Overview of 30 website blunders

There are many reasons for which a website does not perform as it is supposed to. The reasons for this are as varied as the different aspects that are involved in the creation and management of a website.

The choice of hosting services can have a crucial effect on your site’s performance.

Ø  Free web hosting services provide limited facilities; smaller bandwidth, prohibition of inline linking, inability to upload certain file types, etc. All this limits the scope of your site.

Ø  Again a free hosting service makes it compulsory to place pop up promotional windows or logos in your site which irritates your viewers and decreases the professional appeal of your website.

Ø  If someone cannot afford to pay as little as $5 a month, then viewers may not find his services very reliable.

Ø  An appropriate domain name, which highlights the brand or services, is very crucial, especially from a SEO perspective.

The viewer makes up his mind to stay in the site in the very first page. For this reason it is important that your site does not have the following

Ø   Large logos that have little connection with the site theme or content.

Ø  Complicated videos or designs that take a lot of time to upload.

Ø  Boring and misleading opening quotes which do not shed light on the site purposes.

One must avoid the following while designing the site.

Ø  Complicated site plan which confuses the viewers.

Ø  Immature designing(designs must be smart and impressive)

Ø  Presence of visual components which take a lot of time to upload.

Ø  Absence of site map.(makes it difficult for search engines to crawl a site)

Ø  No site search features.

Ø  Complicated order placement procedure.

Ø  No contact address.

Ø  Absence of viewer capturing and tracking tools(wherein the visitors leave behind their e-mail address)

Ø  Bad navigation

Ø  Ugly graphics

Ø  No duplicate site pages.

Ø  Appropriate title and taglines.

Ø  External links to competitor sites.

Ø  Broken Links

Ø  Never ending home pages.

Ø  Unwanted pop up windows or alert boxes

Content of the site is also very important. The following could be the factors that make the content ineffectual.

Ø  Limited content

Ø  Lack of focus(tell the readers only what they need to know to pique his interest)

Ø  Formal tone(write in an  upbeat tone)

Ø  Not too technical or jargon heavy language.

Ø  Writing in never ending paragraphs (write in short crisp sentences that does not bore the visitor)

Ø   Plagiarism or photo or video copyright issues could get your company into trouble.

Ø  Grammatical mistakes

If above mentioned website blunders are avoided website performance will improve significantly.

Start Sampling for Free with the Start Sampling Website.

There is one Web destination that you should know about. The websites is known simply as StartSampling.com, and it can do wonders for your cache of freebies. If you are an avid freebie hunter, this is a website that you will definitely want to keep at your freebies by placing it on your active bookmark list. You will find that this is a fun and active community that you can consult on a regular basis for the best in online freebie sampling.

How Can You Become a Member of StartSampling?

If you are a newbie to the world of online sampling and freebies, here is a brief primer on becoming a member of this active community. First, StartSampling is a free service—never sign up for a freebie service that asks for monetary compensation or that requires a yearly membership sign-up. All you need in order to become a member of the StartSampling community is the ability to willingly sample many fine products from some of the company's leading manufacturers. As a member of StartSampling, you will receive samples as well as participate in the site's own Frequent Tryer Miles program. The Frequent Tryer Milers program allows you to collect points. You collect these points from participating in a variety of sampling programs and taking advantage of special offers and promotions. As a reward for participating in these programs, you will receive pints and gifts for free. This is your reward for being an active member of the StartSampling community.

How to Contact the StartSampling Company Directly:

If you find that you have questions and concerns about using StartSampling, you can contact the company directly by selecting the 'contact us' button that is located at the bottom of the StartSampling home page. However, you will probably find that most of your questions can be answered directly simply by perusing the FAQ section of the website carefully. The FAQ provides you with an extensive list of questions and answers that have been addressed and compiled by the company.

What Exactly Does StartSampling Do?

Many newcomers to the StartSampling community wonder if the company is a web research enterprise. In reality, StartSampling is a promotions and marketing company. They have recently managed to establish themselves as a leader in online sampling. They do this by connecting consumers directly with the right kinds of companies. As an active participant of the StartSampling community, you will have the opportunity to receive samples from companies that you did not previously recognize. Sampling also allows you to inform marketers about your specific desires and interests. This way, you will receive product and service offers that are tailored specifically to your interests. In effect, think of StartSampling as a way to make your voice heard as a consumer.

Where Do the Product Samples Come From?

With so many online samples coming your way, perhaps you are wondering where all the samples provided by this community come from. All the samples provided to you by StartSampling are furnished directly by the small and large companies that are working with StartSampling. These samples are provided to StartSampling because these companies believe in their products and want consumers to try them and express an honest opinion. Most companies are looking to receive consumer feedback from members of their targeted consumer group.

Who is Behind the World of StartSampling?

Many newcomers are curious about who is behind the scenes at StartSampling. StartSampling is a leading online company managed by small group of energetic individuals. It is a privately held organization that is growing at a rapid pace.

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Keeping Your Website's Content Relevant

Visitors and search engines love content-rich web sites, but just having a lot of content on your web site is not enough. It all has to be relevant to a main topic with each page or section of the web site having a specific theme (And yes, this includes any resource or links pages the site may have). Each page should have its own topic and content should not stray to a different topic.

If you are promoting your graphic design business and have a page on business card design, stay on the topic and refrain from using a page title such as "Graphic Design company in Vancouver, Canada - business cards, logos, letterheads". Your want the business card design to be the most important key phrase.

There are two main reasons for content relevancy. The first is so that visitors have an easy time understanding the flow of your web site. Visitors who have to search through multiple pages to find the information they're looking for won't be visitors much longer. The average web site user takes about three seconds to decide whether or not stay on a site. A clear idea of what your site is about should be apparent immediately, followed by easy navigation to other pages that display further topics in more detail.

The second reason for keeping content relevant throughout your web site is for search engine algorithms. Keyword relevancy is an important part of search engine optimization. The more relevant your web site's content is for a specific term, the more likely the site is to show up near the top of search results for the term.

Keyword density is another big deal with search engines. There is an optimal ratio of key terms to the overall amount of text that must be used for search engine optimization purposes. The more unrelated terms that are used consistently throughout the content will bring down the percentage of more important keywords. Keyword density matters throughout an entire web site, not just on certain pages.

Other areas to keep an eye on are the contact page, about us page, and any other pages that you may not think are important to have optimized for search engines such as advertising info, privacy policy, etc. For instance, some web sites have pages devoted to reciprocal links. There's nothing wrong with them unless you link out to a lot of unrelated web sites. The keywords that are used in the anchor text and surrounding description text will detract from your overall site content if they are not related. Incoming links from unrelated sites are fine, but keep in mind that the links page counts as part of your web site as a whole.

Consider using a reciprocal links page as more of a resource for visitors instead of a long list of irrelevant sites. This not only appeases search engines but your visitors as well. And as mentioned before, both visitors and search engines should be kept in mind when creating web site content.

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Shopping Cart Information For Website Owners

Do you own a Website and are considering a shopping cart? Would you like to know all there is to know about shopping carts? Keep reading to find out some very useful information that will help you decide if you need a shopping cart and what shopping cart features would fit your Website.

A shopping cart that is used on a Website is actually a series of scripts that keep track of the items your cyber customer is interested in purchasing until they are ready to checkout. The shopping cart itself does not handle any of the financial transaction, but really just holds the items that the customer has selected for purchase until they are ready to actually make the purchase. The information about the items they have selected is then passed on to a secure connection or payment gateway, which is a separate service from the shopping cart.

The payment gateway service then takes over by handling the requested purchases thought the financial networks whether you have a merchant account to handle credit card transactions or you use PayPal or some other software payment management system.

When deciding on what shopping cart is right for your business (Website) you will run into a lot of shopping cart applications.

Two of the basic types of choices you will run into when it comes to shopping cart applications is the free shopping cart versus the premium shopping cart. Before you start looking at shopping cart applications you should make a list of what you want your shopping cart to do. You should also know what your budget is for your shopping cart. When deciding about shopping cart features you should consider your current needs and your future needs. You should have room to grow in your choice of shopping carts. If your shopping cart won't grow with your business then you will find yourself making a change in shopping carts down the road and that change will cost you time; time that is precious to your business.

Free shopping cart options:

You can find some really good deals when it comes to free ecommerce solutions such as the basic shopping cart that PayPal offers. The basic PayPal shopping cart can integrate with many of the payment gateways and merchant accounts and PayPal are accepted all around the world.

There are no monthly fees with PayPal and you receive free fraud protection and you will not have to worry about charge back fees. PayPal offers Website owner’s easy to use tools that make implementing the PayPal shopping cart a snap.

Other free shopping cart software includes Zen Cart™, 1FreeCart, and AgoraCart.

There are many different premium shopping cart software out there including but not limited to Shop-Script, Mercantec Softcart, 1ShoppingCart Pro, and X Cart Pro.

Choosing a premium shopping cart software can help your business because many of the premium shopping cart programs allow you to accept checks, COD, and other methods of possessing payments; which gives your customers payment options. Some premium shopping cart programs will include wizards that help you to build your web page even if you don't know HTML. They may even come with templates and other tools that will help you to set up your online store. Really good shopping cart software will even help you to keep track of your inventory and generate reports for you.

A good shopping cart will also include a shipping tool that will calculate shipping costs based on parameters that you set and may even link to common shipping methods such as FedEx. Another valuable tool that shopping carts have is that they can calculate tax. Some premium carts will even let customers view previous purchases, which comes in handy for those repeat orders. A premium cart can even help with affiliate programs, coupons, gift certificates and other incentives that help to generate sales. Many premium shopping cart programs offer protection by encrypting information, and by processing credit cards through reputable processing services or by allowing customers to use the program without having to download cookies.

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Do Homemade Web Designs Look Too Homemade?

You have something to sell or a message to spread and you want a website. What should you do? Should you pay a lot of money to hire someone to do it for you? Or, should you learn the art of web design yourself. There are pros and cons to both sides of the fence.

The Do It Yourself Web Designer

If you do decide to learn building a website as a do it yourself project, you can save some money and gain some knowledge. Web design programs are out there that are boxed solutions that you can use to create your own brochure-ware type website or to even a robust online store. There are products that you can buy for cheap or on the higher end that can help you manage and create your website. You could even go with an open source platform like OS Commerce. Those with a bit of a technical aptitude might find the process interesting and fun.

The downside to this is that many of these web design software products either are too advanced for the novice user or are too simple and not advanced enough for the purpose you want it for. You could find that you are frustrated easily by the technical aspects of the software being above your comfort level or could find that the web design software doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that you were hoping for.

A word of caution: Don’t bother signing up for a free community website that’s hosted by someone else. The publishing on the website might be super simple but no one is going to take you seriously if you have a free website and are trying to promote a business on a professional level. A simple and hosted point and click website is ok for playing around but not for a professional business.

Hiring a Pro Web Designer

Hiring a web design company can be a great way to get a professional looking website and even your own online store. The downside here is that some of these sites charge a lot of money and when you’re a beginner web entrepreneur you might not have that kind of cash floating around. If you want professional results but don’t want to pay a fortune, you might choose to look for a freelancer. You can find them on webmaster forums and online bidding sites where you can create a service request and allow professional freelance web designers to bid on your business.

This can be a great option as you can control the pricing and see a professional web designer’s portfolio of work before you use their services. Some website owners do part of their web design. You choose the web designer that’s in your price range and that provides the quality you want. A word of caution here is that you don’t want to go based on price alone otherwise you might be unhappy with your results.

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Internet is the best place to search Free Information and Free Stuff.

Free Domain + Free Hosting + Wordpress + Adsense + Google= $$$

Internet is the best place to search Free Information and Free Stuff. To make it cash is depends on your creativity. In my first article I would to give you how a creativity could bring you some cash into your wallet.

I would explain in 5 steps

Free Domain

I consider you can build a website with SEO friendly. Now you should make a domain for your site. To get free domain you can follow this link Get Free Domain / Visit-http://imtiaztips.t35.com

If you already have a domain, do this next step Ok!

Free Hosting

There are dozen free hosting provide on the internet. I would recommend this sites for your hosting. Although Free Hosting they provide several feature almost same as paid hosting.

The features you can enjoy are:

>>Webspace 350MB

>>Bandwidth 100GB

>>cPanel Control Panel

>>PHP, MySQL, CGI, Perl

>>Subdomain, Domain

>>Technical Support

>>Host Unlimited Domains!

>>Free POP3 Email

>>Webmail Access

>>FTP and Web Based File Manager Access

>>500+ Website Template

Get Free Hosting Now!

Wordpress

If you don’t have Wordpress yet, you can download here. now you can uploading the file into your free hosting. Set your file according to Wordpress policy.Visit imtiazTips

Adsense

Before you register to Google Adsense you must write 5-7 article on your site. My suggestion is if you not have article originally you can search or googling, you can find free article according to your site theme, but you should put the writer or/and web resources.

Wait 24 hour to receive email confirmation from Google Adsense. If you are done, now you can add Google Adsense Code into your web page.

Google

This is the last step. If you want have a popular website you should submit into search engine like Google. Submit Site Now and / or directory.

Web Design Freelancer ImtiazTips different colorful designs, which create a special stage among other web sites. Visit also: http://plrarticlecollecton.50webs.com/ Related Links: Computers Technology & Internet Business[The Money making of a Niche ::Free Data Entry Work :: Imtiaztips Weblog :: Free Webmaster Articles :: More iPod Articles :: Download Freeware Software :: Updated Contents about Google AdSense for NEWBIES.]

Do Homemade Web Designs Look Too Homemade?

You have something to sell or a message to spread and you want a website. What should you do? Should you pay a lot of money to hire someone to do it for you? Or, should you learn the art of web design yourself.

The Do It Yourself Web Designer:

If you do decide to learn building a website as a do it yourself project, you can save some money and gain some knowledge. Web design programs are out there that are boxed solutions that you can use to create your own brochure-ware type website or to even a robust online store. There are products that you can buy for cheap or on the higher end that can help you manage and create your website. You could even go with an open source platform like OS Commerce. Those with a bit of a technical aptitude might find the process interesting and fun.

The downside to this is that many of these web design software products either are too advanced for the novice user or are too simple and not advanced enough for the purpose you want it for. You could find that you are frustrated easily by the technical aspects of the software being above your comfort level or could find that the web design software doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that you were hoping for.

A word of caution: Don’t bother signing up for a free community website that’s hosted by someone else. The publishing on the website might be super simple but no one is going to take you seriously if you have a free website and are trying to promote a business on a professional level. A simple and hosted point and click website is ok for playing around but not for a professional business.

Hiring a Pro Web Designer:

Hiring a web design company can be a great way to get a professional looking website and even your own online store. The downside here is that some of these sites charge a lot of money and when you’re a beginner web entrepreneur you might not have that kind of cash floating around. If you want professional results but don’t want to pay a fortune, you might choose to look for a freelancer. You can find them on webmaster forums and online bidding sites where you can create a service request and allow professional freelance web designers to bid on your business. This can be a great option as you can control the pricing and see a professional web designer’s portfolio of work before you use their services. Some website owners do part of their web design. You choose the web designer that’s in your price range and that provides the quality you want. A word of caution here is that you don’t want to go based on price alone otherwise you might be unhappy with your results.

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10 Great Tips On How To Design A Card

1. There are many types of cards you can choose from . Design the ones that you need or that sound the most interesting to you. Try birthday, anniversary, cards for children, wedding, sympathy, holiday or get well.

2. To begin the design you will need good paper. Look for pre-folded cards or use cardstock and fold your own. Using a bone folder is helpful here because it makes a very nice clean fold. There are several sizes to choose from, make sure you have an envelope to fit or be prepared to make one. There are templates galore for this type of thing.

3. Next choose a sticker or rubber stamp for the image on the front of the card. If using stamps, try different color stamp pads until you get the design and color you like. You can layer the stickers or stamped image on other paper to create a more pleasing design. Try using a combination of plain and matching patterned paper for this step.

4. There are embellishments you can use instead of a stamp or sticker. These are often dimensional and add a lot to the design of your card.

5. Make certain you have appropriate glue. Carefully consider the adhesive you want to use. A glue gun works well for heavy items but will wrinkle most papers. Glue dots and strips are handy for many design gluing jobs. I really like the glue stick that says"heavy duty" on the label, it is good for almost any paper and dries smooth and clear.

6. Design the words next. Think about what you want the card to say. Do you want the greeting or message on the inside or on the front of the card? You can use rubber stamps for this, stickers or computer generated greetings. There are so many fonts available that every card can be unique.

7. Lay your design out on the card before you attach the different elements. Check to make sure it all fits and that you like the design. Glue everything down and making sure all pieces are secure.

8. Now look at the inside of your card. If you are going to put a message there think about layering it on other paper to match the design on the front of your card. Attach these pieces to the inside of the card.

9. Check out the whole card now. Are you happy with the design? Does it need anything extra like colored brads or buttons? Is there part of the design that would look nice colored in with marker, colored pencils, chalks or watercolors?

10. I believe a card is not finished until the fiber is added, both inside and out. Matching colors from the design, take two or three strands of coordinating ribbon, yarn, metallic thread or wire and tie into a knot. Trim the ends so it looks the way you want it. Attach with your glue gun and you are done with the card.The envelop please! To put a final touch on your design decorate the envelop to match the card. Use your markers, chalk, stickers and stamps to create an envelop that is as gorgeous as what’s inside.

In very little time you can create a special and unique card and envelop using your own design.

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Website Design…Getting the Strategy Right.

The following tale must repeat itself a thousand times a day across the USA, and there is no telling how many times it happens across the world.

I am asked to attend a lunch with some of the principles of a soon-to-be-launched new venture. One of the principles, to whom I am known, believes that perhaps I could comment on some aspects of the company’s objectives.
As a good friend I return the favor for the lunch by commenting on those areas in which my friend was interested. Before we went our separate ways I asked my hosts what role a website would be playing in this new company?

Their response was heartening: “Our website will play a significant part in assisting us to achieve our objectives.”
How wonderful I thought, and so another question followed. “You have told me that you have contracted with a company to design your site, and that the design is well under way. Has your contractor involved you, or any of your partners, in any strategic discussion on how the site will take advantage of the considerable internet traffic that already exists for this industry?” (I asked this question knowing something about what their new organization was going to be, and how it was going to operate.)

“What do you mean Leo?” was the reply.

The next few minutes uncovered a number of disturbing details, but the most alarming fact of all, was that there had been absolutely no discussion of how this site was going to rank with the search engines, yet the design was well under way.

There had not been, nor was there likely to be, at this stage at least, any review of the strategic opportunities (and they are considerable), that could be exploited by Search Engine Optimization. There had been NO discussion on possible domain names, key search terms, the role of link trading etc. Why? The answer is simple. The company contracted to design the site has no concept of seo. It is neither an seo firm, nor does it have links with an seo firm.
The story would have gone something like this. Several months down the track somebody in this new company would have realized that there was valuable internet traffic that they could exploit. The principals would have come together and asked themselves what could be done about this? They may have even gone back to the company who designed the original site (in reality this company has done nothing unprofessional-they did meet their original contractual obligations), asking them how to accomplish the task of attracting their share of this internet traffic?

The contractor now tells the client that this will require some modification to the website and that they will set up a meeting at which the pertinent factors will be discussed. Hopefully the contractor realizes that in order to meet the company’s new requirements they will need the services of an seo firm? Now the client is involved in discussions that should have taken place months ago, long before the company was launched.

The client’s focus is disrupted, they are involved in additional expense that could have been avoided and they have a less than positive view of a growth industry that is contributing to America’s global market leadership.
The seo message needs champions

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Article Optimization - Directory Submission

It is a pleasurable challenge writing to Ezine and Article publishing Directories. This is the "sandbox" that most writers are contributing to today. More articles are written and show up as an entry to Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVist and other search engines than their are websites. Some websites are articles in themselves. It is much easier to write an article than it is to build a new website for most of us. The common person may not be able to do build their own website, but he or she may have the talent to be a successful writer. Think of the competition though! Thousands of writers writing about their content, promoting their website, and sharing their ideas. The numbers are overwhelming! There are a number of things that a writer needs to be aware of when submitting articles to develop a mass readership.

Article Optimization - If you want your article to show up on page number one of Google, it has to be optimized. Optimization is done by following some of the simple rules called "Search Engine Optimization".

Choose a high quality article directory to submit to. This will contribute a great deal to getting the article close to the number one spot. You can determine the article directories PR rating in Google ·by installing the Google task bar on you browser and going to the article directory website. Contributing your article to the directory is a very simple thing. You will have to provide personal information, possibly a pen name, your website url if you have one, and the category you will be writing about.

Use keyword rich content in the title, teaser, and body of the article. You have to do some keyword research and plug them in to your article every chance that you can. A good example in this article would be the keyword "article directory". It has to make sense when you use it. Once every paragraph or two and your readers will not get bored with the article and keep reading until the end of the article.

Use bold, italic, and underline when it seems appropriate with your keywords. Using Google, go look up some of your favorite keywords. You will notice in the list of Google links that the keywords you put in are in bold. Google picks up on the keywords. Let me repeat that, Google picks up on the keywords. In SEO Made Easy, the author indicates that not only does Google pick up on keywords, but Google picks up on keywords that are in bold, italic, and underlined.

Article Directories will let you place one to three incidents of anchor text in the body of the article. This is an excellent way to get a link back to your website! Google takes a while to do this, but eventually it will index the article and register the link. You can work in your keywords in clever fashion this way. If you have a website, and you are promoting your website in the article, this is the opportunity to use the keywords from your website. If the article directory allows the technique, html anchor text entries can be made in the body of the article as well as the bio. The reader would not normally know that html was being used. Of course the Article Dircetory has to accept html code for this to work.

Use anchor text in the article writers bio. Most Article Directories accept three, others will only allow you one. This is the sales pitch. If you have interesting content in the article, and have succeeded in convincing your reader that your contribution is worth investigating some more, they will want to go to your website and look some more! This is the author's sincere wish most of all, to gain trust and repore with his or her readers and to start a continuing business relationship. It can be done with a proper close to the article asking for the reader to "come on in, the water is fine!"

Article Writing - If you want your article to be read from start to finish, choose keywords and content that will make sense to the reader. Don't try to write about nuclear physics to a business crowd.

Determine your audience. This is done easily by entering your keywords into Google. Look at the number of entries returned. An article will be successful if you choose an audience that is not to large that you cannot compete against and not so small that you will only expose the article too few times to too few readers. When starting, it is a good idea to start with keywords that are getting about 30 hits a day at Overture. Normally there would also be less than ten million entries returned from the Google keyword search for your topic. Work on the larger populations when you get this down. You will find innumerable targets and keywords that you can do this with. There is no end to topics available on the internet. What a rich source of information!

Use original content when submitting to Article Directories. They have a way of finding out if your content is not original. Article directory submission guidelines always require you have exclusive license allows your name to be associated with the articles produced for you or by you. So don't do it. You will get caught!

Enjoy your writing! The world is open to to your ideas and more than willing to accept what you have to offer, if it is done the right way!

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4 Stages of Website Design

Stage 1 - Style over substanceThe first stage is to design a site that the chief executive officer, venture capitalists, and ad agencies like to see. There are all types of "bells and whistles" in this design. An entire site might be a Flash animated site. Or there might be some beautiful JavaScript mouse over effects or drop-down menus in the design. It's always a pretty design, but the message is clear - style over substance.

Stage 2 - Designing for online visibilityIn Stage 2, the reality of an ineffective web design begins to hit, usually around 3-6 months after the initial launch. A site will typically get rejected by many of the major directories, not be indexed by the major search engines, or not get the traffic or sales that were projected based on the various types of marketing strategies used. Typically, that's when companies decide that they will try to hire a professional online marketer to promote the site. Doorway page companies, in some way, shape or form, rear their ugly heads. Unfortunately, many web site owners fall for a doorway page company's pitch because the beautifully designed site couldn't possibly be the problem with low site traffic. Yahoo might have rejected a site, or the site might have been listed in Yahoo and the company cannot understand why they have no description next to their company name. But in no way would many ad agencies or doorway page companies want to tell potential clients the truth -- they simply did not design and write an effective web site -- because it would mean losing thousands of pounds in business

Stage 3 - Designing for your audienceBy Stage 3, after spending an exorbitant amount of money on pretty web site designs and various marketing strategies, web site owners generally figure out that they did not design or write an effective Web site for their target audience. Typically, web site owners will bring in a usability expert to analyze potential problems and present various solutions. Bringing in a search engine marketing expert to help with search-engine friendly web designs &templates early in the design phase can save a company thousands of pounds in online marketing costs.

Stage 4 - Site redesign After careful usability and search engine visibility analyses, web site owners finally have an effective web site. A site that is written, coded and designed for user friendliness and search engine visibility generally gets the most traffic and resulting sales because it was written, programmed, and designed for end users.

Web sites should always be designed with your target audience in mind, not your own personal preferences. Colours have meaning. Professional designers understand the psychology of colour and the use of white space to best project the image your audience wishes to see. (For example, try not to use the colour red on a financial site.) Understanding the products / services / information your target audience is searching for is paramount to designing and maintaining an effective web site. When you launch a site, you might have to make an educated guess as to what your target audience wants. After that, tools such as site statistics software and reporting from site searches tell you exactly what your visitors are looking for. Then content and marketing strategies can be adjusted accordingly. Unless the advanced technology clearly benefits end users, do not use it on your site. If your venture capitalists or CEO's or lawyers like the site, ask if they are going to spend the thousands or millions of pounds to keep you in business.

They're not. Your target audience who will ultimately determine the success or failure of your site.

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How to Put Video on your Website: The Basics

Video is an extremely powerful medium. If you use eye-catching videos on your website chances are you will capture your website visitor's interest. Moreover, if you put video on your webpages, search engines will love you and will push your website in the top pages of their search results.

There are a lot of ways to implement videos on your website. Let's discuss some basic issues in this article.
You have two options (from the website visitor's perspective) when you want to put video on your website. Either let the visitor wait for the download of the entire video file and then view it, or use streaming techniques to immediately start playing the video file when the page loads. Streaming video becomes more and more popular every day.

Many web designers or webmasters think that the process of creating a video, editing it and uploading it to the website is a pain. The truth is that it does take time to do it, but it's not that complicated.

What you should pay attention to, is the bandwidth usage. Videos are real bandwidth eaters. You should also be aware of the various legal problems that may arise if you use video files that don't belong to you.

So if you decide to put video on your website you may first think if the value of the video justifies the time you need to spent to prepare the video and implement it on your website. Will the specific video help the website visitors? What technique of video implementation is better for you?

For example in a slow internet connection (56 kbps), a 1mb video file will take about 5 minutes to download. Is the value of the video high so that a visitor with a slow internet connection will wait for the file to download?

In other words, if you want to put video on your website make sure it's a good one. One that adds real value for your website's visitors and enhances your website's quality.

Please visit: ImtiazTips- Webmaster Articles & Website Design, Development Tutorial for more information about web design.

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Your Website Really Needs a Physical Address

I see it happening all the time websites with no physical mailing address. It's as if they don't exist anywhere but in the scary world of cyberspace. I say scary because that's exactly what a high percentage of the web browsing population thinks of the Internet. When these people are looking to purchase a product and don't see a physical address, they get scared, and very likely abandon the purchase. And don't think that a typical email address for your contact information cuts it. People want a physical location.

So, what do you do? Simple. Use a physical mailing address as a contact option in your 'Contact Us' page and/or website order form. However, if you're a website owner that operates from your home, don't go and attach your home address to your website just yet, you might want to think about your mailing options.

Deciding where to have your business mail sent is not as straightforward as you might think. There are a few factors that you have to take into consideration quantity of mail received, length of time at location, convenience, and of course, cost.

The good news is that you have several options that are available to you:

Using your home address: Using your home address is definitely the cheapest option. To the small to medium size website owners, it is probably the best option. However, if you tend to grow rapidly, or if your website already has a large user-base, then your home address may not be the best option for you.

If you are selling products from your website and allowing customers the option to mail in their order (which is good practice – and many do), then you could potentially get a lot of mail, depending on the user-base of your website, of course. If this is the case, then your home mailman will not be happy with you at this stage! And you may also find yourself spending a half hour out of each day prying your mail out of your tiny home mailbox that is not big enough to accommodate all that mail. Furthermore, if you ever move you will need to forward your mail to your new location, which never seems to be as smooth as you'd like it to be.

Then there's the fact the all of your customers can easily find out where you live. Not that you're hiding from anyone! But you could find yourself in the situation where you have a few inquisitive customers that don't mind "stopping by" to ask a few questions!

Using a Mailing Services: The use of a mailing service can be quite expensive ($25-$45 per month). However, there are some benefits. You can assign a suite number or have a real street name assigned to your business address, instead of a P.O. box. This can give the potential customer the impression that your business has an office or building that resides at the location. However, I have found that the cost of this service usually outweighs the benefits associated with it. Nevertheless, the money you pay to use a mailing service is tax deductible as a business expense.

Using Mail Forwarding: Now, if you REALLY want to get fancy you can opt for the mail forwarding option. Here you can pay a company in a "big time" city like New York or Chicago to accept your mail and forward your mail to you. This is EXPENSIVE! And there is another major drawback - you are always getting your mail about 2-5 days late due to the forwarding time.

Using a Post Office Box: The use of a P.O. Box is, in my opinion, the best choice for those that run high traffic websites out of their home. Not only does your mail get to the P.O. Box more quickly, but also the cost is relatively cheap (about $50-$125 per year). Again, this cost is a business expense, so save your receipt and write it off!
In my opinion and experience, most people are accustom to the P.O. Box and do not mind sending orders to it. In fact, many big companies use P.O. boxes as a matter of conveniently keeping the mail separate.

There you have it, four good ways to make your customers feel more secure by adding a physical address to your website. Pick the one that suites you and your company's needs best – everyone is different. The important thing is to give your customers a place to send physical mail.

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Pay Per Play, Will you miss the boat?

The Pay Per Play opportunity is a great way for webmasters to earn money. People call it Pay Per Play because website ownersget paid when an audio advertisement gets played on their website. I like the idea of the Pay Per Play program because it's gearedtowards playing contextual or relevant ads based on what a website is all about. So if I have a sports related website then allof the ads played on my website will be sports related and the best part about the Pay Per Play opportunity is that no clicks are involved to make money.

The idea came from when Google started allowing webmasters to place contextual advertisements on their websites to earnmoney. This form of advertising has paid off for the publishers and has made webmasters very wealthy since its launch. Alot of people are expecting the Pay Per Play revolution to be just as successful as Adsense. I personally believe that Pay Per Playwill be successful but requires alot of people who do run across these kind of advertisement some time to get used to becauseinternet surfers are not used to hearing audio play from webpages to often unless they are on sites like YouTube.

The launch for Pay Per Play will begin February 1, 2008 and has already over 60,000 advertisers lined up to promote their productson relevant websites across the world wide web and have over 25,000 members ready to let the pay per play ads play audio on their websites that make them money. Could Pay Per Play be the biggest form of advertisement since the release of Adsense as far as the internet is concerned? I don't know but sure don't won't be left out in the cold if this is the next BIG thing that's hits the net and makewebmasters wealthy. Pay Per Play has announced that they will be shutting the doors to their program soon to all outsiders.

So my advice to you is if you want to know more about this once in a life-time Pay Per Play opportunity then visit http://imtiaztips.blogspot.com that's if the doors aren't shut already.

Who knows, maybe Pay Per Play might flop and be the biggest hype of the year. However, I rather be a person who joins the Pay Per Play revolution and have the Pay Per Play program flop than a person who doesn't have access to the program and watch webmaster make a lucrative income from the sidelines.

Building Your First Website - Things You Need To Know

Do you have a small business or idea that you would like to get on the web? This article will explain the basic steps to get your business or idea on the web.

There are many free ways to get an online presence but the best way is by having your own, unique, web site. There are a few thinks you will need to get this web site online but they are not very complicated or expensive.
The first thing you need is a domain name. A domain name is the address that you put in the address bar of your web browser. It usually looks something like http://imtiaztips.blogspot.com/. This is a unique name you will use to identify your business from the rest of the world.

The next thing you will need is web hosting. This is a service that lets you have a place to upload files and display them to the world when someone goes to your web site.

Once you have your domain name and web hosting set up, the real work begins. You will need to design a web site. There are any number of tools you can use to create a web site, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage, Notepad, or another similar program. Designing a web site requires, at least, some knowledge of HTML (or XHTML). HTML and XHTML are static scripting languages that you use to tell your web browser how to show your information. There are other languages you can use to create web sites such as PHP, ASP, and ColdFusion. These languages are more complicated and are used to create dynamic sites and interface with databases.

Designing a web site can be a daunting task. There is always the option of having a design company create you web site for you but that can cost quite a pretty penny. Another option is to install a pre-made web site script that you can administer from a simple administration. Some of these script include Mambo, phpWebsite, e107, and many more. A script like this, usually, still requires some knowledge of HTML and/or web design because they are highly configurable and require a bit of tweaking to make it look the way you want.

It may sound complicated to start a web site but it really isn’t. All you need to do is take a bit of time to read some tutorials and examples, that are freely available on the web. You can learn the basics in no time completely free of charge.

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Web Programming and Design: Images and Thumbnails

Let’s start with an example so you see where we’re going to with this article. Consider a listings type site; in this case, let’s think of a real estate website which lists properties. Each property has a picture. You have a page where you list all properties in a given neighborhood, about 20 properties per page. For each property, you display a smaller version of its picture (this is called a thumbnail), and a brief description of the property, so site visitors can click on the property they like to learn more about it. The problem is: this page takes really long to display in the browser.

There is a high probability that this problem is related to the images. You need to analyze how your site generates the thumbnails. In many scripts, the thumbnails are just the original pictures, but displayed in smaller width and height. If this is the case, then each picture takes too long to load. You should change this approach and generate real thumbnails of each picture. You also need to change your script to work with the images thumbnails, and not just the original big images.

There are different ways to generate the thumbnails:

1) Using a graphics program. You load the original image, and resize it to the thumbnail size. Then you save it with a different file name. For this approach to work, your script must let you upload the big image for each property, and also the thumbnail.

2) Your script can generate the thumbnails automatically when pictures are loaded, and save them on the server. You only need to upload the big picture. If your script is written in Php, for example, this can be accomplished by using Php image functions, which make use of the gd graphics library. These functions let you generate thumbnails in different image formats like gif, jpg and png.

3) Your script can generate the thumbnails on the fly and serve them directly to the browser. This will save storage space in the server, but requires a lot of server processing time. It is not recommended if you have many images, or if your site has many daily visits.

The important aspect to remember here is that you should not resize original images to show them as thumbnails, especially if you’re showing several of these images on the same page. It will not only slow the page load in the browser, but it will also use a lot of extra bandwidth you can save.

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