Posts Tagged ‘blog’

The Right Way To Provide Your Website A “Face Lift”

Saturday, October 2nd, 2010

Springtime is usually a time of change, revival and rejuvenating growth. Why not utilize this wonderful season to your web site and give it a spring boost. Here are some tricks to get those brain cells moving.

#1  Modify font designs. Typeface designs have more effect on your prospective customers and product sales than you may realise. Utilize this chance to check the effectiveness of a handful of different font colors. It’s a simple way to change your website, provide a new look, while at the same time maintain a higher level of continuity and perhaps increase your revenue and conversions.

#2  Update your photo, or maybe add a picture if you really don’t have one on your website. A personal touch, like a photo or perhaps a personal audio or video message, is a wonderful approach to connect with these potential customers. People like to view who they are doing business with, who created the website including a photo or an image of you helps them come up with that link. Springtime is really a excellent time to update your photograph or update your audio or video message. Renew it and add brand new life to your internet site.

#3 Put in a social networking application. You can add a twitter feed, a connect with me on twitter, myspace or whichever social networking websites you have a profile on. These types of small feeds help boost your supporters and again they are often a personal link – individuals have the ability to observe what you happen to be posting

#4  Improve your banner advertising. If you are similar to numerous affiliate marketers or website owners, they look for a number of good banner ad campaigns strongly related their own niche, paste the actual code inside the sidebar and let them be. Unfortunately, these kind of banner ads grow to be stagnant. Right now is the time to evaluate the success realized from these banner ad campaigns and to update the ones that are operating and change the ones that are not.

#5  Add a brand-new technology. Information feeds, as they relate to your industry, really are a fun as well as useful technology you can to your website to incorporate a new spring lift. You can even add a brand new survey, competition or some other modest bit of interest which also serves to activate your target audience and/or give you important information regarding your customers.

#6  Update and make sure all your links are working.  This may be a tedious activity for those who have a great deal of links however, it is critical since a single broken link can send a visitor away.  The goal is to keep them on your website, right?!

Spend some time critiquing your site to find out wherever it could be enhanced. Discover technology obtainable and analyze your clients needs and difficulties. If you can boost the consumer experience on your web site and add value, go for it.

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Quiz: Every Page on Your Business Website Is a (Fill in the Blank)

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Maybe you are a new web marketer who doesn’t match my previous level of ignorance.  I often think, “If I had only known then what I am aware of now.”  By “then,” I mean my early year or two in my adventure into the quagmire of online business.  I could easily fill a large book with important things that I didn’t know how to do but that I attempted regardless.  In truth, I could fill a multi-volume set.  It’s a bit embarassing.

Occasionally I try to keep new online marketers from copying my mistakes.  Tips that if I had known them at the time I began my first Internet business venture I could have started making a decent income sooner, could have spent less time by doing it the right way the first time and wouldn’t have to tell embarassing stories about myself now. 

Here is today’s life-changing advice:  Every page on a web site is a landing page.

I laughingly believed that every prospect who came to my site would first come to my home page.  They would all digest the valuable content there and progress through my site in an orderly fashion, like third graders in line on their way to gym class. 

If I had been wise enough to engage a consultant to explain to me how Internet surfers actually locate my website and how they act once they get there, my sites would have been designed very differently.  I needed to either contract with an outside expert, take much more time to learn before acting or had someone with Internet marketing experience professionally build a business website for me–one that actually had a chance of meeting my goals.

My business would have reached a decent level of success much sooner if I had known these things:

*  Most people find their destinations by using search engines

*  Search engines don’t really care about entire web sites; they think of the web as a huge collection of independent pages

*  Each individual page on your site and mine should be authored in a way that it contributes to the websites main purpose (sell, obtain leads, whatever)

*  Having tracking software that would allow me to diagnose how real people move through my site’s pages

*  More quickly discovering that, cumulatively, the interior pages of my website receive more first time visits than my home page

*  Distinguishing between a pretty website and a productive website

*  Learning that spending some money early on can earn a lot more money down the road–and sooner rather than later

I actually love the process of designing the architecture of business websites, now that I actually understand it, so I probably would still not do what I recommend to you: Hire a professional Internet marketer to build yours.    Meanwhile, there were plenty of other tasks that I could have had done professionally to allow me more time for my learning.

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Build Your Website Using Your Web Hosting Account

Friday, July 24th, 2009

Let’s look at web hosting plans and how you can build a website using some of the free tools that are available inside your web hosting control panel.

When you’re looking for a web hosting plan you should look closely at the features offered, and one of the most important features is the control panel which is used to manage your hosting account. Popular control panels include cPanel, Plesk, WebAdmin and then some providers will have created their own. Whene deciding which one to use, make sure it offers an extensive free script library that offers blog scripts and also CMS (content management system) scripts.

The most popular control panel is probably cPanel and this usually includes the Fantastico script library. This provides plenty of useful tools and scripts which can be installed easily with just a couple of mouse clicks, and these can enable you to build a website without downloading any web design software.

Here are some of the most popular CMS and blog tools:

Wordpress is one of the most popular blog scripts online today. Install it through your hosting control panel’s script library, choose a template or theme. and you’re ready to start adding interesting content. Don’t forget to install an SEO plugin so your blog is configured to rank well in the search engines.

Drupal and Joomla can both be used to create large, feature rich sites that iclude blogs, forums, and even ecommerce store fronts. Both have hundreds of free plugins and templates available for extra functionality and both also have huge communities of users where you can ask for help or get advice.

Maybe you’ve considered starting a forum for your chosen topic, and if so take a look at phpbb and SMF which are both very popular free discussion forum script capable of handling thousands of members.

Look for these scripts when you are choosing a new web hosting plan. HostGator is a very popular hosting provider and you can save by using a HostGator coupon. They provide the scripts mentioned above plus more tools which will allow you to have your website up and running quickly.

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How to Choose a Hosting Plan for Your Site

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

So you think you want to start up a website.  Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation.  Next we will discuss hosting:  One of the critical decisions you will have to make is what type of hosting plan to use and what hosting provider to choose.

Once you have created the pages for your website, now you want to publish it to the internet.  To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan.  A hosting plan is different from a domain name.  You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan.  With a hosting plan you will be paying a service provider to publish your website on the internet for all to see.  Let’s go over some of the key important factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan:

SERVICE  The most important consideration is the level of service provided.  Bells and whistles and fancy features will do you no good if you can’t get customer service in a timely fashion.  After you have published, or “gone live” on the internet, the last thing you want is for the website to go down and become unavailable to potential customers.  Therefore should a problem occur it is important to select a hosting provider that is readily available and will resolve the issue in as timely a manner as possible.

UPTIME  What is the hosting company’s “uptime guarantee”? Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers.  That sounds great, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time, which means over 7 hours out of each month! The best hosting providers will have a track record of up to 99.9% uptime, which essentially guarantees you that downtime is negligible or even non-existent.

SIZE  How large is your site?  One of the determining factors for the price of most hosting plans is the amount of space required to store the website on their server’s hard drive.  If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.

LINUX OR WINDOWS  This question refers to the operating systems available for hosting and which one to choose.  This question has no relevance to the brand of operating system you are using on your computer.  The determining factor here is what programming language was used to design the website.  For example, if CGI or PHP programming language was used, the best choice for the hosting operating system would be Linux.  For a website designed with ASP, the best choice would be Windows.  For the novice user who is building a simple html website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on as you become more experienced and add more features to your website.

TRAFFIC  Will you be expecting lots of visitors to your website?  Most hosting providers sell their hosting plans on a sliding scale according to bandwith usage.  The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need, and the more the plan will cost.  The best advice here is to start off with a low cost, low bandwidth plan and upgrade it later as the traffic to your website grows.

 

SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING  The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way:  First a brief description of shared hosting, which is sharing space on a server with dozens or perhaps hundreds of other websites.  The main factor here is that you will have no control over the operating system, database structure, etc., and will have to work within the structure setup by the hosting provider.  Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space.  In other words, you would determine what operating system to use, what type database management software, what type of blog software, what type shopping cart, etc., etc.  This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a custom setup.  The bottom line:  start off with shared hosting if you are a beginner, until you are advanced enough to progress to your own controlled dedicated hosting environment.

At StartMyWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service.  The hosting plans that are offered include a variety: shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.

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Help! My Website Needs a Good Domain Name

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

A crucial building block in setting up a website is the choice of a domain name.  Whether you are building a site to advertise your local business, an e-commerce site, photo or video or music download site, information site, or if you want to start up a website to advertise your garage band, the entire undertaking begins with the registration of a domain name.

Next you might ask- “What is the best choice of domain name?”.  There are various factors to take into consideration.  What I mean by that is if your site is just going to be devoted to family photos and events, domain name choice isn’t as important as it might be otherwise.  Why?  Most likely in that case you’re not looking for lots of traffic, friends and family are your desired visitors, to keep them informed.  So your domain name choice in a case like that is not as crucial as it would be if you were looking for tons of traffic to the site.   

So you can name a website anything as long as it is only meant for a select few.  It’s only if traffic is a factor and you want to attract customers, and as many as possible, that the domain name you choose to register really matters.  So……

What if you want as much traffic to your website as possible?  What if you are looking for business on the internet?

The simple answer is, it pays to have a domain name that drives traffic to your website or company.  If your website is about car parts for example, do you really expect the average web surfer to remember how to get to your website if it is named “bobsthingsforsale.com” or some other unrelated name?  The best strategy is to find a domain name that directly relates to your business, whether it is the business name itself or related to the category of business.  For example, a car parts website should have a domain name like carparts.com or bobsautoparts.com, something that immediately associates the domain name with the theme of the site.  It’s all about branding, and making a lasting impression on the target audience or customers.

The WhoIs database contains all domain names registered, and when you are searching it will show whether or not your desired name is already registered.  I have conveniently placed a domain name search engine on StartMyWebsiteToday.com for this very purpose.  When searching for the domain name, the results given will instantly show whether or not the domain name is available, and if so, give you the option to immediately register it.  If it’s not available, several alternative domain names will be proposed, to help you fine tune your search, or possibly giving you an acceptable alternative domain name to register instead.

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