The Demo Site

by: John V. W. Howe

When evaluating the best web host, don’t get bogged down in evaluating the gigabytes and bandwidth of the various hosts. That is not what really matters in your decision about which is the best web host. Do you know what really matters?

All over the Internet, you read ads for web hosting that tout the number of gigabytes of storage and the bandwidth that the particular web host will supply to you. Do you think this is the real measure of what make the best web host?

These are measurements of hardware capacity and can be provided by any web host, good or bad. Web hosts that advertise in this manner are a dime a dozen. Many of them come and go in the Internet business.

Some of these are resellers of web hosting that do not own their own hardware, but resell space on the server of another web host and you do not even know it. You sign on with them, they go out of business, and you are faced with a problem.

Any web host can provide gigabytes and bandwidth since these are necessary for a web site to function on the Internet. However, there are many other services that the best web host should provide.

The best web site host should offer the following services:

1. Fast, reliable hosting
2. Reasonable cost for services provided
3. No initial set up fee
4. Domain registration included in hosting charge
5. Unlimited data transfer
6. Email customer support
7. Telephone customer support
8. Point and click page building
9. Unlimited web pages
10. Tools for brainstorming key words for your site theme
11. Tools for evaluating the supply and demand for your keywords
12. Assistance in building your web pages to make them search engine friendly
13. Uploading your own web pages if desired
14. Automatic submission of each new page or each updated page to the search engines
15. Page templates for your site
16. Customized 404 error pages
17. Automatic creation of Google and Yahoo site maps.
18. Inclusion of a blog site
19. Unlimited email accounts
20. Email forwarding
21. Email domain forwarding
22. Support forum of other users
23. Point and click custom input form creation tool
24. Unlimited autoresponders
25. Ability to upload XML code for RSS pages
26. Link exchange and link builder
27. eZine publishing tool
28. Email marketing list builder/distribution
29. Reports
a. Search engine ranking report
b. Traffic statistics and analysis
c. Click tracking and analysis
d. Keyword search report for search engines
e. Tracking of search engine spiders
30. Any other additional services

You should not expect to receive this level of service for the cheap hosting prices that are advertised on the Net. The low prices are “lost leader” prices to hook you and get you signed up. After you have wasted a year trying to build a successful web site and failed, then you will start looking for the best web host to help you build a successful web site.

Don’t waste that year. Spend the time to find the best web host before you start building your web site.

The-Best-Web-Host.com can help you make the important decision about which web host is the best web host for your new web site.

Good luck on finding the best web host.

Copyright 2007 John Howe, Inc.

About The Author

John V. W. Howe is an entrepreneur, author, inventor, patent holder, husband, father, and grandfather. He has worked with computers for over 44 years. He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics. His website http://www.the-best-web-host.com helps people analyze their needs and match those needs to the best web host. He also publishes http://www.boomer-ezine.com an ezine for Internet entrepreneurs.

by: John V. W. Howe

The old adage, "You get what you pay for" applies on the Internet just like in the offline world. "Free" is never really free.

"Free" is Not Free

"FREE" -- You see it everywhere on the Net. When you dig deeper, you always find that whatever the offer, it is not really free. It will usually cost you your name and email address on a sign up form for a newsletter or some such offer. At the very least, it takes your time to even check it out.

A classic use of "free" on the Net is in web hosting. There are many sites that advertise free web hosting. Now who can turn down a bargain like that? Being a frugal person of Scots heritage, I for one considered it until I really dug down past the top layer.

Historically, many of these hosts have started up and disappeared quickly. Poof, there goes the hard work you invested in setting up your website. Now you have to find another host and go through the process again.

Another group of the free web hosts began as free hosts, and then started charging for services with the hope that the users would pay rather than go through the hassle of moving their website.

Still others require the right to put some form of advertising on your web pages. This does not project a professional image to your viewers.

This is still not the major hidden cost of a free web host.

The real hidden cost of a free web host (or a budget web host) is the lack of services that the host provides.

Put yourself in the position of the CEO of the free web host. How much can you pay for support personnel if you are not charging the user for your services? How solid a hardware system can you afford to host the websites? How much can you invest to guarantee no downtime on the servers?

If the web host does not provide the services as part of your hosting agreement, then you have to provide the services yourself. This causes you to pay for the services or work long, hard hours to compensate for the free web host. Your time is worth money. You should be realistic in your accounting for your time as part of the costs of your business.

If you are not familiar with SEO (if you do not know what SEO means, then you definitely need support); if you do not know how to program in HTML; if you do not know about Google site maps; if you do not know what the new XML sitemaps file at Yahoo looks like; if you do not know about blogging; (the list goes on and on); then you should not be on a free web host.

Unfortunately, if you remain on the free host, odds are you will find that you are included in the over ninety percent of individuals who start out to make a living on the Internet and fail.

The ideal web host should provide you with a multitude of services that all but guarantee that you will be successful. Do you think that a free web host will do that?

The old adage, "You get what you pay for" applies on the Net just like anywhere else.

If you have a small website that is a personal toy or you need a one page site for a landing page, then perhaps a free web host is your answer.

When your website is a serious site that you intend for your income for years to come, be realistic, bite the bullet, and pay for the services that will give you every chance for success.

The decision on which web host to use is the most important decision that you will make as you launch your Internet business. It will spell the difference between success and failure.

Make this decision wisely.

For a review of the best web hosts go to http://tinyurl.com/3ahjkj

Copyright 2007 John Howe, Inc.

About The Author

John V. W. Howe is an entrepreneur, author, inventor, patent holder, husband, father, and grandfather. He has worked with computers for over 44 years. He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics. His website http://www.the-best-web-host.com helps people analyze their needs and match those needs to the best web host. He also publishes http://www.boomer-ezine.com an ezine for Internet entrepreneurs.

by: Colin Stables

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn't matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design -- accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I've come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high time to take serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I'd just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitor’s burden when viewing your site -- users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics -- user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it's illegible you won't be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct every time each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it's meant to do effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!

In Summary:

1) Avoid background music
2) Avoid Extra large/small text size
3) Avoid Popup windows

About The Author

Colin Stables owns and operates http://eBooksAtoZ.com.

by: Alex Armen

Hopefully, you have basic idea of what you want out of your website. The next step is to put it into some sort of order. Where do we start and where do we finish? It is a simple question, but the answer takes a lot of perspective and planning.

Assuming that you know what you want to include on your website, a simple organizational chart can put the layout into some semblance of order.

"Home" page is the front door or gateway into your website. One way or another we got the customer/client to open that door and come in. Now that they have taken that first step, we cannot afford to lose them due to confusion and not knowing where to go next.

A simple, uncomplicated flow of traffic from your major categories, to your sub-categories and from there, to each of your adjacent or lower levels makes it easy for the non-technical (and that happens to be most internet surfers), to get around your website and not become confused. On top of going from one category to the next, they must be able to maneuver with ease within each of those categories. You want to direct them to where, you want them to go next and not be jumping all over the place.

The layout that you see in this chart will become the basis for our navigation system. This is a major piece of the puzzle, which we need in order to put everything together. In essence, this will be your flow of traffic.

Organizational Chart.

This type of a Chart is as basic as can be. For all practical purposes, this is your road map. You are starting at Home and going to your first stop. This could be Products, Articles, Services, etc. Within each of these secondary categories, you have their own sub-categories, each of which should be relevant to its primary category. It is important to maintain the continuity that you want and not have the customer jumping all over the place.

No Excuse for a Poorly Planning.

A poorly planned website is one that does not permit you to navigate from one page to any other page on your site. For example, if you are on Page 4 of a site and want to go to Page 2, you should not have to go back to Page 1 in order to go to Page 2. There must be a smooth flow of traffic throughout the website.

If this is not poor planning and navigation, I do not know what is. There is no excuse for it. All it takes is a few minutes longer to properly layout your map. Regardless of the size of your website, assuming that it is more than one page of course, being able to move around your website easily is imperative. It is one of those little things that frustrate the customer and cause them to leave.

Think Like a Customer.

Just stop for a minute, sit back and think like a customer/client. When you are surfing through a website, consciously or unconsciously, you are thinking “how easy, hard, or confusing this website is to navigate”?

Usually in my talks, or articles you will hear or see me repeat, innumerable times, "Think Like a Customer". Very often we become so engrossed in what we are doing that we do not sit back and look at whatever it is through another persons eyes. A different perspective is imperative. Always get someone to give you an objective opinion and/or proof it for you. For a moment, you must stop looking at it under a microscope and give it a panoramic view. You will be amazed at how much you have either missed, left out, or should be corrected.

Armen Graphic Design is a relatively new company with a background in marketing and design. The company's foundation is based on the premise of K.I.S.S., believing that simplicity in marketing effects the greatest returns. CONTACT US FOR A FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION. Go to our website for more information and an understanding of how we work. www.armengraphic.com.

About The Author

Alex Armen

Armen Graphic Design is a relatively new company with a background in marketing and design. The company's foundation is based on the premise of K.I.S.S., believing that simplicity in marketing effects the greatest returns. CONTACT US FOR A FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION. Go to our website for more information and an understanding of how we work. http://www.armengraphic.com.

by: Bruce Alan

Are you just getting started in Internet Marketing and you want to sell something? Not having your own product, you decide to try affiliate marketing (selling someone else’s product). OK, great…but how do you do it?

You can buy hundreds of ebooks all with different “systems” or strategies and you can find lots of free information as well. Eventually though, you are going to realize that you will need to make some landing pages.

What are landing pages? Landing pages are where you want your visitor to ”land” and once there, you hope they click on your link to go to the sellers website where they will then buy the product.

Why not just link directly to the sellers website? Why do you need a landing page at all? Well, it depends on how you are going to get your visitor to the sellers site. A popular way is by writing articles, having them published, and having readers find those articles and click on the links inside them. The problem is that many article sites do not allow direct affiliate marketing links. They will allow links to your website or landing page but not directly to the seller.

You can learn a lot about landing pages by typing in “What are landing pages” in Google. You will find lots of useful information and tips galore on how to make great landing pages. But just like everything else on the Internet, after reading 10 or so different articles, you may be no closer to making one and confused about exactly what you should do.

I believe the best way to get started is by making simple landing pages that pretty much say to the viewer ‘here is the product and here is where you get it“. I don’t do a lot of “pre-selling” on my landing pages and many Internet marketers would disagree with that. The common consensus is that you should warm your visitor up to the sale by reviewing the item and/or telling them how great it is.

The problem with that is that it is difficult to write convincingly about something you know little about. Another problem for beginners is that their writing skills may not be up to par…at least not yet. That is why I recommend setting up something simple at first.

My opinion is that it is my job (or you might say the landing page’s job) to get the visitor to the seller’s website. It is the seller’s job from there to convert the sale. I sort of just open the door for customers to walk through and let the product and shopkeeper do the rest. If they can’t do their job, then I have to at some time move to another product.

I suggest opening a blogger.com account or Wordpress.com account (which are both free) and use those as your landing pages. Make your site as pretty and color coordinated as you can (some people will obviously be better at this than others) and do a lot of copying and pasting graphics and words from your sellers website. Only use one link to the seller’s website though, as using free blogs for marketing is frowned on and if you overdo it they could suspend you. Ideally you should get your own domain and hosting but that can be done once you start making money. If you have a Wordpress blog you can even go to YouTube and perhaps find a video about the product you are selling and put that in your blog. Looks great and I’ve done it.

Basically you are making a big advertisement that says “This is where you get so and so product”. If the people you drive to your blog want that product, then they will click on the link to find out more. Once they do that, you have done your job. Making a landing page is the easy part…..getting targeted traffic to your website or blog is much harder.

About The Author

Bruce Alan

Join me in my journey to Nuke My Day Job at http://www.DayJobNuker.com. All Newbies welcome

by: Steven Hancock

If you sell digital products online, there's a good chance that your products are being stolen. Here's how it works and how you can protect yourself.

A customer buys your product. After downloading their purchase, they visit a forum and post your download link for other members to use. By the time you realize what's going on, hundreds or even thousands of people have aready downloaded your product for free. Since a good number of these people would have probably bought your product, you end up losing a lot of money.

If you use PayPal, it can be even worse. If you don't encrypt your payment links, it's easy for someone to view your source and find your download page. They could also change the price and end up paying you $.01 for a $90 product.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Sam Stephens has written a powerful, secure script called DLGuard. This script is an easy and effective way to prevent link sharing, but it does much more than that. DLGuard completely integrates with ClickBank, PayPal, 2Checkout, AlertPay, PayDotCom, EBay, EA Script and many other third-party ecommerce scripts. DLGuard supports single item sales, multiple item sales and even membership subscriptions. It even helps you to protect and track products you're giving away for free and works with your autoresponder to help build a responsive list of customers. You can download DLGuard at http://urlfreeze.com/stevenh77/dlguard/

DLGuard prevents link sharing by giving each customer a secure download page. You can set this page to expire after a certain amount of time and you can limit the number of times a customer can download your product from this page. It also prevents search engines from indexng your download page, or worse, your actual product. Many search engines can read PDF files and convert them to HTML, so customers could actually be stealing and reading your product directly from Google.

While you can't prevent theft entirely, DLGuard does provide a lot of protection and prevents casual sharing of download links, which accounts for the majority of download theft. Get it now at http://urlfreeze.com/stevenh77/dlguard/

About The Author

Steven Hancock is the author of the Marketing Essentials blog.
http://marketing-essentials.blogspot.com

by: Jake Smith

Flash websites generally aren’t known for their ease of use. Nearly every site has a non-standard user interface, which can mean trouble for your surfing guests as they spend precious time getting used to your user interface.

One interface that most people who’ve used a computer for more than 20 minutes can handle is the drop down menu. Quick and easy to make when you know what your doing, they’re great for sites and projects that are built with expansion in mind. Add another item, add another option in one of the menus.

This example is actually based on a drop down menu flash file that can be found at http://www.jake-man.co.uk/ , a personal site of mine I made about video games consoles. As I collected more consoles, I needed to be able to add them to specific genre, based on the consoles processor. The drop down menu proved a great way to handle this, as I could easily add more items in as and when needed.

The clever part of this drop down menu is the “invisible button”, one of every flash designers best weapons! No matter what project I’m working on, I end up using an invisible button somewhere.

Basically an invisible button is simply a flash button, with no content in the first 3 frames, just one object/shape in the hit area. You can expand on this to add sounds in the “over” stage, so as a user rolls over the invisible button, a sound plays. There is a lot you can use them for, so it’s good to start using them as soon as possible.

What do I need before I start?

You’ll need Macromedia Flash 5, which is on the cover CD

How hard is it?

Easy – a knowledge of buttons and frame labels and movie clips should be all you need.

How long will it take?

10-15 minutes

Walk through: A 14 stage walk through of the software with a grab for each

stage and 50-60 words.

Stage 1

First things first… decide the size of your movie, frame rate and background colour. You can change these later, but it may give you some headaches if you drastically change scene sizes.

I’ve chosen a black background, a frame rate of 21 fps and a size of 120 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall.

Stage 2

It’s time to add our main menu options. For my console-related site, I’ve grouped everything by processor. 8 Bit, 16 Bit and so on. Add each menu option as separate pieces of text, might as well choose the font and colour now.

Stage 3

Select the first menu option, and hit F8 (or select Insert>convert to symbol… ) and name the movieclip something useful. For the “8 Bit” piece of text, I’ll name the movieclip “text-8bit”. Do the same with all the other separate menu option text.

Stage 4

Now select the “8 Bit” movie clip, and make another movie clip by hitting F8 again. Name this one “menu-8bit”. Edit the freshly created “menu-8bit” by double clicking on it (confusing at first, I know!) in the library and set up the layers as shown in the picture.

Stage 5

We’re now ready to start working on how our menu will behave. We need one frame for an inactive menu state, and one frame for when the menu item is clicked on. Add keyframes on frame 5, and add a label named “closed” in frame 1, and a label named “open” in frame 10.

Stage 6

We need a little bit of actionscript on these 2 labelled frames, nothing major, just a stop command to keep the movie from rolling along on its own. Add the command to each frame as shown in the picture.

Stage 7

Time to make our invisible button. Create a rectangle in a blank layer underneath the “8 Bit” menu option. Select the rectangle and hit F8 again, give the button a name, I suggest “button-invisible menu”. Edit this button, by double clicking on its name in the library.

Stage 8

Here’s the clever part… simply grab the keyframe in the “up” state of the button and drag it over to the “hit” frame. This should result in a blank keyframe on the “up”, “over” and “down” states, but a rectangle in the hit area.

The button will give no visible feedback in this state, but will act as a hot spot. Great for adding buttons to Photos or artwork…

Stage 9

…but we want to make a menu. So we need to add something in the rollover frame of the invisible button, so copy the rectangle from the hit area and select Edit>Paste in Place to duplicate the menu. Now you can change the colour, the transparency, add a sound effect etc. Do the same in the “down” frame too…

Stage 10

So we have our menu option in the first frame, complete with a button that needs a script… so click on the button once, open the actionscript window, and double click on the Go To command in Basic Actions. Select ‘Type: Frame Label’ and enter ‘open’ in the box, and uncheck the “Go to And Play” box.

Stage 11

In the “open” frame of our menu, we need to add the list of options that will appear when our “8 Bit” menu is clicked on. I’ve added a few names of some consoles… try and keep the first list item just under where the “8 Bit” would appear. Create a new layer at the very bottom and add a background square, so your menu blocks the other options when clicked.

Stage 12

In the layer beneath the menu options in the “open” frame I’m going to drag the “button-invisible menu” out from the library, one for each menu option and resize them to fit. The script for each of these buttons determines where the user goes when they click… in this case, I’m simply going to load another web page in a frame, you can see the script in the picture.

Stage 13

Finally, when the user “rolls off” the menu, we want to return to the “closed” frame. The best way to make this happen is to have 3 or 4 huge invisible hit areas to catch the users mouse. Create another invisible button as in stage 8, only filling in the hit area, and add the script to the new button as in the picture, then duplicate twice.

Stage 14

Repeat this for each main menu option you need. I followed the whole process 4 times for my menu. Be sure to reuse the invisible buttons as often as possible, as this reduces the final file size of the movie. After all, a simple menu doesn’t have to be over 200k!

JP74 Ltd, Digital Agency

About The Author

Jake Smith is Creative Director for JP74, an interactive digital media company based in Blackburn, Lancashire. For further information see http://www.jp74.com

by: Paul Kleinmeulman, PLR Expert

Believe it or not, many web marketers do not generate all their own content on their websites. Fact is that a lot of people actually use private label rights (PLR) articles and other materials (graphics, sales copy, templates, etc.) to help them get the content they need for their websites.

However, note one important item here:

Search engines do have a problem with duplicate content. And if you have duplicate content you may be penalized by various search engines like Google.

So if you are wondering how webmasters use the duplicate content on their sites and avoid getting penalized for duplicate content by the search engines, read on….

There are some popular tactics used by webmasters to help with search engines. For example, if you have PLR content that you have purchased, you can change it as needed. You do not have to do a great deal of changing to the articles to make the unique for your website. But you will want to be sure that you change the way the content looks and reads, and you will also want to make the content better as well.

The following are some ways that you can enhance and revise PLR content for use on your website and for your other promotional needs, like for use with auto responders.

Tip 1 - Trim it Down - You will want to trim down the article and get rid of any fluff. Try to summarize what the article is saying and get to the real point of the article.

Tip 2 - Use of Synonyms - Using synonyms, words that have a similar meaning, can help you make the content unique as well. You may want to use a thesaurus or dictionary, or a synonym finding within your word processor. Try to find the closest meaning possible so you do not change the entire meaning of the article.

Tip 3 - Change the Tone - Remember that PLR articles are written in the voice of someone else. Try changing the article to match your personality. A great place to start is with the title. You want to be sure that the title grabs the readers. Also change the body of the article and interject layman’s terms and some humor to make it reflect your personality.

Tip 4 - Rewrite - Taking a look at the PLR articles can help you get a basis for your articles. Then you can rewrite the articles adding some of your own knowledge and experience as well.

Tip 5 - Use Software - There is also software available that can help you to change the articles and edit the graphics. This makes it very easy for you to get fresh content.

Tip 6 - Change the Order - Changing around the order of the content can help it be more unique as well.

Tip 7 - Change the Intro and the Conclusion - Just changing the introduction and conclusion can be a great help. Remember that a great introduction can get the attention of your readers. Having a good conclusion is important as well, especially if you want to call your readers to action.

Using these seven tips can help you take PLR content and make it your own. They will help you come up with the best search-engine-friendly and people-friendly site content possible.

About The Author

Paul Kleinmeulman is the foremost private label rights (PLR) expert. Learn more about his Automatic Niche Profits at http://www.presssuccess.com/PrivateRights and save a fortune & a lot of time!

by: Neil Parnham

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages on your website

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use too many banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

Written by http://www.diyconservatories-and-windows.co.uk/ of http://www.digital-view-web.co.uk/

About The Author

Neil Parnham

Web Design - Programming and Multimedia Services at Digital View http://www.digital-view-web.co.uk

by: Jason Smith

Many website designers do not understand the importance of website design principles and elements. If you have been through educational training for website design you will know the importance of common design principles and elements, but most of us who create websites do not. You will be much better off if you do understand the importance of these things for your website design.

Keeping Your Website Balanced -

You can maintain the balance in your website by using colors that complement each other, such as a dark color for only a few things and a much lighter or even white color for the most of your website design. This keeps the balance in your website and makes it easier on your visitor's eyes. Having a website that just looks good is not good enough. You must also be constantly thinking about your visitors as you design your website, and maintaining a balance of colors in your website can make your visitors happier and want to stay a while.

Creating an Prominent Part -

If you want to make your visitors see one thing on your website before anything else, you will need to make it stands out from the rest of the design. You can use a variety of methods to create a focal point for visitors, such as using a different color, making it smaller or larger than other parts of your design, and even creating a specific shape for what you want to stand out.

The Lines in Your Website -

There are always lines in websites. Some lines are horizontal (which make the visitor feel calm), some are horizontal (which are more active, and others are diagonal (which are very active). The lines in your website can have a direct effect on your visitors. If you want to create a business website, use horizontal lines. If you are creating a website that is specifically made for kids, you can use the very active lines that make it fun for kids.

Website Color -

This is something that is very important for website designs. Different colors can make people feel a variety of feelings, and some can even bring strain to the visitors' eyes making it hard to look at the website, let alone read anything on it. Colors can either complement each other or clash with each other. Most websites have two to three different colors in the theme of their website. If the colors clash, it will not look so good. You should use the least amount of different colors on your website as you can. Too many different colors will look horrible and even confuse a visitor. You should start with black and white (white for the background and black for any text) and add in a light color if you want to.

Website Space -

You can create a variety of illusions with what you do with the space on your web pages. A lot of the time good website design is all about knowing what to put where.

This is a brief overview of a website's common design principles and elements. They all play an important part in your website's success.

About The Author

Jason Smith

For more information on custom website builders, advice, templates and help, please visit our webiste http://www.xsiteprowebsitedesignbuilder.com

by: Matthew Bredel

In order to get ahead of their competitors, most people spend so much time, money, and effort for pay-per-click campaigns, promo emails, and newsletters. Many online marketers give too much attention on convincing readers to click on links indicated in their ads, while very little focus is given to the structure and content of the web pages where those links lead to. To the reader’s disappointment, some linked sites barely contain significant amount of quality information.

If you would like to earn a bandwagon of prospect buyers, you need to create a landing web page that has good design and quality content. So how are you going to do this?

• Keep your articles clear and concise. Aside from their short attention span, most people who research online have limited time to spend in front of their PCs. Present your point in just two to three sentences, or you can write your points in bulleted lists instead of long and tedious paragraphs.

• Use the landing page to provide general product information. Include product photos, item descriptions, and price per product quantity or length of service. Short testimonials from your existing customers can also help.

• Do not direct visitors to your homepage if you are advertising for a specific offer. In this way, you’ll prevent your prospect buyers from wandering away from the possible purchase or sign-up actions that you want them to take.

• Utilize one landing page for every product or service. If you have enough resources, it’s best that you design a separate landing page and campaign for each product or service. If you offer a wide range of products or services, you can group them according to product or service type and then create a single landing page for each type.

• Indicate your clear call to action. Always place an “Add to Cart” link beside the item description and price list of each product or service. “Enter email to subscribe” can work for promo emails and newsletters, or “Click here to download” if your service includes access to files or software.

• Don’t ask too many personal details from your readers. Unless they’re making a credit card purchase for your products, asking for the users’ name and email address is enough. You need to assure the users that the information will be kept confidential.

• Don’t overdo your web design. Avoid flashy signs as they can pull your readers’ focus away from the articles in your web page. Keep a consistent look and feel to your site - it helps if you use the same colors, fonts, lay-outs, and navigation buttons all throughout your website.

Landing pages play an important role in maximizing your pay-per-click ads or email campaigns, so you need to dedicate a thorough effort to keep your landing pages clean and usable. It can be a rigorous procedure to go through, but it eventually pays off by increasing your site traffic and sales.

About The Author

Matthew is the founder of TheWebReviewer: http://www.thewebreviewer.com, Work from Home Scams, and NetWebVideo: http://www.netwebvideo.com, Work from Home Free Videos. Matt currently is located in San Diego, CA and is married with two children.

by: Laurence James

All websites want to be listed at the top of the best known search engines. Website developers and business owners alike understand that an effective site involves more than simply spending time and money on a good design. The overall goal is to get visitors to the website and then make it 'sticky', using good, solid content to keep them there. In this context, design is only used as a tool to make the content visually appealing to the target audience.

Boosting a company's web presence is a crucial aspect of any good marketing campaign, and search engine optimization (SEO) is how successful websites get visitors, and keep them. Search engine optimization is the art of striking a balance between the words and phrases visitors use in search engines when looking for information, with website content that is written to appeal to site visitors.

The first step in creating effective SEO copy is to determine what keywords or terms site visitors are using to find your website and/or your competition. By using tools such as Hitwise or the less expensive alternative, WordTracker, you can find common terms and phrases your content should be built around.

The top search engines, Google and Yahoo, also have their own useful tools for determining which keywords are being searched on, and how much traffic you can expect to get for certain keywords and phrases. It's often best to be very specific when selecting your search terms too, choosing multiple word keyphrases instead of single words. For example, 'SEO copywriting' instead of just 'copywriting'.

Once your keywords and/or keyphrases have been identified, the next step is to build effective copy around those terms. Building naturally flowing content around specific terms and phrases may take some getting use to, especially if the phrases are a bit awkward. Despite these limitations, try and produce quality sentences. The general rule of thumb is to always write the content that appeals to and caters to your site visitors, even if it's not perfect for the engines.

Discovering which keywords your site visitors are looking for is the first step in writing SEO copy. Writing copy that motivates and interests your readers, while keeping focused on the purpose of the website (based on these terms) is next. Writing effective SEO copy takes time and practice, but the end result is a major boost in both your site's appeal to visitors and its overall search engine rank.

About The Author

An English graduate from the University of Birmingham and professionally trained journalist at postgraduate level, Laurence James has been copywriting for over ten years. A Member of The Institute of Direct Marketing, he is also founder of The Copy Box - http://www.thecopybox.com

by: Mark Gerrard

Building a website is an undertaking similar to how you first started your business. You planned what you wanted and went for it. You put in the time and still do, to ensure that your business functions smoothly.

It’s no different with a website. You have to maintain the website because if you don’t the content (words and phrases) become obsolete and the information hungry website visitor won’t visit because there isn’t anything to keep them on your website. Nothing of interest translates into nothing of value.

When undertaking your website building, you need to ask yourself these questions:

1) What do I want my website to accomplish?

It is very important to know before hand what you wish your website to accomplish. For example, if you have a website that provides information for a specific disease, you may want your website to be the ‘place’ where professionals meet to give their opinions and write articles.

Other website business owners may wish their website to sell products and services. Research into what the numbers and other statistics will help you determine whether there is enough interest in order to justify owning a website.

2) How much am I willing to spend?

The cost of your website is also another important consideration. Obviously, you don’t want to spend an outrageous amount, although you don’t want to initially spend so little that in the long run, it costs you more to operate the ‘cheaper website.

3) Do I want to learn HTML?

Learning HTML is important to any website building, even if you choose not to build it yourself. Why? You won’t be held hostage and be paying for regular maintenance (that you can do) cheaper and with a sense of satisfaction. Learning HTML will also allow you to negotiate better in the long run because you will know what it takes to build, maintain, and create content for your website.

4) How much time can I devote to my website?

The time that you put into your website is important. Your website business success hinges on regular maintenance. Just like your vehicle, your health and anything else that has value, regularly devoting a specific amount of time will prevent major issues in the long run.

5) Are my expectations equal to what my website goals?

Sometimes we have expectations that do not seem in line with our goals. For example, if you wish to have your website ranked #1 within the 2nd day of having your website up and running, well that may be an unreasonable expectation considering that your website has only been ‘on-line’ for 2 days. Ensure that your expectations are reasonable and you will be able to satisfy those expectations.

6) Are my website goals attainable?

Your website goals need to be attainable. This step goes hand-in-hand with question 5. Without attainable goals, you’re setting yourself and your website business for failure even before your website goes on-line. Attainable goals may be modified after each is attained. For example, you may wish to increase your website rankings by 5 places by the end of the year by following a specific marketing plan. The key is to plan out how these goals are to be obtained and if they are indeed attainable.

These 6 questions are important when asking whether a website building experience will help you and your website business goals. By planning and mapping out what you want, you will ensure that your website building goals are on track to attaining the success you desire.

About The Author

Mark Gerrard is the Development Manager of the Freestart Website Builder Platform. See our website builder in action at http://www.freestart.com

by: Mark Gerrard

Operating your business requires the right amount of finesse, rapport with customers and the unshakable faith that you will succeed.

You’re a business owner and you’re always looking for new avenues of growth. You’ve been mulling over the idea of having a website ever since you went to your business development conference and they informed you that having a website will boost your sales and give you another outlet for your products or services.

You’ve performed your research; however, you’re more confused than ever. There seems to be so many different ways that a website can be designed, the computer languages it takes, uploading, downloading, FTP; so many names and so confusing.

As a result of so many businesses confused about what a website can do, an informal survey of prospective and current website owners was conducted. These are its findings:

1. Inexpensive Website Building
2. Professional Design
3. Have Access to Changes From Any PC
4. Customer Service With Real ‘live’ Human Beings
5. High Uptime (99%)
6. Network Status Availability
7. Common Control Panel

Inexpensive website building doesn’t mean that you won’t pay to get the job done right the first time. What it means is that you’re not going to spend $50,000 on a 2 page website. You expect and deserve value for your money.

Along with an inexpensive website, a professionally designed website or a website that looks professionally designed is also important. You don’t want an outdated design style because this will drive away prospective customers.

In order not to drive away potential customers, you also require the ability to provide changes to your website wherever you are that has Internet connection. For example, you’re on vacation and your Uncle calls you to tell you that something on your website isn’t spelled correctly and can affect sales. So you log on from your hotel and within 15 minutes the problem is solved. Can you imagine if you had to wait until you arrived home? By that time, your stress level would have increased and you would need another vacation!

Another area that tends to stress new and old website business owners is the ability to speak with a real person when it comes to customer service. Customer service and real human contact is important to forge real business bonds. This allows transparency of operations for the website company and provides another element of trust for the customer.

A website business couldn’t be successful unless the computers that are storing those files (hosting) are functioning 99% of the time. If those computers are down, that means that potential customers may not be able to reach your website and will look at another to get what they want.

Another important aspect is network status availability. This is related to high uptime. What network status availability means to you, the website business owner is that the network that connects those computers that ‘host’ your files is also functioning. For example, the computers may be fine, however if the network has issues, then those computers won’t be able to communicate with Internet users, thus resulting in potentially lost business.

Controlling your website and its content from one central area is also important. Usually, this is called a ‘control panel.’ This allows you to re-set passwords, see website statistics (number of visitors etc) and can help you manage the content of your website. This tool should be relatively straightforward and self-explanatory. It may take you some time to understand, however shouldn’t require a Ph.D. in computer science to operate.

These 7 steps can help guide you to having a successfully built website. Take a look at what your requirements are and don’t hesitate to ask whether these 7 items will be delivered. In order to eliminate the doubt, hesitation and lack of trust that can be associated with business transactions and website building, the website owner needs to be reassured that what they’re paying for, they’re getting.

With a successful website builder, your business can attain another level of success.

About The Author

Mark Gerrard is the Development Manager of the Freestart Website Builder Platform. See our website builder in action at http://www.freestart.com

by: Mark Gerrard

As a business owner, your initial steps towards building a website are usually ones of hesitation and doubt. You’ve heard the hype and every single business news and media outlet talk about this website and that website and all what a website can do for you and your business.

But what are your options?

You have several options if you are going to purchase a website package.

They are:

Hire A Website Designer

When you hire a website designer, you WILL get a professional looking website. However, what you’ll inevitably get is a very big price tag and a lack of control. You are at the whim of the designer and their schedule. Also, you’ll have to qualify them (many are sole proprietors or ‘freelancers’).

Pros: Professional looking website
Cons: Cost; scheduling delays; lack of control

Do-It-Yourself/Get A Friend

The Do-It-Yourself/Get A Friend option is very appealing at first glance. After all, you’ll learn a new skill. You learn how to code, how to maintain a website, how to build a website and all the infinite details. However, this all requires time. If you have the time, go for it. All the risk and rewards will be yours. Since you don’t have the time because you’re busy attracting more customers and focusing on the business, you decide to get a friend to help. Your friend tells you that they’ll get to it. A week later, you ask your friend how’s the website because you haven’t seen anything. So they tell you that they had a hard week at work and… You get the picture. Your friend’s time is valuable to them as well.

Pros: Potential to be very inexpensive

Cons: High learning curve; your margin is at risk because you are taking away from your core business knowledge and spreading yourself thinly. May damage your friendship because you’re managing your friend just like an employee. Your business image is at risk because you don’t know if the finished product will be professional.

Website Builder
When building a website, you look for these 4 items:

1) Inexpensive website building
2) Professional design
3) Have access to changes from any PC
4) Accessible Customer Service

The cost of a website is the initial sticker shock when thinking about website ownership. However, the cost can often overshadow what you require. For example, you require a registered domain name, a place to host your website (store your files) and the ability to control the context of your website from one central location. If the price appears too cheap for what they’re offering, then you may question whether you want to have your website hosted with that company.

You also want a company that will backup your data on a regular basis. A website company that also keeps abreast of technology that can help your website business grow is also important.

Website building shouldn’t be overly complicated. A website company that can help you build your website from the ground up with a focus on delivering your website professionally, inexpensively and on time will get your business 99% of the time.

Evaluate your website company and see what they can deliver. That’s the only way of knowing if they’re right for you and your website business.

About The Author

Mark Gerrard is the Development Manager of the Freestart Website Builder Platform. See our website builder in action at http://www.freestart.com

by: Fritz Dorado

Running a website is not an easy job; it takes some effort to make money online. There must be hundreds of millions of webpages out there struggling to be noticed by search engines and by their target audiences. If you are a website publisher who's eager to get your brand or service in front of the right readers, it would take more than just a good logo or business concept to get them flocking to and trusting your site. To grab people's attention and increase website traffic, you must provide something extra, something unique, something they may not find elsewhere. But the problem is, you may have so much on your plate as it is that you can't possibly provide grade-A content 100% of the time. Even great webmasters and website publishers need a little help sometimes.

If you think about it, no amount of black hat SEO or link wizardry will get you the long-term results you are really shooting for. High-quality content is what your target customers want. Skillful linkbuilding may build a lot of short- to mid-term traffic but classic content lasts a long long time. To make serious money online, you have to give your clients this content. Many website owners invest their time and money in web design and online promotions without even considering the importance of original content. Do you really want to look just like your direct competitor -- providing a mirror-image of their services to your readers and potential clients? High-quality content, as opposed to knock-off imitations and readily available templates, is crucial to a website's success. What you need are highly capable content producers who will drive qualified traffic to your website and give it some distinction. This is what competent and effective website copywriters are all about -- producing quality content for your website and help you make money online.

But before you hire, you must ask yourself what exactly you are looking for in a website copywriter. The following guidelines will certainly help you pick the best website copywriter to help you increase your online profits:

1. Can they produce quantity as well as quality?

This is extremely important; high quality content is imperative, and so is quantity. A constant and steady amount of high-quality material is an essential ingredient for a successful online business. A website copywriter has to be able to deliver both quantity and quality to make you money. With this in mind, you must ask them for a guaranteed daily quota. You would want a lot of work done in a short span of time, but you can't possibly expect high quality with that mindset. When you ask for too high a quota you will probably be sacrificing quality. Somewhere around 2000 words a day is average.

2. Will they be able to produce original content?

There are a lot of ways to ensure that your content is purely original. Ask the website copywriter for a guarantee that all written materials will be checked explicitly for duplicate content. To avoid plagiarism and other copyright issues, they must run their work through originality checkers such as http://webmasterlabor.com/tools/checker and http://copyscape.com, or other reliable duplicate content checkers available to them. Your content plays a very important role in search engine optimization. Passing off content that you can easily find in thousands of other sites won't help your PageRank or traffic at all. Original high-quality content is indeed the best way to optimize search engine results -- and a website copywriter producing original material makes it all happen.

3. Does the website copywriter have a back-up?

When you retain the services of a ghost writer for a long period of time (to produce blocks of content, for example), you must make sure that there are contingencies in place -- just in case they become unavailable all of a sudden. Having a back-up will ensure your deliverables. Moreover, you have to ask if the back-up is just as, if not more, capable than the original writer. You wouldn't want your content quality to nosedive whenever your leased writer is temporarily unavailable. Using a copywriting company, as opposed to a single freelancer, is your best choice if delivery and quality consistency are important to you.

4. Does the website copywriter have an editor?

Some website copywriters for hire could very well be their own editors. But wouldn't it be better if they had someone to help them with errors they could overlook themselves? Editors play a key role in this process because they make sure that the writer's work is delivered on time, every time. They check for grammatical errors, inconsistencies in flow, compliance with your instructions, and overall quality of the writer's work. Also, they function as project managers; they inform the writer of the topical and stylistic guidelines that the client requires.

5. Do they follow a quality-assurance process?

How can you be sure that you are getting materials that live up to your own standards? Would it cost you extra to send some back to the writer for revisions? Website copywriters should follow protocol as far as quality-assurance is concerned. First, they must submit a block sample of their work to the client. Second, they make necessary revisions after receiving client feedback. This process continues until the client gets what they want. Meanwhile, the website copywriter shoulders all costs incurred during these revisions. Quality-assurance like this will only guarantee the best results in output and client satisfaction.

6. Will the writer surrender full rights of the materials produced to the client?

All materials produced by a website copywriter must be on a purely work-for-hire basis. Ideally, the client assumes all rights to the materials obtained from the writers during the length of their employment or contract. Under the work-for-hire system, copyright ownership falls on the client and not the writer.

7. Can you, as the client, set the tone or style for the articles?

You can, as the hiring party, ask the website copywriter to follow certain parameters -- specifying demographics, for instance. As the client, you must also welcome the writer's preferences in tone and style for the job. To be able to work efficiently, you must allow them to make any suggestion that they think would cater to your audience better.

8. Will they accommodate your format requirements?

Ask for an OS platform-neutral delivery format so your text can be published correctly. These are usually in the form of .txt or .html files.

Website copywriters who offer these services and more will promote a business relationship that is result-oriented, stable, and consistent. With the best copywriter working for you, you can sit back, relax, and leave the arduous content work to them for a change.

About The Author

Fritz Dorado is a website consultant. For more information on website copywriters or ghost writers, visit http://www.webmasterlabor.com

by: Natasha Chernyavskaya

Unfortunately, there are many websites that may not be considered usable and push off lots of potential customers just because it's hard to find a menu, or a product price list, or to navigate through different sections. These looking little gaps sometimes turn out to be really critical, especially for small businesses, and have no right to remain unfixed. It's great if you have worked hard on functionality, but what's the use of it if no one will like to work with the site because it's inconvenient or ugly? Any web project has to be well optimized for search engines and on the other hand it has to be very simple to navigate, clear and easy to use.

Following tips will let you know what to look at when you are testing your website for usability. It's very important that you use a smart usability approach in developing of your website before at the time of composing a technical requirements.

Content

I believe that work with any project starts with content. Content defines a web site structure, and the structure defines the way a web site will be navigated. Clear and simple navigation requires certain graphic and technical solutions. Content always shows the most efficient path to building a project.

First put all your content on a paper in a clear and logical sequence. If this is an online store, it's pretty easy to understand what comes first and what follows. On every level of your site visitors have to be absolutely sure about three things: where they are, where they've come from, and where they have to go next. Your customers have to be one click away from the page where they either find information they needs or understand what they have to do to get to this information.

You need to think like a first time visitor. For example, if your products are soaps, body wash gels, as well as candles, and you believe that soaps is one section and candles and gels is another one, don't show your visitor candles first on the page a link to which was named "body wash gels". Don't be confusing ever, because the only one confusion may cost you a huge chunk of business.

One of the mistakes is to place as much information on one page as you possibly can. Maximum number of clicks to scroll down the page containing business information is 3. Ideally, your visitor has to click only once to get to all important information in one section. If all information you wanted to give your visitor doesn't meet this requirement, you either have to split it into smaller blocks and organize sub level sections under main menu, or rewrite the block so it would have only necessary information. Ideally, all your content has to be organized in different sections according to the logic of the content structure. If different sections of your website have a cross-related content, there should be weblinks leading to that related content.

It's a good practice to put additional links to documents outside of your project. Say, if you are selling a book about Beethoven, it will be good to have a link to related documents, like an official Beethoven fan website or an article in Wikipedia. This is a good practice, because Internet is based on linking. Help your visitors to find all the best they may need about information they are looking for, and they will appreciate it.

Think as your customers, help them to find all related information or links to the information they may need on your website, otherwise they will hit a search engine and find your competitor who will have it all. Don't be afraid that if your visitors open a link from your site they won't come back. If they liked your product, and want to do business with you, as soon as they are done reading about Beethoven, they will immediately get back and buy your book. Link! But be moderate; don't let your visitors sink in the ocean of links. 2-3 related links are enough per page.

And one last thing about links to additional resources. You don't have to do it. Do it if you like it, it's a good practice, but be consistent. If you did it on one page of your website, put it as a rule for the whole project. If you don't want to have another headache of linking, just don't.

When it comes to articles, the requirement changes. An article may take a several scroll down clicks space, but if it's too long (more than 5 Word pages), it will make sense to allow a visitor to download it in Word, PDF, or an archive (ZIP, RAR) or at least to break it into blocks and publish smaller blocks on separate HTML files. It will be also good for search engine optimization, because some of search engines like smaller contents.

However, the size of a page, especially when it comes to an index page, should not be too small. Experts say, that the minimum content on the title page of your website has to have at least 250 words. (as an example, it's just about three previous paragraphs.) It's not only important for the visitor's convenience, but also for search engines indexing.

Content Appearance

The common rule you have to follow - is to make it clear to your visitors what is going on, where they are heading, and how to operate the content. It's better if all links of your website are underlined, however, for a change, you may use another ways to distinguish a hyperlink from a simple text, for example, make it a different color. What's important is to be consistent and make all links on your website look the same. It's a bad mistake to let all your links to be underlined and one of a sudden make non linked text underlined too. Or make a button like image, which doesn't have a link on it. You should not allow any type of unclear signals on your website. In other words, don't mislead your customers because being mislead once, they will get disoriented expecting the site itself to be misleading, not the image you expect them to have about your business.

Test your site for colors very carefully. Remember that your website is not only being viewed, but it's also being read. Make it as convenient for them to read it as possible: choose contrast colors for background and text, font size, which is big enough. Very important what are the main colors of the website. It's easier to read dark text on light background, so if you have a lot of content on your site, choose dark on light color scheme. Some projects with little texts, especially artistic ones, such as photo portfolios, look really great on a dark background. Then you may use light font colors. But still remember about the contrast.

Bright colors are great, and it's very good if your project is bright. However, bright colors are never either dark or light enough to make it to a good background. So, if you want a lot of color on your website, make sure that it's either a background for a light color field with dark text, or just use those bright colors as elements in design of your project. Don't forget that eyes get tired easier if there are a lot of bright colors around the text, so if your project has lots of texts, try to limit bright spots by using them in small design elements.

Navigation

Navigation is very important, because that's mostly navigation which defines how convenient it is to use your website, because using is not limited by reading, it's also finding important information and operating the whole website. According to statistics up to 95% website dissatisfied visitors were dissatisfied by an inadequate navigation.

Whenever you decide to put your menu - horizontally or vertically, - the most important thing, in fact, is to keep your menu in the same spot on every page of your site, and keep its look the same. Your visitors have to know where they have come from, where they are, and how they may get back. Your logo or a name of your company, or a web project has to link to he main page from every document of the website except the main page itself. All links leading to the document you are currently at have to be disabled on this document, it means that if you are currently in Website design section, you won't be able to click on the menu item that leads to Website design section.

Don't be afraid of creating multileveled menus. It's better to break the content into the smaller blocks and create sub menus instead of filling your pages with tons of information. If you have a long list of products in the store matching a particular search criteria, it would be very nice to allow customer to choose whether he wants to see all items on one page or divide the list into fractions, for example, 10, 20, or 50 items on one page, and design a search result page according to this module.

Regarding online stores it's a very good practice is to show some important information about the product like size and price in the search result, and then to allow visitor to view a page with a bigger image and a full description of the product. When it comes to a complicated or multileveled structure of your content, especially when search comes in place, it's very important to have a comprehensive system of links, because when you lead a customer to more than 2 steps deep from the first page, he may easily forget where he came from and how to get there.

Besides a classic visual highlighting a menu item to show the whole tree of a menu structure, which is visible on each page of a website, there is a great solution which does not require an appearance of menu tree: paths. It's a line somewhere on top of the page, which contains the whole path your customer has made from the index page. For example, he is now in the section Womens apparel, sub section Tops, another subsection Cotton on a page showing a White Short Sleeve T-shirt. The path will look this way: Womens Apparel: Tops: Cotton: White Short Sleeve T-shirt. All items in the path have to link to their parent sections, so a customer always one click away from every section he passed reaching the document he's looking at, and one look away from understanding where he is, how he got there, and how he can get back.

It's very important to inform your visitor if the link leads to the document in different format rather then HTML. It will be a good courtesy to give them a choice of downloading a Word document, PDF, or an archive (ZIP, RAR) and make sure that you let them know it before they click the link. It's especially important if link will force launching an application. A lot of users may be discouraged by the fact that you are forcing them to do what they didn't agree to. That may be a big turn off. A good addition to this type of warning may be a size of a document which is being downloaded or type of application to be launched.

Here is the example:

Usability and Navigation: How to Make it Work. Author: Natasha Chernyavskaya. © Artographica.com. Download or open in PDF, 31,1K (if opened will launch Adobe Acrobat) Download in ZIP archive, 26,2K.

I personally don't like when a link opens in a new window, no matter if it's an internal or an external link. But no matter why you open links in a new window, warn your visitors about it.

To Splash or Not?

Some website owners like splash (intro) pages. Some are so obsessed with them so they insist on those intros to be a first page of their websites no matter what. The worst scenario it's of course a Flash or any type of movie when a visitor has nothing to do, but wait till it ends and then a link Enter a Site appears. If you have a splash like that, you may say good-buy to up to 98% of your visitors (and potential buyers!).

A moderate kind of splash is a Flash movie with a link Skip Intro that leads to the actual first page of the website. It's better, however, it will cause loosing big amount the customers as well. Researches say that no matter what your intro page looks like or says about, up to 95% visitors will leave without clicking Skip button, or finishing watching the movie, or reading the intro text if it doesn't contain any valuable information. Why having this type of intro on your website if your visitors hit Skip button anyway?

Some website owners believe that it's cool to have this type of Intro page. But, sincerely, what's the use of it? Most of these splashes are just sets of slogans like Our Company is the Best! Deal With Us and You Will Win! If your intro doesn't give any specific information about your company like what kinds of services you provide, how your client may benefit using them, how mush they cost, etc, your intro is completely useless. Even if you have all necessary information about your business in your intro, then you don't need a website. Besides, all this information has to be present on the actual first page of your website in text format anyway. So, why make your visitor read it twice?

Some of splash lovers also don't understand one very important thing: search engines can't read text you have coded inside your flash movies! And their job is to index the index page of your website. So, how they deal with indexing of your first page? They check it, find nothing and go away. Do you want the delay in putting your website in the search results in the search engines? No, you don't. Disliking splashes is the best you can do for your website.

A little bit about active content such as Flash movies with sound and any type of motion. It's a very bad idea to make your visitors listen something unless they decide to do so. Let me draw a picture. I'm relaxed at home, listening to nice music (the one I like!), navigating the net, looking for some products to buy or services to order. I click on your website's link in a search engine thinking that you may be a good match to what I am looking for and suddenly I hear in my headphones something I really don't want to hear - music or voice, it doesn't matter. Do you think I will get amazed by an incredible technology you have used on your website to talk to me? Or I will start looking for a switch to turn off the sound of your movie to be able to read your site peacefully? The easiest way for me to restore my peace is actually closing a window and forgetting about that website forever.

If you want to put some movie, interview or show on your website, you may do so. But it should not start automatically as soon as visitors open the page. You may offer them to view (or download) a demo movie, and if it's a "view". You have to provide visitors with an ability to turn it off at any time, change volume or play it again.

About The Author

Natasha Chernyavskaya
http://www.artographica.com

Total experience in Journalism and Copywriting 15 years, Web Design experience – 10 years, Web Consulting experience – 8 years, Public Relations and Advertising experience – 7 years, Management experience – 7 years.

by: Mark Scriven

If you are involved in the marketing of your company website then you may well have received a call at some point from businesses offering to create and submit a Google site map on your behalf.

The caller stresses the importance of a Google site map and the positive benefit to your site's positioning in Google. But just how necessary is it for your website to have a Google site map? The answer is "it depends".

A Google site map is a highly useful tool as it allows a website owner to 'tell' Google which pages it should index, and in which order of priority. However, if your site is already well positioned in Google then there may be little if any benefit to submitting a Google Site Map, and it is unlikely to have any impact on your existing rankings.

The real value of a Google Site Map is if your site uses complex technology, has poor internal navigation or delivers dynamic content and you are having problems in getting your content successfully spidered. On bigger and more complex sites using a Site Map could help encourage a deeper crawl and ensure that constantly changing URL's are indexed. It's also a useful exercise when you launch a new website as it puts it firmly on Google's radar.

If your site would benefit from a Google Site Map it's relatively simple and quick to put in place. If you have a small and uncomplicated site then you can do it yourself using one of the many third party site map generator tools that are now available(http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html). For larger and more complex sites this is something that your IT or development department should already have put in place. More information on Google Site Maps can be found here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html

About The Author

Mark Scriven is the M.D of Turismotec Ltd (http://www.turismotec.com), a UK based search marketing agency that specialises in the travel sector. Turismotec publish a bi-monthly search marketing newsletter called etravel.success. Subscribe here - http://www.turismotec.com/news_letter.html.

by: Fritz Dorado

The buzz on duplicate content penalties is almost deafening. Some people think it's a myth while others strongly believe that search engines are out to hunt down these so-called posers and give them the worst punishment possible. Regardless of their accurate definition, duplicate content penalties do occur. The bottom line is that search engines aren't big fans of duplicate content at all, so why even have it on your website?

The last thing any search engine would want is to give its users an unsatisfying search experience. They are doing everything in their power to provide optimum search results. By constantly improving their algorithms and filtering duplicate content, they are presenting their users with the most relevant and unique listings for search results. This is the main reason you use search engines in the first place. For them to work to your advantage as a website owner or blogger, you will need high-quality content that is both unique and informative. This way, search engine results related to your niche pull up your page as a primary valid listing.

How do search engines deal with duplicate content exactly, you ask? Google, for instance, uses a supplemental index found within its database that acts as a filtering mechanism. Basically, it weeds out websites and blogs that have duplicate content. They use spiders called Googlebots to collect and analyze similar content found in different web pages. They select a few of these web pages and present them in related searches. Meanwhile, those that are disregarded are placed in Google's supplemental index. This doesn't mean your site is thrown into the void, never to be found again; it is merely positioned at the end of search listings, which makes it almost impossible for search engine users to stumble upon your site.

Duplicate content doesn't do you or your site any good at all. You want significant traffic to pour into your site. The best solution to boost traffic for your site with SEO is to create original content. Writing unique content to your readers is like coming up with a remedy for a particular disease. People are always looking for something that would satisfy their curiosity, but if you give them information that they've already been hearing a thousand times over, then you are not really offering anything new to the table. A good website or blog thrives on well-written and originative content -- that is a fact. By providing original content, you are giving search engine users a pretty good reason to visit your site.

It isn't easy to come up with purely original content all the time. You do your best to write original content, but sometimes it still isn't enough. The good news is that there are tools available for you to maximize your original text output. The best of the lot, I would say, is a duplicate content checker. This tried-and-tested tool analyzes and checks your articles for duplicate texts. A duplicate content checker basically goes over your own material, checks it against other available web content, and hits you with a red flag if matching texts are detected.

All in all, without original content, your site could just be as good as invisible. Be seen and be a valuable source of online content. Write unique copies and use a duplicate content checker every chance you get. By doing so, you're sure to get some Google-love and, ultimately, a decent amount of traffic into your site.

About The Author

Fritz Dorado is a consultant with http://Webmasterlabor.com. She highly recommends using the duplicate content checker for better website content.

by: Daniel Sims

When the internet first became popular years ago, it was o.k. to get your neighbor's kid to design a website for you. Remember that? A page with a bunch of square pictures and fonts of different sizes and colors telling about yourself or your business. WOW! We thought that was something!

While that may have been acceptable 15 years ago, today you would be the laughingstock of the community. Below we list three easy ways to spot a bad website, or 3 good signs of a bad website. This list will help you avoid common mistakes make by beginning web designers.

Here are 3 things you need to check when designing your website:

1.) Consistency-A website should be consistent in design throughout all pages. You should not have a picture of palm trees as the background for one page and pictures of Egyptian pyramids on the next. Your website should flow seamlessly like a software program, not like a composite of 20 different sites piled on top of one another. Your font style and size should be the same on every page. It is best to use a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) to control your font sizes. However if you are not sure how to use one, just do your best to make sure that each page follows the same design standards.

2.) Components- Beware of using "free webmaster tools" for your guestbook, forum, or other site components. Such services often steal your hits, rob your traffic, and lower your Pagerank in the search engines. They do this because your visitors must leave your site to sign your guestbook, etc. When your pages are indexed by the search engines, they will not be listed with your domain. Not to mention the fact that they're usually ugly. With todays easy to use Content Management Systems, it is simple to download and install these components on your site. This not only keeps your visitors on your site, but it also helps you follow rule #1.

3.) Compatibility- Not everyone uses the same web browser. Just because your site looks good on your computer does not mean it looks good on others. Download Firefox, Netscape and a few other browsers. See how your site looks on them. Then set your monitor to a different resolution and try again. Make sure that you are not losing possible clients because your website looks strange in their browser.

If you are going to put forth the effort to own a website, you might as well make it look professional. Avoiding these three common mistakes in web design is a good start.

About The Author

Daniel Sims is Senior Designer at Simoh Christian Web Design, a website design firm that specializes in Christian Website and Graphic Design. Visit http://www.simoh.com. Contact at webmaster@simoh.com

by: Daniel Sims

When the internet first became popular years ago, it was o.k. to get your neighbor's kid to design a website for you. Remember that? A page with a bunch of square pictures and fonts of different sizes and colors telling about yourself or your business. WOW! We thought that was something!

While that may have been acceptable 15 years ago, today you would be the laughingstock of the community. Below we list three easy ways to spot a bad website, or 3 good signs of a bad website. This list will help you avoid common mistakes make by beginning web designers.

Here are 3 things you need to check when designing your website:

1.) Consistency-A website should be consistent in design throughout all pages. You should not have a picture of palm trees as the background for one page and pictures of Egyptian pyramids on the next. Your website should flow seamlessly like a software program, not like a composite of 20 different sites piled on top of one another. Your font style and size should be the same on every page. It is best to use a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) to control your font sizes. However if you are not sure how to use one, just do your best to make sure that each page follows the same design standards.

2.) Components- Beware of using "free webmaster tools" for your guestbook, forum, or other site components. Such services often steal your hits, rob your traffic, and lower your Pagerank in the search engines. They do this because your visitors must leave your site to sign your guestbook, etc. When your pages are indexed by the search engines, they will not be listed with your domain. Not to mention the fact that they're usually ugly. With todays easy to use Content Management Systems, it is simple to download and install these components on your site. This not only keeps your visitors on your site, but it also helps you follow rule #1.

3.) Compatibility- Not everyone uses the same web browser. Just because your site looks good on your computer does not mean it looks good on others. Download Firefox, Netscape and a few other browsers. See how your site looks on them. Then set your monitor to a different resolution and try again. Make sure that you are not losing possible clients because your website looks strange in their browser.

If you are going to put forth the effort to own a website, you might as well make it look professional. Avoiding these three common mistakes in web design is a good start.

About The Author

Daniel Sims is Senior Designer at Simoh Christian Web Design, a website design firm that specializes in Christian Website and Graphic Design. Visit http://www.simoh.com. Contact at webmaster@simoh.com

by: David Berghouse

There are a number of ways guaranteed to turn-off visitors to your web site. These are worth considering as you either design a site, or revise a site. Turn-offs generally can be defined as anything that impedes the user from quick and easy (intuitive) use of your site. Turn-offs also are often the result of gratuitous use of technical 'bells and whistles'.

One of the major turn-offs is a sloooow loading site. There can be a number of contributing factors to this:

* Large graphics files (meaning the file size in bytes). Graphics files need to be optimised to reduce the file size to a minimum to enable them to travel through the Internet in minimum time.

* Splash Screens. These are often Flash graphics and can take a long time to 'load', especially where there is limited bandwidth. Bandwidth is the carry capacity of the Internet, the bigger the faster - a bit like comparing a fire hose and a garden hose. Unfortunately in Australia bandwidth tends to be at the smaller end of the scale. Splash screens also annoy repeat visitors, as they revisit the site and have to wait for the screen to load (not everyone knows how to properly Bookmark).

* Excessively long pages. Pages should generally be no longer than three screen-fulls (scrolls). Also, bear in mind that most people scan web pages rather that read in detail (until they find the specific page they seek).

Other turn-offs include:

* Background music that automatically starts as the page loads. As well as slooowing the page loading down, your choice of music is unlikely to please everyone.

* Set a screen resolution too wide for the majority of computers in use. You would be surprised how many computers with 640 pixel x 480 pixel screens are still in use. So, set Table widths as a percentage of screen width, otherwise many of your visitors will be annoyed by needing to utilise the horizontal scroll bar.

* Requiring obscure 'Plug-Ins' as essentials to effectively use your site. A Plug-In is a piece of software that works in conjunction with a browser to display specific material, e.g. a movie clip, sound, etc. As your visitor probably won't have them, they then need to download the Plug-In and install it before they can continue using your site. Often people do not know how to do this.

* Endless little 'Pop-Up' screens that appear on top of the web page, particularly if they contain advertisements. Incidentally, if you are annoyed by these as a user of the Internet there are a number of pieces of software that can eliminate these, as well as banner advertisements when pages are viewed.

* On subscription and order forms ask for excessive information. Research indicates that response drops off almost proportionally to the amount of information required.

About The Author

© Copyright David Berghouse 2007
Helping Small Business use the Internet since 1995.
http://www.microbiz.com.au/

by: Mark Walters

New technology released in 2007 has made it easy for people to create their own websites and FTP upload entire pages from the tools in MS Office Suite 2007-Business Edition.

However, now that it is easy to make a website without FrontPage or DreamWeaver, there are still some elements of web design that you need to remember before publishing your site.

Tools

Both MSWord and Publisher can be used to create websites. But, like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, the page will not appear the same on every browser. Anyone who wants to create their own webpage needs to download Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox.

IE is the most popular browser in the USA. But, Firefox (Modzilla) is most popular in the world.

All images should be chanced to .75 dpi. This is easy using Window’s Paint.

There are several FTP publishers. These are software programs that lift your web pages off the computer and publish them on the Internet. This is the best way to load a website. Avoid the ‘easy’ tools.

Here is a quick guideline to help work at home business owners build a website which can earn money.

1. It’s about the content. The only way to get listed today is to have good content, updated at least once every two weeks.

Many new business owners build a website on a few dozen keywords. They believe this brings more traffic. Unfortunately, it works backward. Too many keywords confuse search engines, reducing the websites Page Rank.

There are no keyword search engines anymore. Today’s search engines are more concerned with inbound links. Instead of writing articles that have a keyword repeated a few dozen times, write an insightful article that solves problems for your readers.

The search engines not only know how many people click onto a web page, but they know how long they stay. Websites that keep readers for more than 30 seconds will rank higher.

2. Don’t sell. The web visitor is not walking into a store. They do not arrive at a website thinking, “I want to buy something.” Instead, most of them want to be entertained, or educated. The best way to sell from a website is to solve problems. This includes things like posting the cost of a product or service, and even problems and solutions.

Avoid the long pages of testimonials. These are so ‘out of date.’ Instead, add a forum to the website and let the ‘real’ website visitors leave their comments.

3. Make effective use of the title and description tags. The only keywords most search engines care about are buried in the Heading Tags. Word will imbed Heading tags into a web page.

Forget the Meta keywords. They rarely play an important part in today’s Search Engine Optimization.

4. Don’t design in Flash or use any other ‘cool tools.’ Many people do not have the tools needed to view these. If you must add a video, then upload it to www.youtube.com and paste the code onto your page.

Search engines cannot see pictures. This means that a page full of pictures will only reduce a page rank, not increase it.

Flash creates major problems with search engine indexing. There is no way for the search engines to extract content from the website as it is all contained with in the swf file.

5 .Instill a sense of well. One of the first things most web visitors will look for is proof that the business cares about them. They want something before they are sold. It is also important to have business contact information pricing, privacy information, shipping, problem solving FAQ, and even a personal blog from the ‘owner.’

These things will improve the success of any web based business, or work at home web site.

About The Author

Mark Walters is a third generation investor who guides others to financial independence through the Creating Wealth Club http://www.CreatingWealthClub.com

by: Sharon Housley

Stock photography websites contain thousands of existing photographs that can be licensed for specific uses. A customer who uses stock photography instead of hiring a photographer can save time, effort and money. Typically publishers can either purchase exclusive rights to a single image or they can purchase a subscription of sorts. The subscriptions allow publishers to download a limited number of photos over a specified period of time.

Stock photo websites allow webmasters, marketers and publishers to locate pictures for their marketing and promotional materials without the hassle of organizing a photo shoot. With copyright laws businesses must be very careful in using unlicensed photos.

There are also risks to using "free" photographs. Many of the free websites contain collaborative works from multiple photographers and artists. While the websites attempt to monitor the images in their collections in violation of copyright laws, there are no guarantees. If you opt to use photographs or images from a free portal, it is important to keep this in mind.

The following are a large number of reputable stock photo websites available:

Photo-Wizard.net - The Photo-Wizard's website contains thousands of fantastic, high-quality photographs, in more than 30 categories. Photos can be used on websites, in promotional materials or educational materials. The Photo-Wizard's stock photo directory is packed with eye-catching photos that will meet the needs of graphic designers and webmasters looking for exceptional quality images at reasonable prices. The site is filled with inexpensive, professional quality royalty free photographs. There is no longer a need to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a single photograph. Single images can be purchased for $.99 each or subscriptions can be purchased for $49.95 - $ 179.95.

Photo Wizard - http://www.photo-wizard.net

Photos.com - Photos.com contains professional royalty-free stock photographs available via a subscription. Pay only a single fee and download up to 250 photos from the Photos.com collection per day. The photos.com collection contains more than 325,000 professional quality stock photographs. Subscriptions can be purchased for $149.95 - $ 699.95 .

Photos.com - http://www.photos.com

ClipArt.com - The ClipArt website is exceptional, known for its large variety. You can filter images based on file formats, (photographs, photo objects or clipart) so only the specified format appears in the search results. Subscription can be purchased for $ 17.99 - $ 269.99.

ClipArt - http://www.clipart.com

Morguefile.com - The term "morgue file" is popular in the newspaper business to describe a file that holds past issues. The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for use in all creative pursuits. Photos on Morguefile can be used free of charge, but only for personal use; but are not available for commercial or business use.

MorgueFile - http://www.morguefile.com

PixelPerfectDigital.com - PixelPerfectDigital contains 4,000 images. The website uses a forum format to display the images, many of which are clipart rather than photographs. The images can be used free of charge for personal use.

Pixel Perfect Digital - http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/free_stock_photos/

StockVault.net - StockVault contains photos and logos that are free for non-commercial use. They have additional image packs available for fixed prices.

StockVault - http://www.stockvault.net

Free-Photographs.net - The Free Photographs Network is an online resource for royalty-free stock photographs for non-commercial use. The collection is very limited and a search function specifically for the site is not available.

Free Photographs - http://www.free-photographs.net

FreeStockPhotos.com - Photographs on Free Stock Photos can be used free of charge for non-commercial use, but the photograph must include credits to FreeStockPhotos.com when used on the Internet, in a web page, in printed publications, or in any product, advertising, or packaging. This credit, however, may be cropped out or digitally removed from the photograph if it is included in readable type near each photograph, group of photographs, in the text, or in the credits. The collection is limited and a search function is not visible.

Free Stock Photos - http://www.freestockphotos.net

FreePhotos.com - FreePhotos is a collaborative website that contains photos. The website contains many different image categories, but not a large variety in each category. In order to download an image users must register.

Free Photos - http://www.freephotos.com

ArtFavor.com - ArtFavor contains a limited selection of small high-quality photographs. The images are not available for commercial use.

ArtFavor - http://www.artfavor.com/types.php?type=12

FreeDigitalPhotos.net - The photos on Free Digital Photos can be used for commercial and non commercial interests. If the images are used for promotional items (greeting cards, mugs, t-shirts, screen savers) there is a $ 20.00 charge for the use of each image. Some images also stipulate that they require a link back to the FreeDigitalPhotos website.

Free Digital Photos - http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

FreePhotosBank.com - Free Photos Bank is a collaborative website with a number of attractive photos. Photos contained on the Free Photos Bank are from a variety of photographers and the reprint permissions may vary.

Free Photos Bank - http://www.freephotosbank.com

DesignPacks.com - Design Packs offers free, high-quality image collections that can be used in both personal and commercial web design projects. Each collection features a group of 15 images that share a common theme.

Design Packs - http://www.designpacks.com

ShutterStock - Shutterstock is a large subscription-based stock photo agency. They have an outstanding collection of premium, royalty-free photographs, illustrations, and vectors. Subscription can be purchased for $ 199.00 - $1,999.00 and allow subscribers to download up to 25 images per day.

ShutterStock - http://www.shutterstock.com/

ComStock - ComStock contains a large collection of royalty-free images. ComStock offers three purchase options images can be purchased individually, CD options are available or publishers can purchase a subscription for $299 - $1999.00 which allows them to download up to 50 images per day.

ComStock - http://www.comstock.com

These are all a number of options available for webmasters and publishers in need of images for marketing campaigns or packaging. Regardless of the website selected, be sure to read the agreement terms carefully to ensure that you are adhering to the guidelines.

About The Author

Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.