Web Hosting Introductory Special - up to 2 years!

March 9, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Powweb, the web host that I use, has a special introductory offer right now.

Regular price is $7.77 per month, but this special is only $5.77 per month — a big percentage off a cheap price!

You can grab the special for 1 year or 2 years, prepaid, with no set-up fee. Or, you can get a 3-month package and pay a set-up fee, too.

I’ve been using PowWeb for web hosting for three years and am very happy with the service. Now, they offer 300 GB of storage space and up to 100 GB thruput per day! Of course, we get PHP, Perl, MySQL, FrontPage Extensions, wizards for easy installation of lots of blog, forums, photo galleries, etc.

Of course, if you’re technically minded, you can upload and manage your own installation of software, too - you don’t have to use the wizards if you don’t want to… It’s an amazing package…

And, it’s at a price that we all can afford — with a money-back guarantee, too.

PowWeb Hosting
300,000 MB + 3000 GB xfer
*On Sale* $5.77/month!
http://drawingontheweb.com/r/powweb

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Visitor Experience, Web Hosting 

Suggested Web Design Resources

February 22, 2007 | 4 Comments

I am often asked which resources (books, etc.) that I recommend for people who want to create web sites.

Many web hosts, such as Powweb, provide basic templates for easy creation of a web site. These can be your base for your very first web site, or can function as a quick way to set up your personal blog, a photo gallery or even a forum.

Once you have your first site created by some type of script or template, you will want to play around with it and change it. Whether you create a site using FrontPage, DreamWeaver, a web host’s templates, or code it by hand, you will probably find that you want to do things that can not be done by the standard package. That’s where coding and tweaking the site by hand come in.

HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide, Fifth Edition (Paperback)
– excellent structure, very readable and very understandable. Bite-size chunks of information and examples.

Open Source Web Development with LAMP Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP (the LAMP book will be hard to find).
My reviews of these two books.

If you’re using FrontPage, get FrontPage 2003 The Missing Manual.

Actually, all of the books at this link. I have but haven’t used the JavaScript one. The others are good. Start from the top, with Don’t Make Me Think.

Get one or the other versions (paperback / hardack) of the HTML for the World Wide Web, even if you have another HTML book. www.terryscomputertips.com/computers/web-design-books.php The CSS and PHP anthologies are not learning tools, but more reference / script libraries. The “Build your own database-driven website” book is a good example for getting going with PHP.

The Adsense Secrets” ebook by Joel Comm. Joel is “Dr. Adsense” — one of the first people to make over $10,000 per month from Google’s Adsense pay-per-click ads on his web sites. I found this book a BIG help in understanding how to create and display Adsense “pay per click” ads on my sites.
Get Adsense Secrets

Visibone.com’s “The Browser Book” is a 16-page quick-reference booklet that I use almost every day. It covers HTML, CSS, colors, fonts, special characters, JavaScript, DOM and Regular Expresions.
www.visibone.com

The Super Affiliates Handbook about selling other people’s products. Rosalind Gardner, formerly an air traffic controller, made over $478,000 in one year as an affiliate selling other people’s products on the web.

Notepad++ color-coded syntax programmers editor (free). Mostly, I use the EditPad Pro ($40, www.jgsoft.com). I reviewed Notepad++ in my November 28th issue of Terry’s Computer Tips.

Adsense Gold (Adsense Tracker script + 2 web-based PPC price lists + ebook). I waited and waited, convincing myself I didn’t need it. I finally bought it recently. It brings a whole new level of understanding web site stats and information on which pages get visited and which adsense ad formats — and ads — get clicked, without having to mess with Google’s limited “channels.”
Get Adsense Gold

SEO Elite Finally, one software package that I’m still considering — probably like my unwise delay in buying Adsense Gold. This package is all about fine-tuning your web site(s) to get high rankings in Google, MSN, Yahoo and similar search engines — and establishing incoming links from other web sites — because higher rankings mean more traffic! And more traffic means more earnings, whether you are selling stuff or have content with advertising. SEO Elite helps you get targeted traffic — traffic interested in your site’s subject.

Why get links? The more inbound links you have — links from other sites to yours — the higher you should rank in the search engines. Search engines also look at blogs for their rankings because blogs have become a major factor in Internet communications in the last year

You can sign up for Free Web Advertising via the ability to post entries to a blog designed specifically for advertising by members. Free members can post a 700 character ad once per week. Paid members can post much more often, with larger ads and HTML (fonts and images) that free members can not.

Pay attention, though — there is a special one-time offer for a paid upgrade that is not repeated. Although you can purchase a lesser upgrade later, you can not post nearly as often and you don’t get all the bonuses available if you go for the “Elite” upgrade. I wish I had…

One of the new services that I have found is LinkMetro. With LinkMetro, which is available in both a free membership and Advanced Membership modes, is a great way to identify potential web sites that you might want to link to you.

Why get links? The more inbound links you have — links from other sites to yours — the higher you should rank in the search engines.

LinkMetro’s free service helps you identify potential link partners. The Advanced Membership makes the tedious task of modifying and maintaining your web site’s link files into a virtually automatic activity. Just initiate a link request, or accept a link request from someone else, and pick where you want the link in your links directory — LinkMetro’s software will handle the rest.

LinkMetro will also allow you to easily view the pages on which your link partners have your links and make sure the links are still there.

Sign up for a free or Advanced Membership at LinkMetro. I recommend the free membership, not the advanced.

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Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, CSS, FrontPage, HTML, Internet Marketing, PHP Scripting, SEO, Scripts, Search Engine Optimization, Text Editors, Traffic & Linking, Usability, Visitor Experience, WYSIWYG Editors, Web design tools 

Bad Web Design #1

January 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Looks like Jason Berberich is starting a series of bad web design reviews. Or, perhaps this might be the only one — he’s featuring it because of the hour+ that he spent on hold waiting for tech support..

Check out his Bad Web Design #1: Symantec Mysupport . He’s got a very valid point. I’ve run into poorly designed customer service sites like this before. If you need to do customer support, the last thing you need to do is aggravate your customer one more time.

Or, make that, one last time…

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Usability, Visitor Experience 

IE7 Web Developers Nightmare

January 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment

IT Gears has an interesting article on IE7 incompatibilities.

Looks like the author ran into a few more of the incompatiblities that I have, although I was very displeased at the look of some of my web sites when I first saw them under IE7.

My earlier IE7 articles talk about some of those bugs (like the one with the center tag).

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, HTML, IE7, JavaScript, Visitor Experience 

I Hate IE7!

November 19, 2006 | Leave a Comment

For an “improved web browser,” Internet Explorer 7 has much in common with a stubborn mule. No matter what you want to do, it doesn’t want to do it right now.

If you happened to visit my Terry’s Computer Tips web site late this afternoon, you might have seen what I mean…

I made some tweaks to the site and was very happy with the results in Firefox. Then, I checked the pages in Opera. Again, it was great.

But, then I looked at it with IE7 — and found a mess.

Whether it was the absolute positioning changes that I was making, or perhaps a missing or extra <div> tag, or a glitch in the JavaScript, IE7 threw away almost all the content on the page and then laid out the rest of the page in a mess. Yet, Opera and Firefox displayed the pages perfectly.

I couldn’t revert to the earlier version fast enough to suit me — but I got there.

Gee, and I thought the strangenesses of IE6 were bad — at least it would usually display the contents in almost the right location.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE7, JavaScript, Opera, Usability, Visitor Experience 

Internet Marketing: The Signal-to-Noise Ratio Problem

November 12, 2006 | Leave a Comment

If you’re an Internet marketer, you probably have an autoresponder or mailing list. You know or have heard “the money is in the list.”

You probably send emails to your subscribers and your customers on a regular basis. But, how well are those emails received?

If you send your subscribers the same kind of information for which they signed up, you won’t get many spam complaints.

On the other hand, if you sign them up with a free report and then proceed to send them nothing but advertising — especially frequent emails or unrelated advertising — I imagine that the spam complaints will flow freely.

The almost sole exception would be in Internet marketing, although some of the so-called gurus really push the limits with emails 3 to 5 times a week. Gimme a break!

A subscriber is someone who has granted you a privilege of sending them emails.

You may look at the subscription process as a fair trade, a free report for a multitude of emails containing nothing but ads. The subscriber, on the other hand, may see a person that tricked them into giving an email address for spamming.

A subscriber signs up for an email newsletter or for your autosubscriber, not to get advertising, but to get information. Their perception of you will make you successful or not.

The second problem is that this is a world of information overload.

if you emails are full of noise, they’re quickly deleted even if opened. If the signal to noise ratio is high, the subscriber stays subscribed and often will take your advice or buy the product.

You can turn good emails into “noise” by emailing your subscribers too frequently — even if you’re providing content.
You don’t want an email every other day from your brother or sister, so why do you think a potential customer might want an email from you every other day.

Think about what your subscribers want.

Respect your subscribers and they’ll respect you — and that’s the first step in getting them to buy from you.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Visitor Experience 

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