Benefits of blogging

Build Community:

Business blogs provide you a chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a larger audience. An opportunity to connect with a wider audience and build a community is a strong benefit for consultants and knowledge workers.

Provides Easy Access To Company News:

One huge benefit is the ability to inform your customers of any changes, new products, latest offers and much more.

Search Engine Friendly:

Search engine optimization is a particularly beneficial form of online marketing. It can be used to gain search engine traffic for given keywords or search terms.

Brand Awareness:

The more a customer hears the name of your company the greater the chance of remembering it. It takes, on average, around seven items of direct communication between you and your customers to make a sale. A blog with hundreds of posts gives you the opportunity to mention your company name and ensure that your readers think of you next time they're looking for a particular product or service

Relationship Building:

A blog enables you to speak more freely and in a more informal and personable style than your Web site does, and your readers will soon feel like they know you. The more they know, like and trust you the more likely they are to visit your main site.

Reduce Calls And Emails

You can use a blog to pre-empt questions that customers might have. By sending readers to your blog you can gain all of the above benefits and you may reduce the amount of niggling questions that you get asked by customers.

Wireless Markup Language (WML)

Introduction

The Wireless Markup Language (WML) is the markup language used to make sites suitable for viewing using a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) device. If you don't have a WAP device to view the pages, you can get a simulator by downloading the Wireless Companion from YourWAP. The Wireless Markup Language (WML) documents are based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), and as such need to be well-formed.

• WML is case sensitive. Elements and attributes are all in lowercase.
• All tags must have closing tags.
• Tags must be nested correctly.
• All attribute values must be enclosed in either single or double quotes.

A WML document must correspond to a valid Document Type Definition (DTD). The DTD used throughout this tutorial is wml_1.1.xml. The DTD should be specified at the top of the document following an xml declaration, as in the following example.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">

10 web design tips to building a successful site

You probably already know the key to making any kind of income from the net is a well designed web site, professional web design helps to promote a unique look and brand identity for your company, which sets you apart from your competitors.

There are just some things that need to be included in every website. If you mix these tips into your site your visitors will "thank you" for it later:

1.     Navigation is Everything

Keep it simple (KISS), and make sure it's regular from page to page. With bad navigation and poor site structure your site will be confusing and hard to navigate. No matter where you place your menu bar -- either at the top or down the side -- always include a small text menu at the bottom of every page. If you're one of those people easily impressed with Flash, don't design your navigation with it.

2.     First impression is the last impression

The most important thing to remember about popular web sites is that they are always rich in text.   Studies show that most people those who are online not read the text but they people scan the text so please write the text to the point avoid extra things. Your about us page simple describe about your business and your strength, with the help of graphic and rich text. Since most of the users won’t be reading your message anyway, why not let them sit back and watch or listen to your message. Video and audio is a great way to set your site apart.

3. Comfortably Viewed

Scrolling through websites can become irritating very quickly. Try to minimize scrolling up and down on your website. Also, don’t make the user scroll left to right. Users find too much scrolling annoying and will leave if they become too frustrated.

4. Download Time

Don’t overload your site with graphics and be sure to test your site on all browsers and connection speeds. Believe it or not, most people still access the internet via dial-up connection – so keep your graphic file sizes down to under 100k to ensure your site loads correctly for your dial-up visitors.

5. Avoid Dead Links

All links on your website must be in proper working condition. One dead link could make someone leave your site entirely, plus make your website’s search engine ranking drop! Check your website one a quarter to make sure they all function.

6. Privacy Policy: With all of the concern over privacy on the Web if you collect any type of information from your visitors (even if it's just an email address) you need to include a privacy policy. There are many online templates that will help you to create one easily. Once made, post a link to it on every page of your site.

7. Stick to your subject.  Don't try to be all things to all people.   Keep your goal in mind. Creating a web site is challenging and fun. The temptation to put as many bells and whistles as you can on a page is almost overwhelming. But unless your site is involved with bells and whistles, don't do it! The purpose of designing a site carefully is not to make it look cool, or win awards. It's to accomplish the intended goal of the site. It's a good idea to write down the goal of your site before starting any design work. It will help you make design designs for the site as a whole. 

8. View your site through the eyes of a stranger. Once you have completed you site outline, view it in other browsers. Does it look like you wanted it to look? 

9.  Don't forget to tell the world about your new site. Make sure that your URL is on all your company business cards, letter heads, brochures, phone systems, etc. Swap links with other related web sites and consider banner advertising. List your site with the major search engines, but read their rules of submission first!

10.Survey says... Ask users about your site. Create a survey and give a reward for responding. Ask friends to check out the site, and then grill them on what they thought about it. This can be valuable input on what improvements are needed. Often, users can be thrown by things a designer might never see as a problem.  Don't ever stop looking for ways to improve your website. What are your competitors doing better? Ask for feedback from your friends, relatives and customers. They will often see things with fresh eyes.

Font and color scheme should be good so that everyone can easily read your text and your information comfortably if you use dart background then use light color font and if you use light color background then use dark color font so that it should be visible to every visitor. Always use simple language so that everyone can easily understand what you want to tell them, there is no any spelling and grammar mistake in the written text.

For more information mail us at

vrun_gupta@yahoo.co.in

or
varun.gupta.lp@gmail.com

Amit Agarwal from Labnol recently posted a link to Gina's article, where she's listed all the programs that are currently installed in her computer. I have seen many other bloggers prepare such lists too. I spend so much of my time every day, tinkering around with various applications, but have never given them any credit on my blog. So this post is a tribute to all these lovely creatures who improve my browsing experience every single day. It might help you get some ideas or discover some new tools too.

My primary Laptop: Compaq Presario V2000 with Windows XP Operating System

Secondary Laptop: HP Pavilion dv2000 with Windows Vista Operating System

My desire is to own a tablet PC made by Apple. I'll buy it as soon as it's released. :) I also fester desires of learning how to install a fully functioning Linux OS someday!

Browsers: The social browser Flock- Amazing browser for people who are avid bloggers and social networkers on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr etc. Check out my review here.

Mozilla Firefox version 3 beta 2- Just downloaded it yesterday and I'm in love with their new location bar feature, that pulls out page titles and addresses in two different lines and colors, from your recent browser history and bookmarks!

Here's a screen shot from the Official Website:

Add-ons and Extensions:

Shareaholic- An extension that lets you submit a page to countless number of social networking sites such as Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Google Bookmarks, Friendfeed, Facebook etc. You can customize the drop down menu to include only those bookmarking sites that you use. You can also email the page you're viewing. Here's a screen shot (notice the green button with a drop down list only):

Screenshot: This Flock extension allows you to save webpages (entire, visible portion, selection) and windows (eg. browser, blog, uploader) as .png or .jpeg images. You can save these images to your file system, the clipboard or even send them straight to the photo uploader.

Cocomments: This extension helps me track every single comment that I've left on any sort of web page- Be it a website, blog or a channel like Youtube. I get notifications in my browser (in the shape of a small envelope) if there's a reply to my comment. I find this to be really helpful because the "My Comments" tab at WP.com is very slow and it only shows a certain number of recent conversations. Plus, there's no other way that I can track my comments left on non-WP.com blogs. All you've got to do is install the extension and it takes care of everything!

Here's a screen shot:

Greasemonkey: What in the world would I Do without this add on? :) This is the best thing about Firefox and Flock. Too bad that Internet Explorer people have to suffer! Currently, I'm using the following scripts:

LookitUp2- Quickly look something up in wikipedia, a dictionary or whatever you like (its easy to add custom sites!). The result is displayed directly on the page.

TextareaBackup- Retains text entered in text areas

Wordpress Comment Ninja- Respond to comments directly by post and/or email from inside your WordPress dashboard. For WordPress bloggers.

Comment Pre-fill- Fillout comment form fields with a single keyboard shortcut!

Greased Lightbox (v0.15)- Enhances browsing on websites that link to images such as Google Image Search, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, and deviantART

Userscripts.org Rank By Popularity- When browsing scripts on userscripts.org it will change the icon on the left to show how popular a script is. Very useful for focusing on the best scripts.

Mailto 2 Webmail- Open those "mailto:" links in your GMail, Yahoo, AOL etc. email accounts instead of the default Outlook Express.

Yahoo Pipe Cleaner- Removes most of the HTML markup from Yahoo Pipe run output so that it can be cut-and-pasted into WordPress blogs.

Out of these, my absolute favorite is the Wordpress Comment Ninja and the Greased Lightbox (when I'm looking at images and want to see the expanded version, all I do is click on the picture and it zooms out. No need to open another link! Cool, isn't it? :)

You can also check out this and this, where I've prepared a list for other scripts that are very useful.

GoogleDocs Extension: Great stuff for all you Google Fans out there. :) From the official website:

With gDocsBar, you can drag and drop multiple files into the sidebar to upload documents. You can search and filter documents right from the sidebar. Your Gmail credentials are sent to Google directly over SSL. Your passwords are stored in Firefox Password Manager.

Software Applications:

Pidgin- Log into all chat clients and receive new email notifications and lots of other features.

WinRAR- For opening zipped files

DietMP3- compress your MP3 files

TextPad- Works great for CSS/HTML coding etc.

CDisplay- For reading e-comics

Irfanview- Resizes your images and lots of other capabilities

Apart from this, there's the usual crap that's worth not mentioning. I prefer to keep the number of applications running at the minimum and have a fetish for keeping my hard disk neat and tidy.

Some other junk that I found over the internet:

Ten Quickfixes to Make Your Windows Computer Run Faster 

DownloadmyLink- Free Megashare/Rapidshare file downloader...no need to wait for 60+ minutes or reset your internet connection.

Senduit: Easily share you files- very clean UI

Instapaper: Bookmark those articles that you want to "Read Later" and might not be "Delicious".

Social Bookmarks:

Enforcement tools to bring bad design to justice.

http://www.design-police.org/ 

You have to have been screamed at to the point of tears over your baseline grid to appreciate the humour.

Dear reader,

As you may already know, Google has released Video Sitemaps along the widely used Google Sitemaps protocol. Actually the latter one probably shouldn't be called Google Sitemaps, as it is a protocol also accepted by Yahoo! and Microsoft Live search engines.

As sitemaps are created to assist search engines in indexing your site content, the video sitemaps are there to assist Google in finding your site's video content.

Here's the catch, though: the Video Sitemap protocol is not (yet)  accepted by any other search engine besides Google and so shouldn't be mixed with the existing (web) Sitemap protocol. So, basically you have to update two different sitemaps, which can be quite toilsome if done manually.

However, there already seems to be a free solution to this: www.videositemappro.com. However, since I haven't yet utilized either the Video Sitemaps nor the nor the program, I cannot yet recommend Video Sitemap Pro.

Like many web professionals, I have struggled against RSI in my "mouse hand" for years.  It actually stems from my horrendous desk setup years ago in DC, where I worked in a VIP office which was designed to look good and impress visitors, not keep the lady comfortable.  The damage it caused was so serious that I had to give up the needlework and embroidery I had been doing since the age of five.

Despite best efforts at posture and ergonomics, my RSI bugbear flares up from time to time, especially in cold weather, so I am always looking for new ways to combat it.

Recently I met a personal trainer, Donna McVey of Your Personal Best, who suggested a little gadget called the Cat's Paw.  I ordered a set from the US and, damn, does it work.  I can feel my muscles waking up and stretching again, and my hand is no longer ice cold from lack of circulation.  I highly recommend it.

Eu pessoalmente já não consigo acompanhar os progressos constantes que se têm verificado no mundo da web2.0. Sinto-me, por vezes, mais ultrapassado que o sistema de jogo do Camacho. É difícil, mas penso que será mais fácil compreender todas as evoluções e novidades que surgem, a cada segundo, neste contexto tecnológico, do que compreender o porquê do Camachito apostar no Luís Filipe como titular. Digo mais. Não compreendo como o Camacho consegue apostar nele como jogador de futebol. Coisa que ele já teve, mais do que uma oportunidade, para demonstrar a milhões que não é. Peço desculpa Luís Filipe, mas com uns pés desses estás pronto a ir pisar uva para o Douro e pouco mais. Voltando à sugestão deste post. O ReadWriteWeb, um pouco na linha do Techcrunch apresentado há uns dias, tenta compilar e dar uma opinião sobre algumas das evoluções que marcam e, segundo os seus autores, marcarão a forma como olhamos para a web, o que dela fará parte e como iremos interagir com a mesma. Se nenhum ministro tocar nisto pode ser que a coisa corra bem.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/

Located in the heart of the Redwood Empire in Sonoma County, California, the Minerva Systems team specializes in

- designing affordable and practical web sites for individuals and small organizations;

- securing domain name and web hosting for new/existing sites;

- training clients in the use of computer applications, such as word processing, spreadsheets, and graphics;

- providing computer setup and orientation in Windows and the Internet;

- designing and implementing e-databases.

Avete creato il vostro badge col sito che vi ho detto ieri? Sii? Bene, allora oggi vediamo come grazie ai CSS possiamo impostarlo ad un angolo della pagina..
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I am taking my boutique from a small town in Statesboro, Ga to the world wide web!  I feel scared, a throb of panic and excited.  This blog will take you through my trials and tribulations; success or failure.

Here's a tip for every person who owns a web site, especially authors and writes. Never use a hyphen in your URL (that's the www._____.com) unless it’s strictly   used as “secondary site” to point search engines to and not used in any of your   publicity materials. If your name is already taken add on a phrase or name such  as www.greatbooksbymyfirstnamelastname.com.

In my magazine, HopeKeepers, we featured an article and at the end of the article gave the author’s bio and web site. Unfortunately, her web site was www.myfirstname-mylastname.com.

When the paragraph was justified, unfortunately her bio appeared to say:

Now... the hyphen was actually in the correct place, but a reader believed the hyphen was there because of the page break (makes sense, someone on my staff should have caught that!) and she typed in the URL www.myfirstnamemylastname.com  and bought one of the books from the web page, believing it to be Christian material. Needless to say, this was not our writer’s web site.

I received an email from the reader, who visited the author's web site believing
it to be Christian material, bought the book and started reading. She was then
appalled that the woman who “supposedly had written for our Christian audience
had written a filthy, nearly-pornographic book.” Thankfully, I discovered the
error, but I wondered about the many times this must happen when people use a
hyphen in their name and it’s forgotten by the time people get to their computer.

Another reason is that as an editor and someone who is looking for authors who may be interested in being chat guests for our web site community, it’s easier for me to locate you. When
I type in your name to a search engine I am going to get nearly ever place online that sells your book. The first place I always try to locate an author is by typing
his or her name into the URL.

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!