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Web Design & Web Tech Blog

How to Pick a Quality Host

While affordability is very important in making a selection of web hosting site, you still must select the host that is best at meeting your particular needs. If you understand your goals and do some comparison shopping among the many web host competitors, you will easily find an affordable hosting site. An economical host is great, so long as you are getting all of the services that you need. Among these essential services that the hosting site should offer is strong customer support.

When having an online presence is indispensable, but cash flow isn’t quite up to what any webmaster would like it to be, affordable website hosting services can really come to the rescue. As any entrepreneur is well aware, it’s smart to shop for services, and if you’re building a website, you’ll be shopping for website hosting that’s affordable.

One point of major importance, is considering affordable web site hosting for small entrepreneurs. It is important to base your selection of a web site hosting partner on the research of cost, equipment, connection and their morals. It is possible to locate an inexpensive web hosting solution that will cover each of these aspects and will extend quality service. This is exactly what you should be viewing.

Hosting services will also give a variety of bandwidth that is available. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data transferred from your site to your users. Every time someone visits your website, they use your bandwidth as data transfer takes place.

There are two major features with a website plan, which consist of how much disk space allowed on your domain (the amount of file space the website will use) and also how much bandwidth you are given every month.

Affordable web hosting is something that many people are searching for. Affordable website hosting is the most vital part of any website’s plan for its development. Having a good, dependable, affordable web host is the first step to your success. If you plan to spend time on anything, using some time to find good and affordable web hosting is a fine investment.

In attempting to locate a web host, cost effective web hosting is the goal, however, it is also paramount in selecting a plan that will meet your needs. Cost effective web site hosting is simple to locate if you are aware of your needs and you make a price comparison between web host competitors. An additional consideration in making your selection is the customer support services. This is of particular importance when we consider affordable web site hosting for small business. Each time a user visits your site, they make use of your bandwidth as data transfer occurs.

– Tem Balanco

Using Web Site Statistics to Increase Your Traffic

Using Web Site Statistics to Increase Your Traffic

Most people don’t understand how to use the statistics on visitor traffic generated automatically by a web site server. By properly reporting and analyzing your statistics, you can target weak or unattractive areas on your site and determine why your visitors are coming.

Using Logfile Traffic Statistics for Your Web Site

Your first and most important step for increasing web site traffic is analyzing the statistics in your log files. There are numerous commercial programs for doing this, some very pricey; but if your web site isn’t incredibly large, you can use Analog, which is as good as any of the commercial programs and better than many.

Analog goes through your log files and automatically generates reports giving you information such as who your web site visitors are; how many unique visitors you’ve had; what sections of your site they are visiting the most; and how they are searching for sites like yours on search engines. The reports are easy to read and analyze, and generate very quickly.

Traffic Statistics Target Web Site Weak Spots

The hard part is targeting your weak spots. Now that you have your report, ask yourself questions such as: what is my intended market? Are they the ones who are visiting? If not, who is? How are they looking for me in search engines — what key words are pulling up my site? For instance, if you are running a travel agency web site focusing on pulling international visitors to places in the United States, and 85% of your unique site visitors are from America, you probably have a problem.

You can also look at peak usage time and the amount of traffic at those times, which can give you valuable information on whether your customers are aware you have new information out for them; whether you need to purchase more web space or more bandwidth for your site; and even when you might want to put special offers out on the web site.

Web Site Traffic Statistics In Action

Here’s a test case: Joe owns a specialized toy shop and sells online. He runs his web statistics and finds that most of his online customers are coming from New York City; that the most frequently-used term turning up his site on search engines is “Model train”; and that most of his visitors stop by on Saturday afternoon.

He compares this information with other marketing information and decides most of his customers are from New York because of a very successful ad he placed in a free weekly paper there (so determines to do the same for other parts of the country); that he probably has too much information on “model trains” on his homepage; and that since his visitors peak on Saturday but his sales peak on Tuesday, that it might be a good idea to run one-day specials on Saturdays to encourage more purchasing on that day.

Bonus: he ties the one-day special to a registration for an emailed newsletter, which he plans to send out every Wednesday to try to spread out his traffic a little — he’s getting close to maximum bandwidth usage on Saturday.

Emulate Joe. Use web site traffic statistics to enhance your overall marketing program. — Jamie Wilson

How to Understand and Profit Best From RSS

RSS is a simple to use publishing tool, delivering internet content to subscribers. If you are not yet using RSS to keep yourself up to date with the best and accurate information available on the web, then you should start today! You will never have to check your favorite sites manually every day. Once you start subscribing to your preferred RSS feeds, you will be informed just in time the news occur and it will save you a lot of valuable time you can better use to follow your important business tasks.

I have done some research on RSS and put together this short report in order to help you to understand and set up RSS fast without much effort. If you want to read the full story about RSS, go to Wikipedia and check the two recommended links in my bio.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is a content delivery channel that allows you to easily deliver internet content to your target audiences, while eliminating short comings of delivery channels, such as e-mail. RSS content is delivered through RSS feeds, i.e. simple files structured in XML format which enables internet content publishers to easily deliver information about their specific content to end-users.

In a way, this can be best compared to e-mail content alert services, which send you an e-mail message every time content you are interested in is published on a specific web site, letting you know that a new article you are interested in is available on the Web. You certainly notice these square orange buttons with the white point and 2 white stripes, found almost on every blog and other interactive site. To start receiving RSS-Feeds, you need a “News Reader”, a piece of software that checks the feeds and lets you read any new article that has been added.

The main two versions are accessed using a browser (like Firefox) or downloadable applications that let you store content on your computer. The browser version is far enough for the beginning and to stay top informed. I recommend downloading the free Google Reader which constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for fresh content. Whether a site updates daily or monthly, you are informed instantly. Others are Windows RSS Reader and Mac-NetNewsWire.

Once you are set up, Right-Click (control-click for Mac users) on any orange RSS button on a site, blog or news source that interests you. Then select Copy Shortcut (“Copy Link to Clipboard” for Mac, “Copy Link Location” for Firefox browsers) and paste that URL into your RSS Reader. You are done and are now subscribed to get alerts every time new content or information is made available.

Autoresponders are a great marketing tool but the success or failure remains with your prospects which more and more are reluctant to give you their e-mail address. With RSS you have the same power than with an autoresponder, but without the fear people have with e-mail. RSS has 100% content delivery and Spam Filters do not matter anymore. With RSS you can easily deliver daily or even hourly news to your subscribers. Using personalisation, you have the same power as with an autoresponder.

Here are some examples how RSS can be used effectively: Direct Marketing, Ezine Publishing, Lead Generation, Monetising your Reports and eBooks, General Advertising, etc. For example, Amazon uses RSS to announce their best sellers to their subscribers. You can do the same with your Newsletter, Ezine or any other information you want to spread in your niche market.

RSS connects people in real time, your content can be published on other websites and therefore increasing your traffic and Search Engine rankings. It helps you to generate new Subscribers, increase your affiliate sales and to get valuable feedback. Use RSS to deliver information and directions to your affiliates and business partners.

RSS is free, fast and present everywhere – make use of it, take advantage for your business or just to facilitate your work day. An RSS promotion starts on your website and it is there, where you invite your visitors to subscribe to your feed. Therefore place the RSS button at the best possible place. I hope this article has given you a good insight on RSS and its tremendous marketing power.

Martin Bigler is an experienced Copywriter and offers Resources, Tools and Educational Content to help interested People build their Internet Business successfully. His Educational Martin Bigler Newsletter offers profound step by step guidance on various Marketing and Sales Tasks. A big selection of Free Reports, Downloads and useful Links are available at MartinBigler.com. The Marbika.Biz eBook Store offers a great variety of hot Niche eBooks at bargain prices.

Recommended Links:
RSS Content Builder, Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS

Copyright by Martin Bigler.

Site Build It – Is it Worth Buying It?

Web Design Templates – are You Ready for Cloning?

Web Design Template Clones

There are thousands of Web design template sites on the Net. Finding the right templates can make page construction easy as cake. All you need to do is some minor customization and then you can splash your content online. However, apart from this use, where the template is being used like a clever kind of stationary, Web design templates offer mostly disadvantages.

Writers of ad copy claim that what sells is not a fancy site with impressive graphics, but rather, written ad copy.

One of the many disadvantages of Web design templates is that they almost all suffer from overusing graphics. The graphics are often large file sizes that suck up bandwidth and increase loading time. Worse yet, pretty butterflies, skyscrapers, or forests on the periphery of your site, detract from the focus of your content. Graphics should be more than pretty objects adorning your site’s space.

Template sellers know that these graphics are appealing to those without design know-how, so using them makes the templates sell better. However, many of these same designers would rarely use such large graphics in a well designed site! Or, could it be that the designers selling templates couldn’t sell their custom designs because they don’t really understand their art, and thus have been driven to sell templates?

Web Design Templates Are Not Optimized

By its nature, a Web design template is not yet set up for your business needs. In today’s online markets, sites spend enormous resources on optimizing their Web page code and content to achieve higher rankings in search engine results. One marketing study recently concluded that around 40% of all online sales derive from search engine searches. This makes search engine site optimization highly important.

In fact, search engine site optimization is a constant battle because the engines constantly change their criteria for ranking search results. Because of this, your site should be designed with future changes in mind. Any site built to make future optimization easy will need to use cascading style sheet (CSS) technology. These are documents that tell a browser how to display a Web page.

CSS documents contain all of the style guidelines for a site or page, such as font sizes, colors, and everything pertaining to the look and feel and method of presentation. The HTML part of your site then only needs to contain the structure of your design.

Many templates do not use CSS. If you do purchase a template, try to determine if the template uses CSS. If it doesn’t, decide if paying for the template now is convenient in terms of just getting up and running, because you won’t be using it later, once you’ve had to change your site 2 or 3 times.

In fact, almost any Web designer you might hire would trash the whole template and start from scratch in order to provide you with a real site – provided you don’t meet with a designer who’s going to pawn off a customized template as if it were a unique and personal design. You have noticed all the cloned sites online, haven’t you?

Web design is one of the few trades where the term repeat business doesn’t necessarily mean the “designer” is servicing the same customer a second time. The designer may be serving the same product to a second customer if they aren’t ethical or prideful about their work. Make sure you’re getting a 100% unique site built.

Generic Web Design Templates Diminish Branding

Businesses benefit from branding, the effect caused by their company and products becoming familiar through their look and feel. If you use a template, which uses space in a very standard way, and which has no unique color theme, you lose out on much of the branding channel that you need to develop to become a highly successful online business.

Templates might be OK for getting up and running to test an idea, or to quickly go online with some information, but otherwise, expect to move past them in the long run!
– Ian Hess

Building a Review Website the Easy Way

In the past one of the most effective ways to sell an affiliate product was to create a pre-sell webpage. The idea was to warm your prospect up before passing them through to your affiliate sales dates. Today building a review website is also an effective way to sell more affiliate products. In this article let’s take a look at how you can do that very easily.

1. You need a product to sell. This is pretty easy to find when you look at affiliate programs such as ClickBank, Commission Junction, Amazon, and so on.

There is no shortage of products to sell when it comes to affiliate marketing on the Internet today. One key point to keep in mind is that you try and target a niche which will enhance your review website capabilities.

2. You need a domain name. Your domain name should include keywords that specifically identify the product you are representing.

The importance here is that you do not use the bulky website URL that comes from the affiliate program you are in. You want a targeted domain name that you own.

3. You need website hosting. There are many options available for hosting today, but the main thing is that you choose hosting that is very easy to set up your review website.

Many hosts today offer pre-made templates that are very easy to plug into. To make your review website look more professional you will want to include graphics that you have designed including your own header and footer.

4. You need to write the review. The key thing to writing your review is to write from the heart. Include facts and opinions about the product you are reviewing. The best way to do this is to purchase the product and write from a position of experience.

This is a few things to keep in mind when building a review website. You will find this to be a much easier way to sell your affiliate products than using a replicated affiliate program website.

Get Custom Made Product Review Affiliate Websites Every Month Niche Review Templates

Web Design is the First Results Based Art

Web Design is an Art

Web design fuses text with the graphic arts, with technology, with business, with advertising, with just about everything. It is the world’s premiere art form. You can display everything from fine art, to political commentary, to porn on a Web site. And often all three at the same time. While trying to fuse so much together, Web designs more often confuse the viewer.

If Web Design is Art, Then We Should Learn What Art Is

My neighbor’s 4 year old pre-schooler brought home a scribbled picture of a tree. She put it up on the altar of childhood art appreciation: the refrigerator front door. I was over for coffee and happened to notice this fantastic piece of art and I began to rave about how she should make sure the little tyke should be groomed as an artist.

She looked at me after a time and bluntly uttered the truth. “Its just a little kid’s scribbled tree! How can you even begin to imagine it has so much potential? ”

In truth, I’m often WOW-ed by the art of little kids. Its because they see things adults have been taught not to see any more. Let me explain what this little kid had drawn.

The scribble started at the bottom of the page, and ran right up, past the bulk of the trunk with only a quick hesitation of doubt double lining that side of the trunk. Then the line began to scribble a big mass above this one sided trunk, for a long time, you could tell! One constant and joyfully physical, exerted and exasperating line, full of tons of energy. The result perfectly represented the bulk of this tree’s canopy.

It was highly dense and dark in the middle, and progressed to a very light and bouncy exterior. Finally, flecks and gouges of almost page penetrating pencil marks punctuated the canopy, like the few scintillating glimmers of light and birds we see stuck in trees everyday.

Even the single line trunk told me the truth about the appearance of a tree: the lit side had no line, instead blending into the background, just as the lit side of all objects does.

It takes an adult artist years to discover how to again see and then capture these kinds of details. But that’s art. Art is the process of representing things like trees. It is not the result.

Web Design is the Process/Art of Providing Results

We all too often associate creativity with vague results. If someone draws some pretty lines and colors, and the overall effect is kind of cool, we can call that art. And it probably is, even if it does fall pretty far from the tree.

The term Web design can be taken literally to mean creating a Web of designs.

What I mean by that is that Web pages are about presenting the results surfers are looking for. More often than not, new visitors to your Web design will have found your page through a list of search engine results. More than ever before, your artwork, your Web design’s front page, needs to satisfy that surfer with results paired to the term they just searched for.

In other words, if a surfer types the word “tree” into a search engine, and a result pops up for your Web site that states: “This site is about the marvel of trees and everything relating to them! ” Then when that surfer gets to your site, it had better be about trees and everything related to them.

The content of your Web design needs to be related to keyword search results in a way that provides those results. If you don’t know what the keywords are that your site is being designed to serve, then you have no idea what Web design is about, even if you think you’re an adult expert on Web design!

If you don’t know Web design is a results based art, then you’re just like the mother who can’t recognize the genius of her own child. How could you possibly know how to groom your baby for the best results?
– Ian Hess

Web Design for Your Future Self

Web Design is About Profit

The greater the number of customers, the more profitable the Web design is. So why do so few Web design professionals spend the time to make their sites accessible to the disabled? The same Web design professionals who test their sites against every build of every browser on the market refuse to serve up accessible Web designs.

Web Design for the Disabled

I don’t mean to offend anyone. I’m just trying to make a point here. The disabled have to make a living just like everyone else. But, many of the severely disabled do spend a lot more time at home than others, and a great number of disabled people are retirees who often spend more time at home because they can! Granted, my father is retired and spends less time at home than he did during his career as a traveling salesman. But, I notice that his wife is always home because she has mobility issues.

Can you imagine the frustration of not being able to enjoy the Internet phenomenon in its fullest accessibility, just like non-disabled people do? Can you imagine the instant impact your site has on a disabled person when they find it is entirely accessible to them? Can you say returning client?

Accessibility creates a business edge! Why wouldn’t businesses be leaping to this competitive edge?
The Number of Disabled People Will Continue to Grow, So Should Accessible Web Designs

Not only are the baby boomers aging and retiring but we now also have a growing class of disabled veterans. Casualties are not as common in this war because technology can save the severely wounded from dying.

What could be more patriotic than creating Web designs that allow our nearly fallen men and women access to some of the tools that will allow them to function more effectively from home?

Home bound disabled people can live rich lives by taking advantage of home based business. But not so easily if nobody’s designing accessible sites.

My Personal Web Design Accessibility Gripe!

In all honesty, I like to curl up on the couch and use the computer to read news. Frequently I can’t read the small fonts on the news sites while further away from my monitor. So, I flick my browser’s menu to the “Largest” font size. But, these Web pages are, more often than not, set to use only the designated font size. I’m not exactly disabled and even I hate inaccessibility. I can’t even begin to imagine how frustrating this must be to someone with impaired and uncorrectable vision problems.

Multi-millionaires Are Just as Often Disabled as the Poor

I deeply respected one of the brokers where I used to work. His name was Tim. All his clients loved him. Tim was my customer service idol. He served everyone with immense grace, earning every dollar by falling over backwards for his clients. I recall thinking to myself that Tim was so rich he could easily get away with leaving some of his clients unsupported on a bad stock market day, as some brokers have been known to do. But this is the last thing Tim would ever do.

Because Tim knew I held the same sense about serving customers as he did, he would call on me, and only me, anytime he or one of his clients had a problem. One day he finally presented me with a problem that was too difficult. I had to come upstairs to his machine.

When I got to his screen it was set to “High Contrast, Extra-large.” All of the windows were gigantic, and all the colors were in black and white. This is an accessibility setting provided with Microsoft Windows for the visually impaired.

Tim must have accidentally set his windows to this setting when playing around trying to find a fix to his other problem, so I offered to fix that first…. It was exceedingly embarrassing to be told by him that he kept his screen on that setting because he was nearly blind.

The TRUTH About Accessibility Web Design

Folks, we’re all blind. We think disabled people are rare. They’re not. They’re everywhere. CORRECTION. We’re everywhere. I say we, because I hope to grow old until parts of my body slowly cease to function as I get every last moment out of this biological machine.

Yet, instead of accepting that the human machine is not always perfect, and all human machines eventually wear down, we stigmatize disability as if it will never affect us, personally.

Avoid designing for accessibility and you’re not only reducing your current profits due to an ignorant prejudice, but as well, you’re screwing your future self.
– Ian Hess

Erase That Data – How to Dispose of Hard Drives Safely

As time goes on and we hear more and more about computer piracy and the dangers that can be encountered when putting valuable information online, you may begin to wonder how safe the information on your hard drive really is. The truth of the matter is that when you delete information off of your hard drive, there is a good chance that it is still there and that it can be removed by people who are determined enough. Whether you are working with sensitive data, or you are looking to enforce better security protocols across the board, you will find that the more thought you put into this important aspect of data protection, the better off your company is going to be.

The first thing that you need to be aware of is that there are many different ways to remove the data from your hard drive or to otherwise render it unreadable, but for the most part, you will find that this involves destroying the discs and plates that hold the information that you have put on there. These discs or plates can be destroyed or you will find that they need to be overwritten, that is, that the information that you have put on needs to be overlaid with other information. In any case, you will find that a very thorough, very exacting job needs to be done before you can be sure that the data has been destroyed.

One way that you can dispose of your hard drive is physically. There are services that will grind up the hard drive physically for you and you will find that because this involves the physical destruction of the plates and discs that your data will be disposed of. Keep in mind, though, that even though this is something that you can take on, on your own, that it needs to be fairly precise. Even driving over your hard drive will not necessarily destroy the information! Many of the pay services that you can go to for this particular kind of hard drive disposal will actually cut the hard drive into strips before grinding it down to crumbs!

The other method that is used to destroy hard drives before they can be safely disposed of is magnets. Essentially, you will use magnets to destroy your data in a degaussing process. To do this, you will find that you are going to be using powerful magnets and laying them out on a clean surface. You will pass your hard drive over them several times, alternating the exposure of the magnets. While this is effective, you will find that it can be tricky to make sure that you get everything.

When you are looking at methods to get your hard drives ready for disposal, don’t forget that there are professionals out there who will help you do just that. This can go a long way towards easing your peace of mind and giving you the security that you need.

Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who writes for a number of UK businesses. For information on network asset recovery, he recommends Prodec Networks, a leading provider of asset recovery services.

What Hosting Services Are Available?

Websites with complicated applications usually operate with servers to run smoothly. Managing these servers is basically what an Internet hosting service provides. It ensures good upstream bandwidth for an operated website so that the website’s interface or control panels will quickly respond. It usually offers a combined variety of services, ranging from email hosting to DNS hosting.

Here are some of the hosting services that are limited to web applications:

Free web hosting service

It is usually advertisement-supported and easily enjoyed by personal websites. Understandably, it provides limited hosting service as compared to paid hosting.

Shared web-hosting service

A number of websites, ranging from hundreds to thousands, may be placed on the same server and therefore share a common of server sources such as RAM and CPU.

Reseller web hosting service

This enables clients to double as web hosts, facilitating various applications that accommodate individual domains. This type of hosting service largely varies in size and may have its own virtual dedicated server.

Virtual dedicated server

When a server is divided into virtual servers, it enables users to enjoy reliable servers, much like having their own dedicated server when actually sharing it with others. Hence, it provides users with their own virtual space or virtual private server.

Dedicated hosting service

This allows users to enjoy his or her very own server, enjoying full control over it. This type of hosting service is offered as either a self-managed or unmanaged hosting service. The great thing about dedicated hosting is that it offers the least expensive hosting service but the clients will be the ones responsible for the security and maintenance of their own dedicated box.

Managed hosting

This is the kind of service that provides clients with their own web server but not full control over it. It also allows clients to manage their data with FTS and other remote management tools. Managed hosting services usually do not give full control over the servers to prevent server modifications and configuration problems, which usually compromise the security and reliability of the web host.

Collocation web hosting service

This service is very similar to dedicated web hosting, only it gives the client colo server, the one that gives them the physical space that the server may take up. Usually, this type of hosting service provides the customers with electrical, Internet access and storage facilities for the server, but little to no hardware support. This kind of service is ideal for clients who require complex web hosting services. However, they would need their own administrator to visit the collocation provider’s data centre on site to do necessary hardware upgrades or changes.

Clustered hosting

This makes use of multiple servers to host to provide more efficient content resource utilization. This type of hosting service can create scalable web hosting solutions. It is also perfect for clients who are looking for high-availability dedicated hosting.

Grid hosting

This is a form of distributed hosting. This type of hosting service acts as a grid that has multiple nodes, allowing clients to be more organized in managing their servers.

Home servers

As the name implies, it is particularly designed for home use. It makes use of a machine that is installed inside the private residence, working with a consumer-grade broadband connection in hosting one or more web sites.

Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who writes for a number of UK businesses. For Business Internet Services and Website Hosting Services, he recommends Iconnyx.

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