Snap Shots from Snap.com

Another easy tool that we integrate into all our SightPages is Snap Shots from Snap.com (http://www.snap.com/). You may have noticed Snap Shots when browsing our main page. When you put your cursor over a hyperlink, a small window displays the page that it links to. You can preview the page without having to click on it or open another browser window.

We like Snap Shots a lot. It's easy to set up and gives your SightPage a dynamic and sophisticated look and feel.

At SightPage, we have just started tapping the potential of Snap Shots. Right now we just use them to display hyperlinked pages, but you can customize their look and feel, and you can use them to do all kinds of things like display pictures, run videos, or even play audio. We'll certainly be experimenting more and more with this useful tool and will be sure to keep all our SightPage owners updated on new and unique ways to make your SightPage more dynamic and interactive with this great technology.

A final note about Snap Shots is that they do a great job of displaying on many different types of browsers, too. So any visitor to a SightPage can use their choice of browser (IE Explorer, Firefox, etc) and we know that their Snap Shots will perform great every time.

Watch for more exciting uses of Snap Shots on our SightPages and be sure to check out Snap.com for ideas that you would like us to set up on your SightPage!

- Tom

Widgets, Widgets, Widgets

At SightPage.net, we make heavy use of widgets to make your SightPage dynamic and interactive. If you are new to Widgets, just look around our home page and you'll see a few in action. The Meebo Live Chat box is a widget. The "Start Right Now" form from FormLogix is a widget. Our blog is displayed right on our page through a widget (and by the way, a blog widget is called a "blidget").

Widgets are a central part of SightPage. Our goal is to integrate the best of the web into your SightPage, and widgets allow us to do exactly that. We don't have to create all the cool and useful stuff out there - we just want to help you take advantage of it all.

Widgets come in two basic varieties - desktop widgets, which can be found at places like Yahoo! Widgets. And web widgets, which are the kind that we use, and that you can put on your SightPage. A great collection of web Widgets can be found at Widgetbox (http://www.widgetbox.com/). That's where we got our blidget, and that's where we first were introduced to FormLogix. Just about any widget created at Widgetbox can be used on your SightPage, making it an ideal place for you to browse for interactive and fun ideas for your SightPage.

The basic idea behind Widgets, as it relates to us, is that you can go to a 3rd-party company and create and edit your widget on their web site. They output a snippet of code which uniquely identifies your widget, and then we place it on your SightPage. Any edits or changes that you make on your widget then automatically update to your SightPage.

Widgets are becoming more and more popular, and most of the time they are free. Sometimes free widgets will include advertising or links back to the provider, but usually they are minimally intrusive and a fair trade-off for using a free service.

And the widget community is growing. At Widgetbox, for example, the community there can create and add their own widgets, making them available for anyone to download.

We strongly believe in the power of widgets, and we are happy to help you create, edit, modify, and place any widget you can find into your SightPage. And let us know if you are looking for something in particular - chances are we can find it for you.

Finally, if anyone out there has created a widget that would be useful or beneficial to SightPage users, please let us know. We'll be happy to tell all our SightPage customers about it.

- Tom

FormLogix and Syronex

Formlogix (www.formlogix.com) and Syronex (www.syronex.com) are two great organizations that provide tools that will allow your SightPage visitors to contact you safely and efficiently, while at the same time helping fight the war against your SightPage email getting unwanted and annoying spam.

Most web site owners quickly realize that if you display your full email address on your web site, it won't take long before you start getting spam. And most of the evil spam organizations automate the harvesting of email addresses around the web, so it's likely just a matter of time before your inbox starts filling up with junk.

Here at SightPage, we use and recommend tools from FormLogix and Syronex to help your visitors contact you.

Syronex provides a useful little utility that actually encrypts your email address into a simple script that we cut and paste into your SightPage. Instead of displaying your email address, your visitors see an "email us" link, which appears to open as a normal email for most visitors. But behind the scenes, the simple encrytpion is enough to deter any automated collection of your email address. It's quite a handy little tool. And they can also request your visitors fill out one of those funky "challenge" fields - those pictures where the letters are all mangled and you have to enter the text to comlete the field. Let us know if you want to add that to your Sightpage for a little extra security (and a little extra perceived sophistication, too).

Please click here to visit Syronex:



Also, while you're visiting: if you have a spare 10 seconds, please help Syronex test the future technology used in their anti-spam solutions. It's the least we can do for saving us from all that spam, right?

FormLogix provides yet another tool that we use and recommend. I'll soon be writing a little about Widgets and will be mentioning this great company again soon, but in sticking with the Contact theme here, FormLogix is worth noting.

They have a handy utility that creates forms that we can easily embed into your SightPage for you. And they have some free forms that are already preconfigured for standard Contact Us, Newsletter Signup, Support Questions, Feedback, etc. A visitor to your SightPage simply fills out the form and you get an email with all the form data. Pretty handy.

FormLogix also provides advanced Form Creator tools for a small cost per form - usually just over $1 a month per form. We'll be adding a few of their forms soon to our main page - and perhaps into some customer survey emails as well - so getting the monthly subscription for the advanced tools is a no-brainer for us. So we'll easily be able to build any custom form for your SightPage and integrate it for you. Contact Support and we'll help you get a form from FormLogix set up quickly. Be sure to visit FormLogix - there's simply too many form ideas to list here...

So two more great reasons to Just Get a SightPage : protected email from Syronex and customized forms from FormLogix.

- Tom

Flickr and Yahoo!

Flickr (www.flickr.com) is another web site that we like a lot, and we can link to your Flickr pictures directly from your SightPage. A free account on Flickr allows you to easily upload, store, and display up to 200 photos. Your photos can be stored in sets, and the sets can be displayed in a slideshow as well. And it's easy to add comments and descriptions to all your pictures.

It's perfect if you are looking for way to show lots of pictures of your business, your employees, your products, or even the revelry from last night's company picnic.

You can also quickly sign up with your Yahoo! account.

And speaking of Yahoo!, that's yet another great company that provides lots of tools for your business that we can integrate or link into your SightPage. We currently use and recommend Yahoo! Maps for Map link integration. You can find links to Yahoo! Maps on many of our pages. It's the easiest way to show your customers where your business is located.

Yahoo! also provides numerous other web tools that we can help you use with your SightPage, including Yahoo! Sponsored Search (for placing online ads) and the new Yahoo! Content Match (for placing ads from other businesses on your SightPage!).

If your company is hiring, link your SightPage into Yahoo! HotJobs (www.hotjobs.yahoo.com). You can post your jobs online for your visitors to see. And you can also store resumes and track candidates online. (And by the way, Yahoo! HotJobs also provides customized hiring solutions, too.)

And if you really want to have some fun with your SightPage or do something a little different - start a Yahoo! Fantasy Football League this fall for your employees or your customers, and link the league right onto your SightPage. It's an easy way to boost company morale and keep your customers thinking about you every week.

We'll be happy to help you set up your Flickr and Yahoo! accounts, and get it all integrated back to your SightPage. Just let us know how we can help!

- Tom

A Little About Us

We designed SightPage to have a very easy setup, and as such we have a basic design template that everyone starts with. It's clean, professional, and gets most companies up and running quickly.

But even though the bulk of the design work is already done, we also want you to LOVE your SightPage. We are working on some great tools and features, many of which are scheduled for upcoming development, that will give our SightPages more flexibility and allow SightPage owners more control over their page layout, pictures, links, text format, and other design and integration options.

And while our development team works to bring those features to you, we want you to remember that our Support team is here to help with ANY customization. Please let us know what we can do to make sure your SightPage looks and feels how YOU want it to look and feel. We understand that your SightPage is the online face of your company. So if we can add links, pictures, or more text, just let us know. If you need more emails or a new text logo created for you, we're happy to do it. And while we do charge for some customizations, we make sure to keep the costs low and affordable. In fact, most customizations are only $5 per item.

And did you know that we give a $5 credit for every referral you send to SightPage? Now, we hope that you are referring other businesses to us because you love your SightPage, and because we have a great solution for the company you refer. But the fact remains that a $5 credit can pay for a customization, or another month of service. If you send us a new customer, we need to say thank you somehow, right? (And just for the record - your referrals are VERY appreciated. Thank You!)

Hopefully you notice some things are a little different about us as a company. We check in with you. We call you or email you and ask you if you are happy. We want to learn about your business. In fact, when you first signed up for your SightPage, we likely called you and personally told you your account details. (It gives us an excuse to learn about you.) To us, you are a customer, and we're kind of old school in that we still like to call our customers. (Especially Robert!)

So I hope that tells you a little about us. We are happy and proud to have you as a customer, and we want you to be happy and proud of your SightPage.

- Tom

Don't Forget About Your Email

Your SightPage comes with an email address that looks like yourcompany@sightpage.net. There are some interesting features of SightPage email worth noting.

You get access to web mail from your Admin Page, so you can check it anywhere with an internet connection. And you can also set up your email to be received in Outlook, Outlook Express, or your mail program of choice. (Email or call Support and we'll send you the easy instructions.) You can find your email address and password, and a link to webmail, on your Admin Page.

You can also easily forward your SightPage email to another email address, so if you already check one mailbox and want your SightPage email to be sent there too, it's easy.

And if you need more email addresses for your company, just let us know. Your emails will all be @sightpage.net, but we're happy to supply as many as you need. We can also increase your mail box size, set up aliases or groups, and configure a number of other features for you.

Like everything else with SightPage, we want you to be happy, so just let us know what you need!

- Tom

Google is Great

One of the things that you'll notice quickly with SightPage is how much we use Google tools. Google has done a fantastic job of making integration with web sites very easy. Once you have a Google account, your SightPage is open to lots of useful tools.

You likely created a Google account (if you didn't already have one) when you first paid for your SightPage. That's because we use (and recommend) Google Checkout to easily and securely take payments. They are running a promotion right now where Google Checkout is free until 2008. Completely free. And signing up is easy - there's not a lot of forms to fill out and you just need a Company Tax ID and a bank account. They take your payments and then drop them in your bank account. If you want to be able to take Credit Cards, this is a great option. And if you want to sell individual items on your SightPage, we can create little buttons for you that take your customers right into Google Checkout.

You'll also notice more Google features on our SightPages. Our blog is on Blogger.com, a Google company, and you can sign in and set up a blog with your Google account.

If you would like to display a video on your SightPage, your video will actually be hosted by Google Video and we simply embed it into your site.

And Google AdSense is another easy feature to take advantage of as well. By default, we don't put Google ads on your SightPage. But if you are looking to earn a little extra revenue, we certainly can add it to your SightPage for you. We are using Google AdSense - right here on this blog. Your blog is a great place to use AdSense, and Blogger.com will even pass your information to Google for even more easy setup.

Behind the scenes, we rely on Google to help promote your SightPage as well. They have a great webmaster tool that allows us to submit information about all our SightPages, so that Google searchers can find your SightPage more easily. And we just added a SightPage Directory Search on our home page that uses another handy tool from - you guessed it - Google.

Here at SightPage.net, one of our goals is to keep things very easy for you, but we also want to provide useful tools from other companies that can make your SightPage interactive and robust. We don't have to create everything - we just have to make sure you can USE the good stuff that's already out there. And Google has lots of that good stuff to use.

- Tom

flyupload and a Little About Files for Download

Another standard feature that you can add to your SightPage is making files available for downloading by your visitors.

It's pretty easy to do, and as you know, our goal is to help you utilize the Best of the Web in your SightPage, too, so we'd be remiss not to use and recommend the handy little tool from FlyUpload. Talk about easy - Simply go to FlyUpload (www.flyupload.com) and upload your file there.

Your file can be a word document, a pdf, an excel spreadsheet, video, audio, photo, or even just a text file.

FlyUpload will give you a link to your file and you simply send that link to us. We'll do the rest to integrate it onto your SightPage for you.

When a visitor to your SightPage clicks the link, they'll be able to download the file or view it in a browser. If you send out a lot of files in your email (like product brochures or forms), you'll instead be able to send a link to the file. That's great for keeping emails small and also for your customers that may be using a blackberry or other email device.

It's another easy and creative way to get more out of your SightPage.

- Tom

Let's Blog!

So let's talk a little about blogging! We selected www.blogger.com for our blog for a couple of reasons:

One, it's easy (and we're all for keeping things easy).

Two, you can sign up with a Google account in about 3 steps. ( You'll notice that using your Google account is a recurring theme here at SightPage...)

And Three, we can set it up to post back to SightPage using some neat tools from Widgetbox. (See our post about Widgets for more details...)

What a deal!

Blogging about your company can be easy! Simply write about what you know, what you are doing, and maybe some company news and information that you would like to keep kind of informal. It's also a great way to add pictures and even polls.

That's what we plan to do with SightPage InSights...let us know when you are ready to blog about your company and we'll get your SightPage all set up!

- Tom

Welcome to our Weblog

Welcome to SightPage.net, and welcome to our blog about all of the features and tools you can find on your SightPage. We'll try to tell you about ways that you can effectively use your SightPage, and we'll keep you updated on some of the new things we're working on to make SightPage.net easier and more robust.

So thanks for reading, feel free to post your comments, and keep in mind that we can add a blog just like this one to YOUR SightPage.

Thanks again for visiting and remember "Just Get a SightPage!"

- Tom