Now it is possible for a person living anywhere in the world to build his or her own website. This data can be composed of web pages, images, movies, sound files, programs, compressed files, or anything else on your site that can be viewed or downloaded by visitors. When all this requested data is added up, then you have your total data transfer. The more visitors you have, the higher a data transfer limit you’ll need. You can always buy additional data transfer as your site grows. It’s simple to add a guestbook, counters, stock quotes, your webcam, and other interactive features to your site too. If your web pages already exist on your computer; you can check the size of your files to help you choose the web package that best meets your storage size needs. You can always buy additional disk space as your site grows.

Like a memorable street address, it can help people find you’re online. You can register your own name, your company’s name, key words to describe your business, or even a short phrase — whatever will make your web address easy to remember for your friends or customers. Once you’ve registered your domain name, you can begin to build a public web site at your very own address and create a personalized email address.

These forwards can be added or deleted at any time. When you receive email, the messages occupy disk space on a server. The more email you get, the more storage space you need. Packages that include multiple email accounts give you an amount of storage for each account. File Manager also gives you information about your disk space usage, and it links to other useful tools and popular features such as Add-ons and site statistics.

In A website, gigabytes are used to measure data transfer. Mail inbox

You can still use your own domain name, but you don’t have to worry about configuring a new email client if you don’t want to. A sub-domain is also known as a “third-level” domain and is a great way to create memorable web addresses for various areas of your site. For more advanced design, use A search engine With File Manager, you can create, edit, copy, rename, and delete your HTML files, as well as see your disk space usage and site statistics

In A website, megabytes are used to measure disk space. In addition to a monthly service fee, a website’ packages have a one-time fee to set up your account. You don’t need to know any coding or design — just use some Webpage-Builder to drag and drop elements into your page, choose colors and clip art, and create a personalized, interactive web site. Perl is a popular scripting language you can use for a wide variety of web site tasks, including generating dynamic content in response to customer action on your site, collecting customer feedback with automated email scripts, and creating sophisticated web applications. Like a memorable street address, a unique domain name allows people to find you easily online. PHP is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP allows you to perform many of the same tasks as “C” and PERL, such as connecting to a database and reading and writing files.

Source: webmasterslibrary.com

By Simon J. Marcantonio

ay for position search engines, also known as pay for rank or pay per click engines were pioneered a number of years ago by a service called Goto.com. In the beginning, Goto.com was disregarded by many Internet experts who were confident that Webmasters would not choose to pay for a search engine position. At that time, the assumption was valid, given that most popular search engines accepted new sites into their listings free of charge.

Several years later, however, the Internet was a radically different place. Many big player search engines were struggling to break-even financially, their listings were populated with spam, which over time had forced many worthy Websites to accept low rankings or even to being banned for using one too many keywords on the wrong page.

Noticing these problems, search engine companies and webmasters were looking for alternative options. And the Goto.com concept began to take off. After a name change to Overture in late 2001, the company seems to have gone from strength to strength. **Editor’s Note: Since the publishing of this article, Overture has become Yahoo Search Marketing

The Overture Principle

The Overture principle is simple — you pay to be listed. To many Webmasters this seems a terrible proposition at first glance, however after further investigation, Overture clients discover a flexible system that gives them far more control over their listings than was previously achievable.

To be listed at Overture you need to create an account, deposit an amount of your choosing (there is usually a minimum of $25) and create your listings. Listings consist of titles, descriptions, your Website address, keywords, and most importantly, a bid amount. The bid amount is the amount of money that will be deducted from your account every time a searcher at Overture clicks on your listing.

The amount you bid is usually determined by the amounts other Webmasters are bidding for the chosen keyword(s). So, if the number one bid for ‘health’ is $0.90 then you would need to bid $0.95 to become the top ranking site when someone searches for that keyword. You could also bid $0.85 and be listed in second place, which is still very effective.

Competition For Overture

he success of Overture can be a problem for Webmasters with a small advertising budget. The bid amount for the health keyword above is just one example. In reality, popular keywords on Overture can fetch as much as $3, $4 or more for the top spot. Enter the competition. Newer pay for position search engines such as Kanoodle and FindWhat have less traffic than Overture, but at the same time the cost of achieving a top listing is within the reach of many Webmasters. The cost of being listed within the top five positions at one of these newer engines can be reached by almost anyone.

Regional — A New Marketplace

New, regional, pay for position search engines are emerging. Currently, the United Kingdom with its large base of online users has the most choice, with some regional engines offering to list national and international sites. The regional search engines are allowing international entrepreneurs access to markets that were previously difficult to reach — giving a new lease on life to affiliate programs, content sites and other Web services.

Getting The Most From Pay For Position Search Engines

For the webmasters with a niche set of keywords, or a medium to large advertising budget, Overture may be the only search engine with whom you need to be listed. Results from Overture now partially power sites such as Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN, CNN and InfoSpace, as well as an array of metasearch engines. However, if your budget is more modest, then the widely accepted solution is to list on as many pay for position search engines as possible, and to place low bids for as many keywords as possible. As with all vibrant markets, increased competition is providing an increasing choice for the Internet business owner.

Client Interfaces

All of the top pay for position engines provide dedicated Web interfaces so that clients can control their listings easily. These interfaces are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week allowing fast updates to titles, descriptions and bid amounts as well as allowing clients to add new sites as desired.

Most pay for position engines allow the creation of client accounts before payment is required — giving you the opportunity to evaluate the ease of use of each particular system.

Changing Times

In the search engine world, thousands of spammers forced the big search engines into implementing more strict listing policies, often at the expense of legitimate Websites seeking a decent search engine ranking. Pay for position is helping to level the field. Most spammers will not pay for a listing, as a consequence, pay for position search engines are populated by legitimate businesses and entrepreneurs seeking to advertise to their desired markets.

With a pay for position search engine, there is no longer any need to compete with spammers and homepages for top rankings.

The new rules are:

• YOU choose your title
• YOU choose your description
• YOU choose where you are ranked

It’s a simple philosophy prevalent in the offline business world — and one that is now available to online businesses, as well.

Below are some of the main pay for position search engines being used today. Each of these are widely recommended and many webmasters have seen very positive results from using their services.

• Yahoo Search Marketing
• Tired of inflated click prices? Try Search123. - Currently offering a $20 credit with every $50 deposit.
• MIVA (Previously FindWhat.com)
• Kanoodle.com - Currently offering a $5 credit with each new signup!
• UK Sprite

Article by Simon J. Marcantonio, a Director and founder of the UKSprite search engine at http://www.UKSprite.com

Source: webmasterslibrary.com

By Richard Igoe

Fred R. David, a business strategy author, defines strategy as “the art and science of formulating, implementing, and evaluating cross functional decisions that enable an organisation to achieve its objective”, Strategic Management, Prentice-Hall (1985).

My definition of Web site strategy is “the process by which to optimise your website to take advantage of the opportunities in the external environment, whilst addressing the threats that are likely to impact on it”.

Formulating a web site strategy is very important to the success of your website. By laying out your strategy at the start, even before choosing a domain name, can save months, even years of redesign and wasted promotion efforts.

Even if your site is already established, there are a number of basics that need to be questioned to ensure you are heading in the right direction. The answers to these questions will form the basis for your web design strategy.

1. Firstly, what is the purpose of your site? Is it a marketing tool, a shopping cart to enable online sales, or both? What are your objectives?
2. Secondly, what are your strengths and weaknesses? if you were in your visitor’s “shoes”, would you buy from the site and what would make you return?
3. Thirdly, how is your income going to be generated? Will it be from advertising, from site membership fees, from affiliate programs, or from selling your own product? What are your capabilities and how will you use them to maintain a competitive advantage over your rivals?

The answers to the above will determine your content strategy and this in turn will have implications for all other aspects of your web site design.

1) THE PURPOSE OF YOUR SITE

Most websites serve one main purpose - they are either informational or they are e-commerce sites.

Informational sites usually make their income from membership fees, advertising, commissions, or selling at the back end.

E-commerce sites usually make their income by selling a product or service.

It is often difficult to combine both into the same website because an informational site needs to provide unbiased information about the topic of the website, while an e-commerce site needs to generate sales and use direct marketing tactics.

The main objective of informational sites therefore needs to be to maximize your site membership, or your subscriber list. Site usage could be regarded as the internet’s equivalent of intangible assets.

The more information the site gathers about its subscribers, the more valuable the list is because it allows marketing to be targeted at specific groups of people, defined by where they live, how much they earn, whether they are male or female, etc? However it is also VERY important that any subscriber list is entirely opt-in because they want information from you.

Your objectives must therefore be: 1) Clear focused and specific 2) Measurable 3) Feasible and suitable for the industry you are focusing on.

2) IN YOUR VISITOR’S SHOES

Always put yourself in your website visitor’s “shoes”. If you were the website visitor, what would keep you on the site. What makes your site sticky?

By doing this you can easily identify your strengths and weaknesses!

The more focused your site is, the more likely you are to satisfy your visitors requirements, and the more likely they are to return and use your site in future.

The layout and navigation of your web pages are going to affect the usability of your site. It is very important to get these right and to know which web technologies to use. Your website layout and navigation can make or break your site.

Even more important is your Content strategy because you need to provide content that is likely to be targeted at your visitors. Are you providing the content your visitors are looking for?

3) HOW YOUR INCOME IS GENERATED

Informational sites usually generate their revenue from membership fees, advertising, commissions from affiliate programs and making sales to their members or subscribers using off-the-web marketing, for example through a newsletter or direct mail. Selling is the secondary objective.

The main objective of an e-commerce site is to promote an effective marketing message and to make the buying process as easy as possible. Creating a marketing base is the secondary objective. They usually have two types of customers, transactional and relational.

The purchase decisions of transactional customers are influenced by short-term reasons such as price, convenience, and/or availability.

Relational customers have built up a relationship with the business usually through previous contact. Their purchase decisions are based more on the customer relationship that has been built up, quality of support, and knowledge of the product or service or brand.

You need to identify where your market is and what your capabilities are. You need to identify what gives you a competitive advantage over your rivals.

Once you have done that you will be able to generate qualified traffic, turn the traffic into qualified leads, and turn the leads into customers.

Your web site strategy is therefore critical to the success of your site. It must be focused, to ensure your site is visible and attracts qualified leads, and your web pages must be usable to ensure you can convert your traffic.

You can find out more about how to design a successful website at http://www.thewebseye.com/website-strategy.htm

Article by Richard Igoe, founder of http://www.TheWebsEYE.com