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  • Common Reseller Hosting Mistakes to Avoid

    Common Reseller Hosting Mistakes to Avoid

    Reseller hosting refers to a type of web hosting where someone purchases disk space and bandwidth in bulk from an established hosting company, and then goes ahead to resell packages to individual users. Since it does not require setting up and maintaining any hardware or infrastructure, reseller hosting offers an easy and inexpensive way of starting a web hosting business. However, success is not guaranteed for everyone who gets into this business.

    Here are some of the most common mistakes committed by people who are getting started in reseller hosting.

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  • Keyword Research for Web Design Firms: An Introduction

    Keyword Research for Web Design Firms: An Introduction

    Your current clients and potential clients are searching for you…but how are they searching for you? Or here’s a better question, how do you know they’re finding you first? Your firm’s website could have the best user experience and graphics, but your efforts will be wasted if they can’t find you on the web. To drive traffic to your site, make it easier for spiders to crawl your site and get it indexed. For that to happen, it starts with keyword research.

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  • Myth: 72dpi for Web Images

    Every time I read articles or tutorials about saving images for Web pages or sending through e-mail they always mention saving the images with a resolution of 72dpi or Dots Per Inch. The interesting fact about this suggestion is that a computer monitor doesn’t deal with dots or inches, but rather with pixels.

    The resolution of a monitor is indicated as two numbers: [number of pixels for width]x[number of pixels for height]. For example, resolutions are indicated as 800×600 or 1024×768. You notice no mention of dots or inches because a monitor only cares about the number of pixels. This means that when creating images for viewing on a monitor it is important to pay close attention to the size of the file in pixels.

    Let’s see an example of how this works. Below you will see two images from the same image. The top image has a print resolution of 300dpi, while the bottom one has a resolution of 10dpi. You will notice that when displayed on the monitor, they are identical. With regards to monitors, both are the same size: 225×300.

    A 225×300 pixel image will always be displayed as 225 by 300 pixels regardless of the screen size in inches.

    Summary

    Unlike printing, DPI as no affect on how an image is displayed on a computer monitor. When resizing an image for Web sites or e-mails it is important to resize the image based on the number of pixels, and not DPI.

  • Beginner’s Guide to Amazon Web Services [Infographic]

    Beginner’s Guide to Amazon Web Services [Infographic]

    Imagine a cloud-computing service so powerful, that it makes the work dozens of servers in a large room completely obsolete. From the U.S. to China and most countries in between, tens of thousands of businesses trust it with their online security and information. It powers websites that most internet users visit every day, including Reddit, Netflix and Pinterest. Yet, according to our friends at Udemy, almost 2/3rds of Americans don’t know what it is.

    The answer is Amazon Web Services, and it has changed how the World Wide Web is run in a profound way. It began in 2006 and has since expanded to a $40 billion product, with projections expecting that number to climb to $241 billion in the next 10 years.

    Udemy is an online learning marketplace where users can take educational courses in a plethora of subject matters, and they’ve created an infographic to tell us more about the prevalence of AWS, and why it is so important to our daily browsing.

    Beginner's Guide to Amazon Web Services

    The original infographic can be found at Udemy – AWS Training.

  • Which Programming Languages are Best for an eCommerce Site?

    Which Programming Languages are Best for an eCommerce Site?

    There’s more than one way to build an eCommerce website. eCommerce websites are built on many different platforms, and through different programming languages on the backend.

    The programming language you choose has to be able to handle all the functions and aspects of your growing eCommerce store.

    If you are familiar with or interested in programming languages, you may wonder which language you should use to build your eCommerce website. There are many different languages to choose from, each with its own benefits and drawbacks.

    Keep in mind, you don’t have to code your entire website yourself. You’ll soon see why many entrepreneurs who are not familiar with code use an eCommerce builder to create their website instead. It’s simpler, easier, and helps you get on with building your business faster.

    However, if you have a dedicated programmer on staff, or aren’t too shabby writing code yourself, there are certainly benefits to programming your ecommerce website yourself; among them, ultimate customization and complete ownership of your process.

    So if you do decide to take the programming reigns yourself, consider the following languages that can help you do so.

    PHP

    PHP, or hypertext preprocessor, is one of the simplest server-side programming languages in existence. It’s fairly easy to learn php 5 online to get started. Plus, it was designed specifically for web development.

    WordPress is largely built with PHP, so you could definitely use it to create a blog, website, or eCommerce store.

    Ruby

    Ruby is a general purpose programming language. It’s concise, readable, and easy-to-learn. But don’t let its simplicity fool you! It’s a very powerful programming language.

    Many hosted eCommerce platforms are built with Ruby.

    Ruby on Rails is a popular web framework built using Ruby programming language. Ruby itself is most commonly used in Rails applications to create all kinds of things online.

    Python

    Python is a very popular general purpose programming language. You can create web pages, games, even a search engine using Python. Python is easy to read and easy-to-learn, especially for first-time coders.

    You can express your ideas with fewer lines of code. Plus, Python is allowed to run on various systems with fewer limitations.

    Django

    The Django web framework is built using Python programming language. It’s a free and open-source web framework touted as “the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.”

    With Django, you can build better web apps quickly with less code. It could be a compromise for someone looking to code their own website, without having to reinvent the wheel.

    Java

    Java is used everywhere online. It’s a server-side programming language that powers large scale websites with a heavy traffic. It’s no wonder that Java is one of the top programming languages for eCommerce websites.

    Java is versatile, compatible, and functional for so many different applications. You can use Java to code software, apps, and websites. Plus, it works across devices!

    The easy way

    Here’s the question: do you really want to code an entire eCommerce website? Are you looking for a challenge? Do you want to flex your coding muscles? Or are you looking to build an eCommerce business?

    Some coders might enjoy the challenge of coding an eCommerce website, but for most business builders, there are easier ways to get an eCommerce store off the ground.

    You can certainly use a programming language to customize your website, but starting with a framework instead of from scratch can save you a load of headaches.

    Remember, there are no “best” programming languages. There are best programmers. Choose the programming language you know best or hire the best programmer you can.

    That is, if you’d like to build from scratch at all.

    However, the temptation to get down to business faster by opting for a hosted platform is always there.

    In the end only you’ll know your immediate and long-term goals, and weighing whether to go hosted or self-hosted for your eCommerce undertaking depends on it!

  • What Makes a Success Story Website?

    What Makes a Success Story Website?

    Your site is built and you’re ready to invite people from anywhere and everywhere to check out your content. Assuming you’ve built a solid foundation on the basics – relevant original content and easy navigation – here are valuable SEO strategies to maximize your content marketing efforts.

    Low Cost Hosting

    One way to cut hosting costs of a website is to use a platform such as iPage. Not only does it only cost a few dollars per month, it provides user-friendly tools, making it easy for anyone to create websites. This solution can be used by website owners or an outsourced online marketing team to cut costs. At the same time, iPage provides useful tools for creating very professional websites.

    Easy Access Business Information

    When people come to your site they should be able to figure out immediately where they can find answers to their questions about your business, especially contact information. If you don’t include a contact page, at least give some type of contact information such as an email address or social media profile on your about page.

    The easiest way to ensure visitors have no way to get confused or lost about your business location or who to contact, is to include contact information or a link to it at the top of your home page. Links to social media profiles are extremely powerful CTAs to encourage interaction with your brand.

    Another reason why you need easy-to-find CTAs relates to your mobile audience that uses smartphones to make purchasing decisions while shopping. You can increase conversions if you provide easy access to coupons or coupon codes. Many local brick and mortar businesses still promote their phone numbers and physical addresses at the top of every page to remind followers that their businesses are more than just websites.

    Fresh Brand-Building Content

    Whether your site comprises articles, blogs, videos or other formats, you must constantly update your content to stay relevant. Websites that only consist of less than ten pages and never evolve, tend to never develop a significant following, even if those ten pages are incredibly awesome. People have more reason to return to your site if it keeps growing in content. This article provides important tips for building and managing SEO-driven web content.

    A key SEO advantage to creating as many web pages as possible through an expanding blog series is that it gives you increasing opportunities to get indexed by search engines. Google is more likely to take your site seriously as a hub for authoritative thought leadership if you keep adding valuable original content about your brand. Over half of websites worldwide use a Content Management System (CMS) to make content creation more efficient, according to W3Techs.

    Brand awareness is essential to business success, since consumers witness hundreds to thousands of brands per day. They have so many choices thrown at them during any given online session, that you need to take measures to ensure web visibility. The more informative web pages you add to your site, the better chances you have of attracting people in your target market. Here are SEO factors in which Google weighs strongly in its search rankings:

    • High-quality content.
    • Relevant link building.
    • Elaborate content of at least 1,000 words.
    • Use of at least a single image.

    Part of what drives traffic is SEO, but it’s worth repeating that another crucial component is updating your content. According to HubSpot, sites that publish over 16 blogs per month get three times more traffic than sites with less than five new posts per month. Another interesting statistic is that updating old text and images can increase organic traffic by over 100%.

    Customer Reviews

    The reason it’s important to allow audience interaction through a social media company is because customer reviews are now a huge influence on final purchasing decisions made by consumers. The public now puts more faith in reviews than from media advertising. If you find that negative feedback overshadows positive feedback on your social media profile, take that as a marketing research hint.

    Something you must realize before trying to craft a scheme to flood the internet with positive reviews is that most consumers have become skeptical of overly positive reviews. If every review is a glowing endorsement packed with marketing jargon, guess what happens? People think the reviews are fake. They even have tools to investigate review authenticity.

    If automated software determines that too many positive reviews trace back to the same email account, it could be a red flag to many objective observers. Search engines might penalize and downgrade those reviewers as web spammers. Allowing a certain amount of negative reviews can give a more authentic presentation. Negatives can become positives by learning from consumer feedback what improvements need to be made.

    You can expand your site’s universe of online reviews by encouraging customers to post reviews on third part local directories such as Yelp. You can also increase exposure of consumer feedback by including video testimonials on your web pages. Videos can be the best vehicles to share product information, particularly with product demonstrations and honest customer testimonials of how brand experiences met or exceeded expectations and improved people’s lives.

    Focus on Direct Call-To-Action

    Your site needs an obvious call-to-action at the top of every page to encourage visitors to check out your content. CTAs come in many forms, usually as short text phrases or buttons with short messages, symbols or images. They hold monumental importance in directing attention toward a specific action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form or clicking to learn more.

    The most important aspect of CTAs to remember, besides making them obvious, is that they are easy-to-read and have a clear purpose. Some website owners prefer buttons that say “buy now,” while others want to present less of a sales push, so they add extra layers to the sales funnel for information seekers.

    The sales funnel represents the path you pave with breadcrumbs to lead your prospects to whatever golden treasure you’ve crafted for them. Web pages full of informative nuggets are the breadcrumbs while your golden treasure is whatever purchasing opportunities you present for your target followers. CTAs are like the billboards and freeway signs that invite people to the places and stories you offer to make their journey more interesting. Ideally, this journey will lead to establishing long-term relationships with customers.

    Conclusion

    Websites come and go, but if you want yours to last for years and grow through time, it’s wise to implement a set of basic and creative strategies. Don’t be afraid to allow interactivity with your audience and be bold enough to give clear call-to-action statements that direct followers to your landing pages. You have the best chances of gaining high search engine visibility by embedding SEO strategies into your content presentation.

  • How to Organize Website Data with MySQL

    How to Organize Website Data with MySQL

    Suppose you have a tight budget and do not know much about technology, but have a unique idea for a useful site full of elaborate content.

    What is your next logical step? The answer is getting a low-cost web host such as iPage and explore the many user-friendly web tools provided.

    Here are ways to efficiently store information on your site using MySQL database, which comes free with iPage.

    What is MySQL?

    MySQL (often pronounced “my sequel”) is an Oracle-owned relational database, allowing you to enter, store and utilize information in tables, columns, and rows. It is useful for creating a marketing list with various data about your customers.

    Typical information stored in this type of database includes ID, name, address, phone number, and email addresses.

    You can think of it as similar to a spreadsheet, except it is much more powerful since it can be used for web development. MySQL integrates with WordPress, Drupal, and other open source content management systems.

    It is considered the standard database for websites.

    Common Reasons for Using MySQL

    As an example for the utilization of a database, Amazon stores, all of its product information in a database. Many popular sites with search engines, such as Wikipedia, Craigslist, and YouTube draw from databases in response to user queries.

    The two primary reasons for using this technology are to organize website data and provide easy, quick access to data. Here are some of the top benefits of connecting MySQL to your website:

    1. Warehousing for terabytes of data.
    2. High-speed performance for specific applications.
    3. Scalability and flexibility for customization.
    4. Reliable 24/7 access to data.
    5. Organizing and indexing data protected by encryption.
    6. Backing up data and recovery strategies.
    7. Support for application development (PHP, Perl, Java, Visual Basic, .NET).
    8. The capability of quick application downloading .
    9. Performance monitoring tools.
    10. Saves time and costs.

    While programmers need to learn SQL and a programming language, it is not necessary to know the code for storing information in MySQL. For example, you do not have to know how an engine works to drive a car.

    For a more user-friendly graphical experience, you can use a free software tool called PhpMyAdmin, which is an intuitive interface that resembles a website instead of typing in statements.

    How MySQL Makes Life Easier

    Multi-use tables used for multiple purposes, not only allow you to use tables to store customer information, but you can use them to store information on products, vendors, and employees.

    Each table denotes a particular type of information, which divides into columns and rows.

    For instance, use employees as an example of a table, the first column reserved typically for employee ID numbers. The second column might be for the last name, the third column is the first name, and the fourth column would be contact information.

    Rows called “records,” represent individual people. If the table is about inventory, then each record would be a separate product.

    For the database to connect to the web securely, MySQL allows the administrator to set users, passwords, and privileges. If you are working with a team, you may only want certain members to access certain tables and not others.

    Your web host, whether it is iPage or another platform, will provide you with the instructions on how to connect your website to the database. If you like, you can create multiple databases on the same server.

    The left column of your admin web interface gives you simple configuration tools for tasks, such as backing up a database. An option is to import an entire existing database from your computer or wherever you have stored it.

    You assign a unique name to your various databases, and you list them in the far left column of the admin interface.

    Once you select a database, you will then see a list of tables in the left column. You can create as many tables as you want, whether it is for finances, records, web content, or any other type of information you want to store.

    It is a great tool for archiving blogs, marketing campaigns, and future content. You can export tables to Excel spreadsheets.

    Conclusion

    MySQL offers essential database functions that anyone can handle. If you want to learn database programming, you will need to dedicate more time to learning a programming language.

    Either way, it can help you organize your business more efficiently and bypass investing in expensive enterprise software. This solution is practical for keeping all valuable company data in one place.

  • 5 Web Design Tips to Improve Conversion Rates

    5 Web Design Tips to Improve Conversion Rates

    A website is a foundation for any online business. How good your website is directly affecting your business and thus, your conversion rates and profits. But what decides if a website is good or how can you make your website good enough to get a lot of conversion rates? Well, there are certain principles and tips, which if followed correctly, can answer these questions.

    Basically, you need a good website design that can attract a lot of traffic. Once your website gets a lot of visitors consistently, the next thing you have to focus on is on engaging them and converting them to customers. So, how can you implement this strategy in real life? Keep reading the article to figure out the 5 design principles that can help improve the conversion rate of your website.

    1. Make it look appealing and attractive

    This is a very obvious tip. Everyone is captured by something that is visually appealing. The same thing goes for websites too. You need to make your website attractive, modern and classy. It should display your brand information and everything else necessary in an easily accessible yet appealing manner.

    Your website should have all the information associated with your products, their features, have informative articles and maybe even a blog, to provide your customers with all the information but none of this should feel overwhelming to the users. It shouldn’t be cluttered. An unattractive website will easily drive away visitors and potential customers. You should keep the language simple and understandable for the content and avoid all the complicated jargon.

    2. Create trust

    You may already have a very modish and attractive website, but it is useless if it can’t inculcate a sense of trust in the customers. Here are a few tips and methods on how to build trust in your customers.

    1. Provide authentic contact details so that the customers can reach out to you in case they need your assistance.
    2. Refrain from including any kind of fake information on your website.
    3. Keep everything looking professional and well suited for your brand as well as the domain your business operates in.
    4. Speak about your expertise through the services you provide as well as the contents on your website.
    6. Regularly and consistently upload new and good quality content.
    7. Invest in a good web design company to make everything run smoothly.

    3. Easy navigation

    If your website is too complicated, then we have a problem. The ease and smoothness of navigation is key to your website’s conversion rates. While tackling the navigation problem, think of your target audience. If they find it more difficult to navigate through your website as compared to your competitor’s website, chances are that they will ditch you for them.

    Hence, if you are thinking about areas to focus on while trying to improve conversion rates, navigation is one of them. Use suitable titles and subtitles for contents. Make everything clutter-free. Keep features frequently used by visitors in places where they can be accessed easily. Use drop-down menus and subcategories for sorting and filtering. These are just a few examples. A good website design company can help you take care of everything.

    4. Design a sensitive CTA button

    The Call To Action or CTA button is used to request users to respond to various actions that are suggested by these buttons. For instance, a button asking you to sign up for a newsletter is a CTA button. These buttons should say exactly what the consumer should do. Nothing more, nothing less. Falsely navigating traffic will put off the visitors of your website.

    ‘Subscribe’, ‘Sign up’, ‘Add to cart’ and ‘Share’ are some good examples of CTA buttons. Refrain from including more than a few CTAs on the same page as they may end up conflicting with each other. Keep them relevant to the page and give clear instructions so that your customers won’t get confused.

    5. Ensure smooth and easy conversion

    Your focus must be on getting customers from all walks of life without any restrictions on their demographics or location. Accomplishing this is tough. But the basic point is, you need to keep the steps that lead to conversion simple.

    Provide customer support at all times. Make use of the latest technologies like chatbots and artificial intelligence to guide and assist your visitors while they navigate through your website. Show them that you value every single one of them.

    Final words

    If your customers feel comfortable and satisfied with your website, they will keep returning to it all the time, and might even refer a few others. Thus you will get more conversions as well as customers. Follow the five principles mentioned above, and you are all set on your web design strategies to improve the conversion rates on your website.

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