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Picking out the most suitable domain and getting the best suited registration are the initial things to research when establishing a website. However, this is not commonly an easy process. Because whenever you endeavor to divine the most appropriate domain hosting you will most likely detect that researching the provider through reviews may be an essential step. Reviews of domain hosting are unquestionably useful but how to determine what precisely it is you are looking for? As is the case with all good business decisions, you must find out what points are most important to your website. Many people prefer to get their Web pages hosted by the same provider they have chosen to register their domain name. Be aware that even after your website was set up, matters such as support will probably become way more essential than ever. Any review featured on the hosting provider’s website won’t be wise sensible to base a decision on. To determine the most suitable Web registration for you, you must always get an unprejudiced opinion. You need to research as broad a variety of reviews as possible taking into account what all the reviewers have to say. Exactly what seem to be the most prevalent concerns? What do current customers believe is best about the company? Do positive reviews outweigh the negative reviews?

Of course, you will find both bad and good comments. It’s invariably wise to get ahold of all the reviews with objectivity and weigh them all. Naturally, the cost has to be taken into account, but think about what extras are included in the cost. To help you with a choice we’ve put together various bullets you should think through. During which hours do the company provide technical support? Do they have a free number, and can you determine from the reviews whether or not they have got a quick turn around time? What sort of system uptime will they commit to? Will it be >98%? Are there any limits imposed on bandwidth? Some businesses offer limitless domain hosting and bandwidth as standard, and at times you may be eligible for other benefits like software and even vouchers for Google AdWords.

Do they offer a convenient way to make payments? Are payments automatic, and are annual payments accepted? What level of technical support is offered in the event of a server going down? The responses to these questions are critical for any business operation. In the long run it is a choice that only you can make, but do the most sensible thing and read the reviews. Studying any number of domain hosting reviews is usually a great strategy that will help you save a lot of time and effort.

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Whether you are a first-time website designer looking for a parking place in cyberspace or you are a novice webmaster who is looking for new web hosting, there is no shortage of companies to compete for your business.

When shopping for web hosting, it is important to consider your primary use of a website. Will it be for business or personal use? How many visitors do you anticipate having each month? Each web hosting company provides a variety of packages, each of which has a bandwidth limit. This is the number of visitors that can access your website on a monthly basis and the price of your web hosting will be largely determined by this and other factors.

Many companies offer free web hosting services in exchange for them placing banner advertisements on the website owner’s page. The majority of free web hosting services, however, are designed for personal or small business use. The reason is because they offer a small amount of megabyte availability for website storage and do not provide a URL that is easy to remember.

Affordable web hosting services are ideal for new startup businesses due to the fact that they offer a modest bandwidth and megabyte availability for the website, along with FTP access and customized e-mail addresses. Most paid web hosting packages start at $20.00 per month and go up from there depending on the owner’s wishes.

An organization who plans to advertise their website and generate increasing amounts of traffic may want to go ahead and purchase a web hosting package that will fit their needs during the first few months of service. Once a website reaches it’s bandwidth, the web hosting company may suspend visitor access to the site until the owner upgrades to a more expensive package to accommodate the customers. It is always best to select a web hosting company that offers various packages so that, if you are pleased with their service, your website can grow with them.

As a final thought to choosing a web hosting company, it is best to deal with a business that offers a toll-free customer service number with extended hours. It is important to know that your web hosting company will be there incase of interrupted service or delays, advice and general questions. At the same time, it is important that your web hosting company have a toll-free number so that you aren’t spending your dime in the event that you are placed on hold while calling customer service.

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For a website to appear on the Internet, you require a “server” that is usually provided by a web hosting company. Hosting companies are paid monthly, quarterly or yearly. Some companies come with guarantees, too. Recommendations from other business owners and web designers are excellent ways to find a good hosting service.

One of the primary features I recommend is that the hosting companies can grow with you. If they only offer one package, and you need more, your web site maybe down for up to 2 days and/or you may have to change the code on any forms you use to match the new “server settings”.

Don’t be afraid to read a hosting service’s subscriber information, FAQs (frequently asked questions), note areas or bulletin boards on their sites.

A good hosting company offers as many of these basics as possible:

• This is a hosting company I can easily afford.

• They offer a Money Back Guarantee.

• They have information on their site about server uptime/downtime.

• The company contacts me, at my primary email address, when/if there are any server problems. (Could be problems when they’re updating their server, hurricanes, etc.)

• They offer your own IP address http://postmaster.aol.com/info/ipexpl.html

• They provide at least 5 POP email accounts (example yourname@yoursitesname.com) Your email accounts should include Alias Accounts, which look like a POP account to the person sending you an email; however, the address is actually an “alias” that’s forwarded to any other email account you choose. And when you send an email back to the original sender, it is the forwarding email account, NOT the yourname@yoursitename.com that the sender receives.

• There is a Web-based Email system (a place for you to read your email online). If not, my favorite is www.e-mol.com

• An easy system for email forwarding (and vacation notice) capability.

• 24-hour customer service, by phone, even if it’s a long distance call, is best!

• 50 mg space (the space you need for a 100 page website with each page being approx. 8×11)

• 2 Gig Data Transfer/month (this will be enough for quite a while!)

• Front Page Extensions - only necessary if you create a web site with MS Front Page

• Cgi/PHP/MySQL (or asp availability). Check with your designer to see what you’ll require for forms to be created).

• Easy Control Panel: This feature is especially important if you want to maintain your site or have someone else easily maintain it. It’s the one place to visit when making changes to your site, add addresses, etc

• Statistics - Does your hosting companies plan include monthly and yearly statistics on each of your web pages? Will you know how someone found each of your web pages?

• Secure server, Shopping cart (and other things you’ll need to set up a merchant account system)

• Server type: The type of server a hosting company you choose, should take into consideration the programs you will run for things like your shopping cart, affiliate program, web site pages, etc. If you’re using ASP, JSP, PHP, CGI, PL, or CSS, these programs will influence the choice of a server and vice-versa. Your hosting service may use Windows (which for example accepts ASP but not PHP), Linux or Unix-based (Apache/FreeBSD/etc.) servers.

• Password Protection - If you have plans to create a membership are or client’s only area of your site, this is something to consider.

• Newsletter or announcement list

• Auto-responders (not usually available on very low cost hosting packages)

Special thanks to wise-women.org and HTML-on-the-WEB@yahoogroups.com for some assistance with this list.

About The Author

© 2004 Maria Marsala, Business Builder and former Wall Street Trader. “Powering-UP service busine$$es and their owners”. Providing articles, tips, classes, and resources for owners of service businesses. Learn more at http://www.ElevatingYourBusiness.com.

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A flashy looking website with lot of graphics and slow navigation will not work for most professional websites. People don’t like web pages that take many minutes to download nor do they like distractions in the form of graphics overdone. And this is probably what you will end up with, if you place yourself and your website in inadvertent hands.

But there is actually no need for that kind of an experiment if you go in for a web host which also offers web design services. Professional web hosting designs are user-friendly, easy-to-choose, ready made templates that give your website a professional look. These are custom made by web hosts and the user can choose from variety of templates. Made for specific business purposes, such unique designs include reliable professional software, graphic resizing and other flexible options within a template that suits the user’s needs. Once you choose a design template, all you need to do is upload your content. Sit back and enjoy the effect of an eye-catching website. Most companies let you try out the quality of a template for a period and you need to pay for it only after you decide to use one permanently.

Websolutions is a Chicago-based web hosting company which gives their clients web designs and help them in website development. They take care of everything from domain name to graphics and design templates for the websites.

Premiumwebdesign.com has packages that include search-engine friendly design templates and good software for $100 to $125 dollars per page.

ADDR.com is a very professional and highly customer oriented web hosting company with rave customer reviews and testimonials. They keep up with the latest developments in web designs and offer their clients very sophisticated templates. If you host your site with them, you can make it as simple or as complex as you want and be assured that it will be maintained without a hitch.

Professional Web Hosting provides detailed information on Professional Web Hosting, Professional Web Site Hosting, Professional Web Hosting Designs, Professional Web Site Hosting Services and more. Professional Web Hosting is affiliated with Web Hosting Solutions.

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One of the most useful features offered by some web hosting companies, is the option of creating sub-domains in the same web hosting account. The problem is, most website owners are not aware of why and how to create sub-domains.

A sub-domain is a web address pointing to a sub directory within the main website directory. The website consists of files organized in directories and and sub-directories.

A directory in a website is a folder in the web hosting account. The main website files reside in a folder called the /WWW folder, and this is accessed when someone types the URL which is the domain with a http://www in the beginning This where the home page of the website and other pages, like contact us, reside.

Suppose that you start expanding your website from couple pages to tens or more, and you want to add to your website different categories of information, how would you organize the information?. For example, if your website is used for business reasons, and you have to add sales, inventory, and other department information,

This is when sub-domains come into play. They serve to organize your web pages in different directories in order to make the website maintenance mush easier. Imagine you have hundred web pages in your website placed in the /www directory, this means every time you want to edit a webpage, you have to go through the hundred web pages.

Here is the solution to this problem:

You create directories within the main directory with the names implying what they represent. So, you create a sales, inventory, news and other directories in the /www directory Then you add all sales web pages in the /www/sales directory, and the other web pages to the directories where they belong.

After organizing the web pages within sub-directories, someone in the sales department will be able to type the URL addrerss sales.company.com, and will be transferred the the sales sub-directory of the main website. Notice, that you don’t have to use the www in the beginning of he address.

Another important benefits of the sub-domains is the ability to create many websites within one web hosting account. After creating sub-domains, you buy separate domains and point them to a specific sub-directory.

For example, the sub-domain sales.company.com can have a totally independent domain from company.com. You can purchase a domain, like www.companysales.com pointing to the same sub-directory.

In summary, if you aren’t using sub-domains, you will not be able to expand your website easily beyond 30 pages. also, you will not be able to take advantage of the web server storage you get with your web-hosting account. Today, you can easily get a 500 MB. storage. If you have few pages only, you might be using 5-20 MB and leaving over 450 unused.

Article published by George Chamoun. Join my list for tips about HTML coding, web page design, and website building. Get your free 7 part HTML tutorial. It is free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. http://www.HowToUseHtml.com

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I have been an eBay buyer and seller for over 6 years. I have
also tried almost every other online auction site on the
internet. My conclusion - there is eBay, then there is everybody
else.

eBay was the first and is still number one for the sheer number
of items to be found. Their commercials stating find “it” here
are not too far off the base. Yes, eBay nickels and dimes
sellers. Yes, the sheer volume of items make it necessary to
search rather than being able to browse. It still beats the
alternative.

If you are an honest seller with something someone else would
like to buy (which is almost anything with luck and good
timing), you have a chance to sell. If you are looking for
something difficult to find or are a bargain hunter without time
or patience for flea markets and garage sales - eBay is the
place to go to.

There are numerous free lising auction sites on the internet,
including Yahoo (which was free and an almost competitor of
eBay, started to charge sellers and almost disappeared and is
now free again but has yet to recover) and ePier which have been
around for a while. These sites are appealing to sellers because
you don’t pay for what you don’t sell but for the buyers eBay is
the one stop shopping place. Why go to five sites looking for
five items and finding one if you’re lucky when you can find at
least four of the five by going to eBay.

While I will continue to monitor these “free” online auction
sites, both as a buyer and a potential seller, time is money and
since listing auctions can be time consuming I will stick to the
goliath…

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The common scenario is…You have taken a lot of beautiful
digital photos, but you do not know how to make quality
printouts? If you are printing them yourself using a photo
printer, it helps to know some tips and tricks.

This article will show you some of the best practices in
printing digital photos.

Good pictures give good prints

This is obvious. If you have taken photo at a measly 1 megapixel
resolution, you can’t expect to have a huge A4 quality printout.
If you’ve taken the same photo at a 5 megapixel resolution, then
yes, you can have that A4 print. As a rule, remember that you
need at least a 2 megapixel resolution photo to have a decent
4×6 printout.

Remove defects from the image first

Check the photo itself to ensure there are no specks or noise.
If there are, use your favorite photo editor to remove them if
possible. Of course, remember to save a backup copy of the image
first. You can read up this guide on touching up photos if you
need help.

Crop if necessary

Crop the picture you are going to print if it makes sense to do
so. If you do not want to print the surrounding area around the
subject, remove it. That is where you should crop away the area
around the subject first, and then proceed to print. This saves
you a lot of ink too.

Select a good printer

This is very important. Only use a quality printer to do the
job. Always try to find a printer with excellent print quality
If one color runs out, you just need to replace that one color,
instead of throwing away the whole cartridge.

Select good photo paper

Many people tend to forget that good photo prints also depend on
the paper you use. As a rule, you should go for paper that is of
the correct thickness, produces good color and has good
resistance to fading.

If you will be handling your photos a lot, try to choose thicker
paper. If you intend to place your photos in an album, then
paper thickness isn’t too important - you can choose thinner
photo paper.

Color brilliance is important too. Try buying some sheaves of
photo paper and print out some colorful images on them to test
them out. Buy them in bulk only if the color tests turn out good.

For comments and inquiries about the article visit
http://www.digitalprintingcompany.com

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The “Wow” factor that accompanied the introduction of streaming media on the Web has long passed, and the technology now has to prove itself to marketers. Its’ acceptance by advertisers, in conjunction with other rich media technologies, is on the upswing, but it’s still not widely used to enhance commercial sites.

Companies trying to do business on the Internet are bombarded with marketing advice. Go to your target market. Promote your brand. Develop a web “community.” Publish a Zine. All of it, good advice. But shopping carts are still being abandoned at an alarming rate, and conversion has become the most important web statistic.

In the absence of live salespeople, who know how to listen and focus in on the customers’ desires, businesses on the Web must use the technological tools available to replicate that human experience. Streaming is one of those tools.*

Streaming Media is a natural way to motivate purchasing. It can be integrated into your website as a means to help people get over that “hump” when they haven’t been able to see or touch a product. Use it to calm customers’ nerves, build their trust in your company, and to keep their excitement about your service alive.

When would streaming media serve visitors’ needs on a commercial or business site? Use it for:

*Product Demonstrations - Visuals are powerful and convey product features difficult to explain only in text. Medical devices are great candidates.

*Installation issues - especially for products geared to personal safety such as child car seats - are expertly handled with video.

* Human Resource professionals can use it to enhance corporate Intranets for remote sales forces and clients. Training programs can be stored and viewed by personnel at their convenience. Both audio and video can be used in conjunction with written materials to explain company policies and procedures.

*Streaming slideshows are an economical method of showcasing vacation facilities, business plants, and real estate properties.

*Demystify the shopping experience - use it to navigate the selling process.

*Teachers and coaches of dance, sports and gym activities can highlight their training methods with short demonstration clips.

Many businesses would like to use streaming media but are put off by high production costs. Keep in mind that existing materials might be perfectly suited for current needs. Your streaming provider should be able to assist you with preparing and, if needed, modifying your material.

Streaming media is a very effective and affordable marketing tool. In today’s world, where consumers have more purchasing power and choices than ever before, it can be used to make your customers aware of benefits that can’t be found elsewhere. And, benefits often turn into sales.

Streaming media should not be used arbitrarily, however. Unless your material is relevant to your visitors and adds perceived value to their purchase, don’t waste your time or theirs. When designing your streaming media presentation, ask yourself what it will accomplish that your current content doesn’t. Will it complement your existing material? Will it be utilized to enhance your offering? Will it provide additional incentive to make your visitor buy?

If you can answer yes to those questions, streaming media should be a strong candidate for your marketing dollars. Use streaming media technology wisely, and it will go a long way to making your business site stand out in a very crowded field.

*What IS streaming? Streaming promises quick access to crucial audio and video content without the aggravating wait for files to download. Downloading requires that files be sent to the user’s PC in their entirety before they can be played; MP3 audio is a perfect example of this. The files then remain on the user’s machine until they are deleted. Streaming continuously sends these same files, which have already been digitized, to the user’s PC while the user is listening or watching. When the stream is ended, no data is left behind on the user’s machine.

Ronni Rhodes is the owner of WBC Imaging, an Internet company that specializes in web site enhancement utilizing streaming media technology. With her husband, Don, a digital media engineer, they work with companies to incorporate streaming as part of successful and meaningful sales and marketing programs.

Please direct all questions and comments to:
Ronni@wbcimaging.com
520-742-5780
http://www.wbcimaging.com

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Many web sites have both secured and unsecured areas. The secured areas might provide access to a financial bank account or a database of personal information This secured area of the web site usually requires authentication to proceed further. To increase security when switching from the unsecured public part of a web site to a secured area, SSL encryption is invoked. SSL must be supported by both the web server and the client browser to function. In an SSL communication a process known as a digital handshake occurs. The handshaking phase begins when the server sends a message to the client indicating a secure session must be set up. The client then sends its security information and encryption key to the server, which compares the credentials with its own to find the right match. Next, the server sends authentication information, so the client knows the web server they’re communicating with is the correct one. This is important because it Possible, through redirection or other methods, not to be on the web site where you originally thought you were. If you enter your user name and password, you might be entering the information into a bogus web site that collects this information to perform unauthorized activity with your accounts. This handshake confirms not only are you who you say you are, but the site you’re contacting is what you think it is. then this handshaking is complete, the client and server then establish encrypted communications throughout the duration of the session. When the client moves to another web site, the encrypted session is closed. Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the next generation of the SSL protocol. TLS builds on the strong security of SSL with more enhanced encryption and authentication techniques. Unfortunately TLS and SSL aren’t compatible because a TLS communication can’t interoperate with an SSL communication. Either way if you are going to be selling products on your website you must make sure your web hosting offers SSL.

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The coupon strategy works well to promote sales of items on
eBay. And just like its cardboard counterparts, the eBay coupon
is fast, easy, and convenient to use.

Selling real estate over the internet may sound like an awkward
idea. However, the mileage the real estate receives over such a
widespread media like the internet is every realtor’s dream.

Can eBay be used to market real estate? The answer is a
resounding ‘yes!’

eBay provides functionality that is clearly adaptable to the
needs of a realtor. It provides a widespread medium of
advertisement for the real estate. It is also an inexpensive
method of advertising such.

The best thing about selling real estate on eBay is that it
markets to the whole world, not just a local area. eBay makes
the property available to more than 100 million potential
buyers, including those from other countries. Visitors can
browse through the property details 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week - all without the realtor having to explain the details to
every single prospect that drops by.

Advertising Your Real Estate on eBay When one has a house or
other real estate to sell, he or she may list it for auction on
the eBay Real Estate site which is found at
http://www.pages.ebay.com/realestate/. If the realtor seeks to
sell the estate at a fixed price instead of having the property
go through an auction, he may request eBay to display a real
estate listing in a format much like a local paper.

eBay’s Real Estate page has three selling formats: there is the
auction, fixed price selling, and the traditional real estate
listing.

>From here, the user furnishes additional information regarding
his or her property. These details include lot size, number of
bedrooms, number of bathrooms, type of property, year built, and
others. One also furnishes the auction listing period. He may
choose to run a 1-, 3-, 5-, 7-, 10-, or 30-day auction, or a 30-
or 90-day non-auction listing.

eBay Real Estate charges fees for both listing and final values.
Charges for a 1-, 3-, 5-, 7-, or 10-day auction listing is $100.
30-day auction listings cost $150. A non-auction listing costs
$150 for 30-day listing, and $300 for a 90-day listing.
Timeshares and land fees are slightly lower. The final value fee
for timeshares and land is $35 while residential and commercial
real estate have no fees. Selling real estate on eBay is growing
popular as the internet stretches to more countries. Although
nothing beats direct and personal inspection of a property, the
convenience of having eBay connect seller and potential buyer is
definitely appreciated.

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