The Smart Pounder

Your best topic is always a subject you have passion, for knowledge about and experience with. Your personal life experiences have taught you a unique set of lessons. Determine what you know that others might find valuable.

Of course, you can make a 3 Page Site that focuses on almost any subject you want but you will have a better chance of success, especially if this is your first site, if you choose a subject you have some experience with. Plus it makes the process much more fun.

Start by brainstorming a list of topics. Get a pad and pen.

What are you passionate about? Write it down. What do you love to talk about? What do you read about? What specialized knowledge do you have from your job? Any hobbies? Start writing. Get everything down…don’t censure anything, just write it down.

List the 10 biggest problems you can think of in your home, workplace or community. What do you enjoy doing with your spare time?

Ask your friends and family what they think you’re good at and knowledgeable about. You might be surprised at the things they see that you’ve missed.

Spend a solid thirty minutes on this brainstorming session. At first the ideas will come quickly. But then, after you’ve already written down the obvious ones, you’ll start to have to really think about it. This is when the real power of this exercise happens.

You see, the subconscious mind is a funny thing. It takes a constant demand from your conscious mind to get its attention. But once you do, your subconscious will take up the effort for you and begin to supply answers to your question as it comes up with them.

By spending a full thirty minutes intensely focused on brainstorming topics for your 3 Page Site you communicate this demand to your subconscious mind. For the next week your subconscious mind will provide very creative topics for you in a sporadic and seemingly random way. You’ll be driving to work, taking a shower or eating dinner and suddenly you’ll get a great idea for a 3 Page Site topic.

This technique can be used for almost any question or dilemma. Just remember the power is in the results your subconscious mind produces in the days after doing the exercise. And that won’t happen if you don’t focus intensely on brainstorming topics for a full 30 minutes. It takes this long to be sure your subconscious mind gets your message.

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

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

There are different ways to generate the thumbnails:

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

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

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

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

Designing a good looking web-site is not enough – one must ensure that quality customers visit it regularly. Search Engine
being one of the most important sources of traffic to any
web-site – web designers should pay enough attention to
make their creation search engine friendly.

To understand search engine friendly features of any web-site,
it is important to examine how a search engine works. There are
essentially two kinds of search engines – directory and spider
based search engines.

Directory Type Search Engine

This type of search engines list websites under categories
(sometimes called category database). They have large number
of categories to fit all kinds of web-pages. Largely managed
by human beings, the two outstanding features of any directory
are accuracy and selectivity.

Directories are extremely selective about web-pages to be accepted. A directory will not list your URL and will never become aware of your site unless you register with them. They do not make use of spiders or robots that crawl the web looking for new sites.

Examples of Directories are Yahoo, DMoz Open Directory. Look Smart etc.

Listing of a web-site in a directory type search engine
depends a great deal on editorial policy of concerned directory.
For example, Yahoo charges USD 300 to examine a business web-site within a specified time. The web-site is indexed if Yahoo editor finds it list-worthy. On the other hand, DMoz open directory works with voluntary editors and does not charge any money for inspection or indexing. However, the listing process may take long time.

Designer should check requirement of individual directories to
decide on categories, title, meta tags etc. Submission for such
directories should always be manual – one should not try automated
submission for directory type search engines.

Listing in a quality directory is usually difficult and time
consuming. However, the respect and page rank it provides is
worth the effort.

Spider Based Search Engines

Unlike directory-type search engines, spider-based search engines (also called crawlers, robots, worms) seek out web-pages by crawling through the WWW and automatically index sites using its own indexing rules or algorithm. It will not wait for you to submit, but try to seek out as many web-sites as it can find and index them.

By simply telling the search engine what your URL is, its
software robot will go there automatically and index everything
they need. How much it will index and to what degree depends
upon its algorithm – usually a closely guarded secret.

Overwhelming number of search-engines in the WWW are spider-based. Examples are – Google, AltaVista, Lycos, InfoSeek etc.

Getting listed in a spider based web-site is not difficult – all
it takes is to submit your web-site URL – manually or through an
automated process. However, position of your web-site in search
result (popularly called ranking) will depend upon many
factors – some within your control, others beyond. We shall discuss these factors in detail in a future article series

How to make a Web-Site Spider-Friendly

While listing in a directory or high ranking in spider based
search engine require special effort – certain design features
can help you considerably. Besides, there are certain negative
design features that can create difficulties for search engine
spiders, keeping your web-site outside the reach of search
engines.

Frames

Frames is a technique of splitting browser’s screen into number
of windows for displaying various kinds of information. It used
to be a popular technique of web-designing in the 90’s. However,
frames can confuse a search engine spider so much that it may
abandon the web-page or index it wrongly.

It is better not to use frames. Even search engines capable of
indexing a site through frames don’t recommend it. Whatever you
are trying to accomplish by using frames can usually be done with
the help of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). Some browsers are not
frames-compatible, so there is additional danger of visitors not
being able to see your site at all. Bookmarking of individual
pages within a frame becomes difficult without lengthy scripts
being written.

Flash/Graphics Based Web Sites

While web sites that offer visitor more esthetically-pleasing
experience may seem like the best choice for someone searching
for your product, they are the most difficult to optimize. Since
search engine robots cannot read text within graphics or animation, what they see may be just a small amount of text – and small amounts of content may not result in top rankings. If you really must offer the visitor a graphics-heavy or Flash web site, consider creating an html-based side of your site that is also available to visitors. This site will be much easier to promote on the search engines and your new found visitors will also have the option to jump over to the nicer looking part of your site.

Dynamic Web Pages

Content in a dynamic web-site resides within a database – outside
the reach of most spiders. URL of dynamic pages from such databases are usually long and have characters such as ?, #, &, %, or = along with seemingly random numbers or letters – enough to confuse any spider. As a result, search engines may leave a dynamic web-site or at best index it partially.

Improper Use of HTML

Inefficiently designed web-pages that use large amount of html codes for fonts, colors, lines etc. – specially in the beginning of the page can cause negative impact. What search engine robots see in such poorly designed pages are clutters of font and formatting tags, very little text.

If possible, designers should avoid too much html tags, javascripts etc. in the beginning of a web-page. Efficient designers write codes in such a way that such elements do not form part of web-pages (e.g. using CSS). Hand coded HTML to design sites is also a good method for proficient designers

Meta Tags

Meta tags is a way of storing information about a web-page. Information stored in meta tags is usually not visible by browsers but easily accessible by search engine spiders. It is a way of informing spiders about content of the web-page, relevant keywords, how to index etc.

In the absence of meta tags, spiders may index web-pages in its own way – which could be quite un-predictive. It is far more prudent to guide the spider with desirable information so that the web-page gets indexed under right keywords.

Conclusion

A few simple steps in the beginning of design process may go a
long way in making sure your web-site attracts customers. Success of a business web-site is gauged not by its look – but how much it helps in business.

Dr. Amit K. Chatterjee

Amit worked in blue-chip Indian and MNCs for 15 years in various capacities like Research and Information Analysis, Market Development, MIS, R&D Information Systems etc. before starting his e-commerce venture in 1997.
He writes regularly for http://www.infobanc.com

Almost every website nowsadays will have some sort of a login system. If you decide to write a login script yourself in PHP, this article will provide some important pointers on the security of the script you are writing. This article will talk on a common login hacking technique known as The SQL Injection Attack. This is not new in the programmer’s world but worth taking note especially when you are new to programming.There are hackers everywhere, so beware!

When the user submits a form consisting of the username and password, all the variables will be store in the $_POST array after submitting. You can get the values of the array easily using:

$usr = $_POST['username'];
$pwd = $_POST['password'];

Where “username” and “password” are the names of the textfields in your form.

How do you deal with these values?
You probably verify it against your database. If the username and password matches at least one record in the database, you will let this user proceed on to the secure area, else you will probably throw an error, prompting the user to re-login. During the verification process, your SQL statement might look like this:

SELECT * FROM `user_table` where username=’$usr’ AND password=’$pwd’

Re-looking at the SQL statement, if someone leaves username empty and writes ” ‘ OR username LIKE ‘%” in the password field, then your whole SQL statement becomes:

SELECT * FROM `user_table` where username=’ ‘ AND password=’ ‘ OR username LIKE ‘ % ‘

This statement means selecting all the records in the table. If your criteria of letting the user proceed is that the return number of records is more than 0 (at least one user found), then this SQL statement will return all records, meaning that the user will be able to slip pass through the verification process. This type of hacking is famously known as The SQL injection attacks.

One good way to prevent this from happening is to make sure the $_POST array is safe from escape strings such as ‘ and “. You can filter your $_POST array using

$usr = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['username']);
$pwd = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['password']);

There are of course other ways to do it but the idea is to let you know that you have to be very careful in handling the data retrieved from forms, epecially more so for usernames and passwords.

Bernard Peh is a great passioner of web technologies and one of the co-founders of Sitecritic.net Website Reviews. He works with experienced web designers and developers for more than 5 years, developing and designing commercial and non-commercial websites. During his free time, he does website reviews, freelance SEO and PHP work.

Web forms allow site owners to gather information about their site visitors. Web forms can be as simple as an email newsletter subscription box, or as complex as an advanced ecommerce checkout page. Here are some tips on making the most of your web forms.

Not All Web Forms Are Created Equal

Some web forms are extremely basic and only email forms to administrators. Others are integrated into databases and lead management software. Here is some thing to look for when choosing web form software.

Targeted Lead Generation

Web forms allow site owners to gather valuable information, including contact information, referral web site URLs, search engine keywords and visitor comments, and more. The results of these web forms can be posted to a database and emailed to administrators. Respondents to web forms could be buying a product or interested in receiving more information. The leads generated in this manner are highly targeted since the people filling out the request form will have seen your site and know the purpose of your company.

Keyword and Referral Tracking

If you use search engine marketing to promote your web site, tracking keywords from search to sale can greatly increase your ability to focus on the keywords that work. When a person navigates from one page to another, tracking software can carry certain data along. The carried data can include keywords and the referral web site URL. This data is then recorded on the order form or an information request form so that web site managers can determine which keywords and site are sending the most conversions. This allows marketing efforts to be directed to what’s working.

Self-Populating Database

Instead of buying a database of leads, or having telemarketers working to create lead databases, web forms allow site owners to have the prospects themselves populate a business database. In this manner, an entire database can be filled with people specifically interested in the company hosting the web form.

Email Marketing

Email marketing allows site owners to keep their companies in front of targeted audiences. Email newsletters can add value to web sites, providing a precious resource to site visitors. Informative newsletters allow site owners to send advertisements to highly targeted recipients that have opted-into the list. Newsletters can be sent at any interval, including daily, weekly monthly or yearly. By providing informative articles and/or discounts and special offers, many visitors to your site will be happy to opt-in to your mailing list. Sending email to mass amounts of people that have not requested information from you is generally regarded as spam and should be avoided.

Auto Responders

Web forms can allow automated responses to be sent, taking some work out of lead follow up. For example, if a product is likely to be used in 30 days, an auto responder can be sent to send a discount or reminder to the purchaser of the product 25 days from initial delivery.

Conclusion

Web forms are powerful tools for almost any business web site. Before investing in a web form solution, check your options and find a solution with all the features you want. Using advanced web forms can dramatically increase your marketing feedback and sales.

Halstatt Pires is with the Internet marketing firm – www.marketingtitan.com – a San Diego Internet marketing and advertising company offering automated web site systems through www.businesscreatorpro.com.

Have you seen Jesse James on the Discovery Channel’s Monster Garage?
Each week Jesse and his handpicked team create a customized vehicle to dazzle and amaze you. So what does this have to do with eLearning? Read on…

Big boys like big toys

Did you see the episode when the:
* Cadillac Escalade becomes a tailgate party?
* DeLorean is transformed into a hovercraft?, or the
* Scary monster Santa float as it makes it debut in a parade?

WOW they were great… and it got me thinking…Jesse’s approach to monster car design is directly related to leading successful eLearning programs. Here’s why…

Each episode starts with a sketch of the “dream machine” and Jesse’s verbal description of what he expects the machine to do. Just like Jesse’s articulated vision, the training project leader has to be able to articulate the program vision and expectations to his boss and the team. If you can’t describe the training purpose, it’s time to re-think the project!

The Monster Garage rules are simple:
1) When completed, the monster machine must appear to be stock.
2) The team can spend no more than $3,000 cash for parts.
3) Jesse and his crew have only seven days and nights to design, build and race the machine.

So let’s relate this to your training team… Have you taken time to create a simple set of rules for your team? Maybe you should take a lesson from the Monster Garage pit crew and make this a priority!

For the record, Jesse doesn’t take NO for an answer, and whining is NOT an option. Hmmm… yet another good project managment tip!

Each Monster Garage project starts with a day of planning
Even though the team is running on a very short time schedule, the first full day is set aside for PLANNING. Then the construction begins.

How often have you been tasked with developing a huge training project and no one really bothered to schedule time to PLAN? Using the Monster Garage analogy, if you are planning a 5 week development process, a full week should be devoted to planning. This is a good rule of thumb with about 20% of the project time should be spent in planning. Why? Because you can clearly articulate expectations, conduct essential research, collect information from a variety of stakeholders and produce a solid strategy for achieving the stated objectives. Keep in mind if you fail to plan, you plan to fail…

Just like the Monster Garage creations, online learning projects are big beasts and require a team effort. Jesse assembles his “dream team” based upon individual areas of expertise. He has welders, mechanics, fabricators and custom air-brush painters. His team must make the transformed vehicle not only look good, but “deliver on the promise” of functionality.

Likewise, the training project manager sets the scope with clearly defined roles and responsiblities for each team member:

Researchers determine existing content to leverage and competitive information as well.
Instructional designers look for ways to create standardized templates that facilitate the learning process. They create the instruction sequence and determine the best way to create meaningful activities for accountable training.
Programmers must produce solid error-free code.
Developers take raw content and create lessons while the graphic artist adds visual elements with graphics, animations and color cues. The tighter you define roles and keep people on-track, the better. When it all comes together, a training project is truly a work of art.

And finally….the moment of truth and accountability happens…will the monster creation work? Jesse always takes “the dream machine” out for that victory spin. Just like the monster’s moment of truth, it is inspirational when the AHA moment (light bulb) happens for your students in your beta test. It is fun to see students demonstrate proficiences from the training you created.

When your training team is successful and your training customer are happy, it’s a win-win!! You accomplished what you set out to do. We thank Jesse James and the Monster Garage for his inspiration on project management!

Karen Miller has over twenty years experience in applying instructional systems design principles to create blended training solutions. She consistently delivers web-based training products on-time, under budget while exceeding customer expectations. She is a national training award winner (ASTD’98, ISPI’02), published author, adjunct college professor and an ISPI-Certified Performance Technologist. Her company, Instructional Design Consortium provides instructional expertise and USA-based outsourcing services for the design, development and delivery of online training.

There are many different website design companies, offering different facilities such as flash design, however what should a small business look for when seeking an internet prescence?

When choosing which company you would like to build your website, there are many factors which you need to take into consideration.

Firstly how much is the website going to cost to build and host. We all have different budgets, however there are some very good deals to get, if you are willing to search around.

When choosing a company it is important to look at their portfolio, this will give you a good insight into the type of work they do.

Most web desgn firms will offer additional services such as optimisation, website promotion and may also submit your website to the search engines.

For me the website they have created for you should be fully optimised anyway and I would also expect the web design firm should submit the site to the search engines as a matter of course. It is always worth asking to make sure.

It is always worth asking the company to add a link to your website, preferably from their homepage, as the more backward links you have, the higher page rank you will eventually obtain. The higher the page rank, the more visitors you are likely to obtain.

If you want to promote the website even further, google adwords is a favourite of mine. This is where you pay per click to your website and your advert is likely to appear in the first or second page of the results, on the right hand side.

You can also write articles, like the one I am here. This will potentially obtain you even more additional links and visitors.

These are the websites I advise you to submit your articles to:

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.searchwarp.com
http://www.goarticles.com

Stephen Hill has a number of websites, examples are http://www.impotence-male.co.uk and http://www.free-self-hypnosis.co.uk

Here are some easy ways to communicate your message effectively.

Communicate Your Message with Words – Words communicate ideas. They are necessary to describe your products/services and their benefits. To be effective, your message must be focused and appropriate for your target audience. Don’t try to sell to everyone. If you target the wrong audience, they won’t buy. Tell your visitors what’s in it for them by telling them how they will benefit from your products or service. It’s also important to speak your audience’s language.

Keep your text readable. if your information is hard to read, or you take too long to express your points, your visitors will lose interest and go elsewhere.

Long sales copy is okay as long as it’s interesting and easy to read and provides benefits to your audience. Here’s how you keep your pages easy to read.

* Get right to the point. * Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. * Emphasize headlines and subheadlines by using color, bold, and different text sizes. People skim text. If your subheadlines get their attention, they’ll go back and read the rest of your copy. * Break up long text with white space, color, columns, lines, and graphics. * Break up copy into easy-to-read smaller sections. * Use white space or images to divide sections. * Use subheadings and bulleted lists to highlight benefits. * Limit the width of your text to around 500 pixels.

Communicate Your Message with Images – The right image can often make a point more quickly and clearly than several paragraphs of text. To accomplish that, your images must be targeted and appropriate to your audience and topic. Use colors and images that are appropriate for your audience and topic.

Your images also have to be optimized. If your images are too big in physical size or in file size, your web pages will open more slowly. The more big images you have on your site, the slower your pages will open. Limit the total number of images to just those that support your message. Most visitors will not wait very long for a page to come up. Keep them waiting too long and they will be gone and you will lose sales. So, optimize every image!

Check your web site and see if it accomplishes your goal. Does it effectively accomplish what you intend it to do? Do you cover all of the important points that you want to get across? Is your message focused and targeted to your audience? Does it provide benefits to them?

A good way to test how well you completed the above steps is to ask several people to visit your site and give you feedback. Ask each person these simple questions:

* Who do they think the web site is targeted to? * What’s the message they got from it? Is the message clear or confusing? * Does the web site provide enough information? And if not, what is missing? Do they have any questions you didn’t answer? * Is it easy to read? * Do the graphics make sense or are they distracting? * Overall, did they find the web site to be appealing and easy to get through?

With this input, make any changes that seem appropriate to get your message across effectively to your audience.

Perhaps, you have been worrying too much about your web site design services. Are they doing pretty good?

Well, to soothe your brain muscles, lessen the wrinkling of your forehead and the frequency of troubled sleep, here are some web site technologies that you can bank on to effectively promote your business or company to your advantage.

Client Side and Servers Side are the two kinds of technologies used in web sites. Client Side means that the processing of the technology is done in the web browser. Server Side, on the other hand, is done by the web server.

Client Side technologies use HTML, XHTML and CSS in creating fabulous web sites which are similar to most of the sites you are enjoying now. HTML is short for Hyper Text Markup Language. A series of ‘tags’ is used in designing through HTML. This technology is used by labeling text so that the computer can understand what it means and what it wants. To accentuate a word, say to make the phrase ‘World Wide Web’ bold, the right tag is – World Wide Web. The result of which is this – World Wide Web. In order to come up with a whole site, series of apt tags is a requisite.

HTML was created by Tim-Berners-Lee in the year 1990. Lee’s creation was acknowledged by the W3C or the World Wide Web Consortium. After HTML came XHTML. The latter is short for eXtended Hyper Text Markup Language. Experts in web design services are predicting that XHTML will constitute a big part of the World Wide Web’s future. The project of the W3C called “The Semantic Web” will be using more of XHTML as well as other latest technologies. This will bring about further modern anticipated changes.

CSS is another essential web technology. Cascading Style Sheets or CSS was created by W3C. It is one of the most user-friendly technologies that show what the text is and how it should be displayed in the page. It directs designers on how to control documents and present them visually in different mediums. This is an example of how to use it – font-family:Arial, sans-serif. This is used to make the web browser use Arial font. If Arial is not available, then the default will be sans-serif font.

To have a clearer grasp about web technologies such as HTML, XHTML and CSS, you can subscribe to online tutorials. If not, read some of the articles related to them. Make your web site design services functional and dynamic. Make it happen.

How many times have you clicked on a website only to find a screen full of text? You read a large-scale headline and then all you see is text, much like reading a letter. You scan down the page looking for something to attract your attention.

Do you know what you’re really looking for? You’re looking, subconsciously or not, for a picture to show you what’s in the web site. You want to “see” what you’re getting into.

A website without graphics is losing a major portion of the audience it’s owner hopes to attract. Think about it for a moment. Whenever you are reading, your mind’s eye is creating visual images of the perception of the words you are reading.

There are three main areas to which the use of graphics should be applied. The first is a graphic header. This is typically the first area of your site a prospect sees. It must be powerful enough to grab the prospects attention and hang on for dear life. Once a prospect clicks on your site you’ve got approximately 8 seconds to entice him to continue reading. There’s no better way to grab his attention with a picture.

The second area that requires graphics to increase effectiveness is your product or service. Regardless of what you’re selling there must be a graphic to promote it. What if you don’t sell a tangible product? Let’s use membership sites as an example. You’re selling a private membership. Increase your sales by simply showing a graphic of a “membership card”. This will make your prospect feel like he’s going to be a member of a special club. People love to feel “special.”

It doesn’t matter whether what you’re selling is tangible or not, there’s always a graphic you can use to depict what it is you’re promoting. Remember people buy based upon emotions. Pictures always activate emotions.

The third area often overlooked is the background graphic of your site. Well designed, with properly chosen colors this area will automatically set the mood for whatever you’re offering. Again, the emotions must be activated.

These three areas of your website 1) graphic header 2) product e-cover and 3) background graphics when professionally designed and implemented can greatly boost sales and profits from your site.

Andy Eaton has created a 10 day ecourse, which includes informative articles, training videos, special offer discounts, plus lots more – finally learn to create your own amazing ecover graphics. simply send a blank email to arpgraphicslist@graphicsecretsexposed.com or visit http://www.graphicsecretsexposed.com