easily and often, some sites now have three or four CSS files and the reader can choose which they'd like applied to the site to make it easiest to read.
The second evolution of Website building came with the release of several open source web applications that provide the foundation and engineering of the site, two very popular open source applications are Wordpress and Joomla.
Both of these are free applications and once installed on your website provide easy ways of adding content, manging content, distributing content (rss) and changing the design.
For those who MUST CODE their website by hand, the text editor of choice for the Mac is of course BBEdit, it's little sibling Textwrangler is also useful for Hand Coding website, as is Apple's own Textedit. For GUI based website Building on a Mac, My strongest recommendation for users goes to Rapidweaver (it is indeed what this site is built on), however Panic Software have recently released an apparently amazing piece of Web development software called Coda, and lastly there is of course Dreamweaver (frowned on my most Web Professionals yet adored by Graphic Design Folks).
6. Social Networking
All of the 'Hip' Sites nowadays feature Social Networking functionality, this refers to the ability to list and manage friends and contacts through a particular website, these websites tend to have an extra function however the sometimes begin as a purely social networking site (e.g. myspace) and the become a multimedia sharing, video watching, picture sharing, instant messaging website (e.g. myspace), other sites that involve social networking are jyte.com (Just you Tell em), corkd.com (A wine lovers website), Flickr (a Photo Sharing Site), Upcoming.org (A social events calendar), Del.ico.us (A Bookmarking Site), youtube.com (A Video sharing site), Twitter (A What are you doing right now Site)
Generally Social Networking sites function similarly to a standard site, but provide you with the ability to add friends or contacts to your profile and keep track and share each others interests or progress.
Social Networking sites are so hot nowadays and any business, individual or politician has got to be involved with one or all of the sites that are on the web at the moment, Howard Dean famously used Friendster to market himself during his 2004 presidential run and Hilary and Barack as well as John McCain have all used Youtube, Myspace and twitter extensively during their 2008 campaign.
Ensure you as an individual or your company can be found on these sites and you'll be ensuring that your customers can find you more easily.