All posts by Adam Prattler

How To Construct Your Own Website

Small Business Marketing, Web Design

When it comes to creating and building websites online a lot of people opt in with hiring a specialist to help them with their website. There is no harm in hiring a professional web designer and developer but if you cannot afford it, it can be a big burden on your shoulders. These days there are plenty of tools and information available online to help you with making your own site. The tools make the whole process easy and you can even build a website fast these days because of those tools. So, you could learn some of these web development told to make your life easier and burden free.

If you want to learn some of these important and most common tools, here you will learn how to make a website easy steps without having to hire a professional to help you. Following these steps would be a wise option. You may find it tough initialy but this tutorial will help you a lot and will make things easier and understand able for you.

1. First Find A Hosting Provider

Before doing anything you will need to find a hosting provider online. There are lots of hosting sites to pick from these days and often times it requires research to know what hosting company is the best for you. Some hosting providers offer free hosting but you might be limited in what all you can do. Others offer hosting at reasonable prices but whatever hosting program you decide to get always make sure that you go with one that has excellent service. By an excellent service, we mean that a host which is up most of the time because only this way your site will be available to visitors.

2. Pick Out A Great Domain Name

Find a domain name that helps to personalize your website. Make it something that individuals can remember easily and can say. Don’t rush when you are trying to pick out a domain name. Instead just take your time and make sure that you are happy with whatever one you decide to get. One factor which you need to realize while selecting a domain name is that you have to pay fee on yearly basis so be very selective for domain names.

3. Create Goals and Have A Plan

Once you have purchased your hosting and domain name then you are now ready to start creating your website. Before you start to create your website you need to first have a plan. What type of products will you be selling? What type of content is needed on the site? What type of functions and design should the website have? What is the goal for the website that I am doing?

4. Start Designing and Building The Pages

When it gets to this point you might find yourself having to hire professional help. Building web pages can be tricky but just remember, if you do this by yourself there are tools out there that can help with the process. First start off with creating the home page because that is the introduction to your website. Always create a clean and professional look for your site. The writing on the site should be top notch. You can always hire a web page writer so that way you can make sure the content quality is excellent.

5. Ask What People Think About Your Website

Have a mixture of people review to your website. What I mean when I say a mixture of people is have both people that are professionals with creating websites and ones that might not be professional but just your average visitor. Ask them what they think of the content, functions and the design of the site. Find out if there are any flaws on the site. Be ready to hear what they say and don’t get offended if they say it looks bad. Sometimes it might take a few times to make before getting things just right. You may share your website on the

6. Study and Watch Tutorials

Whenever you find yourself struggling just do some research on the web. You will be amazed as to how many tutorials you will find on how to build a website. You will also find tutorials and books on how to construct the website that you are building. Always have a open mind when you are creating a website and know that you still might have to make changes sometimes even when you think that everything is perfect.

Keeping all above mentioned points under consideration while creating a website would be really helpful. Such tutorials are always helpful if you follow them strictly and keep them in mind while creating your website. Once you have completed creating your website then go out and have some fun because you deserve it.

 

Best SEO Practices for Small Business

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is Important For Businesses of All Sizes

Photo by ellenm1 / Flickr

Small business owners have a lot on their plate, and SEO may be the furthest thing from their mind most of the time, but it’s actually very important for the success of most types of businesses. From restaurants to retail shops to other service based businesses, search engine optimization is a way to generate more revenue by attracting customers.

Best Small Business SEO Practices

Here’s a look at some of the ways small businesses can do better with SEO.

  • Know When to Outsource – Another important thing is to know when to outsource SEO. While some things may be able to be handled in-house, if you’re serious about your business, you’re going to want to bring in professionals to get the job done correctly. On the bright side, this frees you up to run the rest of your business.

  • SEO is Not Free – While organic search traffic is technically free – you don’t have to pay Google or other search engines to get it – you’re still paying for the traffic because of SEO work that’s needed. The good news is that the money you spend on SEO can result in a good return on investment if you know what you’re doing.

  • Know Who to Work With – Speaking of outsourcing SEO, it’s a good idea to spend some time learning about any company you’re thinking about working with. You want to make sure they don’t use Black Hat methods that may get your website in trouble. Google doesn’t really care if a third party trashed your website.

  • Avoid Over Optimization – When it comes to SEO in 2013 and beyond, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. When you over optimize your pages, you’re going to set off red flags for the search engines. And when this happens, it can really affect your rankings in the search engines.

  • SEO is Ongoing – Unlike some other technology or marketing related projects, SEO is a continuous process. Small businesses need to understand that SEO should be budgeted into their overall marketing strategy from the get go. As it pays off, even more money should be put into this type of marketing.

Following the SEO tips and advice above will get you headed in the right direction when it comes to search engine optimization. The most important thing to remember is that you don’t want to do anything to upset the search engines. When you do this, you’re going to have a lot of trouble ranking anywhere in their index. Instead of trying to trick Google and Bing, work with them and produce only high quality content that people – not machines – want to read.

Writer enjoys reading different infographics about various topics to stay current.

WordPress Blog Article Strategies

Blogging, content marketing, SEO, Wordpress

Photo Credit by Heisenberg Media / Flickr

If you’re looking for great WordPress blog article strategies, you’ve come to the right place. A lot of people have WP blogs these days, but not everyone knows how to come up with good content in order to attract and – more importantly – retain readers. Below are several ideas and strategies that you can use to increase your chances of blogging success.

WordPress Blog Article Strategies

Here are some ideas that will help you deal with content on your WordPress blog.

  • Know Your Audience – The first thing you need to do is make sure you know your audience. The more you know about them, the easier it will be to come up with article ideas that they’re going to like. And if you do manage to hit a homerun when picking topics to write about, you’re going to attract an audience – one that will keep coming back for more content.

  • Be Consistent – If you can only publish once a week do that, but make sure you’re consistent with it. Some bloggers only post occasionally with no rhyme or reason as to when they post. This works as long as your content is very high quality and can’t be found anywhere else on the Internet.

  • Be Useful – This should be common sense, but you might be amazed at how many people think they just need to write out a certain number of words that sound good together without actually being useful in their posts. The more useful your articles, the more readers you’re going to attract – all without spending money. The good news is that it’s not hard to be useful if you spend some time writing the content.

  • Be Entertaining – This is not a requirement, but if you can also be entertaining – especially funny – you can get a lot more action with each article you write for your WordPress blog. You want to make sure you don’t push it too far, though. There’s a fine line and you need to make sure you walk it carefully.

  • Be Interactive – In the past, when an article was published it was difficult for the writer and readers to interact with each other. The Internet has changed this. These days it’s important to acknowledge and interact with your readers. You don’t want to spend all your time on this, but it’s something you should do a little. It can really make your readers feel special and make them lifelong fans of your blog.

If you can follow some or all of the tips and advice above, there’s a good chance you’re going to be able to slowly but surely increase your audience quite a bit. And when you have more readers, you’re going to have a better chance of making money with the website.

This writer enjoys reading infographics online – at least the ones that are well designed.

How to Create an Anonymous website

Anonymous

One thing that is threatened whenever the corrupt decides to force speech that is distributed on the web is free speech. Around the world you will find that there are many governments that are corrupt and will do whatever it takes to stay as the leader even if everyone hates them.                  

In this day and age it is vital that the speech is anonymous for reasons that are mundane. Advocates that might try to speak up on gay rights activists, evolution, critics of the law and local police or medical marijuana might find that they need to protect themselves when they decide to voice their personal opinion.

Trying to censor speech online might be something that is just doomed to at some point fail because there will always be some way to publish content and not leave a trace of who you are behind the content.

Here is how can you make your own website and make it anonymous so no one knows your identity.

1. Your Domain Name Should Be Anonymous

All websites need to have domain names. You can purchase your domain name thru places like GoDaddy. You can protect your identity by clicking on using domain registration proxy. However, a proxy might not be sufficient enough to protect your identity. It is not like any social media. The reason why is because of the information that is needed and if pressured they can reveal that information.

In order to prevent information being revealed then you will need to come up with information that is pseudo anonymous. You can even enter in information of your competitor if you want to be very sneaky about things.

2. The Payment Should Be Anonymous

              

When you have services then payment is sometimes one thing that is considered to be important in the link of all of this. In order to avoid leaving any kind of trail back on your financial accounts you can use money orders and prepaid credit cards or you can also use Bitcoins.

3. Make Sure Your Email Remains Anonymous

These days it’s very easy to set up emails that are anonymous. It might be important for them to have ways to communicate with you but do it in such a way they can’t trace you back with your emails.

4. Website Hosting Should be Anonymous

Almost all websites need web hosting. You can use your anonymous email and pseudonyms in order to make sure that your website remains anonymous like IT support Virginia. You can put in fake information if needed in order to get access to website hosting.

5. Anonymous IP Address

There are many proxy servers available to use that is free and easy to understand such as Tor. This is a great way to make sure that you have that protection that you need. Just do a quick search online for proxy servers and hook up with one that has great reviews on it.

Whatever you do the threats might continue

The government officials might decide to seize the domain or either the web host server might decide that it should be confiscated. Always back up all of the information that you have so you won’t lose anything if the worst does happen. The domain registrar or either the web hosting company still might be forced to take down any information even when legal action is not present.

Conclusion

Free speech is something that might always be threatened with censorship and could result in imprisonment, assassination and violence. The threats become less if you publish things on the web anonymously and that is another reason as to why creating an anonymous website is a great idea.

Tim Brennan has 30 years of diverse experience in the Technology industry that includes executive management, sales management, technical project management and software development.