Ventrilo Hosting
UGT offers ventrilo server hosting for clans and guilds. Ventrilo is preferred because it allows gamers to talk to each other in real-time with high quality audio. UGT is by far one of the best ventrilo hosts because they do everything they can to make sure people get the best possible ventrilo servers. UGT-servers.com makes it easy for any clan or guild to get their very own ventrilo server. Many World of Warcraft guilds rely on UGT-servers to help them manage large raids. UGT is a licensed Ventrilo Server provider.
The Importance of A Good Design
Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.
Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.
Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.
On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organised, focused and you really mean business.
On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the “salesperson dressed shabbily” anology, and you will get my point.
Search Engine Friendly Pages
There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.
Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.
If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.
Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.
Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.
Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.
Top Ten Web Hosting Companies
I was searching around the other day for web hosting and found this site that proved to be pretty helpful and wanted to let my website visitors know more about it.
The site is called HostingRef (as in Ref = Referee) and they have a listing of top ten web hosting companies with customer submitted reviews and ratings (1-5 stars). There are a few hosts that I have heard about through my web travels and was interested in learning more about them from actual customers. The reviews were informative and most of them appeared positive. I was surprised there were not more negative ones but perhaps they try not to emphasize those.
Anyhow, if you are looking for hosting give them a try and check them out.
Get your Website Designed by Experts
Are you planning to get a website of your own to get your business that online advantage? Although there are very many options available, you will need to consider certain basic stuffs before getting started on your own website.
One most important feature that you will need to spend a considerable amount of time is web design. You should either consider hiring an expert in web design or can try to buy those readymade websites which can be easily brought online along with all the scripts and details and just uploaded on to your hosting company’s server to bring your website live. All you need to add is the written content and other details and you will be ready with your brand new website without much strain.
Before hiring a web design company or freelancer you should always ask to show their portfolio and browse them to decide whether they are indeed capable of designing high quality websites or not. After requesting for portfolios, some web 2.0 design companies even give you a free quote if you can give the details of your web design needs along with the budget and you will be getting the quote within two to three days.
You can bank on such services even for redesigning your existing website or can even get them to add shopping cart to your existing website for a nominal charge. And thus you will be ready in no time to start your online business venture.
You can also buy some readymade websites which actually are pre-designed and you can choose from them the ideal website for your need. You will be getting the domain name, full script, template design as well as PSD file.
If you are looking for web 2.0 design for your website then the readymade web 2.0 templates are the best choice, which you can buy and this also comes with the plug and play option and hence you can get it loaded easily onto your website and add the necessary written content and script to it, it’s as easy as that. The benefit of these templates is that you don’t have to tamper your website for better designs. All you need to do is to give the specifications of yours, like color and designing options, sizes, etc and you will be getting the unique template of your choice in no time.
Or as always can browse through the collection of premium templates available from them and buy the one which you feel would be best suited for your business. Another important but often ignored option when it comes to web designing is the shopping cart which many tend to overlook when building up the web design or online business model.
You can get the online shopping cart for your business or ecommerce website easily by way of such cheap services where you, not only get great designs but also excellent after sales service which sometimes would be exceptional till you are completely satisfied.
Web Design, Development And Testing
Many organizations are interested in building web applications for their business but are unaware of the various steps that are needed to build a compelling web application. In this article I will attempt to put together the various pieces of the puzzle. Application development involves several distinct efforts that need to come together to build a compelling end product. A compelling end product is the combination of design, development architecture, development implementation, automated regression and functional testing and performance and load testing.
Design: People often confuse design with development. Moreover even within design, user interface design is often confused with graphics design. Web user interface design involves the design of the flow of the website and the layout of the specific web pages within the website. The web user interface designer concentrates on the usability of the application. The user interface designer will typically develop “wireframes” using tools like Adobe Photoshop to convey the design. These are often initially developed as prototypes and usability testing is carried with user groups out to ensure that the web application will be intuitive and easy to use. Graphics design on the other hand relates to the aesthetics of the page. The graphics designer is responsible for the aesthetic layout of the pages and the creation of the various graphical objects inside the pages such as images and flash objects. The graphics Designer will typically use a combination of tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Captivate to create the actual graphics objects. A designer will need to work closely with other groups to make sure the design process does not compromise the performance of the application by making sure that the graphics objects are small thus ensuring that the various web performance metrics are unaffected.
Development: This involves converting the design into an actual application. The development typically involves an architectural phase where the underlying modules that make up the application are scoped out. If persistent data storage is needed, a database schema should be designed to accommodate the data storage needs. The choice of the operating system (e.g. Windows, Linux or Solaris) where the web application will run, the web server (e.g. Microsoft IIS, Apache or Tomcat) which will run the web application and the back end database (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL or Postgres) which stores the data will need to be made. Various development frameworks are available to build web applications. The most common ones are ASP and ASP.NET from Microsoft, Java Servlets and JSP from Sun, PHP and Perl that are open source. The choice of the application framework is typically dictated by the strengths of the members of the development team. The architectural phase is followed by the implementation phase. This is typically the longest part of the project and during this phase the actual code is written using the design specifications and graphics objects developed by the design team. The programming will typically be done using a combination of the application frameworks mentioned earlier together with HTML, JavaScript and CSS style sheets.
Quality Assurance and Testing: A surprising number of people are of the view that quality assurance and testing is desirable but is not actually needed. Unfortunately this view has its roots in total ignorance of the process that is needed to build a good end product. Regardless of how pretty or slick we make the application, if it does not work as expected, users will reject it. Quality assurance and testing involve two different kinds of tasks. Functional and regression testing is used to verify that the developed application is doing what it is supposed to do. This is achieved by test automation using a functional testing tool. Load and Performance testing is used to ensure that the application performs as intended when it is subjected to the typical load of a production environment. Load testing is practically speaking impossible to perform without using an automated load testing tool since it involves the simulation of a large number of concurrent virtual users. This effect cannot really be achieved manually and needs the assistance of an application that is designed to subject the application to a specified load and then measure its performance when it is subjected to that load. Quality Assurance teams will need to track the bugs or defects in the application using bug tracking tools. Such tools will allow defects to be tracked by all members of the team.
The three groups mentioned above tend to be specialized for their skill set. As an example, people often make the mistake of using developers as quality assurance testers. This is not a wise strategy because most developers who are good at writing software are quite poor at finding bugs or defects in their own software.
Writing good and compelling web applications requires an understanding of all phases of the process, design, development and quality assurance. Skipping phases or taking shortcuts will result in low quality software that will generally cost more in the long run.
Inbound Links Still the Key
Inbound links has been a major factor in the SERP with major search engines especially Google throughout the last 6 years; obviously major search engines failed to find another effective metric to relay on in ranking websites other than links. Hence what search engines try to do now is tightening the space for link traders by penalizing any website/web master that tries to game their algorithm.
SEO companies those focus all their SEO efforts only on link building need to change their beliefs that inbound links will not harm a site, that has been changed , a reckless link building campaign might end up your website penalized by Google.
Google now observing very closely the groth/history of every website’s links, any extra ordinary changes in the your inbound links groth might rise a red flag some where in Google Plex that triggers a human review or you may end up with a penalty by Google Bot without any human interfere, yes links are still the main factor that decide your ranking but what has changed is which links can help and which cannot, further more you need to know before add a link also which of them are harmful to your website and which are not, here is some tips to help you to build health links:
- Do not go after quantity, quality matters more. You can use some factors like PR, crawling frequency and inbound links to find good resource of links.
- Keep checking Google Webmasters guidelines for new rules (i.e. links exchange had been declared to be against Google TOS)
- Inbound links might harm your websites, stop listening to those who saying that inbound link will not harm your website as they are beyond your control, actually they can, try always not to trigger any red flag; thinks that might trigger red flag is a huge jump in your link building velocity or large amount of inbound links pointing to your website using the exact same anchor, even if you are smart enough to trick the robot you will not be able to trick a human audit.
SEO consultants need to live with the reality that search engines evolve every day, if you need to stay in the game you need to evolve with the same rate or even faster. With the huge amount of data that is Google collecting daily from users it is getting very hard to game the results, as Google set almost a red flag for any changes in your site (inbound links, search engine traffic and user behavior on your website), so even if you tricked Google bot there will be a human being checking these red flags and take instant action in case he finds and violation of Google TOS.
Finally you can join the social SEO activities and conferences in your city to expand you knowledge and build your network, SEO Toronto Meet UP is an example for search engine optimization and link building social activities.
Web Design Templates To Jump Start Your Creativity
Designing a brand new web site or re-designing one that is beginning to look a bit jaded used to be a daunting task. The computer screen just sat there staring back and you and challenging you to be your creative best. With web design templates you no longer need to be intimidated at the thought of giving your website a new look.
Web design templates help you jump start your creative process. If you do a search on the Internet you will find loads of sites that offer you galleries of free templates in every design theme imaginable. So take your pick and get a head start on your web designing attempt. These free templates are easy to preview and convenient to download.
Most free sites have a huge choice of flash templates, website templates and even PowerPoint templates for you to choose from. These ready-made, free web designs can be used as a foundation for your web site and are completely customizable, allowing you to still have creative control over your web site. Almost all web site templates include Photoshop (PSD) file, HTML file, CSS, images and fonts. PowerPoint templates usually include a slide master page and a title master page as well as three image backgrounds.
If you are extremely choosy and cannot find a free template that meets your unique requirements, there are plenty of premium web design templates available for a rather small fee. Think of your paid web design template as a small but very profitable investment, considering the revenue you expect to generate from your newly revamped web site.
Depending on the content of your web site you can choose web design templates in a wide variety of themes including Architecture, Beauty & Fashion, Business, Cars, Entertainment, Interior & Exterior Design, Flowers & Gifts, Heath & Fitness, Jewelry, Music or Travel & Vacation.
Unlimited Web Hosting Offers Explained
If you have been looking around for a web host, you probably already have seen some of these offers: Unlimited Data Transfer, Unlimited Bandwidth or Unlimited Disk Space. The truth is; these deals are not possible.
Unlimited data transfer, or some web hosts might say unlimited bandwidth, is not possible, because if a web host has a server that is connected at 1.544 Mbps (Megabits per second) the maximum amount of data transfer that can be received is * 465.9 GB (Gigabytes) per month. This is a lot more data transfer than most websites will need. However, it is limited to the 465.9 Gigabytes per month and there will be other websites on the server sharing the data transfer if you have a shared web hosting plan.
You may also have heard of offers for unlimited disk space. Also, this is not possible. This maybe a little more obvious. Your disk space is limited to the size of the server’s hard drive. Again, if you have a shared web hosting plan, you will be sharing the space with other websites.
So, why do web hosts make these offers? They do it under the assumption that many websites won’t use very much data transfer and disk space. Be careful with web hosts who make these unlimited offers and always read their policies, terms of service, or user agreement page concerning the unlimited offers.
If you know the connection speed of a web host’s server or your own server, you can use one of these calculators to find the maximum amount of data transfer it can receive in Gigabytes per month.
Remember, when using the calculators, 1 Kilobyte = 1,024 Bytes, 1 Megabyte = 1,048,576 Bytes and 1 Gigabyte = 1,073,741,824 Bytes.
When searching for a web host look for hosts that don’t make these unlimited data transfer and unlimited disk space offers or, make sure you read the web host’s terms of service concerning the offers.
* 1.544 Megabits x 60 (seconds in a minute) x 60 (minutes in a hour) x 24 (hours in a day) x 30 (days in a month) = 4002048 Megabits = 4002048000000 bits = 500256000000 bytes = 465.9 Gigabytes
(8 bits = 1 byte and 1 Gigabyte = 1,073,741,824 bytes)
Good Design Practices
Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.
Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.
Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.