One Business

Step 7 : Turn Subscribers Into Partners

2007-03-01T06:56:00.000-08:00

Your subscriber list is easily the most accessible profit source open to you at anytime. They already know, trust and hopefully respond well to you so you have a good relationship going.

It’s more effective and easier to work with existing established relationships.

You must look upon them as partners in profit. Nuture and train your list to be successful, and you’ll be successful too! There’s something of a universal law in this.

The first step after creating and launching your product would be to set up an affiliate program, after which you get your subscribers to become your joint venture partners and affiliates.

Either provide them a copy of your product, or offer it to them at a superb discount, so that they know what they’re promoting. Create winning affiliate tools to help them, similarly as what you would for normal affiliates.

If you have a relatively huge and responsive list, plus a quality product, you’re going to get phenomenal results from this one tactic alone!

Some people believe that the list should be squeezed dry till the last drop of money is gone, but why not treat subscribers as partners instead as mentioned before?

It’s a definite win-win relationship, everyone benefits and make money together.

Similarly, this works even if you do not have your own product.

Step 6 : Create Your Own Product Based On These Needs

2007-03-01T06:53:00.000-08:00

This next step will get you into product creation of your own.

By now (this may be 3, 6 months or more down the road) :

- You have an established ezine or opt-in list…
- Your subscriber list is growing bigger by the day…
- You are making money through various affiliate programs...
- You have residual income from certain affiliate programs…
- You’ve a better idea of what your subscribers are looking for…

You are ready to re-invest some profits into creating your own product!

Follow these points in preparing for your product creation :

- Survey and ask your subscribers what products they want
- Double check the potential at online forums
- Check if there’s a profitable market by determing how many people are searching for it at the search engines. Use tools like http://www.goodkeywords.com , http://www.wordtracker.com or http://adwords.google.com
- Look offline at magazines, newspapers to see what’s being advertised regularly and successfully.

Find a starving crowd and feed them!

Once you’ve come up with good product ideas, and had researched the market profitability of your ideas, start creating!

Step 5 : Recommend Affiliate Products That Fulfill Their Needs

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Aha! The magic moment…if you’ve done all the above steps, you’ll have a list of responsive opt-in subscribers, who are eager to hear your recommendations!

This is where it’s different, you’re only gonna promote affiliate products that they want – as discovered previously. This approach almost guarantees higher clickthroughs and responses.

Here’s a good copy format to use for recommending affiliate products or services to your list…

· State the initial problem or needs that they are looking for

· Build it up to a worst case senario if they don’t find the solution

· Introduce a solution to them

· Write a genuine recommendation based on your own usage

· Tell them results you’ve experience

· Get their agreement that this is the solution to their problems

· Show them the results they can achieve by using the product

· Create an urgency

· Encourage immediate action

You can search and join suitable affiliate programs at the following websites :

http://www.cj.com

http://www.linkshare.com

http://www.clickbank.com

http://www.associateprograms.com

http://www.affiliatematch.com

Try to promote residual or at least a two-tier affilate program so that you can create residual income through a one-time action.

Step 4 : Find Their Needs

2007-03-01T06:50:00.000-08:00

In all marketing and selling, you’ve got to find a need and fulfill it – NOT the other way round.

Similarly, find out the needs and wants of your subscribers. What are they looking for? What do they need to solve their problems? What specific information would help them achieve their objectives?

How do you discover these needs?

The best way to do that is to ask.

Using polls, surveys or basic email exchanges are all excellent methods of understanding your subscribers. This will be a rewarding and win-win experience.

For instance, conduct online surveys with them using services from…

http://www.surveymonkey.com

http://www.quask.com

http://www.custominsight.com/demo/free.asp

Step 3 : Keep Your Subscribers Happy

2007-03-01T06:46:00.000-08:00

With almost 500,000 ezines (and growing) online, it’s all the more important to make yours stand out and gain your subscribers trust.

Your next priority should then focus on retaining current subscribers, on top of getting new ones. With that in mind, here are some strategies to look at to keep your subscribers happy!

Project Your Personality

Project your personality in your writing! Show some passion!

However, be positive here, never use your ezine to spread negative comments or throw cold blankets on your subscribers. That would come across as being unprofessional and having poor attitude, and you'll see people unsubscribing in droves!

I mean, even in the real world, who wants to be around negative folks?

So spread some good, old love instead. Be known as an editor who's real, approachable and friendly to build a better relationship with your subscribers.

Show Some Respect

You should be treating your valuable subscriber as a friend. I'm sure you won't mislead, ignore or harm your friend?

What I mean to say is treat your subscribers with respect. For starters, never bombard him or her with senseless ads every two days! And keep your classified ads to the absolute minimum, separate solo ads from your regular issue. And never promote just any product to your list just to earn a buck.

Your goal is to provide quality information.

Remember, trust is difficult to acquired but easy to lose…it can be gone in a second.

Contact Me Please

Always provide a valid and working email address so that your subscriber can contact you. Do not attempt to hide your email from them. And if your phone is available, all the merrier!

We’re talking about a long-term relationship here, and how can a relationship be started or sustained without some form of communication??

Subscribers may need to contact you for assistance, questions or feedback. Open this avenue to them, it’ll benefit you too.

And I forgot one important thing…reply to emails!

Work Hard For Your List

Here’s an absolutely crucial factor – YOUR ezine must be able to provide what the subscriber wants….in other words, true value.

Ask yourself, what makes a subscriber subscribe?? To get your ads? No! He or she does so as they believe your ezine can help satisfy their needs.

That is, the associated value, real or perceived, that your ezine can provide them.

This may come in the form of good content, resources, reviews or discounts,etc.

What I’m suggesting here is, you’ve got to work hard for your subscribers….

• Provide relevant quality content, or write your own articles!

• Give them valuable tools and resources that cater to their needs

• Seek and negotiate geniune discounts and promotions for them

• Keep them up to date in their areas of interest….etc!

Putting serious effort into your ezine will make your subscribers appreciate you more, cause it shows.

Step 2 : Generate Subscribers

2007-03-01T06:39:00.000-08:00

Once you’ve got your ezine set up and ready to roll, you’ll need to start getting opt-in subscribers. Every promotion and advertising you do should be targeted towards this aim. Here are PROVEN methods to generating new subscribers :

· From Your Website

Place a subscription box on every page of your website. Visitors may enter from many other pages other than your main index page. They may never even visit your main page, so make sure your subscription box is visible on every page of your website.

Use a pop-up or pop-under to allow subscribers to sign up easily. This has been shown to increase response rate by at least 300%!

· Incentive Subscriptions

Provide attractive incentives or reasons to subscribe to your ezine, related to your target market needs. The incentive may be in the form of a free ebook, software, contest, free ad, ecourse or combinations of the above.

It’s simple and nothing new but don’t let this fool you, it still works like a charm and many internet marketers are not utilizing it fully.

Everyone should include this as part of their list-building strategy. I recommend using this technique in the following ways…

Create A Killer Subscription Page

You’ve got to build an attractive subscription page WITH an irresistible offer to entice potential subscribers to hit the subscribe button.

The best types are those in the ‘direct response’ style - clean, simple, eye-catching web pages carrying action–oriented sales messages.

Now let’s break it down, what must you include in your subscription page to build your list? Here’re the THREE most necessary factors...

* Benefit-driven Headline *

Tell them WHY they should subscribe. What do they gain, what can they expect? Sum up your biggest benefit or unique advantage in the main headline.

* Irresistible Incentive *

You’ve got to create a superb incentive that any breathing prospect would be crazy to miss out on!

How? Do something different, packed it full of value, and again, make sure that it’s relevant to the market you’re targeting at. A good gauge would be something you feel you could SELL equally well.

If you’ve seen from my subscription page, what I’ve done is created a huge bundled package of quality ebooks. Notice the high ‘percieved value’ attached? This is an example of what you can do.

* Eye-catching Image *

Words sell, yes, but so do pictures, perhaps even better for this particular strategy…

Your subscription page should (no, make that a must) have an ecover of your ezine or whatever you’re giving away. An ecover provides ‘tangibility’ and increase the percieved value of your product dramatically.

Promote your new subscription page everywhere and in no time flat, you’ll be able to have your own huge guru-size opt-in list…without having to pay a single cent for it!

· Write Viral Articles

This has got to be one of the best methods of free advertising that can get you more subscribers and build your credibility at the same time!

Write quality targeted articles and allow them to be freely published. The key to using articles for effective free advertising is by making sure your article is informative and then encouraging clickthroughs with a killer ‘ad’ in your resource box.

For further information on writing articles, read "Write For Publicity." :-

http://www.web-source.net/write.htm

Major directories to submit your articles to include :–

http://www.bestezines.com

http://www.makingprofit.com

http://www.ezadsuccess.com

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.marketing-seek.com

http://www.connectionteam.com

http://www.homebiztools.com

http://www.addto.com

http://www.netterweb.com

http://www.ezinearticles.com

· Ezine Directories

You must submit your ezine to be listed in ezine directories. Here are a few good directories :

http://www.newsletter-library.com/ven.htm

http://www.arl.org/scomm/edir/template.html

http://www.coalliance.org/forms/ej.suggest.shtml

http://www.edoc.com/jrl-bin/wilma

http://www.newsletteraccess.com/database/reg.html

http://www.yotta.com/magazine/addfree.htm

http://www.linkfinder.com/submit.html

http://www.dominis.com/Zines/publishers/add-howto.html

http://www.etext.org/services.shtml

http://inkpot.com/submit/

You can also do a search at any search engine for ‘ezine directory’ without the quotes.

· Ezine Advertising

Ezine advertising can help build your subscriber base easily. Look at it as an investment which you can recoup back from in the future.

Common ezine ads offered are – Solo Ads, Sponsor Ads (top, middle and bottom sponsors) and Free Classified Ads.

I’d recommend using top sponsor ads only for the best results at an affordable price.

Again, creating a killer ad is important. Track each ezine ad to determine which gives the best bang for the buck.

Check out http://www.charlesfuchs.com/soloads.htm for some recommended ezines to place ads in.

· Co-Op Advertising

If you’re an ezine publisher, you have a choice of joining an ezine co-op.

What this co-op basically does is provide you subscribers, with the condition that you allow at least one free ad per subscriber in your ezine when they join.

Memberships into these co-ops are normally free, and they do work to get you subscribers fast.

However, a word of warning…these subscribers can be mostly untargeted. They join for the free ad, you’ll have to cultivate them slowly. Plus make sure that you’re able to keep up with publishing new ads, I warn you, it can get quite disastrous as they pile up!

Here are two examples :

http://ad-coop.com

http://www.ezine-coop.com

· Pay-per-subscriber services

Do you know you can actually buy subscribers?

This is a good way to build your initial subscriber base quickly to kickstart your ezine. Such services promote your ezine FOR YOU. Potential subscribers who are interested can sign up through a shared subscription box for your ezine. They offer either single or double opt-in subscriptions. They are often known as co-registration services.

View paid subscribers as an investment. Cultivate and build them into profitable subscribers as they’ll not trust you immediately. Note that while you may want to invest in pay-per-subscribers services, it can be a risk too. There MAY be certain percentages of unsubscribes, undeliverables and even accusations of spams. But as long as you have full details of their subscriptions as given by the providers, you’re safe.

Some of the respected co-registration services used by many internet marketers :

http://www.HipLists.com

http://profitinfo.com/leadfactory

http://www.ListOpt.com

· Subscription Network

Join a shared subscription network to gain new subscribers. Each webmaster have to place a unique code on their sites, which displays an exit pop-up consisting of each other’s ezine details. Potential subscribers can just check each ezine they want to be subscribed to. You basically be leveraging on each other’s traffic and promotion.

Again, your ezine description ad will play a big part in converting more subscribers.

The two most popular shared networks are :

http://www.subscriberdrive.com

http://www.subscriptionrocket.com

· Viral Marketing

Get subscribers by leveraging on other people’s effort. This can be achieved through viral marketing, which though nothing spectacularly new, still produces amazing results!

The basic forms of viral marketing include creating free-to-distribute viral tools such as special reports, ebooks, ecourses or softwares.

Submit them to freebie sites, online forums, on your own website, include them in package or membership sites, etc. Another proven way is to create a service that allows people to gain referrals, credits for recruiting members, eg. traffic exchanges, downline clubs, etc.

Step 1 : Start An Ezine, Newsletter Opt-In List

2007-03-01T06:37:00.000-08:00

This is the foundation and building block of the entire 7 step system.

Any ‘guru’ worth their salt will tell you that having your own opt-in list is absolutely necessary if you’re thinking of making respectable money online at all – and it does not matter what you’re promoting.

Let me make it clear - you won’t be truly successful as an internet marketer without your own opt-in list!

Ever wondered why the whole world seems to be shouting that “the money is in the list!”? Cause it’s true.

Having your own list of responsive subscribers enables you to generate money on demand or drive traffic to any website. It’s also the ultimate form of free advertising for yourself. You know ezine advertising works, so why not start YOUR OWN instead of paying OTHER ezines all the time?

Before you start, you’ve got to consider among many things :

- Your ezine name - eg. Online Biz Secrets, Joe Dude’s Internet Tips, etc.

- Your ‘personality’ or branding

- Nature and content of the ezine

- Format – Text, HTML or web-based

- Publication schedule – Weekly? Bi-weekly? Monthly?

- A subscription web page

- A list host/sequential autoresponder to store subscribers’ data and to manage your ezine

One of the best way to brainstorm ideas for the above is by subscribing to renowned ezines in your niche area. Learn from them and notice how these editors write or format their publications - format your ezine around their proven methods!

The 7 Step System

2007-03-01T06:35:00.000-08:00

Let’s break it down. This 7 steps are deceptively simple but effective :

1. Start An Ezine, Newsletter Or Opt-In List

2. Generate Subscribers

3. Keep Your Subscribers Happy

4. Find Their Needs

5. Recommend Affiliate Products That Fulfill Their Needs

6. Create Your Own Product Based On These Needs

7. Turn Subscribers Into Partners

10 Reasons Why People Don't Buy From You

2007-03-01T06:24:00.000-08:00

1. You don't make people feel safe when they order. Remind people that they are ordering through a secure server. Tell them you won't sell their e-mail address and all their information will be kept confidential.

2. You don't make your ad copy attractive. Your ad lists features instead of benefits. The headline does not attract at your target audience. You don't list any testimonials or guarantees included in your ad.

3. You don't remind people to come back and visit. People usually don't purchase the first time they visit. The more times they visit your site, the greater the
chance they will buy. The most effective way is to give them a free subscription to your e-zine.

4. You don't let people know anything about your business. They will feel more comfortable if they know who they are buying from. Publish a section called "About Us" on your web site. Include your business history, profile of employees, contact information etc.

5. You don't give people as many ordering options as possible. Accept credit cards, checks, money orders, and other forms of electronic payments. Take orders by phone, e-mail, web site, fax, mail, etc.

6. You don't make your web site look professional. You want to have your own domain name. Your web site should be easy to navigate through. The graphics should be related to the theme of your web site.

7. You don't let people read your ad before they get your freebie. When you use free stuff to lure people to your web site include it below your ad copy or on another web page. If you list the freebie above your ad they may never look to see what you're selling.

8. You don't attract the target audience that would buy your product or service. A simple way to do this is to survey your existing customers to see what attracted them to buy. This information will help you improve your target marketing and advertising.

9. You don't test and improve your ad copy. Thereare many people who write an ad copy and never change it. You have to continually test and improve your ad copy to get the highest possible response rate.

10. You don't give people any urgency to buy now. Many people are interested in your product but they put off buying it till later and eventually forget about it. Entice them to buy now with a freebie or discount and include a deadline date when the offer ends.

Get Serious About Your Web Business

2007-02-25T03:35:00.000-08:00

So much has been said about this subject in the past but I feel I must reiterate the importance of getting your own domain name if you are to be taken seriously in the home business world.

There is nothing more offputting than seeing an ad with a free domain name attached (ie http://www.freedomain.yourname.com). I personally will bypass such businesses.

The fact of the matter is that a business person who is not prepared to pay a sum, of at most $35 per year, to register a domain name just doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. You can of course find sites that will register your domain name for as little as $10 per year. You can then get your website hosted for a few dollars per month.

Registering your domain name builds credibility and creates an identity for your business.

When choosing a domain name it is better to use a term that is going to stick in the mind of prospective buyers, something that your visitors will remember you by. For example "Internet.com" would be an example of a relatively short and catchy domain. Unfortunately a greater % of two word domain names have been taken up by the 100,000s of online businesses but if you persist you can get something suitable.

It is also a great idea to use keywords relating to the type of business you run. You can see from my own two businesses above that this has been my strategy. This can significantly enhance
search engine ranking for these keywords and I now rank in the top pages of Google/Yahoo for both these sites with the terms "work from home" and work at home business information.

Another important aspect of owning your own domain is when it comes to e-mail marketing. Who are you more likely to buy from, onepreneur@yahoo.com or one@onepreneur.com? Selling online is all about building trust between you and your customers and registering your domain can go a long way towards building this bond between you and your website visitors.

Whether you use the above strategies or not, it is extremely important that you take that first step now and register your own domain name. At the very least the name will become your property and, depending on the amount of work you put into building your web presence, may become very valuable one day.

Good luck and I wish you every success with your business.

7 Questions To Ask Yourself BEFORE Starting A Business Blog

2007-02-25T03:33:00.000-08:00

Blogging is the latest buzzword in online marketing and PR.

But with so many marketers jumping on the blogging bandwagon, few people are giving a thought to whether blogs are really up their alley, or taking the time to consider the best ways of going about it.

If you are planning to start a business blog, ask yourself these questions before you take the final plunge.

1. Do you really need a blog?

Writing and maintaining a blog takes a certain degree of commitment, as well as a passion (or at least a liking) for stringing words into a decent sentence. If you don't enjoy writing that much, you could always create an audio or video blog.

But would your business objectives really be served by starting a blog? Or could other methods of online marketing - like SEO, ezine advertising or newsletter publishing work just as well, if not better?

2. Whom do you want to reach with your blog?

The first step to reaching your audience is understanding where they go to find information about your products.

If your audience largely consists of people who live in your town or use products that they search for in the newspapers, offline advertising might be more suited to your purpose.

If however, your target audience belongs to one or more of these segments, a blog might be just the thing to boost your business.

- Internet users

Does your target audience really use the internet? If not, then starting a blog (or any online activity, for that matter) will just be a huge waste of time and effort.

- Blog readers

Does your target audience read blogs? Or do they prefer to get their information in their inbox? If the latter is true, then an email newsletter might be a better option than a blog.

- Search engine users

A blog is an excellent way to boost your search engine rankings and get listed for a lot of your target keywords. If you know that your audience uses search engines to find information, a blog will increase your chances of getting their attention.

3. What do you want to achieve with your blog?

There are a lot of things that a blog can do for your business. Blogs can help you -

- Increase your visibility and Search engine rankings

- Brand yourself, your products, your services, your company

- Build a community and network with people who have similar interests

- Expand your reach to those outside your current sphere of influence

- Establish your credibility as an expert or thought-leader in your field

- Put a human face on your business

- Reach out to potential customers and stakeholders

Deciding exactly what you want to achieve with your blog can help you get focused, so that you can spend your time and effort in activities that help, not hinder your business objectives.

4. How much time can you spend on your blog?

Serious business bloggers not only spend time writing their own blogs, but also spend a great deal of time reading up on current events and browsing other blogs in their field for information.

If you are prepared to put in the time and effort required to do that sort of research, your blog will serve as a good branding tool for your business.

If not, you should either hire someone to do the research or seriously rethink your decision to start a blog.

5. What blogging platform will serve your needs best?

Deciding your blogging platform is an important step that you should take only after becoming familiar with the features and benefits of each option.

The reason it is so crucial is because it can be extremely difficult to migrate an established blog to a new platform once you have started it. Moving your blog can result in you losing your data, search engine listings and readers, so don't take this decision lightly.

Decide which platform will best meet your marketing objectives, time constraints and personal preferences before you make your first post.

According to T.L. Pakii Pierce who writes at "How to Blog for Fun & Profits!", if you are short of time, and want to spend more time writing, then a hosted solution like Blogger, Blogware, Squarespace or Typepad might serve your purpose better.

This might also prove a better option if you want to get started as soon as possible, are new to the internet, or are unfamiliar with scripts or code.

If, on the other hand, you're a control freak (like me) and don't mind spending some time and effort to customize your blog, then a server-installed software, like Wordpress, b2Evolution or Movable Type might be just right for you.

If you don't want to install the scripts yourself, choose a hosting solution with Fantastico, which comes with a one-click install of a number of blogging software.

6. How do you plan to promote your blog?

Why is it good to know this before you start your blog? Because it will help you decide where best to invest your time and effort when you need to build traffic to your blog.

You'll learn more about the methods to promote your blog when you subscribe to the email course below. Some of these tasks can be outsourced, while others you would have to do yourself.

Decide what you want to take on and look out for service providers to handle the other functions so you can start building traffic to your blog as soon as possible.

7. How will you assess the success of your blog?

To determine how successful your blog is in boosting your profile or profits you will have to measure your blog traffic and track sales or leads that have come through it.

Planning this in advance will help you take more informed decisions about your blogging metrics, choice of blogging platform and degree of customization you require on your blog.

Understand that blogging is not for everyone. It's just another form of communication.

Don't get so hung up on the technology that you end up ignoring more appropriate ways of communicating your message.

Some things may be easier to communicate face to face, in a conference room, or even through the good old telephone.

But if you asked yourself all the questions above and decided that blogging meets all your objectives, then a blog may be just what the doctor ordered for your business.

Who's Driving Your Business?

2007-02-25T03:31:00.000-08:00

I'd like to start today's gazette with a story about two little old ladies driving down the street. You can barely see their heads above the steering wheel...

The lady in the passenger seat happens to look up just as they pass through an intersection and sees that the light was red.

She says nothing. A few minutes later they approach another intersection. Again, the car cruises right through the red light.

At this point, she turns to the driver and says, "Hazel, you need to drive more carefully or you are going to get us killed. You just went through two red lights."

Hazel turns with a surprised look on her face and says, "Oh, am I driving?"

Sometimes it seems as if many Internet marketers are following the same course. They blindly drive down one road after another, without a clue where they are going or where they have been.

It has been said, "The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same things, but expecting different results."

Are you still following the same paths that lead to nowhere? Exactly who's driving your business anyway?

If it is you that is supposed to be at the wheel, maybe it is time to try something new...

Here are five Internet marketing ideas that have brought great success to myself and many others.

Pay Per Click

When you think of pay per click advertising, the first thing that usually comes to mind is Google Adwords, but there are many other pay per click search engines that cost considerably less.

You may not get as much traffic as you would with Google, but with an effective ad copy and the lower costs per click, you can still make a great amount of money in a short amount of time.

Ezine Advertising

Another great source of advertising is ezines. Many ezines have a circulation into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Rates can vary from free for a small classified ad to hundreds of dollars for a solo ad.

With ezine advertising, you can target your ads to thousands of readers who have already shown an interest in the type of product or service that you are promoting.

You can type "free newsletter + your niche" into a search engine to find the right ezines for your business. When you find some, subscribe to them and read them for a few weeks. Advertise in the ezines with the best content and your ads will perform.

Paid Website Advertising

There are many highly ranked websites that get millions of hits per month that accept your paid advertising. Rates can vary widely, but there are some great deals to be had.

To try this strategy, just type the keywords that describe your website into a search engine. Next contact the top 15 or so sites and ask them if they accept advertising. If the sites are on the first page of the search results, you can be fairly certain that they get a large amount of traffic.

Be sure to track your results. You will want to know which sites are working and which ones are not.

Start an Affiliate Program

Affiliates send literally thousands of visitors a day to my sites.

If you have not started an affiliate program for your best products and services, I highly recommend you do so.

Although there are some costs involved with starting your own affiliate program, it is well worth it. Justify the expense by telling yourself that you are hiring thousands of sales people and paying them only when they sell. A web based affiliate program is just that.

A few secrets to success with my affiliate programs include paying decent commission rates (30% - 40%), paying on time every month and offering lots of tools and tips for my affiliates. I also actively seek out potential super-affiliates on a regular basis. Like with any marketing strategy, a pro-active approach works best!

Content Sharing & Links

Getting lots of incoming links to your site is important. Not only will traffic arrive via those links, but a site with lots of incoming links does better in search engines than sites with few links.

The best strategy I've used to get links, starts with content. You write articles based on your niche, post the content to your subscribers, at your site AND share the content with other webmasters.

You can share content "on-the-fly" simply by including a short footer after your content that tells webmasters they have permission to reprint your article at their website or in their newsletter.

Be sure to let them know that they need to include a live link to your site. You may even want to tell them exactly how to link to your site. (Preferably with a short description of your site and a hyper linked keyword or two. This will help search engines determine that the sites are related and give the link more relevance.)

There are lots of websites in every niche that are in need of decent content. Supply it and you can benefit greatly - your links will grow continually with no effort on your part. And the beauty of this strategy is that only sites in your niche will use your content. This means your links will be high quality links from sites in the right 'neighborhood.' This goes a long way with the search engines.

If you would like to see my own content-sharing link growing strategy in action, visit my archive of marketing articles.

Finally, go pro-active with your content sharing strategy. You can do this by visiting article directories and submitting your best, current articles. Make sure the article is helpful and includes a small footer at the end, about you, the author.

Here's a short list of article directories:

http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.certificate.net/wwio
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.netterweb.com

That wraps up today's gazette. Now take the wheel and drive your business in new and rewarding directions!

Lifestyle Entrepreneurs - Statistics for Leaders

2007-02-25T03:29:00.000-08:00

Lifestyle Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs who all have something in common.

They believe that their lifestyle is as important as are their financial results. They stay motivated and focused in their business because they truly love what they are doing. They keep the balance in life and work and reap the rewards by helping others. They are becoming the next generation of leaders in a world with a growing numbers of entrepreneurs.

Fast Growing Trends in Entrepreneurship

According to a recent article by P. Hise (Fortune, 2007) the U.S Small Business Administration, SBA, had found that nearly 675,000 new companies were formed in 2005. At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that the first half of 2006 saw more businesses being created than the first half of 2005.

Talking about a fast growing trend...

Yahoo Media Relations last year released a study in which it was found that 75% of the people interviewed wanted to start a company someday. About 50% wants to do so in the next five years. "The survey results suggest that entrepreneurial aspirations are rooted among the vast majority of the American public." according to the report.

Small enterprises generate a staggering 60 - 80% of new jobs... This is according to data from the U.S. Census published by SBA. The Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership has published that in 2005, about 460,000 people created small business every single month. It was also found that more than one third of highest tax paying individuals are business owners including owners of big private corporations.

To summarize: there were more businesses created than children were born per month in the year 2005 (CIA World Factbook).

Small entrepreneurs pay over 50% of the total of income taxes. This result was found by the not for profit Tax Foundation and recently quoted in an article by P. Hise (Fortune, 2007).

Why Are People Starting Their Own Business

"Control of Destiny" - The level of security in a startup business is not so much lower than it is in the traditional world. Challenger Gray & Christmas has found in a recent review that usual perks and job security offered by traditional corporations are gone. It's a sad fact that over 70,000 people are being laid off every single month which is a huge increase from the 30,000 just a couple of years ago. Even top executive positions reserved for people who have been working extremely hard to finally get there are no longer secure. Even a multimillion dollar parachute cannot replace the damage the long years of living an imbalanced lifestyle did to their health and relationships.

Capital - A second factor has to do with the way small businesses are easy to capitalize. Money is readily available. This view is supported by a leading Venture Capitalist, National Venture Capital Association, who estimated that initial funding for new ventures nearly doubled in 2005, expectations are that will increase with another 100% again over 2006.

Small business really is Big Business nowadays!

Who Are All These Entrepreneurs...

Unexpectedly, based upon research concluded by Robert W. Fairlie from the University of California who studied data from the U.S. Census and related sources, the largest share of new business starters is represented by people over 45 years old: about 65%. Entrepreneurs in age group 20-34, however, are catching up fast since 4 years. Further investigation of data provided in the same report reveals that 30% of entrepreneurs are actually people without education levels any higher than high school (2005).

It is a sad fact that about 33% of all companies fails within 2 years. This is a percentage that has been used in the investment community as a rule to work with. On the top of the list of problems: misaligned leadership and market focus.

Entrepreneurial Leadership becoming a Key Factor

1- We can see that a lot of people who are starting as an entrepreneur have plenty of working experience and seem to fall in the age category of the baby boomers.
Just imagine all these people coming out of a job situation nowadays. If that is all they have been doing their entire life, they need help. Not only with the setup but mostly with their mindset and attitude to personal responsibility. Here is the opportunity for the leaders in this field: provide the experience and information to make them successful as well. To move from an 'entitlement mentality' to becoming self-reliant is the topic of a best-seller by Trump and Kiyosaki: Why we want you to be rich.

2- Secondly, many people seem to be starting a business without education. Same thing. They most likely can benefit from simple, proven, easy to learn methods to get their business up and running.

Just imagine, if you establish yourself as a leader in this field you will be able to contribute meaningfully to many people's life as long as you live! How great is this, how rewarding, and how different from slaving away in an office cubicle until you reach your future retirement age of 70... If you believe with me that there is something greater than cash, I am convinced that this is what gets me motivated.

How Business Burns

I decided to use the following analogy when training new entrepreneurs to get started:

View your businesses like small fire producing the heat to drive an engine generating revenue for you from output. A system working according to fixed rules.

There are 2 variations:
Either you provide the engine (your new business idea supported by a business plan) or you use a readily set up engine that has been proven to work for your purpose (revenue generation). In the latter case, all you do is set it up, start the fire and keep it going.

A business needs 3 primary ingredients in balance to produce revenue:
1. Cash flow (the fuel) - have enough available to keep your business going without having to scale it down too much risking the engine to stop.
2. A steady flow of fresh leads (the oxygen). Keep finding people who will benefit from the output of your business. Like oxygen, customers are everywhere.
3. The passion (the heat) - Do something that is meaningful to you and to others and be passionate. Network with like-minded people to share ideas and thoughts. Join a business forum and get plugged into training programs.

Successful lifestyle entrepreneurs maintain a balanced focus. They pay attention to the right combinations in business and in life. They keep the fire burning naturally and enjoy the rewards, the lifestyle and the joy.

Have a great day!

Franchise Business - Frequently Asked Questions

2007-02-25T03:27:00.000-08:00

Question: What is franchising?

Answer: Franchising is where you buy the rights to a business concept, trademarks & know how. In return you pay a franchise fee and a percentage of your profits.

Question: What is a franchise?

Answer: A franchise is, in its simplest terms, an agreement between the franchisor and the franchisee, whereby the franchisee has the rights to use the logos and trademarks of the franchisor and the ability to market the franchisors products. Both parties commit to a legal agreement which protects both their interests. The franchisee usually pays an initial franchise fee and ongoing royalty payments.

Question: Is it better to buy a franchise opportunity or start my own business?

Answer: Based on the surveys carried out by the US Department of Commerce & NatWest/BFA, the majority of franchisees are still trading profitably after five years. Everyone knows that the majority of people who start out in business on their own, I am sad to say, end up failing within the first three years. When you buy a franchise business, in return for a franchise fee, you receive training and ongoing support. You also benefit from the knowledge that the franchisor has picked up over many years.

Question: How much does a franchise business cost?

Answer: There are no fixed prices for a franchise opportunity. Depending on your budget there are franchises to suit most people ranging from only a few thousand, to over a million.

Question: What's the first step to buying a franchisee?

Answer: Do a search on the internet for the following: "franchise", "business franchise" & "franchise opportunity". You will find a wealth of material on the internet. You can also buy magazines that specialise in franchises and of course, you should attend franchise exhibitions where you can meet the franchisors or their agents and ask questions. At the exhibitions, in some cases you will also be able to touch and feel the products that form the cornerstone of the franchise!

Question: How do I raise the funds required to buy the franchise?

Answer: Most banks have special units set up to help potential franchisees. In many cases the franchisor has done the hard work for you and arranged special terms with lending institutions.

Question: Which franchise is right for me?

Answer: The best franchise for you is not necessarily the business that makes the most money! Buy a franchise which suits your lifestyle and is interesting to you. If you like the products that you are marketing, then you are much more likely to enjoy your work!

Question: Can I sell my business when I want to move on?

Answer: If your franchise business is trading profitably, then you should be able to sell it like any other business. Your franchise agreement will go into detail regarding the processes that are involved in selling the business. Unfortunately, if your business is not making a profit, then it will be difficult to find a buyer.

Finally, always take legal advice before signing any franchise agreement. Your lawyer has to ensure that the agreement is fair for both parties. Your accountant will help in evaluating the profit potential of the franchise opportunity.

5 Streams of Income Sources That You Can Adopt For Financial Freedom

2007-02-25T03:24:00.000-08:00

In today’s economic environment, with Globalization, shorter Product Life Cycle (hence Business Life Cycle). All these factors have created challenges for every individual, not just to the Businesses. For every working adult, regardless the position you hold, the job that you do and the industry or organization that you work with, there is lesser certainty and “stability”.

As workers, we need to look into new strategy, new approach to manage our career and life to ensure greater survival in such environment. Taking an entrepreneurial mindset in managing our life and financial well-being is one important mindset change that we need to adopt. It is not an option for us.

We no longer can rely on our job and thinking that with our loyalty to the organization, company will take care of us and our financial well being, not to mention about our retirement. Today the competition is across the border, not just at the business level, but also at the individual level. What you can do at your local country, there is always someone in a lower cost country that can do.

It becomes imminent that as individual we need to look into alternatives that enable us to have a alternate sources of incomes to supplement our current employment income. If a business is having more than one client and selling more than one type of product, some even with diversified business units as part of the business strategy, as individual we need to learn from the businesses and adopt such strategy as part of our survival plan. This is what I mean by we need to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset in managing our life and financial well-being. In short we must have multiple streams of incomes apart from our employment income.

It is not necessary that the alternative sources of income need to be providing thousands of dollars a month. For example if a person can have 5 alternative sources of income, and each is giving just $500 a month, it will be a $2,500 extra incomes. The key factor here is the alternate source has to be highly leveraged whereby it does not require a lot of time effort. This single factor will enable individual to create multiple streams of incomes using their leisure times.

There are few types of incomes sources that we can look into to adopt as part of our alternate sources of incomes:

1. Property investment. With the require knowledge and the ability to identify potential property (commercial and residential), this is a tremendous source of incomes whereby it provides Rental Income and Capital Appreciations. In some countries, it is much easier to invest in Property with no or low cash investment.

2. Business investment. With a good niche and the ability to leverage on others Resources (Money, Effort, Time etc..), Ideas, Contact and Expertise, business is one of the great source of income. You can also be an Investor without the need to run the business yourself. But you must understand the business, and have good control and influence on the business. In short you need to protect your investment as much as possible.

3. Stock trading. Options trading is one good alternative. But before involving in stock trading, you have to make sure you have sufficient knowledge and adopt the correct investment strategy, i.e. follow a systematic and objective methodology in your decision making on when to buy and when to sell. A proficient trader just needs to spend about an hour a day to do the transaction.

4. As an “Infopreneuneur”. Publishing a book to share an area of expertise is one example of Infopreuneur. Today with the Internet, you can publish Electronic Book (eBook) instead of physical book. This has reduce the cost of publication tremendously and you can sell the eBook through the internet.

5. Network Marketing or Multi-Level Marketing is another form of income sources that one can adopt. There are a lot of negative on network marketing. Putting things in perspective, actually the network marketing is a good business model. The issue is on how the products were being marketed. There were a lot of hype and miss-representation in the selling process that have created the negative image. Those who understand the concept and play the right way will be able to succeed in such business model. This is not suppose to be the kind of business that make you millions in few years. Doing it correctly, it will give you small income in the beginning and slowly the income will increase to a level that can supplement your employment income. It will take a few years to achieve that.

6. Internet Marketing is another form of alternative income source. You can create your own product (informational or physical) or services to sell through the internet. There are various business model that can be adopted for marketing through the net. The beauty in internet marketing is that it usually do not require high capital investment and when done correctly, it can be highly automated. There are Internet Marketers that have few hundred websites sell thousands of products. Today, to set-up a website, it will not cost any much more than $100 a year. Imagine if you have 100 websites and each give you $300 income a month.

There are other sources of income and the list can just go on. The key factor is we have to adopt an entrepreneur mind and constantly look out for alternate sources of incomes. This is no longer an option but a must for us to pursue. Whichever business model that we are pursuing, we must ensure that we have invested in our own education to acquire the necessary knowledge.

To further understand the concept of Multiple Streams of Income, you can read the book, “Multiple Streams of Income” by Robert G Allen.

How To Increase Your Website Traffic With Zero Cost

2007-02-24T03:37:00.000-08:00

How to increase your website traffic with zero cost?. It’s a bold statement don’t you think. But, believe me it’s true. You can increase your traffic by 1000% with no cost involved if you do it the right way. Continue reading if you want to know how.

I’ve outlined 5 ways to reach your target. But, please keep in mind that these are not the only ways that you can do to increase your traffic. There are hundreds of techniques to increase traffic. But these one are the proven one. I’ve used it personally. More importantly, these techniques can get you FREE traffic. You’re money is saved in your pocket. Let’s go to the first one.

Technique #1: Linking strategy

Linking strategy is the easiest way to get free traffic. When I say “the easiest way” it does not mean that you can ask everybody to link to your site and do nothing after that. Compared to other techniques that you’ll discover, this one will take less time to do.

Here’s how to do it. First select the site in your niche market. Be selective. Choose one that has a high traffic. Usually a high traffic site is pretty stingy to put link to your site. So, the key here is to be persistent. Ask them how many visitors do they received per month and if they could link to your site. If they don’t answer your request, email them the second time.

Be persistent. If they don’t want to link to your site, ask them to trade link instead (reciprocal link). This is the last resort you want to have.

Word of warning: Don’t crowd your site with too many links. Only accept link trading if it’s really worth it.

Technique #2: Offer Free eBooks or articles

You’ll fall in love with this technique if you see what it can do to your site. This technique can create an excellent’Viral marketing’ effect. It can multiply the no of visitors to your site in a matter of days.This most important thing about this technique is that to offer something that is really useful to your visitor. So useful that they can only get that information from you!

You need to the ‘wants’ in your need market. What problems do they encounter? Solve these problems and you have a killer articles or e-book that you can give away for free. Remember, don’t sell it. Give it away for free. If you feel really reluctant to give your article or e-book for free, you can give your visitors a partial of it. But, make sure it’s really useful. Don’t forget to put your name and your contact information in this article or e-book. Usually, if you write an article, you need to include your resource box at the very bottom of your article.

The most important task in this technique is to offer a reprint right to your visitors. What this mean is that your visitors can publish your articles or e-book to anyone in any medium; email, Ezine, website or anything. But please state your condition: Include your contact information or resource box. This will create viral effect to your visitors.

Before I forgot, there is one particular e-book compiler that is good in doing this kind of task. The name of this e-book compiler is ‘E-book Edit Pro’. With this compiler, you can offer your visitors a customizable e-book. This is a great incentive for them to distribute your article or e-book since they can put their name and information in it. If you like to know more about the excellent compiler, please visit:http://www.ebookedit.com/

Technique #3: Classified Ad

This is the most time consuming technique compared to all 5. While it is time consuming, it is really worth it.

Tips - This technique should be used together with the above technique. Let me explain:

First, you need to write an e-book or article that you can give it away for free. Then, you need have an autoresponder. If you don’t have an autoresponder (your hosting company should provide this service for free), you can get one for free. Just type ‘free autoresponder’ in your search engine and you’ll get hundred of sites that provided free autoresponder. This is for opt in emails.
Enough talking. Let’s continue.

After you have your own autoresponder, place your free article in this autoresponder. Now, you need to advertise your autoresponder address in the classified ad website. Don’t put your email address but your autoresponder address. The best part with this technique is that you can capture you visitor’s email. You can contact them again and again if you have any offer in the future.

Technique #4: Deliver informational pack Ezine/newsletter

People surf the net to look for information. Out of 100, only 3 people surf the net to buy something. But others are doing some research or try to find something informational.

With this keep in mind, you can attract people to come to your site if you can deliver them timely information. By producing timely information, you glued these visitors to your site preventing them from going elsewhere. This can be done by giving them free newsletter or Ezine.

This is not an easy task because there is abundance of free information on the net. You need to give them something different from these ‘free’ stuff. Try to provide something unique in your Ezine. For example, if you’re publishing music Ezine, try to make a deal with music label so that you can give special price to your subscriber. Make sure your subscriber cannot get this of kind if deal in other place. If you can create this unique proposition, you’re already on top of the world. Your Ezine will spread like fire. More people will come to your site to subscribe your unique newsletter.

Technique #5: Offer affiliate program

This is the greatest FREE traffic generator technique out there. With this technique both parties win; you and your affiliate program participant. You get more traffic and sales, they get more money from referral commission.

This topic is really a large topic. I can write a whole e-book about how to create a successful affiliate program. But, I’ll discuss the basic thing about affiliate program in here.

Basically, to create an effective affiliate program, you need to create an interest for your visitor’s to join your affiliate program. You can do this by giving them high referral fees and marketing tools for them to use. Above all, you need to make them easy to promote your product or service. Don’t make them do all the hard work. It is your job.

The next thing you need to do is to motivate them to spread the word about you. Contact them in a timely manner. Don’t forget them after they’ve joined your program. Make them feel special. In fact, they are special since they are the one who will do the promotion and advertising.A well designed affiliate program can increase your website traffic and sales by unimaginable amount. But again, you need to devote all you effort in this technique if you want to have a successful affiliate program. Don’t do it half way. Even if you’ve to work 18 hours a day to create your own affiliate program, it’s really worth it in the future. The payoff is going to be thousand times your initial effort.

All of these techniques are free. You don’t have to spend a dime on them. Try it on your site. I’ve tried all these techniques to generate traffic to my site and blog. And they work!When you got more traffic,more money you got.

Designing for Sales

2007-02-24T03:36:00.002-08:00

One thing that lots of designers don't seem to understand is that there's a big difference between the kind of design you should use if you're trying to present information (usually with ads), and the kind of design you should use if the aim of your website is to make sales. This distinction causes a lot of confusion, bad design, and, ultimately, lost sales. If you're trying to sell, then there's a whole other set of design principles that you need to follow.

The Headline is Everything.

If you want your website to make sales for you, then the first thing you need to pay attention to is the headline on your sales page. It needs to be large, to stand out, and to grab the visitors' attention. It should give a clear benefit (not a feature) of your product that you think would appeal to most people. If you have a bad headline then people won't even look at the rest of what you've written – they'll just press the back button.

Always Be Ready to Make the Sale.

As soon as a visitor gets to your product's page, it should be absolutely crystal clear what they've got to do to buy the product. If it's a long page, then 'buy' buttons should be scattered throughout. If a visitor could look at any part of your page and wonder where they have to click to buy the product, then there's something fundamentally wrong with your website's design.

Make Happy Customers Prominent.

On a sales page you should have a space for feedback that has been left by previous customers, whether it's in the form of reviews or testimonials. This gives people an opportunity to read a supposedly objective view of your product, and makes them feel better about spending their money on it. Of course, this means that you need to solicit feedback from previous customers to put in that space – a good way of doing this is to offer rewards for customers who contribute in this way.

Pay Attention to Payment.

You need to make sure that your payment page – that is, the page where you collect credit card details – is well laid out and easy to use. Doing things like making it difficult to type in a credit card number or making it confusing to choose what kind of card you have is likely to damage the customer's confidence in you and your website. This page should be professional and standard – don't be tempted to do anything unusual with it.

Highlight Special Bonuses.

To help persuade potential customers who are on the fence about whether to buy or not to buy, you should take care to highlight any special bonuses that purchasing your product will give them. For example, a physical product might come with free delivery, and a non-physical product might come with a free ebook. Don't go overboard and have a ridiculous number of bonuses, but do add enough to make the customer feel like they're getting very good value for their money.

Keep It Simple.

When you're designing a website that is going to be used to sell products, you've got to keep things as simple as possible on the technical side. That's because the more complicated functions you use, the more things there are that could go wrong and stop them from buying anything from you. It's better that people see a slightly less fancy website than that they don't see one at all because if they don't see your website then they won't be doing any shopping there.

To understand the basics of how e-commerce websites work you should look at as many other websites as you can. Write down the elements that they all seem to have in common – for example, shopping carts – and you will gradually figure out which things are essentials and which things are just bells and whistles. Your website should leaev out everything but the essentials, but make the essential things very easy to do. That is the key so successful e-commerce design, and if you can manage it then it will be very rewarding for you and your website.

Cut to the Chase How to Make Your Website Load Faster

2007-02-24T03:36:00.001-08:00

So your web pages have great content, a nice design, but hardly anyone seems to click through from them to any other part of your website. In many cases, the problem is the load time – people are abandoning your site for the simple reason that it just takes too long for the thing to load.

How Fast Does It Need to Be?

Fast load times are extremely important: usability studies say users rate them as one of the most important things about a website. Users would much rather use a quick-loading site of average quality than a great one that loads sluggishly – no doubt you've done this yourself at some point.

What's the limit? Well, studies say that over a third of users will leave a website that doesn't load within ten seconds. You might think that, in the age of broadband, download speeds don't matter, but remember that in the US, over half of all Internet users are still using slow dial-up connections (if you are, you have my sympathy). Other countries don't tend to have quite as many dial-up connections left, but broadband penetration is certainly nowhere near universal.

This means that you need to pay attention to the size and download speed of your site: those 10 seconds on a 56k dial-up connection correspond to about 70KB in page size – that means that your HTML and graphics should add up to 70KB as an absolute limit. That's quite a stringent requirement, and makes every byte count.

Reduce Graphics.

The first thing you should do, then, is to keep the number of graphics your website uses to a minimum. Don't have graphics for things where text or CSS would do, or where they don't enhance your information or design significantly. You should consider the web to be a text medium, and justify every graphic you use to yourself.

Compress Your Graphics.

Once you've removed the un-needed graphics, you might consider compressing the ones that remain. Try turning up their JPEG compression higher, or reducing the number of colours used – you might try using a GIF, if your graphics don't have very many different colours.

When you can't compress your graphics any smaller, don't miss more traditional steps: you could always resize your graphics to make them smaller!

Clean Up Your HTML.

You'd be surprised just how bloated HTML code can get with unnecessary tags, especially if you use a WYSIWYG editor, or design your site using tables. Design your site using CSS as much as you can, and use HTML Tidy (or another HTML cleaning program) to clean up your HTML. Don't ignore the extra bandwidth taken by CSS, though, and try to keep that as small as possible too.

In many cases, a simple cleaning-up process can reduce the download size by your pages by as much as half – it's especially effective for pages that contain long articles, because of the number of unnecessary tags many editors insert at the start of new paragraphs.

Switch Web Hosts.

Finally, you might find that, despite your website's small download size, it still loads slowly. In these cases, your web host may be to blame. Test from a few different connections and computers to make sure, and try putting up a completely different page to test the speeds – but if it's consistently bad, then it may be time to move hosts. You should, however, email your host about the problem first and give them a week or so to fix it, as they may just be having short-term problems.

When you're switching to a host to try to get a good speed, you might want to consider looking around at sites that are already hosted by them. The best way to do this is to do a search for "hosted by [host's name]" (with the quote marks), as many sites will write who they're hosted by on one of their pages – you can then check a few sites out to see whether they're generally fast or slow.

CSS and the End of Tables

2007-02-24T03:35:00.002-08:00

In the bad old days of the web, the only way to create even slightly complex layouts was to use tables. Some sites featured silly numbers of tables, one inside the other, to create relatively simple-looking effects. With CSS, though, tables can finally be replaced.

What's So Bad About Tables?

If you've ever worked with a site that uses tables, you'll know just how difficult it can be. Your HTML becomes a mess of confusing rows and columns, with no clear markers of which parts of the page do what. If you want to redesign the site, you're forced to try to extract your content from the HTML and start building the tables all over again. With tables, building web pages felt a lot like building a house of cards.

What's CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS lets you apply styling information to specific parts of your HTML, identified by tag name, or by IDs and classes you specify. This is done using CSS selectors.

CSS Selectors.

The first thing you need to know about CSS is the basics of how selectors work. There are lots of esoteric and mostly useless selectors, but the basics aren't too hard to grasp.

CSS relies on your tags having classes and IDs – the only real difference between an ID and a class is that an ID refers to one tag and one only, while a class can refer to more than one.

If you just have the name of a tag on its own, then your CSS rules will affect all of those tags. If you use a tag's name followed by a dot and the name of a class, then you'll affect all of those tags with that class. Using a tag, a hash and an ID name will affect only the tag with that ID. Using the hash and ID alone will work on any tag with that ID, while using a dot and class name along works on any tag with that class. So:

p - all paragraphs
p.thing - all paragraphs in the 'thing' class
p#thing - the paragraph with the ID 'thing'
.thing - all tags in the 'thing' class
#thing - the tag with the ID 'thing'

To add rules to each one of these selectors, you just put curly brackets ({}) after it, and then put the rules in that space – that's all you need to do to create CSS.

Useful CSS Rules.

CSS rules look like this:

rule-name: setting;

Here are some of the most useful rule names and the different settings that can be applied to them.

background-color. Lets you set a page's background colour using HTML colours (they look like this: #123456).

color. Sets colours for text.

font-family. Lets you set fonts for your text – you can add more than one font name, separated by commas, in case your first choice is not available.

font-size. You can set the font size in px or em – it's better to use em, as these measurements are relative rather than absolute.

width and height. Lets you specify the width and height of things. You can use px or percentages.

margin. The amount of space around the edges of some content. You can add -left, -right, -top and -bottom to margin to specify these margins individually.

padding. Works the same way as margin, but is for the space between the edges of the tag's box and its content, instead of the space between the tag's box and other boxes.

border. Puts borders around boxes. Takes three settings (width, type and colour), so you have to put spaces between them, like this: border: 1px solid black;

text-align. Lets you align text on the left or right, or in the centre ('center').

text-decoration. Controls some text effects – mainly used to stop links from being underlined, like this: a { text-decoration: none; }

float. Tells content to float over other content, instead of starting underneath it on a new line. This is the tag most often used to simulate the kind of effects that you get with tables – floating a div and setting the main content area's margin to its width is one of the easiest ways to create a sidebar, for example.

Content is King

2007-02-24T03:35:00.001-08:00

Somewhere between ever more sophisticated graphic design and more complicated CSS, many designers have are starting to forget one of the ground rules of the web. This rule is the arguably the most important rule to follow at all times; one that you should always keep in mind when you're designing your website.

So what is it? It's simple. Your visitors are at your website to get information. Content is King.

The Search-Driven Web.

Studies show that well over 90% of users now have a search engine as their homepage, and use it for around half of everything they do on the web. Unless you're advertising your site heavily, most of your users are likely to arrive through a search engine.
However, they're relatively unlikely to just be searching for a description of your products. What are they looking for? Information. There's a reason why the web was once referred to as the 'information superhighway' – while some people might be actively looking to buy things, most of them are just looking for information.

Relevant Articles.

So, if you're selling products, you need to provide articles that your potential customers are likely to want to read. The bigger the audience you can build for your articles, the more conversions you're going to have to sales. It can't be emphasised enough just how important your content is: if it's badly-written, or not useful, your visitors are likely to just go back to their search results page and try another link. If you give them good information, though, you instantly create the kind of loyalty that no number of advertising dollars can buy.

What many practitioners of techniques like 'search engine optimisation' don't realise is this: you can't fake good content. However many keywords you might stick into it, you'll fool search engines, but not the visitors they bring in – all you're doing is costing yourself money in bandwidth and wasting people's time.

No Time to Write?

The most common objection I hear when I tell people they should write great content is that they have no time to write the amounts that would be needed – and, yes, writing can be very time-consuming. What you have to realise, though, is that there are plenty of ways around this, such as hiring a freelance writer to do some of the work for you, or using speech recognition software.

You might also consider buying in content from people who resell it, or even getting your users to write the content – there's nothing better than getting visitors to write their own content and then getting more visitors from search engines where people have found it. There are even sites offering content for free in exchange for a link back to them at the bottom of the article, although you should be cautious about reviewing the quality of content offered this way.

Keep it Updated.

Here's something that many people don't realise: it's better to write a little occasionally than to write a lot all at once. This means that, even if you have written hundreds of articles, you should release them one by one on a regular timescale. Both visitors and search engines prefer sites that are updated often to ones that have a big pile of content dumped on them once and then aren't touched for years.

Content Makes Money.

Nowadays, it's once again possible to make money from good content without even having anything to sell. Plenty of businesses were based on advertising back in the dot-com boom, but ad prices eventually dipped too low for this to be sustainable. Ad prices have now recovered, however, thanks to text advertising.

You can sign up with most of the big search engines now for context-sensitive ads for your site that are chosen automatically – Google AdSense runs the most popular service. This kind of advertising eliminates human 'ad editors' altogether, while producing ads that are targeted enough to give far better returns than they ever used to. Purely content-driven websites with ads are once again a viable revenue stream, and content is as much King as it's ever been.

Column Designs with CSS

2007-02-24T03:34:00.000-08:00

So CSS makes layouts easier than they were with tables – there's not really much debate about that. One of the reasons many people stuck with tables for so long (and, in fact, still stick with tables to this day) is that it can be difficult to create column-based designs using CSS. Since there are so many websites that essentially consist of a middle column of content surrounded by left and right columns containing navigation and ads, this was considered to be unacceptable.

The Power of Float.

Really, though, CSS columns aren't that difficult to produce once you understand how CSS float rules work. Float allows you to say that some parts of your content should 'float' next to other parts, instead of being displayed one after the next (that is, underneath each other).

Despite all the fear of column layouts in CSS, it's quite simple. Basically, the first thing to do is to divide your content from your navigation using the div tag, like this:

Note that the divs must be in this order – left, right, centre – because otherwise one column might end up underneath another in a way you don't expect. Ordering things logically as left, centre, then right, for example, will cause your right column to end up under the centre one.

Anyway, the next step is to write the CSS for those IDs you just set up. Are you ready for the CSS that's made old-style HTML developers run in fear for about five years now? It looks like this:

#left-nav { float: left; width: 20%; }
#right-nav { float: right; width: 20%; }

Obviously you can adjust the widths depending on how wide you want your left and right columns to be (you can choose whether to set the widths as percentages or in pixels). And that's it! You've set up a successful three-column layout.

Then, though, the problems come – they might seem small, but they're big enough to drive anyone who works on CSS column layouts nuts. Luckily, however, they can be solved with a little lateral thinking.

The Background Problem.

If you want your left and right columns to be have a different background colour to the centre one, you're in for a problem. In most browsers, your columns are only considered to extend downwards as far as the text in them does, which means that the bottoms of your columns won't line up.

What's the way around this? The best answer is to make your columns fixed-width (meaning that you specify their width in pixels, eg. 'width: 100px;'). Once you've done that, you can create one-pixel-high image that includes the colours you want for the columns, and make it the background image, tiling it using 'background: repeat;'.

The only problem left to solve at this point is that fixed-width columns can look strange if you leave them spaced as they are. The solution is to specify a fixed width for your document's body, and then set the left and right margins to 'auto' – this will centre the page on the screen.

The Header and Footer Problem.

Another problem? Well, yes. If you want to display a header or footer separately from the page's columns, CSS can give you a little trouble – sure, you can add them to the middle column, but that would require you to add extra space to the navigation columns at the top, and make sure they didn't reach down further than the main content text at the bottom. It quickly becomes painful to work with.

The solution to this lies in a little-known CSS rule called 'clear'. The clear rule means that you don't want anything to be floating around the tag you apply it to. It has three possible settings: left, right and both.

In this case, you want to add your header and footer before and after the other divs, like this:

Then you want to add this CSS to what you've got already:

header, footer { clear: both; }

That tells the browser that you don't want anything floating on either the left or the right of your header or footer: you want them clear of everything. You might also like to add text-align: center, so they appear in the middle of the page. And that's it! What was all the fuss about, eh?

ColdFusion Quicker Scripting at a Price

2007-02-24T03:33:00.002-08:00

ColdFusion is a rapid application development language for the web, developed by Macromedia. It's not free, but many people say that it's more important to them to have the development speed that ColdFusion offers – and you can download a free 'developer version' to experiment with before you commit to anything.

No Need for a Test Server.

One of the nicer features of ColdFusion is that it comes with a whole application to help you write it the language. While it can be used with Apache or IIS once you're finished, this application effectively acts as your test server while you're writing your scripts, saving you quite a lot of trouble.

As a downside, though, ColdFusion on the web can sometimes be unreliable and slow, mainly because it runs on a Java framework. Its Java support does, however, make it capable of running on many more operating systems than it otherwise would be – for most purposes, having written a page in ColdFusion is as good as having used Java for it, but much less difficult. Since ColdFusion also uses the ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) standard instead of tying itself down to one database, this gives you a lot of choices.

In other words, you're sacrificing some of your website's speed in exchange for more choices and compatibility, and quicker development time.

Easy to Learn.

One of the things that makes ColdFusion easy to learn is that it isn't all that different from normal HTML: it acts more like a set of extension tags for HTML than like trying to get a programming language to do things and output HTML afterwards. This is because it was designed from scratch for the web – it's not just a normal language trying to be web-compatible.

For example, here's some code that queries a database and writes the fields it finds to the page:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = '1'

#result.field_from_query#

You can see that the 'cfquery' tag is used for sending queries to a database, while the 'cfoutput' tag adds text to the HTML. The text surrounded by hashes (#) is a variable. How are variables defined, you wonder? Like this:

Once you get used to thinking in tags, it starts to feel quite natural: ColdFusion just feels more HTML-like than other languages do.

Despite its simplicity, though, ColdFusion is considered to compete more with languages like JSP and ASP.Net than it does with PHP.

CFScript.

Unfortunately, trying to write dynamic web pages with nothing but tags can start to feel restrictive quite quickly, especially if you want to do something complicated – you end up with a hard-to-read mass of tags, reminiscent of trying to do a page's layout with tables. To solve this problem, Macromedia introduced CFScript, a Javascript-like language that you can use by putting it between tags. If you're already a programmer, you may find CFScript easier to work with than 'real' ColdFusion code.

Java.

One ColdFusion strength is that it doesn't just run on top of Java – it can also call Java classes using its createObject function and use any methods it needs to, with the results being put in ColdFusion variables. This will be very useful to you if you have existing Java code or know of Java code that you'd like to make use of – you'll get access to all the J2EE libraries as well as ColdFusion's own. It's this fact that has led Macromedia to market ColdFusion as "a scripting layer for J2EE". Of course, whether or not that excites you is a matter of personal preferences.

Integration with Other Macromedia Products.

If you already design your pages in Dreamweaver, it can be good to do the scripting in ColdFusion, as you get the advantages that integration between the two gives you. You can insert ColdFusion code into Dreamweaver files quickly and easily, and you can even use its built-in editor to edit the code however you want without messing up Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG view.

ColdFusion also integrates surprisingly well with Macromedia's flagship product, Flash – but don't let that lead you into developing nothing but ColdFusion-scripted websites with fancy Flash interfaces, whatever you do.

Clean Page Structure Headings and Lists

2007-02-24T03:33:00.001-08:00

When HTML started, people put all sorts of things on their pages: there was a tag to say which font you wanted your text to be in, a tag to say you wanted it to be in the centre of the page, and so on. Now, though, that way of writing pages is out-of-date and very inefficient compared to keeping content and style separate using CSS.

What is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets – it is basically a way of saying once what you want your pages to look like, instead of having to repeat it in HTML all the way through the document. In old style HTML, for example, this kind of code was a relatively common sight:

Welcome to my website!

I hope you enjoy your visit.

Now, though, you can remove the font tags altogether, and just have this:

Welcome to my website!

I hope you enjoy your visit.

At the top of your website, you put a style tag, like this:

Now, instead of having to say again which font you're using with every new paragraph, you've told the browser that you want every paragraph you've got to be in Arial.

Headings and Lists.

Thanks to CSS, you can make documents that are more 'semantically correct' – that is, they would make sense to a human reading them, instead of having to be weighed down with lots of extra presentation code. This has two great effects: it makes web pages smaller (and so faster to download), and it makes them simpler.

On a modern web page, the only things you should ever need to include apart from paragraphs of text are headings and lists. After all, web pages are just text, graphics and navigation put together in a particular order – there's no reason for things to be done as messily as they often are.

You use headings for the title and subtitles of your page – they're the HTML tags that begin with h. You might, for example, write
website title
article title
.

Lists, on the other hand, can be used for pretty much anything else that isn't paragraphs of text. Instead of just putting links one after the other to make a navigation bar, for example, you should put them in a list, using the ul and li tags. Not only is this easier for you to read and add to, but it's also more compatible with non-graphical browsers.

A typical list looks like this:

item 1
item 2

Bold, Italic, and Images.

Of course, in practice, you'll need a few more tags. CSS lacks any good way of making individual words bold or italicised, so you can still use your b and i tags. Images, of course, still need a tag of their own too, although you might consider putting your images in a list if you have more than one.

In theory, at least, that still means that it should be perfectly possible to create a clean looking web page using only six tags: h, ul, li, b, i and img. And, yes, it is very possible – if you can stick to this attitude towards web pages, your page will be extremely clean, quick to download and fast to display. If you've ever sat and waited more than a few seconds for a page to load, you'll know how important this is.

Custom Stylesheets.

One more advantage of this approach is that it lets your users view your website however they want to. There are a surprising number of users out there who are elderly or just want some consistency on the web, and they have their own CSS stylesheets to add to pages to make text bigger, for example, or make the layout simpler.

Once you've written your page cleanly, you can even offer visitors a choice of stylesheets yourself – you can write more than one and then offer an option to switch between them. This makes redesigning your page much easier, if you ever need to, since you can simply swap one set of CSS for another and even leave the old one available for any visitors that prefer it.

Building Online Communities

2007-02-24T03:32:00.002-08:00

When you're thinking of starting a website, you have a few problems. Where will you get content from? How do you keep visitors coming back? When you make your website an online community, though, you can solve all these problems at a stroke.

The Advantages of Communities.

On a community website, people come there mainly to communicate with the other visitors – your role is to set up the software that makes this possible, handling the technical side of things. Once your visitors make friends and find that people posting give them useful information (or just amusing writing), they will keep coming back, day after day, often even making time for it when they really ought to be doing something else. Even better, you don't have to pay anyone to produce content, because the members of your community are producing more content for each other than you could ever hope to commission commercially. The only rewards they ask for are the replies they get from other members.

Altogether, this adds up to an attractive proposition. Even better is the fact that the owners of online communities tend to quickly acquire cult leader-like status thanks to their ability to make the final decision when it comes to deciding who can be part of the community and who can't. Members don't even slightly resent supporting them, and will donate over and over again to make the website better – not only will they tolerate ads, but they'll click on them more in an effort to support you. There are forums out there that run entirely on community contributions: the Something Awful community forums and Metafilter community weblog, for example, charge $10 and $5 respectively per membership, and yet both have tens of thousands of members.

What You Need for Your Community.

Of course, thousands of members don't just appear overnight. To get people to start coming and writing in the hope of getting a response, you need to give them a reason to come to your website in the first place.

In many cases, your software will be what differentiates you. You're likely to be competing with other, similar community websites, and providing better features than the next guy can drive a surprising number of visitors to your website. If you listen to and act on every request, you can't do far wrong – find out the visitors' ideal features, and go out of your way to provide them, whatever they might be.

Another excellent way to build initial traffic to your site is to provide some data that's rare or difficult to get elsewhere, or to organise data in a way that will be especially useful to a certain community. You could, for example, compile live stock price data in a way relevant to a certain business sector, or organise TV listings so that they show all the times a certain show can be seen, whatever channel it's on. If you can find something unique, people will flock to it and love it.

Advertising a Community Website.

One thing to note about this kind of website is that they don't respond well to traditional promotion – few people will respond positively to an ad asking them to join a community. Why should they write for you when you're obviously only in it for commercial gain? Instead, you should make sure your community relates to something you have a genuine interest in, and then promote it casually in other relevant communities. An ideal situation is one where the owner of an existing website doesn't have the time for it any more, and you can move their community over to your site – this kind of 'evacuation' can give your site a thriving community overnight.

Once you've got a community, of course, don't underestimate how much promotion its members will do themselves: they will link it from everywhere they get a chance to put links, email things from it to friends, show it to people they know and get them to join – the possibilities are endless. If you care for your community properly, it will pay you back many times over.

Building a Budget Website

2007-02-24T03:32:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time, building a website was very expensive. Now, though, you can have a site up and running for the price of a used book, if you're frugal and careful. Getting the cheapest website you can is a great first step on the ladder, to get started on the web and see if it's for you.

Five-Dollar Domains.

If you're willing to take the less popular domains like .info, or some of the ones for specific countries, then you should easily be able to get your hands on a domain for less than $5. Some countries, such as .tk (the small island of Tokelau), even offer their domains for nothing!

Free Software.

Nowadays, it's easily possible to build a website using nothing but software you can get for free – most of the best scripting languages are free, and each one has had a lot of free software built for it by hobbyists. Check out sourceforge.net, which is a big repository of free software.

You might think that free software would be less functional than paid-for software, but you'd be wrong. Plenty of free software is simply implementations of standard software, and it works perfectly well – if you want a forum, for example, there's no clear advantage in paying massive license fees to vBulletin (the biggest seller of forum software) instead of just installing the free phpBB. The free software gives you more flexibility, and yet comes at no cost.

Free software has become an ideological movement, for people who want to be able to modify their own software, and much of the free software out there is quickly becoming widely-used and standard. Using free software doesn't make you look cheap, because users are used to seeing it everywhere – even better, the chances are that they already know how to use it.

Templates.

Depending on what kind of website you're running, you could use the design templates that come with your free software – they're usually perfectly adequate. If you don't want to do that, then a quick look around at a site like templatemonster.com is sure to turn up something suitable for your website that only costs a few dollars.

Pay as You Go Hosting.

Instead of asking you to pay monthly for hosting, more and more hosts are starting to offer 'pay as you go' hosting, which means that you only pay for what you use. This saves you a lot of money, because websites that are starting out rarely use all the features and bandwidth they're paying their host to provide.

At nearlyfreespeech.net, for example, you add money to an account and then pay one dollar for each gigabyte of bandwidth you use. Most of these hosts allow you to start an account with very little money – the minimum is usually $5. If you keep your site light on graphics, that first $5 can last you a very long time.

Guerrilla Marketing.

Finally, one of the biggest costs associated with any website is marketing it – whether you're planning to pay for banner ads or ads in search engines, marketing is a big cost. You can save money, though, by resorting to more 'guerrilla' techniques, such as becoming involved in online communities than you think might be interested in your website. The biggest free marketing technique out there is SEO (search engine optimisation), which is when you build your website in a way that makes it more attractive to search engines, getting you targeted visitors for free.

Taking it Further.

Once you've built your budget website, do you need to upgrade it later on when you start to get lots of visitors? Often, the answer is no. You might wish to buy a more prestigious .com domain name, and you might want to pay a professional designer to improve your design, but in most cases the path from a budget website to a big one isn't all that costly either. You might think you're building a website 'on the cheap' but, really, that's the most sensible way to do it now – while you can go and spend thousands of dollars on software and hosting, you're unlikely to see any real benefits at all.

Beware the Stock Photographer Picking Your Pictures

2007-02-24T03:31:00.002-08:00

You can always tell the websites that want to be big, but aren't. How? By the sheer number of stock photographs plastered all over the design. If you've ever been to a business' website and seen one of those ubiquitous photos of a guy in a suit or a woman smiling and wearing a headset, you'll know what I mean. Before you venture into the world of stock photography for yourself, there are a few things you need to know.

How Stock Photography Works.

Stock photography companies have libraries of photographs that they believe will be useful in graphic design. If you're starting a site about tennis, for example, you'll no doubt be able to find stock photos of tennis balls, tennis players, tennis courts, and so on – all of which can be integrated into your design. The photographs broadly fall into three categories: landscapes (including landmarks), objects, and models (people posing in a particular way).

There are two types of stock photography: royalty-based, and royalty-free. In royalty-based stock photography, you pay a small fee each time you use an image – a part of this fee will go to the company, part to the photographer, and often part to the model (if any). For the royalty-free version, you pay one flat up-front fee and get a license to re-use the image as many times as you want.

Unfortunately, when stock photography is used on the web, it pretty much has to be royalty-free: there's just no way of tracking use in a way that would create a sensible royalty structure. This means that stock photography for the web is typically very expensive: you basically have to buy a permanent license for an image you only want to use once. This, in turn, forces people towards lower-end, cheaper stock photos, which is how we all end up with uninspiring pictures of some guy in a suit.

Is It Worth It?

In most cases, then, stock photography on the web simply isn't worth it, at least when it comes from the established companies. You can pay absolutely hundreds of dollars and end up with images that aren't exactly anything to write home about. If you're a big corporation and you're planning to use the same image for a year, then perhaps – but even then it's unlikely.

Look at it this way: not only are you going to end up paying an absolute premium to use relatively mediocre images on your site, but all your competitors will have easy access to the same ones too, and might even use them without noticing.

There are plenty of sites on the web devoted to tracking how often stock photos turn up in different contexts. Magazines regularly have to send ads back to advertisers because two ads have ended up using the same stock photo for wildly different products? Wouldn't you be embarrassed to have some site circle that girl you put next to 'friendly customer service' and then present their visitors with the same picture playing all sorts of roles at other sites? I know I would be.

Cheaper Stock Photos.

Instead of jumping on the stock photo bandwagon, then, the much better alternative is this: do it yourself! In most cases, you can create stock photos that are just as good as, if not better than, the stock ones. Why pay $100 for a picture of a pencil when you have a digital camera and a pencil of your own?

If you don't have access to the thing you want to photograph, though (you don't own that object, or live near that place), then an excellent alternative is to go looking for appealing amateur photography. If you look around, you'll find people with great photos who are willing to let you use them, often in exchange for nothing more than a credit and a link back.

Alternatively, you can use stock photography sites that aren't big and 'established', but are more like groups of enthusiasts, doing it because they like to and charging minimal prices to get their work out there. Take a look at istockphoto.com, for example, where many photos are only $1.

Avoiding the Nuts and Bolts Content Management Software

2007-02-24T03:31:00.001-08:00

If all this talk of coding and designing scares you off, you might want to know that there is an alternative to all this. You can install a kind of software called a Content Management System (CMS) that allows you to put content up on the web without ever knowing a thing about HTML.

Fantastico.

Depending on your host, you might find that you already have a selection of CMSes available and ready to install from your cPanel. Log in, and take a look for the Fantastico script installer. If you have it, then you'll be able to read a description of each piece of software you have available to you – try out a few of the CMSes to see which ones you like.

Finding a CMS.

If you don't have Fantastico on your host, or you don't like what it offers you, don't worry: there's plenty of choice out there on the web when it comes to CMS software.

For finding free CMS software, a truly excellent resource is www.opensourcecms.com. At that site, you can use the menu at the side of the page to see lots of open source CMSes running before you commit to downloading them and installing them yourself. Textpattern, Drupal and Plone are very popular right now, so they're a good place to start.

If you're considering commercial CMSes as well, then you should take a look at www.cmsmatrix.org, which provides an up-to-date comparison of almost every CMS out there. Be prepared, though, that commercial CMSes can be ridiculously expensive or unnecessarily expensive.

Getting a Custom CMS Built.

If nothing out there seems to meet your needs, you might consider having a web designer build you a custom CMS in a scripting language like Perl or PHP. Any web designer worth their salt should have something basic already that they can build whatever features you want onto. This can be really good when it comes to making your website work the way you want, since the CMS will be built around your website to make it as easy as possible for you to modify.

Using a CMS.

The whole point of a CMS is to make it much easier to add content to your website and to edit the content that's already there. Once you've installed your CMS, you will generally be able to log into its user system using a special admin password. This will add 'edit' options to the existing pages of the site, as well as giving you a 'new page' link somewhere to allow you to create a new page.

When it comes to actually writing the content of the pages, most CMSes will make it easy for you to copy and paste from programs like Word: they shouldn't require any special HTML formatting. Some will require you to mark words with special symbols if you want them to be bold or italic, but it shouldn't be too troublesome.

Changing the design with a CMS usually involves installing a template into a template folder and then selecting it in the options. Creating your own templates can be complicated, depending on what software you're using, but it shouldn't be any trouble for a web designer, and most template sites will provide designs in a format suitable for this kind of use

Finding a Hosted CMS.

Once you know which CMS you want, an alternative to installing it on a web host that doesn't necessarily support it is to do a search and find a host that specifically supports your CMS. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding a host somewhere that will support you – if nothing else, you might try opensourcehost.com, which supports almost every open source CMS out there.

Using a host solution might be a little more expensive, but it will save you a lot of time in configuration and a lot of problems if anything goes wrong. Using a hosted CMS is one of the quickest ways to set up a website: you simply pay the host, log in, add your content and you're away.

An Issue of Width the Resolution Problem

2007-02-24T03:30:00.002-08:00

There is a problem that has plagued the web ever since graphical designs for web pages started to become common – and yet it's a problem that's never been solved. You see, different sized monitors can handle different widths of page, and yet HTML doesn't really let you take width into consideration when you're designing. Why is this such a problem? Well, let me explain.

What is Resolution?

Before we can get to the problem, you need to know what a screen resolution is. To put it simply, your resolution is the number of pixels that can be displayed across your monitor, horizontally and vertically. For example, at 640x480 resolution (the lowest anyone still uses), your screen is 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high.

Most monitors can handle more than one resolution, and will give you a choice between them. Typically, there will be a lower resolution that fits less pixels on the screen but makes them look bigger, and a higher one that fits more but makes everything look small. The default is usually somewhere in the middle.

To check the resolution you're using now, right click on your desktop and choose Properties. Now go to the Settings tab and look at the screen resolution section. On most computers, there will be up to four settings to choose from: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024. It's worth changing your resolution a few times and going to some web pages, to get an idea of how much width each setting gives you.

Now, you have to realise that the maximum width of your website, in pixels, will be the lowest width you expect your site's visitors to be using. In almost all cases, this is 800x600: the 640x480 users are now a small enough minority to mostly ignore, as they'll be used to sites displaying incorrectly. At 800x600 and up, though, you should test your site to make sure it looks good.

The Price of Failure.

If you don't test your site correctly, then various things will go wrong. At resolutions lower than the one you designed the site for, visitors may see horizontal scrollbars. If you fix the site's width too low, though, visitors using higher resolutions may just see a thin strip of your website in the middle of their screen.

Possible Solutions.

The most popular solution to the resolution problem is to just design as if everyone was using 800x600 – after all, people with big monitors can just make their browser windows smaller. To make a fixed width design, simply set the CSS width of your body tag to the width you want in pixels (so for 800x600, width: 800px). If you take this approach, you will probably want to set the CSS margins to auto, as this will put your fixed-width page in the centre of larger screens – if you leave the margins alone, then your page will appear on the far left of the web browser at high resolutions, which is common to see but still looks bad.

Of course, the more complicated but better way of doing things is to make sure that your design will work just as well no matter how wide the browser is, because it stretches to fit. These kinds of designs are known as 'elastic'. This can be difficult, but it's doable, especially for relatively simple designs. If your design has three columns, for example, you can make the left and right columns fixed-width but leave the middle column to take up all the remaining width.

The biggest concern with elastic designs tends to be the graphics: if you have a fixed-width header, how can you adjust your site for any possible width? In most cases, the solution is to make your header an image that floats over a background continuing it. For example, you might use an image of navigation text floating over a line – you can then continue that line as the background image, to avoid it suddenly appearing to stop if the viewer's resolution is wider than your navigation images. CSS gives you a lot of power to create illusions like this: make good use of it.

An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro

2007-02-24T03:30:00.001-08:00

Paint Shop Pro is one of the most popular image editors out there. Even though it's increasingly geared towards digital photography, you'd be surprised just how useful it can be to web designers.

Features.

So what features does Paint Shop Pro have? Well, for a start, it supports just about every image format there has ever been. It can 'smart fix' photos, to sort out any brightness and colour issues, but you can still adjust everything about your images manually if you want to. You get 'picture tubes', tiny little pieces of stock photography that can spice up your designs.

You also get all sorts of 'arty' effects that can make your images look like they were drawn in oils or chalk, and you can even create authentic looking black and white pictures. The selection tools are second to none, letting you select areas freehand, by shape, or using other factors like colour and brightness. PSP is especially good at removing foreground elements from their backgrounds, and letting you combine one image with another using layers.

Finally, of course, all the basics are there – resize, crop, rotate, blur, and so on. Resizing works especially well, giving a much smoother result than lots of other graphics editors do. In the latest version, PSP tries hard to make everything it can 'one step' or 'one click', which is quite a relief to those of us who've been using it for a while – with each version, the program gets easier to learn and use as well as a little more powerful.

Logos and Navigation.

Paint Shop Pro excels when it comes to producing logos and navigation elements.

Its text tools let you produce smooth, anti-aliased text in your favourite font, and position it exactly the way you want to create a logo. You'd be surprised how many good effects you can get by rotating your text, and PSP has an excellent feature that lets you curve your text around any shape you want to.

When it comes to navigation, PSP's font functions excel again: it's dead easy to copy one navigation element as many times as you want and add different text to it each time, thanks to the program letting you edit text as much as you like even once it's been placed into the image.

Producing Mockups.

I have to admit, though, that my favourite thing to use Paint Shop Pro for is producing mockups. It's so easy to create the boxes and text that make up a web page, and paste it any images you might need. You can have an accurate image of your website ready within ten minutes or so, and save it in a format your web browser can view, so you can get a better idea of what it would look like 'for real'.

Even better, once you come up with a mockup you like, you can select parts of it to save and use them in the final version, in whatever image format you want. Once you know a little CSS, you can do most of your design work in PSP, using HTML and CSS as the glue that holds your image-based site together.

Photoshop Plugins.

Finally, one of the most notable things about Paint Shop Pro is that it supports Photoshop's plugins, giving you access to a lot of the features Photoshop users rely on without having to actually shell out for Photoshop. Of course, Paint Shop Pro has plenty of plugins of its own available too.

Where Can I Get Paint Shop Pro?

Paint Shop Pro used to be shareware sold by its creators, Jasc, but it's now owned by Corel (www.corel.com). It sells for around $50, which is a lot cheaper than anything comparable on the market, yet it does everything that most users would ever want it to do – the most recent version even adds CMYK, a big reason why many people stayed with Photoshop. You may even already have a copy, as plenty of computers and scanners come bundled with it now. If you don't, though, you can download a 30-day free trial from corel.com.

All About Design Principles and Elements

2007-02-24T03:29:00.002-08:00

A truly shocking number of web designers are unfamiliar with the basic principles and elements of design. Having never been through any formal design education, many just go with what they think 'looks good', with very mixed results. If you're going to design a website, you'll do much better if you have some idea of what you're doing when it comes to graphic design. Here, then, is a crash course in the principles and elements most useful to web designers.

Balance.

It is important for things to be balanced. That doesn't necessarily mean symmetry, making one side exactly the same as the other, but it does mean that you can't make one side 'strong' and not balance that on the other side. For example, if you use a dark colour, you should balance it with a larger area of a lighter colour. What balance allows you to do is to lead the viewer's eye to certain parts of the page without making the page look ridiculous.

Emphasis.

If you want to make part of the page stand out from all the rest, you can give it emphasis using a variety of techniques. Grouping everything together and then moving one thing a significant distance away from them will make it a focal point, as will making it a different shape from the others, or a different colour.

Line.

The directions of your lines will give a mood to your design: as a rule, horizontal lines are calmer, vertical lines are moderately active, and jagged or diagonal lines are very active. If you were designing an austere financial news site, then, you'd use horizontal lines, while a fun site for kids would be full of lines going in all sorts of directions.

Shape.

One thing that lots of people don't realise is that there are two kinds of shapes – positive and negative – and every design has both kinds of shapes. The positive ones are the ones you, the designer, actively placed on the page, while the negative shapes are the spaces created around the positive ones. Many web designers simply ignore this, leaving their negative shapes as a mess – this leads to the 'boxy' look that many amateur pages have.

Colour.

Colour is a big subject. As soon as you add more than one colour to a page, you make the other colours look different. Some colours are complementary, and some just look terrible together. On the web, though, you should usually avoid using too many colours on one page – even if they are complementary, it will look garish.

For the web, hue is more important: the best way to create a colour scheme is to use black, white, and various shades of one colour. You have to consider the brightness and intensity of your colours, to make sure you're not overdoing things. One of the easiest mistakes to make is to use the built-in CSS colour words (background-color: red, for example) instead of creating colour codes – the colour words should generally be avoided, because they're just too intense.

Space.

You can create all sorts of illusions with the amount of space you put between your objects, and where you put it: design is often as much knowing where to put something as it is knowing what to put there. If you make things overlap, or example, the covered things appear to be at the 'back' while the uncovered ones are at the 'front'.

Lots More.

This is the briefest of brief overviews, because graphic design is a surprisingly large subject, and one that's changing all the time. If you want to get properly up to speed, it's worth buying a book, or even taking an evening course at your local college – you won't regret it.

AJAX Should You Believe the Hype

2007-02-24T03:29:00.001-08:00

There's a craze on the web at the moment, and that craze is named AJAX. What's that? Well, according to some people, it's a technology that's going to redefine the web.

What Does AJAX Stand For?

AJAX means 'Asynchronous Javascript and XML'. Adaptive Path came up with the term in this essay: http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php. However, the word is really a bit of a misnomer: AJAX doesn't really rely on XML at all, but rather on a Javascript function that happens to be named XMLHttpRequest.

All About XMLHttpRequest.

XMLHttpRequest was originally invented and implemented by a Microsoft team who were working on a webmail application, and it's been around for a while now (since 1999, in fact). The reason it has suddenly come to prominence now is that Google used it in three projects, Gmail, Google Suggest and Google Maps, and in each case managed to create a much better user interface than they would have been able to otherwise.

So what does XMLHttpRequest do? To put it simply, it lets your Javascript go back to the server, fetch some new content, and write it back out onto the page – all without the user having to change pages. This gives a 'smoother' feel to web applications, as they can do things like submit forms without the whole browser window needing to go blank and reload the page. Take a look at maps.google.com now, and notice how you can drag the map around anywhere you want to go without having to reload the page. This would be unthinkable without XMLHttpRequest.

One of the biggest reasons XMLHttpRequest has become popular now is that browsers other than Internet Explorer have started to support it, mainly due to the fuss over its use in Gmail. The function is, by all accounts, a very simple one in technical terms: it was just a matter of someone having the idea.

Getting Started with AJAX.

The first thing to do to get started with AJAX, then, is to create an XMLHttpRequest object in your Javascript code. As ever, Internet Explorer has to be difficult, doing this a different way to every other browser out there. That means that you should use this Javascript code:

var ajax;
onload = function () {
if (window.ActiveXObject) {
ajax = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
} else {
ajax = new XMLHttpRequest;
}
}

What you've done there is declared ajax as a global variable (usable by all functions), and then created a new AJAX object when the page loads, either using ActiveX for Internet Explorer or the XMLHttpRequest function in other browsers.

The next step is to write two more functions: one to get data from a URL, and one to handle the data that comes back.

function getText(url) {
ajax.open("GET", url, true);
ajax.send(null);
}

ajax.onreadystatechange = function () {
if (ajax.status == "200") {
// do things with retrieved text (in ajax.responseText)
}
}

All you need to do then is call getText from the relevant part of your code with a URL you want to get text from, and put that text wherever you want it to be in the state change function.

The most powerful thing about this approach is that the URL you send to the server can contain variables, using the old REST (question marks and equals signs) way of doing things.

That means that, using the code above, you can easily send a request to ajax.php on your server, and include the current value of, say, an input box for a username on a registration form. The ajax.php script checks whether that username is already in use, and then sends either '1' or '0' as its only output. All you would then need to do is check whether ajax.responseText was 1 or 0, and change the page accordingly, preferably using getElementByID.

Should I Use It?

The question remains over just how useful this is: it's certainly good for some applications where users would otherwise have to submit data over and over again, but it's not much use for smaller ones. AJAX coding has a tendency to take a lot of time, especially the first time you try it, and this is often time that could have been better spent on other parts of the project. In short, don't be afraid of AJAX, but make sure you use it when you find a project that's well-suited to asynchronous transfer – don't go trying to fit AJAX to a website that doesn't suit it, just because you think it's cool.

Ads Under the Radar Linking to Affiliates

2007-02-24T03:28:00.002-08:00

One way to get a good income stream without doing anything that looks very much like advertising is to add affiliate links to your content. They're just links, they don't annoy anyone, and you can choose where you do and don't want to put them. Sounds ideal, doesn't it? Read on...

How Does Affiliate Linking Work?

Step by step, it works like this:

1. You become an affiliate. This works by you going to various online stores, looking at their product range and what benefits they offer to affiliates, and then signing up as an affiliate with the store that makes the most sense.

2. You write about products the affiliate carries. This might take the form of a review, or just a casual mention in a related article.

3. You link to the product at the store, using your affiliate code in the link. This affiliate code lets the store track that the customer came from your link.

4. For each customer you send their way who actually goes through with it and buys the product, they pay you a percentage of the product's price.

You can see the power that this model could have for a lot of sites – if you have a hundred thousand visitors, it doesn't take a very large percentage of your visitors to buy that product before it starts to add up to quite a lot of money for you.

Amazon: the Web's Biggest Affiliate Store.

The most popular affiliate store at the moment is Amazon.com, without a doubt. Why? Because it has such a huge range of products, from books to DVDs to truly obscure things. In terms of books especially, Amazon prides itself in having a listing for everything that exists, and selling as much of it as it can. That means that whatever you want to review, the chances are that Amazon sells it – you're not as limited as you are with other online stores, where you can only make affiliate links to things they happen to be selling this week, and maybe they'll stop selling them sometime after that.

What does this mean to you? Well, imagine you run a book review site. Without being blatant about it, at the end of each article you can put a link that says something like "read more reviews of this book at Amazon". This link then goes to the product's page on Amazon, where there are indeed customer reviews – not to mention the option to buy the book. If it's a good book, this approach means that many people will click the link to see the reviews, and then buy it when they're favourable. I've split-tested this, and "read more reviews" produced almost twice as many conversions as "buy this book", making it a very good strategy.

Hang on a sec, though. What about those of us who don't run book review sites? Well, whatever your site covers, I'm sure someone, somewhere writes books about it. Just introduce a regular 'book review' feature, where you review the latest books in your area of expertise, and then have the 'more reviews' affiliate link at the end. Give books bad reviews occasionally, despite the lack of affiliate income this produces, as it gives your reviews more long-term credibility than if you seem to love everything.

Done right, a book review every week or so can be a good supplementary source of income for your website. After a while, entirely random search engine visitors will start finding your book reviews in searches, and clicking through to Amazon from your site. I have year-old reviews that regularly make a few dollars per week – it might not seem like much, but over time it can add up to a pretty significant amount.

Note: If you're worried about paying more for books than you make back, remember that you don't even have to buy the books yourself to review them – get them from a library!

A Question of Scroll Bars

2007-02-24T03:28:00.001-08:00

Does your website have scroll bars? It might not seem like an especially important question, but it is. In fact, when it comes to website usability, the question of scrolling is one of the most vital ones out there.

Do Users Like to Scroll?

One of those eternal questions of web design is whether users are fine with scrolling, or whether they hate it. In reality, the answer lies somewhere between the two: plenty of users don't mind scrolling in the least, but there are plenty of users who still just don't scroll. The very young (with low attention spans) and the very old (with poor hand-eye co-ordination) are the two biggest groups in this category, but it is also true of people who are just new to the web. You should be designing your site so that scrolling gives added value, but isn't essential for basic usability.

The Mouse Wheel Revolution.

Since the beginnings of the web, people have become much more receptive to scrollable pages, thanks to mouse wheels and similar devices. These let them scroll with a quick flick, instead of the inconvenience it used to take. As a result, your visitors will be much more willing to scroll on your website than they used to be, and this works to your advantage. Still, you shouldn't rely on it completely.

Don't Eliminate it Entirely – But Pay Attention.

The answer, then, when it comes to scrolling, is to be sensitive about it. Place everything important in a position that allows it to be reached with no scrolling even on the smallest monitors. Give your users the choice of whether to scroll or click, by linking to the individual parts of the article at the top of the page in a table of contents. In short, let the scrollers scroll, but don't hide anything from the people who don't want to.

Please, No Horizontal Scrolling!

Whatever you do, though, keep your scrolling vertical. Left-to-right scrolling on the web is an absolute abomination. Users aren't expecting it, mouse wheels can't do it, and web browsers aren't designed for it. In short, it is a very, very bad idea. Every so often some designer will come along and try to make it work, thinking they're being edgy and innovative (after all, no-one else is doing it), only to produce a completely terrible website. In the history of the web so far, there has never been a good horizontally scrolling website, and you're not going to be the designer who produces one.

Keep Flash Away from Scroll Bars.

Another common design mistake when it comes to scroll bars is to think that you can do it better than the web browser, and use Flash to create non-standard scroll bars. While you might like the look you create, it will inevitably be less useful to your visitors than a normal scroll bar would have been.

Your scroll bar won't be immediately recognisable as what it is. It's unlikely to work with mouse wheels or keyboard shortcuts, and you probably won't even let users scroll by clicking in exactly the way they want. You end up designing a scroll bar that's ideal for you, but frustrating for everyone else. However ugly you might think the default scroll bars are, people know how they work, and they're used to them – they don't want to learn something new just to use your website.

Scroll Bars are Better than New Pages.

No matter how down you are on scroll bars, it's always a bad idea to replace them with pagination. An article can easily become three or four pages long with the user having to click a 'next' button to get from one page to the next, and that's just unacceptable on the web – especially since, on smaller screens, some scrolling will be required anyway. If you think users dislike scrolling, then you have to realise that they dislike waiting for new pages to load even more: if your site requires them to wait for more than a few seconds between pages, they'll abandon articles even if they're in the middle of reading them.

10 Easy Ways to Promote Your Website

2007-02-24T03:27:00.002-08:00

Promoting your website can be a daunting task: it feels like there are thousands of ways to do it, but all of them take a lot of time or money for no guaranteed return. To help solve this problem, I've compiled a list of ten easy ways to promote your website.

1. Advertise in the Media. Now, you might have already ruled out advertising in newspapers and the like as too expensive, especially since the chances are your audience doesn't live in any specific local area. That mostly rules out radio, too, and TV is even more likely to be out of your reach. What you might not have realised, though, is that you should stop looking at the general media and start looking at the specialist media for your area. For example, if you run a house-buying website, you could advertise it in specialist property magazines, and even on 'lifestyle' cable channels that show programmes about moving home.

2. Write Your Web Address on Things. If your business has any physical objects, whether it's a product, a carrier bag or just the front of your office, make sure to write your web address on there. Even if people don't keep or remember the exact address, it at least lets them know that your website exists.

3. Give Out Leaflets. There's nothing wrong with a bit of old-fashioned paper promotion: leaflet as many areas as you can. The chances are that your website is targeted to a specific demographic rather than an area, but the post office will be surprisingly helpful when it comes to getting your leaflets where they need to go, if you ask them.

4. Go to Specialist Events. If there's some kind of trade fair for the industry your website is in, turn up to it and promote your website. While there might not be all that many people there, the ones who are there will be influential, and can get your site talked about.

5. Put it on Business Cards. It should go without saying, but once you've gone to all that trouble to set up a website, don't forget to put it on your business cards. After all, if you're relying on them to get people to phone you, why not give them the option of reading more about you on your website?

6. Astroturf on Forums. An often overlooked way of getting traffic to your website is to participate on forums related to the subject and put your web address in your signature. This gets you more traffic than you'd think, especially at very popular forums.

7. Create Controversy. A great trick to promote your website is to use it to say controversial things: as the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity. This works best if you say something that you know will be provocative to a certain kind of person, getting it linked from all over the place. Bear in mind, though, that this strategy is better for advertising-driven websites than it is if you're trying to build a reputation and make sales directly.

8. Keep a Good Blog. While more and more businesses are starting blogs, few of them are doing it right. If you're using your blog to publish product announcements in corporate-speak, it's useless. You need to remember a simple mantra, 'views not news' – make sure your blog has something interesting to say.

9. Buy Search Engine Ads. Many people seem to think it's some kind of admission of defeat, but search engine advertising can work very well, especially with keywords that aren't already cluttered with ads. If you do it right, you can get very targeted ads very cheap – indeed, ironically, the more targeted the ads, the cheaper they tend to be.

10. Start an Affiliate Program. Finally, if you're selling something, don't forget that old standby of web marketing: the affiliate program. Offer visitors a cut of the profits if they can sell your products for you, and all of a sudden you've got a crack sales team raring to go. The only trouble with this plan is that everyone is doing it, so you'll need to offer a high percentage of your profits to your affiliates to make the offer attractive to them.

7 Ways to Make Your Web Forms Better

2007-02-24T03:27:00.001-08:00

Since many people who design web forms have never designed any form of any kind in their lives before, it's hardly surprising that plenty of the results could do with a little improvement – and if you've spent any time on the web, you'll know just how annoying bad forms can be. In this article, then, we'll look at seven quick and easy ways to make your web forms much better.

1. Remember the Rest of the World.

This one is a call-out to American websites especially: don't forget that your site will have more than just American visitors! It's very insulting to be asked to register for something, only for the site to demand my state and zip code, leaving no space for me to choose any other country or enter a postal code in any other format than five digits. To save the trouble of the whole thing, I usually just go for 'California' and '90210' – a bad entry for that person's database, just because they didn't consider me when they designed their form.

2. Don't Use Huge Drop-Downs.

Likewise, though, if you are nice enough to let me choose a country, don't make me do it from an alphabetised list of every country in the world! The same thing goes for lists of states, counties, and so on. Drop down lists that are long enough to have scroll bars are just plain difficult to use and inconvenient – I'd much rather just type the name myself, thanks.

3. Always Offer Suggestions.

So someone can't get something they filled in on a form – their username or domain name or whatever was already taken. What do you do? Please don't just say "sorry, that one's taken, please try another". Come up with some useful suggestions of alternatives that are available, and let me choose them easily if I like them. Do try to be more imaginative than just adding numbers to the end, though, unless you want all your users to be called 'jane23436'.

4. Don't Punish Double Submitters.

There are some people, let's face it, who just aren't all that sure how the web works. They've been taught that you have to double-click computer things to make them work, and so double-click they do – on links, on buttons, on everything. At some point, one of these people is likely to click twice on your submit button. You should allow for this in advance, instead of punishing them for it with an error. You might even consider using Javascript to grey out the submit button once it's been pushed once, which solves the problem in most cases.

5. Stop Being So Picky.

Come on, now, do you really need my birth in dd/mm/yyyy format? Couldn't you figure out what I meant if I wrote a month out in words, or if I only put in a one-digit day, or a two-digit year? Of course you could. Don't throw my input back and ask me to fix things that a little server-side scripting could just as easily fix for me.

6. Display Warnings on the Page.

There are few things more annoying than websites which pop-up those little alert boxes, causing the computer to make a loud 'ding!' sound as they do so. If there's something I need to go back and fix, add the warning to the page itself, preferably with a red border or background to mark it out for my attention. Don't make me read a dialog box, click OK, and scroll back up myself to hunt for my mistake.

7. Only Ask for What You Need.

Last but not least, this is a rule that could make so many web forms so much better. If the information you're asking for isn't absolutely crucial to your dealings with me, don't ask for it. Every second I spend filling in a form is a second I spend getting more frustrated with your website, and more likely not to finish what I've started if something goes even slightly wrong. Your site should be set up to figure out as much as it can about me automatically. Don't ask what language I want to use – my browser tells you that in its HTTP headers. Don't ask which country I'm from – you can detect that with my IP address. Save me time, and I'll be much more likely to appreciate your site.

6 Reasons Why You Need a Website

2007-02-24T03:26:00.002-08:00

If you don't have a website, then you might not realise all the great things they can do for you. Maybe you think there wouldn't be any point, because your business is too small – or maybe you don't even have a business! Perhaps you think it'd be a lot of work for little reward. Or maybe you paid big bucks for a site back during the dot-com 'boom' days, only to get nothing but trouble out of it and shut it down a year later.

Whatever your situation is, though, you need a website, and I'm here to tell you why.

1. People Will Look for You Online.

Sooner or later, someone's going to type your name into a search engine. What do you want them to find? Nothing? These are people who want to find you, and if you don't have a website then you're letting them down – they expect you to be online. For many people, you might as well not exist if you can't be found with a search engine. Not having a website is like not bothering to get listed in the phone book. Whether it's customers or old school friends you're hoping for, very few people are going to find you if you aren't online.

2. Websites Cost Next to Nothing.

Once, it cost a lot to run a website – but those days are long gone. There are 'pay as you go' services out there now charging as little as $1 per gigabyte of bandwidth. If you're sensible about the size of your pages, that dollar could last you a whole month, or even longer! If you don't want to pay for design, it's never been simpler to do it yourself, or find free software to do it for you. Really, it's never been cheaper to have a website than it is today.

3. Websites are Great Advertising.

Whatever you're advertising – your services, your products, or just yourself – a website is a great way to do it. Every other kind of advertising going costs a premium, especially if you want to target a specific kind of person, and there's no guarantee that they're paying attention. Websites are like brochures that are free to reproduce, interactive, and quickly distributed to people who are already looking for them. No advertising medium even comes close to the ease-of-use and effectiveness of a website.

4. A Website is a Worldwide Presence.

On the web, it doesn't matter whether someone is next door to you or on the other side of the world – they can see your website just the same as anyone else can, at no extra cost to you or to them. Phone and post both cost enormous amounts long-distance, but a website lets you send information anywhere without any extra effort or expense. You can make friends and contacts in places you've never been and will never go – suddenly, working globally is no more effort than working locally.

5. Your Website Can Make You Money.

There's a lot of money on the web, and it's not hard to get some – the longer you're online for, the bigger your share can get. If you have something to sell, you can sell it worldwide, thanks to credit cards. Doing business online eliminates almost every overhead there is: all you need to do is have the goods. If you've written something useful, you can put it out there with a few ads. You won't get rich overnight, but you can set up a steady trickle of income... and there's no limit to the number of trickles you can set up.

6. Your Website Can Save You Time.

Giving out information takes time, whether it's on the phone, or in brochures, or even if it's just emailing your family. Websites are designed to save you time. All your family and friends can read your online diary (known as a weblog), but you only had to write it once. Customers can see your whole product catalogue without ever needing to talk to you or visit you. This is the power of the web: things on it are written only once, but can be downloaded endlessly – a good website runs itself, and keeps being useful to people for much longer than you'd expect.

5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look

2007-02-24T03:26:00.001-08:00

If you've looked around at a few websites, you might have noticed that many of them look absolutely terrible. In many cases, this is because they were produced in the early days of the web's mainstream popularity, but they haven't been maintained or updated since. The chances are that their creators have never even looked at them in a modern browser, and don't realise just how bad they look now. These websites have an affliction I like to call the '1998 look' – but, unfortunately for you, even new sites aren't altogether immune to it. Here, then, are five ways to avoid becoming a victim.

1. Don't Use Animated GIFs.

The animated GIF is dead. It was a charming idea, once, letting us include animations on our pages as easily as normal graphics. Now, though, it looks extremely dated thanks to the small number of colours used, not to mention jarring and out-of-place. It's even worse if you use one of those early-web 'stock animations', like that spinning @ symbol to represent sending email – there are very few things that look more amateurish.

If you don't want to look like you don't know what you're doing, stay away from animated GIFs.

2. Text in Graphics.

Unless it's your logo or possibly a heading, don't type text in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, save it as an image, and then put it on your site. It's supremely silly, and gives you no benefit whatsoever – not only does it make the text take much longer to download, but it also stops people from selecting it or doing anything else they might want to do with it. Not to mention that text created this way is usually aligned badly and compressed so that it looks even worse than it would usually.

Keep your text as plain text, and use graphics for pictures. Text as a graphic is almost always bad.

3. Bad Backgrounds.

It's amazing that people still do it, but there are plenty of websites out there still with absolutely disastrous backgrounds. Either they'll have a colour that doesn't provide enough contrast with the text, making the text unreadable, or, even worse, they'll have a small pattern, tiled to fill the entire background. Wallpaper-style patterns are one of the most 1998 things in existence, and instantly make your website look like a joke, not to mention often making it entirely unusable.

So what should you use as a background colour? In almost all cases, the answer to the question is white – but, if you really want a colour, make sure it's a restrained background colour that people can still read your text over. If you're using a pattern, don't repeat it more than once.

4. System Requirements.

Listing system requirements on your website is no longer fashionable, and thank goodness for that. In the bad old days, sites would write things like "best viewed at 800x600 using Internet Explorer 4". Did they really think people were going to switch, just to view their website? It acted like a disclaimer, saying they couldn't be bothered to make the site look good for everyone, and anyone using something unusual had no right to complain. It was, quite simply, terrible.

The end of the Internet Explorer/Netscape war thankfully consigned these messages to history, for the most part, but there are still some sites that have them. Don't let your site be one – it does nothing but make you look hopelessly out of touch.

5. Open in New Window.

Finally, there's this one, back from the days when graphic designers were just starting to get to grips with the web and wanted exact control over everything, including the size of the web browser. Going to a site would give you a message like 'click here to launch', and the site would then try to open a new window automatically, with none of the browser's toolbars.

This technique has always been bad (it takes away too much control from the user), but it's even worse now that so many users have pop-up blockers thanks to the abuse of pop-ups for advertising. If you design your site this way, many people will have trouble seeing it, including people with the latest version of Internet Explorer. Don't do it.

5 Steps to Understanding HTML

2007-02-24T03:25:00.001-08:00

HTML is a relatively simple language, but that doesn't stop people from having problems with it. Why is that? It's mainly because, while the HTML tags themselves are easy, creating an HTML document that works as intended on a web server requires you to know a few extra things that aren't often explained. Here, then, is a guide to understanding those parts of HTML that they just don't tell you about in the books.

Step 1: Understand Doctypes.

It isn't often noted that valid HMTL documents don't actually start with the tag – they have one extra tag before it. This is the doctype, and it must be present right at the top of your document for it to be valid HTML.

There are only really two doctypes that you really need to know about. The HTML4 doctype looks like this:

The XHTML one looks like this:

These versions of the doctypes that are a little more forgiving – if you're a purist, you can use the strict ones instead by changing the words 'transitional' and 'loose' to 'strict'.

But what is the doctype for? Well, its purpose is simple enough: it tells web browsers exactly what version of HTML your page was written in, to help them to interpret it correctly.

Step 2: Understand HTTP Errors.

A truly shocking number of people writing HTML pages don't know how HTTP works – and they quickly run into trouble because of it. HTTP is the way a web browser communicates with a web server, and this communication includes information about your pages, such as cookies.

You don't need to worry too much about the internals of HTTP, but it's worth knowing that it works by the browser sending a request to the server for a certain page, and the server then responding with a code.

Your website should be set up to handle error codes well. For example, a 404 (page not found) error should show a page with links to the most useful parts of your site. Other common error codes include:

200 - OK

301 - Page moved.

403 - Forbidden (no authorisation to access).

500 - Internal server error.

For more information, visit www.w3.org/protocols.

Step 3: Understand MIME Types.

MIME types are another part of the HTML header – an important one. Also known as the content-type header, they tell the browser what kind of file they are about to send. Browsers don't rely on HTML files ending in .html, JPEG images ending in .jpeg, and so on: they rely on the content-type header. If you don't know about this, you can have problems if you need to configure your server to send anything unusual.

Here are some common MIME types:

text/html - HTML.

text/css - CSS

text/plain - plain text.

image/gif - GIF image.

image/jpeg - JPEG image.

image/png - PNG image.

audio/mpeg - MP3 audio file.

application/x-shockwave-flash - Flash movie.

Step 4: Understand Link Paths.

One of the hardest things to understand about HTML is all the different things that you can put in an 'href' property. Abbreviated URLs are created using the rules of old text-based operating systems, and there are plenty of people writing HTML today who are completely unfamiliar with these rules.

Here are some examples. For each one, the assumption is that the link is on a page at http://www.example.com/example1/example1.html.

- links to http://www.example.com/example1/example2.html
- links to http://www.example.com/example1/example2.html
- links to http://www.example.com/example2.html
- links to http://www.example.com/example2.html
- links to http://www.example.com/
- links to http://www.example.com/example1

To put it simply, one dot means "in the folder we're in now", while two dots means "in the folder above the one we're in now". This can get confusing fast – just look at the difference one dot can make! Be careful with it.

Step 5: Understand How to Insert Things That Aren't HTML.

One of the most common HTML questions is how to insert things like Javascript and CSS into an HTML document. This is one of the easiest questions to answer: you simply use the link and script tags, like this:

5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments

2007-02-24T03:22:00.000-08:00

When you're selling things, you need people to be able to pay you. Sure, they could send you cheques in the post, but that's not really convenient or scalable, is it? No, to do business on the web, you need to be able to accept card payments electronically – and, luckily for you, it's never been easier. Here's the whole process, in five simple steps.

Step 1: Choose a Payment Service.

While you could get a merchant account and do your own card processing, it isn't usually worth it, unless you do an awful lot of transactions. For most business, third-party payment services are a better solution, and there are lots of services out there that let you accept card payments for a small fee.

When you choose a payment service, then, the main things you want to consider are the prices, and whether your customers will trust it. You used to need to consider which services your customers would have accounts with, but as most services now let you accept payments from people who don't have accounts with them that's not much of an issue any more.

Right now, the biggest general payment player is PayPal, and they're worth considering first, but you should be aware that many businesses have had issues with PayPal freezing their accounts and being slow to respond (see www.nopaypal.com for more). StormPay (www.stormpay.com) is a decent general-purpose PayPal alternative, and useful to keep around as a backup. You might also like to check out more specific services, such as AuctionCheckout (if you're taking payments for auction items) or ClickBank (non-physical products only, popular for ebook sales).

Step 2: Create an Account.

The next step is to create an account at your chosen online payment provider. This will require you to give out either your personal name and address or a business name and address. Depending on who you're registering with, you may also need to give out credit card or bank details. It almost goes without saying that you shouldn't give these details out to anyone you're not sure of – be suspicious of payment services that you've found with a search but never actually seen in use.

Step 3: Get Verified.

Before you can receive any significant amount of money, most payment providers require you to become 'verified' – this is usually nothing more than the minimum they need to do to comply with the law. If you haven't been asked for your bank and credit card details already, you will be at this point, and some services will even ask you to fax them a photocopy of your physical card, to prove you're the real cardholder. Some services will even cross-reference your phone number with your address and then phone you up to make sure it really was you. Don't be too disturbed by all this: it's all in the name of security, and you're not doing anything bad (or at least I hope you're not!).

Step 4: Add the Payment Button to Your Pages.

When it comes time to actually start accepting customers' money through the service, all you'll need to do in most cases is add some kind of button or image of a button to your sales page that says 'Pay Now'. The payment service will usually provide the HTML for this, and a few tutorials to explain things like ways to make sure that the correct amount shows up on the payment page.

Step 5: Withdraw Often.

Whenever you're dealing with electronic payments, the final step is to withdraw every time you get an amount of money you consider significant, and an absolute minimum of once per week. There are all sorts of reasons for this, but the biggest one is that online payment services aren't anywhere near as strictly regulated as other financial institutions, and aren't under that much of an obligation to give it to you in any timely manner. You should consider any money left with them to be at risk until it's securely in your bank account. Besides, you don't want your money sitting there earning interest for them instead of you, do you?