Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

So you’ve started a website and now have an abundance of traffic coming in. That’s great! But where are these people coming from? How are they finding your site? And most importantly, how are they behaving when they’re on your site? This is where the importance of web analytics comes into play.

Web analytics is the study of how your site’s visitors behave. This includes the tracking of important statistics such as unique vistis, pageviews, bounce rates and conversion rates. For many small sites, the last two statistics are not as important, but for large sites or online businesses, the last two play a key roll in optimizing your site’s performance.

There are two main web analytics technologies: server logfile analysis and page tagging.

Server logfile analysis involves the reading of log files on a server in order to collect analytics data. During the early days of the Internet, server logfile analysis only tracked the number of requests made by a visitor to the web server. This was commonly know as a “hit” and was logical since many sites only consisted of a single HTML file at the time. As more elements were added to web pages (images, multiple pages, etc.), server logfile analysis became impractical, as it would count every server request on one page as a “hit”.

These complications led to the creation of new web analytic metrics: pageviews and visits. A pageview was defined as a request to the web server for a single page while a visit was defined as a series of requests from a single person that ended after a certain time frame. Eventually, cookies were used to track unique user sessions due to the evolution of proxy and dynamic IP technologies, which made the old “visit” statistic fairly useless.

Some of the most popular software programs for tracking web analytics use the server logfile analysis method. These include Webalizer, Urchin, WebTrends and the open-source AWStats.

Page tagging involves the placement of code on a page in order to track analytics data. The earliest form of page tagging was the website counter. These visible, numeric counters eventually evolved into invisible snippets of JavaScript. The small JavaScript code would be placed on a page and send data back to an analytics program or company for analysis. Just like the server logfile analysis method, page tagging also involves assigning cookies to each user in order to determine unique visitors.

One of the most popular page tagging analytics programs is Google Analytics. The service is free to anyone with a Google account and is the standard in web analytics for any person or company on a tight budget.

So why should you worry about web analytics? So you can increase the performance of your website of course!

Why do people leave your site? A “bounce” is when a visitor leaves your website after only viewing one page. Many analytics programs have a statistic called bounce rate, which measures the percentage of people that commit a “bounce”. This metric allows you to see which pages on your site are performing poorly and then make improvements or adjustments to that page. This statistic is extremely important for e-commerce sites or sites that would like a visitor to commit a certain action.

How much time do people spend on your site? This is known as session duration and is important to know because it allows you to see what pages on your site have content that is compelling your visitors to stay. It will also let you know what pages need additional content added in order for visitors to stay on them longer.

Hosting services limited to the Web:

* Free web hosting service: is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported web hosting, and is often limited when compared to paid hosting.
* Shared web hosting service: one’s Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.
* Reseller web hosting: allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a provider. Resellers’ accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server.
* Virtual Dedicated Server: dividing a server into virtual servers, where each user feels like they’re on their own dedicated server, but they’re actually sharing a server with many other users. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. This is also known as a virtual private server or VPS.
* Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. Another type of Dedicated hosting is Self-Managed or Unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for Dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the box, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated box.
* Managed hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server but is not allowed full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
* Colocation web hosting service: similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of the web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client’s machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colo, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.
* Clustered hosting: having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered Servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution.
* Grid hosting : this form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
* Home server: usually a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PC’s.

Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user’s connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.

Some specific types of hosting provided by web host service providers:

* File hosting service: hosts files, not web pages
* Image hosting service
* Video hosting service
* Blog hosting service
* One-click hosting
* Shopping cart software

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.

First, Google News is not the major player for news releases, it’s Yahoo News that has the greater market share of news search. In some cases it does make sense to have two variations of a news release. One version is distributed via a news wire service and another version is posted to the client’s online newsroom. Content related to the release can be created for pitching, or a social media news release might be appropriate as well as alternative information formats for social news.

There are a lot of applications for variations of the same message as far as a news release. As far as there being a conflict between what’s appropriate for journalists and what’s meaningful for news search engines, you have to focus on the audience not on the mechanism for distribution. Don’t compromise your message just for search engines.

The web service for fetching contacts from MSN messenger / Windows Live Messenger has been hit by a series of problems over the past few days. First I hit the bandwidth limit for the account used to host the service. Next, the server used was hit by a DDoS attack. Finally after all that was sorted out the bandwidth limit again caused problems.

Hopefully everything should now be back to normal and the service will be stable.

As always, if you do have any problems, my contact details are available under the ‘About’ tab at the top of the page.

Problem

You need PHP’s built-in ftp functions for the ultra-cool script you are writing, but your service
provider does not have PHP compiled with the –enable-ftp option.

Solution

If you have a shell account on a system with the same operating system as your web server, grab the
PHP source tarball and build using:

–with-apxs –enable-ftp=shared
You can check which flags your provider used by putting a phpinfo() call in a script on your server.

<?phpinfo()?>
Once compiled, you will find a “modules/ftp.so” file which you can copy to your web server and
enable either by putting:

extension=ftp.so
in your php.ini file or by adding this to the top of your script:

<?php dl(”ftp.so”) ?>

If all this sounds too complicated, you have the option of going with a third party service that handles financial transactions for you. To complete a sale, customers are usually redirected to the web site of the payment service where they provide their credit card details. Some of these services have setup fees and charge a commission on each sale, while others (like PayPal) are free to set up and simply take a percentage of each sale.

One of the fastest growing sectors of the Internet is eCommerce. People are becoming accustomed to buying things from Internet store fronts and every year the volume and value of sales increases substantially. If you would like to open up your own eCommerce web site here are a few basics to get you started.

The first thing you need, obviously, is a product or service that you can sell. If you already have a brick and mortar store you can offer the same items for sale on a web site. The number of products that you sell is a big factor in the type of hosting package you need. If you have let’s say less than 20 items, you could set the whole thing up on a very small hosting account. Listing hundreds of products is a different story – you will probably need more disk space, more bandwidth, and more features such as databases and a secure connection for accepting payments.

Since the most important part of eCommerce is getting paid, let’s look at the various payment options available. There are two basic options – collecting payment information directly or hiring a third-party service to process credit cards.

If you have a large and complex website that receives a lot of traffic you may find that shared hosting is limiting your growth and the capacity to serve your customers. It may be time to move on to dedicated hosting. Shared hosting involves placing many websites on one server. All sites share the resources of that server such as disk space and bandwidth. Dedicated hosting means that instead of renting space on a server, you rent an entire server for your sole use.

Dedicated web hosting is much more expensive than shared hosting because the cost of operating the server is not divided between various accounts. The advantages of dedicated hosting include the freedom to use the resources of the server as you please. There are many different dedicated hosting packages to choose from. Their prices depend largely on the physical setup of the server computer. Just as with your home computer, faster processors and bigger hard drives cost more.

Another factor influencing the price is whether or not the server is managed. Keeping a server running in top condition can be a time consuming task. A managed hosting service offers the support and expertise to maintain your server and to perform routine maintenance such as software upgrades. This kind of service can be a viable alternative to hiring your own staff to look after your servers. Managed hosting, however, can be a lot more expensive than unmanaged hosting.  Whether the price is justified depends on the complexity of your website and whether or not you already have people on staff who can look after the day to day operations of a server.

Unmanaged hosting, despite its name, does not really leave you entirely to your own devices. Most hosting companies will offer a certain level of support for all their dedicated hosting packages. This support of course includes hardware maintenance for things like hard drive failure and extra technical support may be available if you need help with configuration or software installation. You will probably have to pay for this extra support but hiring a tech on an hourly basis from time to time may be cheaper than going with a full managed package.

If you are considering unmanaged hosting check to see how much control you can have over the server hardware. If your server becomes hopelessly locked you should be able to perform a re-boot or to expect someone to do it for you with a minimum of delay.

As with any hosting package the value of a dedicated hosting service depends on the reliability and integrity of the hosting company. If your website has grown to the point where you need dedicated hosting you need a hosting provider that you can rely on to keep your site online as much as possible.

Whether you choose managed or unmanaged hosting depends on the technical requirements of your site and the ability of you or your staff to manage a server so that it is running at peak efficiency. If you prefer to have the re-assurance of having highly trained professionals looking after the server, go with managed hosting. If you or your staff can handle most of the maintenance chores, you would be better off with an unmanaged server.

Those who tap into their raw talents and passion get ahead further and faster in the ever-expanding Web world. It seems obvious, but most web types get drawn toward immediate, short-term opportunities and wander far from their true calling.

Enter specialization

Renew your drive by specializing in an area where you naturally thrive.

When you focus on one particular area or niche, your knowledge and experience increase rapidly. Within a short timeframe, you get in tune with leading technologies and trends, become established in your industry and market, start to earn top dollar and ultimately gain full control of a satisfying career.

Conversely, if you attempt to be all things to all people, you’ll produce mediocre work and attract comparable clients.

Such was the case with a web-savvy individual who recently completed a series of projects for my business. During the 1990s, he had his hands in programming, design, online marketing and copywriting. “I was attracting the worst customers,” he said. When he wasn’t haggling over price, he was dealing with unhappy clients demanding freebies. He finally decided to stick with what he knows best: programming. Now he works less, makes more and gets to pick his clients.

Not too long ago, another programmer who’s been developing websites for 10 years asked me: “Should I go to school so I can also provide clients designs?”

Rather than broaden his work scope, I suggested he narrow it. A great programmer can’t necessarily become a great designer and vice-verse. It comes down to recognizing what you’re good at and leveraging that talent. After all, it’s no coincidence the very best websites are collectively created by professional web copywriters, designers, programmers and other specialists.

On the design front, a Vancouver-based design team I’ve worked with began researching the food industry’s web needs, and decided to pursue that niche. It didn’t take long to land some notable restaurants and become the ‘go to’ web design firm in that industry. They discovered they have a knack for it, wholeheartedly threw themselves into it and clients now knock on their door.

Unleash your true passion and talent

How do you determine your niche? Consider what you love doing and what you do well. Hopefully the two overlap. Then determine your market; who could you best serve? Finally, fine-tune how you position yourself by listening closely to common customer complaints and problems. If there’s a pain your competition or the industry isn’t paying attention to, you’re sitting on a goldmine.

Some tips on determining your potential expertise and niche:

1) Write down what, how, when and where you are going to offer your service.

2) Describe your strengths (how and why you’re better than the competition).

3) Acknowledge your weaknesses (things you need to improve or delegate).

4) Develop a profile of your ideal client (age, sex, needs, spending habits, region and so on).

The sharper your focus in a particular segment of your industry, the quicker you can gain expertise or even authority status in your field. And that’s when the best clients come to you; the one’s who value your work and pay accordingly.