New and Improved - Comparison Shop for Insurance

The insurance section of the web site was a relatively new addition, added to help achieve the objective of offering free resources to help you find the information you need. Everyone needs insurance, but finding information and, especially, the best rates can be challenging. We did the research and developed a directory of sites the allow you to comparison shop for all types of insurance. We expect that the bargain shoppers who visit our site will visit several of the places in the directory, which all feature easy to complete forms and no-obligation insurance quotes, and then select the best insurance plan bargain for their individual needs. It's easy to find the best deal on car, health, homeowner's, life, long term care, and other insurance policies with these resources. Although it needs a bit of refining, the new site look should make it even easier to navigate to obtain the information you need to compare rates and shop online--so don't forget to take notes. Click here to start comparison shopping for insurance services now.

About Our Links

People are always asking about the links at the site ... Every section of our site involves extensive research. Sometimes, we end up selecting just a couple of the best sites we find and linking to them or the products they sell--or we end up including content they provide in a variety of ways. Other times, there are several high quality sites out there and we create a directory to link to them. Did you know that sites are supposed to obtain permission before they link to other sites? Most sites do not enforce this policy, but some do. In order to make sure that the links at Do The Research are legal, the links usually either are from sites that grant open permission or that provide clear ways to obtain permission. Luckily, many sites offer programs that offer a way to link to their sites and commission for referring site visitors. That commission, combined with voluntary contributions, is what keeps Do The Research online. Other information and site features often result from people and companies who generously share their programming work or provide content for use on other sites. In our efforts to provide you with the information you need, we often feature directory information with detailed descriptions of other web sites. When possible, our links to other sites open new browser windows so you can easily return to our site and continue to browse the information we provide. As a result of several deciding factors, your favorite web site might not be included at Do The Research. If it's not, please let us know so we can look into it.

Take Notes!

Ever since the start of the site (in 1998, as Online Research Enterprise and then as research4you), it was clear that having a way for visitors to take notes as they used our comparison shopping features would be very helpful. Of course, many email programs, web browsers, and computer systems now have just that feature--but not all of them and not conveniently. Developing a way to offer this feature just didn't make it to the top of the to do list, especially when publicly available programs didn't surface. A program has, however, been made available to webmasters, and Do The Research now has it! Check out our Free Online Organizer at myorganizer.DoTheResearch.com! In addition to having a way to take notes, edit, and save them, the online organizer also has a calendar with excellent to do lists features. As more parts of the site have the new menus design (see the previous blog entry), you'll be able to sign up for your organizer and conveniently login to your organizer directly from the menus. Try it at the top or bottom of this page with the "take notes!" menu. After logging in, leave the notes window open as you go about comparison shopping, browsing the web, working on your computer, etc. Hopefully, you'll be as pleasantly surprised as we were at how helpful it is and how often you go back to it to add more notes (so just leave it open, saving notes as you go, okay). Click here to sign up for your free online organizer now.

New Vision?

Call it a mission, a vision, a focus, a theme, or whatever you want, Do The Research has a new one--sort of. Since the site stopped focusing on its original custom internet research services, it lost some of its focus. Nevertheless, the popular travel and fun sections (which both started as support for the "relax" in the motto "Relax, we'll do the research for you.") continued to attract countless visitors. The site grew as ideas about how to support the site's mission, "helping you find the information you need", came to light. It's still a hodgepodge, but it has a new vision to go with it's new look. As the new home page indicates, the updated theme ... "Do The Research offers free resources to help you find the information you need and the activities you enjoy."

New Look! - With Menus

Notice a new look on some pages? Soon, many pages will have menus like the one on this page. Check them out and explore the hidden and not so hidden features of the Do The Research web site. Hopefully, the new look and menus will make the site easier to navigate and, therefore, more useful to visitors. In order to make the menus friendly to those with less common browsers, the news pages use <noscript>, a hidden feature that shows links on those browsers. The first pages to have the new look are this site news blog, the copyright, terms, and conditions page, and the privacy policy page. Two new pages have been added in order to facilitate the use of the menus on some browsers, a google search and site search at http://DoTheResearch.com/googlesearch.html and a page with information about how to contribute to Do The Research at http://DoTheResearch.com/contribute.html. Updates and additions will be posted in this blog. Let us know what you think of the new look and features!

Site Outages?

The company that hosts Do The Research has been having problems. Since March, their server has been down frequently, which means the site often has been unavailable. This caused considerable loss of business. It also caused the site to lose listings in search engines and sites that help people find out about Do The Research. Previously, this host was a top-rated one with excellent support. So far, they have offered no explanation or apology for the outages. As a result, the search for a new host is underway. Therefore, I am writing this blog entry instead, to apologize to regular visitors for any difficulties they have had accessing the Do The Research web site. We do use the following services to keep track of the problem and resolve issues as soon as possible.

website uptime monitored by host-tracker.com website monitoring service

Welcome!

Welcome to the new Do The Research Site News Blog! This blog will help keep you updated about changes and additions to the Do The Research web site. It is available as a newsfeed via the links at the right. Please post comments and tell us what you think of the new features, favorite links, and anything else we post here.