Easy Website Solutions

Managed hosting simply means you choosing the host provider of your online business. There are a lot of benefits that managed hosting could offer your business especially when talking about strengthening the foundation of a certain business. If your business is dependent on the web, managed hosting would work for you best.

Having a managed host is not cheap. This is because managed hosts are run on dedicated servers. But as time goes by, you will notice the benefits of your investment because unlike shared hosts, you are not prone to technical interruptions such as wrong scripting, wrong coding and server overload.

An advantage of managed hosting is that it offers great speed. This only means that when people visit your website, downloads, uploads, and navigations are very fast. Most online businesses which avail managed hosting also gets ultra-fast internet connection.

Another advantage of managed hosting is that your website will be capable of using and installing essential programs which are much needed for the operation of your business. This will eventually lead to speeding up your connection and making your website more navigation-friendly.

Finally, managed hosting is more reliable in terms of hosting your website because they follow standards to protect their customers. Unlike doing the hosting yourself, you will be prone to privacy and security issues. Managed hosting is very secure and you can be assured that there will be very rare cases of data loss, server downtimes and your site can be protected from hackers.

Hiring an SEO firm is not an easy task. First you need to have some technical expertise and second you have to choose from a hundreds of search engine optimization companies, who all claim can get you top rankings, but often have different methodologies and will confuse you further when you talk to them. Here we provide you the top 5 tips you need to use when hiring an SEO Company.

1- Ask for references and sample rankings. Ask if they worked on similar sites in your industry and what kind of rankings they have gotten. Call the references they provide and interview them

2- Check their own rankings in search engines for SEo related terms, such as search engine optimization services, search engine marketing, seo company, seo firm, and so on.

3- Check associations such as SEMPO and BBB to see if they are members and if there are any negative feedback on them.

4- Check the company name in Google along with keywords such as “rip off,” “scam” or “fraud.”  See if you can find anything negative on the company

5- Get all details of the service. Find out what exactly they do and if link building is also included and if so exactly how many links will you be provided. Make sure they provide you what they will be doing in a written agreement.

Finally, we recommend taking a look at Submit Express, which provides search engine optimization services. They have been around since 1998, the same year Google started. We have used them before for one of our sites and they got us great rankings.

If you have had enough of juggling email addresses and want to focus on one Web-based email option, Internet reviews aggregator Consumer Search says that Google’s Gmail is the clear winner. It named Gmail as the best email provider thanks to its “speed, ease of use, unobtrusive text ads and excellent free features.”

The other free Web-based email providers recognized were Yahoo! Mail, which Consumer Search lauded for having unlimited storage and an easy-to-use interface (although it was knocked for making customers pay for many extra services Gmail offers for free); and Windows Live, which won praise for its design and integration into other Windows Live services but was knocked for its relative slowness compared to Gmail.

It should be noted that while Gmail has won rave reviews, there have also been issues, particularly in the area of email privacy: last year a security hole was discovered that let people discover the first and last name Gmail users submitted when creating their accounts.

Now that we’ve delved a little bit into what the pros think about icon design, let’s hear some of your thoughts. What makes a good design? What kills a design?  If you had to compile the ten commandments of icon design, what would they be? Do you prefer Windows icons to icons produced for another OS?

From a user standpoint, icons should blend seamlessly into the background. That is, good icons, whether Vista icons or not, have obvious and unobtrusive meanings. Yet it’s difficult to anticipate a user’s reaction to an icon given the varying levels of computer and image literacy among technology users (e.g., just about everyone). Sometimes, the best solution for a company building an interface or product is to customize their application icons to their concepts. One company that will create customized icons is Professional Icons.com. Check them out and view their portfolio here.

It’s always interesting to glimpse into an artist’s process. On his website, editorial illustrator and identity consultant Felix Sockwell shares some of the incarnations his png icons went through when he was creating the NY Times graphic user interface (GUI) for the iPhone. Sockwell writes that his favorite icon design was the single lily that was used to signify the obituaries section. You might be wondering, “Lily? Why use a lily to symbolize death?” Apparently Sockwell’s original design was a tombstone, but the editors thought it was too morbid. Other prototypes included coffins, tombstones with flowers in front of them, and even a lily with a skull in the center.  I agree with Sockwell that a lily is an unusual choice. Among the other icons it looks more like a symbol for gardening or horticulture, but we’ll see how iPhone users respond.

Check back next month for more information about Vista, Mac, Linux, and XP icons. 

Tomorrow provides a chance to hear the man who dreamed up the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, at the Asian debut of the 10th World Wide Web Conference (WWW10).
Organised by the Web’s grassroots standards body - the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the conference is an annual meeting of minds about Web technology and standards. (more…)

The man who gave us the World Wide Web is now working on a way to make computers grasp the context of its information.
Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web. Nowadays we take the Web for granted, and we regard it as synonymous with the Internet. But they are different things. The Internet has been around since 1969, and Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1991. (more…)

Natcoll Design Technology’s new Diploma of Web Development has been created in direct response to industry feedback and student demand for a course tightly focused on building feature-rich web applications.
“We simply sat in a room with the whole national team, plus stacks of minutes from industry consultation, and set out to identify the best package of skills for a web developer,” explains national course co- ordinator John Jones. (more…)

It is not surprising that the Internet revolution is often likened to the Gold Rush. The stampede into Internet business has created a whole new industry made up of companies and individuals with wildly varying experience and backgrounds.
Web design is one of the most explosive areas of this new territory, and, as with other areas of Internet consultancy, it is not necessarily the design fraternity that is reaping the most rewards. (more…)

WHAT makes a great Web site? There is no simple answer, but everyone you talk to in the industry is an expert.
If you spend time with graphic designers, they will tell you technology dominates many Web sites.
They will also claim many sites ignore design, concentrating on delivering information. The design is either so bad that it hinders this process, or it is non-existent so the site is unattractive and does not benefit from the extra dimension that good design can add. (more…)