Web Development India

The Benefits of an Effectively Built Website

2008-08-19T21:57:00.003-07:00

There's a "buzz" going on right now on the Internet about the phenomenon of "local searching". Companies like Google, Yahoo and Yellow Pages are gearing up to take advantage of the fact that people are using the "global" Internet to find information about local goods and services. All kinds of studies are being commissioned. These studies are finding out what any Internet connected shopper already knows. If a local company provides information about its product or services via a website, people searching for that information are more likely to buy from t

5 Vital Facts About Website Content Services

2008-08-19T21:57:00.002-07:00

Five important aspects of buying great website copy are: deadlines, human readability, search engine friendliness, pricing and communication. Let's look at these areas more closely.

Deadlines

You need to know when you place an order with a professional copywriting company that they will deliver when they promise. This is vital and can impact your business. A professional writer will only agree to a deadline they can meet.

Human Readability

Your content n

Web Development Tips Which You Should Never Ignore

2008-08-19T21:57:00.001-07:00

The field of Web development has been progressing at a rapid pace and the progress is keeping web developers on their toes but there are certain things which you cannot ignore from the word go. Given below are some of the tips which should always keep in mind before embarking on a project.

Clean code - You cannot escape this as it is regarded as the basis of any web development project. Even though several HTML and browser errors can be discounted but one must refrain from it and follow various validation standards set. Always apply OOP paradigm in case you are implementing server side language.

Security viewpoint - This aspect has become more and more important as several security issues have come up over the past years in the field of Web development . Depending upon the language you implement you should opt for multiple level security for your project since if this subject is ignored it could create lot of hassles at later stages.

Technology and Framework - The technology and framework to be implemented will depend upon the budget and target traffic. A good option for your project will be to choose one framework per language if you can afford to implement it. Always opt for the latest technology in the market as it will help in bringing out the best out of your project for time to come.

Error management system - You certainly cannot escape bugs during the web development phase and therefore you must come up with error management system and create a safe server which maintains backup of your website.

Time management - This has become extremely important keeping in mind the deadlines which need to be met and the importance of completing web development projects on time as it involves lot of labor, time and money.

Keep things simpler - The more complex a thing is the more problems it will create therefore before embarking on your Web development project try to keep it as simple as possible as it will ease the management of the project.

These are just some of the web development tips which you should remember at the back of your mind so that whenever you start up with some web development project you won't face any kind of hassles till the end.

IT Brain Technology is the author of Web development tips which you should never ignore. IT Brain Technology is involved in article writing and SEO consultancy services from last five years.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Peteer_Sons

How to Attract High-End Clients to Your Salon and Spa

2008-08-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

High-end clients would never let their savvy style and fashion sense go stale, and neither should you. There are numerous ways to let high-end customers know that you are dedicated to serving them with luxurious pampering. Creating a website that speaks to your target market's needs and wants is one of the easiest and quickest ways to get this message across.

Always keep your website fresh and up-to-date on style, content, and image. You wouldn't leave cobwebs at your storefront, so don't let your website collect them either. Websites get you clients and sales just as much as your storefront does.

Follow these tips, take action, and watch your sales skyrocket . . .

1. High-end clients want to know that you're there to service them in luxury:

A website, when done correctly, gives potential clients an excellent first impression of your salon or spa. Don't be gimmicky with flashy colors, graphics, and words, because that kind of first impression to a client does not express luxury. These high-end clients are looking to be pampered. The atmosphere of your website should reflect the personality of your salon and spa. If your spa prides itself on its Zen-like atmosphere, why would you create a website littered with cute graphics and big, bold headlines?

Photos, paired with well-written web copy, bring the client virtually into the salon and spa. Give visitors a privileged peak into what a day of pampering at your salon and spa would be like. Show them the benefits of your services, and explain why you are unique. Make sure to speak to their needs through descriptions of the luxurious environment of your salon and spa. The language should reflect the spa's unique character.

The web copy is just as important as the graphics because it describes in greater depth what's seen in the photos. Graphics can create the illusion of luxury, but the copy can expand on this illusion, solidifying your image of high-end status.

2. High-end clients want to know you have an excellent reputation:

Whether your salon and spa has been in business for years or is brand-new, you need publicity. Press releases are an excellent way to get your name out there. Newspaper and magazine articles and coverage on local stations guarantee people will view you at the top of your industry. If you regularly submit press releases and stay in the media spotlight, you will surely get new clients and more money in your bank account.

If you've been in business for a while and have received awards or customer testimonials, post those on your site. They are a great way to show customers that your salon and spa is well known and highly recommended.

3. High-end clients want to see that you're dedicated to their beauty:

Show that you're up-to-date on the fashion world by promoting the products you sell. Have an area on your website where clients can purchase high-end products used in your salon. Describe the products' benefits to skin, hair, nails, and face. This shows your expertise on the products as well as the services they're used for.

Nothing says "I'm dedicated to beauty" more than providing customers with the option of booking appointments and consultations online. This shows you're there for your clients 24/7, whenever they need you, because we all know how quickly fashion emergencies can rise. Also, selling spa-package gift certificates online is another excellent way serve the customer.

Discover simple marketing strategies that will increase your sales and boost your business. My bimonthly ezine, Your Business Marketing Solution, is packed with small business marketing tips. http://www.mlsalater.com/newsletters.cfm Sign up and receive a FREE report on creating web copy that will increase sales and site traffic.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michelle_Salater

What Type of Advertising Space Formats Should I Sell on My Website?

2008-08-13T02:24:00.003-07:00

There is considerable debate over which types of Internet advertising are the most effective, and how ads should be situated on a webpage to maximize revenues. To a large extent, you will need to tailor your website to the mindset of your target audience to consistently keep your advertising revenues at a significant level.

So for starters, what kind of advertising are you displaying on your website? Is it predominantly Google AdWords and similarly unobtrusive, subtle advertising? Or are you allowing banner ads and pop-ups for the most part?

Needless to say that for many, pop-ups are far and away the most annoying advertising that people have ever come across online. Pop-ups are used because they grab someone's attention and, for this grabbing, they are cheap to the advertiser. The problem is they put people off. Some pop-up advertising has tried to be more subtle by floating across the page, then parking itself in the middle where the user can't read much until the ad is either clicked through or "X'd" out. All the same, it's generally best not to use pop-ups; they can give your website a very bad reputation.

Banner ads and videos can be highly effective even though they are still somewhat in-your-face. These don't get in people's way like pop-ups; they feel they have a lot more control about paying attention to them or ignoring them. What's more, these kinds of ads can be aesthetically appealing. Magazine-style block ads have been shown to work well online, too.

So now the question arises: where is the best place for them on your webpage? Banners work best if they are across the top of the page but are VERY understated. If a banner is flashier, it's most effective at the bottom of the page, although it is the general consencus that simple banners (and not highly animated ones) work best.

It is true that by placing banners at the bottom of your page where they are less likely to be seen, means the percentage of those who do see them and click them goes up. So, why is this? Well, it is understood that the website reader feels she got to read the information she sought first without being bothered and this results in higher clicks. Therefore it is sometimes a good idea to repeat the same banner at the top and bottom of pages to capture all comers! Banner ads can also work well if they appear in the middle of a page, but cannot be seen until the reader scrolls down.

Block ads should be placed on your website precisely like they are in magazines: in the left or right margin in a relatively narrow column. It is also worth mentioning that these ads are usually effective when they blend in and match the colour scheme and design of any text and images close to them.

As for Google AdWords and similar services, it is difficult to say with any certainty where they are best placed other than to say they should be higher up on the page, not toward the bottom. It is, however, most effective to show fewer in one spot than more. The web pages that show what seems like a waterfall of AdWords tend to be more off-putting to people; they will try to ignore the bombastic waterfall, even if it is subtle. Placing a section that shows three to five of these in the left or right margin, or in both margins, seems to work well. However, Google AdWords ads should not be made to show up too small and will ideally match the font and type size of the text on your page.

If you use videos, the most important thing is NOT to have them automatically start playing when someone visits the website. Give people the choice to click them and play them, as it is important to give them some control of what they watch and listen to. Videos that start to play automatically can sometimes be even more off-putting than pop-up ads, especially if the visitor has their speaker volume up too loud.

This article May be used on other sites but this resource box and all live links MUST be left intact Andrew Long writes content for advertising websites and runs a subscription service for webmasters and website owners called ARC, which includes topics about Advertising For Your Website and Advertise On My Web Site

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_K_Long

PHP Scripts Designed to Make You More Money

2008-08-13T02:24:00.002-07:00

To be successful in web publishing, you must be subscribed to the "Content is King" theory. Content is what feeds the search engines and attract visitors to your website, and many beginning webmasters fail at creating content because they don't like to write.

Creating lots and lots of content at lightening speed can be achieved by "borrowing" other people's contents. It is a myth that the search engines will only rank sites with original content - this is simply not true. Think about how many websites out there are reporting the same news, same press releases, but they are all being indexed by major search engines even though they are using the same content. The trick is to syndicate content but also make it unique by having your own web template, or other content surrounding the syndicated content, thereby appearing "unique" to the search engines.

RSS technology provides an easy way for webmasters to syndicate content from other websites. You can easily grab videos from Youtube, news from Yahoo!, auction items from eBay, photos from Flickr, and products from Amazon, and have them all syndicated on your website, thereby providing massive amount of information and value to your visitors, and appearing "unique" to the search engines. It is the unique mixture of all that content coupled with auto-updating capabilities that the search engines actually love.

In fact, the additional bonus is that all material is aimed directly at the niche you are targeting so the content is relevant to what your visitors are looking for.

Sure, you can pick up a book and try to learn PHP/RSS scripting in 21 days, or just buy a professional webmaster tool that will create a mega site for just $70 (Check out AutoMegaScript at ScriptIllusion.com ) Some of the features of the script are:

* Includes multiple automated feeds from authority sites such as, YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo, Ebay, and Amazon

* Make money via multiple streams - AdSense as well as Ebay and Amazon commissions!

* Add your own banners for any other programs or affiliates you like promote in the easy to edit template system

* Easy to edit admin area

* Ability to add unique content

* Dominate your niche with targeted pages

* Thousands of pages created in seconds

* Multiple templates available for those who don't understand html or css

* Video tutorials to assist you in creating your sites

* Add links to any sites you want without having to edit the template, just plug in the urls and go....

The best feature of this script is that it will automatically grab fresh content from other syndicated sites, so you simply install it once, and have it run on autopilot. It is highly recommended that you pick up an unlimited license of the script which allows you to run the script on as many domains as you wish. Remember, "Content is King" and the AutoMegaScript is an easy and affordable solution to any webmasters content problem.

Other than the AutoMegaScript, ScriptIllusion also has other webmaster tools available such as the Markov Chains Article Rewriter and Keyword List Cleaner which are excellent tools for PLR rewriting. You'll definitely want to bookmark ScriptIllusion.com as their developers regularly put out quality products that will help webmaster make more money online.

http://automegascript.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Peter_G_Gregory

5 General Rules For an Interesting Website

2008-08-13T02:24:00.001-07:00

For a website to be interesting, it must be able to give its visitors a constant stimulation of freshness. Therefore, a successful website must have the ability to evolve as time goes by. For any good website, they must have the 5 factors so that the website is professional.

Firstly, what a professional website should have is the consistent look and feeling. What we are talking about right now is the mantra of the website. This is the feeling that surfers see when they arrive to your website. Throughout times, the website must have a consistent design, colors, font and general look. If your website has different fonts on different pages and the color scheme is changing as the visitor surfs through your website, it will create an unprofessional attitude because your website will look like a patchwork of web pages. This will also create a visual confusion to the visitors making them feel like your website links to their people's website. Another point is, the visitors might feel that the contents in your website tend to be irrelevant. The best way to give the visitors a professional yet comfortable feel is to use 1 font as the heading and maybe 2 fonts for the text. As for the colors, you should use two primary colors and have a third one as a secondary color. The shading of your website should also be made up of one or two primary color one more for the secondary color. With all these elements build into your website, it will be able to create a sense of harmony and unified design.

Another issue to look after on your website is the consistent navigation. What we mean here is the way your visitors could get around your website. For instance, your links should always place at the same location in all pages. This is a matter of consistent and to achieve this will give your visitors an assured impression that you have gone through great effort in designing your website. This feature is very important so that users could get back to your home page no matter where they have gone in your website. This is very useful as visitors tend to want to get back to home page most of the time and being able to do that with just a click is a must. Another situation where this function could be useful is when someone lands into a subsidiary page on your site from a search engine or another website, they can easily find a way back to your home page.

Search function is also very important for your users so that they could search for specific details in your website. This can save him ample time so that he doesn't have to go through all the pages in order to reach his destination. Next, your website should have well balance text and graphics. Too much complicated graphics may make your website load slower. Therefore, it creates a longer waiting time for your users. So, in spite of going for style, we must also remember the effectiveness of the website.

Contacts should be displayed with extra care and attention. Make sure that you phone numbers, logo and slogan is properly displayed. This is very important so that you customers can contact you if they feel the need to. It would be very frustrating if they can't find a way to contact you.

If you website possesses all the factors that we have discuss, you will have a very informative, useful and effective website because visitors could get around easy, get information easily and so on. Make sure all the pages in your website have such elements and the foundation of your website will have the ideal balance. Then, your website will be successful.

New to website hosting and development? In case you're shopping for web hosting, have a look on Hostgator web hosting service, they are among the best in my list.

Article by Phil Anderson.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Phil_Anderson

Display Your Images Dynamically Using a Flash Slideshow Or Flash Advanced Loader

2008-08-13T02:24:00.000-07:00

A Flash Slideshow or Flash Advanced Loader allows you to make a lasting impression on visitors to your website, and since first impressions are important, this could offer you the opportunity to retain everybody that visits your website.

With the rapid increase in both the ease of creating a website, and the increased bandwidth that allows most visitors to enjoy media rich content, displaying images on a website has never been so popular or apt. If you are one of the many web developers who is looking to create a striking impression, then you need to think seriously about using either a Flash slideshow, or a Flash advanced loader or possibly both in combination.

When it comes to displaying images on the web page, for many people there seem to be only two choices, either choose just one or two images to show per page, or create a large thumbnail gallery that, effectively, displays images so small that it's not easy to even decide whether they're worth clicking. Having a single, large static image will show off your favourite image in all its glory, although being so large it may well take a while to download. On the other hand, the more images you cram on to your page, the smaller they will have to be.

Including a thumbnail gallery is a popular solution, but the trouble is that whilst you are offering a wider choice and range of images to appeal to your visitors, at the same time you are losing clarity and even, in some cases, recognisability. The images become so small and compressed that they lose their impact, and may not even be explored at their full size.

Another challenge developers face is the fact that images, at high quality at least, can take a while to load, and this waiting around can be the death of an otherwise successful website. The solution for many people may well be to use a Flash slideshow of one form or another. The beauty of a slideshow of any kind is that you can display images at good quality, in a reasonable size, and display many images to the visitor. This effectively combines the problem of both number and quality.

However, another aspect worth considering is the use of a Flash advanced loader or preloader which will allow your images to loaded quickly and smoothly. This means that your first image or two are displayed very promptly and cleanly, without appearing one block at a time. The Flash programming knows to load the first image or two right away, and then load all of the others in the background. This prevents a long wait for the visitor whilst the whole gallery is loaded sometimes the case in many alternative slideshow methods, such as Java or DHTML.

Another benefit of using something like a Flash advanced loader or a Flash preloader is that by having all of your images loaded in the background programmatically, your Flash slideshow is then able to display those images in a more dynamic way. In some cases, people have gone to a lot of trouble creating a slideshow, but the image simply flicks or snaps from one image to the next. In fact, the change is so quick, and so subtle, that it's very easy to miss. It's a little like looking at a bus stop full of people, turning away to look at the timetable, turning back and trying to decide who's missing, who's new and who has just taken their hat off.

Whilst your slideshow may be fantastic, it can be easy to miss unless it somehow manages to grab attention by itself, simply in the way that it is able to transition between images. With Flash's advanced mathematical ability, and the many downloadable Flash slideshow tools available, it is possible to incorporate an amazing array of transitions, from curling pages, exploding pixels, gradient sweeps and angled fly-ins.

Trying to achieve this kind of variety and style using any other method, such as creating GIF animations, would create file sizes so vast that it would be inappropriate to have them on the web page, they'd need to be zipped and downloaded, which of course defies the whole point of having the slideshow. By using a Flash advanced loader or preloader you're also making sure that all the hard work of downloading the images is being done smoothly and seamlessly in the background whilst your visitors are drawn by the dynamic transitions, and watch far more of the range of your images.

Since web sites are far more than simply text these days, and if a picture can paint a thousand words, a Flash slideshow can say volumes about your website, and ensuring a smooth and effective load and display of your images using a Flash advanced loader or Flash preloader you'll avoid the problem of forcing visitors to sit and wait for each image to load one at a time whilst they sit and wait for something to happen. Instead, your visitors will be engaged immediately with visually dynamic and clear content that captures and retains their interest and ensures that more of what you have to offer is both seen, and enjoyed.

If you want some Flash components to enable you to make a lasting impression on your visitors, visit FlashLoaded for a comprehensive offering of Flash loaders that will meet all of your needs.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=P_Norman

Importance of a Good Website Development

2008-07-15T08:33:00.003-07:00

A good website is a window to the internet world. It provides a company to make a strong web presence and reach out to millions of web surfers who could be potential customer of a company. Creating a website for internet drives a company to embrace the global compatibility. It also provides a wider platform to market the offerings of a company. A website acts as a necessary step towards a better business sensibility. It serves as a guidance which helps you to take benefit of the online market place.

Website Development Process

Website development is a full fledged process that includes a number of activities. First of all, you need to make sure that you know all the basic requirements of building a website. You need to gather proper knowledge and information about the domain names, web hosting, search options etc. After knowing everything required you'll be in position to construct a website that could be the most applicable for your usage.

Next comes the designing part. Designing of a website is a huge affair. You can design your own website if you possess some basic fundamentals in website designing otherwise you can always hire a good website designing company to get a rock solid web presence.

After adequate designing, a website needs some good and effective marketing and promotion activities. Here, marketing or promotion means hiring good search engine optimization firm to gain good presence in search engines to improve the amount of qualified visitors to the website.

Search engine optimization includes marketing of the content, social media optimization and several other marketing strategies such as link popularity building that can improve the stand of your website on the online market place.

Website development in India

India is one of the largest and widest market place for providing quality website development strategies in the world these days. The country has a lot to offer to gain an upper hand in this cut-throat competitive world.

How Must I Build a Lead Capture Page?

2008-07-15T08:33:00.001-07:00

You start to understand the importance of building a mailing list when you are longer in the internet marketing business. "The future of your business is in the follow-up." they used to say. That really has not changed online. Building a Lead Capture page is the best way to follow up with people.

In order you can build a mailing list of your own to make more sales in the future, let's first talk about building a lead capture page in this article.

1. If you know how to build websites then building a lead capture page is very simple. You need to create a separate page specifically for this as opposed to just pasting a form on your home page. There are many benefits for doing it this way.

2. On this page you will need to describe what you are offering to your visitor. This does not have to be very long but must include a catchy heading, and a concise description of why someone would want to give you their name and e-mail address.

3. You can create a short form with your autoresponder account. This form is easy to create and will include a code that you can place on the new page you are creating to capture leads.

One important point to remember is you really only need a person's name and e-mail address to do follow up, therefore there is no need to require additional information.

4. You will want to include a redirect page in the autoresponder form itself, once you have your lead capture page ready. This is a great place to sell an inexpensive product or to provide additional information after a person has given you their name and email address. Motivate people to give their name and email address by giving them a free gift. It is crucial that the free gift is valuable for them.

5. If you blog you may want to just create a lead capture page right on the blog itself. You can do this the same thing as a webpage and just paste the code from your autoresponder directly into the blog page you are creating.

6. From a marketing standpoint there is a benefit to creating many different lead capture ages. The nice thing about this is you can test to see which of these are creating the most responses for you.

This is a few tips on how to create a lead capture page. If you feel you are technically challenged, and cannot do this yourself, you can always go to the eLance.com or similar websites and hire someone to build one for you.

Focus on Your Goal and Stay Focused

2008-07-15T08:32:00.002-07:00

A major factor contributing to the success of your website is staying in focus.

It is very important to stay focused on your business goal, whether your website is well established or you are just starting your subscription web site. Despite all the diversions that you come across on the internet, you need to decide on your goal and stay focused all the time, because your subscribers are paying a subscription fee because they have confidence in your site and the content that you provide them.

How to stay Focused

There are three very simple things you need to do to stay focused on your business and your website goals. These are:

· Define your focus by defining your site in about 25 words. You can take the help of other websites that have written their mission statement, or about us and develop the mission statement for your site.

· Review your focus at the start of each day, so that you never get out of focus. A small reminder kept on your table, or c a reminder on your computer could serve the purpose of reminding you to review the focus of your website.

· Make sure that you develop some content for your website each day, find new ideas on your theme topic and also write articles that can be used.

After deciding on what your focus is you need to stay tuned to that focus statement. For this you will need to set goals and establish a daily routine for the website related activities.

Set goals

Depending on the peak traffic days for your site, decide on the days when you would upload new content on the site. The site statistics will reveal the high and lean traffic days, upload the fresh new content on the busy days for your site.

Establish a daily routine

For your subscription website to be a success, you must have a daily routine for the activities you need to perform for your website. A routine will be like a process that must be done each day, and when actions are defined as processes then efficiency increases man fold. You can have a ready checklist of must do activities.

A suggested daily checklist:

· Check the news for events relating to the theme of your subscription website. Scan the news for events relating to your theme topic. You might find some interesting clipping that you can introduce as a tip or news for your site content. You could subscribe to some news sites, where you can define your area of interest.

· Visit your site's discussion forum each day. It helps to know what your subscribers talk about, what their concerns are and what do they want. You could answer the queries posted on your website. This will also help you to mold your content to the subscribers needs.

· Get new ideas for the list of articles ideas. make sure you add to the list of articles and content ideas each day because the survival of your site is dependent on new ideas. Develop content on topics that the subscribers need information on.

· Write some content each day to avoid deadline panic stage. Always have fresh content ready to be uploaded, so that there is no panic situation. This you can achieve by writing consistently.

· Finish at least some loadable portion of an article, feature or any other report each day.

Once you have established a daily routine and follow it sincerely, there will be less panic on the deadline days. Follow your checklist for the daily to do tasks and you will always have surplus content on your hands on the upload days. Once you have achieved the task of one periodic upload, take a break and reward yourself with a gift of either a relaxing game or a hearty meal with friends or buy yourself something you have been meaning to or anything else that will make you happy. Online publishing and subscription websites give you a better control over your time, therefore you must take advantage of it by making the best use of time available to you.

Look For the Obvious and Work on It

2008-07-15T08:32:00.001-07:00

When you are working on your own subscription website each day, you at times, tend to ignore the obvious facts and conditions offered by your site.

Sometimes when we offer schemes and benefits that may not interest the subscribers or the potential customers much, the scheme may not take off to the desired levels. The reason may be that the customers are not very excited about what you are offering.

To uncover the obvious you need to analyze issues by asking yourself the following questions about your website:

1. What is the theme of my subscription website and what is it that the subscribers may most want to know at a given time?

2. If the information desired by the customers is of a high demand at that time then can you offer it to them as a premium or a free gift if they subscribed (afresh) or if they lengthened the existing period of their subscription(for existing subscribers)?

3. What will be the cost incurred for generating this premium? Buying Decisions that customers make

Most of the buying decisions that people make are for the benefits they perceive they will get, above all most buying decisions are also a result of the emotions factor. So as a subscription website owner you will have to excite the 'emotion 'element along with the benefit factor of the customer while making the marketing and promotion strategy for your website. Of course the logic need not be overlooked.

The premiums that you offer your subscribers should be cost effective, and the customers should be excited enough to be ready to subscribe to your site to get that benefit.

To make the obvious solution for additional subscriptions for your website

The ultimate aim of your subscription website is to increase revenues by increasing the number of subscribers. You can generate more ideas about what schemes and premiums to offer your existing and new subscribers by any or all of the following:

· Ask friends, business associates, and other publishers for their suggestions

· Read discussion groups regularly to understand the subscribers requirement

· Subscribe to a publishers' site to get more ideas

· Ask for a site critique or suggestions on possible premiums from a professional

You are sure to get some feedback from all these sources that you are trying to tap, but you will have to decide on any of the choices after careful evaluation. Remember to keep in mind that the subscribers will pay extra for any offer that you come up with on your site, provided they need that product at that time and your marketing messages have excited their emotions enough to make the buying decision.

Make a Habit of Analyzing Other Sites For Form, Function and Design

2008-07-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

The need of the hour is to analyze successful websites so as to obtain clues on designing and marketing your own site. Since this is a business that is growing in leaps and bounds, it is necessary to learn the good aspects to ensure you adapt all good aspects of the craft. While this industry is still in its infancy, the prospects are very good and this appears to be a business that is here to stay.

Aspects to Assess.

While browsing the internet and coming across sites that offer subscriptions, make a habit of analyzing them for their functionality, their design and structure. Some of the components that must be assessed are:

1. What is your initial reaction to the site?

A site has a positive effect on you when it meets your specific requirements. Many internet users do not like to be distracted by banners and advertisements. These are considered as distractions and therefore, many sites are constructed in a user friendly manner. These are constructed to give information to those who seek information on 'need to know' basis. The links and directories are available but require proactive steps from the user to access.

2. Does the site make a statement in terms of what it is meant for?

The site must make a statement in terms of its reason for being. A simple button 'About Us' provides information such as Who are they? Why are they here? and What do they want from you?

3. Has the Subscription Button placed prominently?

When the site requires you to subscribe, the information for subscription as well as costing should be prominently available. When you want people to subscribe, it should be made easy for them. The pricing page and payment details should be placed in several locations. Some sites place a Subscribe button on every content page that is made available to the public.

4. Are security aspects looked after?

The most important issue to look at is whether you are entering your personal information on a secure page. There are many sites that require you to enter your credit card number and information on an insecure page. This can lead to misuse of your important information. The best way to look or confirm if the site or subscriber page is secure is to look if the page has a SSL certificate. This can be confirmed by a small gold lock that appears at the bottom right hand corner of the browser when using Internet Explorer or a solid key in a small blue block appears that is available in Netscape Navigator. Another way to confirm this is by checking the site address; the "http" in the URL changes to "https".

5. When you subscribe do you have to wait for an email with your username and password or do you get immediate access?

A great way to attract and keep subscribers is that they should not wait when they subscribe. As soon as they subscribe, they should be able to access the information they have paid for. To attract subscribers, do not make them wait.

These are some of the aspects that must be assessed when looking at sites that require subscription. These will allow you to design your site for users who are internet savvy, and can spot weaknesses without any effort. The design of the site should be catering to a customer base that is accustomed to using the internet and does not tolerate weakness in design and execution.

A great example would be to consider the internet as an expressway where these tips are exit ramps on which you do not want your customers. The site should be so designed that the customer is propelled towards the tool gate, is able to pay tool easily and can gain access to an unrestricted road beyond.

Web Design is Product Design

2007-07-09T02:58:00.001-07:00

Many people think of web design as being closely related to graphic design, or even just another branch of the profession. Look in your local Yellow Pages and you'll find dozens of graphic designers offering websites as one of their long list of services, along with logo design, business cards and brochures.

Websites Have to Work

Brochures, magazines ads, signs, logos and posters all differ from websites in one crucial aspect: people don't have to use them. All designers have to make sure their work is attractive, but product designers need to ensure their products are also easy to use and have features that people want.

A mobile phone, for example, needs to be attractive, or consumers wouldn't buy it. However, people also need to be able to use it. There would be little point in having an attractive phone if you weren't able to call people because the speaker wasn't loud enough for you to hear, or the buttons were too small for you to press.

People also choose mobile phones based on the features they offer. Most phones these days come with a colour screen, but-in camera and several games. Like mobile phones, websites need to be easy to use and offer people features they want. Being attractive is important too, but in most cases it's not the most important thing.

Of course, graphic design isn't just about making things pretty - there's a lot more to it than that. The difference between graphic design and product design (or web design) is that the objects designed by graphic designers don't have to be used (at least in any complicated way); they are simply looked at and read.

Graphic designers already have lots of the skills and knowledge to become good web designers. However, don't make the mistake of thinking websites are just online brochures. They're not. Just as there's more to print design than creating pretty layouts in Quark, there's more to web design than creating attractive designs in Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

Features, Function and Form:

Websites, like products, can be looked at from three angles: features, function and form.

1. Features: The features of a product are often the most important aspect. When the cordless kettle was invented, people bought it because it did something other kettles couldn't. A good website needs to do something that people want. The BBC website gives people up-to-the-minute news, while Google helps them find web pages they would be interested in. Even a 3-page, small business website lets people do something, i.e. find out about the company.
2. Function: The next aspect of any product (or website) is how well it works and how easy it is to use. Dyson vacuum cleaners do the same as any of their competitors: they suck up dust. However, they've sold well because they suck up dust much more efficiently than most other vacuum cleaners. Likewise, Google wasn't the first search engine, but it has been pheonomenally successful because it was easier to use and produced better search results than its competitors.
3. Form: The final aspect of any product is how it looks. Whether the aesthetics of a product are important depends on how similar its features and function are to its competitors. iPods do a very similar job to every other MP3 player, but they've been successful because they look stunning, despite costing more. By contrast, the first Xerox wasn't particularly attractive, but it sold in huge numbers because, in 1959, it was the only automatic copier on the market. People often use ugly websites that offer something their competitor's don't. eBay isn't the best-looking site, but because so many people use it, it's a very effective way of buying and selling things. Of course, you should try to create attractive sites, but looks aren't always everything.

Ugly Websites Make Money!

If you were to ask designers (or anyone else for that matter) to list the most attractive sites on the Web, few would mention Google, eBay, MySpace, Yahoo or Amazon. Yet these companies are worth billions. Why? The answer's really simple - substance is much, much more important than style on the Web.

Many of the companies that collapsed during the .com bubble had beautiful websites. However, if you don't have a good concept, a workable business model, an easy-to-use website, interesting content, marketable products, reliable delivery, a genuine potential market and effective marketing, then it doesn't matter how pretty your site looks, it will unquestionably fail.

So, Should I Design an Ugly Website?

Of course not! The fact that ugly sites make money doesn't mean you website must look ugly in order to be successful, far from it. It simply means that looks are a minor factor in determining the success of most websites.

If you focus on aesthetics at the expense of more important factors, like usability, content and customer service, then your site is unlikely to meet the goals you set. However, if you create an easy to use site with interesting content and effective marketing, as well as good design, then you're well on your way to creating a successful website.

The trick is to try to design a site that would succeed even if it was ugly - and then make it look attractive. The look and feel should be the icing on the cake.

Content Management Software

2007-07-09T02:57:00.000-07:00

Content Management Software is a system used for content management, which includes audio files, computer files, electronic documents, image media and web content. The purpose of content management software is that of making inter-office files available even while being online.

A content manager cuts down on the time it takes to manage web content. With out a content manager the steps of managing a site can be quite time consuming with opening files, making changes and then uploading the new content.

Use of content management software leads to faster and more efficient content management. When making adjustments, all you have to do is visit your web site, click on the link to the content you wish to manage then simply edit in the form that is provided and click the save button.

Some of the supporting features of a content management system would include:

CMS allows the creation of documents and multimedia material and importing those items into your web site.

All key users and their content management roles are identifiable.

Assigning responsibilities and roles to different content types and categories flow much easier.

The definition of the content workflow tasks, which is often connected with event messaging that, will alert the content managers of any changes in content.

Content management software gives you the capacity for tracking as well as managing multiple versions of your content.

Content managers also have a support repository which published content can be placed or archived. This serves for easier search and retrieval of your content.

Some content management software gives a bit more freedom of text content. For instance, they allow you to set your own default layout, fonts or colors to be used in your daily business.

Content Management Software makes it possible to manage a documents cycle of life from the time it is created through any revision, publication as well as archiving and destruction of a document.

One of the best content management software is Joomla! Joomla is available for use and it is free. Joomla's CMS is suitable to be used with many different web applications and they are adding new features to their software with every new release. Joomla also offers a users forum that comes in quite handy, and there are always Joomla forum members who are happy to help anytime you need them.

So what else does Joomla have to offer?

Joomla is an award winning content management system that makes building your web presence easier and offers you many ways to use their software.

Joomla CMS is being used by people for the following reasons:

Non-profit and organizational websites Online commerce School and church web pages Personal and family websites Corporate portals and web presence Small business web sites Community-based portals Government applications And many more

Joomla software is easy to install and use. Joomla also has ample support for its end users.

Joomla also has many useful extensions such as:

Blogging software Calendars Business and organizational directories Data collection and reporting tools Joomla has so much more to offer, go check them out for all your content management needs!

Advanced Tips for Make More Profit With Web Site Creation

2007-07-06T02:19:00.003-07:00

If you have had a desire to become more involved in productive web site creation, there are some advanced tips that you will want to keep in mind in order to make more profit through web site creation. These tips really will get you on the path towards productive web site creation.

The first tip that you will want to keep in mind is that people today seeking a web site developer are seeking a comprehensive service provider. In other words, these people are looking for a one stop shop for all of their web development and design needs. Therefore, if you want to develop a productive web site creation business, you will want to make sure that you can serve all of the needs of your client base.

The second tip that you will want to keep in mind when it comes to making more profit through web site creation is the need to stay ahead of the game, as they say. You will want to be able to offer to your clients the latest design and web site development techniques. The typical client will want cutting edge web site development and you must be on your best game in order to ensure that you make more profit through web site creation in this day and age.

Finally, productive web site creation requires that you have a top notch portfolio that you can show prospective clients. The typical potential client will make the decision to hire you based nearly exclusively on your prior work.

Basic Facts on Website Requirement

2007-07-06T02:19:00.001-07:00

Emergence of Internet has brought up tremendous change in the way people do business. It has made buying and selling of products and services possible at the luxury and comfort of the home. Moreover, we can say that the Internet has made the world a small virtual marketplace which is easily and instantly accessible.

As a result of easy availability of the Internet, process of doing businesses online through website is flourishing day-by-day. Everybody is trying their best to become a leader in their domain and there is an intense competition online.

In such a situation, it is imperative for any established company or startup to have a website that is unique, a masterpiece in itself, with features that are highly usable, attractive and search engine-friendly. Hence, a thorough planning and implementation of available resources is needed for the development of the website in order to make your online business dream a success.

Here the question arises, how can a business portal become a masterpiece? The answer is very simple, i.e., approaching website design and development firm that have long years of experience in website design and development, and have professionals who are innovative and conversant with contemporary business trends and imaginative about the future growth and business turn around.

A website needs professional touch of designers, programmers, web content writers and search engine optimizers in order to make the website available to web traffic and hold them for long. In the process, users can visit each page, understand your business practice and become potential buyers.

In order to retain visitors, your website must contain those factors which urge them to explore your site in more detail. Here, programmers comes handy, as they can make easy navigation throughout the site with plenty of useful features, and designers can use effective colors that touch the visitors’ emotion and help generate goodwill and curiosity on services that you provide.

Similarly, web content writers can describe your business process in detail, using major keywords that better describe your business. Search engine optimizers do on-page and off-page optimization to make your website compatible for major search engines.

People do have the misconception that only large businesses should have top-notch websites, but the strategy of developing a good website implies to both large and small businesses. Until and unless people know about your online existence you can not expect business growth in whatever measures it is.

Therefore, rigorous research on website development firms is needed in advance, that can give you a perfect portal worth your investment. This can be done by looking at companies’ portfolio, testimonials and contacting people who have taken their services before.

As the Internet marketing is becoming more popular, a good and appealing website has become a priority. But, doing business online is not a child’s play; it needs hard work, and ample amount of patience and endurance. In order to sustain in today’s competitive marketplace, it is necessary that you should allow web experts to handle your business portfolio so that you can have an appealing website that can translate your business dreams into reality.

Still Chasing Every Internet Hype? Silly! Thought For The Day

2007-07-02T04:37:00.001-07:00

More and more people are using the web to search for anything online. To keep up with the on going internet hype, more and more web masters have become pre-occupied with all kind of techniques and tricks with the hope of propelling their web sites to the top of the leading search engine results.

Now before you join this cat and rat race game and graciously earn yourself a free membership ID amongst web masters that are still busy chasing every internet hype circulating out there on the web. Here is today’s thought for the day, Stop, think...don’t be silly.

Now imagine just for a moment, that a given keyword search in one of the leading search engine, lets say "internet hype" brought back the following three results:

* Search engine optimization—7 secrets,
* How to rack google ad sense money,
* Thought for the day.

Given the above results I’d bet that any prudent web developer will most likely click the first two results, then probably skip the latter by hitting the back arrow to continue with their search queries. After all what weight does a phrase like "thought for the day" has to bring to the table for the web savvy and time pressed web masters?

It’s no secret that there is so much internet noise circulating back and forth all over the web and we as web masters have failed by not helping out any better. What is it that makes web developers so much fascinated and enticed into learning about any trick, technique and method that will ultimately enable them to position there web sites ranking, a rank higher on the search engines that they forget about the basis that enables their very existence and survival?

I will reiterate again, before you start chasing every internet hype, Stop and think...don’t be silly. Every foundation for any successful web site starts with the basic. There has never been an easy way out, no shortcuts, and no easy money; never has and never will.

If some one approaches you with some of those sweet phrases promising heaven, run, I’m telling you don’t walk away rather run, run away as fast as you can; those I tell you are all scams.

Next time, before you get carried away and start worrying and become preoccupied by those advocating things like search engine optimization techniques, traffic building secrets, money killing tricks and all those internet hype hard copies, here is what you need to do. Stop and think, don’t be silly, instead start with the basics.

Why not start by optimizing your self first, how? You may ask. Simple, become an authority in a given subject matter. Find or discover a niche area that interests you and optimize your self by being the best at it.

Create or build a web site with rich content in an area that you know and like, have passion for, experience or you have a desire to do. Create a web site in a niche that you have already acquired and accumulated great wealth of experience throughout your life.

Selecting Keywords And Keyword Phrases

2007-07-02T04:36:00.000-07:00

What is a relevant keyword phrase? A relevant keyword is a word or phrase that singularly describes, or as closely describes, the topic of your web page as possible. Put another way, someone should be able to look at your keyword phrase and know what your web page is about.

Its been common knowledge, in the webmasters world, for years that selecting the most relevant keywords is one of, if not the most, important steps in preparing you web site for search engines. After all, it's the only way for people to find us on the Internet.

We all know what a search engine is and how to use them, but do we actually know how they work? Knowing what a search engine does and how it works will better show the importance of keywords.

Search engines have robots that continuously crawl the Internet indexing new web pages and re indexing (updating) older pages. The first thing that a robot does, in relation to keywords when it visits your site, is read your robots.txt file for permission to crawl your site. Once the bot has permission it index's (archives) the title of your page, the keyword and description meta tags and the header tags in your content. The search engine uses this information to determine what search terms apply and are most relevant to your web page.

A web site is merely a group of web pages and each web page in your web site should have it's own set of unique keywords. Be sure to include, if at all possible, your most relevant keyword phrase in the title of each page and in the anchor text of links to that page. This will work wonders in getting your page listed and also ranking.

Now that we know what a keyword is and how search engines use them we next need to know how to select the relevant keywords for our web page. The best way to do that would be to select a keyword as an example. Lets say that you have a web page about cameras, the obvious word for that page would be "camera". The problem here is that the word "camera" is to broad of a keyword. so you have to get more specific.

* If you type the word camera into a search engine it returns 443,000,000 pages with the word camera in their content.
* But, if we type in the keyword phrase "digital camera" the results drop to 207,000,000. That has already cut the competition in half.
* So we refine the keyword phrase even more and type in the words "cheap digital camera" and the results drop even more to 9,150,000.
* Next, we experiment a little, and try a different phrase "affordable digital camera" and the results are even better with 1,980,000.

So, we keep refining, tweaking and experimenting until we get the best keyword phrase for our web site.

It's always best to use a keyword phrase rather than a single keyword to describe your web site. Think about it. A phrase of two or three words will describe the content of your web page much more accurately than a single word.

Refining your keywords is fundamental to creating your web site, but, its only one step in the quest for a top ranking. Lets face it, their's always going to be other digital camera web sites.

Why Do You Need Free Content For Your Website

2007-06-25T03:00:00.000-07:00

There are numerous methods of getting free content for your website, ezine or blog. Why would you need free content? The answer is simple, why pay for content when you can easily get good quality free content from a number of sources.

Let us examine in more detail why you would need content anyway. Imagine if you will a new website that someone has worked very hard to develop, spent hours researching a niche, writing pages and pages of code. They launch, the site looks great and pretty soon they get a trickle of visitors and some of the visitors bookmark the site and decide to check back regularly to get the latest information in that particular niche. Imagine their disappointment when they do check back and find the information on the website is exactly the same as when they first visited. The one thing you can guarantee is that they probably won’t be coming back the site and will take their business elsewhere.

That is the keyword, business. To a large proportion of website owners having a loyal following of visitors who regularly check their site is vital to the success of their business. This is why it is important to demonstrate to the first time visitor, who subsequently checks back later, that your site’s content is dynamic and evolving and not static and stagnant.

Where do you get free content from? Well, you can find a nice quiet place somewhere, grab a pen and a piece of paper and write it all yourself. Now there is nothing wrong with this at all and the only thing it will cost is your time. The great thing about doing it yourself is that you can be sure of one thing, the content will be unique and it will be yours.

However, with the hectic pace of modern life not every website owner has the time and not necessarily the inclination to write and publish their own content. So where do they go for their free content? One of the most popular sources for free content is an article directory.

An article directory is nothing more than a modern day library, a depository for those people who do find the time to write articles and who decide to share them with rest of us. Most article directories neatly arrange their articles by category, allowing you to select free content for the particular niche market you website is aiming at. There are conditions attached. At the end of an article there is, what is known as, a biog box. This is a space in the article which allows the author to write a little bit about themselves and insert links back to their own website. Be sure to check the article directories terms of service for any restrictions in the use of articles.

To summarise. Content is vital to the success of any website and it is important to keep the content fresh in order to keep the visitors coming back as well as attracting new ones. You can spend the time writing fresh content yourself, but for those people with little time on their hands, free content can be sourced from article directories.

Using PLR Articles to Make Money Online

2007-06-25T02:59:00.000-07:00

Content is king. You will hear the phrase over and over if you spend any time trying to make money online. If you are not a writer, then you will need someone to provide you with content for your websites, blogs and autoresponders. Even if you can do some writing, it can be hard to get started. You can go to sites like Elance to hire a writer, but you will pay $8-$10 an article. PLR articles are a much less expensive way to get content for a website. PLR stands for private label rights. When you purchase a set of PLR articles, you are allowed to publish them as is, change them completely or put them together into an ebook or larger article. In most cases, as long as you rewrite them a little, you can submit them to article directories to direct traffic to your site.

There are plenty of places online to find PLR material. Some sites will give you PLR articles for free, hoping that you will join their membership site. A PLR membership site provides its members with a set number of articles each month and charges a monthly membership fee for the service. You generally get a lot of articles (in the hundreds or thousands) every month. This can be a good deal if you plan to run a lot of websites or blogs. One word of caution, do not join a site that has unlimited memberships or even allows a large number of members. You will all be sharing the same articles and the more people that have the articles, the less unique they will be.

You should look carefully at the free PLR material, if any is given to you. This will give you an idea of the quality of the articles you will receive each month. Try searching internet marketing forums to reviews of programs. I suggest forums because you are more likely to get honest reviews that if you just look a websites. Most of these sites pay a hefty sum to affiliates, so a website reviewing the membership program may not be giving an unbiased opinion.

You can also buy packs of plr articles. There are several sites that offer set of 5-15 articles on one topic. If you are just starting out or are looking for some content to beef up a site you already have running, then this may be the way to go. Look for a site that limits the number of each pack it sells. This will help cut down on your competition.

While you can use PLR articles as is, you will get the best benefit from rewriting them slightly to avoid have the exact same content on your website that someone else has. If you really do not have any desire to rewrite them and you do not want to pay to have exclusive content written, then consider using the material to create a small ebook that you can give away to site visitors for free if they sign up for your mailing list. You could also use them as content in emails to your list. There will be no penalty for duplicate content.

Lucrative Website Creation - Succeed in Business through Website Creation

2007-06-21T03:22:00.003-07:00

Information technology paved the way for a lot of businessmen to globalize their products and services. Most people who have a home-based business create websites to showcase their products and services. This has been undeniably a key to their success since a lot of people really prefer the convenience of online shopping.

You too can profit with website creation. There are just some few simple things that you need to remember to create more money for your online business.

First you have to make attractive web pages. Make sure the layout, content and overall look of the website would really be good in representing the products and services you are offering. You should have a very catchy, easy to recall domain name as well. It is good if you can think of a domain name that is related to the products you’re marketing as well.

The next thing you need to do is to generate a lot of traffic in your website. The best way you can do this is to advertise your website in a lot of free advertising sites. You can also utilize SEM strategies and publicize your site in forums. The more people who visit your website, the more chances your products and services would be availed.

The power of good website plus good traffic is the perfect combination to succeed in website creation. Along the way, you would find some other ways to profit through making websites. If you’re really good at it, you can even sell your skill and earn by making website for other people. So take website creation seriously because it would surely make a lot of profit for you.

Web Site Creation - 8 Steps to Advance in Web Site Creation

2007-06-21T03:22:00.001-07:00

The website is the foundation upon which any Internet based business is built. Therefore, if you are interested in quick web site creation, there are 8 steps that you should keep in mind to advance in web site creation:

1. When it comes to quick web site creation, you will want to make sure that you are up to speed on all of the latest trends in website design and construction.

2. You will also want to ensure that you have access to some basic, high quality templates that can help you in quick web site creation.

3. In addition, it is important when considering quick web site creation to develop some unique design concepts of your own.

4. One aid in quick web site creation is to develop strategic partnerships with other professionals. For example, if design is your strong suit, you will want to connect with a talented copywriter.

5. When it comes to quick web site creation and your own efforts, you will want to make sure that you have available a strong portfolio of your prior efforts.

6. Similarly, you will want to make certain that you have references available to people or businesses who may be interested in your services.

7. As you go about promoting your quick web site creation services, you will want to make absolutely certain that you deliver on deadline.

8. Finally, you will want to make sure that you offer solid follow up services including technical support.

Re-read these steps, then start to create your website.

Profitable Web Site Creation - 3 Top Ways to Web Site Creation-

2007-06-13T04:15:00.000-07:00

The website will be your mirror to the internet world. People log on to a website with the intention of getting some information about you. So it is important to create as interesting a website that generates maximum profit for you.

First and foremost, you have to get a good website editor to create a website. There are many ways you can do this like buying programs like Front Page or Dream Weaver. They are effective in teaching you to create a website. Then there are programs on the internet like Wizard SEO which help you create a website online. The advantage of this program on creating websites is that it keeps SEO in mind and designs the website in the manner.

Once the web editor is chosen, it is important to get as much content for the website as possible. It is only with the right content that you will be able to generate traffic to a website. You can find out as much information required about your topic on the internet and use this content as a basis for creating content for your website.

The third thing to be done for a profitable website creation would be to think of a domain name for the website through which the people will get to know about the site. It will also be necessary to get a hosting account for the website. These are just some of the steps that will help in the boosting of the productivity of the website; use it and you are sure to find results immediately.

Website Creation

2007-06-13T04:14:00.000-07:00

Websites these days are becoming more and more specific, especially with regard to the information they deal with and display. Many such websites cater to the needs of a niche audience and those that are more enriched with information are the ones preferred by the search engines (like Google, yahoo, msn, etc.) and are therefore, more likely to come up more often during searches. Information, more than anything else, is the most probable way to attract more traffic to a web site.

When first creating and putting up a website on the World Wide Web, two questions need to be kept in mind. Firstly, one must decide on the source of all the info that is to go into the making of the website. Once the source of the content is located, one must consider next how to make the website accessible to everyone. The language should not be jargoned or too technical. A layman should be able to assimilate the information provided with ease. Otherwise there is the risk of narrowing the target audience base too much.

Many websites let their readers reprint and use the articles. This is because this increases the popularity of such sites through distribution of the articles which help to build a reputation for expertise in a certain field or subject. Also, this helps build a network of incoming links for the website.

In creating a website you would need a template. Thousand such templates are available online most of which are available for free. Choose one and start your own website.

Web Application Development Is The Business Strategies And Policies Carried Out On The Web As Online

2007-06-08T03:38:00.001-07:00

Successful organizations rely on Web applications as effective points of contact with customers, partners, and employees, and as a means to help reduce costs internally. There are many entities that require applications for the Web-one example would be Business-to-Business interaction. Many companies in the world today demand to do business with each other over secure and private networks. This process is becoming increasingly popular with a lot of overseas companies who outsource projects to each other.

The corporate intranet is slowly changing into the enterprise portal. Web applications are business strategies and policies carried out on the Web through the use of User, Business and Data . Anything from a simple online catalogue service to an online banking service is the example of Web Application Development . This process is becoming rapidly popular with a lot of overseas companies who outsource projects to each other.

Web Application Development Model

Like other software development models, the Web application development model is consist of 3 levels: User Services, Business Services and Data Services.

To interact with the application, visual entrance for the user or consumer are created in the very first level the User Service. This may be basic DHTML and HTML to complex COM components and Java applets.

The user services then take control of applications and business logic from the Business Services. Web scripting falls in this level range from in PHP/ASP/JSP to server side programming such as TCL, PERL and CORBA that permits the user to perform difficult or complex activities by a Web interface.

The final level is the Data Service layer. Data services store, recollect and update information at a higher-ranking. The examples of Data storage and retrieval devices are writeable media and Databases file systems. Databases are most practical for Web applications development. Databases make possible for developers to store, recollect, add to, and update information in a organized & systematic manner.

Web Site Design Tips - Graphics

2007-06-08T03:37:00.000-07:00

Lots of people in business on the Internet feel that in order to have a web presence with their site, they have to load it up with graphics and tons of visual images in order to make the site more appealing. The truth is, as Les Wilder said in the movie "Angels In The Outfields", less is more. This is very true for web design. In this article, we're going to give you some web design tips for graphics that will give your page just the right look and also keep the load time to a minimum.

For starters, you want to make sure that any graphics that you use on your site are fully optimized for the web. In other words, if you've got some really large images that you want to display, shrink them down not only in size but in file size. The smaller the file size, the faster your page will load. Any good graphics program like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop will easily reduce your images to workable sizes.

The next thing you want to keep in mind is the number of graphics you have displayed on a single page. Sometimes, just having one or two photos makes them stand out more on the page. When you have a lot of graphics on a page, they tend to get lost in the soup. But with one or two, they will be noticed. Also, by limiting the number of graphics you have on a page, you increase the load speed. Not everybody has a fast Internet connection, so keep that in mind.

If you absolutely must have a large number of graphics on a single page, represent them as thumb nails that your visitor can click on in order to see the larger image. The thumb nails, because they are smaller, will load faster than the full size images. This way, a visitor can see what the image looks like right away and then if they want to see a larger view, all they need to do is click on the image. Of course you will have a note on the page telling the visitor to click on the thumb nail to see the larger view. Not everybody will know to do this.

Finally, you want to make sure that all your graphics are professionally done. If you can't do them yourself, hire somebody. Don't ruin your web site with poorly made graphics. If they are photos, make sure they are high resolution photos. You want the absolute best quality that you can have for your site. There is a lot of competition out there in every niche. A visually poor web site is not going to help you.

By following just these few basic tips, you will greatly improve the look and performance of graphics on your web site.

Domaining & Domain Names

2007-06-05T04:02:00.001-07:00

The conventional wisdom has typically been that single word domain names are the most valuable domain names to own. Most people take this as a basic truth. As a result, in the domain aftermarket, single word domain names are more valuable.

However, web searches have changed and by a majority, most people search with multiple words. Everything being equal, a search for “prefab steel building” is more likely to bring up http://steelbuildingprefab.com than a more generic single word site.

I suggest that 3, maybe even 4 word combinations are more valuable. For instance, http://bathingsuitsale.com should be more valuable for someone who actually sells bathing suits. The combination http://onlineacademicdegrees.com or http://graduateclassesonline.com are so specific to the subject matter that it should be uniquely valuable for someone in that business. In the same vein, one can see how any one of the following can be considered uniquely valuable. The theme should be clarity and specificity. In effect, the domain name that you select should be consistent with the keywords for you will be using so that your SEO efforts extend to the domain name.

In fact, I would argue even 4 word combinations might offer more value. Consider the following http://acidrefluxandheartburn.com, http://newandusedautosales.com - are all very specific to potential content for the underlying site. Someone who searches with the multiple search terms or related will most likely get these examples in the result than otherwise. It is clear that appraisers have to rethink how they valuate domains in light of how search has evolved.

The Power of Content

2007-06-05T04:00:00.000-07:00

Small businesses sometimes find it difficult to keep their web sites updated with fresh, relevant information, because they either don’t have the time or don’t have the content (or a combination of both). But in order to keep traffic flowing, visitors interested, and sales increasing, you simply must keep your site updated with great content.

Studies show that visitors will spend approximately seven seconds to decide if your web site is worth their time, or if they should click away to another site to find whatever it is they are looking for. What differentiates your web site from your competitors? After all, if you have products or services that are similar to what the competition offers, you may not be perceived as being very different at all. But your web site can be the differentiator! Give your visitors lots of interesting content that is useful to them, and they just might stick around long enough to turn into customers.

One of your site’s goals should be to give visitors enough information about your company, products, and services that they feel comfortable doing business with you. If you don’t have enough content on your site (or if your web site is outdated), visitors will simply move on to other web sites until they find the information they need. If a visitor leaves your web site without finding sufficient content, it’s unlikely that they will return – ever.

Another important reason to keep your site loaded with good content is because search engines evaluate your web site and rank it based largely on the site’s content. It’s true that things constantly change with search engine algorithms, but one thing that stays the same is the importance of fresh, relevant content.

So don’t underestimate the value of keeping your site up to date and adding fresh content on a regular basis. It’s well worth the effort!

Connecting Things - Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee

2007-05-21T04:08:00.001-07:00

Experience in research and developing the research website has enables Web researchers to model collaboration and connection. The aim of this is to connect all the research that each person has done with research of others. This enables each person to connect with work they would like to have done themselves or can see they should have done, or should get involved in, but haven't had time. This can help business by allowing the business to clarify what it should focus on while knowing who can provide the othre services it needs. The advantages of this understanding of connections are most obvious in software and web development. This idea of connecting research via web links fits in with this quote from Steve Jobs of Apple "Creativity is just connecting things" (Jobs, 1996).

Further research is needed into providing a linking mechanism for 'snippets' of information. People need answers to particular questions they are asking. In order to get the facts they need it is important for the returned information to contain this. Return of the information as factual snippets that can be pieced together into a report with links to the multiple sources would aid this. The work with semantic technologies and languages such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) (World Wide Web Consortium, 2006) and RSS can assist in this. RDF, and Web Ontology Language (OWL) add a layer of standardisation of semantics, above the standardised syntax of XML (extensible Markup Language) (Bechhofer and Carroll, 2004).

RDF

Structuring information makes it easier to export it to different software systems to make his possible. It also makes it possible to provide visual navigation menus with a tree or graph structure. RDF can be searched using SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol And RDF Query Language) (World Wide Web Consortium, 2006). Because a resource can represent anything, knowledge from any domain can theoretically be represented in RDF. This, and its standardised syntax that allows it to be machine understandable, are the reasons why RDF is such a useful and important technology for the Semantic Web. RDF consists of a resource, a property, and a property value. This triple corresponds to subject, predicate, and object in logic. Each RDF triple represents a fact. A Resource is anything that can have a URI (uniform resource identifier). A URI can look like a web address and can actually be a web address, but this is not always the case, it is a way of representing an entity. A URI consists of the name and location of the entity. An RDF Resource is described through a collection of properties and property values called an RDF Description. RDF provides a mechanism for describing collections, which are special kinds of resources, and a sequence is an ordered collection. A collection does not have to possess its own URI but it can. RDF information can link to further RDF information elsewhere, providing connectivity. This allows resources to be linked to each other indefinitely, which is why it is such an important technology for the Semantic Web. Because it is XML based, an RDF Web page can be linked to an XSL stylesheet to produce a visual representation of the structure This is also explained by (Cayzer, 2004) who uses RDF to provide structure for Semantic blogging. Oren et al (2006) also use this approach of combining RDF and Semantic Seb use with ease of editing in a Semantic Wiki.

RSS

RSS allows web users to more easily find information by subscribing to websites that provide the information they are interested in and update this regularly. RSS is explained in (JISC, 2007) and by Cayzer, (2004) who explains its use in semantic blogging. An RSS feed is a list of articles in the website and a short summary of the article with a link to the full information. Software available on the web or downloadable can track the RSS information for sites the web user subscribes to.

RSS has split into different syntaxes and can stand for RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, and there is a third alternative called Atom. All of the RSS syntaxes are based on XML and some are also based on RDF. The incompatibilities however do not seem to hinder searches using these formats too much, and use of RSS has become a useful method for making information on the web easier to find.

Tools and browsers are available or becoming available for searching RSS feeds. An example of this is the downloadable Flock Browser (2007) that includes an icon by the web address to indicate an RSS feed is available for that page. RSS and Flock projects are also related to the concept of blogging that gives individuals who may not be computer literate the opportunity to put there thoughts onto a web page without needing to edit HTML. This is a similar concept to that of Wikis such as Wikipedia (2006d). RSS allows for a more structured representation of the contents of a web page or a blog.

Berners-Lee et al (2006) explain "The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale." As well as connecting research it is necessary to connect information sources, so this work should be taken further by enabling connectivity between open source ontology, modelling, and visualisation tools, with those tools and applications commonly used in industry and organisations. These applications already hold large amounts of information, sometimes they are legacy applications that have been filled with information for many years.

Keep It Simple, and They Will Come

2007-05-21T04:07:00.000-07:00

I once managed a large athletic park. It was a difficult job, fraught with all the troubles that any oversight job has, probably much like yours. From time to time, I would have the chance to give a tour of the place to someone who had never been there before. I always loved the opportunity. Being able to have a fresh set of eyes looking at your work, can be very revealing.

I would tour them around, watching their reactions, listening to their comments, and asking them questions about what they were seeing, then attempting to act on this new information to improve our service. What they saw was different from what I saw, because I was there every day, and my focus had become limited as a result. Try it at your job sometimes, you would be amazed, at what a different perspective can do to sharpen, and broaden your own focus.

The internet entities, who provide services for web users, could learn from this model. I took a tour through one of the major services, of their local small business listings, it took nine clicks, just to find my listing, and I knew where it was! I was not surprised that I had gotten no contacts through them.

A far worse plight awaits those who are not familiar, with all the technical jargon that has become so wide spread among internet based companies and their avid users. An outsider has no idea what is being said, and learning the stuff is worse than any language that I have ever tackled, and I know several!

With all the talk of domain names, "URL's", "ISP", "SE", "SEO", "Nameservers", "ftp", "html", "java script", etc (those are the easy ones) anyone wanting to build a family website is left to find a company with a nice set of templates, and even then, much explanation is in order.

What I propose, is that providers of internet services, work on making the language a little easier to understand. Call one of your neighbors over and have them shop your business services. Find the most low tech human being you can find, and build your services around them! I really believe, that if this was done, many companies would be surprised at just how far from the reality of day to day life, that they have slipped.

There are many people who do not venture onto the internet, because of this gap in information. There are many more, who are interested, and may use their computers for e mail, or some searching, who would love to venture in further, but who will not do so, because of the language barrier.

Why should this be of interest to you if you are inside the business? Simple. You are missing out on an untapped market, thousands of potential customers, because you are speaking a different language!

CRON – Automatically Run Jobs on Your Website

2007-05-21T04:06:00.000-07:00

CRON is a function in Unix and Linux operating systems which allows you to schedule a job and the job will run at the date and time scheduled until you delete the CRON statement.

Initially, you may consider this to be too technical for you, but not so if you will carefully read this article. It is a function of which you should be aware. Even if you do not need it now, remember about CRON for the day you will need it.

Apache server includes this function and it is easy to use with the graphical interface.

The format for CRON is "CRON * * * * * Command to execute" Each asterisk represents a field in the command and can contain the following values. If you do not want to specify a value for that particular field, leave the asterisk in that position in the CRON statement line. Each of the five fields is separated by white space.

Here are the values that each field (left to right) can have other than the asterisk:

Field -------- Value ----- Description

minute ----- 00-59 ------exact minute the cron executes

hour -------- 00-23 ------ hour of the day the cron executes(0 =midnight)

day --------- 01-31 ------ day of the month the cron executes

month ------ 01-12 ------ month of the year the cron executes

weekday --- 00-06 ----- ay of the week the cron executes (Sunday = 0, Monday = 1, Tuesday = 2, etc)

command ---varies ------ sequence of commands to execute

What prompted the need for the CRON on our site was our use of the software package that required that we copy the ClickBank master file into a file on the Boomer-eZine website periodically so our copy is kept current with the ClickBank master.

Since we get busy and forget to do this weekly, a method to have our web host perform this automatically was the answer.

The CRON function is very flexible and can be set to run on almost any time frequency you can imagine.

If you specify a minute in the first field and an hour (24 hour clock) in the second field and leave all the other fields as asterisks, the specified program will run on that hour and minute every day. If you want the program to run twice a day at 10 and 11 AM, you can write the CRON as:

CRON 0 10,11 * * * Command to execute With the proper combinations, you can set up a job to run automatically on almost any schedule that you can imagine.

Let's try a few. Write a CRON to execute on every Sunday at midnight.

If you got "CRON 0 0 * * 0 Command to execute", then you are right. The zero in the first position is on the hour. The zero in the second position is midnight. The zero in the fifth position (day of the week) is Sunday. This is what we used for our CRON settings for the CD AD Box update.

Set up a CRON to run once per year on the last day of the year at midnight.

CRON 0 0 31 12 * Command to execute If you have a graphical interface on your web server, it is easy to enter the CRON information

Sometimes the CRON function is difficult to find in your control panel. If you have difficulty finding it, send an email to the support group for your web host and ask if this is available and if so, where is it located.

As I said earlier, you may not need this right now, but remember it for when it will come in handy for you. It can greatly simplify the work of managing your website.

The Importance Of CSS In Web 2.0

2007-05-21T04:04:00.002-07:00

There’s a lot of hype about CSS and for good reason. CSS provides a fast, clean, efficient and very powerful method of styling websites and so much more. CSS can be used for many different aspects of the web including design and functionality.

Various things CSS can be used for include, font styling, web page layouts, expanding menus, roll over effects and so much more. All these things mean CSS has pushed the web into a new era creating a smarter, more efficient internet than we have ever seen before.

Dynamic content and CSS styling

Dynamic webpage’s created using languages such as ASP and PHP work hand in hand with CSS to provide easy to edit webpage’s. With multiple CSS files including a master or main CSS file your dynamic code can be kept short and sweet with far less filler code for you to sort through to make a simple style change.

File Structures and CSS

If you have a large scale website using separate CSS files per section your site will be easy to maintain, update and edit. If you were to have four sections to your site for example the home page, links page, help and a contact us page. Your CSS file structure would look like this:

Master.css
This file would control things that are required on all the pages of your site such as menus, footers, header, body attributes, head tags and even the basic layout.

Home.css
The home.css file would be used to control content specific to the home page its self such as the pages layout and specific attributes.

Links.css, Help.css, Contact.css would be used to control attributes and the layout of the files they control e.g. links.css would control the relevant file such as links.php.

So to sum up CSS is a fantastic web language and the future of the web itself. Learning CSS can be challenging if you have no web experience however if you have already used web based languages before than CSS can be a fun and fulfilling language to learn with many practical uses on the web today.

The Importance Of CSS In Web 2.0

2007-05-21T04:04:00.001-07:00

The Importance Of CSS In Web 2.0

2007-05-21T04:04:00.000-07:00

Buy A Web Site, Build A Web Site, Sell A Web Site And Make Money

2007-05-21T04:03:00.000-07:00

I started my internet marketing career in mid 2004 with a couple of network marketing affiliate programs. I tried hard to make these work and ultimately these two never made me any money. Then later that year I came across a plug in website business that teaches you how to create your own site and market it. Through this program I became involved with other network marketing programs, single level affiliate programs, email marketing, building lists, article marketing, membership sites, adsense income and other ways to make money online.

However, I really didn't have the success I was looking for as an internet marketer until I did two things:

1. Build my own sites.

2. Buy existing sites.

When I started doing this I wasn't really planning to sell the sites. I just wanted to earn some income from selling products on the sites and increase my adsense income. However, I at some point decided to try to make some quick money from the sites that were generating traffic and money. Why? Well, at that time I needed some extra income above the monthly amount I was making.

The great thing about building a website that gets traffic and earns some income is that you have created something others want. Others are looking to buy web sites to build up their income and are willing to pay a good amount for web sites. You can get anywhere from 6 to 36 times your monthly income by selling a site. perhaps even more if you have a high traffic site with great potential.

So now, my main focus online is to build and buy websites with the intent of eventually selling them. I call this flipping web sites. I even wrote an e book about the subject called Flip Web sites: The Difinitive Guide. More and more people are finding out about this under appreciated way to earn a few extra bucks or perhaps a huge full time income on-line.

Using PHP and MySQL to Develop a Simple CMS - Version 2

2007-05-15T04:47:00.004-07:00

In version 1 of our simple CMS we introduced the following four files:

* cms.sql
* updatePage.htm
* updatePage.php, and
* index.php

Together, these files formed a very simple CMS, which you can download from the following address:

http://www.computernostalgia.net/downloads/cms_v1.zip

In this article we'll extend the CMS slightly so that the database contents are extracted and presented in the form (UpdatePage.htm). This will make it easier to edit the contents, rather than simply overwriting them.

In order to make this modification, updatePage.htm needs to become a PHP file. I've called it editPage.php because updatePage.php already exists.

Here is the contents of editPage.php:

1. <>
2. <>
3. <>Really Simple CMS< /title >
4. < /head >
5. <>
6. <>Really Simple CMS< /h1 >
7. < ?php
8. mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "password");
9. $result = @mysql_query("SELECT contents from cms.page");
10. while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
11. $contents = $row['contents'];
12. }
13. ? >
14. < name="form1" method="post" action="updatePage.php">
15. Enter page content:<>< rows="10" cols="60" name="contents">< ?php echo "$contents" ? >< /textarea >

16. < type="submit" name="Submit" value="Update Page">
17. < /form >
18. < /body >
19. < /html >

Most of this file is fairly simple HTML that doesn't need explaining. However, the following bits of code are probably worth discussing.

Lines 7 through to 13 containt PHP code to connect to the database and extract the contents of the web page.

Line 15 contains a tiny bit of PHP code to display the contents in the form's textarea. This line shows how easy it is to integrate bits of PHP code into lines of HTML code.

Remember though that in order to use PHP code in an HTML page, the file has to have an extension of .php.

Tips For Building Niche Websites

2007-05-15T04:47:00.003-07:00

The first step is to find a niche area. You could draw inspiration from your friends, media, books, yellow pages, or from top affiliate programs. Once found that, the next important thing is to market the website so as to attract a good traffic to the website everyday. In fact, this is the difficult most part in building a niche website. This article discusses few tips that could effectively help one to market his/her niche websites.

1) Write articles and submit to various popular directories. This is an efficient method to drive traffic to your websites. But, ensure that the articles have a link back to your website.

2) Participate actively in various discussion forums in your niche. Find few good and popular forums in the web and register for an account. Observe the activities in the forums for few days to get a feel of it and then have a go at it by answering few questions, all the while subtly promoting your website.

3) Use blogs to your advantage. Publishing your blog with RSS feeds and updating it regularly will ultimately increase the visibility of your website.

4) Link exchanges can increase a website’s page ranking. Hence link to other relevant and high quality websites in your niche. However, it must be kept in mind that linking to low ranked websites could be counterproductive.

5) Posting comments in other blogs in your niche is also a good way to improve the visibility of your website. But, while doing so, never attempt anything unethical like abusing a particular entry or making hostile criticisms.

6) Another effective way to popularize your niche website is through periodic press releases, on something news worthy that is happening in your portal. Designing an affiliate program and recruiting hard working affiliates in exchange of a share of your profits is also a decent idea you can try out. Finally, if you are prepared to shell out few bucks, consider pay per click advertising – like MSN AdCenter and Google ad words – banner advertising or buying paid links to high PR websites.

7) All these aspects could increase the popularity of your niche website. But what purpose it serves if the website does not figure in the first few search results in a search engine? Therefore, some serious SEO while designing the website is also important. Sans SEO, it is next to impossible to remain visible in the web.

Build Your Own Website

2007-05-15T04:47:00.001-07:00

Building your own website is easier than it was even a few years ago. All you need are some good, basic instructions - that's it. No going to special classes, hiring expensive people, or taking an axe to your computer.

The Basic Steps

1) First, decide which will best meet your needs: a blog or a traditional website. Both can host ads. A blog is considered more informal, although you can put anything up there you want - photos, movies, advice, learning materials. Choose a website if you need to look professional, sell your services, or sell products.

2) Next, choose a package in which to put your content. Wordpress, Blogger, and Blogstream are just a few packages for blogs. Joomla is one of the main packages used for websites. The good news? They're free.

3) Decide on your domain name and register it. You can register at many places, such as Dotster.com, GoDaddy.com, or Register.com. Each of these sites will take you through the steps, and make sure the domain name you choose has not already been taken.

4) Either package - the blog or Joomla - takes you through the set-up. Their help services are excellent, and both have forums you can join.

5) Now you must find what's called a host service. The domain service is not the same as the host service - although often the same company will offer both services. Basically, domain services get you your name; hosting services provide a place or location for you to place your site.

6) Find a hosting service that is reasonably priced (compare prices between three or four services), and has a proven track record (check their website to see how long they've been in business). But most importantly, be sure they have 24 hour customer support with human beings who answer the telephone.

7) You will also need an ISP (Internet Service Provider) that offers either broadband DSL or cable. The dial-ups, while still less expensive, are too slow for the website creation process.

8) Once you get all this co-ordinated, you're ready to customize your site. Both Joomla and Wordpress already have basic customization done for you. But you can change colors, pictures, columns - to suit your personal or business needs. Wordpress will take you through much of the customization process, but you may need to know some CSS when working with Joomla. CSS means Cascading Style Sheets - and it's the language that controls the look and feel of your pages - colors, fonts, and other visual aspects. There are many free on-line tutorials and reference pages for CSS - just type it into your search engine and you'll find them.

Content, Advertising, and Shopping Carts

For content, you can do the writing yourself, or populate your site with many excellent articles from reputable content providers such as EzineArticles. If you have the budget, hiring a freelance writer is another choice.

For advertising, many people start with Google Adsense because it's easy to install, and automatically targets ads to your content.

Shopping carts give you the capability to sell products. You can get low cost shopping carts from Paypal and other sources, or even free shopping carts from groups like osCommerce (os stands for open source). Shopping carts, because they are obtained separately, must be installed onto your site.

How to Create a Web Site That Works

2007-05-15T04:46:00.001-07:00

If you want to create a web site, you better be prepared for competition. There are numerous people out there who have started a business online or brought their business to the web. Many of them have found out that it takes more than basic knowledge of web design to build a web site that makes money.

If you want to create a web site that works for you and your business, you will need to map out the process from beginning to end. Preparing to build a web site before you actually begin doing any of the work will increase your chances of having a successful online marketplace.

Here are a few web design basics that you will want to keep in mind when you begin making the preparations to create a web site:

Competing Web Sites

Before you begin to create a web site for your business, you will want to carefully evaluate your competition. Knowing how many other people have chosen to build a web site on your desired topic will help you determine who your competition is, and what they have done to make their online business a success. This will also give you an opportunity to determine whether or not your idea is too broad. For example, if you want to create a web site focusing on books, you might find that there are too many other people out there who have the same business idea. Narrowing down your topic to business books or books for young adults may lead to more profits, additional traffic, and less competition for your business.

Domain Names

The web design aspects employed on your site should properly reflect your business name and your business idea. The same can be said for your domain name. When you create a web site, you will want to choose a name that is easy to remember, easy to spell or type into a browser, and if possible, keyword rich. For example, a name like PadfootPalace.com is cute for a business that sells dog care products, but it may not prove to be able to garner the rankings that a more obvious name like DogCareEssentials.com could. You should always keep such things in mind before you choose a domain name or create a web site.

Strong Content

Although a good web site design is important, strong, well-written content is the key to any successful online business. Your visitors will lose interest quickly if you don't put in the time and effort that it takes to build a web site with valuable content. When you create a web site, you need to pay special attention to any content that you add. It is also very important to make sure you create a web site that is keyword rich. This will increase visibility in search engine rankings, and in turn, increase the amount of traffic that visits your web site. Above all, make sure that all of your content is factual, spelled correctly, and easy to read.

When Custom Programming Isn't Custom

2007-05-15T04:42:00.000-07:00

I have seen a pattern forming over the years where we will be contacted by a potential client with a story such as, "I paid over $5000 four months ago to have my ecommerce site built and it's still up and the designers won't fix it!". I'm not a big fan of stories like this. For one, this means that this potential client has already spent their budget having something created that didn't actually meet their needs - meaning that they do not have the budget to pay the going rate for having the site done properly. But the more disturbing aspect is when I have a look at what has already been built and find out that the ecommerce website is really nothing more than OsCommerce.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with OsCommerce, it is a FREE shopping cart solution built by many different programmers to be offered as "open-source". It's fine if a client really has a bare-bones budget because hey, it's free. When we use a free solution such as OsCommerce, what we charge the client for is simply installing, customizing the template, and setting up initial categories, shipping, etc. Unless you are programming or installing many additional complex modules to interact with the base cart, I really can not fathom why a job using OsCommerce would cost $5000 or more. To me, this screams of shady business practices.

I've said this in a number of other articles, that I believe honesty is always the best policy. If you are using any sort of pre-developed software (whether it's free or if you are paying for it), do not fool your client into believing that they are receiving 100% custom work. I find that even when using software, there are aspects that are custom (usually the design), but we make clear in our estimates and contracts which is which and what the client is actually paying for.

Designers and programmers are always on the look out for things that can help them while doing a job, everything from free scripts to stock photos to the latest software. As a designer or programmer, you have to judge for yourself what works best for you and what would benefit your client the most. I find the clients are much more comfortable working with you when they know exactly what you are doing for them and what they paying for and it's simply more ethical to let a client know when you are using a free or pre-built solution.

Make Your Own Translate Widget

2007-05-08T04:49:00.002-07:00

That's because of english is not only language that people who surfing internet use for. If the non english speaker come to your site and They don't understand your article that's because of your website is english only. So you miss to a chance to increase your blog reader to miss a chance to increase your web traffic,selling a stuff or many bad reason. It's gonna be better that your website have 6 different languages even eight or nine.You can make it.Today I gonna share you how to make your own Translate widget.

1. Go to famfamfam.com

they give you a free icon.We need the Country flag icon.Download here.

2. Extract it....then you will get the small country icon every country in the world now.

3. Go to Google translate provide you the translate service from English to 11 languagues.

4. We gonna put our web address or the web we want to translate in the Translate a web page. I gonna put my blog address online-tip.blogspot.com > Choose the languague to translate.First I go for English to chinese simplified >press translate

5. Now you'll our website in Chinese simplified languague.That's good isn't it ? Have a chinese website with no sweat and not even know the chinese word.Thank for google that provide us a good services.Ok then you Copy the URL like

Website Optimization

2007-05-08T04:49:00.001-07:00

As most webmasters would agree, getting traffic is one challenge, and retaining traffic is another. Fortunately there are numerous inexpensive and free methods and strategies, for retaining traffic.

Quality Content is King and Queen

The following are staples of a website, Home, FAQ, About Us, and Contact pages. Those are a given, however having only those pages would be a very boring and ineffective website. Yet without those pages it would be quite difficult for a visitor to easily navigate your website. Thus said include them whenever possible.

This should go without having to be said but quality content is an absolute must. If there is a product or service being sold, your visitors want to know that you're informed, and know your stuff. Actually, they’d like to believe you're an expert if they’re going to buy from you.

For example, if you are selling cashmere scarves, write articles on the origin and care of cashmere. While you’re at it, write a few articles on the origin and care of a few other fabrics, silk, lambs wool, and so forth. Taking this extra step makes better use of your keywords, which helps to generate even more traffic. And your valued visitors see you’re providing helpful and relevant information and not just pitching them.

This approach can help to keep your guest interested enough to stay for a while, and perhaps bookmark your website for later visits.

It is extremely important to always keep your readers in mind and write accordingly, always. If you’re writing about downloading music, you don’t want your article to sound like a medical report, and of course the reverse applies as well. It’s very important to be conscious of your guests so as not to alienate them. People do not want to read even good content, in a form that is distracting or unusual to them.

Make It Easy To Navigate

One of the most frustrating things a visitor can experience is having to track down what they’re looking for on your website. Your sidebar should be concise, clear and very easy to use. Generally put yourself in the new visitors position. What type of information would you want to see? Let’s say you have a service, be sure to list rates and hours. For a product, remember size specifications and shipping guidelines. For a brick and mortar, include a map and maybe a picture of the store front for credibility and recognition. All of these items should be easy to find on your website.

To summarize, imagine you’re the visitor at your website for the first time. Now include the information you’d expect to see, when deciding whether or not to pursue the products and/or services being offered.

Have someone that is not familiar with your product and/or service, provide you with feedback on what may be missing. Oftentimes when a person is very familiar with a topic they forget or overlook the fact that others aren’t as knowledgeable and may need help. The outsider’s perspective may greatly reduce the chance of omitting something quite necessary for your website’s visitors.

Looks Are Important

As with food, presentation is important. Don’t overwhelm your guests with ads and promotions. Less can be more. Use colors that have a wide appeal. Watch your images, spacing, font selection and placement of links. Once again, don’t hesitate to get feedback from others. Yes it is your website, but the website is not for you. It’s for your prospects and customers. We must always remember that.

By being careful and intuitive we can strike up a balance of good looks and quality content. We should never have to sacrifice one for the other. Look for a good balance and evaluate the results.

Rob L. Daniel is a United States Air Force veteran. He served for years as a top-producing stockbroker, with the Investment banking firm of Lehman Brothers. He has had key sales and marketing positions in and outside of corporate America. He is a full time Internet marketer, with a fast track global personal development company. He leads his team and helps others generate traffic and sales for their businesses. Currently he resides in Los Angeles, California.

Want to Copy MySpace?

2007-05-08T04:48:00.002-07:00

I get numerous emails from people who want to build sites like MySpace. Sounds like a great idea right? After all, MySpace is one of the popular community sites on the Web, and probably cleans up on advertising dollars alone.

I see one major problem with this, though...

MySpace is a very well established brand. So unless you've got the money to advertise your site and compete with them, you will have a difficult time getting enough traffic to make your site popular.

There is also a lot of money and resources that go into creating a community site like this. First of all, you need a huge amount of web space for all the data. So you'll have to invest in a dedicated web host (not some cheap, $5 per month host).

You will also need to hire some programmers who can create the functionality (unless you can do it yourself). There's no MySpace Software you can buy, or some HTML code you can just copy and paste to just put up a site like MySpace.

Am I Trying to Discourage You?

Yes, I am. MySpace is very popular, but it took lots of money to produce, and there's no reason to try to copy what's already been done unless you have the money and ideas to beat MySpace at their own game.

Let's face it. The average person won't be able to compete so there's no point in wasting your time, energy and resources trying.

So What Can You Do?

Make it easier on yourself. If your goal is to make money, simply build a niche site on something you love. That's what I've been doing for years, and I didn't have to hire any programmers to help me. Sure, I don't make nearly what MySpace makes, but I make enough to live comfortably and not have to go to a boring 9 to 5 anymore.

What are your interests? Football? Cars? Music? Cooking? Skin care? Build a "how-to" site on a topic of interest that helps people in some way. Then make money by referring them to companies that sell products related to the theme of your site. That's what I've been doing for years and my sites earn a full-time income.

Are my sites as popular as MySpace?

Nope. Not even close.

But I earn enough to live quite comfortably, and all of my sites are very low maintenance and contain nothing but useful content targeted to a specific audience.

Save Your Money

Building a MySpace-like site would not only be complicated, but it would be very expensive to setup due to all the programming involved. If you build a simple content, "how-to" site you can get a domain name and web host for cheap at a site like WebsitePalace.com.

So rather than trying to compete with the big dogs, just keep it simple and build an informative site on a topic you are interested in. You can still make a lot of money, and without all the programming headaches it would take to create a community site like MySpace.

Don't waste your time and money competing with the monster sites. Carve out your own niche and build your brand of one. Produce great content and you'll soon develop a following. Finally, recommend products and services that will appeal to your audience, and watch those commissions roll in.

Writing for the Web

2007-05-08T04:48:00.001-07:00

Writing for the Web

Writing for the Web is a matter of common sense and adjusting your writing style. The way website visitors read copy is unique and is nothing like when they read a book. If anything reading on the Web resembles the way we read a newspaper. The eye jumps around, on a webpage, looking at headings, titles and boldface text only then settling on those areas of copy that piques an interest or satisfies a need.

Even when the visitor decides to read a particular block of text they will tend to skim through it gleaning only those bits of information that interest them. As a result if you want to make your content sticky it must be brief, ripe with ideas and focused only on relevant content. Filling your webpages with needless content will only increase its bulk and do nothing to retain visitors.

No successful website wastes any space on filler copy. Filler copy is copy which is written to take up space or feed keywords to the search engines and imparts little knowledge to the people reading it. Even if the search engines take the bait and index your website based on these keywords your visitors will be few and they won't stay long.

Importance of Good Content

Good content is crucial to visitor retention. Having your website visitors stay awhile and brouse through the deeper areas of your site will increase the chances that your message will be understood and acted upon. This is the key to selling your product or advancing your ideas.

Don't make the mistake of believing that raw content filled with keywords is all that is necessary for developing a winning website. A few well developed paragraphs are better than pages of wordy explanations. Time spent distilling your content into its basic tenants will always be time well spent.

Web Writing Tips

There are several factors which when properly applied will improve your writing skills and add to visitor satisfaction. They are not difficult to learn and the results will surprise you. They are;

Content

Make titles clear and catchy - Brief titles that say volumes are the best. Distill the subject into a 3 - 7 word phrase for best results.

Avoid wordy introductions - People are bored easily and are turned off by wordy introductions. Get to the point quickly in every paragraph that you write.

Make the subject of the content clear at the start - Begin each text block with an explanation of the content that will follow.

Be clear and to the point - Never be too wordy but use as few words as possible to make your point. Brief sentences and paragraphs make reading easier.

Logical structure - Move from title to subject to conclusion in each block of text. Disjointed and illogical copy will damage any ideas that you are attempting to present.

Stick to the presentation of solid information - Every line should provide information about the subject at hand. Facts beat fiction when information is at stake.

Optimize your word count - 600 to 800 words is an optimum size for articles and subject topics. This is a good rule of thumb for any webpage.

Layout

Present a clean copy layout without frills - When viewing a webpage the visitor should not be presented with a sloppy or disjointed layout.

Use a sans serif font - Frivolous type fonts make web copy difficult to read and tend to turn visitors off. Clean and simple text fonts work best.

Make copy easy to scan - Webpage text should flow from idea to idea and not ramble. When presenting a subject develop it in obvious steps.

Use bullets and subtitles - Using bullets and subtitles will make ideas and points of interest pop out of the page.

Lists are effective for the visitor - Lists are the best way to show the logical progression of any subject matter or argument.

Presentation

Spelling must be correct - Poor spelling conveys an impression of ignorance. Most visitors will see this as a sign of poor credibility.

Use proper grammar - Poor grammar has the same effect as poor spelling. Know how to communicate your subject matter properly and always proof read your copy.

Strive for clear and brief text blocks - Avoid wordiness in your web copy. Keep your sentences and paragraphs tight and poignant.

Whitespace is better than graphics - The eye follows borders and blank spaces when viewing a webpage. Use these wisely.

Graphics should be an extension of the text content - When using graphics always be sure that they expand on or emphasize the content that they support.

Website Development - Click Click - Who's There

2007-05-08T04:47:00.000-07:00

What is a website?

Is a website a tool for product and service providers, or an electronic guidance system for prospective customers? In other words are you selling or helping?

How you respond to this question may determine the success of your website. So think carefully?

How we define what a website is really depends upon which side of the desk we’re sitting. Most business people would say their site is a sales tool.But that is a fundamentally flawed perspective. Use this position, and sooner or later you’ll pay for it. Let’s take a quick look at the Internet. The Internet assists buyers and people looking for information.That’s why most people use the Internet.

Your prospects are looking for a website that helps them. A website that helps them understand what they want to understand and buy when they want to buy.

In order to build trust, credibility and website loyalty, helping your prospects is the way to go. And it certainly doesn’t have to be for free. The vast majority of us are in business to make money. Many of your visitors are looking to buy something. However as the saying goes, no one likes to be sold but everyone likes to buy.

In order to generate sales from our websites, we must design them to assist and help our prospects. Asking how can I help my prospects buy, would be a step in the right direction. Our websites should be designed and built from the ground up with the purpose of being a form of online help. The key to successful online help is to answer one simple question: What does the prospect really want to know?

Once we have determined exactly what the prospects, needs and wants are. Then we know how to design, develop or perhaps optimize our websites to address their needs or wants.

Below are some common questions you may ask yourself which should help with your website development.

- Who is visiting your website?

- Roughly what time of day is this search taking place?

- Is the search being done at home or at work?

- Is the boss looking over their shoulder or are they the boss?

- Are they in a hurry or relaxed?

- Whose money is being spent, theirs or someone else’s?

- Are they looking for a tool or service to make their job easier?

- Or are they looking for something to make their job possible?

- Are they trying to resolve a problem, or keep a problem from appearing?

- Are they looking for the cheapest solution, or the best available solution?

- Do they want something with all possible features, or something which focuses on one issue only?

- Are they looking to buy right now (as soon as they know they’ve found what they want)?

- Are they okay with buying on the Internet?

- Are they the decision maker or must they convince someone?

- How much do they currently know about the subject matter?

- How much do they want to know about the subject matter?

- How much time are they willing to spend right now?

It’s your decision and whether real research is done or you make educated guesses, it’s important to know who your visitors are. At that point and only then can they be helped. And when they’re helped, you’ll start to see the real sales potential of your website.

Rob L. Daniel is a United States Air Foce veteran. He served for years as a top-producing stockbroker, with the Investment banking firm of Lehman Brothers. He has had key sales and marketing positions in and outside of corporate America. He is a full time Internet marketer, with a fast track global personal development company. He leads his team and helps others generate traffic and sales for their businesses. Currently he resides in Los Angeles, California.

Is Your Website Ready for Primetime?

2007-05-04T03:57:00.002-07:00

You spent months pouring over the Internet in a search for the perfect domain name. You are so proud that you found the cutest, most adorable name on the planet and grabbed it under .com, .biz, .info, .org, .us, and every other “dot” imaginable. Then, you went to your brother-in-law, or found an on-line template, or actually paid a developer to create your site. It’s going to make you a fortune and you’re really excited to get it on the net and off the staging area. You’ve tweaked the photos, text, and colors and it shines. You’re set to go live and see how it does. Hold on there Mr. Trump. You need to step back for a moment and examine a few things first, before the billions roll in.

Let’s go about this in order, beginning with the basics. As with any other written product, you must look at your spelling, grammar, and punctuation. What level of viewer are you targeting? Third graders or adults? It makes a difference in the language that you use. Are your words easy to understand and are the instructions clear enough to be understood by all ages? Double and triple check your spelling. Look professional and not amateurish. Think of your image. First impressions only happen once. Rewrite whatever is needed and have people of all ages review the text for content.

Having done that, check your links. Do they all work and go to the right places? Bad links are far too common and easily corrected. If you have an e-commerce site, do the credit cards work and the auto-replies convey the right messages? You did remember the auto-replies for the various parts of the payment system, right? If not, it’s not too late to tackle that issue. Speaking of replies, how is your contact-us page and email text? Did you remember to add a sitemap for navigation? And all the appropriate disclaimers and privacy policies? Of course you did. I was just testing you.

Now review the other domain names and make sure they all forward to the main site. Then, try accessing the site on a Mac and PC using Safari, Explorer, Firefox, and Netscape. Do all the parts still work and are they all visible? Try using a dial-up service and see how fast it loads or are there too many images? Have friends and family look at the site and try every aspect as if they were a customer. How do they like it and what would they change, if given the chance?

Finally, how are people going to find you? Have you added the appropriate meta-tags and descriptors to drive traffic and the right people to your site? Have you allowed for a pay-per-click or other type of marketing program? Or will your site be the best kept secret on the net? Don’t be too anxious to make it live just yet. A poorly conceived site with bad spelling or broken links is worse than none at all. You need to spend the time to make sure it works before posting it. You can always make adjustments along the way, but fix what is wrong first. Once you’ve done all you can and decide to make it live, you can be proud of your work, sit back and relax. Now let the magic of the Internet take over and realize that you’ve just become a primetime player.

Embedded Software Design

2007-05-04T03:57:00.001-07:00

This is the information age where technology is ruling not only minds but also the business. And if you are following the IT trend then you must have heard the drone around embedded software design. Embedded software design is not new to the world but with the changing time it has gained a lot of importance and also popularity. Prior knowing what is embedded software design, it is wise to know what exactly embedded system is.

Embedded system is a system wherein the normal computer is purposely encapsulated by the device it controls. Moreover, it is like a general-purpose computer which can be your personal computer. Above all an embedded system usually performs one or a few pre-defined tasks and that too with very specific requirements. Being dedicated to precise tasks the design engineers have got the freedom to optimize it by significantly reducing the size and cost of the product. Seeing its importance, now embedded systems are often mass-produced, so the cost savings may be multiplied.

There are various companies offering embedded software design services but only few are able to sustain in this competition and Softage is one of them. Softage is a complete IT company offering all the services falling in the bracket of IT. Having years of experience, Softage makes sure that it provides best and professional services to its clients. While going for embedded software design debugging plays a vital role.

According to the software experts, debugging is one of the most difficult parts of embedded software design.Debugging is usually done to test the software before it is passed on to testing. Ones it has been cleared of all the bugs, the next task on hand is testing. Testing is the most crucial phase or stage wherein the software goes under various rigorous tests to check its validity and functionality. Being the last and decisive stage herein software undergoes a lot of testing just to ensure it is functioning properly and also free from any bugs. Ones the software has passed this phase it is ready to deliver to the client.

Softage is one of the best and leading IT companies in Russia providing embedded software design services to the world. And if you have such kind of requirement then simply outsource it to them.

Embedded Firmware Programming

2007-05-04T03:56:00.002-07:00

With each passing day more and more people are getting dependent upon technology, whether it is related to computer or to mobile phones. If you are a neophyte and new to the world of IT then you must have come across the term embedded firmware programming. Embedded firmware programming is somehow related to embedded system programming which is nothing but the activity of programming system software.

The biggest and prime characteristic of embedded firmware programming is that it requires a greater degree of hardware awareness. This notion generally arises when it is compared to application programming. This is one field which requires expert technical assistance and knowledge. This is the reason why majority of the embedded firmware programming work is outsourced to other companies and countries. This highly technical field is growing day by day; this is the reason why now you can find various companies offering these services.

However, embedded firmware programming has also got limited facilities. That is, the use of automatic garbage collection is not so regular and the software personnel tend to face some problems while debugging. And if runtime library is available, it is usually far less commanding, and does less error checking. That’s why anyone going for embedded firmware programming always gives a second thought to it. Furthermore, monitoring and logging are frequently used; above all operating systems may have extremely elaborated logging subsystems.

If you are looking for a company who can help and guide you in embedded firmware programming then Softage is there for you. Softage is a complete IT Services company based in Russia. This Russian firm houses some of the best and expert software programmers who are proficient enough to deal with this technology. Also they carry the experience of more than five years, which ensures that only the best and quality product will be delivered.

Following the transparent work management, Softage makes sure that all the work developments are visible to the client so that in case there is any alteration it can be made instantly. This IT Services Company hosts the best programmers to support embedded firmware programming so that the delivered project is free from bugs and errors. Thus, if you are looking for a embedded firmware programming then Softage is the best choice.

Website Conversion Analysis Framework

2007-05-04T03:56:00.001-07:00

What Exactly Is a Website Conversion or a Website Conversion Rate?

Let’s first get some definitions out of the way. A website conversion can be defined as a website visitor performing a desired action. Now, conversion rate, per se, is the percentage of visitors who take such a desired action. For purposes of this article I will designate two distinct types of website conversions. Level one conversions or “revenue conversions” and level two conversions or “rain check conversions.” Revenue conversions are actions that are designated as the final goal of the website creators. Revenue conversions turn visitors into clients or customers. Rain check conversions, on the other hand, are actions that are used to facilitate a revenue conversion sometime in the future. A revenue conversion in its most common form is known as a simple sale that translates into an online transaction. Familiar rain check conversions include newsletter opt-ins, form submissions, membership sign-ups, catalog requests, e-mails to customer service, or a call to your awaiting sales department. If nurtured correctly these rain check conversions germinate into full fledge revenue conversions at a later date.

Understanding Your Business and Optimal Visitor Actions

Clearly defining goals for your business is not enough to beat your evolving online competition. You must have clear objectives and an understanding of your customer for your internet presence to work for you effectively. Before hiring a web designer or database programmer to build your site, you must have a solid comprehension of what it is you want your website to do. More precisely, you must have an understanding of what you want your visitors to do within your site. Is your product too complex to offer a real-time e-commerce solution? If so, a phone call might be a better desired action. Are your products too inexpensive to warrant paying for a customer service department? If so, e-commerce may be the better choice. Are you receiving dozens of unqualified phone calls on your voicemail system? You might consider creating a form that both filters and qualifies potential customers. Are your buyers educated enough to fully understand what your service provides? A prominent phone number might help to attract clients to engage you over the phone. Is your target customer executive MBA students from The Wharton School of business? If so, you might want to write copy that speaks their language.

Off-Site Conversion Factors

The most common error in conversion analysis is neglecting factors not contained within the framework of your existing website. Off-site elements affect the quality of the traffic entering your website. All things held equal, a high quality visitor converts at a higher frequency than a low quality visitor. It is commonly held that surfers originating from a Google search are considered a higher quality visitor than your average web surfer. An individual clicking on an organic or natural search engine listing is also considered a higher quality visitor than one who clicks on a pay per click advertisement. A “direct access” visitor, one who simply types in your company url as the first step in the conversion process, or a returning visitor, typically also is considered a higher quality visitor. If someone knows you by name or actively decides to come back for a second visit, the odds of a desired action increase. To the contrary, visitors arriving to your site from affiliate programs, banner advertisements, e-mail campaigns, or blogs, are usually considered lower quality visitors as their actions are less reliable.

On-Site Conversion Factors

Usability is the term used to define the efficiency of a user interface. Websites are a form of interface where human beings interact with a host computer housing a particular website. Usability is important for us because it impacts conversion rate. Your website must be efficient. Visitors must be able to perform their tasks quickly. Long forms, excessive steps in an e-commerce order process, complex account creating protocol, or an extended webpage load time can bottleneck a visitor’s desired action. The action must also be easily understood the first time the visitor enters the website. You’ve got one chance and a brief stint of time to teach your visitors and limit frustration before they move to the next site. If you do happen to get a return visitor, can they remember how to navigate the site the second time around? Your interface must therefore be memorable. Lastly, are you leaving your visitors satisfied? Does the color scheme, text font, or images in relation to website content leave your eyes hurting? A visually unappealing site can and will lead to a mass exodus of potential conversions.

Trust Us- Won’t You?

Trustworthiness is also a significant on-site factor leading to higher conversions. What however, comprises a trustworthy website? Clearly defined privacy policies, frequently asked questions, shipping instructions, order protocol, and prominently displayed terms of use can be a means to that end. Industry affiliations, awards, or memberships also give the visitor reason to believe they are doing business with a reliable corporation. Eliminating broken links, misspellings, broken images, coding or design errors can also serve to minimize visitor skepticism.

Persuasive Website Writing

Individuals tend to read newspapers, magazines, or books, while internet users scan web page content. They scan to grasp bits of information and quickly move on from page to page, topic to topic. Quick and efficient delivery of your message is a necessity to improve the stickiness of any website. Headlines should be used frequently with crisp, eye-catching, and prominent wording to give your web surfers the main idea and objective promptly. Your core topic areas should be displayed above the secondary or tertiary subject matter. The flow of content within a website’s inner pages should be intuitive and easily accessible. Websites that are content rich should have pages that are easily downloadable in pdf format or offer printable versions. Fonts, colors, and themes should be consistent throughout the website. Examples of fonts that are easiest to read are Verdana and Arial, while Times New Roman tends to be the most difficult.

Calls To Action

A call to action in a website sense refers to the active copy that compels or persuades a user to take action. This call to action can lead to either a revenue conversion or a rain check conversion. The key to calls to action are treading the line between pushing and persuading. A prominent “Act Now!” button might be too openly aggressive for the average web surfer’s taste, while an indiscreet “click here” might be too gentle to nudge your visitor towards the desired destination. A happy medium typically yields the most favorable results. Subtly pulling your visitors to your end goal is more effective than attempting to bully them around. After all, they decide what, where, and when they click on any given link to a deeper page within your site. Descriptive text links can and should be used at the end of every text paragraph to help persuade a visitor to make the desired move. The clearer the description within the link, the easier it is for the surfer to make up his or her mind.

When In Doubt- Test, Track, and Analyze

Having the ability to track your website visitors in real-time is essential in understanding what your website is doing right and what your website is doing wrong. Click path analysis, or exposing the travel patterns of your visitors as they click from one page to another is critical. Uncovering the common pages that visitors are leaving from will offer clues as to where your potential conversions are escaping. When testing different pages it is however, vital that you drive enough traffic to the site in order to make a sound decision on what works and what doesn’t. Don’t be tempted to jump the gun by changing a particular page that only received half a dozen hits or unique visitors. See how the pages perform over a longer period of time to ensure you have a critical mass of data to analyze.

Conversion Rates Still Got You Down?

Here are some miscellaneous points to consider before throwing in the conversion towel. Make sure that your website supports all major browsers (Explorer, Firefox, Navigator). Make sure you know what pages within the website you are directing visitors to. Conversions can be improved by directing visitors to the most relevant pages within your site, not just the home page. The closer the visitor is to the desired action, the less steps available to convolute the conversion process. Rain check conversions can be improved by giving away valuable information. Giving your readers something they need or want is an effective way to persuade a return visit at a future date for a future action. Make your e-commerce shopping cart linear, intuitive, and easy to use. Utilize “one click” technology to make repeat shopping attractive for your users to return. Not only should the site be memorable, but the domain name too- keep it catchy and easy to remember, and odds are your visitors will come back for seconds to convert another day.

Hiring Web Developers - What to Know

2007-05-04T03:55:00.000-07:00

1. Basing your Decision on Price Alone

Price is always an important factor when choosing any product or service. For those who are not familiar with web design companies and don’t know what questions to ask, often the default is to choose the lowest bidder and this could be a serious error. It is very likely in the technology field to run into problems when awarding jobs to the lowest bidder. Web developers who quote low prices are usually taking some kind of short cut in their development. Some shortcuts are the omission of statistics or the use of template style designs. Although some templates look reasonably good, if your web developer has done work for other companies, even your competitors, your sites may come across with striking similarities. Once your site is completed you may notice new sites popping up in your community designed by that developer with the same template. In the end, you need to evaluate the price/ performance proposition and ask yourself if you really want the lowest bidder building what could be your most visible marketing tool.

2. Get Someone who can Provide Ongoing Support

Many business's web sites contain information or material that is incorrect, obsolete, or just plain out of date. Some web developers will move onto their next project and forget about your site's existence leaving you with no human support for future changes. Be sure that your web developer will look after all aspects of your website; a single call or email is all you should have to do to get what you need.

3. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Statistics

Make sure your web developer will provide you with detailed, real-time web statistics. Some developers may provide basic hit counters, or worse, no statistics at all. As the owner of the web site you need to see your web site's statistics to measure its effectiveness and make changes as necessary. Be sure that you have access to traffic, and detailed statistical information. Knowing which pages on your site get the most visits, how long visitors spend on each, which search engine sent them to you and where they can from are just a few of the tools that will enable you to periodically fine tune your web site for better results. Also, you should never have to rely on a web developer to send you reports - be sure you have online access to this anytime you want. Ask in advance if it is free with the web site or an additional cost or monthly fee. You wouldn't drive your car without a dash board – don't try it with your web site either.

4. Insist on Formal Training and Experience

Your developer needs to understand design aspects and accessibility issues. This comes directly from having proper experience and training. Ensure they have the required knowledge of web programming to build custom applications from basic to advanced as your business grows. Database security and integration is essential when storing sensitive information on your website. Your developer should always keep up-to-date with upcoming technologies and programs.

5. Overlooking the Possible Need for Scalability

One major downfall of sites created by amateurs is the lack of scalability. At some point you'll need new features added to your site. Not only will it make your site more profitable, but it will make your job, and your staff members' jobs less time consuming as you begin automating tasks within a web environment. When the time comes to expand, your site will need to be scrapped and a new one created. This is one of those "pay me now or pay me later" situations.

6. Mistaking a Directory Listing for a Web Presence

Many business owners have a vague understanding of the Internet and how it works. Web directory listings may seem like an appealing, inexpensive solution to business owners who are not familiar with Internet marketing. A web directory listing is a web page within a larger web site. Capabilities on a directory listing site is minimal if any. Some will provide only basic company information and not much beyond that. Future development would be nearly impossible without switching to a real web developer. Any business trying to promote a successful image needs to have a customized professional web site with a unique domain name – www.yourcompany.com.

7. Be Sure You Can Pick Up and Move if You Want

Some web designers lock you in with them for the duration of your site. They may actually hold the rights to your domain name (www.yourcompany.com), which means if you ever decide to move, you can't take your name with you because it doesn't belong to you. This is ethically and morally wrong. Always retain the rights to your domain name and have access to your registration information. If you don't take the necessary precautions at the start, it may cost you down the line as your site grows in popularity while you're stuck with a designer that has limited abilities.

8. You Should Need Only One Number to Call For Any Problem

Having a web design company who will look after all aspects of your website will save you time, money and headaches. If you have any problems it's best to have one number to call for a solution and only one number. You don't ever want to find yourself managing an issue among various service providers, especially when the technical issues become complex. It is very easy for a developer to say "oh no - that's not my problem, you need to talk to your web host, or your internet service provider, or your domain registrar". Have a single person who knows what they are doing and willing to be accountable and solve your problem, even if they need to deal with a third party regarding the issue. At least you know you will be looked after with only one phone call on your part.

Web Development Must Haves

2007-04-30T03:26:00.002-07:00

The second thing you must have on your web site is an opt-in form. No visitor to your site should be allowed to leave without the option of leaving their email address. You rarely get two chances with a visitor, so make your opt-in form prominent and offer some freebie to induce them to sign up. This can be a newsletter, a free ebook or perhaps even 5 or 7 part course. Courses are good since you can prove yourself to be an expert in your field.

However, once you have at least a first name and email address, you can keep in touch and send special offers of products that can provide you with an income. You will notice that all of the successful internet marketers have an opt-in form, either directly on their web site, or as a pop-up that appears while you are visiting their site.

Thirdly, it is of great advantage to you have a page saying something about you. Every web site should have an “About Me” page, so that visitors can read about whom your are, where you live and what you have achieved in the past. You can include a photograph of you, and even of your family. People feel a bit more secure doing business with someone who appears to have nothing to hide.

Fourth is contact information. These things that you must have on your web site are presented in order of importance, since what might be the most important to one person could be the least to another. Contact information is essential. You should provide at least a contact email programmed to an autoresponder that informs the sender of the email that their mail has been received and will responded to within at least 24 hours.

A telephone number and postal address, while not essential, lets your visitors know that you are accessible, and don’t mind others knowing your phone number and address.

The fifth essential design item is a simple navigation system. Your main navigation should be on your home page, but this should not provide links to every page in your site. Your home page navigation should take visitors to your main theme pages, which themselves should have further links to lesser pages.

For example, your home page on a writing site could link to calligraphy, which itself could then lead to various calligraphy-related pages, then each sub-page to articles. Additionally to this you could sign up for Google Adsense and place an ‘Adsense for Search’ box on your home page. This provides a Google web search box that can also be used for a site search on up to three of your websites. Alternatively, you can use site search software available on the internet.

If you include these five web design basics, your site will be more successful than without them.

Web Site Must Haves

2007-04-30T03:26:00.001-07:00

A web site is not easy to design, but there are some web site basics and there are five things that every web site should not be without. In fact, there are probably more, and the five presented here are not necessarily the five that others would choose. If, however, you include these five then you will have a far better chance of your web site being successful in its objective that without them.

It is true to say that the essential components of a good web site depend upon the objective of the web site. For example, an information site that is not selling anything has no need for a checkout and credit card payment portal that is critical to a sales site. This article, then, will present the five aspects of site design that are essential to any website, irrespective of its objective.

First, the site must have good search engine optimization, or SEO, factors embedded in the design. There are ways to construct a web site that make it friendly to search engines, and there are many theories on the subject that are not the topic of this article.

An important factor is keywords. A keyword relates to the search term used by a search engine’s customer to find the information they want. Include keywords on every page of your web site, and currently you want no more than two keywords every 400 words. The days of 1% - 3% keyword density are over, but you must also include vocabulary relevant to the theme of the article.

Another important factor is the title of each page. It should be different for each page, and you should have the keyword for the page in the title, the title in bold text and contained within <> html tags. These are basic SEO practices.

Create Your Own Web Site Part II

2007-04-30T03:25:00.002-07:00

The third stage is to plan your site. You should not start to build a marketing website until you have a plan of exactly what you want to achieve with it. It can be used simply as an advertisement, introducing an offline company to online visitors, or a full blown internet shopping facility where the customer can purchase from a range of products and pay by credit card or a specialized online payment system such as PayPal or e-Gold.

You can get some ideas for your site by browsing through other sites on the internet that are doing something similar to what you want to do. They may be selling the same product or providing the same service. You don’t directly copy them, but you can get some good ideas. They will be, after all, your competitors on the internet so you should be aware of what they are doing.

Once you have a plan of your website drawn up, and know how many pages you need and what will be on them, you can start to build it. You don’t have to do everything at once, and once you get started you can add to it later. The important step is to start to build your site. If you decided to opt for a web host at around $25, they should provide you with a template based system that makes designing your site easy. You should get a wysiwyg html editor, or use something like Microsoft Front page that comes with Windows. Add plenty of useful content to keep your visitors happy and you are away.

Finally, you have to market your site and measure results. You have to advertise, possibly by submitting articles to directories, and track all of the activity on your site. Find out what pages they visit, and how long they spend on your site. Modern tracking software allows you to find out what pages your visitors entered your site on and which ones they left on. This can give vital information as to where you should place the content that you want them to see. If you intend to make money using Adsense, you should place your Adsense blocks at least on the page that they leave from. If they are going to leave your website they might as well earn you a bit of cash as they do so.

It’s not difficult to start up your own internet marketing web site, so check over these five steps again and get going. It could be the wisest thing you ever did.

Create Your Own Web Site Part I

2007-04-30T03:25:00.001-07:00

If you have your own web site, you have access to more than one thousand billion potential customers world wide. That is not to say that all of them will be interested in your product, but you cannot even begin to plumb this vast sea of people using the internet unless you have at least one internet marketing web site.

There are five steps to creating your own marketing web site. The first is to purchase a domain name that is relevant to your web site. Before you do this you must find what is known as a keyword, which is a word or phrase that describes the theme of your site. It should be chosen so that if somebody saw your keyword or phrase, they would understand what you web site was about. For example, the term ‘domains for sale’ describe exactly the purpose of a web site using these words as its keyword.

You should then check whether or not your selected keyword is available. Unfortunately, most of the obvious keywords will have been taken up, at least with the .com ending. You might be able to find one of the other endings but you might also have to find another domain name related to your website. You can easily find companies on the internet that sell and register domain names, and the average cost is about $9 upwards.

You then have to find a web host. That is a company that will host, or run, your website. The host provides you with the web space in which you can build your site and store all the files and software require to operate it. Depending on what facilities you are looking for, hosting can cost from around $5 to over $30 a month, and if you are completely new to internet marketing, it is worth your while going for something more expensive.

For around $25 monthly you can get web hosts that provide you with everything you need to run a site, including website design templates, html editors, email accounts, autoresponders and a checkout and payment system. If you intend to sell anything on your site you will need all of this and more. The cost would be very much higher than $25 a month if you were to acquire all of the software required separately, and the beauty of that kind of web host is that everything is already integrated together, all ready for you to begin.

Preparing for Successful and Professional Online Presences

2007-04-30T03:24:00.000-07:00

The planning and preparation of website development

As the importance of an internet presence becomes increasingly evident to those offering any form of practices, services, business, or information - the implied question is how to go about obtaining a website designed, developed and promoted to best meet your goals?

The first step in preparing for the creation of a website - no matter who designs it or what it's for - is determining the site's basic functions and purposes.

The usual functions that websites serve are:

* Improving trust and image of practices or business - Not having a website these days or having one that portrays an unprofessional or otherwise negative image is not a good sign to prospective customers or clients.

* Bringing people in from the internet - No matter what you sell or offer, there are many people already searching for it on the internet. Lacking an internet presence means web searchers won't be finding or hearing about you or your business.

* Attracting more offline customers - Many people will not make purchases from a person or company that they are unable to learn about or research on their own, or without dealing with representatives.

* Providing a 24/7 storefront to inform, build confidence and sell - While you are sleeping and your business or storefront is closed - your website is always available to persuade and convince, allow transactions or submissions of forms, or simply provide information.

Websites serve various functions depending on their purposes and goals. Specific to your practices, business, or services, you will want to create a website that offers your target audience what they want to see, and that is presented in a manner that persuades them to buy your products, contact you for information, or whatever other goals you may have for your site.

A quality website developer will consult with you regarding your goals and desires and inform you of the possibilities, but as the quality and skill of webmasters greatly varies I strongly suggest getting numerous opinions if you don't like the responses you are getting from one, or are told something simply is not possible.

Planning your website and understanding your goals and desires helps you best prepare your project and put it to life with your preferred website developer.

Preparing your Website - Understanding your goals and desires

Certain aspects of your website should be carefully planned in order to best establish an internet presence that meets and exceeds your goals, and most website designers will therefore want to work with you to determine the proper solutions for your project.

It will be better for both you and your designer if you have thought about certain aspects of the project in advance, including:

* How do I want my website to look? How flashy will it be?

* Who will be providing the design and any graphics or other media?

* What will the website say - which categories and pages do you want and how many?

* How will the website be structured?

* Who will be providing the informational content, including any text? Do you want help writing or developing content?

* Will your site require regular updates? Would you like to make changes or updates yourself later on?

* Will you be selling something online? If so, what? And how will you want your transactions to be made?

* Will you need a database to store or retrieve information?

* Will you want any form submissions or other functions?

* Will you want users to be able to or required to log in for certain or all aspects of your website?

* Will you want to take advantage of internet marketing for increased traffic and business?

* What is your time frame and budget?

* What are your desires and expectations for your internet presence?

Once you have planned the basics of your website you will want to find the right website consultant or web development company for your project.

Creating an Appealing Website

2007-04-25T05:05:00.002-07:00

Easy Navigation and Easy to Read:
A website needs to be properly structured and organized. Poor organization is the main cause of a poor site. For this purpose, navigation should be user friendly and visitors should find it easy to get around your site. They should feel comfortable and should get prompt information on things they are looking for.

Fresh Content:
It is important to keep adding an element of freshness for your visitors, and especially for search engines. In this way you give your visitors enough reasons to come back to your site. If you are offering quality content with originality, then they will be eager to come back and see what’s new in your world.

Smart use of Graphics:
A careful and intelligent use of graphics and images is utmost essential to design a successful websites. Graphics should be of a reasonable size so that they get loaded at the right speed and at the same time, keeping the interest of the reader intact.
The next thing is to add images, just enough to catch attention, keep them interested. Yet, not over done to the point that that message you are trying to get out is being blind-sided.

Increase viewer participation:
Interactive communication through websites augments the interest of your viewers, whether it’s through filling in a simple contact form, or having a weekly poll. Their participation enhances web presence and visibility. You could certainly go into more depth, like forums and the like, but even the small simple things work.

Research:
A lot of time should be spent on trying to learn how to capture your audience, what is it that will make them remember you and more importantly, want to return back to your site again and again. This is one of those times you need to think out-of-the-box.

Outsource Web Based Application Development To India - A True Knowledge Bank

2007-04-25T05:05:00.001-07:00

Application Development

The introduction of technology into our daily lives has changed significantly the way business used to be conducted. Today, the internet is not just being used for propagating information to the target customer base but also, to manage, store and update the information so that it can be applied and hence be transformed into knowledge.

The need for web based applications arises as it facilitates management and updation of information minus the hassles involved in installing millions of client systems with the revised information over-and-over again.

A web-based application encompasses of several standard examples like:-

# E-commerce Application: This application is an excellent combination of be-spoke custom shopping cart development which helps organizations to be able to display and promote their products on their website and sell online. Alongwith third-party solutions like integration of payment gateway like Eway, PayPal etc which shall help in processing the payments.

# Content Management Systems (CMS): Our CMS gives the web site administrator complete control to manage and update textual and graphic content through out the website independently. It saves time and effort and hence is highly recommended in cases where the information displayed on the website is extremely dynamic in nature calls for continual management and updates.

# Database Management System (DBMS): It is an accumulation of software that controls the storage and retrieval of data into databases. Most common examples of databases are Oracle, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, etc.

# Inventory Management Systems: This application is developed to assist in the planning, management & control of vital information like price, quantity, item code, size, description etc in relation to products/services by keeping an online track record of availability or unavailability of stock inventory, real-time updations etc

# Online Auctions: This online auction application is developed using the World Wide Web (Internet) as a platform and serves as an online marketplace for buyers and sellers to bid and pay for the products/services etc. It allows the seller to display their products alongwith its vital information and invite quotes from different buyers by the way of carrying out an online auction.

# Discussion Boards/Forums: This application is developed to facilitate a common platform for website users to create an online community by sharing/ exchanging their views on topics of their interest by developing robust chat rooms, blogs, web blogs, message boards, etc

# E-newsletter Application: It is an application which operates as an efficient marketing tool for organizations world-over and aids in the wide-spread communication & information dispense in a cost-effective manner as compared to paper mailers etc

# Real-time Lead Management System: A valuable lead management applications for several clients so far and recommends it highly as a high-quality tool to satisfy quick transmission and maintaining easy record of sales leads etc for busy organizations.

# Currency Converter: A highly-skilled technology team has developed and incorporated robust online currency converters into countless e-commerce websites which usually involve high quality shopping carts. We believe it is a must-have for a website that allows world wide users to shop online as it adds a comfort factor for them to be able to think in terms of their local currency.

# Member Registrations: It is believed to be an indispensable proposition when you are looking for ultimate customization for your website’s visitors. This application helps users to register online by submitting their personal information on the website and becoming a member. Hence every time they visit your website they are personally greeted and can view their past order records too. What’s more you can use this database to send promotional newsletters, RSS feeds, E-zines (Electronic Magazines) and offer discounts as well.

# Advanced Search: Websites that contain large amounts of information generally tend to confuse the web site user and eventually lead to frustration in circumstances when he/she is unable to find topics of his interest quickly and comfortably. In such a situation a competent technology team would always recommends its Advanced Website Search facility that ensures end-user comfort and easy accessibility to information about desired product/services/topics.

Changing Your Site's Url Structure? - How To Avoid Your Site Being Penalized

2007-04-25T05:04:00.002-07:00

Unfortunately it will likely have a negative effect no matter what you do. The effects though are temporary. If you MUST change the URLs, and you CANNOT 301 redirect the old URLs to the new URLs, you will risk your rankings, period. At least short term.

No Index, no follow on the old is not going to help. You might try creating a custom 404 page that 301 redirects to your home page. This is not nearly ideal, as your old section pages were targeted and your home page is not, but at least your keep any backlink credit in the family so to speak.

If most of your external backlinks point to your home page and product pages, you should regain your rankings before too long. If many are pointing to the pages you are removing (changing the URLs of) I strongly suggest you create 301s at least for those with lots of external backlinks.

Finally, make sure you run a headers checker on your new set up to check that old urls are redirecting correctly with 301s not 302s. Make sure to double check everything.

However, do take your time to read everything you possibly can about 301s. It's easy to get confuse initially, but makes good sense with time.

The home page may experience a short-term negative effect. However, assuming there are no links from external pages to the pages lost, the new pages will get indexed and provide the same internal linking value as the previous pages. Thus, no long term effect to the home page.

What are the Website Strategies for Internet Entrepreneurs?

2007-04-25T05:04:00.001-07:00

Your Internet Business website is like the engine of your Internet Business. You need to have a website up and running, in order, to move forward. Below are 6 website strategies that Internet Entrepreneurs need to follow. It does not matter if you are a beginner or if you have recorded successful sales. You can always twist your website to make it more effective.

1) Forget about what your website designer said to you. Forget about creating beautiful websites. These kinds of websites are not very effective in Internet Business. You should look at the websites of successful Internet Entrepreneurs. It has been proven that websites, which are more, toned down helps to increase sales.

2) Do not use Java and Flash for your Internet Business website. These are unnecessary and may cause some viewing problems for your visitors. For example, some of the visitors may not have the latest flash player installed. Some visitors' Internet browser may face problems when it runs Java.

Use HTML in your website. HTML is viewable in nearly all web browsers and loads quickly. The most important thing is that you must create easy navigation for your visitor.

3) Do not use audio and video in your Internet Business website. Avoid the usage of too many graphics. Do not use all of these because they have a large file size. Hence, it will take a longer time to load your website. When it takes a long time for your website to load, your visitors will get impatient and leave the website without looking at it properly.

If you still want to use graphics, then, you must compress their file size. You do not need to have photo quality.

4) Create a powerful header that can interest the visitor. You can ask a graphic designer to create one for you.

5) Use headlines and direct response copy writing on all your websites. A great headline will make the visitor want to know more. If you want to place a picture with your headline or in your website, you must make sure that the picture prompts the visitor to read the headline or the accompanying text.

6) The main purpose of your squeeze page is to generate leads. Your squeeze page must have the copy that prompts the visitors to subscribe to your list. In the end, you need to drive traffic to your squeeze page.

Build A Professional Website That Pulls Targeted Traffic

2007-04-25T05:03:00.000-07:00

No Matter What Type of Product or Service You Offer, This System Allows You To Quickly and Easily Get Noticed, Ranked and Pulling In More Leads and Sales Than You Thought Possible.

This system is easy, professional and produces results. What more could you ask for?

I will admit that it does cost some money to set-up but not nearly as much as you would think and the cost is about the same (maybe even less) than using the traditional methods of doing it yourself.

After all if you are building a business, you have to expect that there is going to be some set-up cost. It really needs to be viewed as the cost of doing business and is part of your business investment.

I only wish I discovered these simple steps before I spent the money to set-up my business sites. Since that time I have switched to using these tools.

Important Note: These tools have not been developed by me. They are from several different sources (and I am not even sure these other sources know about each other.) I endorse them because they have produced results for me. They have made my life easier and more productive.

Since, I have gotten involved in using the web to get my message out, my tool use and process has evolved. But I am going to start with where I am right now and then work my way back in time. The benefit for you is that you can see (and maybe relate) to my examples, solutions and successes. So, let's get started. Current System and Success Achieved

The Three Main Components of The System

1. Build your site by intergrating both a website and blog as one system. I use wordpress (which is free) and is included as an install in the better hosting services available.
2. I use Blue Host as my primary hosting service. They are the best and very easy to use. In fact, you need to be careful because not all hosting services are created equal. You will need to load wordpress in the root directory. Blue Host allows you to do this easily and quickly. In fact it takes me about 30 seconds to set-it up.
3. Then I install a set of wordpress templates called SemioLogic Pro Package These are absolutely outstanding, professional and built to automate all the key performance enhancements that you want and need to help you get noticed and monetize your site.

Issues With Formmail

2007-04-23T04:24:00.001-07:00

If you are a webmaster interested in adding an HTML form to your website, then you are going to need a PHP file commonly known as formmail.php. This file processes the HTML form and sends the results to you via email. However, there are a number of things you need to be aware of when creating and installing it on your website. If you have never created an HTML form before, then you really need to pay close attention.

To create a Formmail file, you can either write the PHP code yourself (which is impossible unless you are experienced), or you can download the code from one of the many sites that have made Formmail available for download. After you download it, you will need to modify the code in order to adapt it to the form you have created.

The first challenge you will face is changing the code, if need be, so that it automatically checks to make sure that all required fields from your form have been completed. Some versions of Formmail automatically include this code, some do not. If it does not include this code, you will need to hire a programmer to create it, or visit some free programming message boards and ask someone to help you with it.

The next challenge you will face is writing the code that will create the email message containing the answers to the form and send it to the email address you specified in your HTML code. This is extremely difficult to do if you are not familiar with PHP. Again, you will need the help of a programmer if you can not do it.

Also, you will need to make sure that included, somewhere in the code, is protection against spammers who will try to send spam through your form by altering the recipient field. To prevent this, you need to create a variable that only authorizes the email address you are using as the recipient. For example, if you have set up your form so that the results will be sent to your Yahoo email account, then you need to insert some code into the Formmail file that prevents the form from being submitted unless your Yahoo email account is the recipient. If you do not this, people will be able to send spam right through your form, which brings us to another important point.

Because it is possible to send spam through a form if the Formmail file is not created properly and does not authorize only one email address as the recipient, several web hosting companies do not allow their customers to run forms on their sites. Or, they use their own PHP files to process your form, which gives you less flexibility. The bigger, better web hosting companies all allow forms and allow you to create your own formmail.php file to process the form. The better web hosting companies also have extensive firewall protection built into their servers to prevent spam if a form is vulnerable.

I hope this information has shed some light on what you need to consider when installing Formmail to process your HTML form. Call your hosting company and ask them if they currently have your site hosted on a server that can process forms. If they do not allow their customers to process forms or have certain rules that restrict your flexibility, you should switch to a bigger, more experienced hosting provider that will give you the ability to do you what you want.

Web Design And Development Tips To Maximize Your Site

2007-04-23T04:23:00.003-07:00

Web design is a very important part of operating your online business. Since there is not an actual store for people to walk into, the set up of your website will determine if they stay long enough to make a purchase or if they will got to another website. With so much competition in the e-commerce world, the consumer has the upper hand.

Getting people to your website is the easy part. Making it attracting and easy to navigate is much harder. The connection speed for your website will make or break the deal. Most internet users are not very patient when it comes to waiting for pages to open. On average you have six seconds before they decide to go somewhere else. If cool graphics on your website take time to open, you are better off without them.

The website should be appealing, but not overwhelming. The layout should have tabs to make the website easy to navigate. Some good tabs to include are products, shopping cart, about the company, contact information, and frequently asked questions. You can design your tabs to fit the product or service you are offering.

Customers generally don't make a purchase on their first visit to a website. They often like to think about it as well as do some comparing. Offering a wish list is a great way for a consumer to save what they want to come back to finish the purchase at a later time. Sending an email to the customer at that time thanking them for coming to your website is a great way to keep your product fresh in their mind.

The checkout process needs to be very simple as well. Consumers don't want to have to click many places to make a purchase. At the most it should involve three clicks. Set it up so that many payment options are possible to meet the needs of various consumers. It is good customer service to provide a confirmation number so that the consumer knows their purchase has been made.

There are many tools you can use to improve your website if sales aren't going as well as you would like. For a very small monthly fee, you can use a web hosting service. They provide you will tools to compile data. You will need data to see what is going on with your website, and then analyze the data to make it better. You will want to compile data telling you the number of visitors to your website on a daily basis. Then you will want information telling you where in the order process they are leaving your website. If most leave at the same point, that indicates something needs to change like the price or the checkout process.

Once you have compiled and analyzed the data, you can start making changes. Most web hosting services also provide you with the necessary tools to improve your website. This can include colors, graphics, and even the set up of the website. Most have great online tutorials for your convenience. If you don't have a lot of experience in the area of web design, you can use the customer service representatives from the web hosting service to walk you through the process.

The checkout process is one of the most challenging areas for good web design. Consumers become very frustrated if this doesn't move quickly. Some individuals are not comfortable giving out the bank account number or their credit card number even with security being in place on the website. You can offer other options including Paypal and C.O.D. The more options you give them, the higher amount of sales you will generate.

There are also many powerful tools that you can add to your website, to make it more user-friendly. On good example of this is Google's Custom Search Engine tool, which allows you to create a custom search engine targeted to any niche or category you choose. This can help you offer your visitors a unique tool that they will return to your site to use.

Content Management - An Overview Of Its Workflow

2007-04-23T04:23:00.001-07:00

Internet has become the greatest source of all kinds of information, whether it is business or literary, academic or hobby-related. Just type in any keyword in your favorite search engine and millions of websites will pop up before you to answer your queries. You may be quite aware that these websites were created by content writers and website designers. However you may be less aware of the contributions of the content manager. The term "content management" may sound new to you, but they play a big role in the web content development.

Like any other managerial work, content management also involves coordinating a network of myriad actions, and is done essentially in a chronological order. The designing and content development are two simultaneous and important aspects of website creation. Content management involves the coordination between these two parts of website development.

Content management involves the integration of two creative aspects, namely designing and writing:

* It is the writers who put pen to paper the thoughts and messages of the website owner. The designers on the other hand try to bring the content to life by complementing them with suitable graphics and other forms of visual designs.

* Both aspects of the production are monitored by the content manager. From time to time the designers are provided with necessary templates, and writers are provided with guidelines on the articles by the content management team.

* Finally, both productions merge into one to create the product, that is, the webpage.

* Now is the time for the content management team to give final touches to the product and here the role of the editorial manager becomes crucial. This is the most important stage in content management, as it is the final stage before the product finally hits the market.

* It is the efficiency of the content management system that can actually make or break the success of the WebPages. It is the scrutinizing power of the content management that decides the fate of the webpage once it has been uploaded to the server. However, a thorough scrutinizing or detailed editing does not alone influence the popularity of the website. It is the foresight of the management in choosing the topic that determines to some extent how popular the website is going to be. Thus research work should be of high quality, and it is the responsibility of the content manager to ensure that the best materials are used to produce the output.

So the content management workflow involves:

* Knowing the trends and needs of the market before deciding to launch any product

* Conducting refined research

* Thorough scrutinizing of the contents

* Smoothly coordinating between words and designs.

Web Content Management To Enhance Your Business Online

2007-04-23T04:22:00.002-07:00

It is hard to imagine a world without e-commerce nowadays, and more and more people are trying their hand at creating websites and earning money online. For anyone thinking of running an e-business, you have to give considerable thought and planning to the content management of your website. The web content management for your website involves a number of defined measures and schemes to optimize your site and your business.

Strike A Balance Between Content Management System And Website Requirement

The website can help boost the client's presence and business over the internet. The content on the website needs to be in sync with the client's products and services. The responsibility of the team is to pinpoint the most important areas of the business and emphasize those areas by effective use of copywriting and graphics. Here are the steps that the management team generally follow through the course of website development to satisfy the needs of the client:

* It is the responsibility of the management team to perform a postproduction review to see whether the content of the website will meet the needs of the customers visiting the site. So before uploading the pages, the team thoroughly goes through the content once again.

* The responsibility does not end with placing the material on the server. The management is also responsible for updating the content to keep with the changes in the industry.

* The management should always keep their eyes and ears open to current affairs and make necessary additions or omissions as and when necessary.

Technical Aspect Of CMS

* The creative process occupies a major portion of the content managers' work. Yet they also have to have a good idea about the technical aspects of web related activities.

* They should also be aware of the several kinds of content management software that can help to enhance the quality of the output.

* One of the major responsibilities of content management is to make the visitor experience to the website informative and at the same time user friendly. The website should be easily accessible from any part of the world and capable of supplying the information the visitor seeks.

So if you want to make your company's presence felt in the cyber world, you have to focus on the aspect of content management. First be clear about the goals for your website and how you expect it to impact your business, and then hire a good website development company to help you accomplish your goal.

The Evolution of Macromedia DreamWeaver

2007-04-23T04:22:00.001-07:00

DreamWeaver, a popular web development tool from Macromedia, is currently in version 8. The software package has evolved from a simple What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor to a fully integrated tool, implementing CSS, Javascript, database information and much more.

As a WYSIWYG editor, DreamWeaver can hide HTML code from the user, making it easy for people who are not experts in web development to easily create web pages. DreamWeaver has made it easy to create page layouts using both table based designs and more conventional methods such as CSS layouts.

Understanding that people have preferences when it comes to their internet browsers, Macromedia allows users of DreamWeaver to set up quick shortcuts to any amount of browsers installed on their system for a quick preview of the page they are working on. This becomes important for developers, as they need to ensure their site appears the same and is compliant with all browsers.

Another large benefits of using DreamWeaver is its built in snippets of Javascript code, which they call Behaviours. These behaviors allow creation of dynamic on-screen HTML without any javascript coding knowledge from the user. Of course, you are then limited to DreamWeaver's range of javascript functions. However, there is a wide range of downloadable behaviours from the online DreamWeaver user community.

Templates, snippets and library items help development teams keep consistency throughout the web sites they create. Usually each web page will link to these objects, and when the object is modified, all pages that use the object will also be updated. However, this can also be done by using include files using any other application. The main benefit of include files is that each page does not need to be updated and uploaded to the server.

Other WYSIWYG applications, such as Microsoft's FrontPage are also used within the web development community. However, it is widely accepted that DreamWeaver is the more heavily armed and bigger application, with more features and expandability. This usually make DreamWeaver the number one choice when it comes to deciding which product to purchase.

With version MX of their software applications, Macromedia introduced Contribute - their baby web development package, based on DreamWeaver itself. It allows marketing and non-technical writers to update content in a word processing environment, with no access to code or technical modifications. This allows a good separation of content and design.

Throughout the years we have seen Macromedia DreamWeaver evolve from a simple WYSIWYG tool to a fully integrated development package, assisting web designers and developers to be more efficient. While a lot of experts still prefer to hand code their web pages to ensure strict compliance with web standards, DreamWeaver provides the perfect solution for semi or non-technical users.

The Popular But Wrong Way To Build A Website

2007-04-20T03:02:00.004-07:00

There are many websites that are simply built from the wrong end. And believe it or not, if your site is built that way, you'll be spending money without getting commensurate results. So what's this popular but wrong way and what is the right way or ways to build a website?

The wrong way to build a website is to start from setting up a beautiful site that catches your fancy. It is going all out for great graphics, flash and animations we all love to watch.

It is going all out to get a merchant account, a payment processor and a shopping cart. It is getting all your product description up and ensuring that you have the best shipping arrangement and a few more.

Is it that these things are bad or unnecessary? By no means! They are important for you to sell online although you can still be a massive success online without any of those. However, you can't succeed despite all those if you do not determine how you will get steady and high quality traffic to your site.

A lot of website owners online discover what's most important after they have spent a few thousand dollars building a great site that gets no visits. It is then that a simple reality dawns on them: That a website is worth nothing if it is not visited.

So, do not make that mistake if you want to build a business online. Take your time to study the ways of getting massive traffic. When you've done that, build a site that is designed to get massive traffic. You can't get too much traffic. It will make the difference between another internet success story and a person who stays awake all night wondering how he/she got into such a mess.

If you've made the mistake already, you can still retrace your steps. You're certainly sadder but also wiser for it. Devote your main efforts and resources on getting as much traffic as you can handle. That's the right way (no, the only way) to succeed in your internet business.

Numbers Game: The Irrefutable Case for Standards Compliance

2007-04-20T03:02:00.003-07:00

For true online professionals these days, this point is obvious. We all know and support and promote standards compliance in our websites and in our best practices. We know the benefits, in savings over time, in increased accessibility of content, of being looked upon more fondly by the various search engines, and so on. But do we really know -- and can we really show -- the true measure of just how much standards compliance matters?

I bet not. Today, I'm going to show you some numbers that may help you convince that next disinterested client that his or her website needs -- lest it be doomed to failure -- to be made standards compliant.

What are the standards I'm talking about?

The standards under discussion here are the ones that make up all of the behind-the-scenes substance of your web pages. At the basic level these include the XHTML markup language (which is the latest HTML standard), CSS for stylesheets, and even Javascript is a standard too. At the next level they encompass best practices for each of these standards.

Best practices means things like no partial or broken syntax, using the proper XHTML tags based on their meaning and letting the CSS do the job of styling your web pages. Best practices also mean following guidelines to ensure you haven't done anything to limit who can view your page. A common example of this is providing alternate text for any photos and images on a page, so that visually impaired people browsing with screen readers can still get a description of the images. Let's get on to some number crunching.

The Internet as a whole

Let's start with a sense of just how vast the potential market is online. According to Internet World Stats, there are over one billion people online, at a growth rate of over 200% since the start of this millennium. In North America, roughly 70% of people are online, over 232 million. And in terms of growth percentages, North America is in dead last of all the regions of the world. So while we have the largest percentage online, the rest of the world is catching up fast.

In a nutshell, the Internet is huge and has huge potential for just about any company.

Accessibility

According to the American Foundation for the Blind, there are approximately 10 million blind and visually impaired people in the United States. That's about 4% of Americans who would have special requirements in order to use a computer and access your website, and that's for visual impairment alone.

If you're not standards compliant, you've just potentially refused entry to 4 out of every 100 visitors to your website.

As Joe Clark wrote in his book Building Accessible Websites: "Accessibility is about accommodating minorities. So of course it serves small numbers - in each individual group. Add the groups up and suddenly the numbers aren't so small. But be mindful of the real people hiding behind small percentages. So-called minorities have a way of expanding as your site does: If 1% of your audience can't see graphics, and all of a sudden your site becomes popular and moves from 20,000 hits a month to two million, does the change from 200 to 20,000 affected users influence your opinion that "too few people" might benefit? Even with 200 affected users, can you justify ignoring the inexpensive basic accessibility advice in this book?"

Browser usage

So 4 out of every 100 visitors is now being turned away, assuming you're not already up on standards and accessibility. Let's look at another major side of things: web browsers.

The dominant web browser these days is Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), which for many years counted all but a slim minority of the Internet's population as its users. This created a trend in web design companies to get lazy and simply design for IE, ignoring other browsers and not bothering to verify how your business is being presented to users of the alternative browsers. It's bad enough that this act completely ignores accessibility, but it also cuts you off from additional minority chunks of visitors and makes your website less able to adapt to changes in online trends, such as IE's slow decline in market share over the past couple years.

You see, as of January of 2007, it's a different story for IE. For the first time in many years, its market share has dropped below 80%. That's right, you're now turning away over 20% of your potential visitors if your website was designed for IE only (the most common form of non-standards compliance). That's 1 in every 5 visitors who comes across your website. Not good.

To be fair, alternative browsers such as Firefox (13.67% market share) and Apple's Safari (4.7%) do try their best to cope with bad sites such as these, but they're not perfect at it. However, if your website is designed with Internet standards in mind, then you've done your part to help ALL browsers show your visitors your business as you meant for it to be seen, and you can be more assured of a consistent impression across the board.

Printer AKA researcher friendly

Lots of people use the Internet for research. Their research could be about a product they or their business is interested in buying, or it could be a school project or personal interest they're looking up. As an example of how big online research is, let's look at Wikipedia, the free and user-created encyclopedia website. To date, Wikipedia has reached over 3 million pages of information in almost 250 languages, with tests verifying that the content actually rivals commercial encyclopedias in terms of quality. So a mere volunteers project has created a comprehensive, exhaustive research tool 3 million pages deep. Online research is obviously important to many people.

So is your website researcher friendly? Can people print it out without printing 3 pages of menus and headers before getting to the substance of what they're after? Did you know that with simple standards, any web page can be made consistent in its content layout, and you can have complete control over how it appears on paper too. And it's easy to do.

Make your website printer friendly and that lowly researcher tasked with scoping out which company to buy product X from may just recommend you for making his or her life that much easier.

"Search Engine Optimization"

The hot topic online these days is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the practice of modifying websites to improve their ranking in search engines, primarily Google. This practice has had its fair share of people attempting to fool the system with quick and dirty schemes, but those people usually end up getting caught in the end. For professional SEO specialists though, it all starts with a standards compliant website.

The reason for this is that standards make it easier for Google and gang to make sense of your website, so it gets ranked better and automatically comes up favoured in their eyes (because they make more sense out of what you've given them, so they can better understand where you fit in terms of keywords and topics). That's not to say all you have to do to reach the #1 spot is be standards compliant, but it's a good -- if not essential -- first step.

Google themselves publish in their webmaster guidelines that all you need is clearly written content in a standards compliant format. There are other factors such as having other related websites link to you, but those sorts of things are easier to procure when you've got something good for them to link to in the first place.

Website management software that follows standards and puts you in control of your website's various elements, such as meta tags, page titles and page URLs, can help you take the first few steps to improving your Google rank and consequently to increasing your number of visitors without having to hire an SEO specialist (another win for standards compliance). It also helps you get the most out of a potential SEO specialist, since you've already taken the first few steps on your own.

Standards compliance benefits

Let's look at some of the benefits of standards compliance, in addition to all the bad stuff you avoid by investing the effort into it. Besides not turning away 1 in 5 potential customers, standards compliance can actually save you time and money.

In the short term, standards compliance should be able to save you money because for a qualified web professional, standards compliant websites are actually simpler to build than non-standard ones. They are simpler because the standards are more concise so there is less code (HTML, CSS) to write, and therefore it's faster to write and easier to understand. With almost every non-standards compliant site the HTML code is disorganized and littered with context-specific extras that obstruct readability and understandability of the overall design.

In the long term, standards compliance will again save you money because it's easier to make changes to something simple and organized than to something created ad hoc to just "get it done on time". If the code is hard to understand and hard to read while it's being created, imagine coming back to it to make changes after months or even years away from it. Good luck. Worse still, non-standards compliant HTML almost always permeates to the content level, making it necessary during any sort of website redevelopment or rearchitecting to "clean it up", meaning to go through it piece by piece and remove all of the context-specific garbage found in the content as well. These sorts of endeavours can be very time-consuming and costly and are often impossible to cut down on via automated process.

Another way that standards compliance helps is that since it's more concise, standards compliant websites are smaller and load faster than non-standards compliant ones. This means less wait for visitors, and standards compliant websites will get more visits on the same website setup, all other things being equal.

And finally, just as important as being backwards-compatible (for the same reasons of not wanting to turn away potential visitors) is forward-compatibility. Forward-compatibility is something only standards compliant websites can be assured of. What it means is that you won't get to work one morning only to be told that your website no longer works for anyone who just upgraded to the latest and greatest new web browser (Internet Explorer 7 for example), and so with standards you don't have to worry about fixing such cases. Standards safe-guard against these unexpected (and costly) scenarios.

Standards compliance works

Standards compliance and accessibility are not unfeasible or even expensive goals, provided you choose the tools you use to build your websites with these things in mind. As with most things, it's much cheaper to do it right the first time than to go back and fix it later. So be sure to ask potential software vendors, service providers and consultants what they know about these things and what their products (if applicable) do to help you comply with them. If you don't get straight answers and they seem to be lacking detail, that ought to raise some flags. If they can't answer you, they most likely can't help you either.

The Internet has changed from the days of your favourite nephew creating your website with spinning globes and bevelled text. While that may be a bit of an exaggeration, you get what I mean. The Internet has grown up, the tools of the trade have matured, and your web presence needs to reflect that. But don't think that 1 visitor in 5 will mind if you don't consider these things; they'll just quietly take their business elsewhere.

Make A Website In Few Hours

2007-04-20T03:02:00.001-07:00

After reading this article, I think any person can make his or her own website within few hours.

The things you may not need:

It is okay if you do not have command over programming or scripting languages. But yes if you have little bit idea about html and php that it would be the add advantage. No need to have much finance.

The things you must have:

You must have connectivity to internet. Some tools like filezilla it helps you to upload and download files from your server.

One domain name:

You must have one domain name e.g. www.zihh.com on which we will you want to develop website. If you do not have one that you have to register it from any registrar some of good and reliable registrar are godaddy.com, registerfly.com, domainsite.com you can register domain name which normally costs you from 2 to 9$ for one year.

Hosting server:

You need hosting for your website. Keep in mind your hosting should support PHP, Mysql, Apache (PHP is scripting language, Mysql handles database, Apache is server like IIS but it is cheaper than IIS server).Depending upon your need you can purchase the space like 50mb to 1gb what ever you thing is sufficient for your website.

It costs you around 1 to 2 $ for a month. You may also get hosting services for free many companies giving such promotional offers.

Domain configuration:

When you get your domain set it’s DNS(Domain name server) to the one which is provided to you by your hosting service.

Making your website script:

You need to have script for your website it may be Php or Html as per your convenience. There are millions of script is available for free on the net. You can take one of them or you can easily make it your self using any html editor. You can customize script according to your need if you have little bit knowledge of html ot php.

A Website Ecommerce Builder That Works: Simple Tips To Make It Work For You

2007-04-20T03:01:00.003-07:00

Ecommerce is big business, people are literally making millions of dollars everyday with websites that are selling everything from ideas to bulldozers. Using the right website ecommerce builder is the most effective and cost efficient way I know for the "regular" gal or guy to build a high traffic website that converts visitors into sales.

* Ecommerce is worth trillions of dollars a year and is projected to grow exponentially in the coming decade.
* Building a highly profitable website that processes orders and earns money 24 hours a day is true business automation.
* Fulfilling the needs of your customers and clients by offering them a solution to their problems is the easiest way to create repeat buyers and explode your profit margins.
* You can integrate your ecommerce website into an existing business or you can develop your own business utilizing market research first, and building your business around a highly profitable market with little or no competition.
* Once you have built an effective and profitable ecommerce website you are free to build another site if you want, or you can sit back and watch the sales roll in.
* The possibilities are nearly endless for highly profitable ideas for your ecommerce business

But, for the new marketer, breaking into ecommerce has been a notoriously difficult process. There is an astounding rate of failure in the e-commerce arena. Proper business planning and using the right tools is truly the difference between success and failure for most ecommerce business owners. In fact, my own business began to consistently succeed only when I discovered the right website building tools and techniques and applied them to my existing business. Using the right website builder is the first step toward your Ecommerce success.

There is a huge misconception that your website has to have flashy graphics, great sales copy, lots of video, and expensive web design. While these are useful tricks to have available at times, the "regular" small business owner doesn't need any of these to make money from the get go.

What your business needs to be successful quickly is a website that delivers exactly what your potential clients are looking for. Satisfying the needs of your customers by solving their problems will make your business a million times easier and emmensly more profitable. Prospects and sales literally flow to you when you find out what your prospective customers want and need, and position your website accordingly by giving them what they want.

Here are my most valuable tips for using your ecommerce website builder to earn sales immediately:

* Do your homework-Rome was not built in a day, neither will your business be. Doing the proper market research today will explode your profits and give your business long term sustainable success tomorrow. If you do it right, your profits are literally built into your business. Doing it right is easy when you have the right tools, have done the proper research, and then build your website around these two key factors.
* Give your customers exactly what they want-How frustrating is it when you search the Internet for doom-a-hickeys, but all you can ever find are widgets being pawned off as doom-a-hickeys? What if you were the only business that offered true doom-a-hickeys on the Internet and you found out there are actually thousands of people searching for them every month? Do you think you'd make sales if you built a website offering genuine doom-a-hickeys? Of course you would. This is what you will do with your ecommerce website.
* Offer real value to your visitor-99 percent of websites put the cart in front of the horse when it comes to making sales. Offering your customers something of value not only puts your customers in the right frame of mind to buy from you, it positions you as an expert so you have repeat customers who seek you out because you're so good at solving their problems. This essentially locks those people up as "your" customers and takes them off the market in your niche.
* Get motivated-Your business, easy as it is to get started, is not going to just magically appear and build itself overnight. Get started carving your ecommerce market out on the Internet. Today.

The key to a highly profitable ecommerce website builder is using the right tools and doing the market research first. Too many people build their website then look to drive customers to it. When done properly, your website attracts customers and delivers exactly what they are looking for for. When built the right way, the only way you can not profit is to shut the website down.

Jesse "the octopus" Boland is a business coach, blogger, and webmaster. "My success in business only came when I learned how to attract clients and customers to me, rather than me chasing them; this idea is the core of what I teach my students." "Many of my clients have seen 180 degree turnarounds in their businesses in their first week or two of implementing one of these ideas, as a coach it's a great feeling to see your ideas succeed when someone else uses them."

Portals Based Application Development

2007-04-20T03:01:00.001-07:00

Architectural approaches to provision of IT applications. Portal based application development is a better way of delivering web based applications than the traditional software development methodology. Portal based development provides the smallest distinct application possible (Portlet) which includes Presentation, business layers and data layers. The portal framework and architecture supports this, within a highly flexible application delivery mechanism.

Because these building blocks are loosely coupled and highly configurable, it is possible to use them in many applications and potentially within many parts of a single application. The potential for re-use is substantial. In addition the cost of developing portal based applications is potentially lower due to the fact portal platforms provide frameworks, architectures and portlets common to all applications. If the total cost of ownership is considered, the cost of maintenance and modification to the application delivered must be included and the cost of modifying and maintaining a portal based application is lower as modification can be made purely through configuration rather than redevelopment.

Of course this is new technology and does have some obstacles. It’s changing, it includes some additional security risk, it includes upfront costs for portal platforms and standards are yet to be completely ratified providing platform dependencies.

If This Senior Can Build a Website - Anyone Can

2007-04-18T06:00:00.002-07:00

At first I thought that this article would be mainly for seniors, however, there is something here for everyone. Even teens and young working parents can benefit from my observations.

We traveled in our RV for a number of years and then decided to settle down. I took up quilting, sewing and Swedish or Huck weaving. That was interesting for awhile. Designing quilts is neat, but half way through the actual assembly it becomes very boring. My husband became ill and during that time I found that I needed something a little more challenging to keep my mind occupied.

Although I have had accounting experience, have taken a computer programming courses, used Apple Computer's Multiplan spread sheet program, Lotus 123, dBase, Excel, I have been out of the work force for years. All my computer experience was dated. I had been using the computer only for browsing, shopping, email and games. I decided to investigate Internet marketing. I had to start with no marketing knowledge and absolutely no knowledge of websites, html or java script. I am still not familiar with the more advanced applications, but I can build a website.

Building a website under the direction of Top Online Profits and Internet marketing is a brand new territory that I have found sometimes difficult, but rewarding.

These are my personal rules for success: The #1 Most Important is that you cannot solely rely on family, a job, or friends for your own feelings of self-worth. Everything changes, jobs come and go, children grow up, friends move away, and you can lose your loved ones. You need some endeavor that you find worthwhile that is not dependent on events out of your control. When I was fourteen, my Mother informed me that it wasn’t her job or anyone else’s to make me happy. I was shocked, but realized that I was my own person, separate and apart from my family. Her quietly harsh words are still true; we all have to go our own way.

Look for Something New to Learn! The saying, "Use it or lose it," is really true. If you are working full time with small children or a senior with health problems or other limitations, your time may be restricted. That's when you'll have to decide whether or not your leisure activities will be beneficial in the long run. I encourage everyone to critically examine their behaviors. Sometimes we fall into patterns that bring little value to our lives. If I had to choose between playing solitaire and doing a crossword puzzle, I would choose the crossword puzzle because I might be improving my vocabulary

Don’t Give Up! As long as my health holds up, I'll just keep on. Persistence is one of the biggest keys to success in any endeavor.

Do Something Constructive! It does not necessarily have to be Internet Marketing. I chose it because I live in somewhat rural areas and working from home was my only option. What I am trying to convey is that you need to be both mentally and physically active. If you have had a hard draining day at work, perhaps some exercise with your kids or solo would be refreshing.

We all have tedious chores. Moms and Dads know all about those. I don't clean or cook any more than absolutely necessary. I might spend an hour or more making an entree that will last for three days. I would rather eat leftovers than go to all that work every single day. When I married at twenty, it didn't occur to me that I was signing up to cook for 44 years and counting!! I don't consider daily chores to be fulfilling, rewarding or constructive. I do them as quickly and efficiently as possible so I can do what I truly enjoy.

Limit Passive Activities! I have nothing against fun, we all need little escapism. It’s good for you, but it can be addictive. We all enjoy watching TV, movies, plays, sports or reading. Turn off the television!! Pick a few programs you really enjoy and only watch those few. Even reading to excess has little to offer if all your reading is poorly written formula novels.

Be as careful with your time as you should be with your money. If you are spending hours and hours in passive unproductive activities as a means of escaping from every day humdrum life, think about substituting a productive activity. Internet marketing, courses, hobbies, sports and volunteer work are all very stimulating and rewarding. Learning something new can be fun and you get a rush from every little success.

Stay Focused! There are some of us that have many activities on the go, so have trouble focusing our attention and efforts. I am currently working on a quilt, afghan, ceramics and Internet Marketing. I'm a hands busy person so I do sewing during TV shows and the ceramics classes are fun and social. I try to schedule my activities.

Learn Patience! Are you a race horse or a plodder? I’m a list maker and methodical plodder when it comes to work. You race horse types have to learn to take it easy. You must start at the beginning of a project and follow each step to the end. A shot gun approach will have you going in circles and you just won’t finish.

So get going and get busy.

Top Online Profits - The Work at Home Directory Program When I started in this business I made some terrible mistakes and spent money on a program that has yielded nothing in return. When I was floundering without direction, My SFI sponsor suggested that I try Top Online Profits.

What it boils down to is that it takes knowledge, hard work and some investment to earn income. Top Online Profits will give you the tools to succeed.

As part of their program, they give you a website, but recommend that you obtain your own domain name and web hosting. They recommended Ipower. Ipower has built in email, web builder and many other useful programs. It's easy to use, reasonably priced and I highly recommend it. Also, they don't send out 100's of emails advertising additional services like some other web hosting companies.

I don't use the web building program in Ipower because I have a very uncertain wifi signal. I have used it for minor edits only. I work offline and upload to the server. I tried Microsoft Frontpage and didn't like it. One of the major assets of Top Online Profits is their Work at Home Discussion Forum and forum moderators. On the forum I discovered that many people in Top Online Profits have been using NVU, a free web building program. They have a section devoted to helping NVU users. I started using it and it does the job. That doesn't mean that you don't have to learn html or xhtml. You need to know the html basics because any of these web building programs will accept a lot of commands and your site will get garbled and you simply must go into the code and fix the problem. There are lots of websites online that offer free html and xhtml instruction. There are also tons of free graphics, free banners, free online banner makers and free templates. I used the Top Online Profits website provided to me as a template and just started gradually changing it as I learned.

The mentoring I've received from the Work at Home Discussion Moderators for Top Online Profits has been invaluable. The program is structured to ensure your success. All you have to do is follow directions and do the work. It's a matter of duplication. Spend all the time you can reading the various forum threads. You'll find useful information and the moderators are very helpful regarding specific problems. One of the best sources of web building help is to look at other Tops members’ sites and read the moderators’ reviews and suggestions regarding their sites. That will help you to avoid their mistakes. In order to progress through the three phases you must submit your site to the moderators for approval before going on to the next phase. I’ll give you a big hint, for a newbie the first phase is the hardest.

Top Online Profits will guide you through the process of setting up a professional website. They will provide a website template, and you are encouraged to modify it to make it your own. Their program very nearly forces you to learn what's necessary to become a successful Internet marketer and web master. Best of all, the cost to join is low, about $60 a year for the program. A big bargain for all the help I have received. If you are serious and willing to invest your time and some money: JOIN TOP ONLINE PROFITS. This is the absolute best advice I can give to anyone.

How to Successfully Evaluate Software Development Proposals

2007-04-18T06:00:00.001-07:00

The First Impression

The first impression says a lot about a firm, especially about software development companies in a time like this when thousands of offshore firms fiercely compete against each other, and where professionalism has become a trade off for low prices.

When you first contact a prospective software development provider, ask yourself how they present themselves; how long does it take for the firm to get back to you on emailed questions? Does each representative have their phone number shown in their email signatures? Does the company phone you up to discuss your requirements? Does the company seem to grasp your requirements and is verbal communication flawless?

In today’s world of outsourcing, freelancers commonly use a company name of their own to lure their prospective clients into thinking that they have more experience than what they really have. In reality they might be one man shows who perhaps will not be able to provide you with sufficiently fast turn around times, nor a broad range of expertise. Always speak with a representative of your prospective partners and probe them on their company’s track record, location and number of employees. A company that refrains from having a phone conversation with you is a clear warning sign that something fishy is going on.

Software development companies should be able to present a lot of information on their operations and prior projects. Ask for case studies, coding conventions, testimonials, résumés of the staff that will be able to work on your project and all other information that can be used to judge the professionalism of your future software development partner.

Experience and References

Once you feel that the company evaluated has presented itself well in the first stage of evaluation, go ahead and ask for references and proof of prior experience such as case studies or perhaps even demos of applications similar to that you are going to develop. Once you’ve asserted that the company has the expertise required to take on your project you can proceed with asking for and analyzing the company’s proposal.

The Proposal

In the company’s proposal, cost and milestones should be clearly specified along with terms of payment. Other aspects worth noticing is whether or not the proposal stresses the benefits that the application will bring with it for your organization and if it includes suggestions on how to go beyond the initial goals outlined. What will the turn around time be for finishing the application, and more importantly what will happen if the deadline is not met?

In the final agreement you sign with your software development partner, make sure that a requirements specification is included and signed. The requirements specification should be as detailed as possible and all possible functionality that you require should be printed onto that specification. Without a clear requirements specification a software development agreement will do no good in case your partner decides to deliver an incomplete product.

Your project's success or failure will be fully contingent on your choice of software development partner. Read on to learn about the most important aspects when it comes to analyzing a prospective software development partner and their software development proposal.

Leave A Positive Impact On Your Viewer By Considering 3 Key Steps To Usability Of Your Website

2007-04-18T05:59:00.002-07:00

If you are into online business then you must have a desire and need of possessing a website that must appeal to a definite target traffic and market. Users must be comfortable in viewing your site, surfing it and without more ado, understand what the website is all about. On the other hand, to achieve maximum usability, your website has to appeal to search engines’ crawlers. To make it simpler, usability comes down to three main areas, including site design, page design, and development. If these areas are worked out properly, your site will definitely attract both users and search engines and keep them coming back for more.

Site Design

The site design plays the key role to keep your user to your site or switch to your rival sites. A poor download speed of site can spark your visitor to look for another site. Huge and excess of graphics can slow down the download speed of a site. It would be great for your site if it contains properly optimized graphics considering users’ needs and choices. A little concern to your users can fetch you great positive user experience.

Never ignore the navigation point of your site. An easy navigation along with relevant information at highly visible sections on a website can give your user an insight to come back and find new and more information. A simple yet attractive look while placing all the links correctly will make the site’s usability more effective and functional.

Page Design Like site design, page design also consists of graphics and content. However, an overall visual impression can easily lead a user to a sore experience if the graphic placement is not properly planned. An optimized presentation with the right meaning is not less than a challenge that every designer and developer must face everyday. A page stuffed with unnecessary graphics can confuse and distract users and weakens the message you are trying to convey. Usability is all about making the user feel at ease. An easy navigation and high visibility of call to action areas makes your message very clear and to the point.

Users online has very short attention span so they just scan pages only reading headlines and titles and click for more information only if something catches their eye. Meaning is simple; smartly written headlines will draw more users every time and keep them stuck to your site. To measure your site’s scan-ability, keep yourself in user’s place and scan the site for 3 seconds. Are you getting the right message? Did you get an idea what the company is about? If not, then you need to re-work on the pages. If not, you need to think about the structure and organization of the page design.

Development

The development is perhaps the most critical step in the exposure to your website. Designing a site with great look and feel is just useless if it is out of reach. The website should be search engine friendly to keep your online business up and live. To make your website accessible, you need to develop the site with web standard code that allows its categorization by major search engines. Proper H tags, appropriate style sheets, and using proper HTML and XHTML markup language play important role in a proper coding. Using web standard compliant code also facilitates you to reach the largest number of viewers with and without disabilities.

By this time, you must be aware of the fact that the site design, page design and development go hand in hand. You cannot have a successful website and thus a successful online business without each of these elements being carefully planned out and developed. To leave a positive impact on your viewer today, your website must be attractive, informative, professional, and above all, accessible and that can be acquired only by following these three strategically planned steps.

How A Website Works

2007-04-18T05:59:00.001-07:00

Many are keen to learn the process that makes a website system works. If you know how or what makes a website works, you are in better control of your website. Each website is identified with unique domain name. This domain is unique identity or address for a website. This is also known as URL. You get a domain name from the domain registry if the particular domain name is not chosen by anybody else. You have to pay an amount yearly to the domain registrar for using this domain name. If you are not paying the amount in time, then you are at risk of loosing your domain name.

After getting the domain name, you need to choose a web hosting service. Web hosting service is the provider of necessary space for your website. There are various packages available from different hosting services. Compare these packages and choose the right kind of package, which is both economic and efficient.

Now you start designing the page. A good html editor like Microsoft FrontPage can help you to create a web page very easily. Once you design your pages upload them to the web space provided by the web hosting company. Now you will be able to view your completed pages in your browser.

The final stage is marketing of your website. You have to market your web site properly. The first step is to submit the URL of your web site to various search engines. Build reciprocal links or one-way links from other website. This will help the search engines to identify your web page uniquely. It may take sometime to get your site listed in these search engines.

Content Compression Using PHP

2007-04-18T05:58:00.000-07:00

HTTP 1.0 introduced the idea of content encodings. A browser/client can notify the server that it can accept compressed content by sending the Accept-Encoding header. The Accept-Encoding header can be set as follows

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

or with just one of gzip or deflate. You don't need to worry about any of this - PHP will automatically choose the correct compression to use.

Compressing content usually results in less data being send across the network. This has three benefits:

* Bandwidth usage decreases - you can serve more visitors before you reach your bandwidth limit
* Network latency can be reduced because fewer packets will be used to transmit the data. Your application can appear faster to a user - page load times are reduced.
* compressing files allows you to format your xhtml code for readibility without sacrificing page load times.

There are two methods to using compression in PHP:

Using zlib.output_compression
Your PHP needs to be built with the zlib extension. In your php.ini file set

zlib.output_compression = On

to enable compression. You also need to make sure zlib.output_handler is empty.

You can change the level of compression by using

zlib.output_compression_level = d

where d is a digit from 1(minimal compression) to 9(maximum compression). The higher compression levels increase CPU usage, possibly without any significant reduction in content size. Probably best to use a midrange value like 5. Or you can test different values and compare the content compressions. whatsmyip.org/mod_gzip_test shows you the original and compressed content sizes for any page you submit. It also tells you if your content is compressed - good for checking if your settings are working.

The PHP manual recommends using this method over the next method.

Note: You can only enable zlib.output_compression in your php.ini file, even though the PHP documentation suggests otherwise.

Using ob_start
The disadvantage with zlib is you need access to the php.ini file, if zlib.output_compression is not already enabled (phpinfo() can show you if its enabled). Some ISPs do not give you access to the php.ini file.

You can use PHP's output buffering to compress your pages. In your scripts, or on the page you want compressed, add the following line

ob_start('ob_gzhandler');

This should be at the very top of your scripts. It needs to be called before any content is send to the browser/client. If you have an include file that you use for all your pages, you might want to put this line at the top of that file.

This will put all output in PHP's output buffer. At the end of the script, the function ob_gzhandler is called. This callback function determines the compression to use ('deflate' or 'gzip'), and compresses the content. The compressed content is then send to the browser/client.

Website Development: Top 3 Tips for Getting Started & No Longer Feeling Overwhelmed

2007-04-16T03:23:00.001-07:00

Do you know today a website is as essential as a business card? Yet many professionals feel overwhelmed with the prospect of setting up their business websites.

Do you feel overwhelmed with the idea of starting your own website? Website Development For Dummies: Top 3 Tips for Getting Started and No Longer Feeling Overwhelmed provides three easy to follow tips to begin your entry into the world wide web!

1. Create A Name.

One of the first steps for developing a coaching website is creating a business name, and registering a domain name for your website.

A domain name is the keyword before .com, .net, .org, etc. For example the domain name for bayareacoach.com is bayareacoach.

For your coaching business, you ideally want to register a .com domain name. The reason for this is .com is associated with businesses, whereas .org is for non-profits, and .net is for networking companies (i.e. verizon.net).

You can go to any number of free domain name search engines (for example go to directnic.com), to see if your domain name is available. Be patient with this process as it takes a lot of creativity to find a name that has not already been taken.

2. Remember Your Own Name Has Value

With professions that require a personal touch such as coaching or medicine, you will want to register your own name (yourname.com). For example, I own neerapuri.com. Registering a domain name is relatively inexpensive. Sometimes people are more likely to remember your name, than even your business. If they misplace your business card, and try to google your name, your registered personal name will show up in a domain name search.

Once you know a domain name is available, you will want to contact your web designer to know where to register the domain name for your website development. Many professionals do register multiple domain names, given they are so affordable. Usually with your domain name registration, you can set up a free domain forwarding rule that will point any domain you register to your working website. This way, you can focus on developing one really good website, and forward the other inexpensive domain names you registered to your main business website.

3. Registering Your Domain Name

You generally want to register your domain name with the place you are going to host your website- the place it will be held for work by the web designer. For example, if your web designer prefers to host your website on Bluehost.com, then you want to register your domain there.

Once you register your domain name for your website, you will feel marvelous, overcome your fear of websites, and be on your way to your first professional website!

The Elements of a Successful Website Marketing Strategy DON'T Leave Them OUT!

2007-04-16T03:21:00.000-07:00

Website marketing is a complex process that will likely take you a lot of time to complete. Not a lot of companies have been successful on this so be prepared to hear some discouraging remarks. Be ready to back up your website marketing strategy with vital information and fail safe plans.

Website Marketing Strategy: Increase Website Traffic

Your best bet in acquiring as many customers as possible is to increase your website traffic. Imagine your website as a store outlet. If your store is located in a place where it is accessible to a lot of people, it has a higher chance of acquiring a good number of customers.

To increase website traffic, you can do search engine optimization to boost your website,s exposure to the general internet public. You can seek help from a dependable search engine optimization (S E O) service. This service may be your own S E O team organized solely for search engine optimization, or you can avail of the services of an outsourced company. Whatever the case, the goal remains the same and that is to increase search engine driven traffic.

Website Marketing Strategy: Catch and Hold Attention

Once your site has acquired good traffic you have to actively work on making your website sell. To be able to convert mere traffic to site customers, your web page should be able to catch and hold on to your visitors attention.

This could be attained by a good sales copy. The purpose of a sales copy is to sell. This is therefore essential in your website marketing strategy. In a nutshell: good sales copy means persuasive copy, and persuasive copy means sales. There should also be an appropriate sales headline to your sales copy so that people who are in a rush will be persuaded to read the persuasive copy.

Also try to minimize confusion by avoiding baffling and packed product displays. It is better to keep the number of products displayed on a page at a minimum so as not to distract the visitor from looking at each product in greater detail.

Website Marketing Strategy: Informative Content

Everything in your website should not blatantly sell. It will benefit your sales greatly if your site has good informative content that will inform your visitors to the idea and your services before you actually bombard them with your sales pitch.

As such, it is best that you give your site visitors good value by providing information that your target consumers would likely want to know. For instance, if your site sells insurance online, your content can include information on various insurance cover available as well as basic insurance terms that they will encounter. By doing this, you are imbuing your site with the mantle of authority on the subject. The goodwill you inspire in your visitors by giving them information they are looking for can also be enough to convince your visitors to buy from your site.

Remember that attaining a good website marketing strategy is a process, so this cannot be attained in a day. Once you have published a working website, try to monitor your sales and make minor improvements from time to time. Content should be regularly updated to reflect changes in your products, new information and special offers. After changing something monitor it for sometime before attempting to modify another aspect of your marketing site. This will enable you to monitor the effects of certain changes.

This would help you decide if you need to explore other website marketing strategy options.

Create A Small Business Web Site -- Your Options

2007-04-16T03:19:00.000-07:00

Developing a web site for your small business is practically a requirement in this day and age. When potential customers are searching for information, they often begin their search by finding out if your business has a web site. Most small business owners do not know the first step about developing a web site. There are some options that a small business owner can use to get their site up in running in no time.

Option 1: Hire a Web Developer or Web Development Company
This option is probably the most expensive one, but if you do not have the time and rather leave the details of your web site in capable hands, this option will be your best bet. Before you rush out and hire someone or a company to build your web site, consider the following aspects of web site development:

* Domain registration
* Hosting
* Web design & eCommerce
* Credit card merchant accounts
* Secure online ordering
* Marketing programs
* Copywriters
* Maintenance

Be sure that whoever you choose to hire can help with most of the list above - if not all (depending on your needs.)

Option 2: Learn How to Develop the Site Yourself
If you have the time and dedication to learn how to develop a web site, this option can save you some money and allows you to maintain your site as often as you like. You can learn web development through books, online tutorials, or by taking programming classes at a local college. Besides HTML, you may also want to learn a web programming language such as PHP, ASP, Perl, Java, or Cold Fusion. You'll also want to consider learning how to develop Flash if you want animated flash movies on your site and how to use graphic software programs to create images. The downside to this option is the time it takes to learn how to use the languages and software.

Option 3: Let a Friend or Family Member Build Your Site
This can be a good option for you and your friend or family member. You get a free (or very low cost) web site developed and the person who develops it gets practice and a project to add to their portfolio. The big downside to this is that your web site may not look very professional, it may not get done on time, and can become difficult to maintain. Unless you're lucky enough to have a professional web developer as a friend or relative, you may want to think twice about this option.

The above options are all good ways to get a small business web site up for your business. Depending on your time and budget, choose which option will work best for you.

Flash - The Next Generation Integrated Development Environment

2007-04-16T03:18:00.001-07:00

Flash is an integrated development environment (IDE) that refers to the Flash Player, a virtual machine used to run or parse the Flash files, and the multimedia authoring program used to create the image, video, etc. Flash files are traditionally called "Flash movies" or "Flash games,” having .swf as a file extension and may be an object of a web page, a standalone Flash Player, or a self-executing Flash movie.

A Flash Player includes the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM), a virtual machine for scripting interactivity at run-time, support for video, audio, and bitmap graphics. The latest version is Flash Player 8 the main quality of this version are the two video codecs: On2 Technologies VP6 and Sorenson Spark, and run-time support for JPEG, Progressive JPEG, PNG, and GIF.

Initially focused primarily on creating animation, earlier versions of Flash offered a small amount of interactivity features and thus had very limited scripting capability. However, recent versions include vector and raster graphics, bi-directional streaming of audio and video and ActionScript, a scripting language that can be used to create almost all of the interactivity (buttons, text entry fields, pick lists) seen in many Flash applications. Thanks to the recent additions to Flash that it has become a widely popular method for adding an element of interactivity to web pages, software products, or displays. The latest version of Flash also allows development of rich Internet applications (RIA).

Today, Flash libraries are being used with the XML capabilities of browsers to render rich content on the web. Today, Flash is considered as a viable addition to the capabilities of a browser for its comprehensive support for vector graphics than browsers and since it provides a scripting language geared towards interactive animations. However, Flash libraries are yet to reach its potential as it is still in a nascent stage. However, once functional, it is bound to be another feather in Adobe’s cap.

Other Keywords: Create Websites-Make Your Own Website

2007-04-16T03:17:00.000-07:00

Webpage building is partly an art and partly a science. Art comes into play when you want to create websites that are visually pleasing. Science is also important because you need to understand the method that goes into building pages that are optimized properly for search engines. If you want to make your own website that stands out among the many competing sites on the web already established, you will need to keep the art and science of webpage building in mind at all times. In other words, you need to create websites that are search engine friendly and user friendly all at the same time.

Here are a few specific tips that will help you through the process:

Make the Site Easy to Navigate

Today's web visitors are impatient and more than a little finicky. If they come across a website that is hard to navigate, they'll log off and go elsewhere. This is extremely important to keep in mind during the webpage building process. The site should be easy to navigate and should be set up so that the user does not get trapped in one section. If they hit the back button, it should take them back to where they were. When you make your own website, you will also want to put a link to the home page on every other page you create.

Watch Out for Broken Links

Nothing is more frustrating to a user than clicking on a link that doesn't work. When you create websites, you should periodically review all of your outgoing links to make sure that they actually go somewhere. While this won't be something you need to do every day, it should be something you take care of once a month and during the initial phases of the webpage building process.

Keep Content Fresh

If you want to make your own website, but don't want to keep updating it with new content, you might want to rethink the idea altogether. The only way to create websites that stay fresh and keep visitors coming back for more is to consistently update the site with fresh content. If you have the same old stuff on your site from month to month, visitors will notice and so will the search engines. Webpage building is an ongoing process. Anyone who tells you differently is lying.

The Web 2.0 Phenomenon: Another Internet Trend?

2007-04-03T03:29:00.002-07:00

I bet you've heard the term web2.0 but do you actually know what web2.0 means? Let me get you in on the action. In my opinion, web2.0 is a revolutionary concept, it's the next generation of internet allowing web users to take active part to the development of a webpage's content and history. Using sophisticated dynamic applications a website can do some really cool things!

Web2.0 gives web users the ability and the freedom to do what they want, enhance and control their experience. Web2.0 websites are not just static or dynamic web pages. They are web based applications that you can use anywhere.

There are thousands of developers working on web2.0 websites as we speak. Many will say that web2.0 is another Internet trend that will go away in a few months. But web2.0 is here to stay and there are so many reasons for that. The most important reason is that web2.0 technologies allows a website to connect with millions of users and makes the Internet a really cool place to be.

It's not a coincidence that very well known websites like YouTube.com or Myspace.com are implementing this exact web2.0 concept to reach users and succeed with their goals. Should I remind you that YouTube owners recently sold their company for over 2 billion dollars to Google? Should I mention that MySpace.com has become one of the top-5 most popular websites in the entire web?

How about Social Bookmarking websites like Digg.com or Furl.com? Why have they've become so amazingly popular?

These websites are a cool place to be that's why they are so popular. They allow web users to take part and customize their online experience in an easy, fun and free way! Users decide whether they want to upload their own videos or talk about their favorite interests or hobbies and even share their favorite websites. Users can create their own friends lists, share them and thus leave their mark in the website's history.

All these remarkably popular websites are active web based applications utilizing the ideas of web2.0 concept. And they make tons of money every single day relying solely on advertising. They will never charge you for using their website.

Another great example of a web2.0 website is the infamous wikipedia. The first free online encyclopedia where users can edit it's contents. Wonder why wikipedia has become so popular? It's not only because it's free and provides tons of great info. What makes wikipedia stand from the crowd is the ability/option to edit it's contents. Isn't it so simply amazing?

So what this have to do with you? If you are a webmaster or an internet marketer or a coder then you better take advantage of the web2.0 idea while you can. It's so easy to get into that and conquer it effectively. How many niches do you know of that has a real web2.0 project established in it? I bet there are thousands of niches waiting for web developers to take the next step and conquer them.

In a few months from now you will not be able to avoid the web2.0 concept. It happens all the time. Good ideas just appear, it takes some time before they become accepted and gain some popularity and then everyone wants a piece of the action. Web2.0 is already gaining popularity in an unimaginable way.

File Not Found Equals Visitors Lost

2007-04-03T03:29:00.001-07:00

I guess we’ve all experienced the frustration of following a link only to be presented with a '404 - File not found' browser generated error page. Have you checked your web site statistics or server logs recently to see how many instances of this is occurring on your site?

A 'File not found' browser message is a sure-fire way of sending potential customers scurrying off your site and to your competition. Here’s some tips for rectifying the problem.

Verify your links

If you’re seeing 404 errors occurring, the first thing you should do is to check all the links on your site. This can be a rather painstaking task if you have many pages, but there are software applications around to automate the process. Xenu Link Sleuth is great freeware application I’ve used many times for checking link validity.

Even if your site is rock solid, you never rename or delete files and all your links are working; the 404 error can still happen. A couple of the scenarios when this can occur:

- someone linking to you using an incorrect URL

- a malformed browser request

- a corrupt search engine listing link

Custom error pages

While some of the causes of 404 errors may be beyond your control, there are simple actions you can take to maximize your chances of keeping the client on your site, such as creating a custom error page.

This is just a page with your site design containing a friendly message stating that there’s been an error and suggesting links on your site that the visitor may be interested in.

Then, in your .htaccess file, add the following line:

ErrorDocument 404 http://site.com/404.htm

.. where site.com is your site and 404.htm the name of the custom error page file

After implementation, the next time a page from your site is requested that doesn’t exist, the person will be redirected to the custom error page.

Exclude search engine robots

Note: if you already have a custom error page in place, I also recommend including a robots exclusion statement for the page. It’s a page that you don’t want search engines to index as it has been reported to cause ranking issues.

A robots exclusion statement can be placed in your robots.txt file, or in the page itself between the source code head tags like so:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

If you do find a need to rename or move files around, rather than rely on a custom error page it’s wise to use a 301 redirect - this is also implemented in your .htaccess file. This can also help preserve your search engine rankings for that page. The 301 redirect will seamlessly redirect any request for the old page to the new/moved/renamed page.

Web Analytics - What You Always Needed and Could Never Find

2007-04-03T03:28:00.000-07:00

In a matter of very few years, the Internet has consolidated itself as a very powerful platform that has changed the way we do business, and the way we communicate. The Internet, as no other medium, has given an international or "global" dimension to the world. It is the universal source of information and became the most democratic of all the mass media. With a very low investment, anyone can have a web page in Internet. This way, almost any business can reach a very large market, directly, fast and economically, no matter the size or its location of the business. With a very low investment almost anybody who can read and write can have access to the World Wide Web.

The Web evolves very quickly. It is now known and confirmed that the world reached a milestone already in late 2005 as Internet access became available to one billion people worldwide, with approximately 845 million using it regularly. In August 2006 there were registered more than 92 millions of domains worldwide and almost 47 millions active websites. Europe with 313 millions of Internet users is on the 2nd place (just after Asia), but the penetration of Internet users in Europe’s population is almost 4 times higher than in Asia and with 38.6 % it is in the 3rd place, after Australia/Oceania (53.5 %) and North America (69.4 %,) on the 1st place.

Together with the Internet expansion the Internet marketing has evolved. Internet marketing is the use of the Internet to advertise and sell goods and services. Web income from advertisements or paid services is proportional to traffic, which can be measured instantly via simple traffic analysis services or more complex tools as web analytics.

Benefits of Web analytics and on-line marketing

Web analytics has evolved into much more than visitor "hits" counter. The new generation of Web analytics is an important resource for assisting customer relationship management, optimizing marketing, increasing sales and measuring site activities that directly affect customer behavior. Analytics reports provide information that allows managers to improve Web activities, eliminate wasted marketing efforts, target new sales customers geographically, support existing customers for repeat business and lifetime loyalty, enhance the site for more efficiency, etc. Web analytics is moving away from IT and into management, sales and marketing.

It is well known that customer satisfaction is critical for business. So take Web analytics reports, analyze the data, apply the conclusions on a consistent basis, and you will be able to pinpoint problem areas, reveal oversights or errors, and correct them. For example, by monitoring variables like visitor click path, page duration and exit pages, a comprehensive report can be formed that will indicate visitor habits directly related to the site pages, from arrival to ratio of use-to-action. With such reports, the site owners or managers gain information needed to make changes or improvements that can positively impact the revenue.

Measuring of internet marketing

Measuring of usage and performance provides important insights on measuring the Return On internet marketing Investments. Measuring the ROI of internet marketing without traffic analysis is like calculating elevator usage without assessing its speed and capacity. If you possess both figures you can compare and may learn that you are not getting enough visitors because the elevator is running out of capacity, is slow or broken. Now imagine it is the only elevator in the department store - how much revenue will be lost because of that? Similarly you can promote your website and acquire more potential clients, but you may also discover that your site is unable to handle such traffic; it is slow or simply not available. According to Zona Research, "more than $21 billion per year lost when users abandon a website because of excessive delays in web page downloads."

Small and mid-sized businesses willing to obtain complete metrics of their website performance have to subscribe both to website monitoring and web statistics services. While a visitor tracking feature together with network and website monitoring service could carry the on-line monitoring service to the next level. This combination could provide unique and valuable source of information to effectively manage online business sites.

There are lots of website and network monitoring services in the market offering mostly similar products and among them there are at least 10 significant companies providing this service. Also there are minimum of 5 important companies among those numerous providers of traffic monitoring service. All of them have common one character - they are specialized just to one of these services.

In the global market, there is one outstanding company!

Nice Tips for Webmasters

2007-04-03T03:26:00.000-07:00

1) Search engine submission to google, yahoo, msn, etc.
2) Directory submission.
3) Public relation: join few forums, and put your site on the signature.
4) Place this site URL to my other site footer.
5) Join link exchange.
6) Article writing will increase more one way links it's very good for page rank and traffic.
7) Social bookmarking sites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links.
8) Collection of relevant keywords example: electronic

Increase your site's link popularity by increasing your internal and incoming links.

Internal links - Cross link all your sites and important pages within each site. This will maximize the PageRank of all your pages within each web site.

Incoming links that you control - Create several small web sites related to your main site. Each site should only consist of a few pages. Then cross link them all together using the most important keywords. Don't forget to include links back to the main site.

Ask sites that link to your competitors to link to your site. To find out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit a search engine and enter, "link:" followed by the competitors' domain name.

Exchange links with sites listed in the same category as yours in the major web directories, such as the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory.

Find sites that accept site submissions. Visit your favorite search engine and search for:

Type

#"Add link"+"your keyword"
#"Add a link"+"your keyword"
#"Add site"+"your keyword"
#"Add a site"+"your keyword"
#"Add your site"+"your keyword"
#"Add URL"+"your keyword"
#"Add link"+"your keyword"
#"Add a URL"+"your keyword"
#"Add an URL"+"your keyword"
#"Add website"+"your keyword"
#"Add a website"+"your keyword" etc......

For example

#"Add a website"+"electronic" Here electronic is a keyword

Include a TITLE tag as the first META tag, directly after the HEAD tag.

Include robot.txt file

Web Online Marketing: The Finer Points

2007-04-03T03:25:00.001-07:00

It is alright to have a website for the products or services you offer, but it is a completely different thing when you have to make full use of it. There is no doubt that your website and the internet at large provides a huge opportunity for you to reach out to your customers, but to do so effectively you have to understand the nitty-gritty of web online marketing. It all rest on how you do the basic things right. We will try and explain some of the finer points of web online marketing so that your website delivers the results you want them to do.

Lay Your Hands on Traffic Analysis Data

Whenever you are hosting your website you can ask your host to provide you with traffic analysis data. Although many choose to disregard such nitty-gritty of web online hosting, it can prove to be very effective if handled and analyzed properly. The data will reveal on which pages the visitors are spending more time and after visiting which page they are choosing to leave. You can then arrange your data accordingly. And with the next update about the traffic analysis you can actually measure how effective have the changes been.

Proof Read

Since you are using your website for your marketing, be as professional as you can be. Even the smallest of errors can make your visitors perceive you as being not serious about your business. Avoid all such errors. Proof read all the content, at least twice. And it would be better if you can enlist someone else also to proof read the entire matter. And also try to avoid all kinds of short forms and abbreviations.

Newsletters

Build up a list to send your newsletters. Make sure that they are targeted to the right person. And send the newsletters only to those who agree or else it would end up in the spam folder and you will never be able to send them a newsletter in future.

Internet Real Estate - Creating An Ecommerce Website

2007-03-27T02:59:00.001-07:00

Owning your own profitable piece of internet real estate may not be as difficult or expensive as you think.

If you're like the majority of people online, chances are that you have at least thought about building your own ecommerce website. The reason most people don't get past the actual "thinking" process is because they believe there is too much technical expertise involved or the cost of building an ecommerce website is too high.

The truth of the matter is, the only real costs involved are reliable web hosting, a domain name, a keyword research tool (like Wordtracker) and the time and effort you decide to commit.

Let's go through the steps involved in building a successful ecommerce website.

First and foremost, is your site concept or theme. Think of a hobby or passion you have that you know a lot about, or would be interested in learning more about. It could be gardening, cycling, fishing, comic books, dieting, fitness, shopping, or anything else you may have an interest in.

Become an expert on your chosen theme. If you are passionate about your concept, then you probably know more about it than most other people. Combining your own knowledge about your chosen theme with doing research on the internet will make you an expert in no time!

Think about how you can monetize your site's theme. It could be through promoting related affiliate programs, Google Adsense, selling your own ebooks, or any number of monetization models.

To get high ranking in the search engines, you need to find the best keywords relating to your site concept. These are the bread and butter of your ecommerce website. To find the best keywords (the ones with high demand and low supply), type your seed keyword (site concept) into Wordtracker.

You will receive a list of hundreds of keywords related to your site concept, with the supply and demand data for each keyword phrase. Pick out the best keywords and use them as your site blueprint. You will then begin creating pages of content for your site revolving around the keywords you have chosen. Use one keyword phrase for each page you create, and be sure to liberally insert the keyword phrase throughout your page.

You will probably need to experiment a little to find the right keyword density for your web pages, but once you do, you will start to receive high search engine rankings and hordes of organic, targeted traffic to your site!

Creating the content for your site may seem a little overwhelming at first, but if you think of it as talking to a friend about your passion or hobby, it will become much easier over time.

Register a domain name related to your site concept. There are hundreds of domain registrars on the internet, and most of them charge about ten dollars (or less) a year to register a domain name. Make a list of possible domain names and type them into whichever registrar you decide to use, until you find one that is available.

Avoid using free webhosting for your ecommerce website. Not only will it lower your credibility, but you won't be able to use your own domain name. You can find reliable web hosting for less than ten dollars per month.

After you create each web page, submit your page to each of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Windows Live), then resubmit them about once a month until you get indexed. Be careful not to over submit.

You can find out if your page has been indexed by typing the url of the page into the search engines. You can also get free hit counters from several different sources to keep track of the traffic you are receiving.

It will take some time, patience and persistence on your part, but once the traffic and profits start rolling in, it will make the effort all worthwhile.

How Realtors Can Use A Website to Increase Leads – Homeward Bound

2007-03-27T02:58:00.001-07:00

People rely more and more on the internet for shopping. It's a fact that the percentage of people who have bought something on the internet is growing. Even those wary of the internet are beginning to test the waters.

But what is really amazing is that the internet is being used more and more for large and expensive items. Automobiles, large appliances and even airplanes are for sale in cyberspace.

So does it make sense that realtors can use the internet for their business? Of course it makes sense! It not only makes sense, it gives realtors a leading edge on the market.

Where My Thoughts Linger

People are using the internet to list their houses for sale. They are not professional realtors and don't know how to maximize their selling price. And yet online real estate sales are successful. If in doubt, you can visit any online auction site and find thousands of listings by owner.

So if a private individual can successfully use the internet to sell a house, imagine the possibilities for selling real estate if you are a professional with an understanding of the market.

- Get potential leads on people planning to move to the area – those who thoughts are already on their new home

- Make your commercial listings known to potential investors around the world

- Create a unique real estate identity that people can trust

- Search engine optimize your website so you come out ahead of the pack on the browsers

- Take advantage of online marketing opportunities to get your listings noticed

- Become known as the local professional who has all the necessary information about the area

- Include stories and references that potential leads can use to verify honesty and integrity

When people are moving to a realtors area from a distance place, one of their major concerns is finding a real estate agent who is

1) knowledgeable,

2) interested in their goals and

3) will work to find the right properties.

Many wait until they actually move to even begin looking, renting in the meantime. If they could get the information they need before moving, a realtor could potentially ease their fears and show them housing long before the actual move.

This benefits the realtor and the buyers. Renting while looking for a house is disruptive to a family because it means moving twice. A realtor can carve out a niche in the online real estate market that will increase leads and sales.

Follow The Leader

The tools available for building a website expand all the time. A Realtor can use these tools to develop a website that enhances the professional reputation while building leads.

- Auto-responders make sure you don't miss a potential customer by logging visits to the realtor's website and responding to inquiries immediately

- Audio on the website can add a personal touch so that the customer feels as if they meet the realtor which raises trust level

- Online newsletters can advertise successful sales and offer useful information to potential buyers

- Pictures can present the properties in any detail desired – room by room if the realtor chooses

- Streaming video can offer tours of the homes and the surrounding area

- Online forms collect important information about the buyer and their housing requirements

A well-designed realtor website will generate targeted traffic. If you are not qualified to create the website you need, there are webmasters who can help you design a site that will build business.

Done correctly, the website will pre-sell many of the properties before you even talk to the potential buyers. Be a leader in the real estate cyber world and you will have plenty of followers called leads.

Television Content Providers

2007-03-27T02:57:00.003-07:00

Television plays the most important role in the entertainment media. Television has a huge number of fan bases and it's the most sought-after and regularly watched form of media. The quality of television programs has gone up to a great extent, thanks to the ever-growing demands of viewers all over the world. The quality of content is the most important thing that determines the viewership of any program.

Unlike print media, television is a place where there is immense competition with content providers fighting for the maximum viewership. The one main factor which makes television content providers thrive for better content everyday is that the viewer has immense choice in his hands literally at the flick of his finger. So, television content providers try to come with better content to gain the maximum number of Television Rating Points (TRP) to make their product a successful one in the television medium.

Television is a place where high level of creativity is required. Television content providers need to be creative to the core to deliver the goods to different kinds of viewers. They form a plot first, around which the entire story or content has to be developed. The nature of the content should be such that it attracts viewers across boundaries. Conceptualizing a plot is a very important step. Big companies usually have a storyboard discussion based on a synopsis to develop a compelling content for the viewers.

There are companies that provide good quality television content in the market. Television channels usually have a contract with content providing companies for a particular period over a mutually accepted amount of money. As and when the rating for the particular program goes up, the rate for the company will be increased substantially. Usually, providing content for television is an acid test for most of the content providers, as you can get neglected by people within a matter of minutes. So, experience, expertise, and creativity play a big role in this field.

Using Nenest Form Server To Collect And Manage Information

2007-03-27T02:57:00.001-07:00

Building Form Nenest builds forms in a rich text editor (WYSIWYG), so everything is visual and direct. You can format texts in styles (color, font, paragraph etc) you like. You can insert tables, images and even chemical structures into forms. There is a screenshot of building a "Contact Us Form".

The upper section is the form modification history list. All your changes are buffered in database and no single change will be lost. The lower section is Nenest Rich Text Editor for form building. There are two toolbars: one is the general Rich Text Editor toolbar; the other one is Nenest field toolbar.

Nenest Rich Text Editor provides an easy way to insert pictures. Editors from other providers can only insert pictures by using a URL. That means the picture must be on internet. Nenest Rich Text Editor allows you directly insert a picture from you local computers, which gives you a lot of convenience.

When building large forms, you can switch to full window mode to have more spaces for a large form.

For advance form builders, you can switch to HTML mode and modify HTML scripts. In HTML mode, you also can paste HTML scripts copied from other web pages, which gives you an easiest way to copy forms.

Nenest provides you many pre-programmed controls that you can use for inputting fields in a form, such as telephone number, email address, number, home address, rich text editor and so on. Check the Fields Manual page for the whole list. These fields can do data validation when filling forms and render data in a more readable format when displaying forms and listing form entries. You get all those handy features without any programming.

Because some pre-programmed fields cannot be rendered in client side, at design time you can switch to preview mode and watch the form's live looking.

There is the live looking of "Contact Us Form" mentioned above:

Changing Form Setting There are several settings which could be very useful to you:

* Form permission: It defines who can fill forms and whoc can view, modify and list form entries.
* Form display mode: Form entry can have two modes, single-entry mode and thread mode.
* Form overwritten mode: You can choose whether entry modifying history.
* Form attachment: You can choose whether allow files attached to this form.
* Form lock: Once form is locked, it's not accessible to form users till it is unlocked.
* Form notification: You can set email notifications so you can get notified when new entries arrived.

Filling Form With Nenest pre-programmed fields, filling form is so easy. When you finish a field, data validator will automatically check the input. If it is not a validate data, the field border becomes red then you fix it.

Before submitting form, data validator will check whether required fields are empty and then validate all field data again.

Nenest forms provide many unique fields such as Rich Text Editor field, Image field.

Here is a Rich Text Editor:

Witch Rich Text Editor, you can create a Microsoft Word like document. You can insert pictures locally from your computer or remotely from a URL. Rich Text Editor can work in full-window mode so you can view documents in a larger area. You can switch to HTML mode to modify HTML source code.

Rich Text Editor also provides a nice table tools. With this tool, you can visually insert tables; you also can merge and split cells to create a complex table.

Listing Form Entries Although you can get email notifications when new entries arrived, you are able to store form entries in Nenest database and later can retrieve them.

Form Entries can be shown as a list. You can delete, download and mofidy them. When form entries are deleted, they first go into recycle bin. This gives you a level of data protection. You can get the deleted data back when finding that is a mistake. When form entries are removed from recycle bin, they are then deleted permanently.

Nenest offers many handy features for Entry List:

* You can choose which fields to show
* You can change field names at anytime, but entry data is still available
* You can sort fields
* You can search fields
* You can do full-text search againt one form or many forms
* You can download entry data
* You can define a search shortcut, so next time you can do the same search in just one click.
* You can change per-page-count number.

Newsletter Content Providers

2007-03-27T02:56:00.001-07:00

Newsletters play a vital role in businesses today. A newsletter is considered one of the best forms of communication for business-to-business or business-to-customers. Newsletters help you keep in touch with your customers, exchange information about your business and keep everyone updated with your business. Big companies and corporations have their own newsletter service to their employees and clients to keep them informed about the company.

With newsletters playing such a big role, not surprisingly, newsletter production is big business today. The creation of a newsletter is an art that requires lots of skills. Unlike articles or web pages, newsletters cannot have a huge content that takes a lot of time to be read. They should be crisp, clear and straight to the point. The purpose of a newsletter is to educate the reader and keep him or her updated about a particular product/service or a company.

There are several companies and individual newsletter content providers available in the market. Newsletters can be printed out and issued or they can be delivered in electronic format. Availability of good content is a must for both these forms. Newsletter content providers do some research about the kind of products/services and other things that a particular company has and then they form the core content with all the necessary details. Then it's checked for accuracy, richness of the content, and its informative nature to make sure it hits the bull's eye.

Though newsletter content is highly priced in the market, there are also free newsletter providers available in the market. They are individuals or companies that are looking for marketing their brand. These companies/individuals provide free newsletters on various topics and they get a link to their website placed in the concerned company's website. They also provide the subscribers of that particular company with their own ezines and snippets to get free marketing.

A Website for Your "Brick and Mortar" Business - Why You Should Have One

2007-03-23T03:07:00.001-07:00

You are losing business and money for every day that you are not present on the World Wide Web!

Your customers expect you to have a website.

How many times have you entered a business name into a search window to see if they had a website, to check hours, phone numbers, what they did, or just plain curiosity? Well your customers and prospects are doing the same thing every day, and if they don’t find your business, they are finding your competitors.

My AH…HAA moment.

In 1996, I had just signed up with my first ISP, 1996 was the old days and all you had to choose from were a few dial up ISP’s, they were very slow and charged you by the minutes you spent online.

One day very soon after, I was working on some reports for work and needed a phone number for a customer in a major city, I knew that I had a phone book for that city in the basement, I yelled at my son, who was then a junior in high school to get me the phone book, he asked what I needed, went on the Internet and found the information I wanted quicker that he could have gone to the basement.

The point is that even at that time, when the Internet was in the infancy of what it is becoming today, the young people in our society were already using the World Wide Web to find information. These are the people who are now becoming your customers, they are working with computers everyday, and they can, and do, access the Internet from their cell phones.

Here’s a newsflash, we all assume that young people are the fastest growing segment gaining access to and using the Internet…Wrong! The fastest growing segment is the mature adult 55 and up, and guess who has most of the money!

What should my business website be?

Online Brochure – This is the minimum you should do.

# Who you are – brief bio’s of principles.
# Company history – How you started, where you are going.
# What you do - products or services you offer.
# Where you are - locations.
# Contact info - phone, fax, email, websites.
# What certifications you have.

Information Center – To busy to describe a product or service over the phone? Direct them to your website for complete information.

# PDF files for products or services, your customers should be able to download.
# Slide show of your products or services.
# Video files for installations or how to use, or assemble products.
# Audio files for almost any message.

Online Store – Becomes a 24/7 profit center, you will be making money while you sleep!

# Your customers and prospects want to buy when it fits their schedule, some don’t want to even contact you, let them do it automatically.
# You may or may not make money right away, but over time will build a following.

How much will this cost me?

On going costs.

# Domain name (URL – your business name & address on the Internet) about $35.00 annually.
# Hosting (this is where your website is stored and served to the web from) $15.00, per month and up depending on where you host it and somewhat on the features you have.
# If you have an e-commerce site you could have a monthly cost for “shopping cart” software. $20.00 and up per month.
# You may need an auto-responder service. About $20.00 per month.

One time costs

# Web design runs from about $500 to $2000 for the typical small business site, depending on whatever agreement you enter into for updating and maintenance you could have a retainer, a flat fee, or a hourly rate.

Things to think about.

# You should not look at a website as a static advertising medium, or even as advertising. Your website should supplement all of your other advertising, you need to include you web address in every other advertising medium you use.
# You can change or ad to your message any time you want…try that with your “yellow pages” ad!
# If you have a free or low cost web site from the chamber of commerce, phone carrier, trade group, etc., you really only have a few pages on their site, if they change the rules or even shut down the web site, you don’t have a web site any longer, However if this is offered as a free service, by all means take advantage of it to direct more traffic to your main website.

Now start making plans for getting your web site on the Internet!

Overcome Informational Asymmetry on the Hosting Market

2007-03-23T03:06:00.002-07:00

Web hosting market is often called “market for lemons”, which points out the fact that it’s very difficult or even impossible to determine the quality of hosting services prior to signing on, and features of the plan extolling hosting offers won’t shed any light on the type of product you’re going to buy.

Problem Posing

The asymmetry of information is manifested in the fact that the only real limit that applies to the majority of hosting companies is the CPU and RAM usage, and these features aren’t stated in the package plans, often they are limited in the TOS. And it’s not disc space or bandwidth that may cause you site to perform ineffectively or even make your hoster ask you to leave the server for violating CPU usage rules in the TOS.

If the hardware discs are big, the server has to process bigger amount of information. The speed and often reliability isn’t very high. Such server should be used for storing files and hosting non-mission critical sites running few scripts. If SCSI disc is installed into RAID, the server performance gets better than in the first case. You can host highly visited and mission critical sites on it. But the cost of the disc space on the second server will be higher. So, 500Mbs of disc space on one server is absolutely different from 500Mbs on the other server.

Hosting providers usually tell about “the best ratio between price and quality” to their clients instead of explaining them what their hosting service should be used for. One company can provide low-cost hosting, another powerful hosting, the third can deliver reliable DDOS protection to their customers. This is how things really are, but choosing a hosting company the client doesn’t have all this information. He has to judge only by the disc space.

Hosting Features

It was traffic that reflected server load some time ago. The more traffic, the more visits to the site, so the greater load on the server. More bandwidth in package plans meant more system resources. But today things have changed, overselling has come here to stay.

The feature “the number of MySQL” is simply neglected by the number of hosting providers. You can often see “unlimited MySQL” in beginners’ plans. And that’s MySQL usage that creates additional load on the server. Such features as the number of email boxes, ftp accounts, PHP support can be the same in different hosting packages. You can’t judge about the package plan by them.

So, disc space is what’s left to go by. This is what majority do. But this is a common misconception. Often sites “fitting” into the disc space use more resources than allotted in the package price. Then the hoster has to ask his client to upgrade to a bigger plan or to leave the server.

How does one mitigate the effect of a market for lemons? The best way is to make the client aware that there is a limit to the number of processes executed on the server per second for every account, and especially, for every hosting provider. This variable should be used to go by when choosing a hosting provider, as it makes your site perform with a different degree of effectiveness. So, looking for powerful hosting, don’t think that disc space is the most important feature.

Why Would You Want An Expensive Custom Design Web Site When You Can Get a Cheap Turnkey Site?

2007-03-23T03:06:00.001-07:00

Today, when deciding what kind of website you need for you business, often you can choose from a turnkey template driven site, which is usually much cheaper in cost, or you can choose to have a custom web site built from scratch.

Custom web site design offers you much more flexibility in the appearance and layout of the site. Your ideas for you website and what you want it to do can be better transformed to a custom designed site. You do not need any technical knowledge of coding or web languages. You can leave that up to the web developer and designer.

Turnkey sites on the other hand, already have a certain structure and layout. Now the cost is significantly lower to have a turnkey site done, but you may not be happy with this choice in the long run. The web is constantly changing and your visitors that come to your site are also demanding certain functions that a turnkey site may never be able to offer you. Sometimes though, depending on your business needs, this can be a good option for your business.

A custom designed web site not only offers you greatly control, but allows the site to grow with your business. Changes can be done to a custom web site much easier than a turnkey site. Also, maintenance and updating the site is something you are going to want to do. Again custom sites offer much more choices. As an example, many businesses like to change the look of their site to match different seasons or holidays. With a custom site, you simply can call your web designer and let them know what changes you would like to make. Typically this can be done relatively easy and affordably.

As the Web evolves, so does the end users experience when they visit your site. In the beginning everyone rushed out to get a website expecting as soon as they put it up, they would have an immediate increase in business. Users and visitors quickly clicked away from bad looking sites or hard to navigate sites. Most companies today are on their 2nd or 3rd website redesign. They are finding that a custom web site offers much more flexibility, thus the long term cost is greatly reduce by not having to do a complete redesign because the original site is not able to handle the changes.

There is no doubt that upfront a custom design web site will cost you more than a turnkey site, but in the long run you will be much happier with a custom designed website. There are many companies offering websites for $200.00. All I can say is typically you get what you pay for. These sites may look nice, but they will not be able to handle the functions you should be incorporating into your site. Today’s website visitors are much more savvy and they are demanding more our of your website. Websites of today and tomorrow are much more interactive and functional that the sites of Yesterday.

In conclusion, when shopping for a new website, take into consideration what you want to accomplish first. Think about what your customer or visitor that comes to your website wants. If you don't know what they want, they slow down and find out. Once you have a clearer picture of your vision for your website, you will then be able to move forward. Do not put the cost of the site first, you need to think long term and the payback of the site. This is why custom designed web sites are a better choice for you business.

Three Building Blocks To A Successful Business Website

2007-03-23T03:05:00.002-07:00

Are you planning to build or update a business website? The following three questions will save you time, money and frustration, and help you get the results you want.

1. What is your website’s objective?
2. Who is your target market?
3. What’s your position?

On several occasions, my colleagues and I have come across business owners who spent upwards of $20,000 on website design and development, with literally nothing to show for it.

The reason? They didn’t invest time and effort to establish their specific needs. They rushed ahead. And as they went along, plans changed, different ideas evolved and costly experiments ensued. The targets shifted month after month, right up until funds were finally depleted.

So how do you avoid this pitfall when it’s time to launch your business website? Figure out what you actually need before you start sending out any requests for quotes. Here are three crucial questions you need to answer before you build a business website:

What is your website’s objective?

The objective of your website is to support your business and its goals. For example, do you want to sell products online, generate leads, build a brand and awareness, attract members, generate feedback or reduce call centre volume?

Here are the most basic business website categories and their purposes:

e-commerce – sell merchandise, increase sales, decrease expenses

Content sales – sell subscription services, generate revenue via ads or subscriptions

Lead-generation – generate sales possibilities, usually for high-priced products or services

Self-service – improve customer service and decrease costs, i.e. online help centre

When you’re considering your business website needs, recognize not only your requirements, but what your customer needs or expects.

Base your website around building relationships and loyalty, which will help you achieve consistent, persistent growth over the long term. A short-sighted mindset will limit that growth success. In fact, it could harm your very existence. Thousands of business websites disappear daily, replaced by thousands more of the same ilk. Industry Canada reports 50 per cent of businesses do not survive beyond the third year.

A carefully planned and executed website can help your business achieve sustained growth and stand out above the rest.

Who is your target market?

Before building a business website, you need to define your target market and understand their needs and wants.

This is essential to appeal to and connect with those you choose to serve. Before your website can sell anything to your target market, you need to be able to answer their questions and put their fears to rest. Where do you begin? Groundwork. Go where your target audience socializes. Go where they work. Go where they shop. Observe their behaviors, and conduct informal and formal surveys. As well, study how your direct competition caters to them.

What does your target market value? What makes them feel good? And, quite frankly, what makes them reach for their wallets? Your observations and research data will gain you a sound understanding of your target market’s trigger points – what’s truly important to them. By focusing on these key areas, you’ll have an opportunity to make them noticeably better than the competition.

Moreover, if you take the time to understand your customer, you’ll be better versed to provide customized and personalized service. While conducting business in cyberspace, many traditional business practices still apply.

What’s your position?

You need to determine what market position you want to establish for your brand. How do you want potential clients to view you? What sets you apart from the competition?

Your business website can significantly influence how you are perceived, especially considering it’s a common first point of contact between you and your potential customer. What’s your image of choice? Trendy or practical. High end or affordable. Swift or steady. Your image will evolve -- for better or worse -- regardless whether you take a proactive, reactive or passive role.

So be proactive and shape how the market views you. Ensure your business website conveys clear messages that reflect who you are or strive to be. You’ll make a good first and lasting impression.

Content Provider Terms

2007-03-23T03:05:00.001-07:00

Content production is big business in today's market, regardless of what medium you are writing to. There are a number of things that these content providers cater to. The first and foremost thing is the internet with content providers catering to websites, blogs, and every other form of forum. Then comes the print medium for which there is a huge number of content providers providing content for stories, discussions, articles, and so many other things. Last, but certainly not the least, is the television medium. It is considered one of the toughest to cater to, with the field brimming with immense competition.

Content providers are of high demand and they are most sought after in lots of fields. They work on lots of terms and conditions. Usually, the clients explain the content providers the kind of content they want and the kind of outcome they expect. Then both of them discuss and then come to a deadline upon which the work can be finished. The content providers usually have their own rates for different kinds of projects. The rate may go up or come down depending on a number of factors like the complexity of the project, the kind of deadline they have, the kind of research required, and other things. Well experienced individual content providers and big content providing companies have their own fixed rate upon which the project can be worked. They usually charge a fixed amount or a particular percentage of the total remuneration as advance before they begin working on the project. They get the balance amount upon completion of the project.

Companies too have lots of terms when it comes to getting the work done by content providers. They sometimes have a mutual agreement that the work should not be outsourced to any third party. Some of the companies and individuals work on a "work on hire" basis, so that the content providers bear the entire responsibility for the content produced. In such cases, the content is literally sold to the client and it cannot be used again by the content providers. Almost all the content providers have written agreements signed with the client before they start working on the project.

Small Business Websites - Is Yours Doing Everything It Can to Help?

2007-03-06T05:12:00.001-08:00

As you no doubt know, having a website is a critical component of doing business in today's marketplace. More and more people are going online to find their service providers instead of opening up the old Yellow Pages or one of the various knock-offs. Since that's the case, it's become increasingly important for you to be there when your potential customers come looking for you.

But having a website that actually works for you is more than just a bunch of fancy graphics and some information about your company. If you want a tool that works for you 24 hours a day 7 days a week to help grow your business, here are a few keys to keep in mind about your website:

* Have you made it easy for the visitors to your site to leave their contact information? If not, how do you know who's coming to your site and how do you plan to stay in touch with them once they leave? It's mission critical to have a mechanism for easily capturing the contact information of the visitors to your site, otherwise you don't have much more than an online brochure.
* Are you losing potential visitors even before they make it to your site? While many things such as splash pages (those fancy graphics that dance and sing then have a button that says 'Enter Site', or something similar), annoying animation, large graphic files, or other 'eye-candy' techniques used by many web designers might look nice, they often do nothing more than scare away over half your potential visitors. Believe it or not, there are still a large number of internet users that use dial-up, which means their connection is slow, which means anything that slows down a site from loading any slower than it already does will limit the number of potential customers that actually stick it out to see your site.
* Does your site talk enough about your prospects and all the benefits they'll gain by using your service, or does it spend too much talking about you? Remember, no one cares about you. The only thing your visitors are concerned with is what can you do to help solve their problems or satisfy their needs? Answer that question, and your site becomes infinitely more powerful.

Now, these are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself as you analyze your current website or the site you're planning to build, but they should provide a good starting point for creating a website that truly does become an integral part of your overall marketing toolbox.

The internet is such a powerful medium for getting your message to many more potential prospects that you could reach traditionally and if you learn to use it correctly, it will help keep your pipeline full of eager prospects waiting in line to put your services to the test.

About the Author:

Chestin Salisbury is President of Lawn Care Marketing Magic, a direct response marketing company located in Charlotte, NC that focuses on the lawn care and landscaping industry. He has been helping small businesses grow for 7+ years by creating magical marketing systems that use time-tested direct response marketing principles to grow business by 100-500% in 120 days or less. Guaranteed.

Web Site Navigation & Design

2007-03-06T05:11:00.000-08:00

It seems that one of the hardest things to get right in web design is creating proper layout and navigation. Sometimes a web site will be very rich in content, except that traffic will suffer due to poor navigational structure. In other words, navigation has become one of the key ingredients in developing sustainable, long-term traffic to your site.
Often before you even get into the graphical aspects of your site, it is useful to think about the content that you will have for your site and brainstorm possible navigational schemes, otherwise known as site trees. These trees describe the way in which your site branches out into articles, products and services, and any other additional sections you may have. You would be surprised how different tree layouts can be created, but not all are created equal.Generally speaking, the root of your website will be your home page or index page which serves as the main landing destination of your visitors. From here, they should be able to easily reach many parts of your site, often within 2 clicks or less, and be able to return to your home page with ease. Depending on the size and nature of your site, you may need to create ‘deep’ links, (3 or more clicks away from your homepage), but they should only be used for very specific information. As an example, there is no reason why the 7 pages listed above shouldn’t be accessible from your home page, as they are very broad categories.

Content Layout

What is essential in laying out your content is that from every portion of your site your visitors should know where they are (through the use of titles and graphics), where they can go (using navigational and contextual links), and how they can get back (either to previous pages or back to the home page).

Once you have developed your site tree it’s time to think about where to place your links. There two most popular are header links and sidebar links. Many sites use a combination of these two. Others use only header links.

Drop down menus can also provide readers an easy way to get to a number of different pages in one click. This is particularly useful when you have a variety of content, as it saves people from ‘drilling down’ through multiple pages to get to a variety of content. This also helps you avoid the problem of deep links, pages which are three or more clicks from your home page.

One of the best ways to provide a way back to the home page is to place your company logo design in the top-left left corner of every page in your site, and have it link to your home page. Not only is the logo a well-known way of getting back to the index page of a website, but it also allows you to consistently brand your identity throughout your site. It’s important to remind your readers that the pages and content were created by you!

For top and sidebar navigation links, try to stick to common names that people are used to. You will have the opportunity to get into more detailed subjects within your content, but it is often better to provide your readers with easily recognizable buttons and names which they are able to intuitively understand.

Disabling AutoComplete On Forms

2007-03-06T05:10:00.000-08:00

An important issue raised at a recent 'black hat' conference was the security threat posed by the popular browser “autocomplete” feature - where users can have sensitive information stored in their browser cache in order to speed up completion of forms.

While we can’t control our users browser settings physically, we can prevent this feature working at the form level on our own sites.

The problem with the autocomplete feature is that it is very insecure - there are widely available free tools for grabbing that information from a users’ system. I won’t mention the name of the tools for lifting stored AutoComplete data for obvious reasons.

While the autocomplete function is easily switched off by the user, many people still use this method for storing sensitive information; either because they don’t know how to switch it off, or they just don’t understand the risks.

As a site owner, you can help protect users from themselves by adding a simple tag to your forms.

For example; a form field such as:

< type="text" name="email">

with the addition of autocomplete=”off” like so:

< type="text" name="email" autocomplete="off">

..will prevent both Firefox and Internet Explorer from caching the information, even if the AutoComplete feature is enabled in the user’s browser.

In case you don’t know how to switch off autocomplete in your own browser:

Internet Explorer

* Tools/Options
* Content Tab
* AutoComplete (click settings)

To delete any information that was already stored in AutoComplete, under Tools/options, click the general tab, then the “delete” button under browsing history. You’ll then see options for clearing form data and passwords.

Select the “Saved forms” tab and untick the “save information I etc. etc.” box. Be sure to clear any stored information by clicking “clear saved” button.

Then click on the “passwords” tab and disable that function; be sure to click the “view saved passwords” and clear all those too.

Modelling and Decision Support using Web Technologies

2007-01-22T02:57:00.000-08:00

Shim et al (2002) explain the importance of the web for all types of decision support activity "At the beginning of the 21st century, the Web is the center of activity in developing DSS." Shim et al explain how decision support systems can be provided at low cost and for geographically dispersed companies, customers and suppliers. They cite Power (2006b) when stating "Web-based DSS have reduced technological barriers and made it easier and less costly to make decision-relevant information and model-driven DSS available to managers and staff users in geographically distributed locations." This was the reasoning behind the DATUM (Design Analysis Tool for Unit-cost Modelling) project research (Scanlan et al, 2006). An open standards web driven method of collaboration is required to make it possible for organisations and individuals to become more deeply involved in projects that are well coordinated using web technologies. Shim et al explain how the use of web technologies to standardise user interface design across different models can dramatically improve the ease of use of decision support software. This standardisation can also ease problems of installation and maintenance.

(Morris et al, 2001) examine Interactivity and collaboration on the web. Aziz et al (2005) examine how open standards software can assist in an organisation's collaborative product development. This approach is outlined in (Ciancarini et al, 2001) that explains ways of designing a document-centric coordination application over the Internet. (Ciancarini et al. 2001) explain that web documents can be generated on the fly. This can allow the user interface to respond dynamically to choices. Program code can be attached to the documents themselves, and code can activate certain behaviour based on the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) content of the document. Code can also be created separately and called on as a service when a document needs it. (Nidamarthi et al (2001) explain how web based collaboration can aid the design process. (Huang and Mak, 2001) evaluate issues in the development and implementation of web applications for product design and manufacture. Reed et al (2000) show how web based modelling and simulation can be used in the aircraft design process. Kim et al (2002) explain their approach to modelling and simulation. Zhang et al (2004) review Internet-based product information sharing and visualisation. Li (2005) examines the role of web based services for distributed process planning optimization.