WDTalk

Center Your Pages – Pages that are left or right aligned don’t work well with larger PC monitors, and often look out of place due to the large amount of space left to one side.

Use Ample White Space – Resist loading up your pages with everything imaginable. Focus is important. Use white space to guide visitors as they navigate your site. Clutter simply invites confusion.

Consistency – This reverts back to short term versus long term memory retention and branding principles. Try to use the same terminology in your prompts and menus.

KISS – We’ve all see the term. Keeping it simple works. Highlight the key products or services you offer on your home page, then provide more in-depth information about them deeper in your site. Don’t try to squeeze everything onto one page that scrolls forever.

Embrace all five senses – reach out to your visitors in a way that they’ll best understand what you have to offer. Use a mix of graphics and short blocks of text to capture their attention.

Employ analytics – to determine how visitors reach your site, how long they stay & if they return. If your site has a high bounce rate, perhaps the search query doesn’t match well with your content, or the content may need to be revamped.

Enhance Credibility and Trust – Add an About Us page. In a era where we’re being warned to avoid certain websites, as they may infect your computer with all sorts of malware, it’s important to convey credibility at first glance. Let’s face it – the design of your site directly relates to the perception of your professionalism.

Color and Layout – speaks volumes about your business. Color themes are perceived differently in global markets, so it’s vitally important to understand your target audience. What works for car dealerships doesn’t necessarily work for furniture retailers. Research your competition – emulate success.

Online Store? Increase your conversions with options, discount codes and freebies. I know if I’m comparing products and one vendor offers an immediate rebate, I’ll opt for that every day over the option to mail in some coupon and wait for weeks to get a check back.

Xen™ – is a virtual machine environment that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with outstanding levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Servers with – quad core processors and GB’s of RAM are ideally suited to employ virtualization to present the illusion of many smaller virtual machines, each running a separate operating system.

Virtual machines – on one dedicated server are isolated from one another, allowing concurrent execution of multiple operating systems – without allowing the execution of one to adversely affect the performance of another partition.

XEN Hypervisor – is a layer of software running directly on the server’s hardware, replacing the operating system, which allows that server’s hardware to run multiple guest operating systems concurrently. It becomes the interface for all hardware requests such as CPU, I/O, and disk for the guest operating systems.

Server virtualization benefits

• dynamic fault tolerance against software failures (through rapid bootstrapping or rebooting)
• hardware fault tolerance (through migration of a virtual machine to different hardware)
• the ability to securely separate virtual operating systems
• the ability to support legacy software as well as new OS instances on the same computer

I remember when I first learned how to use print screen - to capture screen images. I thought to myself, “Wow, imagine the possibilities!” Technology has advanced so rapidly, it’s impossible for one person to keep pace with new developments and software, even with something as seemingly simple as screen capture programs.

Doing a Google search for “screen capture programs” just now returned over  – 37 million results. Some of the more highly recommended programs are:

SnagIt 10 by TechSmith® (free trial/$39.95)

Snagit gives you the tools you need to create engaging images for presentations, feedback, tutorials, and training documents.

The only con I saw was that it could only save video files in .AVI format.

FullShot 2012 by InBit. (free trial/$49.99+)

FullShot is a professional screen capture (print screen) application designed for any Windows user who needs an effortless, effective way to take screenshots of Windows screens. It’s perfect for capturing on-screen images you want to include in manuals, training handouts,presentations, marketing materials, and web pages.

Cons - This product doesn’t seem to offer the ability to capture video clips.

Jing and Jing Pro - by TechSmith® (free versus $14.95/year)

Jing Free - SWF Video | 5-Minutes of Screen Recording | Mark-Up Tools for Images | Screencast.com Free Account

What do I use? – the FREE version of Jing because it fits what I do for now. If you need to produce MPEG-4 videos, I highly recommend Jing Pro as it offers the best combination of features vs price.

Every successful business has its niche -  (a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fit). Marketing materials are carefully written to emphasize a business’s strengths and their competitor’s weaknesses. A great example that comes to mind was one brand of typesetter which was capable of producing point sizes in tenths of an inch (unique to that brand).

Another was capable of zooming horizontally independent of vertical - in one percent increments (great for Rx labels). When the time came to upgrade or renew leases, thousands of existing documents had been produced using their unique parameters. To maintain uniformity, all new bids had to confirm to those same standards – effectively locking that client into their brand. In document imaging, one brand of copier can produce banner advertisements. Another can direct print PDF documents without opening them first. My point? There is a niche unique to your industry. Have you identified your niche, and are you marketing what makes your products and services unique?

The niche doesn’t have to be technical in nature
A niche could be how fast you deliver, the quality of your work, the level of support you provide, your pre-sales advertising venues, and any number of other things – anything that sets you apart from your competition. In web hosting, most niches relate to more bang for the buck – in bandwidth, RAM, disk space, add-ons and so forth.

The Web Hosting Industry
The web hosting industry is fiercely competitive, just as in many other industries. Web hosting continues to be a mystery to most new entrepreneurs though, even as prospects are rapidly becoming more computer and Internet savvy.  My own grandchildren are extremely Internet savvy, but couldn’t tell you the difference between Linux and Windows, or ASP and PHP.  Most prospects understand the need for an online presence, but are lost when it comes to how to select a decent provider.

Branding
In terms of mass appeal, branding is paramount. Here again, an integral piece of branding is your niche.  I can think of a few web hosting providers who own their niche, not financially, but in the mindset of prospects, just as Kleenex and Xerox own their niche.  If I were to ask someone if they’ve heard of your company, would they be like, “Yeah, they’re highly recommended,” or “Never heard of them.”  Getting from Point ‘Unknown” to Point “Highly Recommended” requires more than competing with similar packages, which I see a lot of online. When prospects compare your website against all the other sites they’ve just visited, is there anything that definitively sets you apart?

Five nines or 99.999% relates to - the up time availability of data centers. Prospective clients look for uninterruptable uptime as a prerequisite to constitute reliability of a data center, but what is acceptable to one may be inadequate to another. Accordingly, this expectation of uptime relates to a demand for computer reliability. Data center infrastuctures include a variety of critical physical layer environmental sub-systems that must integrate cohesively. Among those are power and cooling. If a system is deemed ‘fault tolerant,” this means it can sustain a worst case, unplanned event and NOT disrupt the end user.

The Four Tiers of Data Centers

Tier 1

It has non-redundant capacity components and single non-redundant path distribution paths serving the site’s computer equipment.

Tier 2

A tier 2 data center has redundant capacity components and single non-redundant distribution paths serving the site’s computer equipment.

Tier 3

A tier 3 data center has redundant capacity components and multiple distribution paths serving the site’s computer equipment.

Tier 4

This is a fault tolerant data center with redundant capacity systems and multiple distribution paths simultaneously serving the site’s computer equipment.

A tier rating for an entire site is limited to the rating of the weakest subsystem that will impact their operations.

When you publish your website - there are things you can do to get found and accelerate inbound traffic. I’ve seen a lot of SEO practitioners recommend submitting your site to Google and so on, but they’ll find you (quicker than you imagine). If you’re online, there isn’t much that gets by Google.

The following services are largely analytical in nature - with each of them providing some valuation of your site. Beyond that, researching your site at these locations actually helps get your site recognized and indexed.

Robtex - Swiss Army Knife Internet Tool

Alexa – is the leading provider of free, global web metrics. Search Alexa to discover the most successful sites on the web by keyword, category, or country. Use their analytics for competitive analysis, benchmarking, market research or business development.

Quantcast - Quantcast Measurement provides free, directly measured traffic and audience composition reports. These reports are Media Ratings Council-accredited, ensuring that your traffic data is both accurate and reliable.

Web Worth - is a free and innovative tool to help find out a website value or worth calculation, estimations about a web site and SEO information about any web site the user submits – you could call it a Website Value Calculator

Cubestat - is a free tool for website value calculation, estimations and information.

Website Informer - is a special service for web masters that gathers detailed information on websites – general information, statistics, main competitors, similar sites, IPs etc.

PeekStats - estimates website value based on a wide range of publicly available statistics. They provide you with insight in all these numbers and the estimated results.

Markosweb.com - is a web service that collects and analyzes any data about domains and keywords they are optimized for.

Hostirian is named Best VPS Host by Best Free Web Space because of the quality of service and the best virtual private server (VPS) technology they use. In this Hostirian review we will take a look at some of the best web hosting services they have to offer as well as a little about the Hostirian company, in an effort to help webmasters figure out if this is the best web hosting service for his/her needs. Hostirian was started in 2001 and is part of the River City Internet Group. Hostirian manages over 5,000 servers in a 30,000 square foot datacenter, making it possible for them to offer top of the line VPS hosting options. In addition to top of the line technology, Hostirian focuses on providing the very best web hosting customer support.

At Hostirian,  customers will have the option to contact customer service through their toll free 800 number, integrated ticket system, and live chat options for both pre and post sales service. These are just a couple of the elements that Best Free Web Space feels makes Hostirian one of the best web hosting services around. In addition, Hostirian offers several web hosting options to meet the needs of the most customers. Choose from shared web hosting, cloud hosting, a virtual private server, dedicated server and more. Having so many options makes it possible for many different websites to perform very well on the Hostirian web hosting service.

VPS hosting plans start as low as $4.95 per month and include 256 MB dedicated memory, 10 GB disk space, 100 GB monthly bandwidth and a 2.4 GHz Xeon processor. In addition to the Hostirian VPS Starter Package they have four other VPS plans to choose from, each offering additional dedicated memory, disk space, monthly bandwidth, and Xeon processors. For a webmaster that has an established website that is having performance issues, because of the available resources on a shared web hosting plan, moving to a VPS plan could be the perfect answer. A virtual private server uses a partition to provide each VPS account with dedicated allotments of resources as well as the ability to choose the operating system, reboot the server, or take advantage of other administrative rights that one would usually only have with a dedicated server.

The fact that Hostirian has more than 10 years of experience in the web hosting industry is a good indication that they provide a reliable web hosting service that is stable and secure. Hostirian reviews from actual customers tell about the reliable uptime and exceptional customer service they have enjoyed with Hostirian.  Whether you are new to the web hosting business and just need a basic shared web hosting plan or if you have been around for a while and are looking for a more specialized service like a managed server, disaster recovery, cloud hosting and more; Hostirian offers affordable, professional services to meet all your web hosting needs. Signing up with Hostirian is easy and secure. Visit the Hostirian website to learn more about the best VPS hosting options. Watch for Hostirian promos like the current 20% off new VPS hosting plans, when you “like” Hostirian on Facebook.

For any other questions about the Hostirian service, contact them by phone, email or live chat. The Hostirian support is available all the time and they take pride in providing every customer with the tools and service needed to build and maintain a successful website. Take a few minutes to read the hosting articles and  the frequently asked questions to learn more about the Hostirian web hosting service.