Affordable Web Design

So there are so many Web Design Agencies, Web Development Agencies, and Design Agencies that offer Web Design, it can be difficult to know which was to turn.

Bare in mind that I am a Web Designer and work for a Web Design Agency, so I do of course believe Acknowledged Internet Solutions offers a great service at a extremely competitive price. However for the purposes of this article I will attempt top be neutral and offer some useful observations.

So how to choose the right agency or individual for you.

First thing to say is to ’shop around’ as you would with your car insurance and anything else. Don’t just go for the first company you find, there are many of us out there who offer a variety of services at a variety of prices.

It is often the case that a prospective customer will simple choose a web designer in their area, or the cheapest, or the one with flashiest home site.

First of all contact with your Web Design company will generally be conducted via email, phone and conventional mail so why choose the one in the same town if the agency the other side of the country suits your need better.

Secondly the thing you need to understand is with Web Design ‘what you pay for is what you will get’ in other words if you pick the cheapest your likely to get the poorest service or simply from a templated design they have used before. Good Agencies need to be competitive in their pricing particularly in the small to medium size business market, many offer set packages so you can see exactly what you get for what price.

A good rule of thumb for a static web site (no animation or online sales) is £70 per full size page this may or may not include you hosting/domain services, if the quotation you receive is considerably under this something is probably wrong.

You may also find it useful to contact a web quotation site, who will offer your project out to several Web Design Agencies for tender, saving you time surfing through Google’s multitude of Web Design advertisers for your perfect match.

To conclude remember to ’shop around’, generally good Web Site Design is affordable, but not cheap, make sure you look at the Agencies portfolio, and what aftercare they offer, some will just ‘hit and run’.

Good Luck !!

Ashley Smith Acknowledged Internet Solutions www.acknowledgedsolutions.co.uk

Affordable Web Design / Ashley Smith

www.acknowledgedsolutions.co.uk

How the Internet actually works

To most people, the Internet is the place to which everyone plugs in their computer and views webpages and sends e-mail. That’s a very human-centric viewpoint, but if we’re to truly understand the Internet, we need to be more exact:

The Internet is THE large global computer network that people connect to by-default, by virtue of the fact that it’s the largest. And, like any computer network, there are conventions that allow it to work.

This is all it is really – a very big computer network. However, this article will go beyond explaining just the Internet, as it will also explain the ‘World Wide Web’. Most people don’t know the difference between the Internet and Web, but really it’s quite simple: the Internet is a computer network, and the Web is a system of publishing (of websites) for it.

Computer networks

And, what’s a computer network? A computer network is just two or more of computers connected together such that they may send messages between each other. On larger networks computers are connected together in complex arrangements, where some intermediary computers have more than one connection to other computers, such that every computer can reach any other computer in the network via paths through some of those intermediary computers.

Computers aren’t the only things that use networks – the rail network is very similar to computer networks, just that transports people instead of information.
Trains operate on a certain kind of track – such a convention is needed, because otherwise the network could not effectively work. Computers in a network have conventions too, and we usually call these conventions ‘protocols’.

There are many kinds of popular computer network today. The most conventional by far is the so-called ‘Ethernet’ network that physically connects computers together in homes, schools and offices. However, WiFi is becoming increasingly popular for connecting together devices so that cables aren’t required at all.

Connecting to the Internet

When you connect to the Internet, you’re using networking technology, but things are usually a lot muddier. There’s an apt phrase, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” because neither was the Internet. The only reason the Internet could spring up so quickly and cheaply for people was because another kind of network already existed throughout the world – the phone network!

The pre-existence of the phone network provided a medium for ordinary computers in ordinary people’s homes to be connected onto the great high-tech military and research network that had been developed in years before. It just required some technological mastery in the form of ‘modems’. Modems allow phone lines to be turned into a mini-network connection between a home and a special company (an ‘ISP’) that already is connected up to the Internet. It’s like a bridge joining up the road networks on an island and the mainland – the road networks become one, due to a special kind of connection between them.

The Internet

The really amazing about the Internet isn’t the technology. We’ve actually had big Internet-like computer networks before, and ‘The Internet’ existed long before normal people knew the term. The amazing thing is that such a massive computer network could exist without being built or governed in any kind of seriously organised way. The only organisation that really has a grip on the core computer network of the Internet is a US-government-backed non-profit company called ‘ICANN’, but nobody could claim they ‘controlled’ the Internet, as their mandate and activities are extremely limited.

What I have described so far is probably not the Internet as you or most would see it. It’s unlikely you see the Internet as a democratic and uniform computer network, and to an extent, it isn’t. The reason for this is that I have only explained the foundations of the system so far, and this foundation operates below the level you’d normally be aware of. On the lowest level you would be aware of, the Internet is actually more like a situation between a getter and a giver – there’s something you want from the Internet, so you connect up and get it. Even when you send an e-mail, you’re getting the service of e-mail delivery.

Being a computer network, the Internet consists of computers – however, not all computers on the Internet are created equal. Some computers are there to provide services, and some are there to consume those services. We call the providing computers ’servers’ and the consuming computers ‘clients’. At the theoretical level, the computers have equal status on the network, but servers are much better connected than clients and are generally put in place by companies providing some kind of commercial service. You don’t pay to view a web site, but somebody pays for the server the website is located on – usually the owner of the web site pays a ‘web host’ (a commercial company who owns the server).

Making contact

I’ve established how the Internet is a computer network: now I will explain how two computers that could be on other sides of the world can send messages to each other.

Imagine you were writing a letter and needed to send it to someone. If you just wrote a name on the front, it would never arrive, unless perhaps you lived in a small village. A name is rarely specific enough. Therefore, as we all know, we use addresses to contact someone, often using: the name, the house number, the road name, the town name, the county name, and sometimes, the country name. This allows sending of messages on another kind of network – the postal network. When you send a letter, typically it will be passed between postal sorting offices starting from the sorting office nearest to the origin, then up to increasingly large sorting offices until it’s handled by a sorting office covering regions for both the origin and the destination, then down to increasingly small sorting offices until it’s at the sorting office nearest the destination – and then it’s delivered.

In our postal situation, there are two key factors at work – a form of addressing that ‘homes in’ on the destination location, and a form of message delivery that ‘broadens out’ then ‘narrows in’. Computers are more organised, but they actually effectively do exactly the same thing.

Each computer on the Internet is given an address (‘IP address’), and this ‘homes in’ on their location. The ‘homing in’ isn’t done strictly geographically, rather in terms of the connection-relationship between the smaller computer networks within the Internet. For the real world, being a neighbour is geographical, but on a computer network, being a neighbour is having a direct network connection.

Like the postal network with its sorting offices, computer networks usually have connections to a few other computer networks. A computer network will send the message to a larger network (a network that is more likely to recognise at least some part of the address). This process of ‘broadening out’ continues until the message is being handled by a network that is ‘over’ the destination, and then the ‘narrowing in’ process will occur.

An example ‘IP address’ is ‘69.60.115.116′. They are just series of digit groups where the digit groups towards the right are increasingly local. Each digit group is a number between 0 and 255. This is just an approximation, but you could think of this address meaning:

    * A computer 116
    * in a small neighbourhood 115
    * in a larger neighbourhood 60
    * controlled by an ISP 69
    * (on the Internet)

The neighbourhoods, the ISP, and the Internet, could all be consider computer networks in their own right. Therefore, for a message to the same ‘larger neighbourhood’, the message would be passed up towards one of those intermediary computers in the larger neighbourhood and then back down to the correct smaller neighbourhood, and then to the correct computer.

Getting the message across

Now that we are able to deliver messages the hard part is over. All we need to do is to put stuff in our messages in a certain way such that it makes sense at the other end.

Letters we send in the real world always have stuff in common – they are written on paper and in a language understood by both sender and receiver. I’ve discussed before how conventions are important for networks to operate, and this important concept remains true for our messages.

All parts of the Internet transfer messages written in things called ‘Packets’, and the layout and contents of those ‘packets’ are done according to the ‘Internet Protocol’ (IP). You don’t need to know these terms, but you do need to know that these simple messages are error prone and simplistic.
You can think of ‘packets’ as the Internet equivalence of a sentence – for an ongoing conversation, there would be many of them sent in both directions of communication.

Reliable message transfer on the Internet is done via ‘TCP’. IP is fundamental to the Internet, but TCP is not – there are in fact other ‘protocols’ that may be used that I won’t be covering.

Names, not numbers

When most people think of an ‘Internet Address’ they think of something like ‘www.ocportal.com’ rather than ‘69.60.115.116′. People relate to names with greater ease than numbers, so special computers that humans need to access are typically assigned names (‘domain names’) using a system known as ‘DNS’ (the ‘domain name system’).

All Internet communication is still done using IP addresses
(recall ‘69.60.115.116′ is an IP address). The ‘domain names’ are therefore translated to IP addresses behind the scenes, before the main communication starts.

At the core, the process of looking up a domain name is quite simple – it’s a process of ‘homing in’ by moving leftwards through the name, following an interrogation path. This is best shown by example – ‘www.ocportal.com’ would be looked up as follows:

    * Every computer on the Internet knows how to contact the computers (the ‘root’ ‘DNS servers’) responsible for things like ‘com’, ‘org’, ‘net’ and ‘uk’. There are a few such computers and one is contacted at random. The DNS server computer is asked if they know ‘www.ocportal.com’ and will respond saying they know which server computer is responsible for ‘com’.
    * The ‘com’ server computer is asked it knows ‘www.ocportal.com’ and will respond saying they know which server computer is responsible for ‘ocportal.com’.
    * ‘The ‘ocportal.com’ server computer is asked if it knows ‘www.ocportal.com’ and will respond saying that it knows the corresponding server computer to be ‘69.60.115.116′.

Note that there is a difference between a server computer being ‘responsible’ for a domain name and the domain name actually corresponding to that computer. For example, the ‘ocportal.com’ responsible DNS server might not necessarily be the same server as ‘ocportal.com’ itself.

Meaningful dialogue

I’ve fully covered the essence of how messages are delivered over the Internet, but so far these messages are completely raw and meaningless. Before meaningful communication can occur we need to layer on yet another protocol (recall IP and TCP protocols are already layered over our physical network).

There are many protocols that work on the communications already established, including:

    * HTTP – for web pages, typically read in web browser software
    * POP3 – for reading e-mail
    * SMTP – for sending e-mail

I’m not going to go into the details of any of these protocols because it’s not really relevant unless you actually need to know it.

The information transferred via a protocol is usually a request for something, or a response for something requested. For example, with HTTP, a client computer requests a certain web page from a server via HTTP and then the web server, basically, responds with the file embedded within HTTP.

Each of these protocols operates on more or more so-called ‘ports’, and it is these ‘ports’ that allow the computers to know which protocol to use. For example, a web server (special computer software running on a server computer that serves out web pages) uses a port of number ‘80′, and hence when the server receives messages on that port it passes them to the web server software which naturally knows that they’ll be written in HTTP.

The World Wide Web

I’ve explained how the Internet works, but not yet how the web works. The web is the publishing system that most people don’t realise is distinguishable from the Internet itself.
The Internet uses IP addresses (often found via domain names) to identify resources, but the web has to have something more sophisticated as it would be silly if every single page on the Internet had to have it’s own ‘domain name’. The web uses ‘URLs’ (uniform resource locators), and I’m sure you know about these as nowadays they are printed all over the place in the real world.

A typical URL looks like this: :///

For example: http://www.ocportal.com/index.php

HTTP is the core protocol for the web. This is why URLs usually start ‘http://’.

Typically the ‘resource identifier’ is simply a file on the server computer. For example, ‘mywebsite/index.html’ would be a file on the server computer of the same path, stored underneath a special directory.

We now have three kinds of ‘Internet Address’, in order of increasing sophistication:

    * IP addresses
    * Domain names
    * URLs

If a URL were put into web browser software by a prospective reader then the web browser would send out an appropriate request (usually, with the HTTP protocol being appropriate) to the server computer identified by the URL. The server computer would then respond and typically the web browser would end up with a file. The web browser would then interpret the file for display, much like any software running on a computer would interpret the files it understands.

An ‘HTML’ file is the kind of file that defines a web page. It’s written in plain text, and basically mixes information showing show to display a document along with the document itself.

I’ve explained how typical web pages are just files on the disk of a server computer. Increasingly, things are slightly less direct. When you visit something like eBay you aren’t just reading files. You’re actually interacting with computer software, and the web pages you receive are generated anew by that software every time a request is made. These kinds of systems are known as ‘web applications’ and are becoming increasingly prevalent.

How the Internet actually works / Chris Graham

Chris Graham is Managing Director of ocProducts (http://ocproducts.com/), a company specialising in advanced website solutions, via the ocPortal website engine (http://ocportal.com/). ocPortal allows the creation of interactive and dynamic websites with great ease; advanced websites that anybody can create, run and manage.

Fake Pagerank Checker

We try to rank things in order to manage the complex universe around us. We try to get that 4.0 GPA, the highest ranked university and want our favorite team to rank best. The Page Rank designed by Larry Page of Google is a rank assigned to each of the pages that are indexed by Google. This page rank is calculated(http://www.sem-faq.com/improve-google-pagerank.php) using the “Backrub algorithm” and is often considered to be a proxy for Google’s search ordering. In other words, a high Page Rank(PR) page will rank higher on Google(all other factors being the same).

There is a vast and growing market for text links. A lot of highly ranked sites think of outgoing links as a way of monetizing their site (supply) and businesses that need visitor/search engine exposure buy the links(demand). While the purists may look askance at such a market, supply and demand is what the market makes.
Even the Garden of Eden had a serpent, and one would be surprised if all was as it seems in the text link market. Indeed scams abound, ranging from “no follow tags”, pages removed from navigation, or included in robots.txt file. But, there is a scam that gets almost everyone, except the truly paranoid. This scam is “Fake page ranks” or URL jacking.

The mechanics for spoofing the page is extremely simple and the results are awe inspiring. Using this technique, one can get any page rank they wanted…even PR-10. So, the burning question of how to do it? All one has to do is to obtain a throw away domain and do a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file on it to a page with PR. You want PR-5 ( http://www/ixs.net) to make it more credible, or with your boundless ambition, you want a PR-10 page…the choice is yours. Let’s assume that you chose the latter…and you can point to Google.com itself and inherit it’s PR-10. After Google PR update happens, you can detect Google bot and selectively forward it to Google.com itself. Everyone else gets to see your site and its fancy PR-10 rank.

So far so good. You have done nothing illegal, immoral, unethical etc. Things can go downhill from here though, if you attempt to sell the domain, or sell links from this website based on it’s PR—sheer fraud, in other words.
The webmaster who plays with 301 redirects is actually losing out in the end. His rankings will not rank higher…in fact the site won’t even get cached by Google.
For kicks we did a case study and picked up a domain from expiring domains that purported to be a PR-7. We chose a subject near and dear to our collective hearts(NOT!)…Michael Jackson. We gave this Micahel Jackson tribute site, http://www.mjpromotions.com/ kind of a snazzy look, quickly wrote some content for it.
We also wrote a tool which allows you to check to demonstrate that the page rank is completely fake. http://www.sem-faq.com/fake-pagerank-checker.php .

Acquiring domains or website or even purchasing links is a risky process, fraught with all kinds of frauds. During the process of due diligence, we propose that you consider a Fake PR Checker as a tool to avoid getting conned by URL Jackers.

Fake Pagerank Checker / Ron Arthur

Ron Arthur is a Search Engine Marketer working for Carlsbad, CA based web-metrics company Sofizar( http://www.sofizar.net/search-engine-optimization.php ) . He is a member of the team developing a click fraud detection software, ZarTective (www.sofizar.com/click-fraud.php) While not writing exposes on the darker side of the web, he plays with his cat Mano and watches Rocky Horror Picture Show for the 17th time. Or maybe 117th.

RSS Aggregators

Really Simple Syndication, formerly “Rich Site Summary” or simply, RSS makes this possible.

Most users visit a lot of websites whose content continually change, such as news sites, community organization or professional association information pages, medical websites, product support pages, and blogs. As Internet surfing became an intrinsic part of business and leisure, it became important to get rid of the very tedious task of repeatedly returning to each website to see updated content.

RSS easily distributes information from different websites to a wider number of Internet users. RSS aggregators are programs that use RSS to source these updates, and then organize those lists of headlines, content and notices for easy reading. It allows computers to automatically retrieve and read the content that users want, then track changes and personalize lists of headlines that interests them.

The specially made computer programs called “RSS aggregators” were created to automatically find and retrieve the RSS feeds of pre-selected internet sites on behalf of the user and organize the results accordingly. (RSS feeds and aggregators are also sometimes referred to as “RSS Channels” and “RSS Readers”.)

The RSS aggregator is like a web browser for RSS content. HTML presents information directly to users, and RSS automatically lets computers communicate with one another. While users use browsers to surf the web then load and view each page of interest, RSS aggregators keeps track of changes to many websites. The titles or descriptions are links themselves and can be used to load the web page the user wants.

RSS starts with an original Web site that has content made available by the administrator. The website creates an RSS document and registers this content with an RSS publisher that will allow other websites to syndicate the documents. The Web site also produces an RSS feed, or channel, which is available together with all other resources or documents on the particular Web server. The website will register the feed as an RSS document, with a listed directory of appropriate RSS publishers.

An RSS feed is composed of website content listed from newest to oldest. Each item usually consists of a simple title describing the item along with a more complete description and a link to a web page with the actual content being described. In some instances, the short description or title line is the all the updated information that a user wants to read (for example, final games scores in sports, weblogs post, or stock updates). Therefore, it is not even necessary to have a web page associated with the content or update items listed — sometimes all the needed information that users need would be in the titles and short summaries themselves.

The RSS content is located in a single file on a webpage in a manner not very different from typical web pages. The difference is that the information is written in the XML computer code for use by an RSS aggregator and not by a web user like a normal HTML page.

There are 2 main parts that are involved in RSS syndication, namely: the source end and the client end.

The client end of RSS publishing makes up part of the system that gathers and uses the RSS feed. For example, Mozilla FireFox browser is typically at the client end of the RSS transaction. A user’s desktop RSS aggregator program also belongs to the client end.

Once the URL of an RSS feed is known, a user can give that address to an RSS aggregator program and have the aggregator monitor the RSS feed for changes. Numerous RSS aggregators are already preconfigured with a ready list of RSS feed URLs for popular news or information websites that a user can simply choose from.

There are many RSS aggregators that can be used by all Internet users. Some can be accessed through the Internet, some are already incorporated into email applications, and others run as a standalone program inside the personal computer.

RSS feeds have evolved into many uses. Some uses gaining popularity are:

•For online store or retail establishments: Notification of new product arrivals
•For organization or association newsletters: title listings and notification of new issues, including email newsletters
•Weather Updates and other alerts of changing geographic conditions
•Database management: Notification of new items added, or new registered members to a club or interest group.

The uses of feeds will continue to grow, because RSS aggregators make access to any information that individual users like more convenient and fun.

RSS Aggregators / Veronica Azam

Veronica Azam is an experienced and established ebay seller and ebook/home business entreprenuer. http://www.veronicaskloset.biz http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Veronicas-Kloset

Make Money Selling Other People’s Products

A lot of people are now getting into online businesses and online marketing either to supplement their “real world” income or for it to become their primary source of income. Why? Because online marketing just provides them a lot of benefits!

First, you can reach just about anybody in the world who has Internet access if you market your products online. That means a wider market for you, which can translate to larger profits. Second, setting up an online business requires only a fraction of the cost required to set up an actual business establishment, which means a lot of savings for the business owner.

Another aspect that has attracted a lot of people towards online marketing is the fact that one doesn’t have to have his own products to get started. In online marketing, one can start making a lot of money just by selling, or even by just trying to sell, other people’s products. And getting started with this kind of marketing strategy is actually quite easy. All that one needs to do is to set up an agreement with an online retailer or merchant, and after everything is settled, one can immediately start making money by selling the merchant’s or the retailer’s products.

Incidentally, the most popular and the fastest growing method of selling other people’s products online is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing, in its simplest definition, is a relationship between an online merchant or retailer, who has products to sell, and his affiliates, who are willing to promote the merchant’s product on their website.

In a typical affiliate marketing set up, the merchant provides his affiliates with banners and text ads that links to his site. The affiliates will then get these ads posted on their website and they get paid whenever traffic or sales is directed to the merchant’s website. Affiliates are often paid on commission basis, although other online merchants would opt to pay a fixed fee for the affiliate’s compensation.

Starting to make money online with affiliate marketing is relatively quick and easy. All that one has to do is to sign up as an affiliate for an online company that offers affiliate programs. An alternative method, and usually an easier one, is to sign up as a member of an affiliate network—a network that hosts a variety of affiliate programs for different online merchants or retailers. Signing up is usually free, although other companies and networks may require you to pay a particular fee. Such fees, however, are made as payment for additional services that the company may render, like providing you with tools and assistance to jumpstart your online business.

When you sign up with an affiliate marketing program, you are usually required to fill out a form containing information about yourself. Some affiliate programs may also require you to present the URL of your website and describe its contents. This will allow the retailers to verify that you actually have a website with contents that are relevant to their products. Some affiliate programs, however, won’t require you to have a website. After filling out the form and all, you are then allowed to choose the affiliate programs you want to promote.

After signing up with an affiliate program and being an actual affiliate, you are now ready to start making a lot of money by selling other people’s product online. How do you make money? There are actually a number of ways for you to earn money as an affiliate, and most of these ways depends on the type of affiliate marketing program you’ve gotten into.

Many affiliate marketing programs compensate their affiliates in either of three ways: pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-sale (PPS), or pay-per-lead (PPL). In pay-per-click affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever he directs traffic to the merchant’s site. PPS and PPL affiliate marketing programs work rather differently. In PPS, the affiliate only gets paid when his referral converts into an actual sale. In typical PPS affiliate programs, the affiliate would usually get 15% to 20% commission for each conversion. PPL affiliate programs work the same way, although affiliates are paid a fixed fee whenever his referral converts into a lead for the company.

Some affiliate marketing programs are two-tier programs, wherein the affiliate is also allowed to recommend other affiliates to the merchant. In such affiliate programs, the affiliate would not only be paid for the traffic or sales that he would direct to the merchant’s site but also for the traffic or sales directed by the affiliates who signed up with the program through his recommendation.

Yet another way of earning more profits with affiliate marketing is through residual affiliate programs. Residual affiliate programs are affiliate programs where the affiliate gets paid a number of times for as long as the merchant keeps the customer the affiliate has referred to his site. One form of residual program gets the affiliate paid a commission every time the referred customer purchases something on the merchant’s site. Another form of residual affiliate program gets the affiliate paid a percentage every month for as long as the company keeps the referred customer.

With a lot of options available and a lot of ways to earn money, affiliate marketing is undoubtedly the most popular and the easiest way to make money by selling other people’s products online. As to how much money one can get from affiliate marketing actually depends on the affiliate. A dedicated and hardworking affiliate would certainly get more from the program compared to those affiliates who would simply sign up and forget about the program later.

Make Money Selling Other People’s Products / Jane Foster