Email Links

I still see people who everyday lose there email to spam due to stupid ways they go about there everyday life. Don't write someone@noreply.com. There is no reason to ever do this. There is also never a reason to make it a link. Instead write your link like someone (at) noreply (dot) com, or something similar to this. Or even better, just make it an image. A user will be able to tell the difference between the two, and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble from spam.

Easy way to make money online

Their are several ways to make money online. Several of these ways people will claim will make you "rich." The reality a very small percentage actually make money, and an even smaller group actually get "rich." Their are some ways that are bullet proof and you are sure you to make money. Will you become rich, well that is determined by how much effort you put into it.  Below are two ways which one could get rich online.

1. Drop shipping  - Drop shipping is when you sell a product to a customer, then order it from your supplier and get it dropped shipped to the buyers location. This way you don't actually have to have an inventory on hand. The best way to approach this way is using a personal site, with the addition of eBay. The more listings, and sites you have the more likely you are to sell something. To find drop shippers start with sites like dealextreme.com and focalprice.com. These two sites send you things from Hong Kong with free shipping and free drop shipping. 
2. Ads - AdSense and sponsors are one way people are making a lot of money online. The thing that drives this is CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT. If you don't have content you won't get search engines finding you. The more content and the more pages of content you have, the more likely you are to be found. Every click matters, and the more impressions you have the more likely you have with people clicking on your ads. Build up lots of blogs, sites etc with as much relevant content content as you can within these sites. Make sure you read up on the market first and it would be best if there isn't as much information about the market yet. 

The bottom line is, go out there and try it. Try several different things and try not to spend much money on it. It might fail and you might be out everything you put into it.

Website Demographics and site Optimization

One of the most common things I hate about websites that I run into is that the webmaster didn't design it properly for his audience. I often see sites where the ads will cover up links. Or the ads will enlarge and virtually make it impossible to get around. This is often frustrating enough that I give up and leave the site. Their are other times when it all works and runs properly but they are sticking a narrow width when most people have huge LCDs. Besides these mistakes, their are still people out there that don't understand that not everyone uses Internet Explorer, in fact news was just released today stating that FireFox is more widely used in Europe and Google Chrome is starting to catch up.

 Things to look at while designing your site

• Look in all browsers including, FireFox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Safari
• If your site relies on mobile phones, try a few.
• Test all links and drop down navigation's with all of your ads enabled within each browser. You might be surprised by some of the things you find.

Install a few scripts that might help you out

• Statcounter.com offers a free useful hit counter which will give you a lot of information. This includes the users OS, resolution, area, search terms. After given this information, take the top few picks and see how your site views in the "Users" eye.
• Google Analytic s -  This tool is useful to tell things about optimizing your site for the search engines.  

Optimization

Website optimization is important to any web page you create. It cant not only help out those people who are still unfortunate to have high speed Internet (still people who have dial up) but it can also help to keep your bandwidth down if you are getting close to your limits.

• Images - Optimize all pictures using your favorite photo editor. Scale all of your images down to the size you are going to use them and not in some ridiculous size your fancy camera shoots your photos in. Also, convert your images to either a gif of png. It's true, they are better for the Internet and load much faster than a jpg of bmp. Plus, png are more easily editable at a later date and time when you decide to do so. 
• Logos/Navigation bars - Not very many people do this but I feel like it is true. Even though I have never tested this make any navigation bars and logos backgrounds of div tags instead. You can go ahead and try to do this yourself, but I can almost guarantee you that it will load faster. The unfortunate thing about this is that when a user decides to print your site, these things often don't show up. There are ways to get around this but I won't get into it in this article.
• Mobile Version - Many sites, including a lot of my own, have been seeing in their sites an increase in the amount of page loads from smart phones. If you see your site is starting to lean this way check it out on a mobile phone. You might be surprised by how much of a pain it is to navigate. Instead, fix it and make sure it loads on those quickly and good looking. 
• Auto expanding backgrounds - If you have backgrounds that auto expand and repeat make sure that they are only 1 pixel wide. Why create something that is bigger then that, its going to look the same anyway. This will speed up your backgrounds tremendously in your optimization effort.
• Clean up inefficient script queries - No one likes waiting around for a script to finish each time a page loads on your site. Instead clean up that query that loops 40,000 times each time a page loads. This will also allow more people to connect to your website at a given time.

Website optimization will improve the speed of your site tremendously.  It is also something that cant be learned overnight, but it shouldn't be taken lightly either. Fix your webpage day by day and eventually you'll have a site that even an ancient dial-up modem can handle.

PHP Syntax for Header/footer and other simple things.

I often hear that people find it hard to learn PHP as they are also learning html, graphic design javascript and probably a dozen other things at a time. Instead they decide to put it off and not use it at all. Rather than learning all of PHP I have listed below some of simple PHP syntax that any website designer cant live without. PHP is very easy to learn and once you get the hang of it you won't be able to live a day without it.


*For all of my tips, make sure you change all your pages to a .php extension rather than a .html extension . Don't worry, all of your HTML will continue to work*

Tired of changing the header and footer on every page of your site. Use the below syntax.

<?php

require_once("headertemplate.php"); //path to your header template html file

?>

 Your html content goes here

<?php 

require_once("footertemplate.php"); //path to your footer template html file

?>

This is pretty straight forward. Whenever you have a require_once(); that puts that file in its place. To make this a little more useful I will also show you how to put the title into your HTML file.

MyPage.php

<?php
$title = "This is the title";
require_once("headertemplate.php"); //path to your header template html file

?>
 Your html content goes here


<?php 
require_once("footertemplate.php"); //path to your footer template html file

?>

headertemplate.php

<html>

<header><title><?php echo $title; ?></title>...

 As you can see I set the title variable in MyPage.php and the I outputted it in my template.

The last thing I think an HTML developer cant live without is the following for updating your copyright notices.

<?php

$time = time();

$year =  date("Y", $time);

echo "Copyright 2001 - $year";

?>

 Now you no longer have to edit the year on all of your copyright notices. In addition, you won't have to change every page to change a link or a color on your site.

Start off the new year with a change

It's that time of the year again to dust off your old websites and make them shine again. There are several things that you can do to make sure your site stays at the top of the list. Without these preventive measures your site will eventually drop its ranking. I recommend that you do the following more often than once a year, but its never to late to begin.

1. Update Content and add new content to your website - It never hurts to add or update content on your website. In fact, in almost all cases it will only help. Add a few new pages in about a new product. Spice up your about us page because you have recently merged with a company, in addition to editing the years in business because you have edited your website.
2. Update your copyright notices and other time marked stamps- Google and other search engines like to see new content and easy way to tell it hasn't been updated is by looking at the timestamps. Make sure these are up to date with your edits.
3. Submit your sites to directories and search engines - If your site hasn't been around much this is vital. Even older sites can benefit from this by getting there site out there more. It can never hurt to resubmit your site. The only time it hurts is if you want to get listed in DMOZ. This is because it actually resets your place in line.
4. HTML Validation - Make sure your site is up to date on the new standards for HTML. If you know that your old website has tables still being used everywhere and the word CSS does not show up anymore, it is the year to finally change your site. Convert all your sites to use Cascade Style Sheets and try to avoid using tables. I still believe that tables are still acceptable to use for tabular data. That is data that should be represented in a table, for instance statistics.  Also everywhere more and more HTML tags are becoming deprecated. Eventually the <font></font> tag will no longer work on most web browsers. It is time to remove this tag and many others.
5. Spam prevention and Cleanup - It's time to stop those spammers from bombarding your forums, comment sections and email with spam messages. Turn off your catchall email addresses and add captchas. Catchall email address, catch all email address (joe@example.com, joe1@example.com, joe3@example.com, etc) and direct it to a single address. Than a spammer randomly sends a message to support@example.com and it gets directed to you. If you turn off catchall you'll most likely get rid of most of these emails. Also, use a captcha in your forms. A captcha is a validation to make sure the user is indeed a human and not a robot. Most spammers are lazy and use robots to search and submit there forums. Fix those forums, and forms for emails.

This is the year to fix all of the things you have been putting off regarding your website. Why put it off another day or year. Everyday you put it off is another missed sale, or a missed advertisement. Don't hurt yourself anymore and put a couple hours to your site for the next few days. You are sure to improve your websites performances for both your new and old clients, in addition to the robots searching your website. Good luck and may the new year bring you increased website hits.

Making money with blogs

Making money with blogs is one of the oldest ways people have been making some money on the Internet. It is also one of the hardest ways to make money. This is because it requires constant work and is a never ending process. Creating a blog is easy but making it generate money is another story. Here are 5 tips in starting up your blog to make sure it is a success.

1. Write about something you enjoy. You'll be writing a lot of content so it's best that you write about something you. 
2. Content Content Content - Content is key to making any site a success. Whether you are trying to make site for your business or a blog to make money off AdSense. Content is crucial in improving your search engine results. With more people finding your site your more likely to get clicks from AdSense.
3. Create Multiple Blogs - Some blogs have higher competition because there are already a lot of people in that particular market. Instead make multiple blogs and you'll be more likely to find results within a particular market, or even within several markets. It is all a number game. If you have have 20 blogs each making a dollar a day. Than its 20(blogs)*1(dollar a day)*30(days in a month) = $600/month.
4. Post content regularly - Post content on a daily basis. You might think this is a hassle but its the only way to succeed. If you thought making money through blogs was going to be easy you were very confused.  Blogs involve a lot of work, but it is completely doable with proper discipline.  Maintaining 20 blogs is going to be hard, but if all it takes is writing 20 articles that you already know stuff about then it isn't that hard. You already like the topic so it isn't a chore at all. Its something you enjoy. 
5. Google Forecast - This a is a new tool I have been running into that I think is also a key to making a blog a success. The forecaster or ad competition tool (don't remember what exactly its called) is found when using Google AdWords. It tells you how many people search for a particular phrase a day, in addition to the advertiser competition. You want to find something that gets a high search value and a lower competition. This means that people will be paying less to click on your ads. But it also means it will be easier to compete with other people. If you do this effectively, you'll be making less per click but be getting a lot more clicks.

These 5 tips to blog success are a start to making money with your blogs. Making money with blogs takes practice and time. If you keep to it on a daily basis and continue to grow your blog content you will be sure to make money eventually with your blogs. At the end make sure you enjoy it. If you don't enjoy writing content and maintaining your blog, then don't do it. There are millions of ways to make money but at the end you have to enjoy what you are doing.