Articles « Professional Website Design

The Need For Banner Advertising

Banner ads are a great way to advertise your website all over the Internet. It is both cheap and effective and also quite straightforward.

Banner ads are one of the most common and oldest forms of Internet advertising although its usefulness is becoming increasingly overlooked with the increasing popularity of keywords. Nonetheless, there are a great number of options out there for banner advertising and the competition is often still as aggressive as ever.

The concept of banner advertising is indeed pretty simple. Basically, a banner is designed and placed on a webpage other than your own. If the banner attracts the viewer’s attention and s/he wants to find out more, then they will click on the banner which will redirect them to your website. A banner ad is generally based on a picture or company logo with an enticing advertising slogan superimposed upon it.

When a surfer clicks on a banner ad, not only are they redirected to the site concerned, but something called a click-through also occurs and every time the banner receives a click request, the online marketer earns money.

Banner ads are an efficient and cheap form of advertising and they greatly benefit the company concerned because of this. Essentially, they act like billboards in the real world, and although many people may not click on them, they will have learned some basics about your company and what it has to offer and may remember the name and come back to it later. However, unlike a billboard and the vast majority of other forms of advertising, banner ads are extremely cheap.

One of the most effective uses of this advertising method is to place the banner ad in an article such as the type you may submit to free online article directories.

In addition to these attractive reasons to market your company in this way, banner ads are also much more likely to be followed up by potential customers, since it is only a click away for them to your company website.

Google Indexing – How Long Will I Have to Wait

A very common question when people start up a new site is “How long do I have to wait before Google updates its database?” Unfortunately the answer is never an easy one to give and as such we thought we’d try and simplify it here for the benefit of the general public.

One of the first things you have to take into account when it comes to Google’s indexing service is how old your site is. If you have a new website or even an old website with no inbound links, then Google might take some time before it indexes your site. The average waiting period here can be anything from 4 to 8 weeks. For those who have just revamped an existing website that already has a couple of inbound links and had some basic SEO in place, that period could be much shorter.

So if you’re in the first category of old or new websites, there are a couple of things you should be paying attention to, to ensure that the indexing period is shortened as much as possible.

1. Spider Accessibility One of the main things to pay attention to when submitting your website for indexing is whether or not it is accessible by search engine spiders. If not, then you might have to review the code of your website.

To find out if this is you, have a look at the errors you receive in Google’s Webmaster Tools. In addition, it will be wise to include an XML sitemap of your website to ensure that Google’s spider finds all your pages.

2. On-Site SEO Is your website currently optimized? Now if you don’t know what we’re talking about, then it most probably isn’t and you’ll need to enlist the services of an SEO expert right away.

On-site SEO pertains to the optimization of a variety of tags in your website’s code as well as the optimization of content to ensure that web users will be able to find a specific page according to a set of predefined keywords.

3. Link Building This relates to off-site SEO and is probably one of the most important features of SEO. The reason for this is that if other sites link to you because your content is valuable, then Google will assume that you are a source of good information, thereby supplying its users with your website first.

There are a couple of things to be careful of though: too many links too fast could earn you a couple of penalties. As such the road to the top is best taken gradually.

It will also help to ensure that you familiarize yourself with other SEO-related concepts to ensure that your site is perfectly optimized. Getting to the top, especially if the amount of competition for your specific keywords is high, you might want to focus on other techniques to help you in the interim and that will also assist you with your rankings, such as link building.

Importance of Content

Introduction

Practically everyone on the internet trying to explain what makes a good site will say to you, ‘Content is King’ and ‘You need good content’, but we believe that this is still not taken seriously enough by the majority of webmasters. There are still too many sites around which have no real content, nothing original, or are just plain boring. What many people don’t realize, though, is that good content does more than just keep your visitors interested and give you a good site. It can also help you to promote your website.

Increasingly search engines are ignoring the traditional method of reading the META tags for keywords and descriptions, as these are often abused by users. Instead, search engines like Google now read the whole web page and use it to generate matches. It stands to reason that, the more pages and words you have, the more chance you have or being returned as a search result.

Similarly, if you have good content, other websites may link to your content and this will bring in even more visitors to your site. Links to your pages will also boost your ranking on Google, which counts links to your site.

The main reason for having good content remains, though, that it will make your website popular with your visitors and will give it a good chance of surviving and doing well. So how can you get good content on your website?

Write It Yourself

By far the cheapest way to generate content is to write it yourself. For a number of reasons, though, this may not be the easiest way to do it. Writing quality content takes a lot of time, and you will need a good knowledge of your subject to be able to write effectively on it. If you have the skills and time to generate content, though, this is really the best route to take. You will be guaranteed to have exclusive content and you will know that you have copyright permission to publish it. When trying to create a lot of content, it is a good idea to set a timetable, for example planning to write one article every week. Although this won’t seem like much at first, you will end up with a large amount of content at the end of it. Free Webmaster Help has been developed in this way.

Get Someone Else To Write It

This will save you a bit of time but could be harder to administrate. You can either ask friends/relatives/employees to write some content for you (this works especially well on fan/community sites) or you can hire someone specifically to write content. This does not have to be a dedicated journalist working for you. Many people online have excellent content-writing skills and are more than willing to work for you – for a price. If you need a lot of good quality content quickly, and cost is not too important, this is the right choice for you.

Get Your Visitors To Generate It

It has become common recently for sites to invite their visitors to contribute. This could be in the form of user-submitted news or articles, comments and feedback from readers or even a forum or discussion board. This is cheap to do and will save you time, but you will need quite a few visitors to make this worthwhile. The popular website Sitepoint, has the majority of its content submitted by visitors.

Syndication

A good source of content is to use syndicated content from other sites. Many news organizations will provide a free ‘news feed’ where they give you some code to display news headlines on your site, and because the headlines link to their pages, they are willing to do it for free. There are also many authors who write articles etc. which can be used in exchange for a byline (a small paragraph of text and a link at the bottom). This is common in many newsletters, where guest authors write featured articles.

Conclusion

Whichever way you choose to generate your content you must remember that it is the most vital part of your website. However
good your design or however fast your site, people come for content, and that is what you should be giving them.

Netbooks

What a difference a year makes. It was just over a year ago when the first true netbook, the original Asus Eee PC 701, hit the market. The Eee was a ground-breaking little computer but had a few flaws, the biggest being the limited 800×480 display. Today there’s an overwhelming array of low-cost but highly portable and efficient little laptops as you find them taking up a decent size area of the sales floor in any major electronics store.

Each is a full-featured notebook with displays in the 7- to 10-inch range and all are easy to tote around. Nearly all offer several USB ports, a webcam, LED backlit screens, integrated speakers, Wi-Fi and more, so there are very few differentiators. But the many choices in this growing netbook market can be overwhelming, so the choice in deciding which netbook to purchase as with any computer purchase is dependent on your business or personal needs. We will say this though, in no way are these meant to replace the fully featured laptop or desktop.

Blog For Business

Business blogs are cropping up everyday, and knowing that worldwide there are hundreds of millions of people reading blogs, doesn’t leave you with much wonder about why business would want to be involved in this media. Which is why you are here reading this blog.

There are several reasons why you should consider starting a blog for your business. I will cover just a few of them here, but keep in mind that the motivation to blog is different for every business. Just like any other aspect of a marketing strategy, you need to know why you are doing it before you get started.

Connecting With Customers
Blogging gives a company the ability to connect with their customers on a more personal basis. Lots of people like to “shop the net”, but that cuts down on customer loyalty. Why? Because customers don’t know you and therefore feel no commitment to you. Blogging gives you an opportunity to help your customers know you, and in turn, replying to their comments makes them feel known by you.

Helping Customers
Using your blog you have the potential to help your customers. Instead of only informing them about your product or sevice, as is usually the point of a web site, you can cover topics which help them to better themselves or their business.

Low-Cost Marketing
Blogs are useful as a low-cost marketing tool for businesses. Of course, “time is money” so having a strategy is essential. Check back as I’ll follow up with a post on how to strategically plan for your blogs success.

Increased Traffic to Your Site
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a science, because we can’t know for certain the specifics of what Google wants to see in order to get us top Search Engine Results. SEO experts try, and tweak, and try again in order to find out what works. That is why an experienced SEO firm is far better than someone new to the industry.

However, one thing is clear – content rules. Great content, loads of content, content all focused on the same general subject, is bound to establish you as an expert in that area, and what is a blog besides content. Fresh, unique ideas on your blog will attract incoming links from relevant sources, which will increase your Search Engine Results further still.

These are just a few of the reasons to consider starting your business blog. For many companies, using social networking, including blogs, to connect with their customers on the internet has become an essential part of their marketing plan.

Easily Create Your Own Forum

Having a forum section can be a great boost for your website business All sorts of visitors, including actual and potential customers, can discuss all matters to do with you, or your company’s service or products.

Visitors can relate and converse not only with the website owner but also with each other. This can lead to a vibrant on line community that further attracts more visitors who may also return more regularly to keep up to date.

The search engines love all of the activity and the content that it provides, too. This can help with search engine rankings.

This interaction enhances the experience that the webmaster has and can increase their enjoyment and satisfaction of running the website. Businesses can have a great benefit, too. They can poll customers and ask them all manner of questions about existing or new products and services. This is high quality market research for free! Any problems with service can soon come to light and be rectified much quicker than would otherwise be the case.

You can create your forum in many different ways. You could ask a website develop to create one for you. There will be quite an expense to this!

One trick is to think about having a forum before you have bought your web hosting. You can then choose a provider that offers you the ability to add a forum to your website easily, here at Horizon Webs we provide that as a standard option. The really great thing about this is that you can automatically install a forum onto your website simply by ticking an option to do so. Hey presto, you have a website with a forum!

One of the biggest issues with a forum is having to keep an eye on the content. This is called moderating the forum. This needs to be done to ensure that content is suitable for its audience. You can get people trying to out unsuitable material on to a forum, or blatantly advertising, both of which can be annoying.

Now, you can reduce the amount of time that you spend doing this. First of all, create forum areas or groups where like minded people can talk. It could be about a particular issue, service or product type, for instance. Then, ask your visitors for volunteers to moderate the discussions.

Very often, people will do this completely for free. However, you can always offer some sort of incentive by offering them privileged access to forthcoming products, or give them something for free or at a discount.

So if this has convinced you to ad a forum to your site and you need help with it, please contact us. We will help you if your hosted with us or somewhere else.

Why You Don’t Want Music On Your Website

Over the years clients have requested that music be playing in the background of their website. Besides the obvious exceptions: such as band websites or sites heavily involved in multimedia, It’s generally not a good idea. Here are a few reasons why.

It’s obtrusive:
Having music playing in the background can interrupt whatever is currently coming through the users speakers. Many people use their computers as media stations that play music and video. It’s forcing something down the users throat they didn’t ask for. Users expect web pages to contain useful information, not carry a tune.

It cuts off when you click around:
Unless you’ve got some kind of hidden frame (if you do, you’ve got bigger problems than music right now), the sound will cut off every time they click from page to page.

Not all browsers and operating systems support multimedia content: There are still a lot of older browsers out there on the net that might not support multimedia or will have serious issues playing it. This is a difficult point for the client to argue with because it’s a technical issue.

It slows things down:
Having music playing will decrease the performance of the site, especially on slower machines. Not only will this make the user experience poor during their visit, it’ll also make them less inclined to visit your site again for fear it’ll once again transform things into molasses.

It’s tacky and unprofessional:
Having background music was cool in the mid-nineties when the web was first coming together. Now it’s not, it’s considered dated and the mark of an amateur. If you’re gonna put background music in, you might as well put on a pair of hammer pants. You’re a fossil, go sit in a museum and fart dust.

There’s a reason other sites don’t have music:
Many clients think that since the majority of the web does not play music, by having it on their site they’re being exceptional and will stand out from the competition. This is wrong, the reason most sites don’t have music playing is because most sites agree that it’s a bad idea. Just because you’ve never seen a site on the web with a giant kitten for a cursor doesn’t mean that you should be the first one to try.

Not everyone may like your music:
What some people consider ambient and pleasant, others may find to be annoying, elevator music.

Ask them if they’ve ever surfed myspace:
Ever gotten to someone’s myspace page and found yourself frantically trying to find the STOP button on the music player they’ve embedded somewhere in the abomination they call a profile? That experience alone will make anyone not want music on their site.

It uses up bandwidth:
This is hardly an issue nowadays, but if it’s a high traffic site having music may run the risk of putting it over its traffic limit and costing extra money.

What is Overselling

Overselling is a term that is used by the web hosting community to describe what happens whenever a web host oversells their services. This means that if the web host has 1,000 GB of bandwidth per month and the host sells 20 packages that include 1,000 GB per month of data transfer, then this totals 2,0000 GB of monthly bandwidth and thus the web host has oversold itself. Of course, these web hosts are hoping that you will not use your allotted amount of bandwidth or else the web host will become unsustainable. Otherwise the host will have to pay an overage cost and if they cannot do this they go into debt, resulting in their service being suspended, your web site being offline and in then end your host may even go out of business with your one year of prepayment.

Of course, this is something that you do not want to happen to you. Therefore, you need to understand that cheaper is not always better. Instead, the best idea is to go with a respected, high quality web host. Yet, you may still be wondering why a company would do this anyway? Simply put, this is a marketing strategy. If everyone that is on the host does not use up all of their allotted space there is going to be a lot of unused space. For this reason, a lot of web hosts decide to take the risk of overselling. This is like betting though. Herein the web host is betting that not all of the customers are going to use all of their space. Generally, most web hosts are able to get away with this without having any problems since the majority of web hosts really do not use all of their allocated space.

There are some hosting providers that will actually tell you whether or not they oversell their products. However, you are going to have to be the one to send an email or go to the live help center to ask whether or not that particular company oversells because this is not something that a web host is going to advertise. After all, this is not something that is going to help them gain customers. In fact, it may actually drive some customers away. For this reason, once you do ask this question, it is then up to the web host to decide whether or not to give you an honest and direct answer. Generally speaking, it is going to be quite difficult for you to find out whether or not a web host actually oversells. Unfortunately, this is not a really honest way in which to deal with clients since you may not find out the real truth until you begin having problems. This is why it is so important to take the time to do your “homework” so that you can choose a reliable host. Herein you will want to make sure not to choose a host that offers ridiculous amounts of bandwidth or disk space for a very small amount of money. For instance, you do not want to pay only $4.99 per month for 50 GB of disk space as you can clearly see that this web host will not be able to make any profit. Of course, web hosts exist to make a profit, just like any other business does, so you can be sure that this is a host that is in the practice of overselling.

Now, there is also some debate as to whether or not overselling is actually bad since it is so common today. In reality, overselling is not really bad if the web host is able to closely monitor the service status. The web host also needs to make sure that they are able to provide their customer with the level of service that was stated in their agreement. If the web host is able to do these two things, then overselling should be fine as it should bring the company more profits than problems. This is why almost all the web hosting companies are now using this overselling strategy. They are able to host thousands of web sites all on one server, promise thousands of GB for each web site and still only charge you less $10 per month. With this being said, you should know that some of these companies are able to manage this overselling quite well and thus be able to keep up with the service they have promised their customers. However, there are some times when this overselling is not done well and then you will end up with a server that will become in-stable, leading to a lot of downtime; slow connection speed; and very poor quality customer service.

Whenever you are searching for a reliable web host, there are some things to keep in mind:

1. You get what you pay for. With this in mind, you should know that cheaper is not always better.
2. Make sure that the web host you choose to use has multiple support options.
3. Research the web host to find out how long it has been in business.
4. Look at the web host’s main web site. If you notice that it is slow, then more than likely your web site is going to be slow as well.

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Borrowed From Overselling.com

You can be assured that Horizon Webs DOES NOT oversell.

Have A Slow Computer?

Computers are honestly the best technology in the world. Not only have computers completely changed the world as we know it, but there are so many uses for a computer, that it really is incredible. The question that you have probably been asking yourself for months is ‘why is my computer so slow’, there are many reasons for a computer to slow down, you really just have to think about what you have been doing with your computer and why it would be slow in the first place.

Firstly, you need to look at your virus scanner. Do you have one installed? If not, that is probably going to be your first problem as you computer is probably affected with thousands of viruses, which to be honest, happens to a lot of people. If you do have a virus scanner installed, there could be quite a few others reasons.

The next reason is going to be spyware. Spyware happens whenever you go on the internet and honestly, it is harmless for the most part but it can definitely slow your computer down. If you get yourself a good spyware scanner, you should have absolutely no problem with that as well.

One thing that you need to realize about computers is that they are just like a car – they need to be tuned up once in a while and they certainly need to be taken care of. Defragging your computer is extremely important and it is something that should be done once a week.

If you computer is still slow after all of this, you should definitely get it checked out by a professional. It could just be that you are taking up too much memory and you might need a back-up hard drive to store everything. There are tons of reasons to slow a computer down, you just have to find the one that fits your case.

Someone Has Copied Your Website, What Can You Do?

A domain name is a piece of intellectual property. If someone has registered and is using a domain name that is confusingly similar to your own, you may be able to gain control of that domain through a quick and simple arbitration process.

As internet marketing becomes more popular businesses face increasing threats on the web. Common problems include domain names that are misspellings of the company’s domain or similar enough that users looking for your company end up on a competitor’s site by mistake. Some cyber-pirates design websites that mimic a company’s site in a way that confuses users and causes them to believe the infringer is associated with the company in an attempt to siphon off potential customers. Another problem is discovering a site with a similar domain name that is designed to disparage your business.

The quasi-private authority which controls ownership of all domain names is called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN provides a simple procedure for resolving disputes related to abusive behavior. To initiate the arbitration proceeding one files a Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy Complaint, UDRP for short.

What are the types of disputes that a UDRP complaint can resolve?

The complainant must assert that the party controlling the abusive website (called the respondent) has:

(a) a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and

(b) that the respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and

What is evidence of bad faith?

The following circumstances, in particular but without limitation, if found by the Panel to be present, shall be evidence of the registration and use of a domain name in bad faith:

(a) circumstances indicating that the respondent has registered or has acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of the respondent’s documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name; or

(b) the respondent has registered the domain name in order to prevent the owner of the trademark or service mark from reflecting the mark in a corresponding domain name, provided that the respondent has engaged in a pattern of such conduct; or

(c) the respondent has registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor; or

(d) by using the domain name, the respondent has intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain, Internet users to its web site or other on-line location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant’s mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of the respondent’s web site or location or of a product or service on the respondent’s web site or location.

What does it cost to file the UDRP complaint, and what happens after the complaint is filed?

The filing fee to file this complaint is currently $1,300 for a single-member panel and $2,600 for a three-member panel. In my opinion a single arbitrator will do. The fees increase if more than one domain name is in dispute. You can prepare the complaint yourself, but its better to have an attorney familiar with domain name disputes and trademark law advise you and draft the document. Attorney’s fees vary, but the cost should be modest. This is money well spent because a confusingly similar site can result in lost business and damage to your company’s reputation.

The respondent has thirty days to answer the complaint. Often the respondent will not answer, in which case the complainant usually wins by default. If the respondent does answer, the complainant has five days to submit any additional relevant materials, and the respondent then has five days to make a final submission. The complainant and respondent engage in a process of selecting and disqualifying panelists. A final decision by the panel is rendered within fourteen days of the final submission by the respondent. The decisions of the arbitration forum’s panel can be appealed to a federal district court within ten days of the arbitration forum’s final decision, but are usually not appealed by either party.

If some one has put up a site that is designed to disparage yours or to siphon off customers, then filing a UDRP complaint may be the way to go.

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Written by Galen Gentry of http://www.galengentry.com

Galen Gentry has 19 years of experience litigating internet disputes, copyright and trademark infringement issues. Galen has received the highest rating an attorney can achieve for legal ability and ethical standards from Martindale-Hubbell. For more information on trademark infringement and internet disputes visit http://www.galengentry.com/CM/Custom/Trademark-Infringement.asp

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