Drawing on the Web

Powweb is still running their “coupon” special — not really a coupon, though — you just have to sign up via the Powweb special discount page.

Powweb’s regular web hosting price is $7.77 per month for their “One Plan” package - It’s a great package (I’m using it!) with 300GB space, 100GB throughput per day (per DAY, not per month!), FrontPage extensions, POP3 mail, webmail, SMTP (outbound) email, install wizards to install blog software, photo galleries, ecommerce shopping carts and more.  Plus, get a free domain name for a year!

If you don’t want to use the wizards, you can download server packages like WordPress from elsewhere and then upload them yourself to get the ultimate in control. Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL - the big packages that let you do everything you need to do — without Windows servers!

See all the Powweb services in the One Plan here.

Their special is $5.77 per month — and you can get it on their main page — but you can get another $10 off the total by using this special Powweb discount page

If you sell products, you probably advertise on the web. You probably use Google’s Adwords, too, since almost everyone does…

But, did you know you can get a head start on the competition by researching keywords, prices and competing ads — that you can see what’s actually happening on Google?

That’s the function of Adword Accelerator, the program and online database that is designed to help YOU make your Adwords spending more effective.

Normally all you can do is sign up on the waiting list, so you can join when the doors open again.

But, AdwordAccelerator opened the doors for a few new members. The slots will go quickly.

Sign up for AdwordAccelerator here

If you’re monetizing your content-sites with Adsense, you’ll find a focused keyword research system for Adsense in the sister product AdsenseAccelerator.

A new web advertiser showed up in late 2005 with an innovative product — the eMiniMall from Chitika. Chitika has continued to innovate with their ShopCloud and their Related Products Units, too.

The eMiniMalls system (the starting point for new publishers) provides a tabbed interface for ads, multiple sizing, even multiple products per ad, color choices for text, background, borders, the ability to include a search tab, and lots more.

You can even pick “context-sensitive” ads or choose the keywords yourself. At first, you might wonder why you wouldn’t want context-based advertising. The reason is that, if you use other context-based advertising, the Chitika context-based ads might violate the rules of the other system). The ability to choose the ad keywords yourself solves that issue — and you can even enter a set of keywords for an individual adblock that will be used randomly.

I’ve found the Chitika eMinimalls to be rather effective in monetizing my sites. If you’ve got a content site, you should check out Chitika eMiniMalls for your site.

Your business resides on your web site — it’s like the headquarters of an off-line company. Therefore, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load more slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize it using an image editing program so that it has a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too large. If a block of text that is too large, your visitors will skim over the content &mdasah; or worse, skip over your content.

Make sure your web site complies to HTML and CSS web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Don’t use browser-level scripting languages, like Javascript, to handle or manipulate data or to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Don’t create your web site with Adobe Flash, or at least not entirely with Adobe Flash, if you want the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN to be able to index your pages. The search engines can not read Adobe Flash.

Use CSS to style your page content. You can save yourself a lot work by styling all elements on your website in one step.

Even though more and more Internet users have switched to broadband, there is still a large segment of the web’s users who are running on dialup connections. Therefore, it is not wise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website. We have to seriously consider the effect of page-loading time on our site visitors who use dialup.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The problem with slow-loading sites is usually large images. It is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also take the extra steps to optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance. Not only do you reduce the size of an image, but, with JPG images, you can specify the quality of the resulting image.

If you own Adobe Photoshop, Ulead PhotoImpace, JASC’s PaintShop Pro or many other graphics editors, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image. Normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have any of these editors, there are also many free image editors and compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

You can also opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

Do you have a site with a border?

Want to add an ad for 15, 30 or 60 seconds that will stay in the border — even if your visitor scrolls down the page.

This software package is free:
Get Scroll Ad Lock here