Archive for the 'Web + More' Category

Domain Registration and Website Hosting – the Skinny

Monday, January 25th, 2010

The initial task when you’re establishing a website and a solid Internet presence is selecting the right domain name and finding the most suitable Web registration for your unique needs. This is not commonly a simple process. While you are trying to explore the most appropriate hosting you will probably detect that investigating the provider with the help of client evaluation reports can be the best step.

When you are reading domain hosting reviews, how to find out what precisely is useful and what isn’t? Don’t make any decisions until you have decided the features that are most important to your business. Employing the same company for website hosting and registration of your domain name is a popular alternative. Bear in mind, however, that years after your website has been set up, issues like service will probably become extremely significant. Any review published on the company’s website just won’t be wise sensible to base your decision on. It’s crucial to look at an objective assessment before making a choice. Take the time to evaluate several domain hosting review sites and study carefully the reviewers’ remarks. Do you see some of the issues over and again? Can you determine the company’s strong points from the comments? Is the feedback broadly speaking good or bad?

Expect to read good and bad feedback for all the companies. Keep an open mind and study any info you can. Of course, the significance of cost can not be forgotten, but it’s essential to get value for your outlay. Below are some questions to mull over when selecting which provider to settle on.

Does the company you are thinking of extend round-the clock customer support with a free number, can you discover if they answer speedily to any issues or queries? What system uptime are they committing to? Is it better than 99%? Precisely how much bandwidth will be available to you? It is possible to negotiate a deal with unlimited hosting and bandwidth, along with all kinds of other benefits.

What methods of payment does the company take? Will payments be put in place automatically, and are discounts offered for full payment? What kind of technical support is provided in the case of a server going down? These questions could make or break your website. Ultimately it’s completely your decsion, but before you decide, be sure you have grasped all your options. Reading those pertinent hosting reviews is in most cases the best strategy that will save lots of time and effort.

UK-Based Web Host Acquires Dedicated Server Hosting Provider Poundhost

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Namesco, a United Kingdom-based dedicated hosting colocation and registrar provider, announced on Tuesday that it has purchased dedicated server hosting provider Poundhost at an undisclosed sum.
This served as the first major acquisition for the web hosting company since May of last year, when it acquired Register365, the largest web hosting provider in Ireland. The said company was acquired via the company’s subsidiary Namesco Ireland.

Namesco is currently the fourth largest hosting and domain name provider in the country. With the latest acquisition, the company could overtake some of the major players in terms of the company coverage. The company is a subsidiary of Dada SPA, an internet and mobile services firm in Italy.

According to the press release, Namesco will own a hundred percent stake of the capital of the companies that operated Poundhost. This includes Poundhost Internet, VPA, Server Arcade and Blueconnex.

Poundhost currently serves over ten thousand virtual and dedicated servers with about thirty percent of the clients coming from the United States. The company has always been considered one of the major players in the United Kingdom for dedicated hosting services.

The company said in the release that the purchase of Poundhost is consistent with Dada group’s strategy which aims to consolidate its leadership in the European market by strengthening the position of the management among the leading innovative web advertising solutions market.

Thinking of Starting Your Own Online Magazine. Start Here

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

If you yourself are an impassioned young author, natural writer or conceivably a small to medium creative business looking to impart your smart conjectures or perhaps bring one’s imprint on this peculiar world then maybe the more traditional publishing might generally be a stumbling post to revealing your lovingly crafted innermost ideas and concerns out and about, into the world. Take heed the dismayed, there are digital and online alternatives available that may take the anguish, heartache and some of the exasperating guesswork out of publishing one’s textual labours. There is no doubt you might well be overjoyed to learn that you might well circumvent those wretched editors, sub-editors and conceited publishers through assuming your own positive actions to broadcasting your very own work.

So you have a brilliant story that you have been working very hard on for possibly years, or possibly very indispensable data that you just know many folks would sell their limbs to hold. You might have spellbinding data from a particular research survey, or maybe even an assortment of inspired photographs, conceptual pictures or additional classic artwork that you would like to gather as a collection of works to display your artistic competence or possibly to get priceless publicity to the elite services you supply and to get your specialist products appreciation. What about simply having your observation regarding those things that truly vex you; frustrating people, scheming politics, society, fickle culture and sharing your judgement with other likeminded folks.

Now it is likely that you find yourself in a comfortable situation where you could have put in the especially hard labour and have got the produce; a brilliant piece of work that is awfully beneficial, however it is likely that you still need to negotiate with a publisher and convince them that your life’s composition is worthy to be forever eternalised in print. Alas this might ofttimes be the ending of the line for loads of superb authors, wordsmiths, poets, scribes, reporters and biographers. Even if the publisher has been able to be convinced another stumbling post might often be brought to light. This elevated costs of all those irritating extras; editors, designers and other resources necessary to convert a superb design into a realised fruition will probably fall just outside of what you feel is affordable or you might may not be able to see the value in the fee.

The money required in publishing is not the only restriction or bitter stumbling post, for many compilers the turn around times for traditional broadcasting are much too long. This is often the case in the instance of stories, data or facts and figures that is greatly fresh, respecting hot trends or topics and will commonly devalue as time passes and the narrow window of opening for impact begins to disappear.

Modern technology comes to the rescue once again, offering you a fast track alternative method. In our fast-paced, technologically advanced weird world a huge array of services that have typically been offered offline are also fast making the incredible migration into the ethereal original online sphere, making these services far more obtainable to all who desires to use them and often at a far lesser price to the user too. Clever digital broadcasting is just one of those services and it allows you, the developing writer, with the capacity to publish your carefully crafted special works yourself with none of the annoying obstructions and high costs associated with the more “historical” mediums. The online magazine is fast gaining ground on its more traditionally published counterpart, which reiterates the continued growth in digital publishing.

Digital publishing can also provide you the flexibility that you might be eager for in terms of the effortlessness of renewing information, data or even adding entire sections to an already published works. Then there is the growing benefit of rich media such as; interactive applications, animations, videos and widgets. With an online or digitally published lovingly created handiwork this the felxibility is fully possible and a wide variety of extras and rich media are easily integrated into the magazine, article, or e-book.

In summary, an ambitious composer, small research company or photographic studio no longer needs to kiss up to haughty publishers or hold up a small bank to see their lovingly created works out and about in the real world. We live in today’s clever digital age and the world of clever digital has come to rescue to help you realise your publishing dreams.

Dreamweaver Too Complicated? Go Live and Frontpage Too Steep a Learning Curve?

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

I think that some web design packages have too steep a learning curve. That’s why I want to tell you about a product that I’ve just reviewed called XSitePro. Here is a brief summary, and you can see the full review by using the link indicated at the end of this article.

I was looking for something more versatile than a lot of the lower end website building software such as Web Easy Pro, and Web Plus, yet with a good deal of the functionality of the higher end products such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage. As I needed to start quickly I didn’t want the steep learning curve that these higher end products demanded.

Quite by accident I came across XSitePro. At first I was nearly dissuaded from taking it further, because I was presented with a one-page sales website which the software authors put out.
Personally, having spent a great deal of time, recently, researching web products, the one page sales letters deter me from going any further, as I have subscribed to several, and always been disappointed. I also dislike parting with money before I ‘touch and feel’ a product, and particularly like to download a fifteen or thirty day demo, which was just not available.

Erring on the side of caution I posted a request on the Warrior forum, and asked for advice as to which website development software I should opt for. More replies were positive about XSitePro than any other, so I subscribed and downloaded the software, putting faith in the promise of a 365 day refund.

I was certainly not disappointed and initially completed the tutorial, where I constructed a ten page website in around 11/2 hours. You can view the website completed in the tutorial by going to the web page indicated at the end of this article.

XSitePro is feature rich and I have picked out my 12 favorits.

XSitePro optimizes each page to rank well with the search engines and gives suggestions as to what tasks you need to carry out, to bring this about.

The ‘Help’ functionality is very good with on-screen pages supported by ‘Index’ and ‘Search’ facilities. There is ‘Context Sensitive Help’ throughout providing immediate help relating to the function you are currently performing. ‘Online Help’ accesses a ‘Knowledgebase’ of frequently asked questions with the ability to ‘Submit a Ticket’ if the answer is not found.

Using a ‘Template’ principle it is possible to make amendment to all pages by making alterations to the template. Therefore if you want to change text, site colours, logos etc. on all pages, this is easily achieved.

The Multi-Page Creation Wizard provides a quick and easy way of creating the infrastructure of a new site, or adding whole new branches to the infrastructure of an existing site.

You can simplify your web creation tasks using the valuable To Do Report automatically produced by XSitePro. The software produces a checklist of suggested actions still needed for each page so you never forget to carry out essential tasks.

Two mouse clicks will introduce Google Adsense ads to your web pages bringing about another income stream.

Powerful functionality immediately available which includes pop-ups, pop-ins, link pages, automatic sitemap, page import, scripts, redirect pages and much more.

The software comes with 163 website templates included, making website creation even faster and easier.

Built-in Article and Product pages which are of considerable benefit to internet marketers.

No knowledge of HTML needed, making it also a beginners tool. If you can use Microsoft Word, or similar then XSitePro is for you.

Print out an incredibly detailed report that tells you exactly what you need to do to each of your pages, which means you can make sure that all your pages are exactly right before you publish them to the Internet.

Easily add a links page to your site that looks great and is easy to update, which means you can benefit from a reciprocal linking campaign (i.e. exchanging links with other sites).

In summary we found it to be easy to learn, intuitive and we were able to produce results fast.

© Paul Lewis 2006. All rights reserved. Reprints welcomed with article and resource box unedited.
See our completed web pages using the XSitePro web page tutorial.
You can see detailed functionality, screen movies, tutorial samples, free e-books and much more by visiting our XSitePro full review

Are the Fonts You’re Using on Your Website Unreadable and Costing You Clients?

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Colin Wheildon, in his book “Type & Layout” waxes on about this or that font in body text. The findings of his research, however, are decisive. “Body type must be set in serif type if the designer [website owner] intends it to be read and understood. More than five times as many readers are likely to show good comprehension when a serif body type is used rather than a sans serif body type,” he reports.

You may be asking yourself at this point what’s the difference between serif and sans serif type.. To illustrate the difference, you might want to take a look at any large circulation newspaper. You’ll discover that sans serif type faces are frequently used in article headlines and sub-headlines; they are seldom used in the articles themselves.

More often than not you’ll see that serif type faces, like Times New Roman and Geogia are used for body text and for good reason. Serifs, those little footies that appear at the base of vertical letters like “l’s”, “k’s, and “t’s” facilitate the eye’s movement across the column, thereby, enabling the eye to capture groups of words at a glance.

In addition, the thick and thin elements of most serif faces aids the eye in distinguishing between the actual shapes of the characters; making letters more recognizable, and therefore words more readable.

By contrast, san serif types faces like Ariel and Verdana, tend to imped eye movement because the eye is forced to stop at each vertical character. The eye, instead of flowing across a line of type, shutters across the page. This is such a demanding task that readers frequently find themselves regressing – returning to the beginning of the sentence because the tedium of the reading process actually detracts from comprehension.

So should this be of concern to you?

If you are in the business of selling ideas, relying on content to convince your visitors to do business with you, then you might want to instruct your webmaster to convert large bodies of text to a browser compatible, serif type face like Times New Roman (Browser Proportional). If you’re a retailer, who is just trying to get visitors to click on short blurbs about a particular product, the change probably isn’t necessary because there isn’t much to comprehend.

Ron Scott, The PR Guru Guy, is an experienced journalist who specializes in internet public relations. He spends most of his time teaching entrepreneurs how to use internet press releases to promote their online businesses. Most of his clients’ releases get top Google placement in a week or less.