Does your organization have a policy in place regarding unsolicited commercial e-mail? Let’s think about the underlying principles your e-mail policy should be based upon.

The act of sending an Email message without the prior consent of the recipient is considered offensive. The sender of any Email message must have a prior established relationship with the recipient (they should at least know who you are), or the recipient’s express permission to be included on your e-mail list (maybe they don’t know who you are, but for some reason, they don’t mind getting e-mail from you).

Always ask permission to add a contact to your e-mail list. Allow the recipients of your e-mail to safely remove themselves from your list. Immediately remove anyone from your list who asks to be removed, and remove them without question.

-Bill

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Bill Bowman
Senior Technology Advisor
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x135

Is your website current with your latest products and services, company news and press releases? If you’re like most organizations, you’re going to reluctantly admit that not only isn’t the site up to date, but you’re often embarrassed by it.

You had a vision of having a great web site…what went wrong? Most often the problem is due to one of these reasons:

1. Original site was non professionally designed – (the son of a neighbor who just completed an HTML class for example)
2. There was never an action plan to keep the site up to date
3. Those responsible for contributing content “pass the buck” and don’t provide your developer with the materials
4. You provide your web developer and web maintenance provider with materials but the information doesn’t get posted timely
5. The nature of your business requires that your site changes often and you literally can’t keep up with the changes.

In recent years, and thanks to some wonderful open-source solutions, it’s never been more cost effective to create a web site that you (and your staff) can maintain yourself! With minimal training and with little more knowledge than using a word processing program such as Microsoft Word, you’ll be able to make immediate changes to your site in REALTIME.

In recent years, Centrend has been building Content Management Systems for customers to solve the problem of keeping their site up to date and helping them realize these benefits:

• - In smaller companies, owners or operations managers maintain the site directly. Owners love the ability to make immediate changes to their site.
• - In larger organizations, responsibility for maintaining the web site is handed down to department managers. Owners and business managers can then hold each department accountable for their area of the site.
• - The CMS systems work great for internal only sites too such as company intranets and project management and tracking-oriented sites.
• - Because Content is so easily added, you end up with a larger website which adds value for your visitors and makes you site more useful for search engines as well.

Please contact me if I can be of any help getting your web site strategy back on track!

-Paul
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Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO