The Hwy52 Blog

Live chat software is a popular method for making it easier to engage with your website's visitors. As a user of live chat software we found, in many cases, that potential customers were more likely to engage using live chat than they were to fill out a static contact form or to call us on the phone.

Leading market research company, Forrester Research, found that 57% of customers abandon their purchase if they can not get their questions answered quickly. In addition, the same study found that 44% of online consumers rated having their questions answered while in the middle of a purchase as one of the most important features a website can offer.

I hope everyone is keeping safe and taking the recommended steps to stay healthy during this Covid-19 outbreak.

I want to let you know that we have heard from our major suppliers, and they have told us that they are committed to doing what is necessary to keep their employees safe while at the same time maintaining the services that are so important to our technology stack.

Due to the nature of our work, our ability to provide you with services has not been impacted at this point. We want you to know we are ready to work with you, and to support you through this very disruptive period.

For many small business owners, sorting out fact from fiction regarding how to use the internet to grow their business can be a real challenge. There is an overabundance of information on the topic and answers are often hard to come by or overly technical. Does internet marketing really work? Where do I host my website? What about security? What is SEO? How does it all work anyway?

At Hwy52 Digital we have been helping businesses in Oakville, Burlington, Milton, Halton Hills and throughout Ontario get found online and stay ahead of the competition since 2008. Whether you have a new business or want to grow an existing business,

In addition to providing web hosting services we also provide email hosting services - both as part of our web hosting packages and as a standalone service.

Setting up and managing an email client can be a challenge, especially as more and more customers need to check their email on multiple devices (mobile, tablet, desktop etc.). One area of confusion I often see involving email configuration has to do with what email retrieval connection protocol to use - POP or IMAP.

There is no single answer as to whether you should configure your mail client to connect using POP or IMAP. Everyone works differently and there is no single solution that will work for everyone. This post is not meant to be a comprehensive tutorial on internet email but is written as an introduction to the POP and IMAP protocols with the goal of helping you to better understand and configure your email across multiple mail clients.

This is a bit (ok more than a bit) geeky, but I wanted to share my notes on how to SSH to a remote server using PuTTY and public key authentication. People seem to have a lot of trouble with this - mostly with the dreaded "server refused our key" error. There are several ways to set up PuTTY to use public key authentication. The method below has worked successfully for me many times -  mostly connecting to our CentOS VPS. I am sharing with you assuming you already have some basic Linux command line knowledge, you know what PuTTY is and that you understand you are using these instructions at your own risk.

• ssh to server via PuTTY using your username and password. The username should be the same user you will be logging in as via PuTTY. I do not recommend using root. You should be in your home directory if not :
  cd ~
• mkdir ~/.ssh
  chmod 700 ~/.ssh

Earlier this month we changed our name to Hwy52 Digital. We made this change to more accurately position our business within the category of "Digital Marketing Agency".

Digital marketing is sometimes referred to as web marketing, online marketing or internet marketing. It is really the umbrella term that we feel best fits the range of services we have been providing that include: web development, social media management, pay per click management (AdWords, Facebook etc) and SEO services.

Just our name has changed. Our focus continues to be in providing small to medium-sized "local" businesses a range of affordable digital solutions that get measurable results. Please call me if you have any questions.