To keep your knuckles from turning too white, I'd like to make a suggestion for eliminating an unnecessary expense: Fire your webmaster.

A webmaster unnecessary? Could it be?

In the olden days, when you wanted a website you hired a web guy (and it was typically a guy), who built and stored everything on his own individual computer using internet marketing tools. The problem with this was that everything was attached to a particular computer and a particular webmaster. If you wanted to make changes, you needed to work through your webmaster — who, for some reason or other, usually wasn't available when you needed him. You wanted to hold a holiday sale, for instance, but he didn't work around the holidays…you get my drift. This led to a lot of frustration, which in many cases continues to this day.

Now, though, instead of frustrated waiting, there is a whole new option. It is entirely possible to get a website up quickly, or convert an existing one, and make changes as needed — without a webmaster. Using a program called WordPress, you can make your site live on the internet, which allows it to be completely accessible.

What do I mean by completely accessible? Here's an example: I have a desktop computer at home and two laptops in my office. With the administrative, password-protected login, my staff and I can create pages or make changes, anytime or anywhere we choose. We can use a PC or a Mac. We can add pictures, or even cut and paste straight from MS Word. It's simple, effective and economical.

As a business owner, your website may be like a brochure, used for informational purposes, or it may be a direct sales internet marketing tools. Whatever your trade, draw from many different technologies to help you focus and create the website you envision.

Using WordPress, you can:

• Create your website/blog without a webmaster
• Build your list by adding email marketing to your website
• Sell your products on your website
• Add detailed statistics and tracking to your website
• Add audio to your website without the need for an audio service
• Add videos to your website
• Add PDFs to your website
• Password protect pages on your website
• Create separate logins for your assistants
• Put up your own banner ads on your website

Web hosting:
    In very simple terms getting your website on the internet is called web hosting. Every website that you have ever seen, or will ever see is actually stored on a computer somewhere in the world. When you type the address of that website in your browser’s address bar, the website is fetched from that computer to yours. Just like that, your website will be placed on a computer somewhere too. That is known as web hosting.

Web host:
    The company/person who is the owner of the computer where you want your website to be stored or “hosted” is called the web host. It is the web host who offer you packages and take your money and give you hosting and their technical support.

Types Of Web Hosting:
    There are two major types of web hosting. Shared hosting and Dedicated hosting.
        (i).Shared Hosting:
In Shared web hosting, your website is stored on a computer where there are other websites. Means you are sharing a web server with other people like you who have acquired shared hosting.
        (ii).Dedicated Hosting:
In Dedicated  web hosting, you acquire a full web server for your hosting needs. Which means only your website will be hosted on that computer and no one else’s.

Technical Terms You Should Be Aware Of:

Technical Support:
    This is the help and support department of the web hosting company. This is a very important aspect of web hosting and must be fully functional and fast.

Bandwidth:
    This is the amount of data transfer allowed to your website, every month. Usually around 10GB is fine for beginner websites.

Web Space:
    Web space is the amount of space which will be provided to you for your web site. Your web site’s size cannot exceed this given web space limit.

Domain Name:
    Domain name is the word/words which user will enter in the browser to access your website. Domain names are registered separately from the web hosting. Sometimes the web hosts offer to register the domain names too.

Flash:
    Flash is a popular media type mostly used for animations, it is developed by Macromedia. It is commonly used because it requires less space and downloading time with great graphics and animations.

FrontPage:
    A very popular website design and publishing tool (software) developed by Microsoft.

FTP:
    File Transfer Protocol, the means of transferring or “uploading” your website’s files on the web host’s server.

HTML:
    Hyper Text Markup Language, the basic language in which you will write your website and the language in which the client and the server’s browsers communicate.

Shopping Cart:
    A software designed to take orders from your customers on your website and keeps storing them until they want to check out. The software then charges the customer by the designed method e.g. by taking the customer’s credit card number and charging it for the total product’s amount.

CGI:
    Common Gateway Interface, a processing interface. CGI scripts take information from the user and can process it in multiple ways, including storing the information in a database.

MySQL:
    A popular type of database server, very commonly used with PHP.

ASP:
    Active Server Pages, is a scripting language that enables the web designers to design their pages dynamically with databases implementation.

Control Panel/Website Manager:
    A Control Panel/Website Manager is an online piece of software which enables the web hosting users to manage their web content easily and effectively.

Email Forwarding (Email alias):
    Allows the web hosting user to create a number of apparent email addresses on a certain domain, which in reality are only names pointing to just one original and proper email address of your choice e.g. you can make   mike@mywebsite.com,  sales@mywebsite.com and as many as you like. But in reality they would all be pointing to one real email address e.g. mike@someemailservice.com.

SSL:
    Secure Socket Layer, is a protocol designed to provide a secure, encrypted connections like financial transactions on the internet.

Web Statistics:
    A lot of web hosts provide website statistics for free. These are the statistical data of the users who visit your website. By analyzing this data you would get to know how many visitors viewed your website daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Other useful information to improve the content and design of your website is also included e.g. the operating system on the machine of each user and the type of web browser they are using.

Above is the basic technical terms that you must know before you head off to buy web hosting. With this knowledge now you can make a decision about which features you want and which ones you don’t, for your website.
 

A program called browser is used to view the documents. It is not a programming language even though it is termed as a language. The basic element of a Hyper Text Markup Language is page and therefore any document on the web page is in ASCII text.

HTML uses tags and it is represented by angle brackets. All the code is written in between these brackets. Any text which is contained by angle brackets is considered as an HTML tag by the browser and interpreted accordingly. This code can be text, any address, and it supports different type of image formats.

Since HTML uses ASCII text, the web documents are delivered over the network such that they are not platform dependent. Hence only a web browser is required which can interpret HTML files irrespective of whether it is running on a machine using windows or UNIX or Macintosh or any other operating system or hardware platform. We can use any browser from Internet Explorer to Mozilla fire fox.

Web pages for professional web design can be easily created using any simple text editor. In Windows 95 one can use notepad or WordPad. All HTML files are plain ASCII text files with .html extension. Web browsers used to view the files are internet explorer or Netscape navigator or Netscape communicator. The first HTML tags that are used are document tags. These tags are required for every HTML page that is created in professional web design. Different parts of the document are defined by them. An HTML document has two distinct parts namely a head and a body. The head of the HTML document contains the title of the page and other commands. To create the head portion of HTML document and to give the document a title specific text is entered into the text editor.

This tells a web browser that information should be included in head portion of the document and by what name should it call the document in the title bar of the browser window. Most of the work is done inside body. The text is entered here; headlines and graphics are also part of body section. Between these two tags one has to enter the rest of the text and graphics for professional web designs.

In order that all web browsers recognize that this is an HTML document one needs to add some tags on either side of the head and body tags which we have created.

By: Kyle Newton
Article Source: http://www.articleinfo.org

A business website design or a corporate web design goes way ahead of a novice like web design. It is just like having an offline company with your salespersons wearing corporate attire when dealing with clients. Similarly through a robust custom website design, you send out a message to the customers that you have high concerns for quality and you mean business. This works simply because first impressions, of your website design, matter.

On the other hand, if you have a lousy website design, you are literally telling your clients that you do lousy service and have no regard for quality.

With a professional website design, your clients will be very happy and interested. They will regard you for your professionalism and love to work with you or ship off their work to you, by just seeing your website design.

It is always best to hire services of an established and credible website design firm. They not only provide web design solutions but will also address your specific requirements through their expertise in web design consulting. The best part is web design services have really come down in costs in the last few years. Incase you want to have a brief idea of basic website design before hiring a website design company, here are a few tips.

No Splash Pages: Splash pages usually have a "welcome" or "click here to enter" accompanied by an appealing picture. Though it’s the first page of your website design, most clients will move away for a website that gives direct access.

Minimum Banner Ads: Many website design firms put up a lot of advertisements as part of the internet marketing campaign. However, such website design looks very unprofessional and it better be kept to the bare minimum. Let your visitors decide when to buy. You’ll only lose them by pushing sales.

Simple and Intuitive Navigation: Having an easy and intuitive navigation for your website design will help your visitors stay in control. Always remember that visitors don’t have much patience to deal with complicated website design.

Sitemap: Put a sitemap in your web design so that visitors know which part of the site they are browsing. By doing so, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. A confusing website design will only send your visitors away.

Shun the Looping Audio: When your visitors stay a long time at your site, reading your content, they will be annoyed by any audio looping on your website. Make sure that your website design is engaging and you’ll have loyal customers pushing you to glory.

By: Mary Article Source: http://www.articleinfo.org

Here are five good reasons to finally get your business online:

1.  Marketing has changed. Today, more than ever, more persons are searching for local goods and services online. As a result, businesses that market their websites towards local trade often rank highly for related search phrases in Google. This results in sales and information requests.

2.  Being on the web, you don’t have to limit your business to certain business hours. In fact, your site is working for you 24-7. This is very important. Most of the orders, my business gets comes in the late evening or early morning hours, when I’m in bed. So, allow people to interact and learn about your business when it suits them to do so. Provide on your website all the information they’ll need to know about your service so that they can make an informed decision and chose you to do business with.

3.  Add value to all your other forms of promotion. Most people expect a website address to be listed on your business cards, leaflets, flyers, posters, printed adverts and letterheads. This adds legitimacy and professionalism to your marketing. By having it there, you will earn new business.

4.  A Website is usually an extremely cost effective form of promotion. It works for your business all day, every day and communicates your message to your market while you sleep.

5.  Owning a website can give you an advantage over your competition that do not have a website. Although most web markets have plenty of business’s listed, there are still a few markets, that can use some healthy competition. Maybe your business is in such a field. If so, your website will be quickly noticed leading to greater sales. If not, that’s ok too, because you can still get a hefty amount of sales thru optimization of your site.

It’s important to plan an overall business strategy for the years ahead, particularly when times are tough. A website should be central to that strategy as it can help maximize all your promotional activities, put you ahead of the competition and first in line for new business. Therefore, not having a website, can send naegative signals to your potential customers, which is the main reason why you should have a website.