Web Development Articles

You want your own online business? Good because it’s one of the most fun things you can do with your spare time and can be very profitable.

Remember that just because it’s an online business doesn’t mean that you should treat it with any less professionalism or seriousness than you do your daytime job.

Why? Simply because when you run an online business it’s a serious business. Well it should be taken seriously if you want to make serious money.

One of the most important aspects of any online business is the domain name. This is where the vast majority of new online entrepreneurs make their first big mistake - they choose one of those free domain name providers to represent their business online. This is a critical mistake.

Let’s say you’re starting a computer repair business. Which one of the following domains looks better:

‘www.computerfixer.com’ or; ‘computerfixer.freehosting.com’

The truth of the matter is that computerfixer.com is a top level domain and computerfixer.freehosting.com is a sub-domain. These free domain providers would have you believe that their cheapo subdomain is as good as a top level domain - this simply isn’t so.

What is a Dedicated / Virtual Dedicated server and why is it different than normal web hosting. Web hosting offers you limited control of how the server your web site is hosted on behaves. Normal hosting plans put many customers’ accounts on a single server and you upload your files to that Server. Dedicated / Virtual Dedicated servers allow you to actually control your own server where you receive Admin access to install and run virtually anything YOU want on the server. You can host multiple web sites on the one server account, and even sell hosting and host other sites on your server.

I have referred to Dedicated and Virtual Dedicated Servers. You may ask, what is the difference? Virtual dedicated servers are similar to Dedicated servers as they offer many of the same features, but at a much lower price.

With a virtual dedicated server, the customer shares the server space with a limited number of other customers using the same server box. Each virtual dedicated server is isolated from the other accounts giving the user full control of their own server. Virtual dedicated servers are useful for companies and individuals that run complex applications that need the bandwidth, consistent performance, and flexibility of a virtual dedicated server.

Because of this encouraging surge in activity, many individuals are now interested in becoming e-commerce merchants. To profit from your online business, you must first produce a unique website that will intrigue visitors and interest them in your items.

In reality, the e-commerce business is not much different than your average offline retail venture. Both vendors have products that he aims to sell, and each retailer must discover the appropriate avenue to market these items. Online shoppers crave the same things that traditional shoppers demand: a pleasant shopping experience, in-stock merchandise, and a courteous vendor. If you seek to please the customer, your e-commerce business shall prosper.

Almost every e-commerce website that is currently profiting has a clean, crisp layout, and effortless navigation. It is essential for you to have several categories featuring your products that are easy to browse. Clear, detailed images should also be readily available. Customers should have the opportunity to examine your products and compare them with others.

An ideal e-commerce store will have many WebPages. These pages will be organized into various categories, with searchable properties, and will use thumbnail pictures for faster loading time. Each picture should also have a detailed description of the product. The easier the site is to access, the more likely it is the visitor will purchase a product.

What Will My Site Do?

This is the first of eight articles about website design. Our discussion will deal with some of the issues which need to be considered when developing a new online presence. You may have already thought of some of these, but perhaps there are may be things which you haven’t yet considered.

The Company

The Great American Widget Company is a manufacturer of widgets, that common household item that many find indispensable. Until now, however, Great American has been a ‘brick and mortar’ business. With the founder’s son just out of college, he is looking forward to expanding the company’s business on the Internet.

What is the new website expected to do?

Before doing anything else, before you even consider finding a hosting company, or a designer, or even before you register a domain name, or before putting pen to paper to begin writing content, take time to consider what the site will be about. Is your new site to be an eCommerce site, or will it be an online ‘image’ site that displays the image of your business?

Tell me what your website does!
 by: Trenton Moss

You know exactly what your organisation does and what your website offers its users. This information has probably become second nature to you, but first-time visitors to your site won’t know this. As such, make sure you don’t forget to tell them what you do.

As soon as new site visitors arrive at your website the first thing they need to know, before anything else, is what you do. You can talk all you like about how great you are, but unless you spell out what you actually do, they won’t even know what you’re so great at! This oh-so-overlooked yet such basic of information can be communicated to your site visitors in a number of different ways:

Page title

Don’t just use the page title to tell me who you are; tell me what you do too. If your company is called Bloggs Ltd don’t only place the words, ‘Bloggs Ltd’ in the page title as there’s plenty of room for more information. If Bloggs Ltd sells widgets, a good page title might be: ‘Bloggs Ltd - Buy widgets online’.

Your Website Hurts My Eyes: 7 Reasons to Tone Down Your Advertising
 by: Dina Giolitto

So you’re on the computer, as usual. Your eyes are smarting. Your back hurts. You want to jump in the car and sail down the highway with all the windows down and your hair flapping in the wind. But before you call it quits for the day, you have to look up just one more thing. Maybe it’s web marketing, maybe you want to buy some artwork to hang in your office. Off to Google you go.

You type in the magic words, whatever they are, and watch as a list of websites flows down the page. You click on the first one, and it’s an instant assault on your eyeballs. Ten glaring banners, flashing like Vegas at midnight. One of those annoying hover ads that follows you as you scroll and won’t let you read anything until you click the corner. Some sparkly things “snowing” down the page. Frantic messages screaming things like BUY NOW! LAST CHANCE! INSTANT SUCCESS CAN BE YOURS. A picture of a grinning guy who reminds you of your creepy Uncle Lester.

This is a very perfunctory look at the website code HTML, for those who never did any kind of Computer Studies at school and have never had the need or opportunity to look ‘under the skirt’ of your average website. There’s nothing that an experienced webmaster will find here that’s not very basic, but for those who have just begun to discover the ‘website’ and especially those venturing into… maybe starting one of their own, here’s a basic understanding to pique the interest and possibly kick-start the learning process.

If you don’t even know what I’m talking about when I say HTML, as a means to follow what we’re talking about as we go, then just go to this page - Home Based Business & Affiliate Center and click on the ‘View’ option at the top of your browser and select ‘Source’ or ‘Page Source’ (depending on your browser type) from the drop-down menu. You will be confronted by a Notepad document with silly looking symbols, letters and numbers on it. Well, that is HTML code. It’s the coded ‘blueprint’ for the web PAGE (not the whole website) that you’re looking at. Keep the Notepad document open to refer to as we discuss each part.

How You Pay More for Unused Web Space and Traffic
 by: Subhendu Sen

“2GB web space with 50GB traffic for $5.95 per month!”

A luring ad—definitely. In fact this ad makes many small business owners feel cheated by their present web hosts.

This is how the small business owners, who have taken small amount of space (say, 5, 10 or 25mb) calculate and feel that they are paying more :

“If 2000MB (2GB) costs $5.95 per month, then 5MB should cost (5.95 x 5 / 2000) = $0.15 only! But my web host charges me $1! A 700% profit!! Oh…I am losing so much money!!”

So, if a small business site shifts to the advertised web host, he should get better value for his money. Right?

Wrong.

Let me explain how :

As a small business owner, how many HTML pages do you have in your web site? 5, 10, 15, 25?

Experts say that you should not have a page of more than 100K including images. Normally the file size of a starndard HTML page is around 10-15K.

Creating Personal Web Sites
 by: Ashish Jain

This is a two-part article about creating a web site on the web and the tools that you need to do that.

During the last decade we have truly entered the information age. More and more people are becoming a part of the ever growing and wondrous community called the Internet. It was just over a decade ago that ‘Internet’ was just another new concept that a lot of people were skeptical about. Today however, it would be difficult to imagine living in the world without this amazing phenomenon. It really has enabled humans to reach new heights.

Some basic terminology that you should take a look at before proceeding further:

Web Page: A document that contains information created with the help of HTML.

Web Site: A collection of web pages on a particular subject.

HTML: Also known as Hyper Text Markup Language, this is used for the creation of web pages. Information is written in between HTML tags ( ) to instruct the web page as to how information will be displayed. You can also put images into the web page by using this language. Some other languages like JavaScript, VB script, ASP, ASP.NET etc. are also used to display dynamic content on web pages and for performing user driver events.

Creating an appealing, functional, and effective Web site is much harder than it looks. It’s not simply a matter of taking a company brochure or catalog, converting the text to HTML, and throwing in a few pictures (although many sites seem to have been created using this technique!).

A Web site is a 24-hour a day advertisement for your company and should be treated as such. You wouldn’t turn over the design of your next direct mail piece, newspaper ad, or TV commercial to an amateur, and the same should hold true for your Web site. Actually, more care should be given to your Web site considering the potential number of online viewers is much greater than the audience for any other communication medium.

We’ve redesigned Web sites for large companies that initially thought they’d save time and money by hiring a college student to design their site. They wound up with a site that looked like it had been designed by a college student, did not incorporate effective online marketing tools to draw traffic to the site, and the college student graduated and moved on, leaving them without ongoing support.