The iPhone 4 pre-order was made available today. Were you able to get one?

If you were like me you went to the Apple website and tried… and tried… and tried, only to receive the “Your request couldn’t be processed.” The Apple’s online pre-order system used an eligibility check for existing AT&T customers, which appears to have been the cause of the issue. Additional problems arose for users who attempted to pre-order using the Apple retail store software from the App Store and found the software hung up at a “processing” screen while checking eligibility for their upgrade.

Even with all of the “processing” issues, the pre-orders for the iPhone 4 stopped from the AT&T website as of around 1:30pm Pacific from the AT&T website. So I guess in between all of the problems there were people that were able to get their hold on the prized iPhone 4.

As if the problems of today is not bad enough rumors have been circulated that a potential AT&T security breach worse than the one encountered days before with the iPad 3G email addresses being leaked. AT&T reports it has been unable to reproduce the issue but users are reporting that they are logging into their AT&T accounts only to find out they are looking at someone else’s account information. Talk about a case of “when it rains, it pours.”

Image via CrunchBase 

Are you trying to create leads and generate interest in your business with your blog or website? If you’re spending time and money creating content and marketing your site, but using a cheap hosting plan, you might be out of luck.

…And why is that? Google is penalizing slower websites with lowered search rankings!

In April, Google announced that your site will be penalized for slow load times. This is a critical factor for real estate and other professionals that are working hard at getting their site to the top of the page when consumers Google search for services. This will highlight just how much a cheaper, slower web hosting option will really cost consumers.

The dollars and sense of web hosting for rankings

Now don’t go blaming Google for upping the web hosting ante – those cheaper solutions have been a bad idea from the beginning.  Why? Well, ever since higher speeds have been available, people have wanted and expected to use them – meaning they don’t want to wait around for your site when they could get content instantly elsewhere. What may be a few seconds or even fractions of a second in load time translates to what feels like hours for impatient searchers. When your consumer is frustrated before they even get to your listings or other information, they’re not in the best frame of mind to discuss business and may not have the best first impression of our business.

So why so slow?

Many times slow sites are the result of cost-saving measures for small business owners, misguided advice about web hosting services as well as the lack of recognition that the site is loading slowly. Often times, users are unaware of what their site load time is because they fail to visit their site as a consumer would, and they also fail to look at their site from multiple browsers. Browsers can render pages differently, including different load times. The two browsers most frequently used are Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, others include Apple’s Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera.

Checking your site regularly for speed, ease of use and updated content can make the difference in customers sticking around the first time and coming back in the future.

Fast as fast can be, you’ll never catch RWNC!

Realty World Northern California provides free blog websites for their agents built on the WordPress MU platform, which RWNC extensively modified to integrate with the MLS IDX, among other security and performance enhancements. The colocation data facility used provides the highest performance and reliability of web content delivery for the best possible experience for your users.

All website designs are optimized for the best performance to the end users as well as perform rigorous QA testing for cross-browser compatibility – so you don’t have to worry about it and can focus on getting the best local real estate information on your site instead.