Archive for September, 2009

Finding the web hosting service that’s right for you

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

With so many webhosting companies all vying for your business, how can you be sure the one you choose is the best one for you?

When looking into webhosting services for your website the first thing to do is to assess your own personal needs as they pertain to those hosting services you’ll want to consider. Small homepages will have vastly different web hosting criteria from the website of a large company for instance. It is also important to take into consideration anything you are planning on hosting in the near future as well and to take any potential growth into account so that you are not caught off guard by unexpected costs.

The next step in finding web hosting services for your needs is to compare the rates of different hosting companies. While many companies will offer temptingly low rates it’s crucial to know how much the prices will grow if your services and customer base expand.

Good technical support from your web hosting company is also critical to success. The ability to solve any problems quickly with the least disruption possible is key to the growth of your website. The best technical support you can hope for from a web hosting company is an in house 24 hours a day, seven days a week, phone & email, based in your home country service. It’s also worth finding out if the technical support is free or comes with a charge. Also, make sure the hosting company clearly defines “consulting” versus “technical support” as technical support will most likely be free while consulting may have a price tag.

You also need to know how fast your internet hosting company can provide access to anyone visiting your website. This is easily researchable, with the most obvious way being to visit other websites hosted by your potential web host, perhaps varying the time of day you visit the website and focussing on the times when you think your target audience will visit your website. The best webhosting services will offer high levels of uptime which should be a guarantee to motivate the company to keep servers up all the time, while providing impetus to act quickly if anything goes wrong.

You should also ensure that any web hosting companies you are considering doing business with offers the services your website will need in order to run smoothly. You may require services such as visitor counting, e-mail forwarding options, real-time chat and shopping cart functions among others and it’s a good idea to make a full list of your needs so as to not forget to ask important questions during your research of web hosts. You may also want to consider webhosts which offer unlimited bandwidth, in case you have a website with a lot of visitors daily. Also ensure that any potential web hosting company offers some sort of control panel to allow you to make changes to the way your website is hosted so you won’t have to work through customer service every time you need to modify a password or change an e-mail address, which can be an inconvenient and time consuming pursuit.

In many cases, particularly in business, your website can be your only opportunity to make a first impression and, as such, your web hosting company should be reliable, both for you and your customers. Once you have a detailed list of web hosts that can take care of the basic needs of your website, contact each of them for a more detailed discussion.

After all, careful consideration can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

Paul McIndoe writes for a digital marketing agency. This article has been commissioned by a client of said agency. This article is not designed to promote, but should be considered professional content.

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Great tips for designing your website

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

The designing of your website by yourself with website template or use a professional designer – Overlapping layers – when designing your website, layers can be quite useful. So, you must remember when designing your website.

It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day mechanics of designing and maintaining a website and poor organization just makes the job harder. Simply put, designing an awesome content rich website is not enough. Designing a Website can be made fairly simple by working with a company that specializes in helping small businesses create their Website or get Website software available online. Learn Some Basic HTML Adopting a DIY approach to designing your website will save you money and also give you a sense of pride and accomplishment at the end results.

If not – “pause” your campaigns and come with me…Your Marketing Objective Defines Your Strategies Business owners and marketers have a tendency to think in broad terms about their marketing objective by focusing on ones such as “generating traffic” or “designing a website. Layout: Layout is extremely important in designing your website. In designing your website, you should be aware of all the components that go into successful development and how to use them to your best advantage.

Many printing and business gift companies provide all the information you need to know about ordering, shipping and designing promotional mugs right on their website. Skills I have added are coaching, project management, designing instruction, building a website, teaching tele classes, and e-marketing. A great tip to creating that website is to reply on friends who are well-versed in web designing. Irrelevant Content Is King when designing your website, and is equally important to both of the major groups who will determine the success of your web site.

What mentioned above are just the “on-page” SEO factors that you must keep in mind while designing your website. Designing the video jacket, website, figuring out how to market the video and get publicity all while trying to lose weight (hard enough to do when you’re not stressed and food is your only vice). Unlike the Hollywood fairy tale of “build it and they will come,” designing a beautiful website isn’t enough. HTMLHTML is a common language for building and designing website.

If you’re all set for this website idea, but you don’t have the faintest idea of how to get started programming and designing such a site, then allow me to make a few suggestions. When designing your website, include keywords in the page titles, Meta tags and heading tags.

Designing Your Directory Structure The first step to implementing a website is to design the directory structure. Many printing and business gift companies provide all the information you need to know about ordering, shipping and designing promotional mugs right on their website. It’s not that difficult to build your own website and the reasons will convince you that designing a website that suits you and your market may lead to increased profits. Designing a beautiful website isn’t enough. Do some research first – including your competitors – what works, what doesn’t work and try to structure your goals before you start designing your website.

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How Multivariate Testing Can Change Your Internet Marketing Direction

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

Internet marketing has changed tremendously over the last few years; advances in technology and methodology have made online marketing the most effective form of advertising and promoting your business. With these advancements and the myriad of online marketing opportunities, how do you measure the actual success of your marketing plan or single advertising effort?

Until recently many online marketers gauged the success of their marketing plans by the number of site visitors, click rates, and conversions, and quite a bit of guess work! Testing the effectiveness of your web-based offers can be much more accurate by employing Multivariate testing modalities, such as “A/B Split Testing” or the “Taguchi Method”.

A/B Split Testing:

A/B testing is exactly what it sounds like, testing the difference in the return between advertisement “A” and advertisement “B”. This measurement tool is the simpler form of testing between the two modalities explained in this article.

A/B testing allows you to test two landing pages against each other in real-time. The two web-based offerings need to be almost identical; almost, meaning that you make just one change between the two versions or your advertisement or landing page. This one change can be just about anything; it can be simply changing the background color, text color, adding a photo or graphic, changing the text arrangement, or changing your headline. Both versions of your advertisement will be live at the same time, allowing you to compare the results of their effectiveness against each other.

The outcome of A/B split testing is pretty straightforward. You launch both ads, determine the length of time of data collection and then wait to collect enough data. Tracking the results can be done in-house; either manually by adding specific tracking code in your HTML, or with specially designed software. There are also free services like Google Web Optimizer, but either way, you’ll be able to strategically design your marketing campaigns based on the results.

The real beauty of split testing is that it allows you to increase your exposure by launching new marketing offers at the same time, without putting your optimization and ranking efforts at risk.

Taguchi Method

Taguchi method was developed by statistician Genichi Taguchi and was originally intended to improve the quality of manufactured goods, but online marketers have employed this practice in measuring the outcome and effectiveness of web-based offers and on-line advertising campaigns.

The Taguchi method is a system where, with a landing page, pay-per-click campaign, or other online direct response promotions, you test not one but many variables; you can use just about any element of the page, from graphics to font, colors to background images, ordering of bullet list items, the possibilities are essentially endless.

If you haven’t used the Taguchi method, try beginning your test with three headlines, three images, three body texts and three link texts. For test results to be accurate, you have to create nine different landing pages. Taguchi testing uses a mathematical equation to determine which headline, which image, body text, and link text works best. Obviously, the more elements you seek to test, the more valuable Taguchi testing proves to be, because you’ve already used the simpler form of testing, A/B split testing and at this point you want a more in-depth view of the search and shopping behaviors of your customers!

The method itself may seem extremely complicated and technical, but it is really focused on helping you test a variety of different elements simultaneously, so you can ascertain the best possible combination in the shortest possible time. This method also requires quite a bit of time to design and facilitate, and for those who don’t have that kind of time, there are a number of Taguchi vendors, experts and software available.

Multivariate testing goes far beyond just one campaign; it should be incorporated in your marketing strategy as an ongoing practice. What you learn from the likes and dislikes of your target audience could greatly enhance the success of your future marketing endeavors and in the end, the overall success of your business.

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Plugin Directory

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. In the directory you can find, download, rate, and comment on all the best plugins the WordPress community has to offer.

WordPress can host your plugin

You’ve got a cool new plugin and are hoping to give it some exposure. You’re in the right place. Just ask us to host it for you. You’ll be able to:

  1. Keep track of how many people have downloaded it.
  2. Let people leave comments about your plugin.
  3. Get your plugin rated against all the other cool WordPress plugins.
  4. Give your plugin lots of exposure in this centralized repository.

There are only a few restrictions:

  1. Your plugin must be GPL Compatible.
  2. It can’t do anything illegal, or be morally offensive (that’s subjective, we know).
  3. You have to actually use the subversion repository we give you in order for your plugin to show up on this site. The WordPress Plugins Directory is a hosting site, not a listing site.

It’s pretty simple

  1. Sign up.
  2. Within some vaguely defined amount of time, some one will approve your request.
  3. You’ll then have access to a Subversion Repository where you’ll store your plugin.
  4. Once you put your plugin (and a readme file!) in that repository, it will shortly be automatically entered into the plugins browser.
  5. Check out the FAQ for more information.
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Are all Internet Marketing programs scams? Not necessarily.

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

Not all Internet Marketing programs are scams or rip offs. I am one of the fortunate few who only experienced two disappointing online marketing ventures before I was introduced to a program by a long term successful Internet Marketer.It is a program that uses state of the art computer technology and today I am his biggest fan.

A Process At Home Rebate Program got me started with the very basics, so I’m grateful for that, but there is a better way for making unlimited income online through Internet Marketing and that’s the method I have been using since the latter part of June 2008. Which is why I am speaking out now – I’ve had time to test drive the program to see if it really works.

The first Rebate Program enabled me to learn the fundamentals like setting up my own email account (yes, I was that much of a beginner), blogging, pinging and being an affiliate, but the instructions that were supplied after I paid my money were vague, the software information was out-dated and the program presentation looked amateurish. That was when I felt disappointed the first time. If the program was as successful as it claimed to be, surely they could afford to update the software information and upgrade the overall presentation of the program. All of this led me to research into whether or not the “founder” actually existed. Luckily though, for more detail visit www.free-ad-system.com while I was researching, I stumbled across an article written by the successful Internet Marketer who recommended a much better way.

The online Internet Business I now use boasts state of the art computer technology, which has up-to-date demonstrations using inbuilt videos to show you “how” to set up your internet marketing business. If the program was as successful as it claimed to be, for more detail visit www.impacts-popup.com surely they could afford to update the software information and upgrade the overall presentation of the program. You are also provided with high demand top quality products to sell, from which you additionally earn a generous commission. Alternatively, you can market your own products. The decision is your’s.

If you are a beginner, don’t waste your money on anything else, otherwise it will begin to feel like traversing a mine field – you won’t know you’ve been done over until you’ve paid your money and it’s too late. I consider myself fortunate that I was only disappointed twice before I was introduced to this amazing Internet Marketing program. If you are more advanced than a beginner, you too will want to be involved with THE program that is at the cutting edge of Internet Marketing. It’s worth checking out, on both accounts.

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Features of Wordpress

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

The following is a list of some of the features that come standard with WordPress, however there are literally hundreds of plugins that extend what WordPress does, so the actual functionality is nearly limitless. You are also free to do whatever you like with the WordPress code, extend it or modify in any way or use it for commercial projects without any licensing fees. That is the beauty of free software, free meaning not only price but also the freedom to have complete control over it.

Key Features

  • Full standards compliance — We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today's browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.
  • No rebuilding — Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
  • WordPress Pages — Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static "About" page that you manage through WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site could be run off WordPress alone. (We don't for technical mirroring reasons.)
  • WordPress Links -- Links allows you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager.
  • WordPress Themes — WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.
  • Cross-blog communication tools— WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as they develop.
  • Comments — Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.
  • Spam protection — Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
  • Full user registration — WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.
  • Password Protected Posts — You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.
  • Easy installation and upgrades — Installing WordPress and upgrading from previous versions and other software is a piece of cake. Try it and you'll wonder why all web software isn't this easy.
  • Easy Importing — We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.
  • XML-RPC interface — WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.
  • Workflow — You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.
  • Typographical niceties — WordPress uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands. For information about the proper use of such entities see Peter Sheerin's article The Trouble With Em ’n En.
  • Intelligent text formatting — If you've dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name: if you have any sort of HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line indiscriminately, breaking your formatting and validation. Our function for this intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags, so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.
  • Multiple authors — WordPress' highly advanced user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.
  • Bookmarklets — Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.
  • Ping away — WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.

There's much more, but these are the highlights. If there's something that you really want, submit a request on the support forums and there's a good chance someone will whip it up for you.

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Basics-A Few Blogging Tips

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

Starting a new blog is difficult and this can put many people off, there are then other people who have blogs with no comments or visits. You want to stand out from this crowd of millions of bloggers, you want to be one of the few hundred thousand blogs that are actually visited. So here are some simple tips to help you on your way to blogging mastery:

  1. Post regularly, but don't post if you have nothing worth posting about.
  2. Stick with only a few specific genres to talk about.
  3. Don't put 'subscribe' and 'vote me' links all over the front page until you have people that like your blog enough to ignore them (they're usually just in the way).
  4. Use a clean and simple theme if at all possible.
  5. Enjoy, blog for fun, comment on other peoples' blogs (as they normally visit back).
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About WordPress

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.

About WordPress.org

On this site you can download and install a software script called WordPress. To do this you need a web host who meets the minimum requirements and a little time. WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything. There is also a service called WordPress.com which lets you get started with a new and free WordPress-based blog in seconds, but varies in several ways and is less flexible than the WordPress you download and install yourself.

A Little History

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.

2005 was a very exciting year for WordPress, as it saw the release of our 1.5 version (introduced themes) which was downloaded over 900,000 times, the start of hosted service WordPress.com to expand WP's reach, the founding of Automattic by several core members of the WP team, and finally the release of version 2.0.

After 1.5 we seemed to have something people really liked and we've experienced some fairly rapid growth. Here are some metrics for 2006 and 2007.

In 2006 we had 1,545,703 downloads, in 2007 we had 3,816,965!

As for plugins we had 191,567 downloads of 371 unique plugins in 2006. In 2007 there were 2,845,884 downloads (15x growth) of 1,384 plugins.

2006 saw the introduction of the first WordCamp in San Francisco.

In 2007 we adopted a regular release schedule, putting out major feature releases roughly every 3-4 months, or three times a year.

Because of the number of improvements in version 2.5 we took an extra 3 months on it, but 2008 looks on track to do three major releases again. It will be a very exciting year.

There are now dozens of WordCamps around the world, from Vancouver to Dallas to Milan, Italy.

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Do you know the In & Out of Blogging

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

Ever wonder why most all of the teens today are addicted to the internet? Well it has everything a young exploring mind needs. From browsing the net for document researches, shopping, cooking, gaming, chat, and a whole bunch of stuff going inside a websites offer. Yet, all of these including one secluded part of a teens life which is their journal. Do not believe me? Then try hooking up on the internet now and see how much there is that is available today. Aside from being a window for the readers to see what is on the authors mind, a blog lets him elaborate on facts or scribble out whatever idea that pops out his head.

A blog is a simplified term for WEB LOG, a new generation medium for writing articles, essays, statements and the like. It is usually composed of texts or sometimes pictures and multimedia topics. If you are tired of jotting down every single detail of your life is worth on paper, why not try the new fad of journalism which is blogging. Blogging literally means sharing a comment of life through the internet. It is an up to date source. A sequence of events. A timeless exhibit of creativity and style. An outlet for ones self.

The popularity of blog comes in different areas. Anyone can write anything that comes out of his head. Whether a walk on a sunny day or a dip into California wild waters, it serves as a diary and is readily updated.

What is good about blogging is that it is not bounded by editing and is cheap. The commercial velocity of a blog depends on a writers instinct to create a worthy article. Formative or informative, rational or irrational, for as long as the readers can visualize what the author has posted your blog is a hit. Technical specialties and skills, not necessary. Publishing freedom, an advantage. All that is needed is for you to have a witty mind, a desire to share ideas and part of your story, and a bit of knowledge to toggle into the internet. Grammatical errors are welcome. No editors and publishing companies to please. Journalism without rules or guidelines to follow and what is best is that readers could post a comment or be inspired to write one too. Logging would not be difficult if you have the right recipes. Not just a simple text article, a blog may be enhanced or converted into other types like an audio blog or a video blog. Nowadays, blogs are more sophisticated and advanced.

Element of a blog starts from a good and captivating headline down to the authors personal profile. Included herewith are the blog post, perm link and the readers comments. A friend of mine is a blogger. She would entertain herself by posting blogs on her web page. She told me that blogging is an advantage for her to speak up to the world of the things that is keeping her shut. And I quote, I am an internet junkie. I am not a big fan of journalism or any kind of writing. But it all changed when the blogging fever entered internet society. I appreciated it more when I felt everything that is written are real and not just a compulsory decoy to deliver information. Right then, I became a part of a bigger picture. Trapped in a world of unwanted opinions, blogging is a benefit. But everything has its own consequences. Blogs are much harder to manage than that of the broadcast media. In politically sensitive issues, blogs can be considered as a political misfit. Results are triggered through suppression of bloggers and punishments were made. Another grave case is the issue of defamation and liability.

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Sideblog Example

Friday, September 4th, 2009

Sideblog is a plugin for Wordpress Blog Platform. It is one way of implementing "Asides" - a series of "short" posts, 1-2 sentences in length.

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