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I found a good source of web templates which I would like to share withyou. Templates are good and they are FREE. GO & check out
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Success!

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill

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Few Tips for Writers Writing for Internet!

Coming at the web from the perspective of a writer, it can be easy to despair. You might be used to writing for all sorts of media: newspapers, magazines, books, or even radio, film or television. The web, though, is different enough to what’s come before that it demands you sit up, pay attention, and adjust your writing style if you want your writing to work on the web.

Subheadings are Key

Do you see what I’m doing here? I gave you a short introduction, and then I go straight into a series of subheadings. These subheadings divide the article up into clear sections, letting you dart around, scan more easily, read the bits you’re interested in, perhaps go back and read some you didn’t think you were interested in… it’s really up to you. Web readers simply cannot abide being given a big chunk of text and having to sort through it themselves – they want clear sections in your writing. Note that your subheadings should be much more descriptive and less ‘creative’ than they would be in print.

Make Sensible Paragraphs

When it comes to the web, paragraph splits are, surprisingly enough, less necessary than they are in print. You will make your site look odd if you put in a paragraph break after every sentence, or every two sentences. Instead, split paragraphs when you start a new idea – note that if you combine two, many readers won’t register the second. In most cases, you shouldn’t go for too many paragraphs before introducing a new subheading. Your aim at all times is to make your page as easy as possible for a reader to scan.

Lists are Always Good

If you’re about to write out a big list with commas and semicolons, stop. Semicolons have no place on the web. Instead, you should be using lists, complete with bullet points, to get your point across effectively. Treat it less as prose and more as a presentation. Clear presentation of information lets people find what they’re looking for more quickly.

Of course, you shouldn’t go overboard with the lists. If you have more than one list in a row, or your list goes on for more than ten items or so, you might want to consider revising the layout of your writing.

Don’t Be Afraid to Link

It might feel strange at first, but link whenever you’re talking about something that isn’t included in an article. You’re quoting a dictionary or encyclopaedia definition of something? Link to it. Are you reviewing a website? For goodness’ sake, link to it! There is absolutely no justification for fear of linking: it’s the way the web works, and if you’re not linking when you could, you’re not writing for the web.

Make Everything Independent

On the web, you can’t be sure that your text is always going to be seen together. Maybe your headline will be listed in an index of headlines. Perhaps your intro will be next to it. You just can’t be sure. In every case, then, you have to resist the temptation for mystery, and play things straight. Imagine how your headline and intro would look if they were detached from the rest of the article. Would you know what the article was going to be about? Would you click through to read it?

You should pay particular attention to this problem if you’re used to writing short, punchy headlines and explaining yourself in sub-headlines: realize that the sub-headlines might not always be there, and adjust your style accordingly.

Listen to the Authority

This has really just been a brief introduction to the kinds of things you should consider when you’re writing for the web: there’s plenty more out there. If you want to read the best articles on the subject, though, you should read Jakob Nielsen’s articles on writing for the web, at http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/. Although many of them explain the results from research that was done quite a few years ago now, they remain as relevant today as they were when they were written. Spend an hour or two making notes, and watch your writing improve.

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Power of Viral Marketing!

It absolutely does not matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website. If people don’t know that you exist, you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just die a death of neglect.

There are many methods that can be used to promote your website and make it well known in the eyes and minds of people. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

It is simple. It is cheap and it is very effective.

Viral Marketing is also known as Viral Advertising. It is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product. It is done by riding on in means to get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

If people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. The media could be anything, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story, free software or free ebook. Anything that is usable and can be passed to others. Now when somebody passes the media along they also pass company brandname or logo or advertisement to help promote the company or its product.

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Along with other methods in promoting your site viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

All it takes is a great idea. Create an addicting game, a funny story or anything that you think will please or tickle people and urge them to be distributed. Many ideas are still out there.

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize this concept.

If you have not done it yet go ahead and just do it.

After all it is the impression that counts.

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How To Register A Domain Name!

Before you can start a website, you need to come up with a domain name. The domain name is the name of your site on the web – the ‘www.yourname.com’ that people will type in their browsers and see at the top of every page of your website. Obviously, it’s important to choose a good one.

Many people don’t realise, but the web has a lot more to offer than just .com addresses. .com is primarily intended for companies (the ‘com’ is short for ‘commercial’) – alternatives include .org (organisations) and .net (intended for Internet service providers). There are also kinds of domains that you can’t get for yourself, including .edu (educational institutions) and .gov (government departments). In most cases, you should be looking at .com if you’re a ‘real’ company selling physical products, .org if you’re non-profit, and .net if you’re web-only – but if you can get a good .com, it’s often worth having just for the prestige and recognition factor.

There are some addresses that have been made available more recently, such as .name (for individuals) and .biz (for companies). They aren’t yet well-recognised, though, and both seem like a bit of a joke – asking customers to go to yourname.biz to get to your business website just makes you sound dodgy, so you should avoid it for now. You should also look out for fake domains like .shop and .free, which are sold at some places but won’t be accessible by most of the Internet.

On top of all that, each country gets its own code, and is free to divide it further how it sees fit. The United Kingdom, for example, owns .uk, and has divided it into .co.uk (companies), .org.uk (non-profit), and .me.uk (individuals), as well as a few non-public areas like .ac.uk (academic) and .gov.uk (government). If you want people to know where in the world you are, or you can’t get the .com name you want, a country address is a good alternative.

Choosing a Name.

Domain names aren’t at all expensive any more, but millions of them are already taken – it can feel very difficult to come up with one for your website. Here are some tips:

First of all, give up on any single word that can be found in a dictionary. There are people monitoring these domains constantly and buying them the moment they become available. It’s also not really worth trying anything under four letters long, especially under .com, because you’re deeply unlikely to find one.

The best thing to do is to come up with a series of three words or so that describes your website. You’ll need to think around this problem. If you’re registering a business website, you might want to include something in the domain to distinguish it from other businesses with the same name – the town where you’re based, for example.

If you want to get ranked high in search engines, it’s worth considering what your potential customers would be searching for when you’re registering your domain name.

If you’re trying to register your own name, then you might just be plain out of luck. Look at every kind of address you can think of. One common trick is to register a domain in a country where you don’t actually live, and use the last two letters as part of the domain – Robert Smith, for example, might register robertsmi.th, even though .th belongs to Thailand.

Finding a Registrar
Once you’ve made a list of domains you’re happy with, the next step is finding a registrar: godaddy.com, namecheap.com and registerfly.com are some of the cheapest out there right now. Really, anything over $10 per domain is a rip off – shop around.

When you type your chosen domains into a registrar’s search box, they will tell you whether or not each domain is available, and how much it would cost. Prepared to be surprised by some of the truly obscure names that are already taken, but don’t give up.

Finally, when you’re registering your domain, make sure to put in genuine contact details, as it can be taken away from you if you don’t. You should also remember the username and password you use, as you will need them before you can point that domain to your website.

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What is a Web Server?

There are a lot of web servers out there. Whenever you go to a website, you’re downloading it from a web server. When you pay money to a web host, what you’re really doing is renting a space on their web server. The Internet consists of millions of computers networked together, but it’s the servers that are providing all the information that makes up the web – you can’t have a website unless it’s on a server.

What is a Web Server?

A web server is really just a powerful computer – they use the same kinds of processors and memory that normal computers use, but they have more of it. Servers usually run a Unix or Unix-like operating system like Linux or BSD, but they can just as easily run Windows.

What makes these computers servers isn’t their hardware – it’s the software they run. Web server software includes the HTTP server itself, as well as databases and other things that are needed to make a web server work however it needs to. This is why different hosts offer different features: they have different programs installed on their servers.

Web Servers Serve Files.

The role of the web server, at its most basic level, is to send people your files over HTTP. It has a hard disk (often more than one) and stores your files like any other computer – if you don’t upload a file called ‘index.html’, many servers will list all your files for you instead of providing a web page. It’s the replacement of the index.html (named because it is supposed to be an index of files) that creates the illusion of everything on the server being one ‘web site’, instead of a set of files linked together.

Web Servers Run Scripts.
Of course, web servers don’t always just serve the same files over and over again. Sometimes they need to insert other information into pages, especially information that comes from databases. This is done with scripting languages like PHP and Perl – the server is told that it should give files that end in .pl or .php to the appropriate script interpreters, and these interpreters then tell the server what to send to the browser. This means that dynamic websites can often be slow, as the server is having to produce a different page for each visitor.

Virtual Servers and Dedicated Servers.

When you buy web hosting, though, you’re not necessarily getting a whole server to yourself – in fact, the chances are that you’re not, unless you’re paying lots of money. Instead, you’ll be sharing a server with the hosts’ other customers. You might not realise this, since the server doesn’t appear to have anything on it that isn’t yours, but the other customers are simply being hidden from you – you’re using what is known as a ‘virtual server’.

For small websites, there isn’t really any option other than virtual servers: they’re a great idea for letting resources be shared among lots of websites that don’t use much of the server’s power or space. If one of the sites does start growing, though, you might find your website slowing down. Oddly enough, this fact means that it’s often better to find a host that offers price plans with limits instead of one that offers ‘unlimited’ disk space and bandwidth to each customer – your website will be much faster at the ‘limited’ host.

One thing that people don’t often think about is that there’s more than one web server program out there. It’s not really visible to visitors, since they all do basically the same thing, but there are lots of servers available, and they’re all quite different in the way they work. There are three main groups:

Apache. The open source Apache software is the most popular server software out there, with around 70% of the market share.

Microsoft servers. Microsoft are responsible for the various versions of IIS (Internet Information Server) and PWS (Personal Web Server), which altogether have around 20% of the market.

Sun servers. Sun produce lots of servers, most notably the Netscape-branded ones. The market share of these servers depends on whether you count all sites (making it 3%) or just the actively maintained ones (in which case it drops to less than 1%).

Other servers available are mostly ’simple’ servers that don’t have all the somewhat unnecessary features of these servers, such as thttpd (the ‘t’ is for tiny or turbo). There are literally hundreds of them, but they have mostly negligible market share.

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Web Design Information: Where To GO?

There’s a wealth of information and discussion forums on the web, all free to read or participate in. I’m going to give you a few websites that are my first port of call when I have a problem or I’m curious about something.

I hope that they’ll be useful to you too.

W3Schools (www.w3schools.com).

A great resource, with free tutorials on everything from HTML to CSS to ASP. It offers a ‘try it yourself’ editor that lets you edit example code and see the results straightaway, as well as comprehensive language references. I go to W3Schools first when I forget the name of an obscure CSS property or wonder if there’s an HTML tag suitable for a certain purpose – they’re all there.

A List Apart (www.alistapart.com).

A web magazine for web designers, it’s very good for ‘how to’ articles covering more complicated subjects, especially when it comes to CSS. The writers at A List Apart are very good at working around CSS’ shortcomings and offering practical workarounds and solutions that you can take and use on your own website.

Digital Web Magazine (www.digital-web.com).
Weekly pieces on issues relevant to web designers, with a focus on web design and accessibility. It tends to be especially good for reviews of the latest web design books, and analysis of current trends.

The Web Style Guide (www.webstyleguide.com).
If you’re a writer, you need to read The Elements of Style, and if you’re a web designer you need to read the Web Style Guide. It is, essentially, an online book, giving best practices for many different aspects of web design. If you’re looking for general strategies, it’s a very good read.

Webmaster World (www.webmasterworld.com).

An excellent place to watch for the latest news relevant to webmasters – if something is going on with a search engine, or there’s a new advertising service out, then Webmaster World will have the news, as well as lots of comment and analysis from people who run big, successful websites. Well worth checking daily.

About Web Design (webdesign.about.com)
A resource that mostly sticks to the basics, but covers all of them, and covers them well. If you’re trying to do something that seems like it should be quite simple and you’d like a step-by-step guide, About Web Design is a good place to go.

Web Design Bits (www.webdesignbits.com)

Web design tutorials with a focus on those big, difficult to use programs, like Flash and Photoshop. Especially good if you’re trying to achieve advanced effects in Photoshop without having to learn it inside out. The tutorials linked to are off-site, making it a good way to find other useful web design websites.

Web Design Forums (www.webdesignforums.net)

A pretty comprehensive set of forums about web design, and a very good place to go if you’re having a problem that you haven’t been able to solve for yourself. As long as you take the time to find the right forum to post your question in, you should find the people there helpful and knowledgeable.

The Site Wizard (www.thesitewizard.com).
This site has a sprawling, categorised set of web design articles – if you want an article about something, you can probably find it here. It tends to be especially good if you’re looking for a guide for how to do something with a specific program.

SitePoint (www.sitepoint.com).
Although it can feel advertising-heavy, SitePoint is a good resource for articles about web design. The articles tend to be slanted towards online business and other ways of making money online, although there are plenty of design tricks there that would be useful to anyway. They also have a very active and useful set of forums.

The W3C (www.w3c.org)

Finally, it’s worth giving a mention to the web’s official standards body, the W3C. They have the authoritative copies of the specifications for open web languages like HTML and CSS. You can also take a look at the working groups, who are working on the future of the web right now.

Go and check them out. You will like them

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Traffic! Traffic! Ways To Get It

1. Social Media Bookmarking
2. Pay-Per-Click
3. Article Submission
4. Press Releases and Announcements
5. Keyword Optimization
6. Niche Forums
7. Niche Blogs
8. Directory Submission
9. Organic SEO
10. Comment on Other’s Blog Posts
11. Content Creation
12. E-Mail Discussion Groups
13. Linkbacks From Other Sites
14. Online Advertising
15. E-Mail Marketing
16. RSS Optimization
17. Offline Marketing
18. Search Engines
19. Viral Marketing
20. Newsletters
21. E-Mail Signature
22. Link Exchanges
23. Affiliate Programs
24. Joint Ventures

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Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG and More.

When you want to put graphics on your website, you’ll face an unexpected problem: what format should they be in? On their own computers, many people save pictures in Windows’ default BMP (bitmap) format, but the files it creates are simply much too large to put on a website – they’d take about a minute for visitors to download and use up all your bandwidth in the process.

When you put pictures on the web, you need to consider the trade-off you want between image quality and speed: the smaller the file, the worse it’s going to look. To help you out, here’s a comparison.

GIF

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and was the first image format used on the web. It was invented by CompuServe in 1987, updated in 1989, and hasn’t changed since – and it shows. Images stored in GIF format can only use a maximum of 256 colours, which makes things like photographs and logos look terrible. GIFs popularity is mainly due to it being first and producing very small files, although it is also notable for being the only image format that allows you to create small animations.

Really, the only things you should use GIFs for now are files that have a limited number of colours, and are technical in nature – diagrams, for example, work well in GIF format. Things like photographs that use many colours will come out looking very strange.

JPEG

JPEG was designed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, who gave it its name. It was designed as a format suitable for storing high-quality photographs at low file sizes – file sizes small enough to put on the web. Today, the format is supported in almost all web browsers, and is also the format that you’ll get photos in if you take them with a digital camera.

The most important feature of JPEG is both the best and worst thing about it: lossy compression. The word ‘lossy’ means that data is lost from the picture when it is saved at smaller file sizes. Image-editing programs will generally let you choose how much compression you want, from none (highest quality, large file size) to 100% (very small files, but terrible quality). Unfortunately, JPEGs that have been compressed too much come out looking worse than useless, but many people still use high compression settings out of a misguided desire to have the very smallest files possible. If you’ve ever seen images on the web that look very ‘blocky’, you’ve been a victim of JPEG compression.

If you do use JPEG, then, it’s really recommended that you turn compression off altogether, or use a maximum of about 25% – the files are quite small already, without going overboard with the compression.

PNG.

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics, and is the newest web image format in widespread use. It was designed as a replacement for the outdated GIF format, allowing files to use millions of colours instead of only 256. PNG files have smaller file sizes than GIFs, although they are often larger than JPEGs, since PNG compression is lossless (never loses any image quality).

The most useful feature of PNG is that it supports something known as ‘alpha transparency’: basically, images with transparent backgrounds that blend in perfectly. The only thing stopping widespread adoption of this feature is that it isn’t currently supported by Internet Explorer, but there is a workaround for this problem: search for ‘AlphaImageLoader’ for more information.

Converting Between Formats.
For most purposes on the web, all the graphics you want to use should either be in JPEG format (for photos) or PNG format (for less complicated graphics). That’s a problem if you’ve got a collection of images in all sorts of other formats.

Luckily, a good image editor should be able to convert from any format to any other very easily. InAdobe Photoshop, for example, you simply open your images and save them again using whatever format you want – you can even run the ‘Batch Converter’, which will convert a whole folder full of files all at once. If you don’t have an image editing program, there are plenty of free image viewers that will do the same job for you.

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How does database work?

Almost all of the most useful sites on the web use databases to organise their content, and they often use them to allow users to register and leave comments too. Any time you do something that a website seems to ‘remember’ the next time, the chances are that a database is involved.

Yet, despite how common databases are, they aren’t very well understood. Every day, new webmasters become database administrators without even understanding the first thing about databases. When you use a database on the web today, you’re not just using any database: you’re using ones that rely on concepts built up over decades of database development and proven effective. Here are some of those concepts.

Relational Databases.

The most common database model in use today is that of the relational database – others include hierarchical databases (where data is organised in ‘trees’, like an organisation’s management structure), and flat file databases (where data is stored in ‘records’ in a text document).

In a relational database, data is stored in tables. The columns are called fields and the rows are called records. So, for example, a table might have two fields: firstname and lastname. If you then added a record to this table, it could be ‘Bob’ and ‘Smith’. Instead of just having that data, you have labelled it with what it is, and that lets you refer to it and search through it much more easily.

Where the ‘relational’ part is really significant, though, is when it comes to the way tables in a database relate to the other tables. Each record of each table has an ID number (technically known as the ‘primary key’) – for example, the Bob Smith record might be ID number 123. This then lets you refer to his record in a new table.

Let’s say you were storing records of people’s orders. You could have two columns: customer number and date. This lets you simply store 123 and the date in the table each time Bob Smith orders from you – the relational nature of the database will tell you later on that customer number 123 is Bob Smith. When it comes to things like, for example, storing posts made by multiple authors, this is powerful.

SQL Databases.

SQL stands for ‘Structured Query Language’. It’s the most popular language for making queries to relational database systems. What’s a query? It’s basically a way of asking the database to find a record for you that matches criteria you specify.

Let’s go back to our example firstname and lastname table – let’s say the table was called ‘names’. To get Bob Smith’s name in there to begin with, we would have used SQL that looked like this:

INSERT INTO names VALUES (’Bob’, ‘Smith’);

The ID number would be assigned automatically be the database. Then, later on, if we wanted to find out who customer 123 was, we could run this SQL:

SELECT * FROM names WHERE id = ‘123′;

This would get us customer 123’s record from the database – Bob Smith’s record.

SQL might look complicated, and it can be, but that complexity is helped by the fact that there aren’t very many SQL commands you’re likely to ever need. Really, most websites can get by with just these statements:

CREATE. Used to create new database tables. You have to tell the database which fields (columns) you want, and what kind of data (text, dates, etc.) each field is going to contain.

SELECT. This command is used to search tables. You can use operators like = (equals), < (less than) and > (greater than) to find the record you’re after. For example, if you wanted to find all your sales this week, you would work out the date a week ago and use SELECT * FROM sales WHERE date > – that is, “find all records in the sales table where the date is greater than…”.

INSERT. Lets you add new records to the table.

UPDATE. Once you’ve inserted data, update lets you modify parts of it. Useful if, for example, Bob Smith tells you he’d prefer to be known as Robert Smith. Update lets you change the data without having to delete and re-insert it, which means that records get to keep their existing ID nun

DELETE. Removes existing rows from the table, using the same basic syntax as SELECT.

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