Watching a great series of how-to videos which address all kinds of technical hurdles in really simple ways.

However, some recommendations in the segment on websites got me fired up a little bit. They said:

• You must register your own domain name; if someone else registered it for you, insist on being given complete control
• Build your own website
• Or, if you hire a professional, make sure they use a template in order to save time and money

As I mentioned in my comments at the presenter’s blog, having control of your domain name is only an issue if you don’t have a solid trust relationship with the person who registers it on your behalf. If you trust them, your domain name is in no danger. If you don’t, why, may I ask, are you doing business with them?

All other things being equal, shouldn’t your technical tasks be outsourced to a technical person? Do you really want to manage your own DNS settings, configure your own email accounts, and do all the little tedious things involved in managing a domain name?

Building your own website is a first-rate top-notch recipe for disaster.

The following may sound a bit like a pitch; like I’m bragging. Probably.

I have hand-coded websites from scratch, with built-in organic search engine optimisation, a spam-resistant contact form, good user-interface engineering and usability, in under an hour. Yeah; 59 minutes.

Fifty-nine minutes.

Cost? $300.

If you build your own website using some site builder tool, guess what it will cost to have a professional web developer take it over when you reach the point that you can’t manage it anymore?

More than $300, I’ll tell you that.

Really; why would you make your web presence a homemade non-professional not-standards-compliant invisible to the search engines hard-to-use thing, when I can hand-code a custom site (using your existing images and content) which meets all the technical and human criteria of excellence, in under an hour, for $300?

Oh; templates? Asking me to work with a template is like asking a brain surgeon to work with mittens on. Sure, I could do it. But you’ll pay extra in order to have a site that came out of a box, instead of being completely custom-made.

I’m testing the Pamela Call Recording tool for my new Skype account. Problem is, I get an error every time I try to start it. The error says, more or less, this:

Unable to initialize Skype connection library, or Skype is not running

I found an answer at the Skype fora (isn’t that the plural of ‘forum’ ? No? Oh; okay) but it had errors in it. I posted my comments, which you can read right here if you log in with your Skype account: http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=352421&st=0&p=1756661&#entry1756661

The short version is, if you’re comfortable with this arcane command, it should fix it:

regsvr32.exe "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Skype\Skype4COM.dll"