Freedom From BigBrother Now!

Broadband is ultra high speed internet access, and is far faster than super slow dial-up access over a modem. If you yourself are viewing this internet guide then you are assumably thinking at acquiring internet access for the 1st time, or thinking to go up to broadband.

The perk of fast internet access is surfers are able to watch movies over the internet, this has became decidedly popular with Channel 4 launching their new TV show software which will allow users to view the most recent episodes of Hollyoaks. With high speed internet access people might often also download rock music and scary movies at a much higher speed than super slow dial-up access.

Broadband is painless to set up. The 1 st thing people will need to do is sign up with an ISP, sometimes known as an Internet Service Provider, and the broadband organisation will supply users with a high speed connection via your phone connection. If you yourself already have an Internet Service Provider then please make sure people use a broadband comparison site for impartial advice on the greatest high speed internet deals. People can quickly find the most inexpensive deals with an internet provider comparison service by simply entering in your street and house number & then the service will come back with a list of high speed broadband packages in your town. surfers will be under no pressure to sign up with any fast broadband while people browse the broadband offers.

Once surfers have signed up with your ISP the corporation will arrange a time for connection and supply you with any necessary routers & cd software. The routers and connection software might well come with step by step instructions and most broadband corporations can often offer people tech guidance if needed.

Once you have successfully connected to the net surfers will probably start to love the super fast speeds of internet access. If you are going to download music, television programmes such as X Files or movies please be wary of any download allocations you may have on your package. Music and telly downloads such as 24 may take up a lot of your ‘download allocation’ as the internet business are big in file size. Use www.comparebroadbanduk.com to help save you money on your broadband bill.

Have you seen one of those post-it pop-up? The one that looks so realistic, with awesome shadow effect. If you don’t know what I am talking about, try opening the following website:

http://myhobbybooks.com/wowpop

They look awesome don’t they?

And something like this is always good for your web marketing campaign. One reason, it never gets blocked by pop-up blockers. And another, it really grabs the attention of your web visitors.

This is good when you want to increase subscription rate to your ezine, or promote an affiliate program, or even increase sales.

But you wonder, how do they do it? You thought that you can achieve similar result, and you try, and try, and try… you tried GIF image, JPG image, none of those can get the job done.

But there’s one thing that you just don’t know. Many pro web programmers know this, but not the normal web designers … maybe even most web designers don’t know how to do this.

The secret is in PNG image format.

PNG image format is the little-known image format that you can use on the web. PNG image format is unique because you can do the Alpha effect with it. The Alpha effect is where you set transparency factor on certain areas on the PNG image. That is what makes the shadow looks so real.

With the Alpha effect, you can set transparency factor from 0% to 100%. So it can be 30% transparent, 50% or even 79%. Have a look at the pop-up again, and take a close look at the shadow - Now you know how it’s done.

But there is just one problem - Internet Explorer don’t really support PNG image format. While you can still call PNG image format using the IMG tag, Internet Explorer ignores Alpha factor. In Internet Explorer, PNG image just don’t appear properly.

So how do we solve this …

Luckily you can still call PNG image in Internet Explorer and have the Alpha reflected using a special CSS command. It’s the AlphaImageLoader().

But this will lead to another problem. Before you can call the PNG image, you first need to identify the browser your web visitor is using. If the visitor is using Firefox, Opera, Netscape or any others, you can call the PNG using the IMG tag. But if it’s Internet Explorer, you need to use the AlphaImageLoader().

And of course, this can always be solved with a bit of Javascripting. And with a little more Javascript and CSS, you can have the PNG image floating over your web content. You can even make the pop-up disappear using the OnClick event trigger.

If you’d like a complete code and PNG image to your own photorealistic post-it pop-up, try visiting WOW Pop-Up. Below is the URL address for WOW Pop-Up where you can get a free set of the code and the PNG graphic.

Iszuddin Ismail published the WOW Pop-Up and is giving away free code and PNG graphics to your own photorealistic post-it pop-up. Get a set of four PNG pop-up graphics for free. WOWPopUp.com

How or where you host your website may not seem like it’s all that important to the overall marketing plan of your site, but I guarantee that you’ll only think that until your website or email goes down when it matters most. Over the years I’ve used almost a dozen different web hosts providers. In that time, I’ve found only one or two which were virtually hassle-free, and for that I had to pay some pretty sizeable hosting fees.

Web hosting costs have reduced drastically in the last several years; however, you shouldn’t choose a web host based solely on cost. As inexpensive as it might be month to month, a poor provider can cost you thousands of dollars in lost sales if your site or email goes down or simple fails to function properly on a consistent basis.

When researching various hosting companies, look for quality over cost. You don’t necessarily have to pay an outrageous monthly fee, but you do need to find a host that provides you all the features you need with minimal inconveniences and ongoing problems.

Tech Support

A good web hosting company will provide around the clock call-in tech support. Personally, I avoid any provider that only offers email or online tech support. That’s a personal thing for me; you’ll have to make your own judgment on that. If you call, you should not be left on hold for more than four or five minutes before reaching a representative to help you. If you email a tech support issue, be sure your provider responds to requests quickly-within hours, not days-and is able to quickly and competently provide you a solution.

Down Time

Many providers offer some kind of uptime guarantee. Be sure to read the small print in order to fully understand what that means. I’ve dealt with providers which the guarantee was only for the website and not for email. I went a full day without functioning email and the host refused to give me any discount on that month’s service charges.

Many providers give a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This means that the provider guarantees that their servers will not go down for more than 8 hours per year or less than 45 minutes each month. Of course, if you’re in the middle of a big marketing campaign, 45 minutes can be crucial.

If a provider fails to meet their guaranteed up time, you can usually get your hosting charges waived for the month. If it happens regularly, you can literally go months without having to pay fees. Sounds nice, but it’s really not adequate compensation for the amount of traffic, and perhaps business, you lose while your website or email is not functioning as it should. If you are currently with a host that goes down more than a couple times a year, you may want to reconsider who you host your website with.

Server Load Monitoring

You want to choose your hosting plan carefully to ensure that it will be able to handle whatever server load your site might generate, especially during peak times or big marketing pushes. Most web hosts allocate a certain amount of bandwidth usage each month. If you exceed that, you may find yourself paying extra fees, or worse, your site may be inaccessible until you ante up more money.

Be sure to know your bandwidth usage and how much you are allocated. Knowing that, you’ll also want to be aware of the consequences if you exceed that bandwidth. Plan for this to happen in advance so you’re not caught off guard when you get a sudden surge of traffic.

Secure Server

If you are processing credit card information or storing personal data that should not be exposed, it is important that you have access to a secure server. Security is a growing concern with Internet shoppers and many businesses report an increase in conversions just by displaying a secure symbol in their shopping cart area.

Some web hosts will provide you access to a secure portion of their server. In these cases when visitors navigate to the secure area, the URL will actually change and the visitor will no longer be “on” your site (i.e. www.yourdomain.com). In most cases the user probably won’t even notice, however many websites place their entire online store on these external secure areas. The downside to this is that it removes many potentially valuable pages off your site making any potential search engine ranking benefit inaccessible to you. Each of these pages could otherwise be an entry point to your site via the search engines.

The other option is to have a secure area on your own site. You can do this by purchasing a secure certificate for your domain name. This certificate is then “installed” through your web host giving you unlimited secure areas of your site to work withall on your own domain. This is the most professional solution and allows you to keep potential search engine friendly pages indexable with the rest of your site.

I would also recommend keeping as much of your website out of the secure area as possible and only transfer visitors to the secure area when they are in the checkout process. If they leave the checkout to continue shopping they should also leave the secure area.

Free Hosting Services

Free web hosting services, such as Geocities, are not recommended for any business that wants to develop a professional online presence. Leave those free services for hobby and personal sites. If you want your business to thrive on the Internet you need to be able to direct someone to www.yourwebsite.com, not www.geocities.com/~mycoolsite/index.html.

In-House Hosting

Many companies are bypassing the web hosting providers altogether in favor of hosting their sites on their own in-house servers. There are some definite pros for doing this but I don’t recommend going this route unless you have a full-time IT person on staff who is skilled at web server management.

I once flirted with hosting my site in-house. I have a rented in-house file server which comes with ongoing customer support. My tech sold me on the benefits of hosting my site in-house. After moving my site over I quickly realized that there was much more to web hosting than meets the eye. Days went by as I waited for my server tech to set-up proper email functionality and domain redirecting. After about a week with calls to the domain registrar, server tech, and programmer, all saying the problem is somebody else’s issue, I return to using a real hosting provider.

In-house hosting also raises site access issues. When hosting in-house the ability for visitors to access and download your site is largely dependant on your local ISP and the connection speed you receive. Even with broadband DSL or cable, typical connection speeds are much slower than can be provided with a quality web host. This can increase download times and create a more sluggish site if you have many visitors at once.

In-house hosting also does not provide you with any kind of uptime guarantee, and in my experience, excellent tech support. Should your server go down, you temporarily lose Internet access, or power goes out, your website will be unavailable to your visitors.

In my experience, quality web hosting is difficult to come by, but is absolutely essential for any business that takes their online marketing efforts seriously. Be sure to research your potential web host providers carefully. Find out what services they provide for free and what you have to pay for. Make sure they provide sufficient tech support, guaranteed uptime, as well as a good reputation from others. If you need to, be willing to pay more for quality service. A little extra each month can help eliminate thousands of dollars in potential lost revenue if your website or email goes down at an inopportune time.

Stoney DeGeyter is president of Pole Position Marketing, a professional search engine marketing and optimization firm providing SEO services since 1998. Stoney is also a part-time instructor at the community College in Reno, Nevada where he resides as well as a moderator in the Small Business Ideas Forum. You can read his SEM blog at (EMP) E-Marketing Performance. You can email him with any questions at stoney@polepositionmarketing.com

Finding the perfect learning tool for Flash is a daunting task
to any novice web developer. One can find help in a number of
ways through books, friends and private tutors. These methods
are great but not often readily available, nor cheap! The best
and cheapest way to learn anything from the basics of flash to
the secrets of the trade is a Flash Tutorial. Think of the Flash
Tutorial as a mini lesson that teaches a specific part of the
flash.

Flash Tutorials come in many levels of difficulty and quality.
Developers don’t publish their tutorials according to an
established curriculum, they simple publish whatever they please
or think will be useful. That makes finding the correct Flash
Tutorial difficult. Many times the tutorial is too vague and the
information is difficult to understand. Conversely, the concepts
could be easy to understand but entirely useless in the real
world. If a person will examine the quality of the tutorial
before they work through it, they will be able to avoid a lot of
unnecessary frustration. When selecting a Flash
Tutorial, look for these three criteria: examples, clarity,
and usefulness.

Examples

When looking for a Flash
Tutorial, be sure that it has examples to go with it.
Examples are actual snippets of code that actually demonstrate
the principles taught in the tutorial. If the source code is
downloadable as an example file for you to look at and run, that
is even better. Look for examples that are easy to follow and
demonstrate clearly the principle being taught. There is nothing
more frustrating than finding the perfect tutorial and not
having the perfect example to work from.

Clarity

Find Flash Tutorials that are clear and easy to understand. If a
flash dictionary is needed, then the tutorial is not worth your
time. Tutorials should be written clearly and concisely. It is
best when the author has put links to the definition of, or
clarifies a difficult word. Generally, it is also helpful when
the tutorial has visuals. That being said, not all visuals are
effective. The visuals should clarify and not confuse.

Usefulness

Above all tutorials should be useful. They should teach things
that can actually be used. It is great when the tutorial teaches
how to effectively use the feature in a real-life situation. A
good Flas
h Tutorial will be adaptable. The user should be able to
take the examples and adapt them to their application without
having to entirely redo the process. Finally, the tutorial
should teach the entire concept. This can be in one lesson or in
many lessons, but it should teach everything the user needs to
know to implement that concept.

In today’s world, a web site is virtually mandatory for any successful business. But there are web sites that will win you customers, and there are web sites that will lose you customers. Good design has a lot to do with which category your web site will fall into. But what is it that makes good or bad web site design? In my personal opinion, a good web site is one that’s simple, informative and gives me a reason to come back frequently. That’s what you should get from a good web designer/writer team. Bad sites, on the other hand, are complicated to use, slow loading, confusing or just plain annoying. Here’s a list of my personal top 7 turn-offs as far as web site design is concerned:

1. Slow loading pages

Studies have shown that you have less than ten seconds to grab a visitor’s attention. If your web page hasn’t finished loading within that (very short) amount of time, you might as well forget about it. The main culprit I’ve found here are huge, slow-loading graphics, especially when they are embedded in tables. If large images are absolutely vital to presenting your business, compromise by adding thumbnails to the main page and allow the visitor to click on them to access the main image. Nobody minds a longer loading time, as long as it’s them who can make that choice.

2. No contact information

As I’ve already mentioned in my article “Do’s and don’ts of web site copy”, one of my pet peeves is a web site that has no contact information accessible form the main page. If I can’t get in touch with a company quickly and easily, chances are that I’ll go to the competition. My advice is to have a whole page dedicated to contact information - address, phone, fax, email, and preferably a map of where you can be found (remember item #1, though - no huge graphics!) And please, don’t use a graphic to display that information in a particularly clever way. I like to copy and paste that information directly from the web page to my contact management program. If I can’t do that, you’ll likely never hear form me - and all other customers who do the same!

3. Difficult to navigate

Don’t try to be clever with navigational features. Simple text links or, if you prefer, quick-loading graphics are perfectly good means of allowing a visitor to navigate your site. Anything that requires interactive navigation, like menus that expand into sub-menus, sub-sub-menus and so on, is more an indication of a wrong information architecture than of a true need for complicated navigational features.

4. Non-HTML features

Don’t get me started on this one. I’ve got a firewall on my computer, and my browser is set to block all those little nasty things that can mess with my PC. As a result I come across many a site that won’t display or function properly, because it relies on features like JavaScript, Cookies, Interactive Headers or Java Applets. None of these are necessary to build a good web site, and unless you want your web site to lose you potential customers, you shouldn’t use them. Or, if you absolutely have to, make sure that they are not integral parts of the web site!

5. Huge splash page

Another pet peeve of mine. As mentioned earlier, you have less than ten seconds to get your message across. Now guess how many visitors are going to wait longer than that just to watch a fancy animation? ‘Nuff said.

6. Pop-up ads

A huge turn-off as far as I’m concerned. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a pop-up blocker installed on my PC, so if your web site tried to tell me something important via a pop-up window, I’d never even see it. If you feel that you have to use pop-ups, consider going for the less intrusive (and annoying) pop-under windows instead.

7. Sideways scrolling

Not everybody has a monitor with the same screen resolution as you, so make sure that your web site displays on monitors with a lower resolution without forcing your visitor to scroll sideways. It’s a singularly annoying thing, and chances are that you’ll lose those visitors very quickly. Or, if you have information in a column on the right side of your web site, it may simply never appear on the screen.

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Need online copy that gets results? Frauke Nonnenmacher is a copywriter who specialises in clear, informative and persuasive web copy. For more information, please visit her web site at http://creativecats.sectorlink.org/tracking.pl?article3
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Salehoo: Wholesale Boost Mole Cell Phones
Don’t worry about the one-time fee, that you have to pay for joining Salehoo, because Clickbank provides 100% money-back guarantee, if you didn’t like Salehoo. Ebay has become a very competitive market and in order to profit from it you have to think outside the box and do things differently otherwise you will pay a heavy price through financial loss simply buying a list like Salehoo is not the answer.

Then check completed listings searches on eBay to see what the item generally sells for and the sell-through rate for each one This is a bad move since most wholesale buyers will lose interest in a wholesaler which is not forthcoming about his prices. An entrepreneur will always be willing to buy products on wholesale prices as it would substantially increase his profit margin

Salehoo Wholesale Fashion Cuff Watch:
Wholesale Distributors can be Salehoo manufacturers or importers too. Wholesale Distributors tend to sell to several customers including wholesalers and retailers. They are the most popular type of wholesaler and usually sell everything including food, beverage, consumer goods, cars, chemicals, and most products out there. They can have warehouses and trucks or drop ship products. They can sell to restaurants, manufacturing plants, retail stores, governments or to other wholesalers.

The only reason I took a look is because he’s also a friend and when he’s given me advice before he’s been dead right. While this isn’t a bad thing this sounds pretty easy. See Salehoo.

In This Article you will learn about Pseudo Directories, a simple tool that will not only keep you organized but when used properly can actually increase your ranking points because you will have file names that are extremely optimized for the Page Ranking Bots.

Conventional Wisdom states you should use Sub-Directories to organize your web Pages. Unfortunately the Page Indexing Tools Penalize your Page Rankings when you Do this, Many of the Page Ranking Algorithms in use today deem that pages close to your Root are of a Higher Value then pages that are further away from your root. If you have 2 Web Pages with the Exact same content (web1.html and web2.html) http://yourdomain.com/web1.html and http://yourdomain.com/articles/training/web2.html.

All things being equal Web1.html will have a higher ranking then Web2.html because Web1.html is in the Root Directory and Web2 is in a Sub Directory.

As a Web Designer or a Home Based Business owner wearing a Web Designer Hat it seems you have 2 Choices, do what seems right and in many ways best and use a Pretty Directory Structure and Loose Ranking points or Throw out the Directory Structure and Gain Ranking Points. Many People Choose the Directory structure either because they don’t know about the page Ranking Algorithms or they feel a strong need to be organized and are willing to sacrifice ranking points.

Pseudo Directories are the Best of Both Worlds. They allow you to keep your Directory organized and not loose ranking points. In fact by using meaningful names for your Pseudo Directories you can actually gain Ranking Points.

A quick lesson on File Naming if you have 3 Web Pages with identical content and they are named page1.html,bathroom.html and Home-Repair-Bathroom.html which file do you think will have the Lowest ranking and The Highest Ranking for the phrase “Bathroom repair”. Page1.html will be lowest ranked and Home-Repair-Bathroom.html will be the highest rank.

The Pseudo Directory takes advantage of this page naming structure to allow you to organize your Web Pages and still maximize your page ranking.

As an Example you have a Web Page that is Promoting products and Services to Homeowners and Would be Homeowners. You want to build some content rich web pages using articles that you find and Reprint. Using Conventional Methods you would have a Directory Structure that looks like

root/articles/Home-Loan/file.html,

root/articles/Home-Repair/file.html and

root/articles/Home-Selling/file.html etc.

With the Pseudo Directory method you keep all your files in the root Directory you just name them using the Optimal naming rules. Now you would simply have Pseudo Directories named

Home-Loan

Home-Repair

Home-Selling

So An Article on Roof Repair would be named home-repair-roof.html Similarly and article on Kitchen Repair would be named Home-Repair-Kitchens.html and on Bathroom repair would be named Home-Repair-Bathrooms.html. An Article on FHA Loan Loans would be named Home-Loan-FHA.html and an Article on how to sell your home by owner (FSBO) would be called Home-Selling-FSBO.html

This next step is optional but it does have a few advantages and will help increase your page rank even more. Create a Table of Contents or Site Map for each Pseudo Directory. So continuing with the above example create a Files called

Home-Loan-Contents.html - Links to all Home-Loan Files

Home-Repair-Contents.html - Links to all Home-Repair Files

Home-Selling-Contents.html - Links to all Home-Selling Files

Next (If you have more then 3 or 4 sub topics) Create a Page called Home-Contents.html where you have links to Home-Repair-contents.html and Home-Loan-contents.html and Home-Selling-contents.html …

Copyright © 2005-2006 Mike Makler

About The Author Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001 and has Built an Online Organization of over 100,000 members. You can see My Web Page Here and be sure and Subscribe to my Newsletter http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/home.html

There is unlimited possibilities when it comes to designing a website. Flash, Database, content management, Client Login, etc,etc. A question to ask yourself when deciding how to do your website is:

How can I most effectively present my information to my visitors

Of course there are several things to consider like budget but I feel that when talking strictly design it is important to put your visitors as first priority as they are the reason you are building the website.

Generally speaking, an algorithm is a step-by-step method of problem solving in which a larger, more general problem is reduced to a sequence of smaller, more manageable steps. The term “algorithm” pops up most often in the fields of computer programming, engineering, and science, but the concept of the algorithm is applicable in most decision-making situations.

When a business seeks out a website design company, they usually do so with the larger, more general problem in mind (and rightfully so). A business should be more concerned with meeting the goals and needs of the business than with the ins and outs of website design. It then becomes the website designer’s task to apply his or her knowledge to meeting the company’s needs. I believe this is best accomplished algorithmicallyapproaching every design project using these steps.

1. Evaluate the needs of the client

It’s a good idea (if possible) to sit down with the client at the onset of the website design process. Listen and make note of their needs and concerns. Have an idea of the kind of questions you should ask in order to assure that you understand the needs of the business. The right questions will also give you insight as to how the website should look, read, and behave.

2. Reduce the larger problem to smaller steps

Reduce the website design process into an ordered system of smaller steps. This allows for a much more detailed and efficient website design, a more accurate break down of design time, and a less involved troubleshooting process. Also, if the website is being designed by a team rather than an individual, smaller steps allow for a more understandable delegation of responsibilities within the team.

3. Apply the design

Review and implement the step-by-step website design. Often, additional steps in process are realized when applying the design. It’s important to keep an open mind regarding changes to the original design, but also to ensure that all steps work toward the goal that the client originally outlined.

4. Compare results of the design with the needs of the client

Does the finished website fulfill the needs of the business? Upon completion of the design, I recommend (if possible) another meeting with the client. The purpose of this meeting is to explain the features of the website, gain feedback from the client, and give the client a chance to ask questions about the website.

5. Adjust the design (if necessary)

Depending on the outcome of the previous step, this step may become necessary. At times, the client may a) request that the design be changed or b) request that a feature which was not previously discussed be added. In this case, the website designer should make the necessary changes and compare the results to the client’s requests.

Algorithmic website design translates into a quicker turnaround and lower cost for the client. Technically speaking, websites designed in this method are more apt to be less problematic, and therefore, less time consuming for the designer.

Richie Fortenberry is the founder of the website design company, Arf Web Design. http://www.arfwebdesign.com