Everett Web Hosting Services That Business Must Know

Web Hosting is helping the business sector in improving their sales through web sites. Every business person is uploading their web sites to web server from where their customers get access to company. Web hosting companies usually measure data transfer on a monthly basis. Every visit to your website will move all the data on your site (all the html code, the text and all the graphics) from the web host server onto the visitors computer, where it’s viewed via a web browser. Web host packages often include a Web Content Management System , so the end-user doesn’t have to worry about the more technical aspects. These Web Content Management systems are great for the average person, but for those who want more control over their website design, this feature may not be enough.

Web Hosting Madness presents free reviews cheap web host providers , detailed web hosting reviews , and exclusive web hosting coupons. Our web site features the most comprehensive php web hosting comparisons of web host companies. Web hosting is the act of housing, maintaining and serving files for a website. The role of a web hosting company is to provide 24/7 connection to the Internet by maintaining a network of complicated, high-end and costly servers. Web Hosting Service is an efficient tool that can help you to take business to new heights. These should be easy and reliable in their functioning.

Web Hosting is quickly becoming an essentiality in the world of commerce. Businesses are constantly turning to Hosting for secure, reliable, and essentially, cheap solutions. Web hosting is an internet storage service that gives individuals, organizations, and businesses the ability to publish web sites on the web. Hosting services provide (normally for a small fee) space on their web servers that clients can “rent” and store personal web sites.

Websites, email and messaging services, and servers have to be up and protected for business communications to function. Data centers that house mission-critical infrastructure the most vital parts of the company network, like servers and databases must sustain the power, climate-control and connectivity that network infrastructure demands. Website Host Tips To produce more Traffic Web host services facilitate to put a website (domain name) on the internet. After registering a website and picking a domain name, the next step is to find a perfect web host service. Website Brainstorming for web developers is a fun and exciting process, finding new ideas and technologies to go with their ideas.

 

Tips to Avoid Designing a Bad Website

Websites are one of the biggest promotional and sales tools in business. Too often people do not put enough thought into their purpose and function, resulting in a poor website. A bad website can send away customers in droves, while a high quality website design will do the opposite. How do you know if you have created a good or bad site? Well, take a minute to see if you committed some of the worst mistakes that website designers can make.

Design a Site Strictly for You.
Your website should be designed for the convenience of your visitors, not yourself. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what they want to know. Usually, visitors come to a site because they want information, to make a purchase or donation, to be entertained. Decide which of these is the purpose of your site and design your site with this principle in mind. As you do this, remember that content is always more important that design. Visitors will forgive a poorly designed site, but they will never forget a site with poor content-and thus never return.

Forget that Your Visitors are Different from You.
You would not expect your visitors to drive the exact same car or be the same height, so do not expect them to be using the same computer. With each computer difference, comes a different web browser, monitor, operating system, etc. Take the time to explore how your site looks and works in different systems rather than assuming that it will always look the same no matter what.

Currently, Internet Explorer is the most commonly used browser. Firefox, however, is close behind. Further behind these are Safari, Konqueror, Gecko, Netscape, and America Online. If nothing else, make sure that your website looks good in Explorer and Firefox. Not all browsers recognize HTML codes the same way and the differences can be surprising. Before your site is finished, make sure that you test it in other browsers and using other display resolutions. This is not hard to do and, best of all, web browsers are free to download.

When it comes to monitors and display resolution, the choices are slightly slimmer. The most common size display resolution is 1024×768, but only half of users use this size. Approximately ¼ have a higher and ¼ have a lower display resolution.

Be Controlling.
This issue has to do with music, video, or some type of animation that automatically begins playing on your website. Not only is this obnoxious, but it is also annoying. If you feel the music or video adds something to your site, then place it with a player that prompts the user to play it.

Text size is another thing that visitors should be able to control. If you do not know how to use relative text sizing, learn. Instead of specifying a specific pixel size for your fonts, you specify what size the font should be (normal, smaller, or larger).

Make Users Scroll from Left to Right.
This issue goes back to understanding your visitors. Most people set their display resolution at 1024×768. If you design a webpage that does not automatically resize, this page will be too large to fit in their window causing them to have to scroll from left to right to read the text. This can be quite annoying. For best results, make sure you have a “liquid layout,” which adjusts in size based on the browser’s window. This will not only prevent left and right scrolling, but also ensure that visitors with larger monitors or higher resolution are not forced to look at a lot of white space.

Make Your Website Standout With a Favicon

The favicon is a tiny image that replaces the typical browser link image with a recognisable icon that signifies your branded website. Although the favicon isn’t a requirement for website design, it makes it easy for visitors to find your link in their bookmarked websites. Imagine viewing a list of bookmarked websites that all have the same link image, but one stands out – your website link – because it contains a customised icon that reminds users of your product. If you’re thinking of a creative way to market a product, a favicon is a simple addition that drives more traffic.

The Image

The favicon has specific dimensions, colours, and file format. The image is tiny, so developing its layout takes a few tests to ensure that it looks visibly distinct in the browser bookmarks. You won’t be able to do high quality images like you do for website pages. The icon format is only 16×16 pixels, so its size limits the amount of detail and quality.

The file type and colour capabilities of a favicon are 256 colours saved as a gif or bmp file. People who developed websites in the 1990s probably recognise the old colour scheme, and favicon limitations are similar to old web graphics. Regardless of the limitations, there is a surprising amount of options when creating the file. For instance, a common use for the favicon image is to use the corporate logo. Logos are usually simple and distinct, so using it as a tag for bookmarked links is an ideal way for your website to stand out.

After you’ve created the image, the next step is converting it to the icon file format. There are several tools used to convert saved gif and bmp images to icon files. AWIconsPro, Easy Icon Maker, EasyApps Icon, and GoldIcon are all good programs available on the Internet to create favicons.

Publish the Icon

After you’ve created the icon, it needs to be published on your website. Many webmasters save the file to the root directory, but the file needs to be saved in the location of the bookmarked link. If you persuade users to bookmark a webpage in a separate directory from the home page, then the icon needs to be saved in that additional directory. For instance, if you decide to convince your readers to bookmark a page named “yourdomain.com/myfavorites/index.htm,” then upload the favicon to the “yourdomain.com/myfavorites” directory. The advantage to this requirement is that you can have several icons with product brands dedicated to different directories. It’s also important to know that the file needs to be saved with the name “favicon.ico.” This file name and format tells the web browser that this is used as an icon for bookmark images. Wherever you save the image, take note of its location, because it’s needed for configuration of the web application.

Edit Web Page Code

The next step is editing the HTML code in your web page. Open your home page file. Most home pages are named index.html or index.aspx. Open this page in your favorite HTML editor. There is only one line of code needed, so you can even open the file in Notepad and add the code quickly. To add the new icon link, find the code that is located in the beginning of the file marked with the “” tag. This is normally found under the “” tag or close to it. Within this tag, place the following code into your web page:

/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”>

This is the standard code for inclusion of the favicon file. Replace “” with the domain name and directory of the favicon saved earlier. After you add the code to the web page, save the file to your website.

Advantages of a Favicon

The ultimate advantage of a favicon is your brand on the customer’s computer with better opportunities for sales. When a customer has a good experience on your website, a favicon reminds them of the experience. It also spreads your brand name as a familiar logo on desktops. The favicon is the basic way to brand your website with little effort.

Branding your website can cost a lot of money in marketing and resources. A favicon is a simple, inexpensive way to give a logo and an image to your corporate website. The Internet is filled with billions of websites, so standing out is a difficult part of marketing. This little addition to a corporate website gives it a little more recognition over all the others.

Designing A Web Site For A Set Screen Resolution is Outdated

Introduction

In website development we regularly ask our clients what size screen resolution they would like us to build their new website at.

I was reading somewhere recently that apparently these days the only answer to that question should be ‘all of them’ and ‘none of them’. What this basically means is that new websites should be built to accommodate all different screen sizes these days, particularly with the increased popularity of hand help web browsers, smart phones, net books and the like. Of course there is also the other end of the spectrum in the new huge wide screen flat screen monitors. I recently treated myself to a 24 inch Asus which does 1920×1080 which is big enough to get two web browser windows on screen side by side, but if you make one of them full size, the majority or websites look, well, just plain odd!

What exactly is screen resolution then?

If you are not familiar with screen resolution, the simple answer is that it is the size of your screen. However, this can be quite misleading because it is actually the number of pixels that make up the display area on the screen of your monitor. Still not clear? Well let’s look at some examples to help clarify exactly what screen resolution is.

Currently what would appear to be the most popular screen resolution is 1024×768 (accounting for 62% of my website visitors). This is a screen that is 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high. What is a pixel? A Pixel, derived from the phrase Picture Element, is basically one of the thousands of tiny dots that make up your display screen. However, this does not necessarily determine the physical size of your monitor (14 inch, 15 inch, 19 inch etc) because most monitors are capable of displaying the screen in different screen resolutions. It is fairly accurate to say that if you want to run your monitor at a high screen resolution then you will need a large monitor, the larger the monitor the greater the resolution it can display at (assuming your graphics processor can support a high resolution).

All getting a bit technical? Put simply the higher the screen resolution the more things you can fit on your screen before they have to go onto the next line, or before you have to scroll down or scroll right.

What’s this got to do with Web Site Design?

When creating the visuals for a new website design, traditionally the experienced graphic designer would be working to a specific resolution in order to make sure that the design fits in your browser window without having to scroll right. (Thankfully most website owners don’t demand you make their pages so that you don’t have to scroll down anymore!)

The most popular screen resolution of 1024×768 will have areas of screen with nothing on them when viewed at a larger screen size such as 1920×1080 or larger so a professional ecommerce web design ideally has a mechanism for dealing with this issue.

When designing at a fixed resolution you can deal with larger display settings by either aligning the site to the left and having a huge great big gap to the right, or you can centre align the website in the available space and then the extra screen resolution will be on either side of the content area.

However, the sensible, modern day approach is to make the site flexible to accommodate all screen resolutions by creating ‘fluid’ content that will flow to fit the available page space irrespective of what size screen resolution it is viewed at.

Also, because of the increased popularity of the web the challenge for a website owner is how to engage your viewers and get them to stay on your website for as long as possible and show them as much content as possible. One way to help with this is to make full use of all of the available space. Two great big blank areas either side of a tiny web page is simply just a waste of space. Imagine if you picked up a newspaper or magazine and only half of the front page had got any content on it, the editor would get the sack for sure! So by creating fluid web pages, web site owners can take advantage of larger publishing spaces available on bigger screen users, whilst optimising content for display on smaller screens as well.

Another advantage with big screen displays is the ability to use the new area for re-publishing. Re-publishing is a way to put content from another area of your website onto a different page, thereby bringing it forward for the viewer. An example of this that we did on one site we created was to insert an alphabetical list of names of the products available on the website below the left hand menu on pages that were very long.

All pages tend to be different lengths, as determined by the content on the page, so we used a clever widget to create this list of product names and squirt it in the gap until it ran out of space. This was great for SEO too as it gave a direct link to specific product pages based on their product names without having to crawl through category pages first, also website users would often see something in the list they wanted and click straight through to the page and buy the item.

Ultimately this has evolved into what would now be thought of as a web 2.0 ‘tag cloud’ a list of tags that are usually user generated, to indicate and link directly to a specific content group or item. Using a tag cloud is a great way to fill stretched spaces on larger screens that you can fill with what are effectively links to other parts of the website.

How do you make fluid content?

Fluid content is quite simple to create, the majority will be words of course, which are naturally fluid so on a small resolution screen you might get 5-10 words to a row, on a larger screen you can get 20-30 words or more. However the challenge comes with images, and particularly website graphics. A photograph, whilst it can be made smaller and larger offline, it can’t be automatically resized by the web browser at the time of viewing (not taking into account the Zoom function in Internet Explorer).

The HTML code that makes up your web pages is again designed to allow fluidity by fitting content into the available page area, so some best practises that can be employed to make content fluid include not using tables in the code (which are depreciated these days now anyway), not setting specific screen width in pixels, use 100% instead. By fading images into blocks of colour in the website graphics, you can create a stretchable element that will scale to fit all window sizes. Use little boxes to put stuff in, these can then flow around the screen as required without having to be in any particular place, they also help to draw the eye to special offers, discounts, newsletter sign ups etc, and can of course be styled by your graphic designer with curves and shadows and gradients to look great.

Conclusion

Any of the many Loughborough web design companies will agree that a fluid scalable design is really the only option to consider these days, as it maximises the available publishing space on larger screens and with the rising popularity of smart phones and netbooks it ensures you site also works well on these smaller screens.

 

Google Search Malaysia Review

Google, Google, Google that is all you ever seem to see on the Internet these days and there is a reason why. It has the largest directory of just about any and every site that can be found. Try it, go to a Google search and see if there is something you cannot find! That is a tongue twister, sorry. (wink)

Google homepage UK is the search engine I use for everything. Forget about Yahoo! You have to pay for stuff with them while Google offers nearly everything for free. Want to build your own web site and don’t have any money? Google will give it to you for free. You may not have noticed it yet, but if you look in the upper right corner of your Google homepage depending on your computer settings, it will say “iGoogle” and “sign in”. It won’t give 1 way links though, but that’s pretty much the only limitation.

If you do not have an account, after clicking sign in you can register for a new account and then up where you signed in, click the “my account” button. From there you can set your profile up and at the bottom you should see a list of stuff to try. Want your own blogger account, get it there. Get webmaster tool, analytics, Gmail, sites, Picasa web photo album etc…

It basically has everything you could possibly need to either build your own web site, get in touch with other people with Talk (Google instant messenger) and even have online meetings with Google Docs… again it is all for free. I am a full on Googleholic! I get my news updates from CNN, weather alerts, Einstein quote of the day, Bible verse of the day, Things to ponder, current moon phases, a clock (lol) and Google translator. C’mon, I even get to customize the theme on my homepage. Right now I am using the “rainforest theme”.

Besides Google being the top search engine on any web browser, it also makes making money on the internet easy. Sign up for Google Adsense. From everything thing that I have tried Adsense actually pays and then they give you suggestions on how to make your web site better and get more traffic which translates to more money. They offer so much that it is hard to turn away.

Now personally, Google if you are reading this sorry, I am loyal but there are some things I think could be better. Like Gmail. I don’t really like Gmail and the instant messenger is weak because you can’t use a webcam. Other than that it is definitely the best search engine in the world and I don’t think I am exaggerating.

Before I switched to using iGoogle my internet use pretty much consisted of checking my mail and I don’t remember what I use to use as my search engine but I do know that my internet use has increased and I have even become my own webmaster and I did it all for free, well… accept for the stuff I would bump into that I found on the web that I couldn’t resist. Let’s face it… I think Google even put a tracker in my head because I think they know me better than I know myself. This is why Google is so successful.

Information about SSL certificates for business.

SSL Certificates were created to validate the genuineness of a web site because it is so easy to counterfeit a business on the web. In 1995, when they were invented, a standard SSL certificates provided adequate protection for consumers. SSL certificates secure your website and protect transactional data. Need a secure logon for your site or online store? SSL certificates must be signed by a trusted authority or more commonly known as Certificate Authorities (CA). CA’s confirm your identity by adding their signature to your SSL certs.SSL Certificates bind an identity to a pair of electronic keys that are used to encrypt and decipher digital information. A public key encrypts the information, whereas a private key decrypts the information.

Security remains a moving target, however, as researchers have also started to find weaknesses in SHA1. Although there are no attacks as advanced as those against MD5, it is likely that SHA1 will also be increasingly threatened by collision attacks as research in this area continues. Secure Sockets Layer, SSL, is the standard security technology for creating an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between our web server and your browser remains private and secure. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology protects your Web site and makes it easy for customers to trust you. SSL creates an encrypted link between a web server and a web browser to ensure that all data transmitted remains private and secure.

Certificates can be reissued as needed in development situations. Certs may need to be reissued when upgrading or changing server software or operating platform; if migrating your site from one server to another, or if an existing private key has been lost, destroyed or otherwise inadvertently overwritten. After re-validating cert information online, the new cert is issued immediately and is valid from the date of reissue until the original expiration date. Certificates are issued by certificate authorities (CAs), which are either trusted because they are a top-level, or root, authority or because they have been granted the ability to issue certificates by a root CA. All Web browsers maintain a list of trusted root certificate authorities as a way to verify certs issued by those CAs.

Web servers have been built to support it and web browsers have been built to use it. SSL provides the ability to secure customers transactions transparently without the customer having to do a thing! Web server certs (also known as secure server certificates or SSL certs) are required to initialize an SSL session.