How to choose a domain name

How to choose a domain name

Although UNI.CC domains are available for commercial usage, using an extension other than .com or another popular one such as .net or .biz could mean less traffic to your site since people tend to remember .com domains easily. Anyway, having a UNI.CC domain name is much better than having a long or confusing URL.

1. List as many words as you can think of related to your project and to the content of your website. Make different combinations with the listed words that are short, memorable, not easily confused and hard to misspell.

2. Shorter domain names are easier to remember and type, and far less susceptible to mistakes, but sometimes a longer domain can be easier to remember by human memory than the shorter one.

3. Try to avoid hyphenation and unconventionally spelled words that might trip people up when they go to type the domain name into a Web browser. When people recommend your site to their friends verbally, having hyphens in your domain name leads to more potential errors than when the name does not contain hyphens.

4. Your domain name should be your website name, therefore for the simple reason that when people think of your website, they'll think of it by name. If your name is also your URL, they'll automatically know where to go.

5. Use your own company/organization name instead a generic product/topic name. People will more likely remember "JohnsonsMonitors.uni.cc" than "ComputerMonitors.uni.cc".

Free web sites

Free web sites

Many beginners choose to start their projects using free website services because they feel that registering a domain name and signing up to a hosting service is too expensive.

Free hosting and website builders are ideal if you need a temporary website (e.g. for school), advertise an event or publish articles (science, history, internet topics, games, etc).

Don't expect to create a successful business website without spending any money. You can't expect people to take a commercial site seriously if it is hosted for free showing pup-up windows and doesn't have a professional appearance.

Another problem is that the search engines have gotten selective about who they add, because of the number of small and "unimportant" sites that tend to have only links to external sites and offer very little information about a focused topic or concept.

There are hundreds of free services like Geocities and Google Sites.

Budget hosting

Budget hosting

Budget hosting is simply the cheapest hosting plan offered by a hosting company. If your site contains mostly static HTML pages, with a small amount of traffic, don't require high amounts of disk space, don't require programming and is used primarily for personal use or by small business, a low cost hosting plan may be a good option to be evaluated.

The plans are a viable hosting option since they usually contain many of the commonly required features. However, you must take into account that your site will be hosted in a server that already hosts hundreds of sites. There is a high probability that one or more of those sites become a victim of a hacking attack or begin to use server resources in excess, which can lead to service downtimes or long download times.

If reliability is important to you, look for a hosting company that hosts better plans in separate servers or doesn't provide budget hosting plans at all.

In general, budget hosting accounts don't include priority and qualified technical support. If you experience problems, probably you'll have to wait long response times and re-submit trouble tickets many times until the techs understand your request and take care about your issue.

In short: budget hosting is a good option only if you are not running a critical business website.

Web templates

Web templates

A web template is a pre-designed webpage that contains free space for text and photos to create websites in much less time. Web templates reduce or eliminate the need for a professional webpage designer.

The first step in creating a webpage is to design a layout. This will involve choosing various fonts, frames, graphics, a color scheme and basic functionality. By loading the web template into an HTML editor, you just need to add your text and images to the ready-made pages.

You may require additional software such as Fireworks or Adobe Photoshop for image editing and an HTML editor such as Front Page or Dreamweaver in order to add your text and images.

Take into account that you will not be getting a unique website and that the level of customization is much lower than having a web designer doing the whole job. Besides, you may experience some difficulties making the content to fit well into the template.

Basic web design guidelines

Basic web design guidelines

The most important rule in web design is that your web site should be easy to read. You should choose your text and background colors very carefully. The web site should be easy to navigate, all of your hyperlinks and graphic buttons should be clear to your visitors. Navigational buttons and tabs should be not too small and easy to read.

The homepage is in most cases, the most important page and gets more page views than any other page. Start the page with a few words that summarize what the site or company does, especially intended for first-time visitors because they need to know about the site's purpose. Your homepage should offer users a clear starting point for the main one to four tasks they'll undertake when visiting your site.

Design your website in a way that your visitors can find what they are looking for in your site within three clicks. Include a Search Input Box, if possible.

Your web site should be quick to download. Visitors quickly lose interest in your web site if a page does not download within 20 seconds.

Graphic design tips:

>> Don't use textured backgrounds that make your text to be unreadable or font colors that are hard to read.

>> Don't set the text size too small.

>> Don't use all capitalized letters.

>> Keep the alignment of your main text to the left, not centered.

>> Center-aligned text is best used in headlines.

>> Try setting link colors to the main color of your website (or blue, which is immediately recognized as a link). Underline links, if possible.

Colors and styles should be unique for each element. People should not be confused between regular text, links, important text and headlines. Use graphic design to enhance important web page items, but don't over-format the main content.

Don't use animation in excess, especially in banners. Frames should last at least 2 seconds. If the animation goes faster it tends to disturb instead of keeping the reader's attention.

Write descriptive window titles. The TITLE tag should start with a brief description of the product or topic of the web page followed by the company name. Add tags to set keywords and description for search engines.

Add an "About Us" and "Contact us" page. Sometimes people do need details about who you are and how they can contact you. Good corporate information is important to increase a new or lesser-known company's credibility and contact information is vital for feedback and to keep in touch with your website visitors.

Web design

Web design

HTML design requires a great deal of skill, therefore hiring a website designer is the option most people opt for.

A web site typically consists of web pages containing text and images. After each web page is created, they are typically linked together using a navigation menu composed of hyperlinks.

There are many aspects in this process, which may vary depending on the desired exposure and response. For typical commercial web sites, the basic aspects of design are: content, appearance (style) and usability.

It is essential to define the purpose of the website and evaluate the relevance of information that will be published for the target audience. You need to organize the basic information structure by categorizing the content and organizing it according to user needs. The site should be user-friendly, with the interface and navigation simple and reliable.

Web designers help you doing this hard work. Think about how many hours you'll be able to spend to achieve a good work and if it is worth to assume that cost.

Website translation and regionalization

Website translation and regionalization

English is one of the most prevalent second languages, and people in many lands read and understand English however, cultural differences often lead to misunderstandings that should not interfere with your message.

Website translation is one of the most cost-effective methods to reach international markets. Many companies and organizations have already realized that by translating their websites, they made possible for some people to buy their products and services.

It is recommended that the entire website is translated however, you may decide to translate only core pages on which you highlight your international offerings.

Translation companies generally accept the content to be translated in text format such as .txt, .rtf, .doc or download the content of your website directly. The translation of graphical elements (.jpg, .gif, .png, files) is a little bit complex: Translation companies can provide you the translations in a text document and you create the new images in-house (or by the web designer in charge of your website). If you can afford the extra price some of them can provide you ready-to-use translated images.

It is important to mention that web site maintenance costs will be higher. Each additional language site may increase the maintenance cost for about 120% for static site and about 60% to 80% for dynamic sites depending on the technology used. For sites implemented on some content management systems (CMS) these costs can be reduced to less than 30%.

Regionalization

We mean by "regionalization" as a process by which the content is not only translated, in addition, it is adapted to a specific local/regional market. Product offerings, marketing messages, payments and delivery processes are different for each local market. Your website should be adapted to communicate a slightly different and customized message to every new market you are trying to reach. A "regionalized" web site is commonly formed by a group of pages telling about corporate information (which are translated to multiple languages) and one product/service information sub-site especially adapted for each market/region.

Graphic Formats

Graphic Formats: Usage of JPEG, GIF and PNG

GIF, JPG and PNG formats are supported by all web browsers. Other formats such as BMP and TIFF are supported only by Windows based browsers and are not part of the web standards, so be careful when you work with images and avoid mixing format types. A common error is to rename the file extension of a .BMP file as .JPG, Internet Explorer will detect the right format and display the image, but other browsers such as Firefox won't do it. When you work with image editing software be sure to "Save As.." images to the chosen format. Never rename the file extension.

GIF and PNG are similar: the main difference is that GIF can only support 8-bit color (or a palette no greater than 256 colors). It may also handle dithering poorly, which is the result of pixels in a graphic that try to mix themselves up to emulate different colors. Photographs saved as GIF can also lose their detail and a wide range of values. PNG can handle a 24-bit palette providing 32 millions of colors. Both formats can include transparent backgrounds and are ideal to display words (titles, text and buttons) and line-art graphics.

Another advantage of GIF is that it supports frames and can be used to animate images. Most banners and animated icons are saved in GIF format.

JPEG is superior in rendering color and detail found in photographs or graphics using blends, gradients, and other tonal variations. It also provides for greater compression options allowing you to set the perfect balance between quality and file size. For photographs JPEG has a better compression (smaller file size - faster to download) than PNG.

Marketing tips

Marketing tips

1. Create the best content you can with the best products you can possibly offer. Your content is your best advertisement.

2. Recommend your site to others: Print personal cards, publish in local newspapers. Publish in Internet directories.

3. Although, search engines are overpopulated with results. You can make your site rank well in the search engines. The key is to create original keywords.

4. Participate in contextual advertising networks like Google Adsense, and Yahoo! Publishing Network, which deliver text ads delivered based on the content of your web page.

5. Partner with different websites; try traditional advertising on others' website.

6. Increase visits with Pay Per Click Advertisement: search the lower competitive keyword, high search terms and low price.

7. E-Mail Campaings: Send out with your own e-mail to targeted audiences. Use only addresses from your subscribers list and direct contacts. Few emails but well targeted and personalized should work well. Don't buy lists from others because you don't know the origin of those addresses and your website and email can be easily included in SPAM databases.

8. Participate in industry discussion forums associated with your industry. Don't ask participants directly to visit your site (as an ad) because that will cause your messages to be removed.

List archives by title

How can I list my archives by title?

Note: This article is for classic templates. If your blog is using Layouts, this feature is supported as an option by the archive page element. (Select the "hierarchy" option.)

Ordinarily, archive links point to pages that contain a day, week, or month's worth of posts. However, if you have a lot of posts in each time period, it can be awkward for readers to sort through them all and find the ones that interest them. So some people like to make a title index of their archived posts, where each title will then lead to the full text of the post. That's what we're going to do here. Before we begin, you'll want to make sure that you have post pages turned on for your blog, and that all your posts have titles. I recommend monthly archiving so that you can fit more titles on a page, but you can use whatever setting you want for that.

Notes:

• You can add in other Blogger tags to this bare-bones version, if you want. For instance, you might add the <$BlogDateHeaderDate$> tags if you want to group the titles by date.
• As with any template modifications, you should be sure to save a backup copy of your template before you start. Just copy and paste all your code to a text file on your hard drive, so you'll have it there as a replacement in case anything goes wrong.
• http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?answer=42209&cbid=p2a19ukuvzui&src=cb&lev=answer

Adding a site

Adding a site

You can add up to 500 sites, including news and mobile sites, to your account. In addition, we'll ask you to verify your site. This is because we need to know you own a site before we'll show you certain information about it or enable you to use our tools. Verification doesn't affect PageRank or affect your site's performance in Google's search results. (There are also special instructions for adding Blogger blogs and sites created using Google Sites.) If you create blogs using Blogger, you can automatically add and verify sites by enabling Webmaster Tools directly from the Blogger dashboard.

To add and verify a site:

1. Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account.
2. Click Add a site, and type the URL of the site you want to add. Make sure you type the entire URL, such as http://www.example.com/
3. Click Continue. The Site verification page opens.
4. (Optional) In the Name box, type a name for your site (for example, My Blog).
5. Select the verification method you want.
• Meta tag: We will ask you to add a meta tag with a unique value to your site's home page. This is the easiest solution if editing your home page's HTML is easier than uploading new files. In addition, this solution lets you easily verify sites you've created using Google Sites.
• HTML file: We will ask you to create a file with a specific name and upload it to a specific directory on your webserver. The file can be empty—Google cares only about the file's location, not about its content.

What kind of sites can I add?

Here is a list of the types of URLs you can add as a site:

• example.com
• www.example.com
• bar.example.com
• foo.bar.example.com
• www.example.com/foo
• www.example.com/foo/bar
• foo.bar.example.com/catalog/dresses

Webmaster Tools data and reporting work best on a site level. For example, if your site www.example.com has separate sections for different countries, we recommend adding each of those subsites or subfolders as a separate site. For example, if you have a travel site with specific subfolders covering Ireland, France, and Spain, you could add the following sites to your Webmaster Tools account:

• http://www.example.com
• http://www.example.com/france
• http://www.example.com/ireland
• http://www.example.com/spain

Promoting Your Blog

Promoting Your Blog

This is in no way a science or guarantee; it's simply a few suggestions with which many bloggers have found success.

Set your blog to Send Pings. When this setting is activated, your blog will be included in various "recently updated" lists on the web as well as other blog-related services.

Activate Your Navbar. Do this and you might start to see the effects right away! One of the features on the Blogger Navbar is a button called NextBlog - click it to visit the next Navbar-enabled blog.

Install Email This Post. If you use Email This Post on your blog, people will be able to forward your posts to friends. This may not have an immediate impact on your site stats but it enables others to publicize your blog for you.

Turn on Post Pages. By publishing every post as its very own web page with Post Pages, you ensure that your entries are way more link-able and more attractive to search engines.

Turn on your site feed. When people subscribe to your site feed in their newsreaders, they're very likely going to read your post.

Add your blog to Blogger's listings. When you add your blog to our listings it shows up in Nextblog, Recently Updated, and other places. It's like opting-in to traffic.

Write quality content and do it well. If your "style" is bad writing, worse grammar, no punctuation, and an ugly design, that might be okay for a niche crowd. But the idea here is to achieve mass appeal, so fix yourself up a bit.

Publish regular updates. Simple: the more you blog, the more traffic you'll get.

Think of your audience. A good way to build an audience is to speak to one in particular. When you keep your audience in mind, your writing gains focus. Focus goes a long way toward repeat visitors.

Keep search engines in mind. There are a few things you can do to make your blog more search engine friendly. Use post titles and post page archiving. This will automatically give each of your post pages an intelligent name based on the title of your post. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search.

Keep your posts and paragraphs short. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on.

Put your blog URL in your email signature. Think of how many forwarded emails you've seen in your day, and just imagine the possibilities.

Sumbit your address to blog search sites and directories. People look for blog content at Technoration their list? You should be. Submit your blog's url to Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, Popdex, and any other site of that ilk you come across. every day, are you

Link to other blogs. Links are the currency of the blogosphere and it takes money to make money so start linking.

Install a blogroll. It's a very simple yet effective social networking scheme and it has the same result as a simple link if not stronger: traffic! So if you don't have one yet, sign up for a blogroll and get that link-list going.

Be an active commenter. This is in the same vein as linking. Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least. So if you feel inspired, leave a comment or two in your blog travels. It behooves you.

Enable Following on your blog. Following a is a great way to keep your friends updated on the latest activity on your blog. New blogs will have this blog feature enabled by default, but for older blogs you will have to enable it from the Layout | Page Elements tab.

Learn How to Improve the Google Ranking of Your Website!

 Learn How to Improve the Google Ranking of Your Website!

Download Google SEO Guide today and learn some simple optimization techniques that will improve the ranking of your website!

We Give You Specific Techniques (with examples!) on how to Optimize Your Site

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• How to Create Effective Meta Tags – Easy to read step by step guide!
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Use Keyboard Posting

Use Keyboard Posting

Blogger has several keyboard shortcuts you can use while editing posts. They definitely work in Internet Explorer 5.5+/Windows and the Mozilla family (1.6+ and Firefox 0.9+), and might work in other browsers. Here they are:

• control + b = Bold
• control + i = Italic
• control + l = Blockquote (when in HTML-mode only)
• control + z = Undo
• control + y = Redo
• control + shift + a = Link
• control + shift + p = Preview
• control + d = Save as Draft
• control + p = Publish Post
• control + s = Autosave and keep editing
• control + g = Indic transliteration

How To Make Your Site Social Media Friendly

How To Make Your Site Social Media Friendly

Numerous companies are losing vast amounts of revenue due to their web sites doing poorly in the search engines. Web sites that are not easy to find via search miss out on attracting new customers as well as repeat customers that use Google to navigate sites they already know about. Is the same true for web sites that are not social media friendly?

People discover new sites through search, but also through recommendations made via email, word of mouth and through social media content. Making a web site social media friendly will facilitate the saving and sharing of content with others, extending reach and facilitating engagement.

Consumers find new content via social networking sites ranging from links on Twitter to Facebook to their favorite blogs. Content creation and links that occur as an outcome of social media participation can provide positive signals to search engines and affect search visibility. Making a site more social media friendly will expand the opportunity for content to be discovered directly and indirectly.

Search is the most efficient and effective way for consumers to discover content. Companies that want to take advantage now of where trends in information publishing, discovery and marketing would do well to ensure their content strategy factors in the value of search as well as social media.

Core concepts to understand search engine friendly web sites includes:

• Crawlable content
• Site organization
• Internal links
• Keyword usage - content optimization
• Code/HTML optimization
• Inbound links from external web sites

The notion of “search engine friendly” basically means making a web site easy for search engines to find, make a copy of, understand and rank in search results. Search engines are by no means perfect, not even Google. Making web sites more search engine friendly means making up for shortcomings in the search engines’ ability to crawl, index and sort web content.

This is why SEO is an important asset to the performance of natural seasrch results. All major search engines invest in continued improvements in order to achieve a better search experience for users. Some of the things that SEOs have traditionally done for web site publishers are now handled automatically by search engines such as many of the features included in Google’s Webmaster tools.

Improving a web site’s availability to search engines as well as keyword usage and links (internal/external) helps the search engine provide better search results to consumers. It’ also helps companies marketing their products and services to attract more qualified buyers. Not only can web site traffic increase, but the right kind of visitors will self segment themselves by the keywords they use to search.

Many companies have the search issue handled or at least they’re on their way. A recent study by eMarketertop digital marketing tactic for 2009. shows B2B companies rate Search Marketing as one of their top marketing investments for 2009. A poll run on Online Marketing Blog with well over 500 responses also ranked SEO as a

Standard search is evolving but it’s not enough to remain competitive to focus on standard Search Engine Optimization tactics. The social web is the web of the near future and real time search results through services like search.twitter.com or even the new sort by recency option within Google are giving consumers more control over the freshness of the information available to them.

The increasing demand for fresh, live web content as well as the expectation of consumers to interact with what they find in the search results demands that web site owners and content publishers make their web sites both search and social media friendly.

Here are a few ways web sites can make themselves more “Social Media Friendly”:

• Fresh content - To play the search and social media game, a web site must be in the content publishing business. Search engines and participants of the social web respond favorably to the signals created from frequent updates. Participation in off site social channels can be brought into the corporate web site through RSS or widgets providing web site visitors access to additional forms of information and interaction with the company.

• Social content - Not all of a company’s social web participation needs to happen offsite with third party tools. The addition of a blog, reviews, forum or even a social network to the company web site can provide intersted consumers opportunities to interact with other brand fans as well as the company.

• Easy to share - Besides the ability to contribute to conversations happening on a corporate web site, there’s a tremendous opportunity and benefit to making it easy for site visitors to share that content with others. Many sites offer “share this” options that make it easy for readers to submit the page being viewed to popular social bookmarking and social news web sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. Sharing options for Facebook, Twitter and email are also popular.Making it easy for web site visitors to share interesting content (web pages, video, images) facilitates the word of mouth recommendations people make in real life, except when done online, they become searchable assets.

The advantages of incorporating social features include improved online word of mouth, stimulating conversations with prospective customers and advocates and expanded market reach. The question is, are web marketing teams incorporating a social media strategy with their overall search marketing and vice versa?

Are you making your web site search engine friendly for the social web?