Web Development Articles

Everyday we hear that another company goes out of business.

When and why does a dot-com become a dot-bomb?

After checking few dozen defunct companies, I think the main reasons for dot-coms failure are:

• Poor business plan. In the last years, a lot of investment capital was spent on poorly planned companies that clearly couldn’t reach profitability.
• Poor company promotion. This applies both offline and online. Two newspaper ads and word of mouth are not enough.
• Poor financial management. Fancy offices, free food, does it ring a bell?
• Poor Human Resources management. With lots of cash in their hands, many start-up companies hired too many people or, even worse, hired unqualified staff. The hiring of friends and relatives often returned no value on investments.
• Errors in the company’s Web site. Sometimes hundreds of errors could be found in one Web page. Yes, those Web site builders should go back to school- if they ever went to school for HTML at all.

I’ll focus my comments on the last reason:

How Errors in the Web Site Can Affect the Company’s Health

Knowledge is power.

And undoubtedly, it is the key to making a substantial fortune online. Consider these: what if you knew the sited your visitors came from before they arrived at yours, what they were checking out before they took a look at your pages, and where they went after visiting your place? What if you knew which of your links were being clicked, how much they were being used, and how well they are performing? What if you knew which among the pages in your site attracts the most attention?

Again, knowledge is power and knowing all these things would lead to better results from your site.

Thankfully, technology has caught up with this highly particular necessity. A lot of programs have been developed to track your hits with meticulous accuracy. It is now possible to determine the things we’ve mentioned above, and more.

Of course, this knowledge would be useless if you wouldn’t know what to do with it, right? Knowing the statistics that tracking services could provide can be applied to many things that can improve the performance of your site.

With a good hit tracking program or service, you could do a lot of amazing things. Here are some examples:

Don’t mess with those links! When you’re designing your site, you should leave your text links in their natural state–blue and underlined. We all want to be creative and not do the bland, expected, normal thing. We want to change our links to red, green, yellow, even black–anything but blue. And we have the urge to take off those underlines.

Resist the temptation. It’s hard. But there’s a good reason to leave them alone.

From the earliest days of the web, text links have been blue. People intuitively recognize that blue, underlined text is a link. They know they can click on it.

The combination of blue and underlines means “If I click on this, it goes somewhere”. We’re conditioned to recognize those distinguishing characteristics. We’re like Pavlov’s dogs–we see the link and instantly know what it means. There’s no time wasted in trying to figure out whether or not that particular word or phrase is clickable.

If you mess with the natural appearance of a link, you lose that instant recognition. People have to stop and think (and often click) to figure out what your colors mean. I have watched countless people try to navigate websites and spend half their time figuring out what’s a link and what’s not. They have no way of knowing.

Fantastico is a 3rd-party cPanel add-on and can be purchased and added to the standard cPanel interface. Fantastico allows you to quickly install a variety of open-source scripts. By selecting a script and providing some basic information for each, you can install a script within minutes. Fantastico is designed so that the script you install is always the newest available.

Below is some of the scripts available for installation in Fantastico:

Blogs

· b2Evolution: A blog script featuring multiple blogs, categories/sub-categories, skins, search function, multiple languages and search engines friendly URLs.

· Nucleus: A powerful blog script featuring multiple blogs, multiple authors, drafts, future posts and bookmarklets.

· WordPress: A personal publishing tool with focus on aesthetics and featuring cross-blog tool, password protected posts, importing, typographical niceties, multiple authors and bookmarklets.

Content Management

· Drupal: An advanced portal with collaborative book, search engines friendly URLs, online help, roles, full content search, site watching, threaded comments, version control, blogging and news aggregator.

· Mambo: A professional level yet easy to use CMS featuring inline WYSIWYG content editors, newsfeeds, syndicated news, banners, mailing users, links manager, statistics, content archiving, date based content, 20 languages, modules and components.

When I first got my web site built, I thought I finally had a presence on-line. Wrong! I soon found out that I needed someone to host my site, and I needed a domain name.

This, I found, was my moment of utter confusion. And my first thought was ? "What have I gotten myself into!?" I realized I needed the following questions answered before I could even begin my on-line journey. What do I need in a web host,what is a web host, what is a domain name and ? you mean, I have to pay for a domain name as well?

What is a Domain?

A domain name is a unique name that identifies an Internet site. Thus, if you want to do any on-line marketing you need a unique name to identify your business ? and definitely a name that identifies or relates to that of your on-line presence.

Do I really need a domain name? Yes. Why? There are several good reasons:

1. It projects a professional image

2. It’s mobile ? you can change web hosts and your domain name goes with you.

cPanel is a control panel for your website and allows you to set up and manage your web account through a graphical interface instead of having to use command line. This means that you can make changes to your website without having to learn to use a command line environment. There are a variety of control panels out there, most offering a graphical interface and granting access to email management, FTP, subdomain administration, website statistics, etc. With a control panel, you can add/remove email accounts or view disk usage and statistics for your site by clicking on a shortcut and entering the appropriate information.

cPanel is the leading control panel on the market today. The two other big players in the control panel arena are Plesk and Ensim.

Ensim offers a variety of features and four levels of administration: appliance owner, reseller, site owner and user account owner. Ensim is the second most used control panel and compares well with cPanel, but its interface can sometimes be difficult to navigate and can be confusing to the users.

Never put form over function. Why? Because it’s crucial that visitors actually be able to USE your site. Everything you do must be designed to be as easy for the visitor to understand as possible. Everything should be functional first.

If you put form before function, you sacrifice your visitor’s best interest for your own preferences. By definition, putting form over function means you sacrifice function–you make it harder to perform whatever task is supposed to be performed. You give up ease of use or simplicity in order to make it look nicer. Basically, you wind up with a lot of icing and no cake.

Don’t get me wrong–form often accentuates function, just like icing accentuates a cake. Something that is visually pleasing often increases the usability by making it more attractive or by using visual elements to increase understanding. Creative design can often be used to make a task easier to perform. It can entice the visitor to take whatever action you want them to take.

However, on the web, there are frequently contests between form and function. Designers make choices between whether to make something look nicer or make it simpler and easier to use. For example, these are common ways of sacrificing function:

Project Safekids provides webmasters a valuable tool which could save a child’s life. Add our Amber Alert Ticker to your website today.

Please visit Http://www.projectsafekids.org/code.html to get an Amber Alert Ticker for your website today.

Our Amber Alert News feed displays information about abducted children as it happens. This auto updating content. You simply enter a few lines of html code into your web pages and that’s it. If a tip comes from your site which leads to the arrest and conviction of a child abducter you are paid a reward.

Project Safekids is a not for profit community service organization dedicated to creating awareness of the dangers that face our children and families daily. Interested in sponsoring an event? Please Contact Us , our trained professionals will help you assess which event will best serve your needs.

Project Safekids is the foremost provider of child safety programs throughout the U.S.A. In an effort to make our services available to more families all of our child safety programs are available on a National Level. Project Safekids Child Identification programs were created specifically to work with the National Amber Alert System. Amber Alerts work ! Over 155 children have been successfully recovered as a result of the National Amber Alert since being signed into law on April 30th,2003.

For those in the Internet business the availability of their web site is a major concern. The cost of downtime for web businesses can amount to $10,000 an hour. And this is without counting the losses caused by missed opportunities and lost sales. Losses in image and credibility these businesses suffer because eventual downtime is even harder to quantify.

Many of today’s web hosting providers offer 99% uptime for their web servers. If you have already chosen one or if you are planning to use one with such a high uptime should you be concerned on the whole matter anyway?

Let’s see how much 99% uptime means. For a 30-day month you have a total of 720 hours. 99% of this is 712.8 hours. Are you comfortable with your web site taking a day off every month? And this if 99% uptime happens. Can your web hosting provider back up its uptime promises with real facts? How can you tell that?

For companies making business online it might seem a good idea to move their Internet operations in-house. They develop their own infrastructure, hire specialized personnel, only to keep their business online. The cost of such an enterprise would seem rather high for the ones seasoned in the Internet business. Why? Because of the high cost implied: around $20,000 a year, without even thinking of the logistical burden.

The Internet has opened a whole New World of opportunity for all of us. With the vast amount of information available at your fingertips, it has never been easier to communicate your message to the world.

A web site will enable you to create your own home on the World Wide Web. Your home may be as simple or dynamic as you’d like and is only limited by your imagination.

Although designing a great web site is an important part of developing a successful online business, it is only one small part of an overall plan.

Although many new Internet entrepreneurs believe that all they need to do to make money online is to put up a web site, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The truth is developing a successful Internet business takes a great deal of time, thought and effort. It takes a sincere commitment, a lot of patience, and a lot of personal drive.

There are a lot of lessons that must be learned, and a lot of failures that must be endured. However, if you’re truly passionate about your business and success, it will happen — you will succeed.