Posts Tagged ‘purpose’

What is a Link Farm?

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

A linkfarm is any type of website in which there is no real content, service, or purpose, but rather just a load of non-related reciprical links to other places. Generally linkfarms are built to increase search engine rankings and turn a profit, which means they’re also generally littered with advertisements from affiliate programs the site owner has partnered with.

Linkfarms are not to be confused with Linkdumps, which are simply places people dump all kinds of links to content on various websites.

WordPress: Network Transfer Speeds in Use

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

To determine why the bandwidth of the connection is important to a high-traffic site, let’s look at the math.

Assume your site receives 100,000 hits in a day. For the purpose of this computation, we will say that one “hit” is a single data transfer, whether that is a single file or a whole page and its supporting files. Averaged out, 100,000 hits in a day equates to 1.16 hits every second.

Also assume the average hit generates 160KB of transferred data; HTML, images, CSS, downloaded files, etc. Every second, your site is transferring 190KB of data (160KB/hit * 1.16 hits/s). The total, 190KB/s, equals about 1.5Mb/s of sustained throughput. (Note that KB = Kilobytes and Mb = Megabits. Most network speeds are rated in bits per second, whereas file sizes are measured in bytes.) Many network providers cap the transfer rate of a site to about this level; some higher, some lower. However, only if each user visits in a nice succession will this steady rate be maintained.

Usually, more than one user at a time will access your site. Sometimes during the day, nobody might access your site at all. If 10 people hit the site simultaneously per second, and that hit rate is sustained over a lengthy period — not uncommon for a high-traffic site — then you would need a 15Mb/s connection just to keep up with the simultaneous connections.

If your network adapters maximum theoretical speed is only 10Mb/s, your demand has already exceeded your capacity. WordPress had nothing to do with it.

It is not necessary to receive 100,000 hits to cause this problem. Sustaining this rate of connectivity for a mere hour generates only 36,000 hits. If visitors concentrate their access to a certain time of day (or an automated comment spam script attempts to access your system multiple concurrent times while posting comments) then you could be left with many dropped requests.

A 100Mb/s connection could handle up to 70 simultaneous connections at the same rate of download, but it is not likely that your network provider would offer the bandwidth that could fully use this speed without paying a premium. This is generally not something you can get with current shared hosting plans.

Does Your Website Have a Purpose?

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Web sites are all the rage today, it seems more companies and professionals have decided they need them and have put plans in place to build a site for their business. Unfortunately outside of the basic notion that a site is needed most businesses don’t plan out what a web site will do for their business. It becomes a situation where you want one because “they” have one, but unfortunately without purpose and planning neither your site nor theirs will be successful.

A statistic regarding web sites is that over 1,500 new web sites are launched every day somewhere. With that many new sites being created every day to make yours stand out, much less provide value it has to have purpose. Here are four steps to creating a stronger web site for your business.

Know your Purpose

Is your web site designed to sell products online, build your prospect list or serve as a vehicle for information fulfillment? It could be one of these things it could be a combination of them. However even if it has more then one purpose then answer the question what is the primary purpose of the site? Rank your priorities in order of importance from first to last. Once you know the purpose you can focus the site on achieving this goal.

Build Your Site Around the Primary Purpose

Build your web site around your purpose. For example, if you goal is to build a site that grows your prospect list then you need to focus on creating ways to get visitors to give you their contact information. You could do this through an online newsletter, free reports, giving away products or consultations and other methods of giving value to a user that will trade that value for their contact information. Your site navigation, color, overall design, copy and organization needs to be built around achieving this goal.

Offer value

If your web site is a basic brochure about you or your company that ranks very low in terms of providing true value to a visitor. If you can offer articles, free reports, fresh updated content, checklists, links to other sources, a current blog on your expertise, etc. you give people a reason to explore the site and share it with others. You also create a reason for the visitor to come back to your site and expose them to your message and marketing again. If you don’t offer value and instead just have a site all about you and your company you may get visitors once, but soon your traffic will start declining. You want to create a site that is vibrant, alive and a destination for visitors, one that they will willingly come back to. The key to getting this interaction with your visitors is value, offer it and they will come.

Measure progress

Once you have something of value to offer now you need to measure how successful it is. However measurement of useless information isn’t going to help. Figure out what really constitutes a useful measurement. Is it sales, visitors or names for your list? Whatever “it” is be sure you not only know and measure it, but have the goal in mind of what this measurement needs to be to constitute success. There are several great management tools that can give you web statistics on your site, but without the right stats and goals that information is about as useful as ice in Antarctica.

It is too easy to build a web site today, so easy that most become a failure. Don’t let your site become a failure because of lack of purpose and planning. Know why you need it and what the goals and plans are to achieve the “why” then like any good plan execute it and measure your progress. If you apply this strategy your site and business will be much more successful.

Safely Editing The Registry

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Windows XP has a vast number of configuration dialogs, but some adjustments can be performed only by directly editing the Registry. Frequently, tips involving Registry tweaks include stern warnings to back up the Registry before making any change. The Windows XP Backup applet can back up the Registry along with other elements of the System State, but the resulting data file can occupy hundreds of megabytes. You’re better off saving a system restore point each time you’re about to edit the Registry. Better still, you can use Regedit to back up only the Registry keys that will be changed.

Click on Start | Run and enter Regedit to launch the Registry editor. To back up an individual key you plan to edit, navigate to the key and right-click on it. Choose Export from the menu, and save the key to a REG file. Open the REG file in Notepad and insert a few comment lines that describe the source and purpose of the tweak. (To create a comment line, simply put a semicolon at the start of the line.)

Now go ahead and make all the changes to Registry keys and values specified by the tip you’re applying. Any time you add a new key or value, make a note of it with another comment line in the REG file. When you’re done, save the REG file and close Notepad.

If later you want to undo this Registry tweak, just double-click on the REG file and confirm that you want to add it to the Registry. This will restore any deleted keys or values and will restore the original data for any values whose data was changed. Note that this will not remove new keys or values that were added; that’s why you need to make comments about such changes.

Right-click on the REG file and choose Edit, which will open it in Notepad. Check for comments about keys or values that were added, and if you find any, use Regedit to delete them. You can delete the REG file itself once you’ve completed this process