Internet Tips

MAIL: PROBLEM: Most companies have internal email at their companies. BUT if there is a problem with their email software or servers they are SOL (simply out of luck). SOLUTION: Go to EXCITE.com or Yahoo.com or Hotbot.com ... and open an internet mail account in your company name for FREE. NOW if you have internet access you can send and receive email with clients worldwide while your company email is being FIXED. BONUS: You also can go anywhere in the world and send and receive email from ANY computer with internet access. AHH also have your office forward a copy of your company mail to your (internet mail account) while on the road and you will have access to ALL your mail !

BROWSERS: HTML is the most common language that webpages are designed in. It is important to know that there is not a STANDARD set up for all Browsers to read the most common HTML the same. We prefer Navigator for viewing web pages but we must admit that if you are printing a web page, M. Internet Explorer gives you better choices. AOL, WEB TV, have browsers that can react very strangely to HTML and just like "NEW CARS" each year there is a NEW BROWSER version that designers build their web pages to be viewed on. This means you should absolutely go to Netscape and Microsoft yearly and download a new version of each to make your internet experience current.

PRINTING FROM THE INTERNET: If you print web pages you will find more often than not that the pages are split, too wide or print funny. A Print Preview function is a great idea and Microsoft Internet Explorer Rules Here. You can do a print preview to see how best to set up your printer for each page. A good suggestion for setting up your web printing is to set it to print at 80% to 90%. in your printing preferences. This will help you be able to print wider pages. Unless you are looking for Text only, tell your printer to print Backgrounds and Graphics and shrink pages to fit for printing. This will get you a better copy of each web page. It will take a bit longer to print but you'll be happier. If you have a stylewriter or printer with smaller ink cartridges you may want to turn off the background printing or you can run through ALOT of black ink printing a site like Getgrapes.com

PLUG-INS OH OHH. Don't give up here now. You should learn to download a few PLUGINS for your internet browsing. ADOBE ACROBAT READER PLUG-IN This free plug in is a must for any business. the .PDF format is the best format for cross platform documents to be read, and you will see .pdf documents all over the web for download. You can and should purchase a FULL Writer version. This will allow you to CREATE .pdf documents from any of your word processing files for email . MUSIC/Video PLUG-INS: Real Audio, Liquid Audio, MP3 Players, Quicktime... All these audio and or video plug-ins come with some newer browsers and can be downloaded for music and video. VIDEO/GRAPHICS: Shockwave is the most popular cool graphics plugin. It is used in design or animation on many game/artistic sites, but unless you have a plugin for it, you can't even view the webpages or parts of webpages. NOT GOOD. But cool.