If you’ve had an online business for any length of time at all, you recognize the importance of website traffic. You’re keenly aware that no visitors equals no sales. So you’ve put considerable effort into attracting people to your website by writing articles, utilizing Google Adwords, participating in forums, exchanging links, etc., etc.

And your hard work has paid off. You’ve earned a respectable position in the search engine results and you’re getting a regular stream of visitors to your website.

But somethings wrong. You’re not getting any sales!

Naturally, there are countless reasons why people don’t buy a certain product or service. For example, it may not be exactly what they’re looking for, the price doesn’t fit their budget, someone else is offering a better deal, etc.

But all too often, the primary reason website visitors aren’t buying is because the website isn’t user-friendly.

What’s a user-friendly website? In simplest terms, it’s a website where your visitors can quickly find what they’re looking for and easily make their purchase.

It encompasses the design and layout, the navigation menu, the sales message, the images, the use of colors and fonts, the general content, the ordering process … in fact, all the elements that make up a website.

But probably the most important element in this list is the navigation menu because if people get lost in your website, they’re going to leave.

A navigation menu needs to clearly show the way through your website. There needs to be enough links to give visitors an overview of your site’s content — but not so many that they have to click repeatedly to reach their desired destination.

It’s been shown that most people are fairly persistent. They’ll click on several links in an effort to find what they want — but their frustration level builds with each additional click.

It’s not unlike trying to call someone at a company and being presented with an automated menu. The voice starts out by giving you variety of options and you enter the one that seems to most closely fit your needs. Then you’re presented with another set of options, so you enter another number – only to be given more options. You try again. Finally, after going down several levels, you may or may not reach the department you originally wanted.

Did you enjoy the experience? Or did you hang up in total frustration?

Always remember that your website visitors are not nameless, faceless entities. They’re real people with real needs. And the more you can help them to find what they want on your website, the better chance you’ll have of making a sale.

Nan Yielding has nearly 10 years experience as an online business owner. She is the owner of Writing-Etc.com and offers website review and consultation services to help website owners attract more customers and increase sales. Contact her if you’re unhappy with the results you’re getting from your website. Free 30-minute get-acquainted call.

“Welcome to thiswebsite.com. Now that I’ve finally got you here, I suspect you’d like to understand our offerings. You can browse through our assortment of services by clicking on the menu bar at the top, or just let your eyes wander to our Key Activities that we’ve emphasized for your interest right here on the home page.

Be sure to check out the news items and assorted collateral to understand how big a company we really are. If you’ve enjoyed your experience, do spend 10 seconds or so entering your mail id for our database, as there’s more useful information we’d like to send you.”

Ok so I’m dramatizing. But if you’ve sat and pondered over what needs to be covered on a home page while creating the information architecture, then perhaps personifying your website could help.

If not, here are some other ways to get a hold over what goes on your home page.

Go to your objectives. The home is the first face, or window to the rest of the site. The objectives for the website therefore apply directly to the home page. So while the rest of your site must support your website objectives, your home must reflect them accurately. The sequence of importance in objectives will also give you both the priority of elements, for placement in your IA, as well as act as a checklist for you to ensure your home page is doing everything you expect it to do.

Look at your sitemap. Your next immediate layer (the ones that usually appear as your top menu) are gateways to more information. But if a person doesn’t enter, what would they miss? Scan through the pages of each sub-section. If a visitor never saw those pages, which objectives would be lost? You’ll then get an idea of what needs to be highlighted on the home page. You may find at time this won’t even be a page, but some information on a page, or a particular white paper that shows your product in good light.

Think company size. One of the first decisions a visitor wants to make when they see your home page is on company size. Overplaying a small company or inadequately representing a large one, are both mistakes that can send a visitor away. Try and be as accurate as possible while reflecting size. Large companies are reflected through press releases, quality white papers or industry reports by recognized experts, important case studies, or key partnerships. Small companies are seen through individual statements, internal news features, upfront contact information, etc.

Know your finish line. An email id? Software evaluation? A filled-in contact form? Figure out how you get a visitor from A to Z, in as few steps as possible. The answers could lead to some new ideas like an email entry box for a free whitepaper on the home page or an ad spot for a free 30-day product trial.

Give visitors what they want. If you’ve defined your target, you should be able to list out the top ten things they are looking for. Make sure the answers (or pointers to the answers) are available on your home page.

When creating the information architecture of a home page keep in mind that a visitor can instantly perceive when you’ve done your homework. And that perception does reflect on what they think of the company.

Vidya Varadarajan - Content Strategist

Learn more about writing for the web at Vidya’s blog, Online Writing in India: http://vidya-varadarajan.blogspot.com

Vidya started writing, like most people, from the second grade. She started her career as a copywriter at a small agency in 1999 and remained an ad copywriter till 2003. One fine day she decided to give online writing a go, and has been hooked ever since.

Having explored writing across ads, brochures, blogs, whitepapers, websites, case studies and screeplays, Vidya now starts her day by swearing allegiance to the power of the web.

Experience in research and developing the research website has enables Web researchers to model collaboration and connection. The aim of this is to connect all the research that each person has done with research of others. This enables each person to connect with work they would like to have done themselves or can see they should have done, or should get involved in, but haven’t had time. This can help business by allowing the business to clarify what it should focus on while knowing who can provide the othre services it needs. The advantages of this understanding of connections are most obvious in software and web development. This idea of connecting research via web links fits in with this quote from Steve Jobs of Apple “Creativity is just connecting things” (Jobs, 1996).

Further research is needed into providing a linking mechanism for ’snippets’ of information. People need answers to particular questions they are asking. In order to get the facts they need it is important for the returned information to contain this. Return of the information as factual snippets that can be pieced together into a report with links to the multiple sources would aid this. The work with semantic technologies and languages such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) (World Wide Web Consortium, 2006) and RSS can assist in this. RDF, and Web Ontology Language (OWL) add a layer of standardisation of semantics, above the standardised syntax of XML (extensible Markup Language) (Bechhofer and Carroll, 2004).

RDF

Structuring information makes it easier to export it to different software systems to make his possible. It also makes it possible to provide visual navigation menus with a tree or graph structure. RDF can be searched using SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol And RDF Query Language) (World Wide Web Consortium, 2006). Because a resource can represent anything, knowledge from any domain can theoretically be represented in RDF. This, and its standardised syntax that allows it to be machine understandable, are the reasons why RDF is such a useful and important technology for the Semantic Web. RDF consists of a resource, a property, and a property value. This triple corresponds to subject, predicate, and object in logic. Each RDF triple represents a fact. A Resource is anything that can have a URI (uniform resource identifier). A URI can look like a web address and can actually be a web address, but this is not always the case, it is a way of representing an entity. A URI consists of the name and location of the entity. An RDF Resource is described through a collection of properties and property values called an RDF Description. RDF provides a mechanism for describing collections, which are special kinds of resources, and a sequence is an ordered collection. A collection does not have to possess its own URI but it can. RDF information can link to further RDF information elsewhere, providing connectivity. This allows resources to be linked to each other indefinitely, which is why it is such an important technology for the Semantic Web. Because it is XML based, an RDF Web page can be linked to an XSL stylesheet to produce a visual representation of the structure This is also explained by (Cayzer, 2004) who uses RDF to provide structure for Semantic blogging. Oren et al (2006) also use this approach of combining RDF and Semantic Seb use with ease of editing in a Semantic Wiki.

RSS

RSS allows web users to more easily find information by subscribing to websites that provide the information they are interested in and update this regularly. RSS is explained in (JISC, 2007) and by Cayzer, (2004) who explains its use in semantic blogging. An RSS feed is a list of articles in the website and a short summary of the article with a link to the full information. Software available on the web or downloadable can track the RSS information for sites the web user subscribes to.

RSS has split into different syntaxes and can stand for RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, and there is a third alternative called Atom. All of the RSS syntaxes are based on XML and some are also based on RDF. The incompatibilities however do not seem to hinder searches using these formats too much, and use of RSS has become a useful method for making information on the web easier to find.

Tools and browsers are available or becoming available for searching RSS feeds. An example of this is the downloadable Flock Browser (2007) that includes an icon by the web address to indicate an RSS feed is available for that page. RSS and Flock projects are also related to the concept of blogging that gives individuals who may not be computer literate the opportunity to put there thoughts onto a web page without needing to edit HTML. This is a similar concept to that of Wikis such as Wikipedia (2006d). RSS allows for a more structured representation of the contents of a web page or a blog.

Berners-Lee et al (2006) explain “The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale.” As well as connecting research it is necessary to connect information sources, so this work should be taken further by enabling connectivity between open source ontology, modelling, and visualisation tools, with those tools and applications commonly used in industry and organisations. These applications already hold large amounts of information, sometimes they are legacy applications that have been filled with information for many years.

References

Bechhofer, S., Carrol, J., 2004. Parsing owl dl: trees or triples?. In: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, NY, USA, pp 266-275.

Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., Weitzner, D. J., 2006. Creating a Science of the Web. Science 11 August 2006:Vol. 313. no. 5788, pp. 769 - 771. - http://www.webscience.org/publications/.

Cayzer, S., 2004. Semantic Blogging and Decentralized knowledge Management. Communications of the ACM. Vol. 47, No. 12, Dec 2004, pp. 47-52. ACM Press.

Flock Browser, 2007. the social web browser http://www.flock.com.

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). Technology and Standards Watch. 2007. What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf

Oren, E., Breslin, J. G., Decker, S., 2006. How Semantics Make Better Wikis. In: WWW 2006, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland.

What creativity is for Steve jobs? It is all about experience connectivity - http://fgiasson.com/blog/index.php/2005/07/23/what_creativity_is_for_steve_jobs_it_is - Quote from Steve Jobs - “Creativity is just connecting things” - Originally from - From Wired Magazine February 1996 Gary Wolf - Reproduced Here - http://romain-moisescot.com/steve/more/interviews/PDFs/1996.pdf.

What Is RSS - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html - O’Reilly XML.com - Mark Pilgrim -December 18, 2002.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2006. Resource Description Framework (RDF) http://www.w3.org/RDF/.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2006. SPARQL Query Language for RDF http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/.

My Research - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/

Web 2.0 and AJAX page - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/Ajax/ajax.htm

Semantic Web Page - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm

I am a Researcher in the final year of my PhD. I specialise in applying Semantic Web techniques. My current research is on a technique of ‘User Driven Modelling/Programming’. My intention is to enable non-programmers to create software from a user interface that allows them to model a particular problem or scenario. This involves a user entering information visually in the form of a tree diagram. I am attempting to develop ways of automatically translating this information into program code in a variety of computer languages. This is very important and useful for many employees that have insufficient time to learn programming languages. I am looking to research visualisation, and visualisation techniques to create a human computer interface that allows non experts to create software.

WordPress was created in 2003 – starting with a few users, and only some basic web publishing capabilities. For a while it ‘lurked’ in the shadows of more established publishing tools. But then in 2005 it started emerging as a preferred blogging tool. Just over 3 years after launch, and things are very different. During 2006, there were over 1.8 million downloads of Vsn 2 of the software – resulting in hundreds of thousands of web sites being powered by WordPress.

And the reason for this massive surge in popularity? There are a few key factors - ease of use, good documentation and support, an open framework, and continual development by a dedicated team.

My introduction to WordPress was in 2005. I had already had some experience with web publishing products. We created a browser-based intranet application for a customer, as published a few business websites for clients – all done in Microsoft’s ASP / ASP.Net. So we were used to a painful process associated with setting up a new site…

When I saw the WordPress statement about a ‘5 Minute Install’ – I thought it was an idle boast. When I logged onto my web control panel (all new to me – as I was only familiar with a Microsoft setup), and quickly installed my first WordPress blog within the 5 minute window, I was astounded. The install – run through Fantastico – was so incredibly simple. And the install auto-populating the new WordPress blog with a few sample entries made it so easy to immediately grasp how the program worked. A stroke of genius that probably most WordPress newbies don’t even appreciate.

Trying to get developers to document software is like trying to herd cats. Many software projects – even in corporates with strict development controls – battle to get this right. Well – somehow Matt Mullenweg – the driving force behind WordPress - has managed to pull this off. The WordPress website has many, many pages covering a large range of topics – from basic setup, WordPress fundamentals, all the way through to developer guides to enable 3rd party developers to create plugins to extend the program. And if you can’t get answers there, the forum usually helps clear up any issues.

The real genius has been the open framework – where 3rd party developers have been enabled to write plugins. These extend the basic functionality of WordPress. Hundreds of developers have created a variety of extensions. An ‘extended’ WordPress can look very different to a basic blog, becoming a powerful publishing platform suitable for many different types of sites – such as content sites, ebay sites, affiliate review sites, and even business sites.

Not all plugins are great, and there are some that are not supported after release. But there are also many good ones that make it so easy for even a publishing newbie to set up a powerful website very quickly. Contrast this to having to pay a developer a lot of money for some customized website software – that takes forever to develop and debug.

The final factor that definitely contributes to WordPress’s growing popularity is the ongoing development of WordPress. Matt Mullenweg and his team of developers deserve at a special thanks for creating such a useful and flexible web publishing platform. And for their continued dedication to upgrading WordPress. There have been several significant ‘leaps’ in functionality with each major release that has taken place over the past 3 years, and no doubt more are on the way.

If you haven’t tried your hand at WordPress – why not give it a go. It is after all free to install. And if you get stuck with setting up a site with WordPress, there are several sources to help you – from video courses, to templates, to plugins, to full-scale products that offer complete web publishing solutions based on WordPress. If you do check it out, you will see that Matt Mullenweg and team have succeeded (actually exceeded) with their goal …

“WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system …”

Jeff Walters is the owner and developer of RapidNicheWebsites - a fast and easy way to set up powerful marketing websites - even if you are clueless about programming. To find out more, visit http://rapidnichewebsites.com.
If you want to comment on this article, please do so on my blog.

Plan

Before you create a new component object in flash Actionscript, consider its attributes and whether the component you are intending to design is actually more than one individual component. Define each of the subcomponents, and their properties, in a separate class file so that the application is broken down properly into individual objects. This will save you a lot of headache in the long run, even though it may take a little bit more time( I promise that it will pay off, I know this from experience).

Publish Settings

Be sure to set the path to your classes folder in the FIle > Publish Settings > Flash tab, if the classes folder is at the root of your project folder, you only need to put in’./classes’, not the full file path from the root of your hard drive. I recommend the folder called classes, as well as a folder called compiled at the root of your project folder. Place your .AS files in the classes folder, also, set your publish settings to place the .SWF file into the compiled folder, this can also be a relative path. This way if you have many separate flash .FLA files the root of your project directory will not get cluttered with additional .SWF files. It is also handy when you are done and just want to grab the .SWF files for production purposes.

Create the Shells

Once you’ve defined your objects and all of their properties, create a class file for each one of them as well. Be sure to reflect logical groupings of objects as separate folders, and also reflect the folder name, as the package that qualifies the class name. Validate your code frequently and find errors early, before it gets too unwieldy.

Create a movie clip object that will be the visual representation of your component. If your component has no visual representation I recommend placing an icon on frame one and setting the component’s visibility to false in it’s class definition’s init method.

For instance, I use a DataController component in my flash movie that handles data access and can data bind to xml connectors, it will also produce arrays of the generated objects when I need them throughout the movie, it is a movie clip, but has no visible child objects. This component only has an icon, and is only visible when editing the movie, not when it runs. It’s very similar to how the XMLConnectors are represented. You can do the same thing for movie clips that have an empty or non-visible clip in frame 1 so that when you place it on the stage it displays as an easy to identify and easy to click picture, rather than a small and very hard to find dot.

Required (Per Adobe) Methods in the Sub Class

There are several required methods that must be implemented when extending UIComponent; including init, size, and draw. You can find more information about these requirements on Flash live docs, in the components book. If you find that you end up writing little additional code within these required methods and properties I recommend that you place them toward the end of the class file so that the most complex methods (the ones you will need to get back to most often) are available to you toward the top of the class. Normally I would not recommend this, in another programming language, but due to the fact that Actionscript 2.0 lacks a user friendly code editing interface, this is useful in order to save time, and sanity.

Method Declarations

For each property that you want to either get or set through the component inspector, you must place [Inspectable] just before the method definition for both the getter and the setter. If you didn’t already know, you can declare the getter and setter so that you only have one word in the dot notation for calling both the getter and setter methods, it follows the following pattern.

[Inspectable]
public function get myproperty():String{…}

trace(instance.myproperty);
// Will display, ‘Testing Setter’, in the output window.

The above example uses a property type of String, the type can be what ever you choose, just be sure that it is the same in both the getter, and setter.

On the new movie clip’s linkage property, choose to use it in Actionscript and ‘Export in First Frame’ must also be checked. Then, type in the package-class name of the UIComponent class you previously created where it asks for and Actionscript class. Click OK, then right click on your movie clip in the library, and choose ‘Component Definition’. You also need to identify the package-class name here. Once you click OK, you can return to the component definition to see that the public inspectable methods are now available for you to assign values via Flash’s Component Inspector, and Properties. You’ll also notice that the icon for the movie clip has changed to the icon for a component.

Other detailed Flash Actionscript programming stratagies coming soon! Watch for more Flash tips and tutorials in the near future.

For more information on extending UIComponents including examples of event handling and binding, find the clock example in the Flash Live Docs Components book.

Do stop by my home on the web, you are welcome any time!
I’m at Flash.Tips-For-You.com

- Base Coder

Frameworks

When it comes to Java programming, the word ‘framework’ is used quite often. A framework is basically an encapsulated way to do something (usually) more efficiently. It is a collection of efficient processing power that is, hopefully free, and wrapped up nicely into one or more libraries. There are many Java frameworks out there, far too many to mention in this one article. I’ll be discussing three of the big guys. You’ve probably heard something about them by now, they are Struts, Spring, and Hibernate. If you haven’t heard anything about these yet, and you’ve been in the field for a while, I recommend Java Google Groups.

Struts

Struts framework helps to manage the UI portion of the application. It handles the tangled request, response and session transactions quite elegantly, some say that it is outdated, but I still think it has a place in the community. The most difficult part of understanding the Struts framework is realizing how the action and form classes interact with each other. This relationship between action and form classes is defined within the Struts XML Configuration file. This framework also offers a collection of tag libraries that are used to eliminate the JSP from the JSP pages (I, personally despise tangled, hard to debug JSP pages full of Java), and encapsulate the Java code inside the tag library classes.

Spring

This Spring framework is probably the most recent of the frameworks mentioned here. It is based on dependency injection and a different type of programming methodology called, Aspect Oriented Programming. The most difficult part about learning the Spring framework is getting your mind around this new programming methods and understanding how to properly set up the Spring XML Configuration file. When the application is executed, the constructor parameters for the core objects in the application are configured in this XML Configuration file. The Aspect Oriented Programming strategy can be very quickly summed up by saying that all of the child objects get instantiated first then are injected into the parent objects, thus the phrase, dependency injection. I personally have not yet embraced Aspect Oriented Programming and I have heard other developers claim that it is a step backward in the evolutionary cycle of Java programming due to a similarity to the archaic procedural programming ways (Blaspheme).

Hibernate

The Hibernate framework is a framework by which business objects get populated ‘behind the scenes’ from database data via a Hibernate’s Configuration XML File. The most difficult part about programming with Hibernate is correctly configuring the Hibernate session factory, and equally, if you’re working in a database that does not enforce relationships (mySQL for example), correctly configuring the XML to describe the relationships between the tables can pose quite a learning curve as well. I want to say that I’ve used several different Hibernate-type tools, including .NET’s version, and the relationships are extremely important to enforce, especially if you are working with a database of roughly 10 or more tables. Once the configuration is correctly in place, Hibernate is a fantastic framework to program with, and it saves a tremendous amount of time, once you learn how to use it.

Conclusion

There are countless other frameworks throughout the Java programming language that I have not mentioned here, or in any of my previous articles. Most of you have probably programmed some kind of framework of your own by now, if you had several years of experience in programming. The ones that seem to catch the eye of the popular world are usually, the ones we should pay attention to.

A good framework can save a programmer a lot of time, not to mention, a lot of stress as well.

Do stop by my home on the web, you are welcome any time!
I’m at Java.Tips-For-You.com

-Base Coder

Adding affiliate ads to your existing website is easy. But to be effective and increase your income, you must choose the right ones, and place them on your webpages in ways that work.

An affiliate is someone who hosts ads for a company in exchange for a commission of the sales. Each company sets their own commission percentage. And they will wait until you’ve accumulated a certain amount of cash before paying you.

There are 3 steps to getting affiliate ads onto your web pages.

1. Finding a company, product, or service.

2. Applying for affiliate status with that company.

3. Placing their ads on your pages.

Finding Your Affiliate

Start by going to the sites of companies whose products or services relate directly to your readers’ interests and needs. Then check their home page to see if they offer an affiliate program. If they do, you’ll see a tab, usually on the bottom of the page in small letters, that says Become an Affiliate. They might also use the term Associate.

When you click on the site’s affiliate tab, you will be taken either to the company’s application page or to an affiliate clearinghouse. For example, Amazon handles its own affiliates, whereas Sephora or Macy’s will re-direct you to their clearinghouse, also known as a marketing network site.

An easier way to find a company to represent is to go directly to one of the marketing network sites, and apply there. Some popular networks are Clickbank, CommissionJunction, AffiliateShop, PayDotCom and Linkshare. The advantage? More choices. And it’s fun to browse through all the companies, evaluate the styles and artwork of their ad links, and compare benefits. Often a company will have special promotions that you can pass on to your readers. 1800Flowers recently had a special on roses. If you were their affiliate, you could promote that special on your site to get more sales.

Applying for affiliate status is easy. Whether you go to a single company or apply through a network site, simply click where indicated. You will be taken to an introductory page, where you will fill out a form describing your website.

Some companies will take a few days to review your application, and some approve you immediately.

If you get rejected, simply choose another company and move on. Don’t take it personally! For the most part, you are reviewed, accepted, or declined by a software program. Some companies simply want affiliates with a certain volume of traffic.

Once you’re accepted by a company, you will have access to ads to place on your website. Each ad will contain your affiliate identification. You don’t have to worry about being paid. The company or network does it for you. You will have a password to get to your account page, and you’ll be able to check it as often as you like to see how your ad is doing.

Choosing an Ad Link

Ad link sizes, shapes, and formats vary widely. Choose from text only, small or large buttons, horizontal and vertical banners, and even flash animations. Some are colorful, some blink like slideshows, some are elegant, some are interactive. Find the ad links that blend with your site’s look and feel. And make sure they support the content on your web page.

Amazon lets you set up your own link, and even build a bookstore that you title yourself. Other companies’ ad links take readers to a landing page where they can get more information about the product. Gaiam, a lifestyle product company, occasionally offers links in the form of movies!

Placing the Ad Link on your Site

1) Once you’ve chosen a link, you’ll see a small window with HTML. Highlight it and copy it to your clipboard.

2) Now go into your own site, and paste the code into the appropriate page. Often you can do this through your HTML, or by using a module plug-in. Check with Website-DoItYourself if you need help with this step.

3) Pull up your website’s page view and see what the ad looks like. Is it where you want it? Is there enough space between the ad and your content? Does it enhance the reader’s experience? Is it easy to see?

4) Choose an ad style that blends in with your content. Some experts say that a banner across the top of your page is effective, and others say an ad in the middle of the content works well. You want your readers to see it, but you don’t want to annoy them. A huge, flashing button in the middle of your page is probably going to be offensive. But the same button might look good on the top right, with content text wrapped to its left. Don’t be afraid to experiment.

Tracking your Progress

Your affiliate or network will have many ways for you to keep track of your ads. Don’t be intimidated if you’ve never done this before. They all have excellent instructions, and responsive help desks.

As the days go by, note which ads - and which placements - are bringing in income for you. Get rid of the ads that don’t get hits. In this way you can fine-tune your ads and bring in more income.

With affiliate ads, as opposed to, say, Google Adsense, income depends on your readers actually purchasing the product. Clicking on the ad is not enough. So you want to make your ad links context sensitive. And you want to offer your readers products and services that will enhance their lives.

There is no limit to how many companies or products you can represent as an affiliate. Just as you try different ad link styles and page placements, you will also want to try different companies. It costs nothing to become an affiliate, but don’t take the process lightly. Do a lot of testing. With Adsense, you never ever want to click on your own ads. That’s a law of the universe. But with affiliate ads, it’s okay to click on the links to test them. If your performance is not what the company wants, they may place you in a lower commission category.

So enjoy the process, but choose your programs carefully. Once you’re an affiliate, give it all you’ve got!

Suzann Kale is a technical writer and copy editor. She helps edit http://www.Website-DoItYourself.com and has written many articles for science-oriented sites and hard copy magazines. She also runs a site on cosmetics and animal protection.

To answer the question “How Can I Make Money With Web 2.0?” is quite at an early stage, but
not too early to see it from a distance today. Web 2.0 is here to stay, and those who fail to take
advantage of it in the next few months, or at least by the end of this year will be left in the dust.

For the past few years webmasters and marketers have been tuned to the latest in search engine optimization for their
particular niche. Those who enter those same niches using what I will call the ” Web 2.0 effect ” will
dominate those niches and the sales. This will effectively make the web a one-search-one-find place. You
will have to search less and less for what you want online, because every one and their cousin will
be busy putting content on the web 2.0 sites and leaving the old “static” web sites behind.

The “old” web went like this : Search what is currently popular to buy, hire a good copywriter, then dominate that
niche with search engine optimization, and make your money. Now it will soon be like this : Have a product to sell, start
up a web 2.0 site, and automatically dominate your niche. The question again : ” How Can I Make
Money With Web 2.0 ? ” is really answered fairly easily. If you do not do web 2.0, you will no longer be able to be found in
the search engines, which is what about 80 percent of people use to find everything they look for on
the web.

Instead of asking : ” How Can I Make Money With Web 2.0 ? ” it may be better to ask , ” What can I be
doing to get my web site updated to Web 2.0 standards ? ” . Its a much better question, in view of sites
like myspace .com , youtube .com and similar sites rocketing to the top of web rankings. The web is the
ultimate social machine, you should start making use of it in your particular business. Web 2.0 will be your
next cash cow.

Here are some basic qualities of a true web 2.0 enabled site :

• Open systems. People can become members easily and contribute and take part of the site.

• A system or method to see what is currently popular on the site. Current web 2.0 sites use what is called a “tag cloud” .

• Members (users) can quickly view what others are saying enhancing the “social” effect of the site.

• Mashup. Okay… what is that ? Mashup is a fairly new word on the web. It is defined as the use of different mediums such as RSS, blogs, videos, or more to contribute to a site and its overall social effect. Think of it more as a mixture of technologies to input and update content to the site.

• Mobile connectivity. Web 2.0 will be making extensive use of mobile technology and a true web 2.0 site will make use of this aspect. ( See Twitter.com)

As of this writing ” How Can I Make Money With Web 2.0 ? ” is a fairly open question, and is in the initial phase of being answered fully. But so goes the web…once you think you have it down, it changes. Making money with Web 2.0 will be easy for those who jump in first, and of course harder later when slots begin to fill in the various popular social and business topics. It is imperative to start now.

Summary : How Can I Make Money With Web 2.0 ? Answer : Update your site, or make a totally new one that has the “Web 2.0 effect” . Do it soon, before your particular niche becomes dominated by someone else and those who stay in the old web will be fading away soon.

Dont get left behind ! See my blog for more information : What is Web 2.0?

Optimizing your photos consists of: 1) reducing their file size which will make your web pages load faster and use less bandwidth; 2) making some small adjustments so that your photos will look much better and have more impact.

I use Photoshop throughout this article, but most other photo editing software has the same controls and the techniques I describe can be used with them. If you don’t have any editing software, there are several good online tools available.

Change Width and Height

Most modern digital cameras take photos that are much too large to use on web sites or in emails and need to be reduced in size.

For web pages, the exact size will depend on your page design, but it’s unusual to need anything over 500 pixels and often you’ll need the photo to be 200-300 pixels.

When emailing photos, I usually use a maximum of 600 pixels. This is large enough to see the photo properly, but small enough not to be not to take up a lot of space in the receivers mailbox.

To change the image dimensions, select the Image->Image size menu. In the Image Size dialog box, make sure that Constrain Proportions is selected, then, under Pixel Dimensions, enter either a new height or width. The other dimension will automatically be calculated for you so that your photo remains correctly proportioned. If you’re not sure of the final dimensions you want, enter the largest you think you’ll need; shrinking it further later is no problem, but increasing the dimension will lead to the photo becoming pixelated.

Fix Brightness and Contrast

Photos taken directly from a digital camera are usually lacking in contrast and may need the brightness adjusted if the exposure wasn’t correct.

Use the Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast menu and, as a starting point, increase the contrast to between +10 and +20. Adjust the brightness up or down as needed.

Sharpening Photos

All photos that come from a digitial camera need to be sharpened. Make sure that the image is displayed at 100% then select Filter->Sharpen->Unsharp mask. You should only use the unsharp mask filter and any of the other sharpening filters as they offer no control over the results.

For photos sized for web or email, start by setting the amount to a value between 50 and 100, the radius to 1.0 and the threshold to 0. Adjust the amount until you get a result you’re happy with but be careful not to over sharpen the image or you’ll get strange colored halos around things.

JPEG quality setting

The quality setting of your JPEG photos has a large effect on resulting file size, with reductions of 50% or more possible with the correct setting. The trade off is that JPEG throws away some of the information in your photo and taken too far your photo will start to look degraded. In Photoshop, the best way to do this is to use File/Save for Web. Make sure that the file type is set to JPEG, not GIF or PNG. You can choose to either use the pull down menu containing the values “low”, “medium”, “high”, “very high” and “maximum” or use the quality slider to set the quality from 0 to 100. The resulting file size is show below the image.

In general, a quality setting of “high”, or 60, is about as high as you want and you probably won’t see any difference in image quality with higher settings, but you will see the file size increase. You can often go as low as “medium”, or 30, and still have a good looking image a with significant reduction if file size.

If you don’t have Photoshop, use the file->Save As option of your editing software and select an output type of JPEG. You’ll be able to adjust the quality settings, although not all packages will give you a preview of what your image will look like.

Paul Markham writes on technology, internet and photographic topics. His free online digital photo optimizer can be found at http://www.webresizer.com

How to request a link

Every webmaster knows that the best way to promote their site, increase traffic, achieve better page rank and search engine placement is by acquiring quality inbound links to their site. The problem is getting them.

What is a relevant or quality link? A quality link would be defined as a link from a well written, content rich relevant site (a site that is related in content to your site) with at least some page rank. Google ranks each site listed in their search engine with a quality rank from 0 to 10. The higher the rank the higher the quality of the site according to Google. You can find out where each page that you visit ranks by downloading the free Firefox web browser with Google tool bar or if you use Internet Explorer you can download just the tool bar. I personally prefer the Firefox browser.

Note: Webmasters should use more than one browser when building web pages. Test your pages in each web browser because not all browsers display pages the same. I test each page in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera web browsers.

Finding quality back links The best way to find quality back links is to do a search. Simply type in keywords relevant to you site and let the search engine do it for you. Visit each of the top sites and find the ones that you would most like to make a link request. Once you have done this, familiarize yourself with the content of each of the sites that you have selected. The next step is to contact the webmaster with your request.

Example of a link request This is an example of an email I use as a link request. You can use this example and modify it to suit your needs.

Date: Monday April 6, 2007

To: john@whoever.com

From: pro-dezign.com

Subject: Link Request

Hi John,

My name is Daryl and I am contacting you regarding your site, whoever.com.

I am the webmaster of another web site design and development site called pro-dezign. My site is located at http://www.pro-dezign.com/.

I would like to request a link to my site in your Links to Other Internet resources section at http://www.whoever.com/resources/. My site is a comprehensive collection of beginners lessons and advanced tips for webmasters and I feel it is a valuable resource for all web developers. If you need more information I can be reached via email at daryl@pro-dezign.com.

I have also subscribed to your weekly newsletter and look forward to reading it.

Thanks

Daryl Putnam

http://www.pro-dezign.com

Good luck

Daryl is the creator of the popular web site Web Essentials and other web based educational Internet sites. He is also the author of numerous authoritative articles on web design and development topics.
To learn more about web development visit Web Essentials at http://www.pro-dezign.com/.