Blog
Tech, IT, and Web Tips for Business Owners
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Pembroke Radio Ad for our Grand Opening!
We’re two weeks away from the Grand Opening of our Pembroke Office. Our radio ads should be hitting the airwaves on MyFM in Pembroke and Petawawa tomorrow morning.
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Construction of Our New Pembroke Office Begins
We are very excited to announce that we have begun construction on our new Pembroke office. Establishing ourselves in Pembroke is multifaceted for us: our CEO was born and raised in Petawawa and sees a great need for IT services in the area, and the SMBs there need a local company that they can depend on. [...]
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WordPress or Drupal, Which is Better?
There are many, many, many posts and articles about which Content Management System, WordPress or Drupal, is better and with comparisons. Choosing between the two can be daunting, especially when you’ve devoted a lot of time to one of the platforms. You can build almost any sort of site using WordPress or Drupal but we [...]
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Products I’m Hoping to See at CES 2013
As a tech lover, it’s hard not to be excited about the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES). While no ground breaking technology has been unveiled at CES in recent memory with major vendors choosing to have their own Apple-style keynotes, smaller vendors use it as an opportunity to get exposure. While some are novelties, like [...]
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Our Twitter Strategy for Business
Twitter is still a mystery to many people, especially businesses. The little they do know about it is along the lines of “it’s for you people” and “nobody wants to know what you’re having for lunch”. Our Twitter strategy for business can be broken down into a few key components. Set a Social Media Goal Using [...]
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Real SEO is Creating Meaningful Content
We want to be ranked first on Google Every small business owner we meet about a website wants the same thing: to be the top or near the top of Google results page. We go through some of technical elements of making the site accessible for search engines, keywords, titles, etc., but it always comes down [...]
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Three Free Website Builders for Starter Websites
A website is a must have for any company, regardless of size. If you are a smaller company, you need a website to raise awareness and build a reputation. If you are a larger company, you need a website to provide your clients with information, forms, etc., and to maintain your reputation. However, you don’t [...]
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Our top 5 favorite WordPress Plugins
We love WordPress, as does the majority of the Internet. It’s incredibly easy to install, straight-forward to theme, has a massive support and plugins base, and it’s absolutely free. Our clients love it because their sites are deployed faster, can maintain them themselves, and can shop around for developers. WordPress is a great platform to build on [...]
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Troubleshoot Windows with Windows File System Checker
Here’s a short, fun one: a client was complaining about the speed of his computer and about getting random errors. This is a very common complaint with many different causes. As we saw in another post, a “slow computer” was actually bad DNS settings. Troubleshooting Windows One of the scans our Grassroot Techs run when [...]
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Find a Lost Microsoft Office Product Keys with ProduKey
This morning a client came to our office slightly panicked and told us that her whole Microsoft Office stopped working, including her Outlook! Since having access to email is critical, especially for SMBs, our Grassroot Tech jumped out of his chair and headed over to their office to play Detective. Like any Detective, our Grassroot [...]
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Check your Hardware Registration, You May Not Own It
If you purchase hardware through a third-party via invoicing, it would be logical for you to think that you own the hardware you purchased. This actually is not always the case and here’s why. For hardware items that carry advanced warranties and additional services such as servers, high-end laptops, enterprise networking gear, etc. the warranty and [...]
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BYOD: Bring Your Own Device
Started with the Smartphone BYOD, or Bring-Your-Own-Device is the latest trend in using technology in the workplace. It started when the iPhone came out and has accelerated with Android’s great offerings with employees wanting to use their new, feature-rich smartphones for their work email instead of archaic-in-comparison Blackberrys. The challenge with BYOD was and still [...]
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If Your Laptop is Slow, Check your DNS
Aging Laptop was Slow Loading Sites A Client called us and advised they were having laptop problems, mainly that they were having trouble loading websites in Internet Explorer and that their “laptop is slow”. They guessed that the problem was caused by the aging laptop they were using. The first step in troubleshooting is to [...]
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Start Cloud Computing with Hosted Exchange Email
Every day, we read articles about large government departments and private organizations moving their mail into the cloud, whether it’s Google Apps or Microsoft’s Office 365. The cost and headaches savings are profound for enterprise level organizations but what about small businesses? Is the difference as visible for businesses that have a local exchange server [...]
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Less is More For Website Content and Design
The Majority of Sites Overdo It When building a website, there is tendency to include as much content as possible to show expertise. This includes definitions of industry terms, out-of-date articles and newsletters, long biographies on each employee, and other fluff. Hours are spent sourcing and writing these pages and semi-organizing them. Once analytics is [...]
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What is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization?
Looking on Google Trends, the term “cloud” has exploded in use over the last 4 years. The majority of us have been using the Cloud for many years before this in the form of our email, Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo, or document and file management like Google Docs or Dropbox. While there are countless applications [...]
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Why I’m Excited about Windows 8
It started with the iPhone Since the iPhone was released, and more so since the iPad was released, we’ve seen a shift away from full-fledged desktop computers to simple, appliance-like, web devices that allow people to quickly access information they want on a regular basis, like the weather, news, Facebook, etc. When the iPad was [...]
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Use a Content Management System (CMS) for your Business Website
The Web is the Wild Wild West The field of web design is not new relative to the Internet, but it is still in the Wild West phase in terms of pricing and process. Pricing can range from a few hundred dollars to a mortgage of a single home. As the web has grown and [...]
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Cloud Computing for Business – A Day in the Life
As the Marketing Manager at a Tech company, sometimes my ego takes over and I try to DIY some of my personal upgrades. I’m fairly confident tech-wise but am definitely not a technician. I’ve done upgrades on my desktops and notebooks in the past, but only the accessible things like the RAM on the bottom [...]
