Finding the Right Web Host

Feel free to use this article. Please include the advertisement and active link at the end. Thank You.....word count 521 

Finding the Right Web Host 

Choosing the right Web Hosting service for your website can be a little bit confusing. There's so many choices out there and many people aren't exactly sure what they should be looking for. 

Here's a few things you should take into consideration when looking for a Web Host: 

File Storage Space/ Disk Space 

How much disk space do you need? That depends on how many files (pages) you plan to upload to your hosting space. If it's a personal or ecommerce site (a site that sells products) with just a few pages and graphics, than 25 MB of disk space a month should be more than enough. If it's a multi-page site such as an online shopping mall, then 2000 MB would be safe. 

Storage space is specified in kilobytes KB, megabytes MB, or gigabytes GB, a megabyte is 1000 kilobytes and a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes. 

Bandwidth / Traffic / Transfer 

All words above are used interchangeably. It's the amount of data that flows through your site, the amount of hits or how many people visit your site. If you're expecting a few hundred hits a day then 10, 15 of 25 GB of Transfer should be enough. If you're expecting hundreds of thousands of hits every month then you should get a hosting account with as much Bandwidth as possible. 
Bandwidth is usually expressed in Gigabytes. 

CGI 

Common Gateway Interface, is a protocal script used to make your site dynamic. Flash banners, moving objects. With the right web design program or scripting knowledge and a host that offers CGI you can easily bring your site to life. 

Frontpage Extensions 

Now-a-days more sites are offering Frontpage extensions. Microsoft Frontpage is a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) web design program that lets you easily create web pages while the software does all the coding behind the scenes. The great thing about using Frontpage and having a host with Frontpage extensions is once you design your webpages all you have to do is click one button that says "publish site" and all your pages go from your computer to your hosting space with one click. 

Shared Hosting / Dedicated Servers 

Shared hosting, or sometimes called basic hosting means that the webspace that you rent will be shared on the same web server with other clients of the company you've purchased web space from. This is the most common. 

If you purchase a Dedicated server it means your website will have it's own unique server. This is the preferred choice for sites with a huge amount of traffic and many graphics that would take to long to load on a shared server. 

Finding a Web Host can be confusing if you're not sure what to look for. If you're planning on having an average website with a few hundred hits or fewer a day, than shared hosting is the way to go. 

Fast Web Design For The Skint Webmaster

About two years ago, I had a go at commercial web site design. I put a medium-sized ad in a London classified ad paper. Nothing fancy: "Web designer seeks work ..." etc. This was expensive, about £500 for a month's run. 

Got a few replies. Lesson number one: advertise where clients of the calibre you want will see it. The clients I got thought £300 was a lot for a web site. They didn't want to pay web hosting. They wanted a lot of bang for their buck. 'Mission creep' was a term I grew to know and loathe. 

This set me thinking: how could I give these people all they could ever want, but not spend a lot of time and money? Lately, I realised how. 

So how can you get a full featured site up in a day? Easy (ish!). 



I wish I'd found this software a couple of years ago. It's freeware. The default set-up allows people without web design skills to update the site. It has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) option. This adds HTMLArea code to text input form fields. Each HTML code input box becomes a mini HTML editor. 

If you can use Microsoft Word, you can add formatted HTML code to the site. 

To get it running you need to know how to install MySQL databases, or have PHPMyAdmin as part of your web-hosting package. 

You can add articles, edit them, send emails to members, and be contacted by users. 

The only criticisms I have of this software are: 

1. The admin interface is confusing. It's all there, just finding and using it is the problem! 

2. You need to search around template sites to find ones suited to your site purpose. I wanted simple, clean, business ones. Most of those available seem to have a fat graphic which covers half the screen. There are more restrained ones out there. 

These are minor gripes, compared to the relief of finding what is essentially a web site in a box. It can be installed in an hour, once you get familiar with it. 

To add ecommerce to your site: 

Oscommerce Shopping Cart

Again, this is a full-featured, freeware software. You can add lots of freeware 'plug-ins' to it, to get a professional shopping cart. 

Therein lies the danger. Some of these plug-ins require altering or overwriting the default cart files. When you try to upgrade the cart version later, you may 'break' it, by overwriting a plug-in, thus creating errors. 

The trick here is to only install plug-ins that add files (rather than overwrite them) or that require minor alterations to existing files. 

What I do is download all the versions of the plug-in type I need e.g. a WYSIWYG editor. I then choose the one which has the least files, or which creates a new directory for its files. If it requires that important files be overwritten, or is complex, I chuck it. 

Mambo and Oscommerce. Don't try to integrate them! Hyperlink from one to the other. I've tried integrations of other softwares, like PhpBB and PhpNuke. Fine, when it works, but when you upgrade one or the other, arrgh! 

*Keep databases separate*. If one goes skew-whiff, then at least the other will still work. Same goes for adding chat rooms and the like. If they're all running off the one database, and that database becomes corrupted ... 

Email Communication Is Dying. What's Next?

Currently there are 3 main types of broadcast Internet messaging systems that you can use to deliver newsletters, e-zines and other informational materials to your customers. 

I'm not going to cover here internal or intranet messaging systems, the main focus of this article is on the virtual world outside your local/corporate network. 

The main Internet Broadcasting Systems are: 

- Email broadcasts that are sent through sender's ISP and received with the email client of your customer (such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Web Mail systems, etc.) 

- RSS Feeds delivered through web-based RSS Aggregators. 

- Completely customizable and personalized multi-media messages that are sent through RSS Channels and received with branded RSS Readers (such as Private Mail Reader and Feed Demon). 

E-mail communications used to be a very efficient way to deliver information to your prospects and customers. This was working well until we got spammers - thousands of unethical people trashing your inboxes with annoying junk offers without any permission on your part. Nobody really wanted these products, ISP customers were irritated with email-boxes full of irrelevant content, to say the least. 

Big and small ISP companies (Internet Service Providers) responded by developing anti-spam filters and society at large was forced to work out a set of anti-spam laws regulating the use of e-mails. 

So legitimate internet marketers had to accommodate themselves to these unpleasant changes by implementing various forms of opt-in verifications. In other words, now the customers have to confirm in some way that they give you permission to send them e-mails. 

And you inevitably loose a percentage of your customers who for some reasons doesn't want to go through the opt-in process. 

Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Anti-spam filters are now so tight, that they easily throw in the bulk folder even legitimate e-mails. How it could happen? Well, you may accidentally use some of the "bad words" - such as "free", "buy", "purchase", etc (there are hundreds of "spam words" and the list grows every day). You know very well what happen to the bulk folder emails - they are as good as trash. Chances that recipient will ever read bulk emails are slim to none. 

You also loose some of your readers when you try to enhance their experience by sending emails in html format (which would allow you to add colors, and pictures to your email, use different fonts, etc). 

You might want to go even further and insert audio or video streams into your emails to give your readers the opportunity to better comprehend the featured topic. 

You might want to do other neat things.... 

Well, don't bother. Sorry to disappoint you, but your efforts will be in vain. Major ISPs consider html to be the format for commercial emails and as such it triggers spam filters almost automatically. 

Some analytic companies estimate that you can easily fail to reach as much as 70% of your customers in the nearest future. According to Doubleclick, one of the e-mail delivery leaders, the average rate of opened e-mails in 4th Quarter of 2004 declined 11.4% from Q4 2003, and is now only 32.6%. 

Very bright picture, isn't it? 

Luckily, there is a solution, and it comes in a form of RSS technology (Really Simple Syndication). 

To put it simply, RSS Feeds are the streams of information presented in xml format. This syndication allows webmasters to find the feeds of interest written by other authors and easily place them on their own web sites (with authors permission, of course). The Big Benefit is that this information is automatically updated every time when the particular RSS feed is updated. 

In case of RSS aggregators, readers simply subscribe to the feeds and read them through web-based user interfaces (one of the popular RSS aggregators, for example, is My Yahoo - find the RSS Feeds of your choices, add them to your My Yahoo page - and you will receive the update on what is new on these feeds and will be able to read it in user-friendly format (you don't have to learn xml). Each time you go to MY Yahoo you will be informed which of these feeds were updated in the last 3 days. 

And finally, there is a third option - RSS Readers. It gives readers the ability not to worry about the information of their choice being blocked by ISP anti-spam filters. They can simply download RSS Feed Reader and enjoy the benefits of private media-rich environment from your computer! 

You don't have to go to any websites to get these data and you're not forced to receive this information, you decide where and when to receive it. (Whereas with e-mails you're facing the fact that anybody could send them to your mailing address). 

There are a many good RSS readers out there. Some are free, other offer free trial. The most well-known is FeedDemon (has free trial), then goes SharpReader, NewsCrawler, Awasu, PMR etc. 

Ecommerce Hosting Considerations

Website hosting can be a complex undertaking. Determining how much space you need, how much transfer, finding a reliable host, and getting everything online is no simple task. Add ecommerce to the mix and things become even more complex. This article will deal with some of those additional complications to finding a host for an online store. All of the same considerations to finding general hosting can be applied to ecommerce hosting, there are simply a few additional ones that need some attention.  Basics- Disk Space and Transfer  The core states of any kind of hosting, ecommerce or not, remain space and transfer, or traffic. Generally measured in monthly increments, your space and transfer will place a crucial role in determining just what size plan you need. Ecommerce sites will, generally speaking, require more space and transfer than an equivilant sized site without ecommerce. This is due to the presence of the shopping cart upon which the online storefront is based. Shopping cart programs are installed to the account on which they operate, requiring space, and their scripts for running the store will require additional transfer to handle customers as they browse, add items to their cart, and check out. Will there be a tremendous amount of extra transfer required by the cart? That depends on how many use the cart and on the cart itself. This is why its best to start small and having a clear upgrade path to handle future popularity.  Prospective online merchants will generally have a good idea how many products they'll be selling initially. This will vary wildly from merchant to merchant, and many merchants don't put their entire stocks online. It is wise to start with a considered selection of products first, especially if you wish to initially keep your hosting plan small and upgrade as the store prospers. Those with a great deal of products need to be aware they will probably be facing a bigger monthly fee for a larger hosting plan. Once the decision is made regarding the products, attention can be turned to finding a suitable shopping cart program to contain them.  Shopping Cart  The choice of shopping cart can be a personal one. Those entirely new to ecommerce will probably not have any experience with any kind of shopping cart software. There are a number of popular choices, and most hosting companies will provide one, if not a variety, from which you can choose. It is important to find a shopping cart that suits the individual user, as attempting to change your shopping down the road can be a long process that will, most likely, bring your store down during a transitional period. Don't immediately jump at the first cart a host offers. Ask if they have demos and try them out. Be sure it's a program you can learn and use, as it is the primary way you'll be doing your online business. Even if you have a large business and have a design firm setting up the cart, a rudimentary knowledge of the cart's processes is highly recommended.  Learn as much about your prospective shopping cart software as possible. Make sure it supports SSL, a common site security protocol that will help keep your customer's credit card numbers safe when ordering online. It will need to support your merchant account and payment gateway. In many cases a host might bundle these services, so compatibility isn't an issue. If you secured your merchant services separately from hosting, be sure they are compatible. Find out if the cart has a recommended maximum product limit and, of course, try not to exceed it. The store may slow down and perform poorly if there are too many products in it.  Finally, make sure it will do everything you want it to do. Some merchants sell services and downloadable items that don't conform exactly to the order-product-ship-product flow. If your cart doesn't support these features by default, there may be 3rd party add-ons that will provide this functionality. Miva Merchant is one such shopping cart with a very active 3rd party developer community providing a wide range of add-ons, or "modules" to extend the feature set of the original program. The merchant will have to buy these add-ons and have them installed on their own initiative, though, and the hosting company will not be able to support them.  Reliability and Support  Perhaps of greatest importance is reliability in your chosen host. Think in terms of a "brick and mortar" storefront. If someone locks the front door during business hours, then no customers can come in and nothing is sold. Similarly, if an online store is down at any hour, no customers can come in and nothing is sold. You want the most reliable hosting for such a mission-critical site. Never just take the word of a hosting company's site in regards to their uptime. Do research and look for customer reviews of your prospective host. Online merchants should always be willing to pay more for a reliable hosting company with good uptime and support. A good rule of thumb is to stay away from free or "bargain basement" hosts, since support and uptime are usually the first things to suffer with this kind of hosting.  Conclusions  Finding the right ecommerce hosting company requires a few additional considerations. Decide on your products, your shopping cart, and then shop for your hosting company. You will need more space and transfer than an equivalent site, but start small with your product selection and you can still save money on your hosting. Find a shopping cart that's easy for you to use and understand, as switching at a later date can result in downtime and a lot of work transferring your products. Finally, make sure your host has solid uptime, as an online store that's down isn't generating any sales.

Bacterial photosynthesis

In becaterial photosynthesis, oxygen does not evolve and water is not used as hydrogen donor. Instead of H2O, bacteria uses H2S . photosynthesis bacteria are greensulphur bacteria E.g. chlorobium purple sulphur becteria, chromatium and non sulphur bacteria E.g.  Rhodospirillum. Photosynthetic pigmenets in becteria are bacteriochorophyll.

Disappointing Designs

Fred Showker catches a line from a Pete Seeger classic, “Where have all the flowers gone?” His flowers are the web designers that he thinks are going extinct. He laments on the seeming “decay” in the art of web designing and says gone are the designers who made a difference in the making of web designs and who provided quality sites for the people to visit.

Showker argues that he has seen a decline in the quality of web sites basing from reviews he made of several sites. From his statements, I can see that he is well-versed in making analyses of web sites and is a credible source of information. Many sites came under his meticulous scrutiny and not one was spared. 

Some of the sites that he revisited were dead and others that are still up failed to meet the expected standards. The changes he saw came as a shock since he did not expect many of them to go down the drain. 

Riddler.com was one site that Showker said proved to be a disappointment as it took out of consideration the reading pleasure of the reader and instead took on a much commercialized look. Webshaker.com is similar as well. 

Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was another site that was axe by Showker. Indeed, I was surprise to see a content in the site about the Black History month with Martin Luther King Jr.’s picture in it. I have to agree with Fred on this one as I see no relevance of the content in promoting B&J’s ice cream. Perhaps there is an underlying purpose for that but I honestly don’t see its bearing here. 

Of course there are web sites that met Showker’s scrutiny like Hallmark, Camobell Soups and Smuckers. These sites provided a good site for browsing and had a good visual offering for the visitor. 

Fred Showker’s main thesis in his review is the importance of the reader as an element in the creation of web sites. The site must be tailor-made for the reader for it to reap the fullest benefits. The content must be of relevance to the reader and not just provide a stiff approach to giving out information. 

He further adds that a site may come up short on the design aspect but it still should follow this basic concept, "The reader is the most important element in the equation." Style gives way to message, and content is STILL king. 

How can My Site Look Good and Rank Well?

Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines? Later in this article I'll show you a real case scenario and the design and SEO approach used.  Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it's certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it's the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank.  How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?  DESIGN CAN'T BE IGNORED  If you have an existing site, you've probably tied it into your existing promotional content. Even if you've allowed your website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.  The reasons for doing so are valid, and can't simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text, you are correctly understanding some of the basic pillars of search engine optimization.  And, you aren't alone if you have this disheartening thought—If I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board, who would stay at my site because it's so stale and boring I'm even embarrassed to send people there!  There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.  Since chances are that's not you, and certainly not me, lets look at the second option. It begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a combination of people with these skills that can work very well together.  DESIGN IS FOR BROCHURES, INSTANT RESULTS ARE FOR THE WEB  That's not the whole truth, but it will help compare and contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web design has to catch a viewer's attention in 5 seconds. It's pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire brochure in less than 5 seconds.  Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be on your pages. But if it's not well organized and broken down into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about what you're offering.  CONSTRUCTION 101- ATTRACTIVE DESIGN AND SEO  Sadly, it's very difficult to optimize a site without completely overhauling it. You'll soon understand why. Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword phrase, "pumpkin bread recipe."  From a design standpoint "Pumpkin Bread Recipe" would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule around it.  There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing "Pumpkin Bread Recipe" needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).  To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.  SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin bread recipe.  Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table in this example if you didn't use CSS. Search engines don't like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that "extra" code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank.  Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organized would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It wont read through page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth character of unimportant code to find the relevant text. Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less code, more content.  SEO USUALLY MEANS REDO  In the previous pumpkin example, CSS will eliminate the need for almost any extra code at all, and provide the means to place the text to the right of the photo.  Now, imagine that someone had already created this page, but done so using other programming methods. The page could very well be W3C compliant, well programmed and got the job done. However, without designing and programming for optimization as in the above illustration, the end result would have no significant rank compared to others that do.  You can be sure that there exist at least 30 web sites built to rank for the keywords "pumpkin bread recipe". Note- why did I use the number 30? It's safe to assume if you're not on the first three results pages of a search, you're not being seen.  While this is a simple example, hopefully you understand that it would be impossible to optimize this simple page without redoing it. This isn't always the case, but extrapolate this into detailed, multiple pages in an entire website and the issue is greatly magnified.  AESTHETIC IMPORTANCE VS. TRAFFIC  Everyone has an idea of what they want their site to look like. The pretty factor- splash pages, cool flash and graphics must now be justified as to their importance to the bottom line. If you want/need to establish an online presence, you will have to make some compromises in these areas.  Understand exactly the role your site should play in your company marketing.  Ask- What is the goal of your website and who is its audience? Is it for existing clients to see? Is it to reach new clients? To venture into yet untapped market segments?  Ask- How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your site?  Ask- Is your website an extension of your existing collateral that must reflect the same graphical look?  Ask- Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is it your sales force?  Chances are you wont have any single answers. That's ok. It will give you some meat for your designer/SEO to digest and develop a solution for you.  REAL CASE OF DESIGN BALANCED WITH SEO AND SALABILITY  If you sell jewelry solely online, you must have a catalog of exceptional photography and detailed, high-resolution close up images. But, you must be optimized and rank well if you want to sell any of that jewelry.  If such a company approached me with this project, my recommendation would be this: If you sell a product, people have to see that product. Lots of good images. The site should be slick and sheik and easy to navigate. The home page has to capture the buyer's attention. If it's very expensive jewelry, the site should have a lot of class and elegance. If it's home made jewelry, the site shouldn't look home made.  However, as you have no store front, if the online community can't find you, you're business will fail. So I'd have a very optimized home page with some discussion of the quality of your product, the history of your company, etc. This is also great sales copy. Ad a few special catalog pieces with descriptions below some smartly placed gifs, jpegs and readable type graphics built out of CSS and you've got a cool to look at, content rich, well optimized layout.  I'd make the link to your catalog very obvious and prominent. Note the catalog is not the homepage. I'd also include subsequent well written, in depth pages about the history of some specific pieces. Load them with targeted keywords and a few images. Again, make your catalog link very prominent. In doing so you're creating relevant content for search engines AND providing additional pages that can rank.

Designing Your Site For The Search Engines

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. 

Creative Ways to Gain Links

Creative Methods for "One Way" Links 

Everyone knows the importance of getting other sites to link to you and the most common way is for a reciprical link. That is the kind of link that Click Sentrys reciprical tools address. These are great links and should always be sought after. However, there has been much discussion about Google giving less weight to a link that is recip. One of the ways to combat this is "triangle" linking but this can be very time consuming and hard to explain to new website owners. That brings us to another method: 

One Way Linking 

When most people think about one way linking their mind immediately turns to directories. These are a great source (and are seemingly endless) of one way links but there are even more creative ways to get them. I am going to break it into two very easy categories - Press Releases and Article Submissions 

Press Releases - New websites seem to believe that people who need their service or product will just find them because of that need. Anyone who has started a site just to sit back and let the orders or visitors roll in has been quickly reminded that despite being the "web", people still need to know you are there. 
There are plenty of great sites that allow you to "announce" your arrival. Even if you are an established site you are still able to write a press release to announce any new products or tools you may have. Somehow in the move from newspapers to internet many have lost the fine art of writing an engaging (and self serving of course) press release. I will write another article sometime about that lost art with step by step instructions. In the meantime, just read some of the other Press Releases and adapt your own. These press releases are spidered by google so it is a great way to not only get a link but to also drive traffic to your site. 

Here are some sites to start with: 

: Your free press release goes to google news(news.google.com) and searchengines like yahoo, msn altavaista and you can view the history and statistics. 
For this release, your article must be professional. 

http://www.prweb.com: 
One of the best press release websites i come across. You can issue free press release which goes to related websites and article posting websites. 
For a fee of 60+ only, your article goest to various news sites like yahoo news, business.com(iam not sure of this) and related big news websites. 

Article Submissions - The second great way to gain links is to submit articles. Do you have a web design site? Write an article about Google starting to index flash sites. All of the good submission sites allow you to put an about the Author section with links to your site in it. This gives you an instant link from the site you submitted it to but MORE IMPORTANTLY, these sites allow other website owners to boost their content by including YOUR article in their websites. The only thing they ask is for the article and your link to not be modified. Write a good article and you may see 100's of one way links within weeks. Write 10 great articles and.... well you get the idea. 

CREATIVE SUITE - THE UNDERLYING INTEGRATION

Are you an Acrobat user and needs a complete tool for your print or web design projects? Read on. 

A few months ago, Acrobat launched its main creative design packages including Photoshop/ImageReady, GoLive, InDesign and Illustrator. After a long period of silence, it came up with a much better package. 

Adobe’s Creative Suite now comes in two new packages, the Standard Edition and the Professional Edition. The Standard Edition is composed of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. This package contains most of the print-oriented flagships. On the other hand, Adobe GoLive and Acrobat Professional comprise the Professional Edition, which focuses on web design. 

Basically, these packages are combinations of the strengths each application offers. They are integrations of tools for handling colour management, screen display, type handling and more. They allow cross-application, meaning any file done in one program can be opened to the other programs as long as the file was created on one of the programs that comprises the packages. When a file is transferred, all other options can be applied. For example, when you open an Illustrator file to Photoshop, that file will be opened as a Photoshop file. 

Every creative application on the package uses PDF file format. Not just a PDF format, they use the latest PDF 1.5 format. PDF format allows you to import and export directly. You can embed vector PDFs from Illustrator and bitmap PDFs from Photoshop in a multi-page InDesign PDF. This can also be exported for PDF web display or repurposed via GoLive. 

Adobe Creative Suites has a new integrated file management system, which is essential in the software’s workflow and tight integration. Different components and versions of a project are hard to manage, especially when you are going to use a lot of programs, as in workgroups. But Adobe has a solution to this, the Version Cue. Version Cue, through the application of Save dialog, enables you to store all job elements and important version of your project. The Open dialog accesses visual thumbnails of the project file. You will also be warned if other users are using the same file. In other words, it provides file versioning and management. 

The packages also contain XMP or eXtensible Metadata Platform standards. This allows you to search for files according to related information like keywords or authors. 

Creative Suite applications are guaranteed excellent tools to provide you with your desired result. Think of these packages as the total of all these applications

Computer Learning Center for Kids is Committed to the Federal "No Child Left Behind" Law

We would like to assist the educational community in meeting those goals by providing a small classroom environment, with a focus on individual student and adult learning at affordable prices. 

Hiram, GA (PRWEB) February 23, 2004 -- Computer Learning Center for Kids exists to respectively serve as a highly valued resource for this regions educational, economic, social and cultural advancement with a commitment to a teaching / learning environment. And, provide computer training skills for children and adults of all ages in a diverse, ergonomic, safe environment and meet the technological needs in this technical world in which we live. 

Serving Paulding County, Powder Springs, Carroll County, Cobb County, Douglasville and neighboring counties in Georgia. 

The pride in understanding basic education and computer skills is priceless. Students will feel secure in the pace of classroom instruction due to the small class sizes and interactive teaching methods. Each student addressed at a personal learning pace that will boost their emotional appeal to learning the computer skills needed for tomorrow. The ease of use of the training programs will attract prospective students to our facility, and encourage existing students to return for more instruction. Computer Learning Center for Kid's Inc will benefit all peer groups of the community. Children will benefit from the advanced computer learning by increasing their appetite for technology and learning. Parents will benefit from the increased appetite for learning their children will experience, as well as the assistance of an additional educational institution to help raise their child's real world IQ. The benefits of our service extend beyond the realms of education into security of childcare and social activities with the belief in “No Child Left Behind”. 

The learning facility is an 1800 square foot office space located at 1899 Lake Road, Suite 211, Hiram, Georgia 30141. The learning center has a restroom, break room, 6 computer workstations, along with fax-scanier, copier, printer, and e-learning educational manuals that will allow ample supplies for an effective learning environment. A sitting area is available for parents that allow visual observation of their child learning sessions. The learning center for children held at the facility with set business hours of operation of Monday-Friday 10:00 AM - 7:00 PM. Saturday hours 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM. 

The primary objective of our organization is to teach computer skills to children of all ages to include adults and senior citizens. 

On hand, experienced trainers will lead small class sessions from beginning to end of basic computer functions and tutorial programs. 

Choosing Your Web Hosting Reseller Software

As a web host reseller, one of your most important business decisions is your choice of web hosting control panel software. The web hosting software you use will save or cost you time, money, and frustration. 

What reseller control panel features will reduce your workload? What hosting software programs are integrated with the reseller control panel or work with it? What website control panel features will your clients like? 

In this article, we’ve compared four quality web hosting reseller software programs: 

• Alabanza 
• cPanel 
• H-Sphere 
• Plesk 

All of these reseller control panels come with control panels for your clients. They all have numerous features — advanced email management, web statistics, pre-installed scripts, multi-language support, and more. They all work on Linux platforms, while H-Sphere and Plesk also work with Windows. According to the cPanel website, a Windows version of cPanel is in development. 

Other features that set these control panels apart are their degree of automation, the number of features and ease of use for the end user, and the features and ease of use for you, the reseller. 
Alabanza 

When you become an Alabanza reseller, you don’t just have a reseller account — you lease a dedicated server from Alabanza. Alabanza owns the control panel the server, and you resell directly for Alabanza. If you lease a dedicated Alabanza server, you can create your own reseller accounts. However, only you can set up hosting plans; resellers below you will be limited to hosting plans that you create. 

Alabanza offers resellers a high degree of automation with its Domain System Manager (DSM), which can significantly reduce overhead and time spent on routine tasks: 

• Account creation 
• Billing and invoice management 
• Credit card processing 
• Domain registration 
• Email notifications 
• Ordering fraud protection 

Even novices can sell hosting with this level of automation. 

DSM also integrates with bulkregister.com for domain name registration. It does not easily integrate with other domain registrars, though. 

A key Alabanza feature that resellers can offer their clients is the Xpress Product Suite, which provides web development and email management tools. The Xpress Product Suite includes SiteXpress, a website-building program that features over 300 templates and requires no web design skills. 

cPanel 

For resellers and end users, cPanel is known for its ease of use and range of features. cPanel’s collection of over 50 pre-installed scripts and Fantastico auto installer help clients set up their sites with little web development knowledge. 

A basic cPanel reseller account comes with two separate programs for resellers to manage their business: 

• WHM (Web Host Manager) is used to create accounts and packages, add and suspend sites, modify passwords, view bandwidth usage, park domains, install SSL certificates, and perform other administrative functions. 
• From the reseller’s cPanel control panel, a drop-down menu takes the reseller to the control panels for each of the sites on the reseller account, including the reseller’s site. 

With the addition of an optional program, WHM AutoPilot, you can automate account creation and suspension, email notifications, and other tasks. WHM AutoPilot also integrates with common payment gateways and has a helpdesk, an invoice module, and other tools. 
H-Sphere 

H-Sphere is designed for both Linux and Windows platforms. Moreover, resellers can set up plans for both Linux and Windows and administer sites on different servers from the same control panel. The control panel, actually a separate server, also provides administrative access to the integrated helpdesk. 

The H-Sphere control panel server automates account configuration, credit card processing, domain registration, and email notifications. It also includes a built-in billing module and supports over 20 payment gateways. 

From the reseller’s point of view, H-Sphere has a higher learning curve than most other control panels because of its numerous features. For example, when setting up a new plan, the administrator has two pages of features to choose from, including setup and monthly pricing for optional services. 

Beginning webmasters may find H-Sphere too complicated for their needs. More advanced users, however, appreciate the features and control that H-Sphere offers the end user. A key feature is the ability to have control over separate domains with multi-domain hosting. 

H-Sphere comes with the website builder SiteStudio, which guides users through a variety of style choices and stores content separately from the layout. No HTML or FTP knowledge is required. 
Plesk 

Plesk is known for its stability and security. Resellers and end users like its simple navigation, its clean interface, and its professional appearance. It comes in versions for both Linux and Windows platforms. 

With Plesk, all users use the same control panel but with different levels of control: 

• Server administrator 
• Client / reseller 
• Domain owner 
• Mail user 

Each level of the control panel gives the user control of that level and the level(s) below it. Email users, for example, can log into their mail user control panel to change their password, add autoresponders, and change other personal settings without having access to the domain owner control panel. 

Plesk handles SpamAssassin at the mailbox level rather than at the domain level. 
This feature enables users to whitelist or blacklist email for each email address, allowing each email user to have individual settings. 

Choosing A Web Designer: A Plan To Guide You Through The Minefield

Choosing a web designer can seem like a daunting task. They come in all shapes and sizes – from freelancers working at home to glossy new media agencies, and there is as much variation in prices and service as there is in size. 

So how do you choose the right one for your business? 

Select Your Marketplace 

Firstly, decide what market your would like to select from: local , national or overseas. 

If you would feel more comfortable meeting your designer, and running through your project face to face (maybe it’s the kind of project that needs to “evolve”) ,and your ethos is “quality of service” rather than “Pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” then a local web designer is for you. They can usually provide better back up, and be able to meet face to face to discuss your project and iron out any problems should they occur. 

If you are a bit more budget conscious, then it makes sense to select from a “wider pool”. Getting quotes from designers across your country will usually obtain a more competitive quote. What you lose in face-to-face service is made up for in cost savings, and all but the largest web projects can usually be sorted out via telephone and email these days. 

For the extremely cost conscious and value for money orientated (some would even say “brave”!) there is the overseas market. If you know exactly what you are looking for and can explain your project thoroughly and clearly in writing, then there are huge savings to be made. But what you save in price is invariably countered by having to do a little more work on your side – particularly when it comes to communication! 

Finding Web Designers 

To find a list of local web designers consult your Yellow Pages (or equivalent) or do a web search for “web designer “ “your area”. Looking further a field, you can do a web search or check out directories such as www.recommended-web-designers.co.uk . For overseas designers, go to web sites such as www.elance.com or www.rentacoder.com, the latter offering the benefit of escrow and arbitration services. 

Draw up a shortlist 

Draw up a shortlist of 3 or 4 designers to speak to. You can do this by visiting their websites, getting a feel for the type and size of business they are and looking at their online portfolio. Then call them – ask them questions about the type of clients they work for, timeframes and any other technical questions you have. Get a feel for how they communicate – whether they are on the same wavelength as you. 

If you opted to go overseas, the websites already mentioned have ratings systems which can help you decide, and you can also send and receive private messages to ask questions. 

Get Quotes 

Once you have your shortlist, you can get quotes. For a straightforward website this can be a simple fixed price – for a more complicated project that is likely to evolve, you may just want to get a budget price at this stage, and then pin down details and a fixed price with your preferred bidder later. Always specify your expected timeframe for completion when obtaining quotes as this can affect prices. 

Get References 

Once you have your preferred bidder, get references. Any established web designer will be able to provide details of satisfied clients. Email them and ask if they were happy with the service received, if the job was completed on time, how unforeseen problems were dealt with etc. 

Remember to trust your instincts: If you are not entirely happy with the references you obtain, walk away and select another designer. 

Appoint your web designer 

You now have a fixed price, references, and confirmed timescale for your project. Now appoint your designer! 

Most have standard agreements –read them carefully, and if in doubt get your legal adviser to look them over. Make sure timescales and project milestones are specified, as well as payment terms. Find out how alterations to your project are dealt with – in terms of cost and delays – and how disputes if they arise would be settled. 

Cheap Webhosting - Is It For You

There's an old adage which states that "You get what you pay for". 

In most areas of life, and business, this holds true. Not necessarily so, however, in the webhosting industry. Often, you pay too much, and don't get what you pay for. 

Several weeks ago I got a call from a web designer friend of mine. 

"John," He said "You won't believe this". 

He went on to tell me about a Plastic Surgeon he was redesigning a website for. This client was paying $600.00 per month for his webhosting account. 

"The incredible thing is" He related, "I can't get the current host to return my phone calls or emails". 

After looking at this clients needs, I was shocked to find that there was nothing special about his site that justified his being on anything other than a basic shared webhosting plan. We quoted him a monthly rate of under five dollars. 

In this case, the client was being raped by an unscrupulous host who was not only overcharging him, but not even providing the basic support he needed. 

This is an extreme example, no doubt, but it all to often characterizes the poor deal which most website owners fall into. 

Several years ago, there was no such thing as a webhosting industry. Nearly all websites were hosted by local ISP's. The average monthly cost for hosting a website was $20.00 per month. Often, if you called the ISP with a technical question, they would tell you to buy a book or take a class. 

Around 1996, we saw the emergence of a few "webhosting" companies. These were companies which were strictly committed to hosting websites. Using the economy of scale, they were able to offer incredibly useful webhosting packages for around $10.00 per month. What's more, some of these companies provided useful tech support which was geared towards meeting a website owners needs. 

Fast forward to 2005 and we now see the emergence of a new type of web host - the cheap webhosting provider. These are companies which offer hosting for less than $5.00 per month. 

Generally, cheap webhosting providers are newer companies. There's a reason for this. It's extremely difficult for the older companies to lower their prices when they already have a large customer base which pays higher prices. They'd be slashing their gross, and most companies just can't afford that. 

So how do cheap webhosting providers offer such a low price to begin with? 

Part of it is that servers, hard drive space and bandwidth are much, much less expensive than they were several years ago. Cheap webhosting providers capitalize on this. 

Another part is that cheap hosting providers use a different business model than the older providers. Webhosting is a very competitive business. Until recently, web hosts attempted to compete by providing the most tools and features. The problem with this model is that not everyone needs everything. Most web hosts provide free backup services to all of their clients. Backups are costly, and not everyone needs or wants them, but everyone pays for them because they're built into the cost of the package. 

A cheap webhosting provider, on the other hand, might give you the basic features that everyone uses, but offer weekly backups as an available add on feature, putting the cost of backing up websites on only those customers who want that service. 

This all sounds great, I know, but what about service? Will I get competent and fast customer support from a company which charges me $4.00 per month? 

The answer, surprisingly, is usually yes. 

Obviously, not all cheap webhosting providers will give you great service. But not all expensive webhosting providers will give good service either. Our Plastic Surgeon friend couldn't get his $600.00 host to return his emails. 

But, with a cheaper provider, the key for the providers success is customer retention. A savvy web host will endeavor to please his existing clients by providing the best support possible. 

Build websites easier with premade templates

To most people the process of building a web site remains somewhat of a mystery. This confusion probably stems from the fact that there is a cornucopia of web sites on the Internet. Even with wide variety of sites, every single one can be divided into two sections: front-end and back-end. 

The front-end is the first thing that it is designed. It encompasses the look and feel of a web site. This is probably the most established part of the web site production process. Design has been around since Guttenberg printed his first bible. Much of what has been used in print media (especially art magazines) has transferred to the web. 

Most well thought out web sites start off with sketches on paper. We like using the big huge box of crayons, the one with the crayon sharpener built in. Most of the colors in the "big box" are pleasing to the eye and are web friendly. If you use begin paying attention to sites you'll notice that only a few colors are actually used, 256 to be exact. Only about 100 of those won't give you a headache when you look at them. On request we will give these early designs to a client that wants to control the look and feel of their site. The site, of course, never ends up looking like the early designs. The same idea and concept is there but because of restrictions colors and whole images are lost. 

This brings us to the next part of the front-end, the actual site creation. This is what many people view as the most important, which is what separates a professional looking site from an amateur one. 

The images are created using products from across the board. Mainly, designers stick to industry standards like Photoshop and Illustrator. After getting the basic image in terms of proportions and size the designer should create the static HTML page. 

This is the basic page you would see if you viewed the page source. This is one of the most rewarding, most hated and most tedious part of the web design process. Each browser displays a page differently. Since most users either use Internet Explorer 4+ or Netscape 4.5 we cater to those two. Sometimes we build a different site for each, trying to maintain the same layout. 

That concludes the front-end section. Personal sites and some small business sites stop here. While this maybe acceptable today, tomorrow any web site hoping to attract and keep visitors is going to have a strong back-end. 

There are many sites and website designers that offer premade templates, these have the entire graphical layout that a page needs. 

For those with little or no experience with website design software, templates have quickly become a practical solution to professional website design. Most of the top end sites offer a huge selection of very impressive, easy-to-edit website templates. All you have to do is check your email containing the link to download the .zip file. The html in these templates is compatible with Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage. The major advantage is the price, they run anywhere from $20 to $70. Another great advantage is you don't have to hire a web designer, who usually takes 1 to 2 weeks to produce a page of such high quality. Webmasters, either novice or expert, can easily save thousands of dollars on design fees by using website templates. 

There are also some exception sites, such as
that provide packages of templates at one price, instead of providing a different price for each template. 

Building Websites for Charity

(ARA) - Learning doesn’t just happen inside a classroom. For The Art Institutes, learning is also creating opportunities for students and faculty to take their talents and skills outside the classroom, into the community, to help others. 

This year, The Art Institutes will hold its second national “webraising” event, with schools throughout North America participating. Based on the Amish concept of a barnraising where neighbors gather together and build a barn in one day, webraisings build websites for nonprofit organizations in one 24-hour period. 

Webraising is just one of dozens of volunteer efforts that some 5,000 students from The Art Institutes take part in each year, contributing more than a quarter million hours toward improving the communities in which they live and attend school. 

For a webraising event, students and faculty of the Multimedia and Web Design departments of The Art Institutes work closely with nonprofit organizations several weeks in advance, conducting research, learning about the organization and the population it serves, and the purpose of its Website. They then work for a period of 8 to 10 hours to meet the launch deadline date. 

"Webraisings are a unique opportunity for Multimedia and Web Design students to put their skills to work creating a critical marketing and communication tool for these non-profit organizations that they otherwise might not have the resources to create for themselves,” says Dr. Ameeta Jadav. She is coordinating the current effort underway. 

In fact, many students who have participated in webraising events have continued to be involved with the organization as volunteers and Web site managers. 

For Art Institute of Atlanta student Robert Horton, the experience of helping to raise a Web site for a local arts organization was overwhelmingly positive. “I liked the whole experience working with my team members and the organization representative,” says Horton. “My participation means a lot to me; it says that I'm a part of something that's productive." 

Breaking the Myth about Page Rank (PR)

The most difficult challenge most web designers face is getting traffic to your site. There are plenty of companies who promise to send traffic your way. Sadly, most of this traffic is not qualified. Yes, your hit counter will move higher, however, if its not qualified, you may find you have unhappy visitors to your site. Unhappy visitors will not click on your ads or purchase your products. 

Once you have optimized your site, consider submitting it to every search engine. If you want to get spidered quicker in Google, have a web page with a PR of 4 or higher point to your site. Your site will be spidered within a couple of days! 

One myth I would like to bust is that PR is a measure of a web site. Its not. I receive countless emails offering a reciprocal link with their PR5 or PR6 site. Unless my link is appearing on the main page, or a page that has PR6, I am not getting a share of PR6. Most likely, my link will appear on a page that has a PR2! 

Page rank is Google's ranking of that specific page's relevance. Just because the main page has a PR of 4, does not make every page on the site a PR4. Beware of sites who claim that they will exchange links with you and its to your benefit since they have a PR5 or PR6. Where is your link appearing? If its on a page that has a PR of 4 or 5 or 6, great! 

Reciprocal linking, if done properly, will ensure that your keywords are at the top of the search engine. If you have a popular keyword, you ll need to have more back links. Pick your link partners properly, and ensure that they are linking to your keyword. 

For example: if your site is www.joesdinner.com, consider sending out requests to relevant higher ranking pages to start with, followed by lower ranking pages and ask web designers to link back in a manner so that your url is a hyperlink for your keyword, not your site url or site name. 

Presuming their keyword is "best dining in new york", having links pointing to your site with an anchor tag incorporating your keywords will improve your search engine rankings dramatically. 

Once you have established a collection of sites pointing to your site using your keywords, you will start receiving reciprocal link exchanges from other sites. This is where you can start to be particular. 

If you want to maintain an effective PR and attract better sites for linking, follow these tips: 

a) Is it indexed? 
While their site may be indexed, the page where they are placing your link, is it at least indexed by google? If you type in allinurl:www.sitename.com/links/right_here.html and there are no results, consider declining their offer. If the page your link appears on has not been indexed, there is no benefit whatsoever to you. If your pages have PR, they may consider placing your link on another page. If the page your link appears on is indexed, but does not have PR, consider accepting their offer. While the page today may not have PR, it will in time. 

b) How many neighbours? 
The value of the page rank is shared with each of the links on that page. If you are splitting that PR with several other sites, your share of PR will be small, which doesnt help you. Reconsider accepting any link exchanges if your site is 1 of more than 30 - 40 sites that will appear on that page, unless its a very high PR. Further, if there are too many links on that page, Google may consider the page to be part of a link farm, which may end up penalizing your site. 

c) Is it relevant? 
Google is big on relavancy. Ensure your links pages are relevant. If you operate a site about golf, having links from cooking sites will not help you establish your page rank. It may cost you more than you get in return. 

How to Find Good PR sites: 

a) Do a search for them by typing in your keyword and start asking for reciprocal link exchanges. Take a look at their PR and go from there. Remember, its the number of sites that backlink to you that matters, not strictly the PR of the page. I would rather have 50 pages that have a PR1 pointing to my site, than to have 5 sites that have a PR5. Of course, if you can get 50 pages that have a PR5 pointing to your site, you are laughing! 

b) Take a look at your existing link partners and check out their links pages. Its clear the people appearing on those links pages are interested in reciprocating. 

c) Purchase software that will help find quality link partners. 

It is important to attract higher PR sites when you are on a reciprocal link campaign. However, its not the most important thing when it comes to search engine rankings. Its the backlinks that point back at you that are key. The more of those, the better off you will be for your keyword. 

Remember: every page starts off as a PR0. Just because its new doesnt mean it wont get a higher PR once google gets around to assessing a score. If the page your site appears on is indexed, and its a relevant site of quality, consider exchanging links. You'll grow a large list of link partners in a short period of time, and increase your search engine rankings in the process. 

Blending Colors

When you are familiar with software applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Flash and other drawing programs, I know you are also very much familiar with the swatches. Swatches contain selection of different colors that you can use during the creation of your web design, graphic design, and animation. Know what, we have a new innovation in these swatches. This is the so-called Color Blender. 

According to the blog entitled “Color Blender” which was posted by Neil last October 27, 2004, the author mentioned that this Color Blender allows you to take two colors and see blends of up to 10 different ones from which you can get their HTML Hex codes. 

How can you do it? It’s actually as simple as 1-2-3. The following procedures were also mentioned in the said article. First, you need to pick a color value format, input two valid CSS color values in the format you chose, and pick the number of midpoints you'd like to see. During this step, the palette will show the colors you input as well as the requested number of midpoint colors and the values of those colors. All numbers are rounded to the nearest integer. When you click on a square in the "waterfall" display, it will fill in the appropriate value for whichever input is highlighted. And, when you switch between value formats, it will translate whatever values are in place. Clicking on the "Clear" button removes all values and colors, but does not change the current value format. 

With this, graphic art professionals and web developers can now experiment more in the color combinations in their projects thus, making them more creative and innovative in their line of work. I would like to commend the programmers of this simple yet so important program. More power! 

Big Business Web Design Disasters

When you think of the world's most successful businesses, what names come to mind? Most likely, consumer-oriented giants such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Sheraton, Disney, IBM, and General Electric. Not only have they spent billions on advertising to buy their way into your head. They offer convenient products and services that have made them a part of your life. 

But when you think of the most successful web sites, what names come to mind? Names like Google, Yahoo! Amazon, AOL, Kazaa (for better or worse), and Hotmail. 

The late-1990s mantra about the web being a disruptive technology that would destroy traditional companies may have been overstated. But a decade and a half into the web's existence, it is clear that the world's leading corporations have been sidelined on the web. 

The biggest shopping site is not walmart.com but  The biggest map site is not  but
Established companies have usually only been able to buy their way into this market through acquisitions (as with Microsoft's purchase of Hotmail, which it used as a base for creating MSN). 

Why, with few exceptions, were the world's most successful web sites not launched by the world's most successful corporations? 

Many Big Name Companies' Web Sites a Vast Waste of Time for Visitors 

The McDonald's web site talks about food, but has no real menu. The Coca-Cola USA web site has no clear ingredients list or nutritional information, no recipes for floats or mixed drinks, no company history, and nothing else useful to people who like Coke. All that information has been inexplicably located on the "company" page, which on every other web site is used for investor relations. The Johnson and Johnson web site has useful information if you can access it—when the author attempted to open it, it crashed two different web browsers (Internet Explorer and Mozilla) before finally yielding (to the Opera browser). 

Many big-name companies' web sites offer lessons in what not to do in web design. The biggest lesson by far is not to sacrifice usability in an attempt to look cool, and never forget why your users came to your site in the first place. McDonald's may be the world's largest restaurant chain, but it didn't get that way because of its web site. 

Why Big-Budget Websites Are More Often Bombs than Blockbusters 

The web sites of many successful corporations (both B2C and B2B) are like big-budget Hollywood movies that spend millions on stars and special effects, and a quarter of a percent of the budget on the script. Worse, the special effects of blockbuster web sites are far more annoying than impressive. 

Special Effect that Bombs Number 1: Flash! 

When web sites don't offer any content—any useful information to read—what do they put up there instead? Spinning Coke bottles. Chicken McNuggets and French fries that zoom out toward you when you position your cursor over them. Changing pictures of generic-looking office buildings and men in suits (on the web site of real estate giant CB Richard Ellis—but that essentially describes the generic look of many corporate web sites). 

Of course, Flash can be used as a way to present content—words, both printed and recorded, and pictures that actually illustrate something. But more often, it is used to impress. And most often, it ends up annoying. Who wants to spend the better part of a minute waiting for a rotation of generic pictures of smiling models? 

Special Effect that Bombs Number 2: Splash Screens 

You type in duracell.com expecting information on batteries—which you will find, if you have the patience not to hit the “back” button while the site shows a picture of a battery revolving painfully slowly. 



Johnson's and Johnson's web site shows a logo before automatically redirecting you to the main page—that is if it doesn't crash your browser first (which happened when the author tried to access the page on May 2, 2004 ). 

Another way big consumer corporations' web sites from Schick to Mercedes-Benz to Thomas Cooke waste your time with splash pages is by making you choose what country you're visiting from. This could have been detected automatically, or at least, useful worldwide content could have been placed on the homepage, with an option to choose a country prominently displayed. 

Splash pages are the internet equivalent of making patrons wait in line out front before letting them inside. Unless a site belongs to a night club or a professional services firm with too much business, keeping people outside can't be a good idea. 

Special Effect that Bombs Number 3: Overbuilt or Badly Built “Dynamic” Functionality 

Every web surfer has a story about a shopping cart that malfunctioned just when they were about to click “purchase” on something they really wanted. Or a detailed form that lost all the information after the “submit” button was pressed. 

Sometimes, malfunctioning dynamic content can distort the way an entire site presents itself. If the dynamic content is so complex that it presents problems for many users, it is unlikely the dynamic content is worth it. When I visited disney.com in May 2004, my first greeting was a message that your computer is sufficiently up-to-date (or not) to handle the site.