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Why I might consider leasing my company website?
I recently found an article on WikiPedia that suggested numerous benefits to renting your website. It briefly touched on these, but in my mind didn’t really go into half as much detail as I would have liked. As the technical development manager of DriveMySite (a company that specialises in web rentals) I knew I couldn’t walk away without adding my own two cents, simply because this is a subject I have had some experience with and felt I could at least contribtute some honest opinions to anyone out there considering a move in this direction. Before going any further I should mention that objectivity was a challenge for me as I have some natural biases of my own but hopefully the reader can take from my remarks some genuine benefits of web leasing.
There are several reason why a company might consider leasing or renting a website instead of buying.
Leasing often needs only a small monthly fee instead of a large fee upfront when buying. Startups looking to make a impact on the marketing opportunities of the web understand that a full blown design treatment along with all of the issues of upkeep and SEO on a shoe string budget just isn’t realistic. I’ve seen some bad decisions made in this area because some companies either didn’t have all of the available options at hand or didn’t really know what they wanted in the first place.
New small business owners can benefit by saving capital.
This is a primary issue for new startups that need a buffer to protect them against a lot of often unforseeable business expenses. I worked for a company that had a client that spent £14,000 for a well designed website without any good SEO. In effect they ran out of the money they should have used to improve their page rankings and were left with a fantastic looking site with no one to see it. Clients don’t always understand this and suppliers in my opinion should inform their clients of this.
If a website is only needed for a short amount of time.
This has often been the case for companies I have worked with that need to run mini campaigns or ‘sell by date’ type brochure sites. In these cases quick turnaround is the key and having a pre-designed template that can be leased for the duration of the campaign makes good sense. After all why spend all that money if you only need the site around for a few months.
If one is unsure their business needs a website leasing is a way to test without paying for a full price site.
This is great for those ‘proof of concept’ or ‘market testing’ scenarios in which you want to test the waters without breaking the bank. I spoke with a colleague today about a business idea he had. He had already invested some money to get a developer to build a database, purchase the domain name and setup hosting. After speaking to him about his idea it was clear to me that what he really needed was a place to showcase his ideas, generate a social networking group to field test this and go from there before spending any more time and money on the idea.
The owner is responsible for the technical aspects and upkeep of the site.
I was recently sat in a meeting with a client that wanted a awesome looking website and told me that he wanted it to be high up on the rankings in Google. He was uncomfortable with my explanation that to do this organically he would need to invest some time to keep the content updated. After talking this through with him I learned that they used a very clunky FTP based method of updating content. It was time consuming and prone to breaking their existing pages which to some degree explained some his reluctance in relation to keeping his site updated. I was able to explain that a good Content Management System can take care of this without the worry of breaking a page. The more reputable site leasing companies provide these. At drivemysite.co.uk we provide our customers with Umbraco an open source CMS that has recently been endorsed by Microsoft but more importantly has been used by many of the clients I have with worked with and to good effect.
Changes and updates are often included in the monthly fee.
This has to be one of the best benefits of leasing. Like leasing a TV or a Car you pass it back and get a newer model without the hassle of selling it first and losing money in between. A lot of clients I have worked with would often come to me asking for a feature or technology they had seen on a competitors site but because the technology itself had been superceded, it wouldn’t be possible with a complete rewrite of the site and its underlying technology.
There are also tax benefits of leasing a website.
This goes without saying. Although most CEO’s will completely endorse and understand the benefits of leasing when dealing with tangible assets many still don’t consider digital assets in the same way. Changing the mindset of the Managing Director is often the biggest challenge here.
Some companies that offer a website leasing or rental service also give the option for the user to buy the full rights to the site either after a certain amount of time (leasing) or at any time (rental).
This is a real win/win if the website leasing company are prepared to do this as it gives the customer the assurance that the site they have been renting for the duration of the lease already has a proven ROI.
Website leasing and rental companies may also offer Search engine optimization services as part of the leasing or rental package.
This is almost an expectation these days. To me it would be like going into a car showroom and having a salesman show me a car without wheels. SEO enabling technologies need to be baked into the content management system in order to be able to compete in this area. Umbraco takes care of most of this for us, i.e. it allows good naming conventions of URLs, provides Sitemaps for your robots file and allows custom html injection of meta data on a page by page basis.
In summary, leasing your website should be as viable an option to your company as leasing any other asset. If the figures stack up and the SEO investment is their then you could do a lot worse with a lot more money at stake. On the other hand if you make a poor choice with website rental you can always pull out early with the minimal loss.
George Robinson is the technical development manager of drivemysite.co.uk a web company that provides a low cost way to get a SEO powered website up and running quickly and without the stress.
Convert Anything You Can Read on the Computer into Editable Text with Screen OCR
Screen OCR uses optical character recognizer technology to convert anything that you can read on the computer screen into editable text. This allows you to copy and edit text from locked documents including protected PDF files and much more. You can also use it to copy text from a program which otherwise doesn’t provide the functionality allowing you to copy text. Screen OCR allows you to copy absolutely anything you want without restrictions. It also provides an automatic scrolling feature so that it can convert an entire document into editable text. Anything which is shown on the screen may be copied and converted; regardless of the program it is being displayed in. The only alternative is the extremely time-consuming task of typing out everything manually.
Screen OCR offers a great solution to anyone who works with text since it can literally save countless hours of time while still providing an exceptional degree of reliability. All text which you can see on the screen is recorded by Screen OCR with an outstanding level of accuracy, making it almost as effective as typing everything out again by hand without the enormous amount of time and effort involved. Regardless of whether the text is on a copy-protected web page, in the form of an image, a scanned document or anything else, Screen OCR will recognize the letters and copy them for you, allowing you to paste the now editable text into your favorite word processing program or other application. Screen OCR is an ideal solution for web designers, writers, interpreters, bloggers, journalists and pretty much anyone else who regularly works with text.
Screen OCR is also especially easy to use. No special knowledge is required and, as soon as you have installed the program, you can quickly figure out how to use it. The interface is presented in a user-friendly way and using the software is largely self-explanatory. When you start Screen OCR, you will first need to choose the selection mode. After this, you can then select the text on the screen which you want to copy and convert into an editable document. Screen OCR will read the text and convert it in a matter of seconds – the software is particularly fast and efficient. Selection modes available include a window selection, customize cursor capture, rectangular section and scrolling capture for situations where you want the program to automatically capture an entire document which cannot all be displayed on the screen at once.
Screen OCR recognizes text in any language, including those which have special characters and diacritics. The Cyrillic alphabet is also supported. Screen OCR can recognize any character sizes from 6 to 72 points making it ideal for reading text in any documents, webpages, emails and more.
The program is stable and reliable and it will run flawlessly on any Windows-based computer including both 32- and 64-bit systems.
Most important 7 Reasons for Selecting an eReader (Page 1 of 2)
The eReader segment has truly warmed up in the last couple of years. According to a freshly released Harris poll, 28% of U.S. adults at present possess an eReader. Looking ahead an extra 13% plan to purchase one within the next 6 months; this is a total of 41% within Six months. So does this mean the end of the printed book? While the quantity of ebooks bought doubled during the past year to 20%, there was just a minor decline in the quantity of physical books bought within the same timeframe. Actually, people that own eReaders are deciding to buy about the same quantity of physical books they generally buy. That is definitely the truth with me, though I’ve got a Kindle Touch (and love it by the way), I’m nonetheless choosing physical books. There’s nothing really like the smell and feel of a brand new book.
So why did I decide to additionally buy an eReader? Straightforward really, there was just far too many convincing reasons not to. Being an keen reader, the advantages an eReader gave me was simply too numerous to give up, plus I am a slight technology nut besides. In this hub, I will be listing the best 7 reasons I think anyone who has a fascination or passion in reading should buy an eReader.
No.1 Storage
The 1st big reason for getting an eReader is going to be the sheer volume of books it is able to store. If for example the really cheap eReaders can hold many hundreds of books, the best models such as the Kindle, Nook or Sony ones holds thousands. This is particularly useful when going travelling or on vacation. As opposed to taking several books which will fill up useful luggage space, you can easily take a single device that takes up the room of approximately a third of a paperback.
No.2 Free books
Not a lot of people today are aware that any book published prior to 1923 is free to download. The reason is , the copyright only protects a book for a certain amount of time. This means that thousands of fantastic books are absolutely free to download. Books that include: War and Peace, Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield, Jane Ayre, simply to mention a few can be yours for free. Quite a number of these books will cost around $10 if you needed to buy the physical copies of them. In actual fact I have saved a sufficient amount of cash from downloading these free books, that it has more than covered the outlay of my Kindle.
No.3 Can change the font size
This can be great for people that require large print to read. Any ebook’s font size can be increased at no further cost. Subsequently if someone else wants to use or borrow your eReader, the text could then be altered back to normal size. You can also alter the font type to an array of different kinds.
No.4 Convenience
eReaders are incredibly thin (normally just 30% as thick as a standard paperback) and light which makes them really compact. They can fit without difficulty into bags, handbags as well as jackets or jean pockets.