How to Set Up a “Tell-A-Friend” Script
I am often asked, “Jo, how do I set up a Tell-A-Friend script like you?” So that’s why I am writing this article to you today. This article will show you how to set up a free “Tell-A-Friend” script that you can get just from searching google. OK… Load your google browser and type in… “tell a friend script”. The first one I see is at:
http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/tellafriend.shtml Now you have the code for a “Tell-A-Friend” script… Now you need to load up dreamweaver. Go to the page you want to set it up on, or just create a new page if you want it on a new one. Now what you need to do is high-light the entire text in the box that has the code for the tell a friend script. Copy it. Go to your dreamweaver page. Click your mouse on the spot in the webpage where you want the “tell a friend script” to appear. Now… there is a little icon near the bottom of dreamweaver to the right hand side. When you mouse over it, it should read “Quick Tag Editor”. Click on that icon. You will see it will have two inverted brackets in it like so: Delete both of them. Then press your Ctrl key on your keyboard and press v. This will copy and paste the code into that particular spot on your webspage. All you need to do now is upload your webpage and you’re done!
Website Basics - Factors Influencing Your Website's Success
An online presence is very important for any type of business: it's probably the most cost-effective type of advertising available today. Numerous small firms use the web to sell their products and services while many companies don't really see the web as a marketplace (yet they do have a website that plays the role of an "online business card"). No matter what you want to do, inform your clients or sell products online, you need to know a few "website basics" in order to be successful.
Basically there are two major types of websites: informative and commercial. If you are just starting out, depending on the nature of your business, you will either plan an informative website meant to attract and encourage clients to inquire your services or you will develop a commercial website that will sell your products online. Some entrepreneurs create websites that are both informative and commercial, especially when they want to promote products that are new on the market or that could bring important benefits to the users. All in all, the Web is a market and a website... your most important online marketing tool. You can achieve online success respecting the following five factors:
1) Register your domain. As a matter of fact, you should first pick a name for your domain. This name should be closely related to your business and easy to remember. Avoid long, difficult domain names such as:
allideasforpartydesignuk.com or names that say nothing about your business such as frght88.net.
2) Chose your hosting company. "Free hosting" is not an option for serious online businesses. There are many companies offering cheap web hosting services. But if you are serious about online business you should choose a reliable hosting company, one that offers 24 hour support and has a good reputation. Probably such a company will be a little bit more expensive than others, but what are a few bucks when we are talking website accessibility and security?
3) Website design comes after you've developed a business plan and a corporate identity standard with clear visual identity guidelines. You'll design your website according to these documents. If you hire a professional, make sure he or she will design your website respecting your visual identity guidelines, the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standards and create the search engine optimized pages. For more information on this topic, please review: Google's Webmaster Guidelines. (
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html)
4) Promoting your website requires a long-term marketing plan. You should take in consideration all probable online marketing possibilities: from basic web submission to pay per click, submission in paid directories, press releases and article submissions, blogging and posting in forums, opt-in email marketing and so on.
5) Last, but not least, think web maintenance. You'll need to keep your website actual, or else you'll lose important points in the SERP and your visitors will consider it irrelevant, uninteresting and not worth another visit.
Well, these are most important factors influencing your online success. Each factor has its importance and will play a major role to determine your website's visibility and usability. But remember: these are basic factors. Creating a successful website is a far more complex task than just registering the right domain name, choosing a reliable host and creating a pretty layout. After you master the basics you should focus on in-depth website analysis to determine whether your goals will be achieved or not and concentrate on marketing, advertising and customer support.
Remember: competition doesn't sleep. There are no guarantees that you'll be successful, unless you work for your success.
How To Get Your Visitors Returning Back To Your Website
There are many websites starting up in business on the Internet every day. The more websites, that get set up on the Web, the harder it becomes to get traffic to your site as every site is competing with you to get as much traffic as they can. It also becomes harder to get good rankings in the major search engines. So once you have your traffic, how can you make sure that a good percentage of the traffic returns back to your site time and time again?
Some of the things you could do to get returning visitors are shown as follows:
1. Make sure that your website gets new content displayed on it on a daily basis. This gives a reason for your visitors to return to your site.
2. Making your site very entertaining is important. This can be done by adding sticky content to your website, or a bit of humor here and there, just so that your visitor gets entertained and it is then more likely to make your visitors want to come back to your website. Although entertainment is good, it also needs to be updated on a daily basis. For example, the games at:
http://games.simplysearch4it.com is being updated on a daily basis. This means that at least one new game is being added every day. This gives a reason for the visitors to return to the site.
The more times your individual visitors return back to your site the more they will start to get use to it and what it has to offer. This is very good. This will mean that they will more likely get to know your brand and also your websites image. The more they visit your site the more they most probably like it and the higher the chance of them telling their friends.
3. Adding a forums or a place where people can hang out to your website is another good way of giving people a reason to come back to your site. This is one of the reasons why sites like MySpace and a lot of forums get returning visitors. This is because people like to meet other people and have a place online to hang out and chat, plus share things with new people and existing friends, plus they also like to learn new things.
4. Making your site so people can easily navigate it is very important. If your visitors can easily find things on your site then they are more likely to return, as people don’t want to be searching for something on the Web for hours. They want to go to a site and find what they are looking for in a few seconds. The quicker they can find something on your site the better.
5. The speed that your site loads up to the visitor is very important. Visitors are on the move all the time and don’t want to wait for a site to load up if it takes rather long. So the quicker you can make your sites pages load up, the more chance your visitor will stay on your site and also return.
6. When designing your website, it is best to spend more time designing your websites homepage to what it is with the other pages of your site. This is because your homepage is where a lot of your visitors normally visit and is considered the most important page of a website.
7. Giving your Website a good name is very important. If you give your site a name that has nothing to do with your sites topic or is to long to remember, then there is less of a chance that your site will get passed on through word of mouth and also, it will be harder for people to remember your sites web address and will then result in less returning visitors to your website.
8. Giving away freebies is not important, but can actually bring returning visitors to your site. For example, if you offer game competitions on your website where your visitors can win prizes, for playing your games, where they then compete with other players, then there is more of a chance that a visitor will play your games, than what they would with other gaming sites where they don’t offer prizes to their visitors
What Exactly is Virtual Web Hosting?
So you have decided that you want to start a website, or even an e-commerce site. You have managed the site design, and have even purchased a domain name, but now what? You will never get any visitors to your site if it isn’t accessible via the web. The only way to do that is by using a server. The server will maintain a permanent connection with the web and on the server will be stored all the information about your website. In effect, users will come onto the server access your website and then when they decide to move to another website they will access information from another server. So, the real question is, what type of server do you need?
For all individual users and most small e-commerce users, virtual web hosting is the way to go. The other option, having a dedicated server, means that you will actually go out and purchase a big and very expensive piece of hardware that will be used for your website alone. Virtual web hosting is, essentially, renting a small piece of someone else’s server. Virtual web hosting which is also called shared hosting, because it usually means many different sites are all located on a single server, and is vastly more economical than owning and maintaining your own server. But beyond just economics, there are a great number of reasons to use virtual web hosting rather than dedicated hosting.
One primary reason is downtime. Running a server is often quite a bit more complex than running your own personal computer. There is a real need to stay on top of technological advancements, watch for usage spikes, and maintain adequate bandwidth access. A server is hardware that must stay in constant contact with the internet if people are to be able to access your site. As a result, trying to manage all of the aspects of a server, in order to ensure that the individuals are able to access your website all the time, can easily be a full time job. A job which, for most individuals and small companies, is simply unreasonable.
Consequently, the virtual web hosting industry has flourished. With easy to use interfaces, individuals who have no experience with internet hosting, or building their own website for that matter, are able to set up an account with a virtual web hosting company. These companies also often provide one stop shopping services such as email forwarding, data transfer, backup services for your website in case of a crash, technical support, and often your own set of email addresses specifically for your website.
All of these features are ultimately designed for one purpose, to make the process of putting up and managing a website a realistic possibility for individuals and small companies that would otherwise find the prospect of hiring a full time staff to maintain hosting impossible. The ease of use and the affordability of virtual web hosting have harnessed the power of economic collaboration to provide individuals and companies with a practical way to get and keep their site on the web
An Overview Of Instant Messaging
A long, long time back, before the internet, people around the globe wrote letters to their not-so-near and dear ones and waited patiently for weeks for that letter to get delivered to the "right" person and then again started anticipating a reply equally fast. Some got delivered at the right address and some wandered off some other place. This was when internet had not been invented and the magic of email was not there. But today we live in a world of a changed picture. We experience different technologies everyday. Mobile phones have already changed some thing like telegraph by “short message service” or popularly known as the SMS. The same has happened to the letters of long gone days. We now have the email. What is even better with this is that it is not only much faster but also the efficiency with which it delivers messages is immense. Now there are no more waits of the postman. You just have to wait for the voice saying “You’ve got mail”. A large number of people around the globe maintain their friendships by online-messaging. Some of them are written to actually communicate and some to just pass time while doing other chores. If you don't know what I'm talking about you are in the rapidly shrinking minority who haven't heard of instant messaging. A slightly larger minority was heard of portals like Yahoo!, MSN but they don't know how to do it. But leaving the "how" to cyber-geeks, I'll try to address the "what" and, most important, the "why" instant messaging is a condensed and personalised version of online chatting or a faster and on the move version of emails. There are many mighty, theory-of-culture imbued, geeky definitions of instant messaging. I define instant messaging as a fast as well as current way to keep your not near but dear friends posted about yourselves on a more in-person level. Unlike e-mails, which are like dated narratives of the events that have happened in your life or probably the same question-answer way of trying to update ourselves on the other? Also better than the regular chatting as this is more personal and you can reach out to maximum people that too, without bothering about uninvited intruders. In an era, when we like everything instant be it coffee, tea or noodles, instant messaging comes as the ultimate way of communication. Thanks to the likes of yahoo!, MSN and rediffbol, we are able to stay connected with friends and co. Saws towering phone bills and the annual, rare get together can be left for the Carpe-diem attitude of the next generation rather than then, 'catching-up' with each others annual reports. And, the added bonus of switching to such an instant mode of life is that we can continue to do our work on the PC or minor work around the PC while messaging. All this at one go, just requiring a manageable typing speed. The technophobes who call us weirdoes or geeks stuck to the "smaller idiot box" can go and take a hiding. With facilities such as shopping, calling, blogging banking and much more available on the net, why should messaging be left to mundane letters or mobile phones which leave us a lot of negative impressions including grunting parents? Email is the fast, easy and economical way to stay in touch with friends, and people you love without much hassles. In today’s times even business relations are maintained through emails and this has brought a new dawn in the era of globalisation. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead get an email id today and experience the world of difference that too along with staying in touch with important people.
