Using e-mail io your advantage E-mail has exploded in the work- place and, coupled with countless other forms of communication available in the office, many employees feel they are drowning in information overload. A study trom Pitney Bowes Ine. says the average worker receives 190 messages of vari- ous types cach day. Is there a way to make ¢- mail work for you rather than against vou? In short ves — e-mail is manageable and really quite beneficial. It is just a matter of knowing how to organize it. Re selective in responding to e-mail. Unless the matter is really urgent, don't respond too quickly. People whe respond to every message within five or 10 minutes prob- ably are paying more attention to their e-mail than their job. Most e-mail services allow you to mark messages for follow up at a Jater date — enabling you to sift through what needs your urgent attention. Filing vour e-mail each day keeps the chaos away. Set up electronic folders to categorize and store e-mails. Take time every day to go through your inbox, immediately discard what you can and file what you must. Handy folders to include are “to-do,” “contacts” and “personal.” : Sift through the urgent. _As you sift through your incoming mes- * sages, some c-mail packages allow vou to colour-code and “tag” e-mails by priority. If 7 : you are waiting for an important ¢-mail from a client, vou can have it automatically coded red when it arrives so it is immediately called to your attention. Tf you don’t use it —~ lose it. Make sure the mail vou get at work is the type of mail that makes the best use of vour limited-time during work hours. Why not have your personal ¢-mail directed to another account, One free option is an e-mail account from MSN Hotmail, (http://msn.caj, an e- mail service which offers fast, reliable e-mail anywhere there's a PC with Web access. Besides, if’ it’s vour own address, you don’t have to worry about the boss reading your personal e-mails. - Use e-mail as your own personal secretary. Keeping track of information on the road is always difficult but e-mail is actually as casy to check as voice mail. Web-based e-mail ser- vices, like Hotmail, can become your virtual suitcase, Have your office e-mail automatically for- _ warded to your Hotmail account. This way you can check your e-mail from any PC in the world with Web access. You don’t have to rely on. difficult phone line connections back to your offive, potentially wasting precious time and leaving you out of the Joop on important business decisions. ‘Though it might only take a few seconds, signing your name and title to every e-mail can add up toa lot of time. And leaving them off can frustrate people trying to reach you. Most e-mail services have an “Auto. signa- ture” feature that will automatically add your title and contact information to the bottom of your e-mails. It’s especially handy for those days when you are so busy you don’t chink you can remember vour own name. north shore news <> BUSINESS HicH TERS Wednesday, June 16, 1999 — North Shore News - 19 Good For 1 C opy of “UBL one ao F wy: ar Bae AE ghee Ory 76) Dead bie mead wereetin, wee ee on Serial Number: 0660-4925-3639.0012 NEWS photo Paul McGrath CHARLES Haynes faunched his latest PC software Saturdzy. Trial versions of webSpinnerPRO are available at . Haynes has put some telemarketers to work to spread the product throughout North America. are launched West Vancouver technology sets out to ease digital building work Michael Secker News Editor michacl@nsnews.com A West Vancouver man has developed a software pro- gram designed to ease the Web-making process for ler companies looking for a share of Internet traf- fic. Charles Haynes and a team of programmers have spent the last seven months v-riting the code for webSpinnerPRO, The Windows program allows users to build, update and up-load Web sites: Earlier in the decade, Haynes was ar the helm of Plasma Computer Products. The North Vancouver high- tech company folded in 1996, when defence-contract funding ran out, The company had been devel- oping flat-screen technology. Haynes and programmer Stephen Bourne, a student employ- ee at PCP, went on to develop a number of smaller software pro- grams. Last September Haynes formed ICPW.com Inc. to market a Web site order form developed to facili- tate e-commerce credit card trans- actions. Haynes says-he approached tive different businesses interested in testing the e-comm waters — one was an auto-dealer grossing $40 million a year in business out- side of the Nez. Said Haynes, “All of them had problems with their Web sites. In order to use the order form maker, they had to add in a link to the order form. That became a barrier. They could do it but I kept hearing the story, ‘I’vg.got problems with our Web designer... that’s going to cost me a hundred back to do... I've had nwo Web designers, the first one charged me too much to make updates so T got a new Web * designer and he told me that the first guy’s stuff was no good and I had to re-do the first one.” Haynes quickly realized that he couldn’t reach his small business target market. “They can’t afford to pay $3,000 for a Web site and $50 for an update. There needs to be a way for them to do that. WebSpinner was born as an casy way to make a simple Web site.” ‘Development of the software began last November. Haynes worked with computer science grads from SFU on the project. The lead programmer was Chris Tsui. Webgpi innerPRO has 15,000 lines of cox. Installed it takes up 10 megabytes of drive space. There are four universal tem- plates: a catalogue, a template for - text and images, a template for favourite links and one to facilitate contract. “It’s essentially to Web site creation what a word-processor is to letter writing,” Haynes said. Haynes has no plans for a Mac compatible release. “Never. It's 7% of the market. It’s much better to have a small percent of 93% of the market.” He is offering a trial ver- sion of the program available free for downloading at . It’s good for 10 uses. His marketing plan is simple. He’s hired three telemarketers. They will be contacting 4,800 Intefnet service providers (ISPs) throughout North America. The ISPs represent about 150 million users, WebSpinnerPRO will go out free of charge for evaluation by the ISPs. Said Haynes, “They then give them to their customers. In effect - they are our distributors. Why do they do that? Some of their cus- tomers will use this program to make Web sites and they will then host the Web sites with the ISP that gave them the program. That’s worth $500-S600 a year to the ISP.” The software program was offi- cially released last Saturday. soma FUME YOUR OFFICE TO THE IE BEACH _ INTEL P-166 or AMD 5-200 SYSTEMS h\ * 850 MB HDD, *16 MB RAM 40X CD-ROM. 56K MODEM 16 BIT SOUND, 15” TOWER CASE (‘UPGRADE TO 4.3 GB FOR $120) + PENTIUM Mother Boards (up to 2COMN) from $20 * 486 PGI Mother Boards *& UPGRADE to PENTIUM-166 {Limites} Time Offer) $1-$18 only $118 (including Izbaur) . _ Pte 166/200 MX Honitars VGA/SUGA 56K Modem New & used hard disk drives LAPTOPS-USED IBM Thinkpad 755 Cx Toshiba 430 CDT $68-$15 from $25 $40 (new) from $5 $749 fl $1099. | PH 233 Toshiba 2500 COS $1499 UARANTEED LOWEST PRICES!!! * Prices subject to range. limited quantities