Technically Easy

Search results for: “label/Web%20Site%20-%20Design”

  • Is LastPass Secure?

    Is LastPass Secure?

    LastPass is a popular cloud-based password manager that has quickly become popular for those looking for an easy solution to create and keep their passwords safe. There are many software and cloud-based solutions available for managing passwords, such as RoboForm and KeePass, but for many users – myself included – LastPass is what they prefer.

    Of course, as with any software that stores personal information, the question on how secure LastPass really is has come up in many discussions online. The “Trust No One” mentality has led many to believe that unless they can see the source, they won’t trust the software. This is one reason many prefer KeePass over LastPass. KeePass is open source (can be reviewed/fixed by anyone), while LastPass is closed (can only be reviewed and modified by the developers)

    I endorse and use LastPass for all my passwords, but haven’t really looked into how LastPass manages my personal information, from the time I enter it into their browser add-in. I was curious at what is sent to LastPass, and the software does exactly what the developer says it does to secure my personal information. The good news is that there are ways of finding out, and in this post I will share my findings so you can make an informed decision, not just a decision based on what others say on the Internet. I am hoping that my tests will answer the question – is LastPass secure?

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  • Why A Failure to Use SEO Is a Death Sentence When Marketing Your Content Online

    Why A Failure to Use SEO Is a Death Sentence When Marketing Your Content Online

    Remember the last time you searched for any type of content online. There are pages which the search engine arranges content in order of their priority.

    This priority is majorly determined by the main keywords used and those optimized by a website owner.

    You probably looked for what you wanted amongst the first couple of sites that appeared in your search engine’s results. You are not alone since only 25% of online surfers look out for any content they need beyond the first page.

    This is also the same for your content and the customers that you intend to reach. Relevance online is only determined by how well you have optimized your website and the content in it.

    This article explores the various SEO services and their crucial necessity to your business and website.

    What is SEO?

    According to Wikipedia SEO, fully defined as search engine optimization, is the process of influencing the visibility of your website or web page over the internet in a web search engine’s results that have not yet been displayed.

    The process is fully natural, and this is the reason why many refer to SEO marketing as organic.

    To put it simply, the earlier (also can refer to a higher ranking on the page displaying search results) and higher the frequency of appearance of your website within a search results listing, the more visitors who use the search engine you are guaranteed to get.

    You can then convert the visitors into customers for the products and services you have, market, or even discuss in your website.

    The way SEOs work

    As stated above, having SEO increases the chances of your website being found by people who type in queries that are related to your online content.

    Depending on the efficiency of your SEO, your website may appear either on the first or subsequent pages of a search result.

    At the moment you type in any query into a search engine like Google, it performs an analysis of all web pages with their relevance as priority and returns an appropriate list.

    There is an algorithm which is used by search engines enabling them to select the pages that appear in all search results. This is then how SEOs are advantageous since they can assist you to organically influence your priority in the list.

    Optimizing content for your website may involve a couple of practices. They include the following:

    • Editing the web content.
    • Adding content regularly to the website.
    • Adjusting HTML for the content purposes.
    • Associated coding which can increase its specific keyword relevance and or even remove barriers that inhibit indexing activities for the search engines.
    • Promotion of a site done by enhancing an increment of the backlinks number as well as the inbound links.

    The history and evolution of SEOs

    Search Engine Optimization began early in the mid-1990s when the earliest search engines began cataloging the web.

    In the initial stages, you were only required to submit the page address and various search engines would then send extractors to get suitable links.

    The links would refer to other pages and any information on the page was indexed. The indexer would always extract relevant page information including the number of words, location, specific weight of words contained, and all links contained in the page.

    The storage of such would assist in later searches for optimization.

    White hat and black hat SEO practitioners arose from the huge demand for a prime visibility as well as ranking for all website owners.

    They used early versions of search algorithms which were reliant on information offered by the webmasters including details like keywords, Meta tags and even index files.

    Meta tags have evolved to offer guidance to each specific page and its contents. Web content facilitators then developed the tactic of manipulating some HTML source attributes for various pages to be given a higher ranking.

    This habit along with excessive stuffing of keywords in content was discovered by the earlier search engines and they made adjustments to prevent any sort of ranking manipulation.

    The adjustments were triggered by the need for the search engines to grant you the user a great browsing experience not filled with irrelevant results.

    They developed algorithms which were more complex in a manner that only relevant results were displayed.

    The algorithms complexity has recently been made to detect if you apply overly aggressive tactics to gain an edge and you can possibly get banned from the results displayed after a search.

    This necessitates the need for expert SEO services for your website that ensure you are neither locked out of the search results and nor are you ranked poorly.

    Your business and website success largely depend on how highly you have been ranked.

    Are you using SEO techniques to optimize your site? What are your results?

  • Making Money Online

    Making money on the Internet is a hot topic, and something many of us would like to do. It’s a nice thought to stay at home and make money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without actually working those hours. One of the most common means of making money is through advertising on your Web site, where a visitor will click on an advertising banner, and you get a percentage of the cost of that click.

    Last year I was looking into ways to make money off the Internet. I didn’t have a Web site at the time, so the advertising idea was not applicable. Another solution would be the more time consuming method: open an ecommerce site. I have done Web programming before, but have never created an ecommerce site. After looking into what is required, such as a Web host, merchant account, inventory management, shipping, to name few, I decided to look for an easier way.

    This easier way presented itself in the form of Shopster. I decided to take the chance and signed up with them to see what they had to offer.

    Here is what they have to offer:

    1. World-class storefront solution.
    2. Choice from over 700,000 wholesale products to add to your store.
    3. Easy management of their store. (You’ll be able to make changes and customize literally anything).

    4. Use of any domain name for your store.
    5. Full Hosting of your store.
    6. Coupon creation functionality.
    7. Automatic cross-sells.
    8. Automatic bestsellers.
    9. Optimization of their store for the search engines.
    10. Logo creation software.
    11. Unlimited categories, custom pages, and feature pages.
    12. Complete order history of their customers. Plus your customer’s contact details for cross-selling/up-selling.
    13. Free Updates.
    14. Complete search statistics of their store. (You’ll be able to see what your customers are searching for).
    15. Choice of up to 1000 products. (You can add more at any time for only $9.95 a month per 1000 additional products).
    16. Customer Reviews on your products.
    17. Full customer service on all of your customer’s orders.
    18. Product delivery on all your orders.
    19. Dispute resolution included.
    20. Payment System included.
    21. Monthly payouts on your sales.
    22. Secure checkout/SSL included.
    23. Branded emails to send to your consumers included.
    24. Fraud detection on all orders included.
    25. Access to Shopster’s excellent community forums.
    26. Free marketing guide and assistance.
    27. $50 in free keyword marketing with Yahoo! Search.
    28. Store hosted on best servers available in the world – fast, secure, 99.8% server uptime.

    I can honestly say that everything listed, is what they offer. You basically create a Web page template for your store (they also provide several templates if you HTML isn’t too good), select your products, organize them into various categories, and then sell the products. All order processing, shipping and handling is managed by Shopster. Once you make a sale, you will get a check in the mail the following month for the profit that you made. The best thing of all is you control your profit margins, meaning you set your own prices for what you sell.

    Another bonus to Shopster is that you can also sell most of the items on E-Bay – they allow you to do that. In the end, Shopster is a partnership – when you make money they make money.

    If you have any questions about designing, marketing you store, or selling items, they also have forums where the Shopster folks are more than happy to provide advice and answer any questions you may have. There are also fellow Shopster members who are also more than willing to help.

    To join, simply click on the banner below, and open up your ecommerce store today.

  • Internet Explorer Not Connecting to the Internet

    Recently I received an e-mail from someone who was having trouble getting Internet Explorer to connect to the Internet. Various other programs, such as e-mail, were able to connect, however, the browser was having difficulty.

    As I always like to do, I decided to see if I can help. It is more difficult via e-mail to solve computer problems, but a few checks and some investigation I was able to determine the issue behind the browser. I provide my findings in this post.

    Connection Issues

    The person having issues explained that Messenger and Outlook were connecting no problem, but Internet Explorer was display a message indicated the Web page could not be displayed. Seeing as Messenger and Outlook were both connecting, I immediately eliminated any connection issues to the Internet Service Provider. I decided to concentrate on the browser itself.

    At first, I thought it may me a DNS cache issue. I had the user run ipconfig /flushdns from the command prompt to attempt to clear any local DNS cache. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as the user indicated that the response back was Could not flush the DNS resolver cache: Function failed during execution. This could possibly mean that the DNS Client service has not been started, so I next had the user attempt to start the service.

    The user did as I asked, and then replied back to me that the software firewall on the machine displayed a message regarding a program change. The little light bulb went on in my head when I read this. For those who have seen these messages from software firewalls, but don’t know what they mean, allow me to explain it to you.

    When a new program attempts to connect to the Internet, the software firewall detects this and stops it from connecting without permission. To get permission, the firewall displays a message on the screen for the user to either allow or deny the program to connect. When you allow a program, such as a Web browser, to connect to the Internet, the firewall allows any requests made from the application to be sent to the Internet.

    In the issue discussed here, Outlook and Messenger were given permission, but Internet Explorer was denied permission to connect to the Internet. This was the reason Internet Explorer could not display any Web pages. Once the user granted permission for Internet Explorer to connect, they were able to display Web pages again.

    Granting Permission

    The image above shows ZoneAlarm asking permission for Internet Explorer to access the Internet. Other software firewalls will have a similar message. To grant permission in ZoneAlarm, do the following:

    1. Click the Remember this setting checkbox. This will prevent ZoneAlarm asking permission every time Internet Explorer attempts to connect to the Internet.
    2. Click the Allow button to grant permission.

    Repeat the above steps for any application you want to access the Internet. Click the Deny button if you don’t want an application to connect.

    Summary

    I recently received an e-mail from an individual who had trouble getting Internet Explorer to access the Internet, even though other applications could access the Internet. After a few e-mails, it was determined that the software firewall installed on the computer prevented Internet Explorer from connecting to the Internet. Once permission was granted to Internet Explorer to access the Internet, the user was able to display Web pages in the browser again.

  • One Year Later: Lessons Learned

    Technically Easy is my first attempt at blogging. I had designed web sites in the past, but never took up the task of blogging, especially on a regular basis. I have learned many lessons over the past year, and now know what it takes to make a better blog.

    I have written posts in the past about what not to do with regards to web sites, but this post will share my experiences of what I have learned over the past year as well as provide a few resolutions that I will try to achieve in the future..

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  • Free Software Anyone?

    I recently reviewed Michael Aulia’s Blog, which I have visited a few times in the past. When I verified that the link to his blog worked properly I was immediately drawn to a post about free software. This post mentioned how you can get a free license of either Microsoft Vista Ultimate, Photoshop CS3, or VMWare Workstation 6.

    Now I know many of you are sceptical about such an offer, as I am, however, after reading the post and then visiting the web site with the offer, I decided to see what will happen if I completed the conditions. This post is one part of those conditions.

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  • Photo and Image Editors

    As I visit web sites one thing that always get my attention is the amount of time it takes to complete a page download. With web sites using more images to display the content, it can at times take much longer than necessary to finish downloading a page.

    The biggest problem with the sites that do use a lot of images on each page is the size of the images. Some who manage web sites don’t realize that images need to be resized outside of the browser to decrease the download size. Specifying the size of an image in the HTML code will only shrink the displaying of the image, not the actual size. To shrink the file sizes you will need an image editor. In this post I will list a few image editors that can be used to edit your images for your web site.

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  • How to Add a Google Sitemap for Blogger Blogs

    I have seen many questions regarding adding a Sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools for a Blogger blog. Many people don’t know that you already have a Sitemap-ready file created for you by Blogger, and that all you need to do is use that one in Webmaster Tools.

    In this post I will look at adding your Blogger blog’s Sitemap to the Webmaster Tools so you can keep track of your pages using those tools.
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