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Frequently, in the act of diagnosing computer problems or deciding which parts to order for upgrades, we find ourselves wanting to know about the hardware components inside a computer. A new program aims to make it easy to know as much as possible about the innards of your machine.

Speccy is a product from Piriform, the makers of CCleaner and Defraggler, and is currently in public beta. Here’s their product description from their website.

What’s in your computer?  If you’re like most of us, you can probably name the processor (Intel or AMD, Celeron or Pentium), maybe how much RAM it has, and maybe how big the hard drive is.

When you go to a computer store and see all the bright shiny PCs laid out next to each other, most will have tags or stickers indicating the:

• Processor brand and model
• Hard drive size and speed
• Amount of memory (RAM)
• Graphics card
• Operating system

Two or three years later, when it comes time to upgrade your computer, that tag or sticker may be long gone. Speccy was designed as a free electronic “what’s inside” sticker for your PC.

We’ve found that, while the basic information is available from Windows Device Manager, Speccy goes above and beyond by providing crucial details that Windows doesn’t. For example, Speccy will provide the clock speed of the memory installed, allowing you to know exactly what kind of memory upgrade to purchase. Speccy gives you the exact model of the motherboard so you can find correct and current hardware drivers.

It’s important to remember that Speccy won’t be able to report on anything that isn’t provided to the operating system by the hardware. For the computers we’ve tested, it provides an exact temperature of the CPU but not the graphics card, since not all graphics cards report their temperature. Also, since the motherboard doesn’t provide the name of the audio chipset to Windows, it can only tell us that the sound card is a “high definition audio device”.

If you want a quick way to tell what’s under the hood without popping the case, or need to know the temperature of your processor, Speccy is a fast and small utility that stays out of your way until you need it.

See the bottom of this post to play this episode directly or subscribe using iTunes or Zune or your favorite podcatcher on the Auction Podcast page.

Hello and welcome to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. Today is Thursday 18 February 2010. My name is Aaron Traffas and today I’m going to examine branding as it relates to a web presence, looking at the best ways to configure websites, email and blogs. This content originally ran as a three-part series in January on auctioneertech.com and began with part 1, domain names.

The choices you make for your domain name begin begin to build your brand before you think about designing a logo or writing a word of copy. There are some rules to follow when choosing a domain name for your site, and the first is to select a .com top level domain. A top level domain, or TLD, is the last part of the website address. .com, .net, .org were among the first and are still the most common TLDs in the United States. Unlike some other TLDs like .gov and .mil, anyone can register new domain names with .com, .net and .org without restriction. The .com TLD is for companies or commercial endeavors. .org is for non-profit – you guessed it – organizations, while .net is for more personal projects that aren’t as official as .com or .org. There are now many other TLDs, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is planning to begin to allow essentially an unlimited number of new TLDs soon, increasing the number from perhaps 100 current TLDs to possibly thousands.

The problem is that nobody remembers websites that don’t end in .com. Now you’re going to object, reminding us that the new domains offer specialization. “But .pro would be a great choice since I’m a professional!” No it wouldn’t. Professionals choose .com. “But .ca is available and I’m located in California!” Your location doesn’t matter. If you’re in the United States and selecting a business or commercial website, .com is for winners.

The second rule when selecting your website is to own the domain that matches your company name. “We’re a US company and someone already has aaaauction.com,  .us works just as well, right?” No it doesn’t. If someone already has the .com name for your company, you absolutely need to change your business name. That’s how important it is that your domain name exactly matches your company name. If your website is kansasbid.com, make sure that your company name is Kansas Bid and vice versa. If you try to get cute with your domain name, or add hacks like hyphens or underscores, few will remember it.

Rule three is that shorter is better. If your company is named for you, your first and best bet is your last name. In other words, if my auction company is called Aaron Traffas Auctioneers, I would look for traffas.com. It suffers from being difficult to spell, but I’d get around that problem by registering travis.com, traffis.com, trafas.com and so on, having each of the alternate misspellings point to the main account. However, since traffas.com is taken, I’d settle for aarontraffas.com, knowing that it was a little less desirable than traffas.com but not quite a deal breaker.

However, let’s say that I run John Smith Auctioneers. Obviously smith.com is taken. Obviously johnsmith.com is taken. Do I look for johnsmithauctioneers.com? Now I’m getting into the problem of a lengthy domain name. The longer the name, the more difficult it is to predict misspellings, the harder it is to fit on business cards, the harder it is to read on billboards, and – worst of all – the harder it is to get customers to remember the site. They’ll ask themselves if it was it johnsmithauctioneer.com? Was it johnsmithauctions.com? They’ll never think to ask if it was .net or .org or .us or .idiot.

Rule four – own your domain name. This problem is rampant within the auction industry. Many auctioneers are approached from an upselling [read:predatory] website hosting company with a sales pitch that goes something like this. “We’ll host a website for you and even register your domain name so you don’t have to deal with a registrar or mess with any of that techy stuff.” I really like it when they use the word techy, by the way. The company then registers your domain name for themselves and creates your website. Should you ever wish to leave, you can’t simply point your domain name to another provider because you don’t own it, they do.

Find out if you own your domain name. Go to http://www.whois.net/ and enter your website. Sometimes, as in the case with Network Solutions, it will tell you you have to go to the registrar used to register the domain name to see who owns it. Stay with me. This exercise is important. Your website provider can be listed as the technical contact, but you must be listed as the registrant or you don’t own your website.

Rule five is that CamelCase isn’t for websites. This rule isn’t necessarily about selecting your domain, but it’s about how you present it to your users. It will probably generate some opposing comments, but I feel it’s both true and important. Websites are case-insensitive. That means that auctioneertech.com in all lower case is just as valid as AuCtIoN – you get the picture. Why don’t I write my website using CamelCase with the A of auction and the T of tech capitalized since that’s the way it looks in my logo? Because websites should ALWAYS be written exclusively in lowercase. Writing your site using intermittent capital letters may make it seem easier to read, but it also makes you seem a little less – to use the word from our patronizing, predatory salesperson from earlier - techy than the competition. Your customers notice the details, don’t give them the opportunity to think less of you or your company because of something as simple as how you write your domain name.

In summary, your website is the most important marketing component to your business. While many people will come to your site by clicking a link, far more will visit your site because they saw your website in an ad or because they’ve been there before. Make it easy for them not only to remember, but to guess. The first thing we web users do when trying to load a site is to type the company name and add .com. If that doesn’t work, if we’re interested enough we may look it up to see what it was supposed to be, either by referencing the ad or searching in Google. In this case, it’s already a strike against the site and the milk is a little more sour before we’ve even arrived at our destination.

Now that we’ve selected our domain name, let’s look at how we can use our email address to strengthen our brand. An email address has two components; the first part is the user name and the second part is the domain name, which usually matches either your email provider or your website.

The worst mistake you can make to turn customers away is to use something other than your name for the user name. This mistake was the at the top of the list in a recent survey, the link to which is available in the transcript for this podcast at auctioneertech.com. sxygrl47 and ladybug_lover worked great for user names in college, but now it’s time to use first.last or firstlast or just your last name. If you have an address that is checked by more than one person, such as a generic company address, then it’s okay to use something like auction or info as your user name, but don’t use that catch-all address for your official company account unless it is actually checked by more than one person. That’s also not the address you should put on your personal business card.

Outside of the above offense, few other concepts seem more obvious than the importance of having an email address that matches the domain name of your website. Nevertheless, I still see some auctioneers who advertise to their customers a generic, free addresses from email providers such as AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Live, Gmail – or worse, from their Internet service providers such as Cox, SBC Global or Comcast.

Using one of these free providers for a personal email account is okay, though it’s much more fun to spend the 10 bucks and register a domain name for yourself or your family to use for your personal email needs. Using an email address for commercial purposes that doesn’t match your domain name is simply unprofessional.

Your website IS your brand. Why on Earth would there be any benefit in advertising an address that doesn’t include your brand? Reasons I’ve heard cited for using a generic email account for business include the following.

• I’ve always used this address
• I have multiple domain names
• Using Gmail makes me seem cutting-edge and hip
• I don’t know how to set up email for my domain name
• I like the tools offered by this provider
• I want synchronized Outlook but don’t want to host my own Exchange server

None of these reasons justifies letting customers see an email address that doesn’t include your brand. The only reason listed that doesn’t involve lack of configuration or simplicity is the idea that customers somehow perceive Gmail users as advanced. This is true, but only in comparison with other free email providers. We all like to make fun of AOL and Yahoo users, but consumers equally ridicule Gmail users who use Gmail for business. It’s assumed that these users are either too lazy or don’t know how to set up their own, branded email addresses.

The solution is simple. Use a service like Gmail - Google Apps for your Domain is a particularly excellent choice – or use a company that provides hosted Exchange server to allow you to have one powerful interface to check all your email accounts. It’s very simple to configure addresses from one or many domain names to have email delivered to one location. Through the use of rules in Outlook or filters in Gmail, you can easily keep track of all your emails from all of your accounts in one central location. When properly configured, each email you send will appear to come from the appropriate account. The methods to this configuration are outside the scope of this podcast and will depend on your registrar and your web host, but there are many free tutorials available to make your email do what you want it to do for you.

I’ve actually met auctioneers who have removed the website from business cards, relying on different colors to make the domain in the email address stand out, thereby conveying both an email address and a website on one line. This leap of faith that customers will recognize this strategy isn’t for the weak-of-heart, but it’s an innovative idea, nonetheless.

When is it okay to use an email address for business that isn’t matched to your domain name? There are two scenarios.

1. You’re unemployed
2. You don’t have a domain name yet

If the first is true, you’re probably not using it for commercial purposes unless it’s to send, and receive responses from, resumes. In this case, a Gmail account – or, better yet, yourname@yourname.com – will lend the most professional impression to a prospective employer. If the second case is true, press pause, think about what I said in the first part of this episode, and buy a domain name. The first year’s registration costs less than having your logo embroidered on a shirt, and it’s many orders of magnitude more valuable and important.

Your domain is your brand. Your email address is an obvious and easy way to promote your brand and show your customers that you run a professional organization.

Now that I’ve discussed domain names and email addresses as they relate to your brand, let’s take a look at your weblog. The same concepts that apply to your domain names and your email addresses absolutely apply to your blog.

Like email addresses, it’s really easy to get a free blog. Free blog providers include WordPress and Blogger. These free blogs assign a subdomain, which is the part of the domain that comes before the primary domain name, lik e yourauctionblog.wordpress.com. Some, like WordPress, even allow you to assign a custom domain name to your blog. This free blog approach is really great if you’re blogging about your grasshopper collection or you want to keep a diary of your trip to the museum of bad marketing tactics, but if you’re blogging for business, you need to have your blog hosted professionally.

Your blog should be branded. Your domain IS your brand. Your blog needs to exist on your website in order to be properly branded. This rule means that the free sites are out of the question – unless you actually work for WordPress, your blog shouldn’t include wordpress.com in the domain name. Assigning a separate domain name to your blog is certainly better, but it still misses the target of hosting your blog on your primary domain.

But wait! I’ve been singing the praises of WordPress for years, why would I say WordPress is bad? The answer is that wordpress.com is a commercial service that will host your blog. wordpress.org is a site that hosts the WordPress software that you can download for free and install on your own website. By installing the software, you can leverage the power and ease-of-use inherent to the WordPress package while allowing your customers to go to yourwebsite.com/blog or blog.yourwebsite.com. By having a custom WordPress theme created, the user experience can be seamless among your auction calendar, your static pages and your blog.

WordPress isn’t the only blogging software that you can use on your website, but it’s certainly my favorite. Your web host may have different software that can just as easily and quickly be installed and configured to allow you to post your articles and news by simply logging in and typing.

Internet branding is simple. While it may be easier to simply grab a free account from somewhere, it’s by far more professional to have a comprehensive, congruent presence that is consistently branded to provide a seamless user experience.

That’s it for episode 21. Did I miss something? Am I wrong about something? Leaving a comment on auctioneertech.com is much better than replying on Facebook or Twitter to tell me about it. Remember, it’s all about unification of the brand.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the Auction Podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

A new site launches today and aims to use the auction method of marketing to allow users to sell news-related video to interested parties. We think it’s an interesting use of competitive bidding, and worth a look. Here’s the release.

January 18th, 2010 – New Orleans, LA – Bideo.com is a revolutionary online media exchange where creators of breaking news video and still images can manually protect and sell their content directly to publications in an auction setting. The Bideo message to creators is simple: stop giving away amazing videos and photos, and start selling them.

A tornado tearing across a field, a plane landing in a river, an amateur dunking on an NBA star, or exclusive shots of celebrities and athletes misbehaving, some pictures and videos are rare gems that are often the direct result of a camera phone being in the right place at the right time.

The increasing amount of valuable content being produced by citizen journalists is garnering interest from major publications, which are now welcoming an opportunity to access, purchase and publish such images. Brittain Stone, Photo Director for US Weekly, sees Bideo as a great resource for publications to obtain newsworthy material. “The Bideo format can be the efficient and trustworthy intermediary between those user creators and the buyer. It will be a way for us to tap into formerly ambivalent and often unattainable sources with ease and immediacy.”

HOW BIDEO WORKS

• The seller uploads an image from a computer or mobile device, adds a description and sets the auction terms. The original file is stored on a secure server while a watermarked copy is created and listed in a live auction.
• Bideo’s notification system automatically alerts relevant publications based on the item’s information. Sellers can also manually send notifications to their own list of potential buyers.
• Buyers assess the image and bid on the exclusive right to publish it. A buy now option is also available.
• The original file is transferred to the winning bidder’s account when the auction ends and payment is made.
• The seller receives 75% (and up to 85%) of the final bid price immediately after the sale is complete, and the seller agrees to honor the exclusive license purchased by the buyer.

Founder and CEO, Pike Barkerding, sees demand for a service like Bideo.com rapidly increasing. “Everyday more and more breaking images are published by citizen journalists who are not properly recognized or compensated for their work,” says Barkerding. “Bideo seeks to empower this growing army of ‘right-place-right-time’ creators by giving them a simple, secure and profitable way to promote their content to interested buyers.”

For buyers, Bideo serves as a central, organized source for newsworthy user-generated content that is otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain. “I think we [Us Weekly] miss a lot of interesting and topical images that aren’t represented by the established agencies and therefore don’t percolate up to us in a timely fashion if at all. On those occasions when these people do approach us, negotiations are skittish and drawn out because the potential sellers aren’t familiar with the ground rules of our particular marketplace,” says Stone.

Why an auction? “Newsworthy images can be difficult to price, especially non-professional, user-created images. Think eBay meets iReport. By posting content in an auction, sellers can let the open market decide the price and get the true market value for their work,” says Barkerding. “The same dynamic also creates a chance for buyers to find great deals on exclusive footage.”

Another benefit of the efficiency offered by Bideo is the ability for buyers and sellers to forego pricey middlemen (agencies), yielding lower cost to buyers, higher commissions to sellers, and greater immediacy throughout. “This also makes it attractive to professional photographers looking to sell a rare exclusive,” says Barkerding. “They can sell it autonomously on Bideo and get a higher return.”

Barkerding sees Bideo as a no-brainer alternative to the popular practice of giving content away for anything less than true market value. “Listing is free, and if you think it’s amazing, odds are someone wants to buy it. You set the price, you control the sale and, if it doesn’t sell, you can still give it away. So, why not try Bideo?”

Last summer, a private beta version of the site was launched in Los Angeles with a specific focus on celebrity content as a test market. During this soft rollout Bideo has been working with several L.A.-based photographers and celebrity publications including Us Weekly, TMZ, People Magazine, Access Hollywood, E! and Star Magazine. Bideo.com will be launched publicly on January 25, 2010 to serve and connect all forms of newsworthy content to publications in media markets throughout the world.

For more information on Bideo, please visit www.bideo.com/invitation.

For media inquiries, contact Matthew Bowes or Skipper Bond at 504-897-0462 or matthew@bondpublicrelations.com and skipper@bondpublicrelations.com.

What do you think about this auction application? Is it a great, new way to expose auctions to the media or does it provide barriers to the news process? Let us know in the comments.

We’re putting the final wraps on the 2010 KAA Convention at the Wichita Airport Hilton.

Thursday night featured a meet-and-greet honoring past presidents.

Lynn Langvardt was the winner of the Kansas Livestock Bid-call Contest held in El Dorado on Thursday night. Last year’s livestock champion, Charlie Cummings, won the KAA Bid-call Contest this year at the state fair and was installed Saturday night as the new state champion.

Here’s some video that was streamed live via Ustream using a Motorola Droid. It features current IAC Champion Kevin Borger, KAA Champion Charlie Cummings, and others selling during the fun auction on Friday night.

This week, we’ve examined domain names and email addresses as they relate to your brand. In today’s third installation of our Internet branding series, we’re going to take a look at your weblog. The same concepts that apply to your domain names and your email addresses absolutely apply to your blog.

Like email addresses, it’s really easy to get a free blog. Free blog providers include WordPress and Blogger. These free blogs assign a subdomain (the part of the domain that comes before the primary domain name) like yourauctionblog.wordpress.com. Some, like WordPress, even allow you to assign a custom domain name to your blog. This free blog approach is really great if you’re blogging about your grasshopper collection or you want to keep a diary of your trip to to the museum of bad marketing tactics, but if you’re blogging for business, you need to have your blog hosted professionally.

Your blog should be branded. Your domain IS your brand, so your blog needs to exist on your website in order to be properly branded. This rule means that the free sites are out of the question – unless you actually work for WordPress, your blog shouldn’t include wordpress.com in the domain name. Assigning a separate domain name to your blog is certainly better, but it still misses the target of hosting your blog on your primary domain.

But wait! We’ve been singing the praises of WordPress for years, why would we say that WordPress is bad? The answer is that wordpress.com is a commercial service that will host your blog. wordpress.org is a site that hosts the WordPress software that you can download for free and install on your own website. By installing the software, you can leverage the power and ease-of-use inherent to the WordPress package while allowing your customers to go to yourwebsite.com/blog or blog.yourwebsite.com. By having a custom WordPress theme created, the user experience can be seamless among your auction calendar, your static pages and your blog.

WordPress isn’t the only blogging software that you can use on your website, but it’s certainly our favorite. Your web host may have different software that can be just as easily and quickly installed and configured to allow you to post your articles and news by simply logging in and typing.

Internet branding is simple. While it may be easier to simply grab a free account from somewhere, it’s far more professional to have a comprehensive, congruent presence that is consistently branded to provide a seamless user experience.

Yesterday, we examined some of the factors involved in selecting a domain name for your business. It needs to be a .com, match your company’s name, be short and be marketed in lowercase. Today, in the next installment of our Internet branding series, we’re going to look at your email address.

The worst mistake you can make to turn customers away is to use something other than your name for the username. This mistake was the at the top of the list in a recent survey. sxygrl47@domain.com and ladybug_lover@domain.com worked great for user names in college, but now it’s time to use first.last@domain.com or firstlast@domain.com or just lastname@yourdomain.com. If you have an address that is checked by more than one person, such as a generic company address, then it’s okay to find something generic like auction@domain.com or info@domain.com, but don’t use it for your company account unless it is checked by more than one person. That’s not the address to put on your personal business card.

Outside of the above offense, few other concepts seem more obvious than the importance of having an email address that matches the domain name of your website. Nevertheless, we still see some auctioneers who advertise to their customers a generic, free addresses from email providers such as AOL, Hotmail/MSN/Live, Gmail – or worse, from their Internet service providers such as Cox, SBC Global or Comcast.

Using one of the above-mentioned providers for a personal email account is okay, though it’s much more fun to register a domain name for yourself or your family to use for non-commercial purposes. Using an email address for commercial purposes that doesn’t match your domain name is simply unprofessional.

Your website IS your brand. Why on Earth would there be any benefit in advertising an address that doesn’t include your brand? Reasons we’ve heard cited for using a generic email account for business include the following.

• I’ve always used this address
• I have multiple domain names
• Using Gmail makes me seem cutting-edge and hip
• I don’t know how to set up email for my domain name
• I like the tools offered by this provider
• I want synchronized Outlook but don’t want to host my own Exchange server

None of these reasons justifies letting customers see an email address that doesn’t include your brand. The only reason listed that doesn’t involve lack of configuration or simplicity is the idea that customers somehow perceive Gmail users as advanced. This is true, but only in comparison with other free email providers. We all like to make fun of AOL and Yahoo users, but consumers equally ridicule Gmail users who use Gmail for business. It’s assumed that these users are either too lazy or don’t know how to set up their own, branded email addresses.

The solution is simple. Use a service like Gmail – Google Apps for your Domain is a particularly excellent choice – or a company that provides hosted Exchange server to allow you to have one powerful interface to check all your email accounts. It’s very simple to configure addresses from one or many domain names to have email delivered to one location. Through the use of rules in Outlook or filters in Gmail, you can easily keep track of all your accounts in one central location. When properly configured, each email you send will appear to come from the appropriate account. The methods to this configuration are outside the scope of this article and will depend on your registrar and your web host.

We’ve actually met auctioneers who have removed the website from business cards, relying on different colors to make the domain in the email address stand out, thereby conveying both an email address and a website on one line. This leap of faith that customers will recognize this strategy isn’t for the weak-at-heart, but it’s an innovative idea, nonetheless.

When is it okay to use an email address for business that isn’t matched to your domain name? There are two scenarios.

1. You’re unemployed
2. You don’t have a domain name yet

If the first is true, you’re probably not using it for commercial purposes unless it’s to send and receive responses from resumes. In this case, a Gmail account – or, better yet, yourname@yourname.com – will lend the most professional impression to a prospective employer. If the second is true, stop reading now, read yesterday’s post and then buy a domain name. The first year’s registration costs less than having your logo embroidered on a shirt, and is many orders of magnitude more valuable and important.

Your domain is your brand. Your email address is an obvious and easy way to promote your brand and show your customers that you run a professional organization.

Today we embark on a three-part series regarding Internet branding. Specifically, we’ll discuss how the choices you make for your domain name, your email address and your blog begin to build your brand before you think about designing a logo or writing a word of copy.

There are some rules to follow when choosing a domain name for your site.

Select a .com TLD
A TLD is a top level domain. .com, .net, .org were among the first and are still the most common TLDs in the United States. Unlike other TLDs like .gov and .mil, anyone can register new domain names with these three TLDs without restriction. The .com TLD is for companies or commercial endeavors. .org is for non-profit – you guessed it – organizations, while .net is for more personal projects that aren’t as official as .com or .org. There are now many other TLDs, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is planning to begin to allow essentially an unlimited number of new TLDs soon, increasing the number from perhaps 100 current TLDs to possibly thousands.

The problem is that nobody remembers websites that don’t end in .com. Now you’re going to object, reminding us that the new domains offer specialization. “But .pro would be a great choice since I’m a professional!” No it wouldn’t. Professionals choose .com. “But .ca is available and I’m located in California!” Your location doesn’t matter. If you’re in the United States and advertising your commercial website, .com is for winners.

Own the domain that matches your company name
“We’re a US company and someone already has aaaauction.com,  .us works just as well!” No it doesn’t. If someone already has the .com name for your company, you absolutely need to change your business name. That’s how important it is that your domain name matches your company.

If your website is kansasbid.com, make sure that your company name is Kansas Bid and vice versa. If you try to get cute with your domain name, few will remember it.

Shorter is better
If your company is named for you, your first and best bet is your last name. In other words, if our auction company is called Aaron Traffas Auctioneers, we would look for traffas.com. It suffers from being difficult to spell, but we’d get around that problem by registering travis.com, traffis.com, trafas.com and so on, having each of the alternate misspellings point to the main account. However, since traffas.com is taken, we’d settle for aarontraffas.com, knowing that it was a little less desirable than traffas.com but not quite a deal breaker.

However, let’s say that we’re John Smith Auctioneers. Obviously smith.com is taken. Obviously johnsmith.com is taken. Do we look for johnsmithauctioneers.com? Now we’re getting into the problem of a lengthy domain name. The longer the name, the more difficult it is to predict misspellings, the harder it is to fit on business cards, the harder it is to read on billboards, and – worst of all – the harder it is to get customers to remember the site. Was it johnsmithauctioneer.com? Was it johnsmithauctions.com? Notice they never think to ask if it was .net or .org or .us or .idiot.

Own your domain name
This problem is rampant within the auction industry. Many auctioneers are approached from an upselling [read:predatory] website hosting company with a sales pitch that goes something like this. “We’ll host website for you and even register your domain name so you don’t have to deal with a registrar or mess with any of that techy stuff.” We really like it when they use the word techy, by the way. The company then registers your domain name for themselves and creates your website. Should you ever wish to leave, you can’t simply point your domain name to another provider because you don’t own it, they do.

Find out if you own your domain name. Go to http://www.whois.net/ and enter your website. Sometimes, as in the case with Network Solutions, it will tell you you have to go to the registrar used to register the domain name to see who owns it. Stay with us. This exercise is important. Your web host can be listed as the technical contact, but you must be listed as the registrant or you don’t own your website.

CamelCase isn’t for websites
This rule isn’t necessarily about selecting your domain, but it’s about how you present it to your users. It will probably generate some opposing comments, but we feel it’s both true and important. Websites are case-insensitive. That means that auctioneertech.com is just as valid as AuCtIoNeErTeCh.com. Why don’t we write our website using CamelCase like AuctioneerTech.com since that’s the way it looks in our logo? Because websites should ALWAYS be written exclusively in lowercase. Writing your site using intermittent capital letters may make it seem easier to read, but it also makes you seem a little less – to use the word from our patronizing, predatory salesperson from above – techy than the competition. Your customers notice the details, don’t give them the opportunity to think less of you because of something as simple as how you write your domain name.

Priorities
In summary, your website is the most important marketing component to your business. While many people will come to your site by clicking a link, far more will visit your site because they saw your website in an ad or because they’ve been there before. Make it easy for them not only to remember, but to guess. The first thing most everyone does when trying to load a site is to type the company name and add .com. If that doesn’t work, if we’re interested enough we may look up to see what it was supposed to be, either by referencing the ad or searching in Google. In this case, it’s already a strike against the site and the milk is a little more sour before we’ve even arrived at our destination.

The current website and interface for financial institution Capital One suffers from some accessibility issues. While its source code suffers a little from divitis and classitis (using the DIV and CLASS (X)HTML elements excessively for layout purposes), by far the most annoying problem is that the site requires users to enable JavaScript to login to view their accounts. It’s as if accessing your Capital One account gave you a paper cut. It’s annoying, but it may be worth a little blood and a Band-Aid® to turn on JavaScript and see your transactions.

This morning, however, Capital One sent an email to its credit card customers announcing that they were moving from an accessibility paper cut to full-on, get-it-over-with-quick amputation.

Starting January 24, 2010, your online statements will be available in PDF format only. HTML access will be discontinued.

If you don’t already have Adobe Reader(R), which is a PDF file viewer program that can open and interact with your online statements, you can download the latest version for free. Please visit [junk link obscured by HTML tracking gibberish].

Remember, your current statement as well as statements from the previous 18 months are always available for you online. Simply log in to Online Banking and select the Statements tab. If you need to, you can even download and print PDF copies, which are identical to your paper statement. Please visit [junk link obscured by HTML tracking gibberish].

If you have signed up for paperless statements and can’t download Adobe Reader(R), click here to learn how to start receiving paper statements again. Please visit [junk link obscured by HTML tracking gibberish].

Their current system is quickly and easily accessible by anyone who can use JavaScript. This user base includes nearly all browsers and mobile devices. It’s pretty fast and allows users to easily and effectively access transaction history. Capital One is turning it off.

In place of their current, working system, they’re leaving us with a head-fake towards functionality by saying we can still download our transactions in PDF format. While it’s true that PDF is an accepted standard, making it the only way to access our data poses the following problems.

1. Now the users must launch a separate program to view their transactions. This program takes time to launch. Even users with Chrome’s PDF plugin, which renders the PDF in the browser using Google, are removed from the carefully-crafted user experience offered by the website.
2. Screen readers and mobile devices will have a harder time accessing the site, if they can access it at all.
3. Third party sites like Mint may no longer be able to access the information. It’s too soon to tell if Mint will be effected, but such a significant change is bound to affect any automated system that logs in to access transactional data.

To make matters worse, they’re recommending the Adobe Reader(R) software, by far the most bloated and malware-like PDF reader on the market. If the user isn’t careful, simply attempting to download Adobe Reader installs a package called Adobe Download Manager. We’re not making this stuff up. If you have Adobe Reader, check your installed programs list. Did you ever wake up and say, “Gee, I wish I could find a product from Adobe that I could install to make it easier to download other Adobe products.” Bet not. It was installed because you didn’t read carefully when you installed Reader. We call it malware when a product installs something you didn’t know about, and Adobe does it with their Download Manager. Uninstall it, you don’t need it and you never did – Acrobat Reader can be downloaded just fine without allowing extra crap on your system. For more information about the proper use of PDF, view the transcript or listen to the episode from Auction Podcast Episode 5 – PDF.

Now don’t read this article and think that we’re saying that PDF should never be used. PDF is a fine format, and the ability to view transactions as a PDF would have been a nice feature to add to Capital One’s existing offering. Providing customers with the ability to print their statements in a way that is formatted like the statements sent in the mail is a very laudable goal. The problem is that they’re moving exclusively to this new format, at the expense of the usability, accessibility and speed by disabling their existing system.

Imagine if we auctioneers said that the only way to get information about an auction, property, or other item was with PDF. Think of how our users would feel when they could no longer simply read the content in their browsers but instead had to launch a completely separate program and enter a different user experience. Sure, we’ve mentioned this topic here before, but Capital One’s accessibility failure announced today gives us a concrete example of why this entrapment of content is bad for users.

Duluth, MN – A Stillwater man is the 2010 Minnesota State Champion Auctioneer. At the 22nd annual auctioneer championship held in Duluth, Matthew Schultz won the competition in which 27 auctioneers competed.

The contest was held last night during the Minnesota State Auctioneers Association Conference and Show. Schultz has been part of the auction profession for almost half of his life. He is a graduate of World Wide College of Auctioneering and prior to this contest won the 2002 Minnesota Rookie Auctioneer Contest. He currently sits on the Young Professional Auctioneers Advisory Committee for the National Auctioneers Association and is actively involved in both the Minnesota and National Auctioneers Association.

Schultz will now have his entry paid into the International Auctioneers Championship to be held in Greensboro, North Carolina this July. Asked to describe how he felt with one word, Schultz said, “Awesome!”

The contestants were judged on presentation, chant/voice, effective auctioneering and an interview conducted on stage. This year’s Reserve Champion was Austin Bachman of Ottertail, Minnesota. Rounding out the top five were Kurt Johnson of White Bear Lake, Theresa Ann Larson from Aitkin and Bryce Hansen of Prairie Farm, Wisconsin.

The MSAA celebrated their 60th anniversary at this year’s conference and show, which concluded Saturday night in Duluth. The association is an organization of licensed auctioneers who work to promote the auction profession. As the new champion, Matthew Schultz will serve as a goodwill ambassador for Minnesota Auctioneers throughout 2010.

Justin Clark shows off his ruggedized, waterproof camera with custom auction functionality and explains what realtimebid.com is and does for auctioneers. This video was recorded in July, 2009, at the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show in Overland Park, Kansas.