Optimizing your website design with your visitor in mind enhances your visitors experience at your site. Here are 4 ideas to enhance your website design for your visitors comfort and convenience.

Photo credit: Artur Cimoch

1) Avoid using splash pages

Splash pages can be beautiful to behold, but why give your visitor another hoop to jump through and possibly give them a reason to just close the page rather than jump though hoops? Your visitor has already clicked on a link somewhere to go to your site, do they really need or want to spend the time or clicks needed to continue? Time is valuable, respecting your visitors time will show that you have their needs in mind.

2) Avoid overloading your site with annoying banner advertisements

Try including relevant affiliate links unobtrusively in your content along with moderate use of banner ads. Rather than overloading your site with excessive, gaudy or annoying, flashing banners that are hard on the eyes and lead to confusion and “banner overload”.

3) Set up a clear-cut, easy to navigate, navigation menu

Aim to set up your site navigation so that it is easy to get from one page to another from any page a visitor is on. Providing a simple navigation menu will enhance your visitors experience at your website and allow the visitor to easily navigate your site. On the other hand a complicated navigation menu can be confusing and cause visitors to give up and leave the site in frustration, regardless how valuable the content.

4) Avoid using auto-play audio and video on your site

How do you feel when you access a site and are assaulted with a blaring audio and you have to immediately look for the shutoff or mute button– that is if you can find it? Then every page you go to it starts up again? That can get pretty frustrating, giving your visitor a good reason to close your page in frustration just to escape the noise and the frantic searching for the shutoff! Giving your visitor the ability and choice to listen to audio or watch a video if they wish shows your visitor that you have their intent and comfort in mind.

Etiquette expert, Thomas Farley and Audra Lowe, the New York host of Better TV, discuss proper internet etiquette. In this clip Thomas and Audra briefly discuss internet etiquette relating to five of the top ten websites: YouTube, Google, Craigslist, eBay and Facebook.

This Tutorial is Part of Atomic Blogging ( A Step By Step Guide to Blogging )

What you see above are the number of Spam messages I get so far on my blog! It’s HUGE! Arent they ignoring? To avoid and prevent all this spam you must use Akismet - A Free Plugin to avoid spam for your blog.

Before I start, Akismet is a free open source spam program online to help fight spam for wordpress owners.

Just follow the following steps to get started to prevent Spam on your blog.

Read the rest of this entry »

Many internet marketers and webmasters employ article marketing.

Bum Marketing was conceptualized by an online marketer named Travis Sago.  When Bum Marketing was released it made a big impact.

So what is Bum Marketing and how does it work?

Bum Marketing begins with a mixture of specific keywords.  Not just any keywords.  We’re looking for phrases that buyers actually use to search for information online. Keyword phrases that have a substantial number of searches but low competition for those keyword phrases.

For instance, say you choose the keyword “dieting”. This topic has hundreds of searches per day. If you use the keyword as it is you may not get many visitors to your site for that keyword because of the high competition for the keyword “dieting”.

So, what can you do?  You need to find keywords that have a high volume of actual searches yet have low competition. Then, when you compose your article for submission to article directories, include the key phrases you have chosen in the article you are writing. This way you can attract traffic to your article using high volume, low competitition keywords and your links are in the resource box at the bottom of your article.

When you make the decision to put your business or personal life online, you will find many options for web hosting and the service you choose will largely depend on the type of site you plan to build.

Some companies offer free web hosting that allows you a certain amount of bandwidth every month and for many personal sites this will be sufficient. With the typically limited amount of bandwidth offered at no charge, these free web hosting accounts may not be sufficient if you are planning to post a lot of photographs on your site or planning a business website. Commonly, many companies offer free services at around fifty megabytes of bandwidth per month. So you will want to consider the amount of bandwidth you may need before choosing a free web hosting account for your site.

The amount of bandwidth is not only for the content of the site, it also includes the information sent to and from the site by you and any visitors to the site, which is very important to understand when looking into web hosting. An average picture can eat up as much as two megabytes by itself, leaving the available space on your web hosting account likely insufficient for your purposes.

Prices for web hosting can also vary tremendously, typically based on the bandwidth available, the amount of storage space, the number of email accounts included and many other factors. The company’s reputation for being available is the another thing to consider.

Some of the free or least expensive web hosting services have excellent reputations for being up and running. In most instances, a 99 percent up time is considered the standard, meaning your web site will likely show an error or be unavailable only one percent of the time.

Whether you are looking to start a business or personal site it is important to choose a web hosting account that will fit your needs. Visit http://www.webhosting.jsgenterprises.com for more web hosting articles.

What would we do without social media now that it has become such a big part of many of our lives? Here’s a look…

The Facebook Song

“Before the internet friendship was so tough. You actually had to be in people’s presense and stuff” ~ Rhett&Link

I have been having trouble playing videos in Firefox 3 lately. I would try to play a video on a site such as YouTube and many times it wouldn’t play properly. The video would sometimes get stuck on loading and wouldn’t play at all, it would play a few seconds and stop or it would play but hang several times throughout the duration of the video. I was able to play videos fine in Internet Explorer 7.

I just noticed that there is an update for Adobe Flash Player available. So I figured I would update my Adobe Flash Player and see if that would fix the problem. Sure enough, I can play videos easily in Firefox 3 now without a problem. The new version of Adobe Flash Player fixed the problem for me.

If you have been having the same problem playing videos in Firefox 3 you can check which version of Adobe Flash Player you have here: Version Test For Adobe Flash Player. If you don’t have the newest version you can update your Adobe Flash Player and see if this works for you too.

photo credit: John Griffiths

I have found it is best to use Adobe’s Flash Player Uninstaller before installing the newer version. Adobe’s flash player uninstaller does a better job of removing all instances of Adobe flash player than the Windows add/remove programs uninstaller (renamed “Programs and Features” in Win Vista) function does. Adobe has complete instructions on using the uninstaller so that it works properly to uninstall all instances of Adobe Flash Player. After using the uninstaller you can install the newer version and see if it works for you too.

Phil

I had tried moving a blog using the standard recommended procedures and didn’t have any luck with it. See Moving Wordpress .

So the last couple times I have moved a blog I used the shortcuts to moving a blog that I found at Move Your WordPress Blog to a New Host in 7 Easy Steps. This way, I didn’t have to mess around with any MySQL tables.

This method at Move Your WordPress Blog to a New Host in 7 Easy Steps worked fine for me. Though I have a small blog, with few posts, and I am not sure this would work for a large blog with a complicated configuration.

Update Jan 13, 2009: I did have some trouble with the steps outlined above on my most recent blog moves. I have no idea why, but i could not log in to my newly installed blog to import and restore the files as in Step 6 until after I updated the DNS records as outlined in Step 7 this time. So, I had to do Step 7 this time before Step 6. It still worked fine, but you may want to consider this before choosing this method of moving a blog. Another method you may prefer is Matt Garrett’s video tutorial on moving a blog. I haven’t tried out this particular tutorial, but his tutorials that I have tried are excellent, clear, and easy to understand and implement.

photo credit: ewen and donabel

If in the future, I do move another blog, I think I will try Matt Garrett’s tutorial video at Moving Your Blog .

Phil

I just learned that Straight No Chaser got a record contract with Atlantic Records! On October 28th they will be making their Atlantic debut with “Holiday Spirits”, a collection of Christmas Songs. Following that, concert performances, TV appearances and plans for a second album are in the works too.

Straight No Chaser is one of the best a cappella groups I have heard. For more news and information and to see more of Straight No Chaser’s extraordinary a cappella performances go to MySpace.com - Straight No Chaser.

If you haven’t seen the video I posted here back in December check out Happy Holidays - Straight No Chaser, men’s a capella and you will see what I mean.

photo credit: *~sTeRnDaL~*

Way to go guys! You deserve it…

Phil