August 15th, 2009 at 09:35pm
Under General
So you think you want to start up a website. Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation. Now let’s talk a little about hosting: One of the critical decisions you will have to make is what type of hosting plan to use and what hosting provider to choose.
Once you have created the pages for your website, now you want to publish it to the internet. To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan. A hosting plan is different from a domain name. You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan. To make your website live on the internet you will be paying a service provider to publish it for you. That’s what a hosting plan is. This article covers what to look for in a hosting plan.
SERVICE First and foremost in your decision is to consider the hosting provider’s reputation for it’s services. It does not matter that a multitude of features are offered or if the price is low if the service you will be getting with your hosting plan is sub par or even worse, nonexistent. Once your website is live on the internet you will want it to be up all the time. For that reason you want to be sure and choose a hosting provider that will provide the best uptime as well the best availability and quality of customer service.
UPTIME When shopping for a hosting company, find out if they have an uptime guarantee. Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers. Even at 99% average uptime it can mean that your website will be off the internet for over 7 hours per month. If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.
SIZE How large is your site? One of the determining factors for the price of most hosting plans is the amount of space required to store the website on their server’s hard drive. If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.
LINUX OR WINDOWS This question refers to the operating systems available for hosting and which one to choose. BTW it does not matter what operating system you are using on your personal computer. What programming language was used in the Web site design? For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you’ll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you’ll need to get a Linux hosting plan. For the novice user who is building a simple html website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on as you become more experienced and add more features to your website.
TRAFFIC How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly? Hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required. Bandwidth = Traffic. The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need, and the more the plan will cost. The best advice here is to start off with a low cost, low bandwidth plan and upgrade it later as the traffic to your website grows.
SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way: First a brief description of shared hosting, which is sharing space on a server with dozens or perhaps hundreds of other websites. The main factor here is that you will have no control over the operating system, database structure, etc., and will have to work within the structure setup by the hosting provider. Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space. Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software. This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a custom setup. The best advice I can give to the newbie is to use shared hosting at first, until you gain more experience and abilities and are ready to take the plunge into something as advanced as dedicated hosting.
At StartYourWebsiteToday.com I offer 99.9% guaranteed uptime and offer customer service 24/7. The hosting plans that are offered include a variety: shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.
By writer
October 6th, 2008 at 09:21pm
Under Marketing
A large number of people are trying their luck with the web marketing field as time goes by. one of the [primary for such an increase in numbers is AdSense, Google's absolutely profitable pay per click (PPC) program that empowers operators from all over the globe to display contextually relevant advertisements on their content pages, and get paid every time a user clicks on an ad.
Nowadays, people who previously avoided the internet like the plague have learned how to publish content websites that invite ads which are organically related to the subject of their web pages. As such, visitors are more likely to click on these ads, and the operators] can profiting] from such.
However, not operator]] is successful with PPC programs like Google AdSense.
Many website [owners fail to satisfy the three essential requisites of Google AdSense success. What are these components?
1. Cost per click (CPC). Because AdSense is a PPC program, your profit would naturally be based on how much is the cost of every click. Being able to target keywords that fetch high costs from this PPC program would most certainly allow maximum [profit from this endeavor. You can get 100 clicks every 24 hours, for example, but if every ad merely pays $0.01 per click, you’d only have $1 as your trophy for the day. On the other hand, if an ad is worth, for example fifteen cents, that’s an easy fifteen dollars for a 24 hour period, which is magnificent for a single website. Hence, imagine if an ad pays a dollar or two per click. You would’ve hit the jackpot, right? Determining CPC isn’t really simple. The best technique is to create an account over at google.com/adwords. Study the bids for any keyword that comes to mind. This will provide an idea how much an ad would pay.
2. Traffic. Visitors are the life of any online undertaking, AdSense-enrolled websites being part of that list. You have to generate traffic – lots and lots of traffic – for great chances to generate some clicks – lots and lots of clicks. You can avail of internet marketing techniques for this, of course.
3. Click through rate (CTR). The CTR refers to the percentage of people who actually click on the ads displayed on your web pages. Your goal is to get a high CTR to earn through AdSense. A high CTR can be attained by garnering the proper ads per web page – which can be done with focused content and correct keyword optimization – and the correct placement of the ads on the structure of each web page.
By writer
October 1st, 2008 at 07:48pm
Under Web Design
Virtually all new companies have a corporate web site from the onset as to go without is, these days, considered foolish. In fact there are many businesses which exist solely on the Internet. If you are one of those people wishing to start an online business you may have shocked yourself if you had priced getting a professional web site built by professional web designers. This may have caused you to reconsider starting up your own business but read on as this article examines various aspects of web design focusing on creating your very first site for free or minimal cost using free tools and templates.
Although the cost of professional web design seems ridiculously high there are a number of reasons why this is so. Not only do you have to cover the wages of the highly trained designer but the company has other costs such as office expenses. Even if the web designer works from home he will be using software and hardware, such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop, graphics tablets and the likes, that is really rather expensive. However there are many cheaper, and some free, alternatives which can be used to create even the most complex websites and some companies even give away complete web designs for free (usually advertised as free web templates).
Finding the cheap or free alternatives is as simple as a search on your favorite search engine. Simply search for “web design freeware” or “web design shareware”, the difference between the two types is that one is free whereas the other requests a small payment for use (especially if the software is being used commercially). You will find a massive selection of web building tools are available and many are so good that some professionals use them!
These days most free web design tools have a WYSIWYG interface which makes web design as easy as drawing a picture. However you will need to learn a little about the programming languages used in web design, HTML & CSS. Even basic knowledge of HTML and CSS will help greatly.
If building a web site from scratch using HTML and CSS is a little daunting then you can search the Internet for free web site templates or free css templates. You will be amazed at the quality of some of these designs which can be easily tweaked to perfectly match your web design requirements.
If even this method is a little too complicated for you there is another alternative which is one of the most popular ways in which to build a web site – blogs. A blog (weblog) can be on any subject at all and is incredibly easy to create, so easy that there are literally millions of them on the Internet.
The really great thing about blogs is that they are free, yes, get that, this amazing web building tool is offered for free! Well not all the time but the most popular, Wordpress and Blogger, are free to use. You are given a small amount of web space to store your posts (pages) and images and the whole process of building a blog is so easy that children do it. The interface is rather like a word processor, you simply type in the text for the page and hit publish and the page is immediately created.
Of course the free blogs are rather basic with some limitations but as your knowledge increases you can upgrade some to include extra facilities and more web space. However it is really not that complicated to change the design of your blog and, if you have downloaded the blog software (Wordpress is best) to install on your own free web space (very easy to install) then you can take advantage of the many free Wordpress themes and templates available.
Remember building your first web site can be as easy as searching for freeware, shareware, free web templates etc. so what is stopping you, why don't you get started on a site today? Take a Look at www.freewebsitetemplates4u.com
By writer