When you design a website, it’s easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see. What you have to realise, though, is that you’re going to have another kind of visitor with a completely different agenda: they’re not going to be looking at your pretty logo and they’re not going to be passing judgement on your background colour. What they’re looking for is the content and structure of your page.

They’re the search engine spiders, and they are in control of probably the largest section of your traffic. You need to please these spiders if you want your site to be successful. Here’s how.

Make Your Structure Clear.

Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways: you want it to be very clear to the search engine where the navigation is, where the content is, and where the headings are. As a rule, put navigation first in your page. Always use the heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.

Avoid using generic span and div tags and only making things clear to the user through CSS font sizes: instead, use every ’semantic’ HTML tag that applies to your content. If you’re quoting someone, use the blockquote tag; if you’re posting program code, use the code tag. Search engines love this.

Keep Keywords Consistent.

It’s not usually worth deliberately saturating your content with keywords in hope of a higher search ranking - the engines have pretty much wised up to this tactic - but do make sure that your keywords appear consistently when they occur naturally. For example, for these articles, I have stuck with ‘website’ throughout, as suddenly writing ‘web site’ instead would bring down my rankings.

HTML and Javascript.

It’s worth noting that search engines read HTML, but they don’t, in general, read Javascript. That means that using Javascript to insert text into your page is a bad idea if you want search engines to see the text. On the other hand, you might want to have just the text in HTML and insert all the other parts of the page with Javascript: this will tend to make your page appear more focused, although you should be careful not to insert navigation links this way if you want the search engines to follow them.

Use Meta Tags.

Yes, meta tags are out of fashion, and search engines pay no attention to them any more when it comes to ranking your site, but they’re still important in one way: the meta description tag is still often used to decide what text search engines’ users see when they find your site in their results! This can be just as important as the ranking itself - write something here that will look useful to the searcher, and you’re more likely to get them to click-through. Don’t forget that, while search engines are just machines and algorithms, the end result of it all does involve a human decision: to click, or not to click?

Avoid Splash Pages.

You might think it’s a great idea to have a ’splash’ page displaying a full-page version of your logo (or an ad) to every user who arrives at your site, but search engines really hate that. Using this trick will get you ranked far lower than you would usually be, so you should avoid it - it’s annoying to visitors anyway.

Include Alt Tags.

Any time you use a graphic, include alt text for it - especially if there is text in the graphic. Remember that, as far as search engines are concerned, all your graphics might as well just be big black boxes. Test by removing all your graphics and seeing if your content remains relatively intact. If it doesn’t, then you’ll be turning search engines away.

Finally, Write Great Content.

The key with modern search engines (and, at the same time, the thing you have least control over) is how many people decide to link to your page from their page. How can you make more people link to you? Make your content useful. Make it something they’ll want to quote on their blogs. Content is more King than it’s ever been, and the best way to design for search engines is to make your content really stand out.

Angie is the lead web designer for a fortune 500 company. Read her thoughts on web design on her blog… www.webdesignblogonline.com.

Amara Flash News Ticker is a new software
program that enables users to quickly create vertically
scrolling news tickers. Users just follow a few simple steps,
and Amara Flash News Ticker instantly creates a Flash new ticker
that they can then easily insert into their website. No
programming skills or knowledge of Flash is needed - the program
does all the work.

With Amara Flash News Ticker, website owners,
creators and webmasters now have an inexpensive and very
easy-to-use tool with which they can add a very
professional-looking and highly functional scrolling news ticker
to their site. Because they can make it their preferred size and
use their website’s color scheme, the news ticker can be
completed integrated into any web page. And users can create as
many news tickers as they like, and update them as often as they
like. Amara Flash News Ticker offers true value for money.

Amara Flash News Ticker’s intuitive
user-interface hardly needs explaining. Users can add a new news
item, type their text, and include a hyperlink to each of the
news items. They can choose from a long list of font type faces
and use their own preferred colors and sizes for the news items
- all the same or all different, it’s up to them. They can
choose the background and border color, as well as the
mouse-over colors for the news items.

The news ticker has various settings for scrolling speed, from
fast to slow, and it can be set to pause from one to many
seconds between the different news items.

Amara Flash News Ticker saves the user’s
creation and gives it as an HTML code which can then easily be
copied and pasted into the user’s website. It is compatible with
all commonly-used HTML editors. The user’s settings are also
saved within the program, so the news ticker can simply be
opened again later to make changes or additions.

Amara Flash News Ticker is a shareware
program, so anyone who is interested can first try out the free
version before buying it. The unregistered version can be
downloaded for free from the Amara Flash Software website, but
any creations will contain a visible watermark. Users who want
to save news tickers created with Amara Flash News Ticker to use
it on their website need to purchase the registered version of
the program. It is available for only US$19.95 via Amara Flash
Software’s website.

More information about Amara Flash News Ticker is available
from the website, where you can also see a working example of a
news ticker created with the program.

www.amarasoftware.com

Many people make the mistake of confusing the terms “usability” and “accessibility.” Usability and accessibility are quite different, although many seem to consider one less important than the other. Usability and accessibility are different but the ideals that correspond can be applied to both.

Utilizing a site’s potential will provide a more suitable structure to build up from, not to mention make it more accessible. Any persons that have disabilities or any learning difficulties may find your site challenging and therefore you will be faced with a dilemma. Of course you should put as much thought into usability as you do accessibility.

Since the Internet is the tool in which most web design courses are dependant upon to work with web 2.0 technology, it is even more necessary that there be a focus on accessibility.

Make sure that any persons that visit your site will consider it to have been pleasurable and easy to view. Flash is often overwhelming to people, especially if it is used excessively so do now overload their browser’s or their eyes. Make the delivery of the content the best and most functional that you can. Mastering Dreamweaver is about having great ideas, but those ideas must be relevant to the user. The main criteria for judging the design of any item, whether that is clothes, cars, or websites is how well the end product meets the needs of the user.

It is the little things that can affect visitor’s perception of your web site. Recently, I crafted and sent off a proposal to a potential client regarding a writing project and some web page assistance. There are several things on this person’s site that need attention, common things I have observed on other sites too:

Broken links. If you have something listed on a navigation bar, it should click through to other pages on your site or to elsewhere on the web. Make certain that the tabs on your navigation bar are consistent on every page.

Punctuation, abbreviations, misspellings. The higher educated your audience, the more likely readers will pick up mistakes. I cringe when I find errors when surfing the ‘net; I begin to think less of that site. Work diligently to make certain your site “reads” flawlessly.

Old material. No, I don’t mean an article that was written in 2003. Instead, if you mention an offer that expired months ago or have other outdated material, your site could look abandoned at first glance. Trouble is, some people won’t give your site a second glance with old information posted.

Copyright dates. If you are mentioning a group of copyright dates for example, 2001-2004, you should change the second date to the current year. Again, you don’t want your site to look outdated or abandoned.

Yes, it is the little things which can impact how people perceive your web site. By keeping the “little foxes” at bay, you can change people’s perception and, ultimately, increase your sales.

Copyright 2006 - For additional information regarding Matt Keegan, The Article Writer, please visit his blog for wit, quips, and freelance writing tips.

Salehoo: Darice Inc. Craft Supplies Wholesale
One thing that I was surprised with was the community within the forum. These people seem to work together to make each other successful. There are many Ebay PowerSellers that are members that are willing to help. I had a question about a distributor one time, and I got the answer within an hour. I was very impressed with the service that this place has. Salehoo doesn’t have a list like WorldwideBrands however it’s one of the largest and affordable directories on the Net.

To be safe ask specifically whether broken items and returns are included before you buy You need wholesale buyers to build a solid wholesale business. The members have the privilege of accessing the product sourcing directory which lists the suppliers along with the product they are offering

Salehoo Men’S Cologne Wholesale Pricelist:
Our wholesale handbag menu also reflects the changing trends and styles. We follow the fashion industry, and the forecasts that send women running to the store to get the newest “It” accessory. That means when we carry a certain product, we know that there’s a high demand for it. This makes our whole handbag site the best place for buyers who want a fast-moving inventory and a reputation for style and good taste!

When press join just before you pay there’s an offer to get 60% off Auction xfactor. While you may still have to use Western Union and Wire Transfer SaleHoo’s three-tier safety method ensures much greater peace of mind compared to locating and dealing with suppliers independently. See Salehoo.

The following is the flowchart of website ownership

1. Buy a domain name

The domain name is yournamein.com. This is purchased from a registrar like the International Internet Authority and is annually renewable. If you let it expire someone else can buy it. In fact there’s a whole industry built around “expiring domain names.” If you search on any engine for “expiring domain names” you will see what I mean. Name registrations can be made for a minimum of 1 year and for a maximum of 10 years at a time.

2. Buy webhosting

Webhosting is the space on a server that processes your e-mail and makes your webpages visible to the public. Without it, all you have is a name. To continue with the analogy of a business name registration, when you walk out the door of the Registrar General’s Office all you have is a piece of paper called a Certificate of Registration. You need space from where to work. This in the tangible world would be called an office even if it’s a home office. In the online world this is your webhost. You ‘point’ your domain name to your webhost and the server at the webhost responds when somebody types in http://www.yourNAMEin.com as well as when somebody sends an e-mail addressed to you@yournamein.com. Webhosting is like an annual rent, very much in the same way you would pay a lease rent to your landlord for an office.

There are literally thousands of webhosts around so it’s not impossible to find all kinds of strange offers. The rule of thumb we suggest is that if it sounds too good to be true, it is. With cheap or worse ‘free’ solutions, you may find that you don’t get your e-mail, your website goes down for long periods or you’re getting spyware on your system. Somebody always pays in the end. Nothing is free. Having said that, you will also find that no webhost is perfect but some are less perfect than others. During over 10 years in this business, we have used 8 international webhosts and have found that they will all have downtime but the key is to find and stick to the one that has the least.

3. Design the website

This is fairly straightforward. This is when someone translates what you want your website to look like into HTML, the language in which webpages are written.

4. Update the website

Keeping your website up-to-date used to be a task reserved for technicians who write HTML. Now, we have user-friendly software known as Content Management Systems (CMS). These allow anyone with basic computer knowledge to add texts, pictures, links and more. Some training may be required but with CMS, you end up saving thousands of dollars. Previously, you would have had to pay a technician by the hour to update your website. Again, there are free CMS and paid-for CMS. The free ones are usually never free. You end up paying when your website goes down and no one is obliged to help you get it back up because you’re not paying for support.

5. Promote the website

This ball is very much in the court of the website owner. A website is like a telephone number. If you don’t give it out, no one will call you. Someone may call you by accident and you’ll find yourself saying very often, “Sorry, you have the wrong number.” To promote your website, you should use both online and offline methods. Go ahead and submit your website to the search engines but bearing in mind that you’re competing with millions of people around the world to get indexed in the search engines, you should also plaster your web address on every piece of stationery you print. Let it be seen wherever and whenever you display your logo. Also, never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth marketing and simple strategies like promotional products.

6. Evaluate and renew

Without a doubt, after your first year of website ownership, you would have learnt a lot. This is a good time to evaluate what you did right, what you did wrong and what you can do better. Implement some of the positive changes you think you can make to your website.

Aleem Khan is an accredited Internet Expert with the International Internet Authority, a safe and reliable place to getYourNAMEin.com

As we all know, this subject is something that we could all use
a little education on no matter who you are.

If you want people to come to your website more than once then
you necessity to repeat them, from time to time, that you live
and give them the newest reports about what’s tainted and what’s
been updated. One of the best ways to do this is to gather
launch addresses and use them to generate a mailing list. But
how do you gather these launch addresses and how do you launch
out emails to so many people all at once?

Collecting the send Addresses.

Collecting launch addresses is easier than you might think.
People on the web are worn to typing their launch addresses in a
lot, and regularly have an launch address to use for this
purpose. In most cases, if you ask for an launch address as a
situation of accessing something interesting sounding people
won’t truly mind generous it to you.

Going through the final part of this article, we will see just
how important the subject can be to many people.

One way of liability this is to merely embrace a box on each
page unobtrusive and not truly calling notice to itself that
gives your visitors the choice to indicator up to your
newsletter. rather counter-intuitively, it is regularly better
to make mailing list sign-up wholly voluntary, as this means you
will get a slighter list but it will only have the most
enthusiastic people on it.

Basically, it’s a trade-off between forcing as many people as
feasible to indicator up or just marketing to the most eager
people. Your strategy should regularly be decisive by how many
people you plot to launch out emails to and what kind of retort
rate you appear to be getting.

What to Write in Your Mailing tilt Emails.

If you want people to read the emails you launch to them then
they can’t just be the newest dull reports about your precise
website features that no-one even cares about. You necessity to
offer information and updates that are practical and germane to
the part who’s ready to be cavity that email.

If you just write in corporate speak and don’t say something
that’s ready to be practical to true people then your launch is
ready to be ready straight into their refuse mail. You should
take some time over your emails. Make them something that their
recipients are ready to want to keep and submit to more than
once often-updated, time-sensitive information is best, if you
have access to it.

Apart from that, make sure to embrace links to the newest things
on your website, as well as a few elder things that are still
popular. If you market anything, you should work in a link, but
don’t be too clear about it a good way of liability things is to
embrace a tip or two with potential uses for a certain product
(making them look like they are planned for people who already
own the product), sparking the reader’s curiosity enough to
click through and judge buying it.

The official Side.

Once you’ve got a mailing list and you’ve printed the first
launch you want to launch to it, the next step is to set up the
precise side of things. Just how do you think those emails are
ready to get sent out? Surprisingly enough, you can just use a
usual launch series like Outlook, if you paste all the launch
addresses into it. If you do this, though, you necessity to make
sure that you use the Bcc (blind carbon copy) meadow for the
addresses, to duck transfer out a duplicate of the mailing list
to everybody on it.

Alternatively, there are specialist programs you can get that
are dedicated to hulk mail. Because spam is such a big industry,
companies producing such programs lean to be cool stay away from
something that advertises itself on the center of how many
emails it can launch in a detailed but if you look around, you
should be able to find something that meets your needs.

There are even web-based solutions that duck you having to
settle any programs or launch any launch from your computer,
avoiding the hazard that you might get blacklisted someway for
transfer out too many emails in too brusque a time. If you can
find a reasonably-priced one, then they’re regularly the model
solution, allowing you to direct your lists directly and launch
out emails easily. Make sure to do a few test runs with slighter
figures of people before you commit yourself to anything, though.

No matter which way you look at it, having a firm understanding
of this topic will benefit you, even if it is just slightly.

In printing, the use of colors has evolved from making prints
livelier to becoming a necessity that a printing job needs to
catch and retain the attention of the readers. With the presence
of many color printers nowadays, colors into prints have been
given a new perspective. People can now create more designs and
get the right combination of colors into their print jobs.

Take the brochure as an example. They come in beautiful with all
those colors and graphic designs into them. For those who would
not know, they would probably assume that dozens of colors have
been used in them to make them in their most colorful. What they
do not know is that there are certain processes involved in
color printing that can make it look like many colors are used
but in reality, only four types are used.

There are two kinds of color printing method that people can
choose from when they want their print jobs done. These are the
process color printing and the spot color printing.

The process color printing is the type of color printing that
has a wide spectrum of color choices to be used according to the
preference of the customer. This is the type of color printing
that allows one to have a full color photos while only using and
paying for four inks which is cyan, magenta, yellow and black
(CMYK). This type of color printing is the right kind of
printing for those who has a low budget but wants to have many
different kind of colors into their prints. The four colors are
diversified into many different variations to put into prints to
make them look more alive. The only disadvantage on this type of
color printing is that the resulting colors may not seem as
radiant as those in the spot colors. And the designer may find
it hard to match a particular color that a customer requires in
the print job.

The spot color printing, on the other hand, uses a system which
consists of colored inks known as the Pantone Matching System
(PMS). There are a hundred varieties of colors to choose from in
this system. Bright colors, dark colors, metallic and any other
type of color one can think of. Any kind of color you want, it
can be found here in the spot choice. This is the kind of color
printing that one can get the color quality that is needed in
their printing. What they choose is what they get. You can even
create your won color style and matches. The disadvantage to
this is that it cannot create full color photos.

These two types of color printing can be used both at the same
time. it will only depend on the creativity and the style you
want it done. The only drawback is the more the inks used, the
higher the expense will go. It is always wise to get information
on expert people before using these printing types to know what
would suit you and your budget, of course.

For comments and inquiries about the article visit
http://www.colorprintingwholesale.com

Multimedia on the web is often seen as a bad idea: it breaks the
flow of textual information, makes your bandwidth costs spiral
out of control, and annoys visitors who aren’t expecting it.
Used properly, though, multimedia can enhance your website to no
end, putting you light-years ahead of your competitors.

The Principle of Least Surprise

The most important thing to remember with multimedia is this:
never, ever include multimedia in a page unexpectedly. You think
it’d be neat to put a video of yourself greeting your customers
on your homepage? Maybe some background music for your product
catalogue? For the love of God, don’t. There are few worse
things on the web than going to a website and having it try to
throw unwanted multimedia at you.

The time to give your visitors multimedia content is when they
have absolutely explicity asked for it. You should link to it
with text like ‘watch the video’ or ‘listen now’, and leave it
up to them what they want to do. Note that this also gives you a
useful chance to ask the visitor which media player they’d
prefer, instead of just trying to play things with one they
might not have.

Audio on the Web

Having been stung one too many times, there are a lot of users
who only browse the web with their speakers turned off. For this
reason, you need to give them something clearly useful to make
it worth their while to turn them back on, and you need to warn
them in advance that they will need to.

Once you’ve done that, what kind of content should you provide?
Unless you’re a radio station or you’re providing an audio feed
of something else that’s happening live, streaming audio is
generally a bad idea. You should also note that there is no
royalty structure in place for web use of commercial music, so
you can’t really offer anything in that way either.

Instead, you should look at offering downloads of spoken-word
mp3 files, divided into ‘episodes’ of about ten minutes or so in
length. What you want to offer is entirely up to you: you could
record some motivational speeches, or read the Bible, or
whatever, if you think your visitors would appreciate it. The
only rule is to keep it relevant and keep it useful - no-one
wants to download and listen to plain old ads.

It’s worth noting that web audio is undergoing a bit of a
renaissance right now as a result of the iPod and so-called
‘podcasting’. This is the practice of making short spoken audio
segments available in a way that makes them easy to download to
an iPod (or other portable music device) and listen to
on-the-go. This is a practice that grows every day, and is well
worth getting into.

Video on the Web

What can you use video for on the web? Well, if you have a
product you want to demonstrate, you could record it in action
and offer that video for download. Generally, though, web video
tends to be restricted to news and e-learning. In a commercial
context, this means ‘webinars’ - videos that offer the web
equivalent of a seminar presentation, made available for
download.

When you make video for the web, though, you have some technical
things to worry about. You should really make any video content
available in three formats: Windows Media Player, RealPlayer,
and QuickTime. Video authoring tools will save in all three
formats, but it can often be complicated to write scripts that
let users choose between these players and load them: you need
to consider this when you design the website.

If push comes to shove, you need to be prepared for a segment of
your audience to be just plain unable to view your video
content, no matter how hard you try. For this reason, I would
recommend that you make a text version of anything you say in a
video available as a ‘can’t see this?’ link, after you’ve
offered some troubleshooting advice for common video problems.
You might also consider taking screenshots of the video and
making them available as static images, so that people who can’t
see the video aren’t just forced to read a huge chunk of text.