If you are currently working at the normal 9 to 5 job but are trying to build your own business to create financial independence for yourself, then web hosting is something you need to know about. Having your own web site for your home business is probably the most cost-efficient way to expand your business into something that will truly become a source of income and independence for you and your family. But how do you solve the problem of web hosting? (more…)

Use the following promo code to 40% discount the review fee for Best of the Web ( BOTW ) directory submissions

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A web designer may do several different types of work, including consulting with clients to determine what type of website will fit their needs, designing the website, customizing blogs, and even designing graphics. (more…)

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Wrong. You can register your domain name this way, but there are better ways to go about it.

Cheap Options to Register Your Domain Name

So many things! First you should check with your internet service provider to see if they offer domain name registration; if you have a large site, they may register your domain name for free as a courtesy service. If they won’t do it for free, they may have a bulk-rate deal with a domain name registrar, the savings of which they may pass on to you.

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Tagging, the emblematic activity of the “Web 2.0″ and social computing era, appears destined for mainstream status, a new study concludes.

Among U.S. Internet users, 28 percent have tagged online content like blog entries, photos, Web sites, video clips, and news articles, The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports in a study released Wednesday. On any particular day, 7 percent of users engage in this activity to categorize and label material they upload or find on the Web.

Justen Deal, a manager in Los Angeles who tags news articles on sites like Slashdot, believes that as the use of tagging increases, it will give blogging and the Web in general a significant boost by making content easier to organize and discover.

“Right now we have one great big pile of stuff on the Web, and especially in the blogosphere,” Deal said. “With tagging, both by the content author and the public, I think there’ll be a good opportunity to start moving content into more specific, relevant piles, that would help make sorting through the blogosphere a lot easier and a lot more useful for a lot of people.”

Because this is Pew’s first survey about tagging, the study doesn’t quantify how fast tagging adoption is growing, but it points at the rising popularity of tagging sites like Flickr and del.icio.us as an indicator that the practice is increasing in popularity.

Jill Hurst-Wahl, president of Hurst Associates, a digitization consulting firm in Syracuse, New York, began tagging about a year ago and finds it very useful and convenient. Recently, she has attended conferences in which attendees agree to tag their blog postings and photos about the event with specific labels. This has made it possible for her to find a wealth of material online from conference attendees in a way that would have been impossible, or at least much more difficult, without tagging.

While she finds the 28 percent adoption rate the study reveals encouraging, Hurst-Wahl still encounters many people who are completely unfamiliar with the concept of tagging or who, ironically, do tag, but don’t recognize the term or fully comprehend the scope of the practice. “To some extent, tagging is user friendly, but a lot of people don’t understand it,” she said in a phone interview.

Tagging is catching on as people realize the convenience of categorizing sites and files online and as large Internet players like Google and Yahoo, which owns Flickr and del.icio.us, offer tagging features in their services, like Web mail, search, photo and video sharing,and social bookmarking, according to Pew.

“The act of tagging is likely to be embraced by a more mainstream population in the future because many organizations are making it easier and easier to tag Internet content,” the report reads.

By giving people the chance to organize online content they’re interested in and sharing it with others, tagging helps with the perennial challenge of finding useful things on the Web. “Tagging is a kind of next-stage search phenomenon — a way to mark, store, and then retrieve the Web content that users already found valuable and of which they want to keep track,” the report reads.

For its study, Pew surveyed adult U.S. residents in December 2006 and found that men and women are equally likely to tag content online. “Taggers” are more likely to be under the age of 40, to have high education and income levels, and to have broadband Internet access at home.

Tag: tag, tagging, web 2.0, social bookmark, digg, technorati, netscape, blog, blogger, posting, internet marketing, google, yahoo

A domain name is the name of a part of a domain which corresponds to certain files on the internet. For example, if I have a web site at www.mywebsite.com, the www.mywebsite.com would be the domain name, corresponding to my web site. No one else would be able to use this domain name for their web site without first getting permission from me because I own the exclusive rights to that name.

Why Do I Need a Domain Name?

If you want to have your own .com or .net or .tv url for your web site, then you must register a domain name. This will give you exclusive rights to that domain name, and no one would be able to use it without your permission. If you are seeking to build a web site for personal or business reasons, having your own domain name will make it much easier to remember and much more professional in appearance.

What Can I Make My Domain Name?

Your domain name can be anything you like, although there are some basic rules. For example, letters, numbers, and some characters such as dashes are allowed, but some characters and symbols such as @,^, spaces, etc. are not allowed in your domain name. Other than that your domain name can be anything you wish, as long as that domain name is not yet registered. Considering the number of web sites in existence this can be a problem in registering a domain name, and part of the reason that choosing a good domain name is important.

Some of the major services provided by the company include domain name registration, web site design, web site redesign, Flash web design, web site hosting, ecommerce solutions, logo design, and Internet marketing. The company has a team of professionals from different parts of the world. The various web site hosting plans provided by the company include Basic Plan, Professional Plan, and Ecommerce Plan. Let us see the major features offered by these plans.

The major features of Basic Plan are no setup fee, 200 MB disk storage space, bandwidth up to 5 GB, 5 email accounts, unlimited email responders, unlimited mailing lists, unlimited email filters, unlimited Ftp accounts, support for anonymous Ftp, PHP, Perl, CGI, protected directories, custom error pages, file manager, FrontPage Server Extensions, Web Statistics, raw access logs and error logs.

The major features of Professional Plan are no setup fee, 500 MB disk storage space, bandwidth up to 20 GB, 5 domains, 5 sub domains, 5 MySQL databases, unlimited email accounts, unlimited email responders, unlimited mailing lists, unlimited email filters, unlimited Ftp accounts, support for anonymous Ftp, PHP, Perl, CGI, protected directories, custom error pages, file manager, FrontPage Server Extensions, Web Statistics, raw access logs and error logs.

Web Traffic from Other Sites

The easiest way to build web traffic to your website is by using “reciprocal links,” or making a deal with another webmaster to link to one another. Obviously, a person with a site just like yours isn’t likely to want to do this, so you need to get creative: look for people who you can help while they’re helping you. If you sell wedding dresses, look for people who sell wedding accessories or flowers, or who plan weddings for brides-to-be, and ask them for a reciprocal link.

Using Search Engines to Drive Web Traffic

Most people think of banner ads and pop-ups when they think of advertising on the internet. However, the best advertisement on the internet is good placement in a search engine; this will drive web traffic to your site. There are a number of engines, such as Yahoo, that require you to register in order for the search engine to place you in a category.

And all search engines look for key words — words that define what your web page is about — in order to know where to put your page when a browser searches for a topic. Use your key words early and often, but don’t abuse it by repeating a key word over and over. And make certain your key word is used in the metatags for your web page.

Using Newsletters to Drive Web Traffic

One of the more recent and successful methods developed to drive web traffic to your site is a free newsletter. Who can turn down something that’s free? And a newsletter that your users actually sign up for is a way of ensuring that your advertisement is reaching people who might actually be interested in your product or service.