Yesterday morning, I just happened to finish my yoga workout and pressed the stop button on our VCR when I heard a reporter talking about David Beckham’s underwear ad. Well, fortunately Wendi wasn’t in the room when I saw this, otherwise, we might not have gotten to the office in time.

I know you may be thinking, “You people at Mr. Technique specialize in websites, not celebrity smut!” Yes, we do specialize in websites, but something about David Beckham pertaining to website development happened to be on the national news this week.

What really caught my attention was hearing the reporter mention that there are several blogs talking about David Beckham’s underwear ad.

Five years ago, a blog would have never made national headlines, much less any respected opinion about David Beckham.

Now any individual can start typing away at his/her computer and start making waves nationwide.

What is a blog you might ask?

Well, for those of you who don’t know, a blog is short for a web log. You can start up a blog for free at www.blogger.com and talk about topics in your industry to your clients, customers, and even prospects. You don’t even need Mr. Technique to update your blog. You can do it yourself. Even better, you can start driving traffic to your website from your blog.

Although, Blogger.com is a great blogging tool, we recommend having a WordPress blog on your website. The advantages of having a WordPress blog installed on your site as opposed to just having an account with Blogger.com are:

• You can customize it to the look of your website
• It can be your website with your own domain name
• There are way more design templates to choose from
• You can add multiple editors to the blog with each editor having their own account
• You never have to worry about your account being cancelled

Of course, we at Mr. Technique can help you set up a WordPress blog. Once we set up the blog, it’s so easy to update the content yourself. No website knowledge is required to keep your blog updated. It really is that simple.

Contact us today to get your WordPress blog set up!

Next week, we’ll be back with more helpful advice, but in the meantime, please pass this information on to your friends, family, co-workers, or even your boss.

Ok, we’re back again with our weekly tip. This week, we’re going to talk about forwarding your emails for our clients who have a hosting account with us. What you would do is access your control panel by going to www.yourwebsite.com/cp. Of course, you would type in your website where it says yourwebsite.com. Next, you would enter your login information as shown below:

Next, you would go to Mail Manager.

Now, click on ‘Yes’ under the Forwarding column for the email address you want mail forwarded from.

To forward emails, you check Enable forwarding. If you don’t want to have two mailboxes full of mail, I would leave the option for Keep a copy of the forwarded messages unchecked. Also, if you don’t want the email account you’re forwarding from to have the option to enable or disable forwarding, you may want to leave the option for Show forwarding menu in Webmail unchecked as well. Finally, just enter any email address(es) you want email forwarded to in the Your Forward list text box and click Update.

You’re done. Now you can go grab yourself a cup of coffee and thank your lucky stars for Mr. Technique! Just kidding. We’ll see you next week.

We’re back again like clockwork. Last week, I mentioned PDFCreator, a free tool that you can use to make PDF files. This week I’m going to talk about how to use PDFCreator.

1. To make a PDF file, you would go through the same steps as you would to print any regular document by selecting File –> Print menu option at the top left of your screen. You should now see a Print window. Just select PDFCreator instead of your printer and click OK.

2. Now, you’ll see the PDFCreator window open. If you don’t want to put any restrictions on your PDF file, you can just click the Save button and skip to Step 5. But, if you would like to prevent viewers from printing your PDF file or you want to prevent viewers from copying and pasting your content, you can click the Options button instead.

3. Now, the Options window will come up. Be sure and click on PDF in the Formats section.

4. Next, you’ll click on the Security Tab toward the top of the window. Then, check the box that says Use Security. If you’d like to prevent viewers from copying and pasting your text, you could select “Copy text and images” from the “Disallow User To”section. Next, click the Save button at the bottom right of the window. Then, click Save again in the PDFCreator window.

5. You’ll be taken to your regular Save As window. From there, just name your document and save it.

6. Finally, just enter a password and you’re done. In the previous step, make sure that under the Passwords section to only have checked the option that says “Password required to change permissions and passwords”. If you check the option that says “Password required to open document”, your viewers will have to know your password to open the document every time.

After you’re done, your PDF document should automatically open. Well, we hope you’re a little more keen on making PDF documents after reading this tutorial!

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!  Wendi and I are back again to give everybody some free tips on how to use your computer and the Internet!

Have you ever wanted to know how to make a PDF file?  By the way, PDF stands for Portable Document Format.  Well, you could purchase a copy of Adobe Acrobat, but a licensed copy of Acrobat will cost you at least $200.  If you don’t feel like purchasing Adobe Acrobat, you can get PDFCreator.  Here are some of the features of PDFCreator:

• You can create PDFs from any program that is able to print
• You can prevent viewers of your PDF document from copying and pasting.
• You can password protect your PDF so only authorized users can view your document

Best of all, PDFCreator is free even for commercial use!  To download PDFCreator, click here.

Next week, we’ll show you how to use PDFCreator.