Web Template

How to Choose the Best Web Template

A web template is typically used to separate the content of a web site ie: the navigation system, logo and contact information etc.

Templates make creating new pages easy and have become today the web designers dream. In creating a website, you could opt to creating your own web template or utilize a ready made one. Such a choice should be made only after careful consideration and if you do not have prior experience in the field it is always the best choice to opt for a professionally prepared ready made one.

Using web template is mainly beneficial to companies that are in its infant or start up stage. Mainly because once the company has its web site done, it can focus on the other key aspects a growing business needs to handle. Templates further allow the whole website to maintain a consistent look and feel with the ability to maintain the appropriate visual cues which the customers tend to look for and appreciate. The template as whole makes the whole website more stable, making the customers more comfortable with probing around within the site as they know they would not get lost. A main benefit companies are to achieve through a template is the ease at which it can make the required changes that would inevitably come along within the web site, making the site more relevant and the company more dynamic in the eyes of the customer.

Having now considered the importance and the benefits of utilizing a web template for any organizational site, let us now look into how one could go about select the most ideal template for the organization. There large amounts of online stores that are able to provide you with a web template. Many of them may appear quite attractive and selecting one from the many thousands available may put you in a tough spot indeed. Do not aim to buy a wrong template and redesign it as it will not be too much of a success and beats the whole purpose of buying one in the first place.

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Web Design Meme

Top Trends in Web Design Meme

Oh, is it the end of 2012 already? Here we go, then. The Top 5 Website UX Trends of 2012, which promises to be the least surprising list you’ll see all year. Because we’ve been seeing these five aspects for a few years now. Single-page sites are back after a long disco-like hiatus, and typography never went away. If anything, maybe we’re seeing the end of web design evolution.

This is actually a good thing; we don’t have to change everything every year just because we can, and it would be nice to make a website that doesn’t have the shelf life of a banana for a change.

Social Media Marketing

6 Deadly Social Media Marketing Sins that You Absolutely Must Avoid

There is no doubt that social media marketing is paying rich dividends to businesses that are using it as a part of their larger marketing plan. It’s also given smaller businesses an opportunity to compete against the big players in the niche. Social media marketing brings with it a slew of benefits, but only if done right.

The problem with a socially driven marketing strategy is that there are all chances of it going wrong. If it does go wrong there are some mistakes that can righted, but there are others from which there is no turning back. Such mistakes are like the deadly sins of social media marketing.

Let’s take a look a these sins that will take your chances of marketing success way down, so much so that recovery will be next to impossible.

1. Having no strategy in place

When you are using social media as a part of your marketing efforts, you need a clearly drawn out strategy in place. You need to know why you are doing what you are doing. Does your use of social media fit in with your overall marketing plan, and what do you hope to achieve from social media marketing? These are the two questions that you need to answer before you put in place a strategy that you feel will pay rich dividends.

If you don’t have a strategy in place, you won’t be able to take the right decisions, which will mean that you actually end up wasting time on social media, rather than making any constructive use of it.

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Cisco Linux

It’s About Time Cisco Showed Linux Some Heart

Cisco, the name spoken with the most reverential tones in the IT and telecommunications market, has a new push for their hardware’s interoperability with Linux software. The move ties in Yahoo!, who will be working with Digium to deploy Asterisk throughout Yahoo’s global communications net, using Cisco SIP end points on the desktop.

Actually, Cisco has shown plenty of love to Linux in the past, just not in supporting Free and Open Source Software on telecommunications systems. Remember, back in 2005, Cisco internally rolled out Linux desktops to their workforce.

The reason given being, not cost, but because Linux is easier to support! Take that, MSCEs!

And then back in April of 2008, Cisco opened up its ISR routers’ API, with an application extension platform based on Linux. So you might actually compare Cisco more to IBM. They’ve been planning this move for a long time, and they do it like they do anything, in slow, steady steps.

TechCrunch

Disregard TechCrunch; Use Google First. Always.

Controversial as always, TechCrunch gets our attention this month by questioning the ‘Google-it’ mentality. And we’d like to not only refute things like this, but go all the way back to Socrates and lay out our direct, irrefutable line of logical statements which leads us to this path.

Proposition One: Nobody owes you an answer.
When you have a question, you are imposing on another person to do you a favor. There is no law, nor moral obligation, for anyone else to answer your question. That’s at all, whether Google exists or not, whether you can find the answer on Google or not. Both Google and people are going out of their way to help you for free.

Proposition two: The only motivation people have to answer your question is to do something kind.
That’s it. Invisible-hand-of-the-marketplace or not, every time a human answers another human’s question for free, they are practicing altruism. It might have the secondary assumption that you’ll ‘pay it forward’ and help other people, or the feeling of obligation that the answerer is paying it forward, or because helping the questioner helps the answerer indirectly, and so on. But all answers start with a desire to help.

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ACTA

Is It Time To Be Afraid of ACTA Yet?

It only looks to involve the US and UK/EU at this point, but the broad plans of ACTA, the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, look like they could eventually become a de-facto standard for the whole wide world of e-commerce.

TechDirt is digging up shovels full of information on ACTA. The agreement is set up to protect against the boom in global media piracy, but the problem is that it’s almost impossible to solve this problem without trampling on multiple human rights at the same time.

That’s why the organizations Consumers International, EDRi, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ASIC (a French trade association for web 2.0 companies), and the Free Knowledge Institute have all banded together to protest the agreement and voice their concerns, or at least put on the breaks until cooler heads can have a look at this.

On Australian turf, the Australian Digital Alliance, Australian Library and Information Association, Choice (a non-profit consumer advocate), and the Internet Industry Association have formed a coalition stating much the same thing. In a package, reducing counterfeiting is important where it endangers consumer health or safety or constitutes commercial scale infringement is a good thing; but we shouldn’t have to roll heads to do it.

windows 7

Is An Upgrade Too Much To Ask Of Some People?

Sometimes you have to wonder if we should re-think this whole software design thing. A reminder of just how over-their-heads some people are occurred recently with the story that Microsoft won’t be providing IE 9 for Windows XP. That’s right, if you’re not using Windows 7 by now, you are simply off the radar for browser upgrades.

The trouble, as all web developers know, is getting users to upgrade those browsers. Why is this always such a struggle? Older browsers are buggy, insecure, troublesome, and the hardest of all to develop for. We’ve gone for years like this, with a few hardy users getting the newest edition of everything, most of the crowd shuffling along within a year, and then there’s the die-hard long tail, bringing up the rear. They use IE7, IE6, even IE5.5, and you’ll get that old browser away from them when you pry it from their cold dead fingers. They make web designers pull out their hair.

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Blog Comments

How to Promote Your Site With Blog Comments

Any blogger reading right now has no doubt bristled like an angry cat at the headline. Blog comments promoting a site immediately suggests comment spam. Well, that’s just what we’re saying: don’t spam! But anybody with a blog that allows comments has seen comments that work, which contribute to the discussion, and then the URL in the comment is tolerated.

The basic method is that you search Technoratti or Google BlogSearch to find blogs in your topic space or niche. Then go there and hopefully leave a comment that won’t get deleted, with a link back to your site.

The important thing is that you make participating in that blog’s community your first priority. Helpfully point out a mistake, add a note and a link pointing out some other aspect of the subject of the post, answer a question posed by another commenter, or even just mention that you also covered another view of this topic on your own blog.

One important strategy that is often overlooked: the sites that already link to you! Whenever a blogger links your site as a reference and you notice some traffic coming from it, go there and leave a comment thanking them for the link… and also fill in your site’s URL in the appropriate field. There, now you have two links, from a site that likes you already! You can also add a link back on your own site, thanking the blogger for mentioning you and pointing your readers to that site for commentary on your subject.

This is how the blogosphere builds friendships.

The important thing is to be a good web citizen above all else. Spam your link to irrelevant sites, or worse yet, hire a third-world freelancer to do it, and you’re heading for trouble and ill will all around. Further tips on blog comment marketing here.

Google AdSense

Analyzing the Latest Most Profitable Google AdSense Words

Handy little list for all users of Google AdSense, this is a list of some AdSense keywords, and this is the list of the highest-paying AdSense keywords.

Talk about any of these subjects on a blog with a Google ad in the sidebar, get the listed dollar amount every time somebody clicks the ad.

Well, as the site explains elsewhere, it’s not that simple! You have to have original content, be a site in good standing, etc. You can’t just post the list and expect it to do anything.

We ran some data-crunching on the list just to see what the top-ten most expensive words are by frequency:

118 mesothelioma
71 attorney
62 removal
62 hair
52 lawyer
44 laser
43 insurance
43 google
42 life
42 hosting

Clearly, our new word for the day is “mesothelioma“, a cancer commonly caused by asbestos. Construction workers and others exposed to asbestos the world over are suing the pants off their former employers, and lawyers apparently consider it money in the bank. This is no laughing matter; asbestos is nasty stuff and mesothelioma’s primary symptom is shortness of breath.

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Article Marketing

Article Marketing – A Major Internet Marketing Strategy

Article marketing forms the foundation of all effective Internet marketing campaigns these days. Having attained the position to be of the industry standard among web marketing strategies, article marketing is the best way to vastly increase the level of natural search engine rankings of your website. Article marketing depends on a variety of factors, including correct placement of keywords, comprehensive syndication and one-way links to text among several other vital practices that work together to make a site interesting to someone searching the web for specific information.

To be really successful, article marketing should form the core of your regular efforts for tackling competition.

There are several ways in which article marketing can benefit your website. The most potent among them all is by providing greater visibility to the site. In article marketing, you provide the articles you have written to several ezines, websites and blogs free of cost. Your payout is that you are allowed to include a brief bio at the end of the article in the resource box with links to your website.