If you operate a mail server in your office — for example, if you have an Exchange server — ask your friendly IT technician if you have backup mail servers in place.

Commonly, a mail server is set up in an office, but if that server goes down (loses power, loses internet connectivity, etc.,) emails sent to that server will start bouncing back at the sender. The longer your server is down, the more likely the emails will bounce back.

This is rather unprofessional, but the easy answer is to configure backup mailservers. Usually, your Internet Service Provider or your web hosting company will allow you to use their mail servers at no additional cost. The backup mail servers will keep trying to forward emails through to your on-site mail server, and will buy you more time before emails are bounced back.

More people are accessing websites on their mobile phone, particularly as the price of data usage on mobile phones is decreasing. You might find that visitors only need to do simple things, such as find your phone number, but a website that is not built with mobile phone usage in mind can make even the simplest of tasks painful.

The easiest way to support mobile phones is to have your web developer create a stylesheet (css) specific for mobile phones. Then, needless parts of the website can be hidden, and colours, fonts and layout elements can be altered to make the website fit nicely on a very small screen.

If your website is larger and more complex, and each page consumes substantial bandwidth just to view, then you might choose to create a separate mobile phone version of your website. A common standard is to use a subdomain called ‘m’, so your URL would be http://m.example.com. You might choose to present just a sub-set of your website’s content on this URL, but ideally, it would be identical to your normal website in content, but have a custom display suitable for mobile phones.

There are several legitimate reasons to own multiple domain names relating to the one website. You might own both the .com and .com.au (or equivalent) to protect others from registering them and causing confusion; popular misspellings to capture visitors who type in your domain name incorrectly, or other domain names that you use to track various offline marketing campaigns.

The best way to handle these is to choose a single, primary domain name. Choose the domain name that the search engines seem to know about (i.e. you search for your business name; the first result that appears is the domain that the search engines primarily associate with your website.) Then, redirect all other domain names to this primary domain. The best type of redirect in this situation is a “permanent redirect”, also known as a “301 redirect”. Your web developer will be able to achieve this for most websites by using what’s known as a “.htaccess file”. Avoid redirects that involve placing code in an HTML page; search engines struggle with these.

“Parking” domain names to your primary website is an easier option, and is usually okay, provided no other website refers to the other domain names. Otherwise, search engines will pick those up, and become confused by the apparent duplicate websites. But to be safe, apply a redirect.

Spammers use scripts that crawl the web and fill out forms, hoping the form will result in someone receiving their spam message.

This causes problems for business owners who can become inundated with spam through their contact/enquiry, order and booking forms, making it difficult and time-consuming to sort through and find the legitimate submissions.

Two effective ways to prevent, or minimise, this type of spamare:

• Have your web developer modify the form to discard any form submissions that contain more than three URLs (which would never occur in ordinary usage)
• Have your web developer install a CAPTCHA (part of the form that requires the user to do something, such as identify a word in an image, that a computer script cannot do)

The former is non-intrusive, and might suffice for many websites. The latter is intrusive, in that it requires your visitor to do more work, but might be worth it in order to reduce workload in sifting through countless spam form submissions.

Many situations lend themselves to using a popup window, where a smaller version of the browser window opens up on top of the main browser window.

However, recent web browsers go to great lengths to prevent popup windows from appearing, which is great for stopping intrusive popup advertising, but not much good when a website has a legitimate reason for displaying something in a popup window.

All major web browsers now require several clicks (and often a page reload) to allow a popup window for a particular website, so the easiest approach is to find an alternative method of presenting that information.

If you must use a popup, provide graphical instructions to your visitor on how to accept the popup window — ideally, detect the browser your visitor is using, and show instructions specific to that browser. (It’s not that hard to cover the main web browsers in use today: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.)