TechQED.com Tech Resources for Small Business

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Technology helping small business

Welcome to TechQED

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Welcome. TechQED.com is a portal for information on how technology can help small business and entrepreneurship. An effort aimed at providing much needed help and pointers to resources for small businesses.

Let's face it. Despite considerable progress in information technology (IT) and its tremendous potential to help businesses sustain and grow, the small businesses are almost always at a disadvantage. Sure, the technololgy is out there but for a small business owner, with typically less resources, navigating this maze of of IT products and hype is not easy.

At TechQED, our goal is to reduce the confusion surrounding the sourcing (i.e. how do we go about getting the IT products and services we need), adoption (which ones do we choose to use), use (i.e. we actually adopt and implement it in our small businesses), and successful exploitation (i.e. we leverage IT to sustain, grow, and even obtain a competitive advantage) of IT for the small businesses and entrepreneurs.

As a start, we discuss some of the most common IT related issues facing the small business.

  • Web sites (domain name, web hosting, web design & development, e-commerce, online marketing)
  • Point of sales systems (cash registers, computerized cash registers, check out lanes, bar code scanning, credit card processing, merchant accounts, etc.)
  • Small office or store front computer networks (how do we create and manage simple local area networks for our offices and retail stores)
  • Wireless plans and capabilities (from obtaining the right cell phone plan for you and your employees to leveraging the growing potential of wireless technology to help your business)
  • Enterprise wide applications (for growing businesses wishing to integrate all their information systems)

  

 

Last Updated on Friday, 10 July 2009 15:54
 

Getting Web site hosting

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Once you have a domain name (or your web site's name) the next step is to get some server space where your actual web site files will be stored and "served" to people who wish to see those files (mostly web pages, images, videos etc.).

Assuming you or someone else is actually developing a web site for you, getting a web hosting service provider to lend you some space on their servers (of course they're going t charge you for this) so that you can 'host' your site is the next step.

There are plenty (we mean really plenty) of web hosting service providers out there and the competition has made hosting costs rather low (if you are being asked to pay more than $15 a month for hosting then it is most likely too much... unless you get into options such as dedicated hosting and very high bandwidth requirements).

In deciding a good host for your site you are of course looking for reliability, good support, long term viability, and good technical specifications.

A simple search on any search engine such as google or bing, will provide you with many many companies providing these services. We have begun to compile a list to put some of the better known hosting providers.

  1. HostRocket.Com Website Hosting (we host this web site at HostRocket and have been pretty satisfied with it. They now have all kinds of options which you probably don't need :-) but if you do they have 'em)
  2. BLUEHOST.COM Website Hosting 
Last Updated on Thursday, 20 August 2009 11:30
 

Getting the domain name, the first step

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How to get a web site name (a domain name)

A domain name is the part usually appearing after the 'www.' in a web address. For example, 'yahoo.com'

You can obtain a domain name through what is called a domain name registrar. There are many out there but here are some of the big ones. Give it a go...

[ Once you get to the registrar's site type in the name (in the 'search for name' box) you are looking for, to see if it is available. If it is then great! If not try other names or consider one or more of the alternatives being offered by the registrar. You'd be surprised how often the alternatives suggested are better than what had you originally planned.]

  1. GoDaddy.com
  2. Register.com
  3. NetworkSolutions.com
  4. Yahoo.com 
Last Updated on Friday, 10 July 2009 16:31
 

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