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Tips When Moving From One Host To Another by: Heris Yunora Moving your website from your current host to another hosting provider could be easy or difficult depending on the type of your website. Although it can be a daunting task, you may have to do it because of several reasons. Maybe you need some features which are not provided by your current hosting provider. Or maybe you need a company with a quality web site hosting service capable of helping you when something goes wrong. Whatever the reasons, the process of moving hosts and transferring files should be accomplished smoothly. This article contains some important steps you can take to move your website to another hosting provider. Here they are: - Old Account Don't to close your old hosting account so that your frequent visitors can still access your website. Besides, you can still receive incoming emails until the moving process completely finished. - Backup your files Make sure you have backed up all of your files (and directories) correctly. Note that there are two types of transfer mode, ASCII and binary. Use the correct transfer mode when downloading the files to your hard drive. Normally, you will have to choose ASCII mode for transfering text files and binary mode for transfering image files. If you use WS-FTP, you can select the "Auto" mode so that the software will do it for your automatically.
border="0"/>- Keep the important information Write down the important information about your old hosting account (e.g. billing history) in case you need it as reference in the future. - Open an account in the new hosting provider After making payment, normally they will send an email to you that contains your login information (username and password), your temporary URL and their DNS information. Just keep it. - Login to your new Control Panel Using your username and password, login to the control panel (e.g. CPanel). Create the email accounts you have already had in the old hosting provider. - Uploading Upload the files to the root directory (e.g. public_html) of the new hosting server. Once again, use a FTP software such as WS-FTP to do it. Before you do it, don't forget to setup the software with your new host name (e.g. ftp.yourdomain.com), username and password. Don't forget also to transfer the files correctly (ASCII/binary). - Testing Through web browser, visit your website with the temporary URL. Notice whether all files have been uploaded properly and all links work. - Transfer Domain Ask the old hosting provider to change the DNS of your domain name. Tell them the DNS information of your new hosting provider. If everything is OK, you will be able to access your website with your own domain name in a few days. Note that if the old hosting provider gives you a username and a password to login to the domain manager of a domain registrar (e.g. enom), you need to go to the domain manager in order to setup the new DNS addresses. - Close the old hosting account After the move is done and everything works properly, contact the old hosting provider to close your account. If your website requires a database support and/or use a server-side script, there are some additional tasks you may have to do.
 - Make sure the new hosting server supports your script. When I moved my website to a new hosting provider, I asked them first using their chatting facility whether their server supported a script I intended to use before using their service. By asking them like that you will also find out the response time they take to answer your questions. - You may have to backup your databases. With CPanel, you can do it using the "Backup and Restore" facility. You can also use the import/export facility in PhpMyAdmin to back them up. In order to avoid incompatibility problem, use both methods. Talking about database, note that a web hosting provider with shared hosting pan usually adds the name of a database with an extra prefix. If both of your old and new hosting providers apply the rule, you can try to ask the new provider to give you the same username as the old one. - Don't forget to modify the configuration file(s). You may have to change the information about your database or the absolute path. If you meet any troubles, don't panic. Check everything from the configuration files to the .htaccess file . If needed, contact the support staffs to help you. Some web hosting providers even offer script installation for their new customers. By moving from one host to another quickly and efficiently, people can still find your website without realizing what you are doing. Although you may meet some difficulties, moving from your current host to a new one that provides better features and supports is something you will never regret. Want a freelance website designer in Chicago to customize a Flash Animation template for you? visit ChicagoAnimation.com
What Is The Difference Between Windows and UNIX Web Hosting? by: Paul Santos Windows and UNIX are in fact two different systems and of course we are referring to computer systems. A web host uses computers, (we shall refer to them as servers, just computers, but sometimes larger) to host websites, and all computers need a operating system, so Windows and UNIX are the operating system. The Windows used is normally Windows NT or 2000 and of course as you know Microsoft charges for it's software, while UNIX is an open source operating system, this means that the original creators of the system have given up the rights and anyone can use it, change, improve or do anything they want with, free of charge.
 From this we already have to main differences, Window hosts are more expensive and UNIX is more reliable, because it as been improved by thousands of anonymous people. Most probably you are reading this in front of your computer which most probably is operates on a Windows XP, have you noticed that it sometimes, it freezes, and the only solution is to restart it? UNIX is much more stable, robust, time-tested, flexible platform for a web server. Hosting Marketers http://hosting-marketers.com/ But Windows servers have also it's positive sides, they are compatible with Microsoft applications, and fully support Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft Access and MS SQL, they also offer advance-programming environments and features such as Active Server Pages (ASP), the ASP.NET framework, Visual Basic Scripts, MS Index Server, Macromedia's and Cold Fusion. Windows operating system require little or no experience in web development to get advanced features working very quickly because of better graphical user interface (GUI) Software such as Microsoft's FrontPage is specially developed for the webmaster to decrease the website development time and efforts. Lets go back again to UNIX, they support FrontPage, Flash, Shockwave, Real Audio/Video, Cgi Scripts, Perl, PHP, SSH (Secure Telnet), MySQL, Web-Based Control System, Anonymous FTP, Web Site Graphical Statistics, Web-Based Email System, Miva/XML, Cold Fusion Perl, JAVA, PHP, C, C++, Miva, Shell Access and other wide verity of feature like Telnet and SSH that provides lots of flexibility and freedom in managing file and directories, but some of this require advance knowledge of Unix commands in order for you to customize the scripts to match your website needs.
 Because of the nature of UNIX, (open source) and the people who love it, there is on the WWW freely available software and scripts, again bringing the cost down. Concluding which one is the best, it really depends what you need, if you need high uptime, security and not so expensive then go with UNIX, if you need to run Windows applications like, MS Access or the MS SQL SERVER then Windows is your choice. Want a freelance website designer in Chicago to customize a Flash Animation template for you? visit ChicagoAnimation.com
When To Let Go Of Your Website Designing Ideas by: Craig Bucknall As hard as it may be, but letting go of your website designing ideas and listening to the customer may actually be of benefit in the long run. I know what you are saying, you’ve been in the web designing business long enough to know what works and wont doesn’t, what would my customer know? Well after approaching web design in the same manner, I’ve unfortunately had no other choice but to give in to my best laid plans and comply with the wishes of my customers. Construction of good websites usually means that it has to be appealing to the eye, as well as being fully functioning for Search Engine benefits, but ultimately it must display professionalism for the business represented.
Complying with W3C Standards (W3C Markup Validation Service) for both HTML and CSS validation is paramount to good design and programming (but not necessary for good Google PR, I will discuss in later posts), so when designing we like to use base HTML formatting and CSS text font like Tahoma 11pt, to make neat easy to read text and nice page image layouts. I will list some cases of where letting go has benefits for both parties involved and how in some circumstances actually resulted in little or no web traffic for the website. Case Study 1. Architectural Firm flash and font matters Our customer wanted the use of Flash elements to display several architecture images with a nice fade between images and changes to original CSS Font used Tahoma 11pt font and replaced with Century Gothic 11pt, which is used in all their logos and architecture design work. As most would know embedding Flash files into your website results in W3C Validation undefined source failure, thus rendering the site Invalid Markup. After explaining this, the customer felt the need to have a nice graphical flash style image far outweighed the importance of quality valid HTML Transitional Markup. To them the appearance and perception of their website to their customers was far more advantageous than complying with the W3C. In addition they wanted the use of the Century Gothic font rather than Tahoma. By design Century Gothic has a much larger font height than Tahoma and when used increased the page height larger than when using Tahoma thus resulting in the site displaying with scroll bars when view under 1024 x 768 resolution, where previously it fitted in the whole page perfectly. In the end the customer achieved the desired affects they wanted and ultimately it is the customer who ‘always’ knows best.
Case Study 2. Box supplier becomes boxed in Our customer had started a new business supplying cardboard boxes for moving and packing. They wanted a simple site with heavy graphical image elements and little or no text on the home page. Explaining to the customer the role of text based search engines results and that having no ‘readable text’ on the home page would limit their visibility, they choose design over results. Why you may ask would a company limit their possibilities of being found on search engines? Well the question still burns with us too, but as mentioned earlier the ‘customer always knows best’ and the decision was solely theirs to make. Their philosophy was simple, their website was purely to be used as a reference guide and not the source of extra business, as their marketing strategies would be enough to garner constant business. To this day I still wonder why they limited their marketability and in particular their website which is always online and can be searched at all times of the day. So in summary the best laid plans of mice and men (well in this case web designers) can be a utter waste of good management as what I have stated all along that the ‘customer always knows best’ and ultimately they are the ones paying for your service so sometimes its best to lay down your guns and concede defeat. Want a freelance website designer in Chicago to customize a Flash Animation template for you? visit ChicagoAnimation.com
Go For Keywords-Add Value To Your Website! by: Scott Lindsay So, what are keywords anyway? Little wonders if you really want to know. They are as important for the success of your website as the advertising and other promotional means. No keywords, no SERP. Linking strategy is probably the most important SEO technique, but keywords follow closely. As a mater of fact, you could exchange as many links as you wish, but, without content, your website has no real value. Without keywords your website cannot be found. People use keywords to find information. They type into the search engines’ search bars different words and phrases hoping to find relevant answers. If you want web users to find your website you have to optimize your web pages for the keywords they use.
It’s not enough to write the keywords in your text, or in your keyword META tag. You need to use keywords everywhere: URL, page title, META description, META keywords, page copy, ALT attributes. You also need to think keyword density and where exactly on the page you should place them: headings, subtitles, first paragraph, last sentence, footers and so on. You have to bold some keywords, use others in text links, in lists and so on. Yet, all these aspects are easier than choosing the right keywords.
Choosing the Right Keywords How difficult can choosing the right keywords be? Well, if you already know what people are looking for, it is not so difficult. However, if you don’t… you have a big problem. The first problem is that you are not going to be able to reach the right segment of your targeted market and the second is that you will fail to deliver the right message to the search engines. As people trust search engine results when they look to buy something online, your only chance to increase online sales is to be have a high ranking in the SERP. When you choose your keywords you also have to think about high rankings and branding. What you choose has to be directly related to your products and your business name. Your keywords have to describe what you sell or your services. Some SEO experts recommend that you also add common spelling mistakes at your keyword list. I wouldn’t. If you run a serious business you don’t want it associated to any unprofessional artifice. So describe your products honestly, correctly and explicitly. You’ll have a long list of keywords and phrases to start with. Unfortunately you cannot use all the keywords in a list for your SEO purposes. Choose the most relevant keywords and start from there.
To determine keyword relevancy you could use Wordtracker – a tool used by most of the SEO experts and gurus around the world. The free Overture keyword tool or the keyword generation tool provided by Google AdWords are perfect if you run a pay per click campaign. Once you have the list of relevant keywords all you need to do is write the content of your website. Remember: relevant keywords bring value to your website, but you shouldn’t overdo it. Your visitors should be able to read your texts without even noticing you are using keywords. Do you think you can master this art? If not, hire a professional writer. Quality has its price. Want a freelance website designer in Chicago to customize a Flash Animation template for you? visit ChicagoAnimation.com
Copywriting Secrets for Effective Websites by: Michael B. Pavlish Successful website copywriting is very different than traditional copywriting. Based on what actually works best –and does not work—from writing dozens of websites for clients, here are the Top 9 website copywriting secrets. By applying them, your website will be a major marketing success for the business and its bottom line. 1. The website must have a strong, reader-benefit headline. The headline is by far the most important part of the website as far as its effectiveness. The words used (i.e., the copywriting) must give a reader benefits of the product or service, a big promise, a reward that the reader wants badly and be as specific and concise as possible. 2. What benefits will the reader get? Why should he believe it? Answer these questions immediately. The reader will leave the website unless these three questions are clearly answered in the beginning seconds.
3. Focus the copywriting to accomplish one main goal, which should be to get the interested reader to call you or place their order. By laser-focusing on this one action the reader should do, the copywriting will be targeted, specific and powerful. Of course, there will be other information and details on the website and there will be a secondary goal for the reader to sing up for a newsletter or download a report … but focus mainly on the one specific action the prospect should take. 4. Be exciting, informative, to the point, interesting. People will not read something that is boring if they don’t have to. Make sure to avoid “corporate talk” that is loaded with “we” and general information the reader already knows. 5. Write mainly to get sales or leads; and not for the search engines. Your website may be listed high by a search engine, but what good is that if it does not bring leads and sales.
6. Encourage interested readers to telephone the business. A good salesperson can sell much more effectively by talking to a prospect than by just emailing. Talking builds rapport, trust, and questions asked so it is customized to the prospect’s specific needs and wants. 7. Words sell and graphics are secondary, so be sure to invest properly in the copywriting on the website. 8. Answer the concerns and objections the reader has. Make a list of frequently asked questions. Answer them for the reader on the website. Overcoming objections and concerns is what often clinches the sale. 9. Use proven winners for successful copywriting. These include reader benefit copywriting, be specific, tell the full story of why this is the best choice for the reader, use customer testimonials, make an offer, use a guarantee, get action now. Need a Flash Animation website templates? visit ChicagoAnimation.com
Design’s That Make a Difference by: Janeth Duque It seems that I can’t get through a day without having to spend a couple hours trying to talk a client out of doing something crazy. I’m only the designer and should give the client what he/she wants, but I have a hard time not adding in my two cents and sometimes even refusing to do a design because I disagree with the direction the site is taking. For some reason people really have a hard time understanding that a visitor to their site could careless what the site looks like. They have come to your website to find information, buy a product or be entertained not for a flash intro page, a cute little guy typing away at his computer or the little stat counter that shows how little visitors your site has really had. They don’t care about the colors of your site, the pictures in the header, your logo, colors, fonts or anything else you might think is important. They are there for a purpose and have a goal in mind and could careless about all the other stuff.
border="0"/>So does the design even matter? You can bet it does, but not in the way a lot of people seem to think. While the visitor to your site could careless about the color of your site the colors do effect him/her. In most cases the site visitor is not even aware of the effect the colors have on them. Some colors have more influence then others but all colors do influence our emotions. For example blue is a calming, peaceful, and trusting color while red is anger, impulsive and an action color. I’m not going to write about all the effects each color has on a person but knowing what colors to add into a site can effect the response a person takes while on your site.
Another aspect of the design is in font and size of the font. Large easy to read fonts are an important part of your site. The easer it is to read what you have to say the better the chances are that a visitor will take the time to read it. Adding scrolling text and moving pictures will only distract the eye of the reader and make the text more difficult to read as will using crazy font colors or constantly changing the colors of the font. Something else I see a lot of people wanting to do is add pictures into the header that has nothing to do with the site. You have 3 seconds to let your visitor know what your site is about. If you add pictures of pretty flowing rivers while trying to sell pigs online this will only cause confusion and cause the visitor to leave in hopes of finding his/her perfect pig some where else. So if your selling pigs, then put pictures of pigs in the header. The header is the first thing people see when entering your site, by using appropriate pictures in the header it helps give an understanding of what your site is about. It’s also a good idea to put a nicely designed logo in your header that tells something about your business. I know most people could careless rather or not you have a logo but a logo does help to build trust and credibility. Something else I find funny is the all about me text everyone wants to place on their home page. No one cares about you or your business; they only want to know what’s in it for them. So the first line of text should tell the site visitor why they should even consider spending more then 3 seconds on your site. What can you do for me? I could go on with my rant all day but the more I type the better I feel. But before I end my rant I would like to say one last thing. The navigation on your site is an important part of your site, trying to come up with something original is just crazy. As a site visitor I don’t want to spend an hour trying to figure out how to go to the next page on your site. Just make the navigation the same as everyone else’s and be happy your site visitor decided to stay long enough to look through your site. Ok, I’m through with my rant now and I can go back to work. Need a Flash Animation website templates? visit ChicagoAnimation.com
10 Important Web Design Tips: SEO Friendly Website by: Siuchu Suga A website should firstly be searched out by visitors before talking about attracting or retaining those visitors. Nowadays, a ¡§well designed website¡¨ does not only relate to a web site¡¦s visual attractiveness but more importantly, how friendly it is with search engines. Below are 10 SEO friendly website designing tips where web designers should pay attention to during the early stage of their web designing process. 1. Avoid creating menu on the left-hand side of a website . If unavoidable, an alternative way is to put some text with rich keywords at the top or above the left-hand menu so that this text will be the first thing to be read by search engines. 2. Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines . To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.
3. Every page should contain the ¡§title¡¨ and ¡§description¡¨ tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines. 4. Try not to use Flash when possible . Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and make people run away. If you really have a reason to use flash, try to make it smaller (e.g. as a flash header) and leave other area of your website for keyword-rich content. 5. Think twice on how to use graphics . Make them relevant to your content and use an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to read as they cannot read graphics and also for your visitors so that they can have something to read when waiting for the graphics to load. 6. Do not only use images to link out . You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though. 7. Avoid using frames . Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.
8. Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated. 9. Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster . It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking. 10. Use standard HTML . Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than is needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that cannot be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or even the whole website. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html so that you may manually avoid or even delete those unnecessary scripting codes. Need a Flash website Template? Visit
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Start Managing Your Website Easily with a Content Management System by: Heris Yunora One main advantage of using CMS is one will be able to manage the contents of ones websites without having to deal with complicated technical tasks. Imagine that you are a very talented writer but you can't show your writings online just because you don't have any idea how to write webpages that consist of HTML tags. With CMS, a writer only needs to type her works in an editor as if she does it with a word processor. Then the CMS itself that will show her works online. It is a great time saver for a webmaster to create and maintain her website. The installation process is also very easy since many web hosting services have offered special features such as Fantastico where a user can install a CMS with just a few clicks of mouse. The process is done automatically.
border="0"/>Basically, a web content management system consists of two main parts, a front-end and a back-end. The back-end is a section where you can do many administrative tasks such as inserting and editing articles, giving privileges to some people, managing the look and feel of your website, and so on. The front-end refers to what visitors see. It is the face of your website. In choosing a CMS, you should know what is the main purpose of using it. There are CMSs which are intended to build portals. Other systems are mainly used to build photo gallery, forum, personal or even corporate websites. Then you need to know what kind of features they have. For example, Drupal, an open source CMS, provides a feature where you can gather fresh contents from other sites by adding the sites' feeds. You can even filter any items so that you only show the items that contain a specific keyword. Usually, a CMS also offers additional modules that will enable you to use additional features without having to put your efforts in programming. Just download the module you need and install it in your hosting server.
Don't forget also to know your own desires and abillities in modifying a CMS. For instance, Mambo should be sufficient for you who don't want to deal with some PHP coding. Mambo has already provided many modules to accomplish specific tasks. It also offers ready-to-use templates you can choose. On the other hand Typo3 is the right choice for people who need a very robust and flexible system. It is necessary to know that there are so many commercial and free content management system available. Vignette and FatWire are the example of two commercial systems while PostNuke, Drupal and Mambo.are free to use. And, of course there are other things you should consider for finding the right CMS. So please do a good and thorough analysis before deciding which system to use. Choosing the right Content Management System from the beginning is very important. Make sure it would best fit your needs. Need a Flash website Template? Visit
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What to Do When a Client is Ticked Off by: Dave Carlson My client Jerry was threatening to sue. Worse, my programmer was dragging his feet and didn’t see the seriousness of Jerry’s threats. I was on the phone with Jerry for hours at a time. The custom ordering system we designed for Jerry’s web site needed some small changes that really weren’t affecting the performance of his site. Jerry kept saying that the whole system was flawed and that it needed to be completely redone. However, he already had more than 600 sales adding up to more than $100,000. What to do? We eventually got all the problems fixed up but Jerry ended up having the site and ordering system redone by another company so Jerry was now out of my hair. Was this a good thing or a bad thing?
Customer retention is crucial in all businesses and handling ticked off customers is a part of growing great long-term relationships. Sometimes you choose not to retain a customer even if they are happy with the work you’re doing. The time and energy they cost you isn’t worth the money you make from them. High and Fire Clients Judiciously Reflecting on the situation with Jerry, I probably shouldn’t have ever taken him as a client because he smelled of trouble from the outset. The first time I came into Jerry’s shop he was arguing with a customer while I waited. He was unbending and wasn’t willing to make concessions. Malcolm Gladwell writes of this in his book, “Blink”. We need to be aware of when something doesn’t feel right and do something about it before getting in too deep. I should have just walked. Advertising guru David Ogilvy proudly admitted that he fired more clients than fired him. It takes bravado and diplomacy to drop a client, especially if they are a big source of income. You have to weigh the headaches they cause with the checks that are deposited in your bank account. Are they worth it? Setting Expectations Early and Realistically I lost another client around the same time because I did not set expectations. Daniel and I had more of a friendship than a client/vendor relationship. He looked and smelled like a good client, but I realized later that he was a problem. He took a lot of my time and had too high of expectations for the work we were doing for the price he was paying. If you have a friendship with a client, you still have to set strong boundaries with them. You communicate your expectations and bill them accordingly for the work you do. It’s easy not to bill for your time if someone is a friend. You have to set the expectation that you will be billing them for all the work that you are doing for them. Don’t Let Problems Fester Daniel and I had a blow up when he misunderstood something that I had written in one of my blogs. He wrote me a strong email that I reacted to in kind by email. If he had read the blog or clicked on the link in the posting he would have seen I had great intentions. And the blog wasn’t even about him—there was just a link on the side of the page pointing to his site. If I could go back in time I would have waited a day or two to cool down. Then I would have written an email explaining my writing and suggested talking face-to-face or by phone. Live and learn. Hire Skilled, Responsible People to Handle Your Client’s Work My problem was I was trying to do everything myself, and things were falling through the cracks. Now I tell my clients to communicate their web site changes directly to the designer and they will be billed accordingly. That way changes don’t get stuck in my In Box. Make the Hand-off Easy If the client chooses to leave or you fire the client, make the transition as smooth as possible. Provide all the files and information they need to move forward if that is the nature of your business. Even if the break up is hostile, make a point to be civil and professional. They may never return as a client, but they may not badmouth you if things end more positively. Daniel got a new company to work on his sites, and I made the transition as smooth as possible for him. I doubt I will ever have him as a client again, but I needed to know in my heart that can make the transition easy for the next person. Smooch Some Hiney Okay, you have a client who pays well and is worth keeping. Now is the time to kiss some butt. You have to admit you did something wrong and make amends. My client Scott didn’t know some of the work we were supposed to do for him was done. But I knew. I took the risk of telling and then also told him that we would do work for him during the following month at no cost to him. It cost me $600 but it was worth keeping Scott as a client. Handling ticked off clients is all about doing crisis management, and then deciding how far you will go to keep them as a client. You may choose to give up peacefully and let them go, or you can fight to keep them. Sometimes you have no choice. But when you have the choice and want to keep them as a client, do all you can to make things right. They may represent many more years of income. Need a Flash website Template? Visit www.ChicagoAnimation.com Need someone to customize a Flash website Template for you?
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Copywriting Tips to Make Any Website Sell Better by: Michael B. Pavlish It’s a fact that one website will pull many times the leads or sales as a competing website. What causes this large variance in results? It’s the copywriting on the website. Here’s what works best from actual results and testing on dozens of websites we’ve done the copywriting for. 1. Websites have one main end purpose and that is to sell your products and/or services, to move people to action, to make money. In today’s high-tech world, most copywriting on websites forgets this vital fact and that is why they don’t perform better.
border="0"/>2. Make the website easy to “scan” with headlines, sub headlines, boxes, sections, colors and the like that give the reader the main benefits he will get. Almost all people are “scan first” or “scan only” readers. The headlines and sub headlines should take advantage of this fact. 3. Tell the reader what he will LOSE if he does not take the recommended action. Fear of loss is a great motivator. 4. Build up excitement, enthusiasm, passion and urgency to get the reader to take the desired action right now. Yes, excitement is contagious and it sells! 5. Make a great offer to get the prospect’s email address. In today’s overcrowded environment and with spam concerns, it’s not enough to just say “enter your email address for our newsletter.” Make a great offer including special reports, bonuses and the like in addition to the newsletter to get the maximum number of qualified signups. 6. Focus the copywriting because people want to buy from the expert specialists in a field. If the copy is too broad it will lose a lot of the best prospects, who of course, are the most likely to buy. A great way to do this is to have separated focused web pages for separate types of people or industries on the website. 7. Make the website as easy to use and find things as Amazon.com (for consumers) or Dell.com (for businesses). The copywriting and organization of these sites is a key reason they are ultra-successful. 8. Start thinking like the website reader (the prospect) and stop thinking like the marketer. Figure out what the prospect wants most from the products or services that they deliver, then come right out and tell him what benefits he’ll get, why, and what he needs to do now. Simple but it brings in billions. 9. Compare the product or service against the competitors to show and prove it’s superiority. 10. Copywriting is king and queen for the website to sell the maximum number of people. The right copywriting can bring up to double, even triple or more the current results for no additional marketing cost. Hire the best copywriter the business can afford, and don’t skimp because this one-time investment can be one of the best investments. 11. Test everything, measure it, use the winner, and always keep testing. This is the key to “optimizing” the website and all your marketing. Don’t guess – test and let the only vote that matters (the prospects) decide what works best.
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Is Your Website Neurology Friendly? by: Cynthia Minnaar Our experience of the world is created by gathering information through the use of our five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell). Each of us tends to develop a favourite mode of focus. Some people are more impacted, for example, by what they see; their visual system tends to be more dominant. For others, sounds are the trigger for their greatest life’s experiences, while for still others, feelings are the foundation. Based on our past life experiences, we all use different parts of our nervous system when viewing situations in life, the three main ones being visual (sight), auditory (sound) and kinesthetic (touch). So whatever experiences we have stored in the mind are represented through these three major modalities. Sometimes one of these will produce a particular result or it could be a combination of all three. We also all learn and absorb information in different ways, some learn easier by seeing things, others by hearing things and others by feeling things or again a combination of two or three modes.
In designing a website would it not make sense to try and produce a web site that would have an even balance of content so as to appeal to the three major modalities? It would be crazy just to aim our site at a visual person as we would be excluding customers who fall into the auditory and kinesthetic modalities. In my own personal experience, I know that a website that is comprised of mostly text does not motivate me enough to stay on the site and read pages and pages of text. I would far rather see some graphics and good pictures – that is because I am a “visual” person. But on the other hand a site that is full of clashing colours and bright flashing banners would quickly make me close the browser! With wonderful technology today, one can easily cater for the auditory person by installing a video with sound onto your website. There are plenty of people who would rather hear things than read. They love talking websites. One does need to ensure that the recording of the voice is of good quality and the tone and speed of the narrator is such that it will not irritate the listener. As for the kinesthetic person – as he cannot actually touch the web site, the design needs to be such that it presents a warm, friendly “feeling” that will motivate the kinesthetic person to read and may be listen to your site. Graphics and pictures would need to be really good, for example pictures of carpets need to portray what it would actually feel like to walk barefoot on them! A picture of an apple would need to stimulate the actual feeling of biting into a lovely juicy apple! A travel site would need to reveal pictures of holiday destinations that stimulated feelings within the kinesthetic viewer that reminded him of a previous wonderful experience.
So designing a website to cater for all three modalities could actually be a lot of fun as you try and put yourself in the shoes of each of the modes and try and experience what they would see, feel and hear so that you can then transfer those experiences into the design of your website. Of course, we cannot cater for all, but we can give it a good try! Making your web site easy to navigate is really important as one can get easily frustrated when getting “lost” on a website. Provide a good roadmap! Of course there is another really important visitor to your website who you have to cater for and that is the search engine robot!!!! But of course he is not concerned about aesthetics or feelings or listening to what the site has to say – but he likes a really good roadmap too! What the robot is looking for would require another article to be written. Have fun creating a website that appeals to as many people as possible and you will surely see your stat counter soar!
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Are Pop-Ups Going Dinosaur Way? by: Desmond Mantor Is it the end of the road for pop-ups? So far you have seen how to attract the potential customers to your site. You must also learn to keep them interested and not turn them away after giving them useful information and quality products. Do you know that happens? Yes, when you use pop-ups, visitors are annoyed, distracted and will not take your offering seriously. Therefore get rid of any pop-ups on your site. Yes, there was period in internet history when pop-ups were the "in thing". They have lost their popularity for some time now. Internet visitors are no longer enthused about pop-up ads. They think of them as unnecessary irritants to their otherwise pleasurable browsing.
Imagine watching your favorite thriller on the TV and a commercial pops up suddently. How do you feel? Your customer feels the same when you use pop-ups. Your visitors come to your site for quality information and any thing that stops them from getting it, even for a few seconds, is definitely a no no. Yes, pop-ups were interesting once, no longer. Continuous use of spam filters and pop-up blockers made Internet users terribly annoyed. Now a days, no one wants to waste his /her quality time on looking at pop-ups. The users are more intelligent and go away to better sites that offer pure undistracting information. One sure way of losing a good prospective customer is to continue to employ pop-ups. The content on your web site stays in the minds of your visitors longer than any gimmick like pop-ups. Suppose a salesperson comes to you for selling an item. He talks about every thing under the sun except his product. What is your reaction? Forget buying from him, would be interested in listening to him at all? The same logic applies to your web site as well. Be to the point, provide good quality information to keep your visitors interested in your website and your products. Use high quality content and good products for making that lasting impression on your customers. Don't use fake logic, hyperbole and stuff like that. Remember that visitors are interested in genuine products and quality content. Period. Don't try to advertise your way to success. Let your pop-ups go the dinosaur way.
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Top Tips for Search Engine Friendly Web Site Designing by: Mridu Sinha Want to have a flashy web site for your business. Will your flashy web site will be able to bring you good business. Read about how you can make your web site more search engine friendly and generate good ROI. Designing a website that also ranks well in search engine results is a job that requires a blend of art, creativity and optimization. Wondering what a web site designing has got to do with the optimization of a web site or its ranking, then I must tell you that 40% of ranking positions are increase because of web site design. Web site designing is not restricted to Photoshop and Fireworks, rather a good website designer must build a superior architecture of the website. Below are few features that a web site designer must take care of while designing a website. 1. Do not use browser specific functions, as all users may not have the same browser installed on their machine. 2. Use small and less images, if it is mandatory to use bigger images then slice them and keep in mind point 1.
3. Always mention the height and width of the images in the code part. It helps browser calculate the space needed to be left for the images and the rest of the page can get downloaded faster. 4. Do not forget to put ALT tag on all images, sometimes few images are unable to appear especially if the connection is slow. 5. Try to keep the average page size less than 30 KB. On an optimum basis the page should not take longer than 5 sec to download. 6. Try to avoid “Mystery Meat Navigation”. Keep your links highlighted so that user at least knows where to click to navigate to other pages. Try to keep navigation easy for users. 7. Display the path of the pages on the navigation to help user know where they are. 8. Keep the design simple and soothing. Colors that are too bright and too many flashes may distract the users, beyond making your site too slow. 9. Do not use too much plug-ins and fancy fonts. Sometimes user may not have installed the fonts you are using on your webpage in that case your page will appear to him in ‘Times New Roman’. 10. You can split your page in two or more tables for fast processing. Like you can put header in one table, body in another and footer in the third table. This will help some part of the page (with small table) to download especially with slow connections, inspiring the user to become more patient. Thus it makes sense that designing a website in not enough. It should score up to certain requirements in order to rank fast and high in the search engine results. With many new or existing businesses wishing to exploit the incredible potential of the internet, it is important to have a professionally designed and maintained web site. You must get your site w3c certified in order to be search engine friendly. A w3c certified site can be easily crawled by the search engines. Now time has arrived to improve your site design and results and increase your traffic and ROI.
Fun for Your Website and Blog by: Lisa Janice Want to make your website or blog fun to view? Some of the best ways to bring traffic to your web site are downright fun - both for you and for your customers. Contests, fun galleries, cartoons, daily jokes and quotes bring surfers back to your site and encourage them to refer your web site to others that they know. And here's a handful of fun, sticky additions to make your website or blog fun to view. E-cards Greetings are a great way to bring fun to your website. Offering a selection of funny e-cards for free on your web site increases your website or blog traffic in two ways. First, a good selection of e-cards - particularly those that fit a 'niche' - will bring people back every time they want to send a card. Second, the recipient will have to visit your web site to pick up their e-greeting, which gives you a chance to solicit their business as well.
To really get feel the full fun of the web site, create (or have someone create) some fun flash photo galleries on your website. There are many flash photo gallery products in the market. Personally, I've worked with Wondershare Flash Slideshow Builder (http://www.photo-to-dvd.com/flash-slide-show.html) and Flash Album Studio for a long time and I can say that they are among the most user friendly products around. Quickly and easily add the animated Story Album to your website or blog just by copying and pasting a little code that they generate for you. You'll love the different themes for displaying your albums with style! Other ideas for making website fun with a daily joke, cartoon, saying or tip - and share it via RSS feed. People love things that make them laugh, inspire them or make them think. Offer a daily inspirational quote, a helpful tip or a daily cartoon on your web site - and set it up for distribution via an RSS feed so that others will link to it as well. As you can see, there are many fun-filled projects you can create for your website or blog. Take note of some of these ideas the next time you're cracking your brains and thinking about how to bring more fun to your website.
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Choosing a Domain Name for Your Website by: Teresa Frady One of the first steps in building your website is choosing a domain name. There are several important things to consider when deciding on a domain name for your website. Following are a few tips to keep in mind when selecting a new domain name: If possible, opt for a domain name that is easily recognizable and describes your business. This will be helpful when you promote your site. Keep your domain name as short, simple and easy to remember as possible. The shorter it is, the easier it will be to remember. Although a good number of the short and simple .com domains are likely already taken, you may have the option to purchase a domain with a different extension, like .net or .us. Your domain name can be 2-63 characters long (excluding the extension), and can contain the characters a-z, 0-9 and '-' (dash). However, domain names cannot begin or end with '-' (dash).
If your first choice is not available, try to utilize synonyms, rearrange the words, add dashes, or use abbreviations or acronyms to find an alternative. You now have several options to choose from for extensions as well. Following is some information about some of the extensions you can choose from: .com denotes the word "commercial," and it is an unrestricted global domain name extension. Many businesses prefer a .com domain name because it is a highly recognized symbol for having a business presence on the Internet. However, the number of available .com domain names is shrinking as more and more businesses go online. .net represents the word "network," and is an unrestricted global domain name extension most commonly used by Internet service providers, Web-hosting companies, or other businesses that are directly involved in the infrastructure of the Internet. Additionally, some businesses choose domain names with a .net extension for their intranet web sites.
border="0"/>.org represents the word "organization," and is an unrestricted global domain name extension that is primarily used for non-commercial sites. However, many commercial entities register the .org extensions corresponding to their .com domain names in order to protect their brands. .biz is a restricted-use global domain name extension used for business web sites. As a relatively new type of domain, .biz offers a company the opportunity to get the domain name it really wants and enhance its presence on the Web with a domain name that means business. .info is an unrestricted domain name extension that creates an opportunity to reach a worldwide audience with information about your business and ideas. .info is growing in popularity, but still has many great names available. .us is a restricted-use country code that may be used by any individual or organization with residence in the United States or its territories, including foreign organizations that do business in the US. What about .TV, .WS, .FM and .CC? Although often marketed as such, .TV does not mean television and .WS does not mean web-site or world-site. .TV is the country code extension for Tuvalu a small island country located in the Western Pacific Ocean with a population of approximately 11,000 that gained independence from the UK in 1978. .WS is the country code extension for Samoa. Samoa, also in the Pacific, gained independence from New Zealand in 1962 and has a population of around 180,000. .FM masquerades as the TLD (top level domain) for radio stations, but is actually the country code for Federated States of Micronesia. .CC is the Internet country code TLD for Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory, but has been promoted for international registration as "the next .com".
How To Have A Low Cost Web Site With High Cost Features by: Alex Liverant There a lot of solutions out there that enables anyone to create a web site. Though these solutions usually give a variety of templates that the user can choose from and customize with his own information. The problem arises when the site owner wants more than just an informative site. He wants to communicate with his web site surfers, receive feedback from them in a variety of issues i.e. Contact us form, Polls, Feedback and many more “Web Forms”. To create and add these “Web Forms” usually he needs a programmer’s help (paid of course) that will build him the code of those “Web Forms” and to upgrade his hosting from a simple HTML hosting to Code / Database hosting.
These operations increase the cost of the web site ten folds and even more. There are some solutions out there that enable a non programmer web site owner to create and manage forms, in this article I would like to suggest one of them: http://www.formlogix.com is web platform that enables you to do that and more. Creating a form is the first step using the system. The form creator tool is a user friendly web form designer, which does not require graphic or technical skills whatsoever. Using the form creator tool, one can create, change and delete forms. Also you can publish the form through your web site (using the formlogix platform with no need for database and expensive hosting) Once data is gathered through the form, one can view it using a web based interface. The information viewed can be sorted and sliced for maximum comfort. You will also be able to create, edit, and delete data. Whenever there is a new data entry, you will be advised via e-mail, and will thus be kept up-to-date. Highly sophisticated query builder will assist you in filtering your data, and creating charts based on it. You can use the platform to create: Contact us forms, registration forms, surveys, polls, business forms, order forms, questionnaires, employee satisfaction forms - these are only a few of an endless range of forms, that can be produced with the Formlogix form creator tool.
Tips for Creating Good Website Designs by: Morgan Hamilton A lot can be said about Internet advertising and online commerce but there is no doubt that they are quite profitable business activities. Advertising on television or in print is less effective than promoting a company on the Internet. But to make a good online commercial targeted to millions of potential clients you need very good website designs. There is nothing more important than good website design when marketing a product online is concerned. You no longer need flashing three sentence ads in giant text on a white screen. Simply said, good website designs are high tech and eye pleasing. They actually resemble a television commercial. Of course, only the good ones do. There are many websites which are not high tech and could not certainly be taken for good website designs. Personal pages could be loud and very colourful but it comes as a big surprise that many companies still rely on old school early 90’s type of web design. There are two possible reasons why they don’t have good websites designs. The first one is that they don’t fully realize the importance of the good design in marketing and advertising on the Internet. The second reason might be for they don’t consider Cyberspace as a major source of income. Though, it is certain that online business will keep on blooming in the years to come.
border="0"/>I suppose the major factor when designing a website is usability. A site with good usability means that not only is the site easy to use but it is also comprehensible for the potential customers. This is the bases for any good website designs. Other important factors are good content and originality. A reader should have lots of information on display; they should be able to review discussions of a product and service. The content should be informative and interesting but professional, as well. Even though looks matter, good website designs are more about content that graphic production. However the importance of graphics should not be underestimated. This includes colour, style of text, image and design graphics. You can give a more professional look to a website with a single line or a bullet well placed. Good website designs contain all these things. It is vital not to turn off customers by putting any pictures (whether of people or nature) if inappropriate to the setting. It is also important that graphics have good quality but low file size because if they don’t meet these requirements then the customers might grow impatient while waiting for the file to load. Other things which should be taken into considerations are compatibility and navigation. Apart from Internet Explorer there are people using Netscape or Firefox as their usual web browser. Thus it is important that the site is compatible with different web browsers or computers. Of course, this will make the designing of the web site harder but it would be worth it. It might sound easy to have a good website but remember that good website designs are hard work and a billion dollar industry.
Do You Know Why You Shouldn't Use Music On Your Website? by: Louie Foxx Top five reasons why you shouldn't use music on your website Just about everyday I come across a website that has music that "autoplay's" when you first enter a site. Using music or audio on your website can be a very useful tool when used correctly (i.e. having a play button, etc), however most people just put it on thier site because that can. That's the worst reason to have music on your site. Here are five reasons that you shouldn't use music on your website: 1. Many people do personal searches at work OK, so you've gotten a potential buyer to click a link to your website while they are at work. Once you site loads the audio comes on and startes playing its little song loudly! Guess what your potiental client is going to do? Close the window with your site! That's the easiest way to stop the music on your site. Many people don't know how to adjust volume on thier computers. When you music starts blaring, your potential client will be worried about drawing attention to thier personal web search/shopping while they ae at work.
2. Just because you can doesn't mean you should The webtemplate that you are using give you the option of using music. So you think, sure I'll put music on. Let's see what are the choices...none of the songs are your favorites, but since you have the option of using it you might as well...WRONG! Just because you have the option doesn't mean you have to use it. For example my car comes with a cigarette lighter, I don't smoke, and don't feel compelled to just because my car has a lighter or ashtray. 3. Many people don't have the sound turned on anyway If you music is so important to your site, how do you handle visitors that don't have the speakers on their computer turned on? That's a great resaon to have a "play" button, and not just autoplay. 4. Adds to download time The more crap a potential client's computer has to download. No matter how small a file is, it adds to the overall download time. If you have a commerce website you need to be aware of how long your site downloads on dial up and broadband connections. Everyone who clicks away because your website takes too long to load is money out of your pocket. 5. Doesn't enhance the shoppers experience If your goal is to make money with your website, everything on your website should push every visitor towards buying. If something on your website doesn't help them click the buy button, then it's not necesary and a waste of time an energy. So before you add Bon Jovi's Blaze of Glory that sounds like it was played on a 1980's Casio keyboard, consider if it enhances a shoppers experience or is just annoying! Rules Are Made To Be Broken Now before you email me to tell me that I'm wrong and that audio has a place on websites, I know that it does! Every rule has exceptions, and my goal with this article is to make you think before you just throw a crappy autoplay song on your website.
Discover The Power of Meta Tags by: Larry Lang Meta tags are lines of code and are located in the “head” section of your web page. These lines of code, even though they are not displayed by your browser, are very useful when providing additional descriptive information about your web page. There are a number of different Meta tags used in your web pages, some more important than others. Meta tags, or a element (both are the same), must contain what is called an attribute, and have some kind of value following it. A required attribute is content, and it defines the Meta information that goes with the attributes, http-equiv and name. The http-equiv attribute has values like “content-type, expires, refresh, and set-cookie.” One example of an http-equiv attribute is if you have moved your web page to a new URL. You want to let your customers know the page has moved and, after a predetermined time, they will be automatically redirected to the new URL.
Example: In the above example, your web page will refresh causing your user’s browser to refresh the current URL. Displayed is the short message you have placed on this page notifying your users the current page has moved and they will be redirected to the new page. In the above example, after 5 seconds the user will automatically be redirected to the new web page at http://www.yournewpage.com. The name attribute has values such as, “author, description, keywords, generator, revised”, to name a few, and is the one most commonly used. For example, this attribute is the one you use when creating the description for your web page, In the above example, we used the name attribute, and its value is description. We also used the required attribute, content. The content attribute defines what the Meta information is that goes with the value, description.
border="0"/>The description Meta tag, as it is more commonly referred to, is very important. This is what is displayed on the results page of search engines, and is located underneath your title tag. The title tag should contain as many of your keywords, or keyword phrases, as possible in a short, coherent sentence describing your web page. The Meta tag that most people have heard of is keyword Meta tag. Although it is not as important as it once was, it is still a good idea to include it on your web pages. You should only put keywords in here that you are using on your web page, so they should be really focused. I suggest using between three to five keywords or keyword phrases, each being separated by a comma. Below is an example: In all of the above examples, notice the Meta tag is, what they call, “properly closed”. It is considered “properly closed” when using a space after the last quote, followed by />. By closing all of your Meta tags this way, they will be W3C compliant. Also, when you check your code, you will not show any errors. Creating the code for Meta tags is easy when you use our Meta Tag Generator, found at Elite Web Coaching. All you need to do to create your Meta tag code is fill in the form, press the submit button, then copy and paste your new code into your website. It is as simple as that!
Dedicated Server
Advantages to a Dedicated Server by: Rene Spronk If you’re exploring hosting options, surely you’ve thought about dedicated hosting and you may have even thought that a dedicated server is a little pricey, but do you know all the benefits of dedicated hosting? First let’s face a simple fact; many websites are hosted on a shared web hosting server. The main reason is the cost. A shared web hosting server costs a lot less than a dedicated server. The number of sites on a shared web hosting server can vary between a few hundred sites to a couple of thousand sites. Although shared hosting is reliable and has few problems, there are advantages to hosting your sites on a dedicated server. You should consider a dedicated server when you find that the traffic to your site has increased substantially and your site is taking too much time to load. An analysis of the traffic to your site will tell you whether you should go to a dedicated server. The main thing to understand is that when you have many users accessing your website, you should replace your shared web hosting with a dedicated server web hosting.
Since a dedicated server does not share its server with other websites (like shared web hosting), you will find that you have a lot more control over your server operation. One of the advantages with a dedicated server is you have greater control to make changes to the server i.e. upload programs, add extra features and general tweaking is a lot easier when you have your own server. The only obstacle is the cost. You are required to pay a lot more for your dedicated server as compared to your shared web hosting. Nevertheless, the facilities more than compensate for the cost. A dedicated server for your web hosting allows you to have a server solely dedicated to your sites. In addition, a dedicated server will allow you complete authority to control and administer your server. When and if you decide on a dedicated server for your web hosting, you should have a fair understanding of dedicated servers. Although most dedicated server hosting providers will provide technical support, you will find it a lot easier if you have the technical expertise to manage the server yourself. However, if you find that you will not be able to manage your server by yourself, you may opt for a managed dedicated server. This option is especially for those who want to have dedicated hosting but do not have the required expertise to manage it. This service allows you to have an entire server managed by a specialized hosting company. The cost of a managed dedicated server is more expensive than an unmanaged server. Therefore, if you think that you can run and manage your website server by yourself, you should opt for an unmanaged dedicated server web hosting rather than a managed dedicated server. When you choose a hosting provider, you should keep in mind that it should provide you good network stability, reliable operation, and the ease of operation of sophisticated applications. A dedicated server hosting provider can be the perfect solution for anyone who is serious about their online presence.
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Nine Important Factors in Choosing a Web Hosting Company by: Isaac Chu Many clients have talked to us about their online business and they would like to have some suggestion in choosing a web hosting company. There are so many companies and packages for them to choose. Here we will listed out some factors that need to be considered. #1 Disk Space Disk space is depends on the size of your web site. So, have a look on your web site folder and see how much disk space it takes up on your computer. You should always get more space than what is taken up on your computer. For example, if your web folder is 200MB, you should probably get 250-300MB of disc space. This extra space allowed you to further expand your web site and put more materials there. Remember that you need to think about what kind of materials you planned to add later. If what you plan to add is some flash animation or some audio/video file, you'd better to get some more buffer. #2 Bandwidth Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer that your web site can use. If you plan on having a massively popular site with a large amount of files, then you should have a high bandwidth. For casual web sites, bandwidth is not as big a factor. Again, consider cost and try to have more bandwidth than you need, not less. It is also important to check the bandwidth for local and overseas.
#3 Web site speed Web site speed is seldom taken into consideration. Web site speed is a really important factor. If your web host has a very slow speed for all of its web sites, then you may not want to go with that host. People won’t stay around at a page forever. If you want many people to visit your site, having a fast speed is very helpful. You should check with the web hosting company and ask them to provide a list of their sites. You can then try to access to see the response of these sites. #4 Database / Programming Language support Database and Programming Language support are important if you plan to have a dynamic website and interact with your customers. Currently, most web hosting provides support for database and programming language, but there are great variety on database and programming language. You should check and pick the one you plan to use. Of course the above factors are depend on how much you want to spend on it. It's always difficult to take all the best. You should think about your own case and find out the best fit. For example, you have a text-centric site with little photos and target in local market only, you may find a hosting with little disk space, enough bandwidth for local (overseas is not important in this case) and normal web site speed. #5 Technical Support Technical support is one of the important factor you need to consider. But how to know their services level? You can test by sending them an email with some questions or just make a phone to their support hotlines. If they respond quickly, this is a good sign. If they cannot provides you answers, you'd better find another one. #6 UpTime The more uptime they guarantee, the better. 99% uptime is the minimum acceptable standard. You'd should Look for 99% plus guaranteed uptime.
#7 FTP Access You need an FTP program to transfer files to the server. You should seek for an unlimited and unrestricted FTP access, otherwise it will troublesome to maintain your website. #8 Control Panel Most web hosting company will provides a web based control panel for you to maintain your web site. You should looking for one with a easy-to-use interface. #9 Statistics Program A good stats program is handy if you want to keep an eye on how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from, referrers, top entry and exit pages and so on. Some companies offer excellent stats programs as standard while others offer basic stats but you have to pay extra for advanced statistics. You should ask the company what kind of statistics information they can provide.
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Strengthening Your Website’s Relationship with Keywords by: Jason McElwaine There are many companies offering Search Engine Optimization. Put them to work, and you're bound to see improvement in your search engine rankings. But what if you can't afford to pay for SEO service? Don’t worry, because there are many things you can do yourself to make your site "search engine friendly." Here's a few: Body Text: Many site owners use keywords inappropriately. You visit their site and all you see everywhere is keywords repeated endlessly all over the page. This can leave a bad taste in a customer's mouth, especially if they don't realize why exactly you chose to write "dog food" 73 times in your first paragraph. In addition, you might give the search engines the idea that you're "keyword stuffing," which can get your site banned from the search engine all-together. Don't get me wrong, it is important to repeat keywords, but tastefully and strategically. As a whole, text keywords should never be more than 10% of your entire body text. This will ensure that your keywords are listed enough to be effective for Search Engine Optimization, while at the same time keeping the search engines (and your customers) happy.
Meta Tags: Meta tags give search engines and browsers a detailed description of your website. They describe everything from the title of your site to the language your site is using. Keywords can and should be used in Meta Tags. "Title," "Subject," "Description” and "Keywords" are specific meta tags where keywords should be used. They should only be used once in each tag, and when writing, remember that "Title," "Description" and “Subject" are often used to display your site in search engine results, so write carefully. (One quick note: Google is one of the search engines that no longer utilizes the "Keywords" Meta Tag, so be sure to use keywords in the other Meta Tags, as well as the Body, Alt and Anchor Text.) Alt Text: This one is easy, and it's a great way for you to list your keyword phrase all over your site, without it looking like a keyword litter box. Within every image tag, Alt Text should be present. This is the text that sometimes shows up when your mouse hovers over an image, or when a surfer chooses to browse the web without images. Search engines have no idea what images actually look like, so they read Alt Text instead. In short, including keywords in the "alt text" of images will increase keyword density throughout your page. Anchor Text: Anchor Text is the actual text that is displayed in a link. Many links do a poor job of describing their destination, but by using keywords in your Anchor Text, it will not only help describe your links to customers, but to search engines as well. It's not always easy to combine targeted keywords with the title of every internal link, but using this strategy will improve keyword density throughout your page while simultaneously strengthening your site's relationship in the search engines with your targeted keyword(s). No Script: No Script tags are widely used to notify users when Surfing without the use of Java Script. When Java Script is employed, the message is automatically hidden by the user's browser. In addition to a standard message, a text link navigation menu using keyword Anchor Text can be included. These days, many websites use image, flash and java script links for navigation menus. This can hurt your site's ability to be indexed correctly, since search engines only recognize text links. Creating a text link navigation menu inside a No Script tag will fix this problem. It will also provide another opportunity to improve keyword density using the Anchor Text method.
border="0"/>Inbound Links: Inbound links can greatly increase your website’s visibility to search engines. A search engine’s “spider” has no rhyme or reason as to where it crawls. It simply starts with the pages in its index, and follows text links endlessly around the web. If using Keyword Anchor Text within your site is important, then the same applies for inbound links. When the spider sees your inbound URL it makes a record of the Anchor Text associated with it. Using Keyword Anchor Text in you inbound links is the #1 way to strengthen your site’s relationship with a keyword! There are many other things you can do to make your site search engine friendly, but strategic keyword placement should be at the top of your list. Using keywords with Body Text, Meta Tags, Alt Text and Anchor Text are four easy and effective ways to optimize your site.
Fire Your Web Design Agency ... A Story From A Dallas Web Design Company by: Akilah McLaughlin The headline could have been a slight over reaction on my part. You are not going to fire your Web agency entirely. However, you can reduce your monthly maintenance costs by performing Web updates in-house. MAC Advertising and Design offers various Web support and maintenance packages at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full time employee to perform similar activities with the Content Management Tool. Today’s web sites are no longer a one time build. Successful web sites and web campaigns require ongoing support, updates, case studies, Blogs, RSS Feeds, new looks, product launches & updates, forums, events, company news and much more. Our Content Management Solution allows any admin the ability to log in and make changes and updates to their web site through an easy to use module, similar to editing a WORD doc. This requires about 2-3 hours of initial training, and then subsequent changes can be made easily, whenever you need them and as often as you please for a fixed cost.
border="0"/>MAC Advertising and Design has been in business since 2003 and has produced countless quality Web sites. From lawyer web site design to realtor web site design, we have an in-depth portfolio. Although located in the Dallas area, we are able to offer professional Web site design services anywhere in the United States. MAC is a professional, affordable Web site design Web site design company that offers Web services to businesses nationwide. We are a Web design firm specializing in flash Web design, ecommerce Web site design and HTML Web site designs that are SEO friendly. We are the Dallas Web site company that other Web firm professionals come to. We work with your company to define objectives and develop graphic design objectives for their Web sites and interactive tools to achieve them including bilingual Web site design to reach a broader customer base for your business. Our clients range from realtors to law firms; from construction companies to personal trainers. MAC Advertising and Design is a premier Web site design company in Dallas offering Web site design and development. We service both small and large companies with custom Web site designs that are affordable for every budget. Web site design and development: Dallas area and nationwide. We take pride in offering the following Web site design services: • Fast-Loading Web sites • Clear and Clean Navigation throughout • Professional and Custom Web site Design • Excellent Web design satisfaction
3 Options For Hosting Multiple Websites by: John Lenaghan The prices of domain name registration and web hosting have dropped to the point that it's possible to own multiple websites without going broke. If you plan to operate multiple websites, here is some information on the different options available to you. The first thing to consider when setting up multiple websites is whether or not to host them all with the same web hosting company. Many web hosts offer packages that let you set up multiple sites on a single account and almost all will let you set up multiple accounts, one for each site. If you are happy with the hosting company you're using for your existing website(s), one advantage of using them for another site is the fact that you know they offer good service and support.
They might also offer discounts for multiple sites, so your costs might be lower if you stay with them again. On the other hand, if you choose a different host you'll be able to compare the quality of another company with whomever you're currently using. If you ever run into problems with them, you'll have an alternative. It's wise not to "put all your eggs in one basket" as the saying goes. Another advantage of using a different host is that you'll get a different IP address for each of your sites. If your sites are related to one another and you want to link them together, having different IP addresses can sometimes help your site rank higher in the search engines. Links from other sites are one of the most important factors in getting your site ranked highly. If those links come from sites on the same IP address, it is a signal to the search engines that they are quite likely all owned by the same person, and they may discount the value of those links. If you do choose to host all your sites with one company, there are essentially 3 choices - separate accounts for each site, a reseller account where they are all hosted or a dedicated server, again where they are all hosted. Separate accounts are self-explanatory, so let's look at reseller accounts. As a reseller, you are basically acting as an agent for the hosting company - a middleman between them and the end user. The idea is that you can set up your own company offering web hosting that is ultimately hosted by the company. You don't have to resell this hosting however - you can use the hosting services for your own websites, essentially "reselling" the hosting to yourself. A reseller account is nice because all your websites are "under one roof" and you have a single point of contact for any technical problems. Hosting on a dedicated server gives you complete control of the computer that is the web server. You can install any software you want, any operating system you want and you can allocate resources like memory and hard disk space however you want to divide it up between your sites. The disadvantage of a dedicated server is that you are responsible for maintaining the server and sometimes even for the technical side of things. If you aren't familiar with the technical side of running a web server, you may need to choose a managed dedicated server, where the hosting company looks after these issues. Dedicated server are, of course, more expensive than the other options, so unless your websites are well established, with a lot of traffic, they may not fit within your budget.
3 Ways Coaches Can Use Their Web Site To Get More Clients by: Kenn Schroder Coaches have a big challenge when seeking clients. They are selling the unknown. By unknown, I mean that most people who can benefit from coaching, whether it be business coaching or personal coaching, either never heard of it or don't really understand how it works. When people work with a coach for the first time, there usually comes a point when they say “a ha!” and are better able understand the value they can get. So trying to get clients can seem like a catch-22. In order to hire you, they need a strong sense of what you do. But to get that sense they need to work with you first! It's because of this hurdle that direct selling or direct response methods like cold calling or placing ads don't work. Those channels don't get you clients directly.
Dealing with this challenge can be frustrating for many new coaches. They really want to help their clients succeed in their business or in their life, but getting the prospect to sign on the dotted line doesn't happen as often as they would like. So how can coaches deal with selling the unknown? Make it known and use your web site to do it! Here are 3 ways: 1 – Write web site copy in terms of “what they do know.” Prospective clients can relate to their pains and troubles. Their pains and troubles might include not having enough time in a day, trouble sleeping at night, or not making enough money. They can also relate to where they want to be in the future. Some examples could be having lots of income, having peace of mind and having a happier life. So when you are writing about your services, be sure to start with things your prospect already knows about, such as their pains and their desires. Additionally, case studies and testimonials of others you have helped would further your prospect's understanding of what you do. These examples are most effective if they are written in terms of initial problems and end results. By explaining what you do in terms they know directly, you better communicate what you do. When prospects clearly see what they can get from working with you they are more excited and more interested in working with you. 2 – Give away free information. Compile an article or report that is helpful to your target prospects. Choose a topic that is directly related to their problems or situations. Then make that report available on your web site for download. This strategy has a lot of value: • Everyone likes free helpful stuff, so they will take action to get it. • Once created, giving it out takes almost no time to do. • It tells the the prospect that you know their about their business, thus making you a good choice for helping them. • Sending people to your web site creates another relationship building “touch.” • People can refer this report to other people, increasing your visibility. 3 - Give away a free online assessment. Create a series of questions on your web site. Then invite your visitor to answer them in return for a score and an interpretation of that score. This gives them helpful information about themselves and gives them a sample of what you do. This technique has a lot of value similar to the report idea. It's free, doesn't take a lot of time or money to implement, it is automated, it gives value, and it can be referred to others. Additionally, you can determine which prospects have stronger needs based on their responses. With that information, you can target your sales efforts towards them and increase your closing rate. In conclusion, use your web site as a tool for educating your prospects. Doing this will gain more trust and grow the relationship until they eventually become your paying client.
Essential SEO Copywriting 1 - 6 by: Decebal (Dudi) Scraba An article named "Essential SEO Copywriting" should begin, I guess, with a definition of SEO copywriting - as a starter for our short trip through the "mysteries" of this issue... Let's try: SEO copywriting makes a text (article, web page etc.) readable and likable for human visitors as well as for search engines, by providing valuable information in a coherent manner, structured around well-chosen keywords that are relevant for a specific topic. .. Did I lose you? Just choose the keywords / keyphrases that are relevant for your topics and write a SEO-wise copy around them. This will help you getting high rankings in search engine results while still making a pleasant reading for your human visitors. Let's get into details and see how SEO copywriting should be completed.
border="0"/>1. Select your relevant keywords (keystrings) How many keywords for a web page? There are a lot of SEO copywriting expert opinions here. I would say that it is better to have one or (maximum) two primary keystrings plus 3 - 6 secondary keywords. Be creative and keep in mind that you can have a complex keyphrase covering several alternatives. For example, "essential SEO copywriting" covers 3 other keystrings: "essential SEO", "essential copywriting" and "SEO copywriting", all related to the topic of this article / web page. 2. Keywords in META TAGS, targeted and concise For this article the TITLE TAG is, obviously, "Essential SEO Copywriting". The DESCRIPTION is "Essential SEO copywriting: learn how to write a SEO-wise copy around relevant keywords for high rankings and traffic on your web site" and includes the title. The KEYWORDS META TAG is: "essential seo copywriting, copy, keywords, seo-wise, high rankings". Keep your title / description / keywords META TAG to maximum 60 / 200 / 1000 characters each. DO NOT repeat a distinct keyword more than 3 times in any of your meta tags! 3. SEO copywriting - for humans Include valuable and viable information in your SEO-wise copy. Write it in a coherent and easy-readable manner. DO NOT make it a meaningless list of keywords - search engines will penalize it and this isn't SEO copywriting. Check spelling and grammar. Write at least 500 words in the body text of each web page. If we are talking about an expert article, keep the copy around 800 words, structured in smaller sections for easy reading. Give a short subtitle to each section and include here some of the targeted keywords. Keep always in mind who will read your copy: search engine robots AND human visitors (readers). 4. Optimize the keyword density of the copy Let's assume that you are writing a SEO-wise expert article, in order to promote your business (website). SEO copywriting specialists would say that you must achieve, for the targeted keywords, an optimal density between 2% and 7%. For example, if your keystring is "essential seo copywriting" and you have it repeated 25 times in an 1000 words article, it's density will be 2.5% - within the optimal keywords density range. DO NOT forget that the text of the article will be placed on a page that will probably enclose also: a script (HTML / CSS), in-site navigation links, outbound links, copyright information, advertising of some sort and/or other type of content. Under these circumstances, the 2.5% initial keywords density may fall below the optimal threshold. So my advice is: try achieving in your article, at least for the primary keywords, a density around 3-5%. DO NOT stuff the copy with keywords, though - it may become unpleasantly unreadable for your visitors.
Make sure to place the main keywords at the beginning, middle and end of the copy. 5. HTML text formatting of your SEO-wise copy All SEO copywriting specialists concur: increase the importance (for search engines and readers) of your body-text-embedded keywords by using the HTML text formatting tags. Use (heading 1) tag for your page's title, (heading 2) tag for the subtitles, (bold) and (italic) tags to emphasize the keywords scattered around the copy (DO NOT overuse these tags, though). 6. SEO copywriting for the entire website We have examined the essential seo copywriting topics for one web page. If we are talking about writing the SEO-wise copy for an entire website, then there are some additional rules to follow: -- DO NOT use image buttons for in-site navigation. Whenever you have on page "A" a link pointing to page "B" of your site, use a text link with the primary keywords of page "B" as anchor text. For example, on my homepage (http://www.ewolwe.com), the anchor text of the link pointing to this article is "Essential SEO Copywriting". Use the same rule for the anchor text of links placed on other sites (domains) that point to pages on your website. -- use your primary keywords in the URL of the web page (e.g. essential_seo_copywriting.htm) -- whenever you have a picture on a page, include that page's keywords in the "ALT" tag of the image. Each section of this article will be detailed in 6 new articles, which will try to cover, in deeper details, the topic of essential seo copywriting. Read more to learn more and good luck to you all!
How To Learn Designing Your First Website by: Siuchu Suga In learning web design, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is something you must know, WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) HTML editor is something you must have and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is some big treasure to you which deserves burying yourself into it deeper and deeper. HTML is a common language for building and designing website. It tells the Internet browsers like Internet Explorer or Firefox how to display web content on the screen via HTML tags. In fact, everything you see on the web is under the control of HTML. What is HTML editor? It is a software like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage which helps you to create websites even though you know nothing about HTML. WOW! Does it mean by using HTML editor, you need not learn HTML yourself?? NOT necessarily. Below I’ll explain why and will also talk about some learning tips.
HTML As I told you earlier, everything you see on the web is under the instructions written in HTML. Therefore, HTML editors also create webpages using HTML. The difference is that when you use HTML editor, you just have to click the buttons to "draw" webpages as you see on screen (What-You-See) and then HTML editor writes the HTML tags for you to display the webpages on web browser in exactly the same form (What-You-Get). However, it always happens that HTML editors write clumsy HTML tags, especially when you amend the webpage layout again and again during your website designing process, which may possibly deter search engines from reading your web page and in turn poorly affect your search engine ranking. What's worse, your website cannot even be listed in search engines at all! The clumsy HTML codings will also increase your file size and hence the loading time, encouraging visitors to leave your website soon. Therefore, you should understand HTML to unable yourself to modify the HTML codes produced by WYSIWYG HTML editors. Besides, in the designing perspective, there are also some design limitations and restrictions using HTML editors when compared to free writing of HTML codes. If you would like some special design or custom look to your webpages, you are recommended to have some knowledge on HTML yourself. In more advanced level, if you are to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your web page, you should know how to make use of meta tags like title, content, alt, header, etc. in order to attain better keyword positions in search engines. If you just happen to own a website designed by others, you should learn HTML in order to edit the context of your website without the need to depend on someone else in this simple but routine updating task. Or you have no website yet but you like to write articles to be displayed in others' websites, you also should learn HTML in order to create appropriate links in your articles for others' easy reference. Tips: If you have already got some basic knowledge on HTML, you may study “Getting Started With HTML” which is the most popular free HTML tutorials online provided by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which develops interoperable technologies including specifications, guidelines, software and tools to lead the Web to its full potential. If you still find the above tutorials too difficult or boring to start with or your time being too limited, “One Hour HTML” is highly recommended for you. It is a practical program to take you step by step in learning HTML from the very beginning and it offers you hands-on HTML encoding experience instead of merely teaching you theories so that you could have already experienced creating webpage using HTML as early as in the first hour of learning. WYSIWYG HTML Editor Indeed, despite my understanding on HTML, like many other web designers, I like to use WYSIWYG HTML editor such as Dreamweaver a lot and in fact, I can't even think of living without it once I encountered it as it saves me so much time in writing the complex HTML codes and the best advantage is that i can immediately visualize the effect in the splitted WYSIWYG designing screen whenever I change the HTML codings above in the HTML encoding screen! I am not contradicting myself. In fact, the key to make use WYSIWYG HTML editor software is that you have to learn the software well and to use its buttons for quick and easy HTML editing yet you don't let the software generated HTML codes to take the control but it is you who know how to master all HTML tags and to make any necessary changes to the HTML tags in order to bring the best visual and seo benefits to your website. Among all HTML editors in the market, Dreamweaver and Frontpage are the most popular ones. Dreamweaver is very popular among professional web designers while Frontpage is popular for small enterprise users. Dreamweaver has more user-friendly features than Frontpage which include its seamless integration with Flash, its automatic generation of closing tags once you enter the opening tags, the fact that it would not automatically re-write your codings like Frontpage does when you save an external HTML page not created by Frontpage, etc. Despite less user-friendly features, Frontpage is a Microsoft Office's tool which many of you will be familiar with and it is fine enough for creating or editing websites for small projects.
border="0"/>Tips: If you have never encountered HTML editors before, you may download the free trial provided by Macromedia. There are a few good Dreamweaver tutorials in the market. Among those, “Tutorials-4-You” and “Dreamweaver Made Simple” are two more popular ones due to the interactive nature of their video tutorials, |