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May 17, 2012 Web designing toolsWeb designing is often considered as an art. A website is the first thing which a potential user encounters related to any product or service and it depends on the design of the site to turn that potential into reality or otherwise. There are different tools and software available on the internet and combined with rich doses of inspiration and innovation, web designers can go a long way using some of them. Firebug is one of the most popular applications. This open source, in-browser web development tool for Firefox has many options such as on-the-fly HTML as well as CSS editing, a logging, analyzing and debugging Java console and a Document Object Model inspection application for quick verification of the elements, as well and their co-relations. It has become quite a rage, developing its own extensions like YSlow and FirePHP. Adobe Photoshop comes next in the popularity meter, for both Windows and Mac users. This graphic editor is useful for tweaking images, development of web graphics. What sets it apart is the wide array of tools and options this software has on offer. A designer can extend his imagination to the widest possible realm and Photoshop has the tool for his needs. Filters Brushes, Actions, Scripting and advanced features like Layer Comps and Revert are some of the most famous tools. Another of Adobe's masterpieces is the Dreamweaver, available for both Windows and Mac. A complete package, it includes syntax highlighting, an excellent code hinting, an FTP client, project and workflow manager and lastly, the Live View which is used for previewing the codes. A shareware tool for Mac OS, Panic Coda is an alternative which reduces the amount of applications required for website development, such as FTP client, CSS editor, etc. It has a one window system using a tabbed layout for editing, file transfers, SVN, CSS, and a highlight called 'Books', which embeds searchable books on the website. The simplicity and efficiency of the design ensured it bagged the Best Mac OS User Experience by Apple in 2007. Coming from the Adobe's stable, Adobe Fireworks is a useful vector graphics editor, available both for Windows and Mac users. Unlike Photoshop, this is developed specifically for web designing and makes the task of web layout prototyping and raster editing very easy. It has an option of 'slicing' the mock design to rapidly create prototypes and allows packaging of the design as a PDF file and optimization to make the entire process lightweight. This is of course, not an exhaustive list. Depending on one's style and preferences, the tools' choice can vary from person to person. Mark
May 4, 2012 Website Architecture and Search Engine OptimizationTwo important components of web designing are website architecture and search engine optimization (SEO). Web architecture, as the name suggests, is an overall approach to the design of the system and just like an architectural monument, it requires planning into functional, aesthetic as well as technical domains. The end result, as always, is user centric. Proper interaction of the website with the internet is kept in mind while designing the architecture. Semantic web and web 2.0 have dramatically changed the way web architecture is perceived, with more emphasis on the information's structural aspects. The above mentioned two concepts have enabled sharing of unstructured data in a uniform manner, providing a common platform. Web architecture is often confused with web designing, but while web design is more of a practical task, which incorporates various other tasks including architecture, website architecture is more of an intellectual concept, which requires proper chain of thought before the actual design. It also includes coding to make the site faster and more attractive, resulting in an enhanced viewer experience. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another integral component of the art of web designing. It is akin to what is known as 'advertizing' in financial terms. Essentially, it is required for any web page's success that more and more viewers visit the page and this is possible if the website is listed right among the top search results of any search engine. This is taken care of by SEO. It has to manage the web page in such a way that it shows up as among the most relevant results in almost all kinds of searches, be it news, local, image or academic search. Optimization for searches began in the early 90s, when the concept of cataloging by search engines came into practice. With growing market and competition, the urge to be listed the first as a search result became more, as the user's attention span and time availability reduced, leading to great technological advancements, than a single 'spider' search. There are some useful methods under SEO. Indexing one's web page to the popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing is one of the most logical ones. These engines use 'crawlers' to find the relevant pages and the web pages, once indexed, need not be submitted again. Then, there is the concept of preventive crawling, where the webmasters can shield some part of the web page from getting indexed, which aren't desirable or relevant. Improving the visibility of a site by cross linking its pages to provide more links is a useful method. For image searches, image search optimization is also essential to ensure a page's visibility. This can be done normally through using high resolution images and providing relevant description about them, trying to match the keywords as close as possible. Mark
April 18, 2012 Whats a CMS system?A content management system (CMS) is an integral part of web designing process. It is a platform through which the users can update and modify the website contents using specific software. It helps in centrally administered site maintenance through publishing, editing or modifications of the web page.
March 16, 2012 Internet Marketing StrategyWith more and more people having internet connectivity, e-commerce is on rise. Internet marketing is seeing much more growth than the usual retail marketing. Today its more convenient to switch on the computer, browse the sites for the required product, compare offerings by different companies, make a choice and finally seal the deal with online payment. All this while enjoying the comfort of one's home or office table. With millions of people turning to internet for shopping there has been sudden quest among the sellers to go for internet marketing. This has made the competition in internet marketing very high. Almost anyone can start an online business attributing to its low initial investment. But to get make that online business a success requires huge effort which is often ignored by the companies. No doubt there are companies making huge profit through internet marketing but a lot is required to reach to the targeted customers and have that right brand image. In order to strive in this highly competitive market one must have a well formalised plan and a good marketing campaign to attract as much traffic volume as possible. All this requires a good background research and consistent effort. One important consideration while going for online marketing is choosing the modes. As important is segmenting and targeting for retail marketing so is it for online marketing as well. Identifying the modes which will serve best to attract the desired targeted segment is important and so is getting the desired traffic which can be achieved through various ways like the pay per clicks wherein the company pays for every click on their ads or the usual organic search engine ranking, emails etc. Implementing the right internet marketing strategies is the key to success for the online business.
January 25, 2012 Social Media in Internet marketingInternet marketing is today being well used by companies to promote their goods and services. When it comes to internet marketing apart from the usual search engine marketing, search engine optimization emails and the generic banner ads on third party website, social media is one that is exhibiting huge promise for future as a great promotional tool. Well social media sites are new but their concept lies on the age old human necessity of being social and meeting friends. Social networking sites just provide a new place where people can meet- well the web. Social networking sites are nothing but a virtual media wherein people meet and share ideas, opinions, insight, perspective and thoughts. What started out earlier as a mere place for people to interact with their friends is today being considered as a great tool for marketers to promote their product and services. In a very short time the social media is cluttered with options. Facebook which started as a place to meet friends and share thoughts has evolved as a platform for creating awareness and promoting products and services. With social media the users have the option of viewing a content or not unlike the television ads wherein the channels are often flipped over on the commencement of ads. One just needs to have the right interest creating and viewer attention holding content and well the popularity is taken care by these social media. An intelligent advertisement that invokes interest in the consumers is being well rewarded through these social media sites where the viewers like and share the content with their friends over the media. The other social media like twitter, blogs, flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn are also serving the purpose of online promotion well. The age old concept behind the word of mouth advertisement is being well used by these media. Social media is being considered as one of the fastest ways to generate interest in new customers. It has been found that most people trust recommendations of their friends when it comes to making purchase decision. Seeking friend's recommendation over the social media is very easy and most e-commerce sites are even trying to harness this opportunity by rewarding their loyal customers for every referral they made. With the right use of social media a company can achieve the aspired result for their promotional campaigns. Mark
December 8, 2011 Website Architecture and Search Engine OptimizationTwo important components of web designing are website architecture and search engine optimization (SEO). Web architecture, as the name suggests, is an overall approach to the design of the system and just like an architectural monument, it requires planning into functional, aesthetic as well as technical domains. The end result, as always, is user centric. Proper interaction of the website with the internet is kept in mind while designing the architecture. Semantic web and web 2.0 have dramatically changed the way web architecture is perceived, with more emphasis on the information's structural aspects. The above mentioned two concepts have enabled sharing of unstructured data in a uniform manner, providing a common platform. Web architecture is often confused with web designing, but while web design is more of a practical task, which incorporates various other tasks including architecture, website architecture is more of an intellectual concept, which requires proper chain of thought before the actual design. It also includes coding to make the site faster and more attractive, resulting in an enhanced viewer experience. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another integral component of the art of web designing. It is akin to what is known as 'advertizing' in financial terms. Essentially, it is required for any web page's success that more and more viewers visit the page and this is possible if the website is listed right among the top search results of any search engine. This is taken care of by SEO. It has to manage the web page in such a way that it shows up as among the most relevant results in almost all kinds of searches, be it news, local, image or academic search. Optimization for searches began in the early 90s, when the concept of cataloging by search engines came into practice. With growing market and competition, the urge to be listed the first as a search result became more, as the user's attention span and time availability reduced, leading to great technological advancements, than a single 'spider' search. There are some useful methods under SEO. Indexing one's web page to the popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing is one of the most logical ones. These engines use 'crawlers' to find the relevant pages and the web pages, once indexed, need not be submitted again. Then, there is the concept of preventive crawling, where the webmasters can shield some part of the web page from getting indexed, which aren't desirable or relevant. Improving the visibility of a site by cross linking its pages to provide more links is a useful method. For image searches, image search optimization is also essential to ensure a page's visibility. This can be done normally through using high resolution images and providing relevant description about them, trying to match the keywords as close as possible. Mark
March 20, 2011 What is MySQL and How Do I Use It?Many current websites operate differently than a static webpage you may be used to seeing on many free website sites. A static webpage is one that has all the information stored on the code for the page itself but more dynamic and active pages all use database driven information stored in a SQL database. An SQL database is a collection of data that is called upon by the code of a webpage and the needed information is placed on the page dynamically. This means the page is easily updated through a separate interface, usually an admin panel and added into the database. When it is needed, it is pulled up separately from everything else and displayed. Normally it is called MySQL and you can find it in the control panel for your web hosting service. Now, if you don't know how to use MySQL that's okay because most website packages that use SQL databases will do all the work for you in creating and setting up the database information. The most common website that uses SQL databases are blogs. If you have ever used a blog you will understand this. The site is a static design layout that is completely devoid of information until you go into the admin section as add a post. That post information is stored in a SQL database table until it is needed. Once you publish that post, it will appear on the page. Now, the great thing about this is that if you have a problem with the site itself and it gets all messed up, your content is safe because it is stored somewhere completely different from the code for the site. You can back up the database so you have a copy if something happens to it. If you don't know how to manually change tables or information in the SQL database that's fine, you should just stay out of it. The website programs will have ways to optimize the database as well as back it up for you. So, if you are looking for web hosting, make sure your package includes an SQL database and that it is the most recent version of MySQL. If you aren't sure, ask a site representative and they can let you know which version it uses.
February 8, 2011 The Top ThreeWhen you want to put up a blog you have two basic choices for how you want to host it, the first is a blogging service website that will set up everything for you for free and host for free. The other choice is getting your own domain, or URL, and signing up with a hosting company. There are pros and cons to each of these but let's talk about some of the better hosting sites that fall into the second option. These are rankings based on the Consumer Rankings website. 1) Justhost.com: This company charges only $3.95 per month for hosting packages and offers a free for life option on your domain. Customer rankings on this site are all 4.5 and 5 on a scale of 5 and this is a very well known company for web hosting. Their technical support normally responds in less than an hour via email. 2) Fatcow: This company charges $5.50 a month for their hosting services and they also have a free domain registration service however it is not free for life. They use an icon-based interface in their very easy to use and learn control panel and have earned very high rankings with their customers. 3) Inmotion Hosting: The monthly charge for their services is $6.95 and they offer free domain registration services as well. This company was awarded the "Top Web Hosting Provider" by CNET and they host over 30,000 websites at the time of these ranking. The control panel used here is the very popular cPanel system, which is used by many hosting companies. No matter what company you choose to go with when hosting your own blog you will need to download and install the blogging software yourself. Some of these hosts will offer this as a service that comes with the package so you may want to check that out as well. The advantages to having your own domain and host includes a customized URL and you will not have to run any ads from the service provider at all, unless you want to. This means less clutter on the site for you and your readers.
PS
January 30, 2011 Optimizing an Existing WebsiteNow that you have a website and there's all this great information on it you want to get more and more people to your site. This is the realm of SEO, Search Engine Optimization and getting your site optimized is easier than you may think. It takes a little time and some effort but you will see benefits from it over time. The way a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo works is by searching specific key words on the site and tying them to the active search at the moment. If you site is not set up to project those keywords in a manner the search engines look for, you won't get many hits on the search engine. This means less hits to your website. If you are using a blog, there are many add-ons you can get for your site that will help you to optimize your site based on those keywords. These normally appear as a keyword or tag bubble on the page. You may have seen them, it's a collection of words and some will appear larger than others. These are the keywords a search engine will pick up on when searching sites. There are also places in the code for the page called Meta tags. These are collections of keywords, which are placed in a very specific place in the page's code to trigger search engines to find them better. You can easily add keywords to this area, just look for <Meta tag> and add your keywords in that area. This is manual way of doing it but most current software has a way to add it for you. Once you get some of these in place, it will take a little while for the search engines to actually update themselves with newer copies of you site. Search engines will run off cached versions of your page so they can search faster all the time. Once your page is re-cached you will begin to see your site appearing closer and closer to the first page on searches. Once you have done the initial SEO on your site you need to make sure you keep up on it and update you keywords on a regular basis.
January 23, 2011 Choosing Your LookThere are, literally, millions upon millions of possibilities for how to make your website look so that it not only reflects you or your company, but offers the best experience to your visitors. This results in more visitors and more revenue for you. If you choose a look that is really neat but hard to read, you will alienate visitors and lose revenue. Here are some tips on what to do and not to do when it comes to website design. Background If this is a business blog or website, you want to go with a light background such as white. This always makes it easier to read black lettering. If you choose a dark background you run the risk of it being too dark for the reader to stick with for any length of time, as it's harder on the eyes to read white lettering than it is black. Also, choose background images carefully because they can slow down the site and make the text hard to read in some areas. Text Make sure your text is easy to read and does not conflict with the background of the site at all. Also, when creating text links, make those in colors that will stand out to a small degree, don't use a color that is too close to the text color because people will not be able to see the link very well. Lastly, keep the font to a size that is easy to read but not so big that it looks odd, 10pt or 12pt is about the size you want. Layout The first thing you need to remember about web design is that people are coming to your site for information and they do not want to spend time trying to figure out where the important stuff is located. Make the layout easy to use and follow. The more, shall we say, interesting, the layout of the site the harder it can be to figure where stuff is. Graphics Keep graphics to a minimum if you can. This, of course, does not apply to product images, as people will want to see those. You don't want a lot of unnecessary graphics clogging up the pages and you really want to stay far away from animated gif files. These are normally very poorly done and convey a sense that the site is run by an amateur.
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