Another way the client might have sent them traditionally would be on a CD or usb drive to send over lots of images.

Drop box changes all that and it is so simple and intuitive to use that anybody can use it once it’s installed.

Drop box allows you to share a folder (and the files within) on your computer with anybody in the world.

Basically you sign up to drop box and download the drop box application to your computer. Once it’s installed, it creates a drop box folder under your user folder. It integrates with windows explorer so you can share folders with other through bringing up the context menu on a right click.

To share a folder is simple, right click it, go to drop box menu item and click share this folder. This will bring you straight to the drop box website where you can share the folder by entering the email address of the person you wish to share it with. Simples.

I’ve used it so far to share files with my accountant, clients, co-workers, family and friends.

Dropbox is here to stay and the best part is, it’s free (well it’s free up to a folder size of 2GB and you get 250mb more for each additional person you recommend to the system, dropbox’s viral marketing mechanism).

• Every page is a landing page, so it should be branded and formatted consistently
• Make sure the brand targets the intended audience (e.g. don’t use shocking pink for corporate site)
• Images such as jpegs etc. should be crisp, nothing gives off a sense of amateurism more than poor image quality
• Avoid Animation / Flash, not only is it distracting, it does not work on iphones, if you have to animate maybe you could try jquery image transitions. If you absolutely need flash, limit it to specific sections of the site.
• Readable Font / Width / Contrast: it’s important that your pages are readable, your fon therefore should be legible, paragraph widths should not be too wide and the contrast should be good (black on white)
• Make use of Whitespace – don’t be afraid of space, whitespace gives a sense of order, try align elements together to an invisible grid where possible
• Easy to navigate (nothing should be more than 2-3 clicks away)
• Good content organisation – content should tell story, beginning middle and end and put your key message at the top for speed readers.
• Put contact details on every page – a basic oversight, users can enter your site from a any page, make sure contact details are there, you might only have 1 shot for the business.
• Highlight your call to action (use colour such as red for apply buttons etc.)
• Use a subtle background (backgrounds can make a site but keep them subtle)
• Make sure the site works on various screen sizes, try on large and small screens, avoid horizontal scrolling at all costs
• Make sure your site works on ALL major browsers, make sure that your site works on the important browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome)

This is just a snapshot of the kind of things that should be considered when designing a website. Best of luck.

If you want to work with an Irish company then I have great time for Blacknight.  But if you’re looking for a shared hosting solution that is scalable, fast and has a well thought out hosting control panel then I would definitely recommend TSO’s clustered hosting package at £19.99 per month (or £199.99 per year).

The advantages:

1. Shared hosting price, but when you need performance it can handle significant traffic.
2. The control panel allows you to create individual hosting accounts for each website you have, this is advantageous because when you’re updating a site through FTP there is no danger of overwriting other files. It also allows you to give out ftp details to clients without any fiddly configuration.
3. A temorary domain is created for each website.  This has been excellent for me, some scripts rely of absolute paths and on some shared hosting accounts the root path is a few directories down from the domain, with tso, your temporary domain root is the same as if the site were live.
4. Automatic database back ups.  This for me is really handy. If you create a database, TSO will automatically dump backups into a backup folder for you.
5. You can resell hosting.  For webmasters this is a great feature allowing you to create sub accounts off the main hosting account.

There’s also a nifty affiliate programme too whereby anyone with a website can add a banner such as the following and earn a commission, like so

1. Get a Clear Picture: The very first thing anyone performing SEO should do is get a clear picture of the current situation. The best way to do this is by installing Google Analytics.  After running Analytics for a month you will see some patterns emerging and you can determine how much traffic is coming from search engines.
2. Filter out seasonal trends: There’s no way you can identify gains and losses unless you figure out the seasonal trends.  You can use a tool such as google trends to do this if you do not have your own data.
3. Find Opportunities: As with any marketing exercise you need to determine if there is a market.  You need to identify the key phrases that people will use to find your site, but there’s no point in doing this if there is huge competition.  Find the best keyphrase volume you can that has poor returns on the search results page and target that.
4. Apply Research Effectively: Once you have the keyphrases identified using tip 3, apply the keyphrase to your site naturally in key areas such as titles, headings, links and body text. Don’t over do it. Find out how many times your competitors use it. As always it is no harm to build links to pages.
5. Measure Results: Using analytics, measure how many hits these keyphrases are generating for you as a percentage against your search engine results position. Tweak your page slightly each month to see if it positively or negatively affects your position. Link building may also affect your position positive and should be an ongoing task.

That’s it.  The basics are simple enough, do them right and you can’t go too far wrong.  It’s that final 20% that’s the most painstaking and most difficult.  Keep at it and you will get ahead of most of your competitors within a realistic time frame.

This is a very simple thing to do.

Instead of:

<input name="submit" type="submit" value="submit" />

insert:

<input alt="Search Button" src="image.jpg" type="image" />

Here is an example of such a form:

<form method="POST">
<input name="searchtext" type="text" />
<input alt="Search Button" src="search.jpg" type="image" />
</form>

For example, if you are a company that sells anything to do with weddings be it flowers, dresses, cakes, invitations etc. and your business is located in Waterford, Ireland, you can target all the females within 50 miles of Waterford, who are engaged or in a relationship and get them to join your company facebook page.

If you are selling GAA merchandise you could target all the people from a certain towns and who have an interest in GAA.

In fact most businesses can get access to their target market very easily through a few simple clicks.  What’s more Facebook approximates how many people you will potentially advertise to based on your criteria selection. You can also target by gender, age and interests etc., you can even target by work place (if users have that set, unfortunately most users don’t set that field).

You can also get a bit more advanced with it and only advertise to friends of people who are currently subscribed to your page, or exclude people who are in certain groups or pages already.

The beauty of it is that once you have someone on your page you can repeat advertise to them for free and what’s more their friends will see your messages via page updates on their profile. This is the beauty of Facebook advertising i.e. your money doesn’t stop working for you once the user clicks like on your ad.

Google ads has it’s own advantages, generally when people search online they search in surf mode, comparison mode and buy mode through the use of keywords and phrases.  You can get people coming to your site looking to purchase your goods if you get the key phrases right and not only will your ads appear on Google’s search results page it will also appear on other webmasters sites whose page topic matches the advert in terms of keywords and phrases.

The problem with Google is that you cannot focus in as specifically as with faceboook and you only get 1 shot at selling something based on the money you spend on a click.

So depending on your business Facebook could be an ideal way to capture your market and you can grow from there.

How could I survive without the trusted Google Keyword Tool?

Thankfully, when I logged in today it seemed to be back to normal with an improved interface.

For anyone that doesn’t know at this stage, the Google Keyword tool is an indispensable application for anyone who wishes to do keyword research on-line.  The tool allows you to put in a keyword or phrase and it will show you how many people search for this word/phrase and variants of it worldwide and also locally (i.e. your target area) for the previous month.  It also gives an indication of how many advertisers are paying for advertising off the back of these key words and phrases.

This information is critical to anyone who wishes to promote their site online.

From a Search Engine Optimisation point of view it facilitates decision making on what names to give pages on a website, what keywords and phrases to put on them etc.  I mean there’s no point in creating a page with a certain title if nobody is ever going to search for it.

It now also asks for a website address as well as a key phrase, which can be very handy to see what your competitors are up to as regards keyword targeting.

It is an invaluable tool for anyone who takes their on-line presences seriously.

Note: Page Rank is not the same as your position on the search engine results page (SERP).

Page rank is calculated based on how many other web pages link back to your website, these link backs are considered votes, however not all of these votes are of the same worth.  A link back page that is already considered important and has a good page rank is worth more than a page with a low page rank.  Also, a page with lots of links is worth less to you than a page with only a few links… therefore the link backs that are most sought after are from pages with a high page rank and low link count. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Page Rank.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Sites with good page rank generally do better on the search results page than pages with poor page rank, however, if the content on the page is not right then it won’t make a difference how much page rank your site has. Also, the links that gave you the page rank should make good use of keywords in those links to let Google know what your page is about.

You can check a page’s Page Rank by installing the Google toolbar on your browser and customise it to show Page rank, this shows a little progress bar icon on the toolbar showing the current page’s page rank. You could also use a site such as PR Checker to check a page’s page rank.

UTD Google Page Rank on The Google Toolbar

If you are using WordPress to create a website often you want a static home page on the site and not have it default to the latest blog entry.  To do this you must log in to the admin area, go to setttings->reading and set a static page as your homepage.

Often times you will want to create this page and title it ‘Home’ however on most themes if you do this you will end up with two home pages.

To get around this, without editing the theme, you need to create a dummy static page that is hidden from public view.  Once this static page is created you must go back and edit the newly created home page and set its parent to this new dummy page.

And that should be it!

If you want to have your blogs appear on another page, simply create another static page (with no content) and again go to settings->reading and set the posts page to this page. You must do this before you make the dummy page private, however.

Debugging wasn’t working, there were no syntax errors, I was stumped. So I started breaking down the code into little modules to test.

I tried printing out a variable that wasn’t initialised and low and behold the dreaded error appeared.

echo $test;

If I initialised the variable first there were no problems i.e.

$test  =  “Hello, World!”;
echo $test;

So, basically, the problem was that php was spitting out some debug warnings, however the shared hosting account was interpreting this as an internal error and hence the error message on the client browser.

An ideal fix would be to get rid of all warnings from the code, however, a quick workaround was to simply turn off error reporting altogether using the following line of code:

error_reporting(0);

Hope this helps someone out there!