Before You Use This Site
We suggest you have a couple things to best use this site:
1. Two Email Addresses: A Personal Email and A Registration Email
We highly recommend you have two email addresses before you use How to be Websmart.
The first email is what we term your personal email address. We recommend you use your personal email address for communicating with family and friends, business, and personal account information, like online bank accounts or stock accounts. All important email should come to your personal address.
The second email is a registration email address.
Why keep two email accounts? Simple. Registration on the internet is a way of life – you simply can’t access a lot of online places without registering an email address. Some sites send you tons of online newsletters and partner offers, other sites don’t. A lot of sites offer you the option to subscribe to their newsletters, while other sites simply subscribe you to all of their mailing lists, flooding your inbox with emails offers. These sites will only stop unsubscribing you once you actively log into your account and ask to unsubscribe, and even then you can’t be sure if they will stop sending you junk mail/spam.
The point is simple – the less you give your personal email away, the less chance you have of receiving spam at your personal address. So create a registration email account (which is a real email address), and use it liberally to register for things.
It’s up to you to decide which email to use for which service. We suggest using your registration email for all online shopping sites, photo sites, and news sites (but NOT for online bank accounts or other highly important personal information sites). Having a real registration email is good, because it protects your personal email from annoying newsletters, but also gives you a real email to check important documents (like a receipt from an online purchase).
A lot of the services that we are going to recommend to you require registration. They are good services, but sometimes some of them send annoying newsletters and such – and more importantly, they could DECIDE to in the future, even if they don’t. We made the mistakes of using our personal emails, and we don’t want you to. If a service requires a registration, we’ll make sure to recommend to you which email we think you should use. You’ll see something like ‘We highly recommend you use your registration email’ within the body of the article.
There are plenty of places you can sign up for an free email address to use as your registration email:
Gmail (This is our favorite email service – by Google. But be warned: if you don’t have a friend to invite you to the service, you need a mobile phone to register). Yahoo Mail Hotmail Hushmail Lycos Mail
Ok, we recommend you also get…
2. A Better Browser: Firefox
If you don’t already use Firefox: you know that blue ‘e’ on your desktop? The one you may double click to get on the Internet?
That blue ‘e’ connects you to a program called Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is a browser or a program you use to browse or surf the Internet.
But it is not the only browser available. In fact, it is probably one of the worst ones available. If you’ve noticed, Internet Explorer often allows those annoying pop-up ads to occur (those are those small advertisements that open in new windows), gives you those annoying script errors, and sometimes allows spyware on to your computer – those are the programs that slow down your computer immensely.
Want to make life browsing the Internet easier? To do so, you need a better browser. We recommend Mozilla Firefox – it does everything Internet Explorer does and tons more, and it’s free.
Sponsored Link:You can learn more by reading our ‘Firefox Explained’ article.
Full Disclosure: Excluding any sponsored links (which identify ads which exist within the main text of posts/pages on this blog), there are no referral or affiliate links in this article.
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You can learn more about why we maintain a full disclosure policy by reading How We Make Money.
