013 – Email Accounts with WordPress Websites
No Email Account
– Some businesses do not have an email account
– How are people supposed to get ahold of someone after hours?
– Suppose you are looking for something that’s not uber critical
– Type out your question and paste it onto contact forms and when someone gets back with you, you have an answer
Personal Looking Email Accounts
– Had a client this week that gave me an email address like this: generatorcity@aol.com
– Seriously?!?!
– What type of business do you think she is in?
– Generators / some sort of sales generator
– Nope, inflatables, like the bouncy house etc you would see at a company picnic
– You have to be really diligent with one shared account
– Accidentally forward personal email
– You could delete potentially valuable work emails.
– Just a nightmare
Professional Looking Email Accounts
– You can have an email address that’s yourname@yourdomain.com
– Example Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com
– Highly recommend separate business and personal accounts
– Multiple accounts throughout the business info, questions, support
– My recommendation
Now that you know what my recommendation is, how do we go about setting these accounts up
1.) GoDaddy
– This is an expensive solution
– 1 email account $1.19 per month
– 5 email accounts $2.49
– Unlimited plan 10 account 2.99 month
– Each additional 10 cost $2.49
– Small business with 50 emails costs:12.95 month / $155.40 for email
2.) GreenGeeks, Bluehost, HostGator
– Unlimited free email accounts, with unlimited storage
– Three different web interfaces
– How to and guides to set up Outlook, Apple Mail etc.
– No good calendar solution
3.) Best solution Google Apps
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html
Features
Free for businesses with less than 50 people
What’s holding you back from having a Professional Email Account?
You’re wonderful! Just wanted to make your day better 🙂
Aug 19, 2011Dustin,
Mar 1, 2012I setup Google Apps for my business tonight and thought of a question for you.
When setting up Google Docs, it mentions you can use a CNAME entry of something like docs in order to allow you do setup a URL like docs.yourwebsiteenginer.com in order to make it easier for you to remember your Google Docs URL vs remembering docs.google.com/a/yourwebsiteengineer.com
I like the idea, but the concern I have is opening yourself up for potential hacks or exposing more services than you probably should to the rest of the word.
I kind of like security by obfuscation, but I doubt that my Gmail would be any safer by NOT using an easy to remember CNAME record.
Thoughts?
@Eric Holstein I don’t think that you are going to set yourself up for more risks of being hacked just because you have the CNAME’s modified for it to be easier to access your google accounts.
Mar 5, 2012Hackers will have to know what that CNAME is and if you want to thwart a hacker from guessing, make it easy for you to remember but not standard; like instead of docs.yourwebsiteenginer.com make it eric.yourwebsiteengineer.com or anything other than the normal.
Also remember that even if someone can get to the login page they still need to have your user id and password, so be sure to make those difficult and hard to crack!