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Getting a website is not enough, being there does not mean that you will be seen. A lot of people imagine that once you get a website and visitors and customers will start pouring in. The disappointment from those high expectations hits them really fast, it only takes a month or two to realize that noone will come and knock on your door just because you have a websites. There are millions of sites on the web today and probably thousands of people own a website in the same nice you are. So you can imagine what it would mean for someone to find you and your website..
It takes dedicated effort, it takes knowledge and still in the bigger part it is testing and analyzing and then testing and refining your strategy and testing and analyzing again. After you have your website built there is a loop of Define → Measure → Analyze → Improve → Control → Define.
What that means is that you first have to Define your goals, your keywords, your niche. Then you have to Measure which keywords get the best traffic, then based on that measure what the competition is like, how many links they have and from what websites, how hard it will be for you to compete with them. Analyze is the process of constant monitoring of where your visitors are coming from, how long they stay on the website which parts of the websites they like and which they don’t, where are they leaving from. Looking for patterns and models, for gaps and flaws as well as for undiscovered opportunities, under-performance and over-performance based on your expectations. It is hard to define the whole process but the truth is that it is different for everyone, once you start doing it you will be able to develop habits of your own. The next part of the cycle is Improve. You have to use everything you found out when you where analyzing in order to improve the performance of your website and you have to apply Control in order to make sure that you will work on all of the key points that you spotted while analyzing your statistics and the plan that you made on what should be improved. Control is crucial, and it involves a lot of focus and dedication. A Rule of thumb is write it down and then follow it. You can’t remember everything. And then back to Define. Once you have the data from the first cycle you will be able to Refine and Define new goals and targets for your website.
Dominating the search engines becomes harder and harder, you have to really have unique product or service in order to be able to get the buzz out of people who can mention you in their social profiles like Facebook or Twitter, or at some community forums, or bookmark you with their favorite social bookmarking services, or link you from their blog or website… The other option you have is to go and do all that yourself, create the initial buzz but still if you don’t know what you are doing it takes some time to master the skills. And the other thing is at the end of the day it will be again all about the quality / uniqueness of what you have to offer. Even if you put huge amount of time and effort in promoting and marketing your services or products, if they are not really worth it you will only have mediocre results. One have to admit even that is better than nothing though..
The two cents in this story – get out there and work, experiment, analyze, test again and again, analyze, improve your performance, analyze again. To be honest it is an infinite loop, but in the process of doing it you will develop a lot of skills that will allow you to lead your niche. Reading about it is not going to get you anywhere. Take some action! Even the longest journey begins with a single step… Persistence is one of the most valuable assets you can develop on your way to online riches. Just do it!
CSS stands for ‘Cascading style sheets’ which is a computer style sheet language. It gives web designers the liberty of affixing different styles like color, spacing, font and so on to the HTML documents of a website. The work pattern of CSS is same as a template, styles can be labeled and then applied to many web pages altogether. Numerous benefits are associated with CSS like effortless website maintenance, easy access to alter the style sheets, SEO advantages, etc are associated with it.
Use of CSS in your websites can make a website more search engine friendly, so that your website gets higher ranking in search engines. The bots very well understand the cascading style sheets and makes a website score fairer in online rankings.
As far as nature of search spiders are concerned, they are very lethargic. They usually avoid going through lengthy and complex HTML codes for getting the indexes. The search engine spiders prefer HTML coding with CSS as they are precise and clear when compared to any other table based coding. Lots of over work is saved by these external style sheets. Primary reason behind HTML codes getting clear and yield higher search engine rankings are the CSS files which help in designing and deciding the attributes. Overall download time of the website is minimized as combination on CSS and Java script files decreases the web page size. Thus the indexing becomes faster leading your website to higher rank positions.
Application of CSS makes a website light-weight which is preferred by major search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Google. CSS eliminates junk HTML codes and keeps them well organized making them a favorite among the search engine spiders. Bots are not concerned with complicated HTML coding but the website and its content.
CSS works not only for search engines but also for the website visitors, as it gives a well-formatted look to the web pages. Visitors also prefer websites that have standardized format and do not have old fashioned and complex HTML coding.
Have you noticed how often when you open a website for the first time, how much time you need to decide whether or not you are going to continue with your journey on that website. Experts say it takes couple of seconds to the average user to decide whether or not he will read on, stay on the website and dig further more. If your design, color scheme and overall looks of the website cannot attract the attention or are too annoying the visitors will just click the X in the top right corner and carry on with your competitors website..
We are all aiming at better traffic volumes, better positioning in the search engines, better conversion rates. At least we should be if we are serious about our intentions and plans to develop the online side of our business or even turn our website in a full time business venture.
Apart from the design there is the accessibility and usability of our website. Those fancy terms are actually used for how easy it is for the average visitor to deal with our website, to find what he is looking for and finally make that purchase or whatever action you are calling for. The general understanding if you are selling a product or a service is that the users of your website should be able to reach it in 3 clicks. This means 3 clicks away from the homepage is ok, anything further deep down becomes difficult for the average person to cope with.
You should aim at making your website easy for navigation, with links to internal pages visible and well positioned, with easy ways of going back and forth without risking to be lost inside the website. Think of that – if your website is visited by someone that doesn’t use Internet that much, or a child, will he or she be able to find their way. If the answer is Yes then you are on the right track. If it seems to complicated then you have to find a way to simplify the whole navigation and design. Simple is better. There is a very useful marketing method called K.I.S.S. – Keep it Simple and Stupid. Stick to it. Do some tests, ask people to open your website and observe how they interact with it, ask them how they feel and based on the feedback that you receive work making your website better.
ew Post
It has been 10 days since Yahoo closed GeoCities – the free hosting service that they acquired back in 1999 for $2.87 billion. Rest in Piece GeoCities! After the news for Yahoo pulling the plug to their free service we started seeing a lot of GeoCities customers moving our way and we are Welcoming all of you that are looking for a substitute. Our Free Web Hosting service has a lot to offer.
What would we do without GeoCities we wonder… Where would we have put our brightly colored, constantly flashing backgrounds? Who else had rotating .gifs for links and neon green page hit counters? There is no substitute for your plethora of font colors and sizes, for your broken HTML codes and page badges… Anyway this name will always remain a symbol for the industry, and Internet relic.
If you’re a GeoCities user, you’ve been given plenty of warning, but you can still hop over there and get your data out today before current owner Yahoo turns out the lights.
Use the time while you are here and take a look at our Free Hosting plan.
Something big is on the horizon… Something expanding so fast that it’s shadow is starting to cover most of the fields, the virtual fields of the big players in the online market. Twitter is so rapidly expanding that one can hardly imagine what is happening behind the curtains.
The initial idea of Jack Dorsey that resulted in the development of Twitter is available on Flickr. This idea dates back to 2000, when Jack Dorsey signed up to Livejournal. The current wikipedia article on Twitter states that Twitter began as a research project in March 2006 at Odeo, a podcasting company. Now twitter works like microblog, social media, network, news distribution platform… well to be honest it is just Twitter! It works so well for 4 main reasons:
- It’s fast.
- It’s open.
- It’s easy.
- It’s two way.
Taking in consideration that recently Twitter signed a deal with Bing and Google to supplement data for live search results based in the tweets, we can predict a bright, extremely bright future for Twitter co. According to Alexa.com, Twitter is the 13th most visited website in the world. The description under it’s name in the Alexa Top Sites rating reads: Social networking and microblogging service utilizing instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.
At the time of this post Twitter has 86,322,844.00 accounts registered. Well it still has a long way till it catches up with Facebook with it’s 300+ million users but considering the fact that twitter only provides you with the ability to micro blog – i.e. update your status. It is far fetched that all of those accounts actually belong to real people. A lot of online marketers register hundreds even thousands of accounts in order to get better exposure and more visitors for their advertisements, still we have to calculate those accounts in the equation.
It will be exiting to see how Twitter will evolve, but one thing is for sure – the new generations will remember this name, and it is something that everyone who wants to do business online has to take into consideration when developing their future plans! You can find us @awpsace
The Domain Name is a unique, case-insensitive, name, consisting of a string made up of alphanumeric characters and dashes separated by periods, that the Domain Name System maps to IP numbers and other information; an identifier of a computer or site on the Internet; a domain — that part of a domain name which … (taken from Wikipedia). Long story short that is your online property – the address of your virtual office – your website. That is what people type in the address bar of their browser to get your website…
Domains are an important part of the decisions that we have to take when starting a website. Not that we cannot change it afterwards and move our website to another domain name or redirect one to the other but it is always better to think first then act.. this way we will not have to deal with all the problems that may arise later. Even though you can use a 301 redirect and use some of the options that the Google webmaster tools provide, in order to go through changing your domain name as easy as possible, but that will be a topic of one of our next blog posts.
Pick your name wisely. Most of the domains are already taken and to be honest the problem when picking a domain for your company is that chances are you will have to go for variations in order to make it sound close to the company name. That is one of the reasons many people pick their company name while researching domain names, the available domain names give them a basis to use when taking the final decision for your company’s name.
Picking a domain name for a personal website or just an informative blog you want to start is a different story. If you just want to write around a topic you feel passionate about you can go for keyword rich domain names. Having you primary keywords in your domain name can help you significantly in the long run success of your online venture, especially if you have serious intentions for developing it as a income source. If that sounds too alien to you we will develop that too in a series of posts in the near future, so make sure you follow us and stay up-to-date.
There are some websites that you can use in order to check for available domains:
NameBoy – doesn’t give you too many options but you can make combinations with secondary words
DomainsBot – nice tool, gives you the option to search for expiring and “for sale” domains
MakeWords - probably the best tool out there, gives you a lot of options. Highly recommended tool!
Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t noticed you can get a Free Domain Name for Life with our Web Pro Plus and Max Pack Plus hosting plans. You can compare them HERE
A website can really kick start your business, and give you that credibility that most people lack when starting a new business, especially if it a small business or if you are a professional of some kind – lawyer, accountant, dentist, vet.. Having a website can do marvels for you. But most of the time during this period, when you’re starting your business, most of us lack the resources to invest and all those related expenses become a burden. One of the expenses we face when we decide to go online is the hosting.
One way to deal with this issue is to use a free hosting service provider. Usually people don’t recommend that as an option because in most cases FREE is a synonym of lousy, causing lots of problems and hassles that may eat up your time and you may end up losing time and money.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. Free does not mean that it will not deliver, well at least we don’t think like that. We see our free service as an opportunity for webmasters, business owners, or individuals to start their venture in the online world. We are here to help them, by providing them with a free service that they can use to kick start their website and their online presence. Our flexible, reliable services are ready for you when your business starts growing and you need more out of your website. But for now try the Free plan ( Easy Starter Hosting Plan ) look around play with it and let us know what you think.
COMPARE OUR PLANS
One of the most ignored topics is the backup. Most of the webmasters take care of everything and they leave the backup aside. We know it’s not one of the most pleasant tasks but by making that effort today you could save yourself a lot of stress and hassle later. Before you lose all your website files stop for a minute, read this article and think about it.
EXPECT – We all had those moments where we think nothing can happen to us. As they say- expect the unexpected. It is always better to do so. With the proper mindset, you are insuring the continuity of your online endeavor in any eventualities. No matter how big and resourceful your hosting company is everyone and anyone can experience problems, after all when working with computers you can never be 100% sure. The best thing you can do is – to be ready.
SCHEDULE – Make sure you pick a time where you will have time, and when the website/ server is not overloaded. It’s is not a good idea to start the backup process when your website is most crowded, after all you don’t want to ruin the user experience and load times.
STICK with it – Most of the time backing up means being patient. So be patient and do it regularly. You don’t want to be left without some vital data just because you decided you can cut backing up for couple of days, or couple of weeks – depending on how often you update your website.
EVALUATE – test your backups. Find a place where you can make a recover copy and test if everything you would need is backed up. Backing up just for the sake of it without knowing if it will save you in time of need is useless. You do need a good and working backup so make sure you have one.
NO Complacency – Don’t be lazy. Don’t skip backing up :) Simple as that.
TRASH – Make sure you backup the things you need. Don’t backup things you won’t need as that slows down the process and it will take more hard disk space. Keep the things you need, the vital files and the files you will need in order to recover everything in a working way.
FRIENDSHIP – Have faith and know it’s your friend. Backing up is the friend you can rely on and when things get messy it will make you smile. Keep that in mind while putting the time and effort to backup.
AUTOMATE – There are software and scripts that can ease your life. You will not need to do everything yourself. Depending on what CMS system you use for your website you can do a search and find a solution there should be at least one to take some of the work off your back. If you are using a custom solution for your website, ask your webmaster about it.
LIBERATE – You will be able to feel liberated. When looking at your website from business perspective – as an income source, you will want to feel liberated by knowing your cash flow is secured. In order to do that – just backup! The feeling of being liberated from the worries of “What if..?” is a wonderful feeling use it a s motivator.
SECURITY – Keep your backups at couple of places – hard disks, flash drives, online storage. This way you will really be safe and sound. Back up and be safe, forget about the stress and be smart – start today.
The fall is coming and the leafs start falling and so do our prices.
Great news for those who want to invest in quality web hosting cheap. AwardSpace now offers 4 and 5 years prepaid hosting plans packages for prices starting at only $3.49/month. You can now take our max pack plus plan for only $6.99/month, which includes UNLIMITED disk space, UNLIMITED traffic, UNLIMITED domains hosted and 2 FREE domain transfers/registrations FOR LIFE. What’s better than buying quality cheap hosting with the US dollar being so low?
The 4 and 5 years plans are also suitable for serious webmasters that intend to invest longer time in developing a serious business online. We all know that Rome wasn’t built in a day and it usually takes more than 1 year for a new online business to take off.
The new packages are also good for people who have used our free service, found that this is exactly the type of hosting they need and want to upgrade to get the better deal. Existing customers already convinced in the quality of the service may also renew their accounts for a longer period and benefit from the lower price.
Any questions? Do not hesitate to contact us!
Our servers require SMTP authentication, which in plain English means you will have to use any of your e-mail accounts, created within the E-mail Manager -> E-mail Accounts section from your control panel.
You can see the code of an example contact form below(contact.html):
<html>
<head>
<title>
Contact form
</title>
</head>
<body>
<center>
<font size=”5″>
<b>
Contact form
</b>
<br>
<br>
</font>
<form method=”POST” action=”mailer.php”>
Subject:
<input type=”text” name=”subject” size=”20″>
<br>
<br>
Name:
<input type=”text” name=”name” size=”20″>
<br>
<br>
E-mail:
<input type=”text” name=”email” size=”20″>
<br>
<br>
Message:<br>
<textarea rows=”9″ name=”message” cols=”30″>
</textarea>
<br>
<br>
<input type=”submit” value=”Send” name=”submit”>
</form>
</center>
</body>
</html>
To have the form working you will also have to create a file called mailer.php with the below code:
<?php
if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {
$myemail = “youremail@yourdomain.com”;
$subject = $_POST['subject'];
$name = $_POST['name'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$headers = “From:Contact Form <$myemail>\r\n”;
$headers .= “Reply-To: $name <$email>\r\n”;
echo “Your message has been sent successfully!”;
mail($myemail, $subject, $message, $headers);
} else {
echo “An error occurred during the submission of your message”;
}
?>
If you already have a non-working contact form try adding the following variables and check if it works:
$mymail = “youremail@yourdomain.com”;
$headers = “From:Contact Form <$myemail>\r\n”;
$headers .= “Reply-To: $name <$email>\r\n”;
mail($mymail, $subject, $message ,$headers);
NOTE: The Reply-To header could be set with different variable than $email, depending on the contact form itself.
If your contact form already has the $header or $headers variable you will have to add the code with the following change:
$mymail = “youremail@account.com”;
$headers .= “From:Contact Form <$myemail>\r\n”;
$headers .= “Reply-To: $name <$email>\r\n”;
mail($mymail, $subject, $message ,$headers);
NOTE: The Reply-To header could be set with different variable than $email, depending on the contact form itself.
If you wish the messages from the contact form to be received in e-mail box which is not on our servers just replace the $mymail in the mail() function with the e-mail where the e-mails should be sent to.
