MKW-Ind.Biz

Creating a professional website can be challenging. E-commerce web design is really a complex animal. To cut development time, many web hosting companies start offering web hosting templates or hosting with templates.

Whether you’re looking for a simple web site or a functional e-commerce website, the chances are that you may be able to find a few web templates from your hosting company. A simple web template may cost under $20 dollars, but a well-designed professional e-commerce website will cost a few hundreds or more if not thousands. The cost of web templates is still cheap comparing to custom-made e-commerce websites when Web designers charge anywhere from $20 to $100 per hour. If you want to check out some templates, go to www.templates box.com

Besides the requirements of standard web hosting plans, Web hosting templates for e-commerce operations needs a shopping cart that supports online catalog and online payment processing (here’s a clue, pick Pay Pal). Web templates for e-commerce often include common pages and navigations for online shopping – searching or browsing products, adding items to shopping carts and making payment. The web templates for e-commerce do not include or connect to any specific shopping cart. It’s up to the webmasters to add shopping cart to the site.

The alternative e-commerce hosting to web templates is e-commerce turnkey solution. EBay Stores, Yahoo! and GoDaddy.com are the most popular turn-key e-commerce solutions for small businesses that want to setup online stores easily. Different hosting plans may have different free structures. The cost of each hosting plan often varies on transaction volume. Another great service that includes not just website management (pages, products and storage) but also ties your website in with a built-in autoresponder service is our sister site 2GSM.Biz

When comparing functionality, there’re many questions to ask: 1) whether a shopping cart accepts online check or debit card. 2) Whether there’s a limit on the number of products and categories that you can setup; 3) whether it automatically sends out an email notification once an order is placed at your web-site.

When looking at the cost of commerce operation, you’ll need to ask questions about 1) what’s the basic monthly fee for transactions; 2) is there’s a setup fee for a new online store; 3) how about handling taxes?; 4) how much it charges for each transaction.

Talk with your hosting service on e-commerce issues and discuss the best plan to go with.

What do you do when an ISP providers’ level of service has decreased or the provider has just closed shop? You don’t panic; all you have to do is switch to a new provider. If you know how these ISP services work, then switching over to a new provider will not be as rough or bad as you think. All it takes is having a contingency plan.

There are two components to internet ISP services which include the physical network connection to your SOHO or small office and the connection to network services so you can retrieve email or look at a web-site. Most SOHO businesses, no matter how big or small, will have network integration. This is also called a Wide Area Network. The connection through the network allows you to physically connect to the internet to look at web pages, use instant messaging or manage email accounts or use your email account.

This wide area network connects your computers to the internet. The services that you get out of the network depend on your network configuration. Again, the type of internet service you get should depend on what’s available in your area and how much bandwidth you need for business applications to be run or developing server side applications for your hosting account.

Many people rely on their own mail server or Web-site on their network, while many other business owners rely on their outside hosting providers.

You should also look at the types of access that you want. Should you consider keeping the same kind of bandwidth, downgrade or upgrade according to company needs? Right now, the hottest access going is DSL transmissions because it uses existing phone wires or cable modem. Cable and Broadband similarities are the same depending on what part of the country that you live in. Any choice that you make is going to be driven by price and availability.

Choosing ISP services can be real tricky and the rule of thumb is to pay for those services that you only need. Instead of plunking down change for all the bells and whistles. The typical small business web-site, four to seven pages, could choose a virtual hosting service with multiple email addresses, cgi-bin access and a T3 connection from the Internet for $19 to $27 per month.

Most small businesses pick the managed server hosting packages which could range from $3.95 a month to $20 a month. As stated before, these hosting packages have all the administrative support that you need and all you have to worry about is the development of your web-site. You are given an FTP client to load your site to the internet. Our service here will run you $45 per Year with live webcasts and video training along with 24-7 support.

Socket Security Certificates cost extra for secure transactions of the financial type through your web page and you expect to pay at least $40 to $80 per month. The setup fees can be expensive and cost as much as $55, and sometimes more if you order special features. Large companies and high volume web sites pay more for certain types of services.

Shop around and get the best deal for your business. You can get web hosting through the internet from anywhere but you have to really study the ISP’s and see what they offer.

A big concern in choosing an ISP should be the response time in case a server goes down. How does the server respond during high traffic times on the server? You would have to ask the ISP representative what their percentage ranking is as far as server downtime.

You can find some of these rankings on the internet by going to cnet.com or use the Google search engine to rate the top ten ISP providers that have the best percentage of what the industry calls, “up” time according to their servers.

Use common sense when choosing a domain name because your domain name, or URL, can have an impact in both the online and offline marketing of your web-site. Long or difficult to spell domain names can make people ignore your web site and it has to be pretty good for them to stick with it (for an example, go to www.thedolphinsmakemecry.com website. Short domain names register better with people’s memory and are easy to remember.

Obtain a domain name that will help you in your marketing niche and strategy. Like I stated before, you can use your business name as your URL. If your business name is already taken by someone else then get a URL name close to what you are doing. Purchasing a business name domain name isn’’t the only way to go, and when a keyword domain name could do just fine.

If you plan on using the .net extension, you may want to wait on deciding your name until after you have found an available domain name that is suitable to your type of business. If you follow the steps below, you should be okay in identifying your name brand to the internet community.

Structure Your Brand Name – Put your domain name on your letterhead, business card, printed materials; put it on your phone recording, the side of your car; don’t forget to include it with your email.

Keep it Short & Memorable – Don’t get a URL that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet.

Secure a .com URL – I strongly recommend purchasing a .com domain name as opposed to a .net, .info, .biz or anything else. If your chosen domain name is not available in a .com, keep looking until you find one that isn’t taken. There is nothing wrong with the other extensions but when you have a .com extension, it sounds like you’ve been on the net a long time.

Remember, your domain name is an extension of your business and your brand of product or service.

There are some good deals on the internet concerning web space and hosting but you have to look to find the best deals. You should also consider how long a provider has been in business.

Finding free web space on the Internet is simple. All you have to do is use a simple Web search (Google, AltaVista or Yahoo) and the results should bring back options for free web space. There are many individuals and businesses looking for a place to put their website without having to pay for the service. These free services can provide anywhere from 5MB to 100Mb of online web space for hosting your web site.

Free sites also come with some cool stuff, such as counters, guest books, virtual domain names, tracking logs, blogs, copy and past scripts that are usually Java code scripts and more. These additions are good for people that have little or no knowledge into building a web site.

A free service provides benefits to all people and may sound like a good idea but the goal is to do your research to see if the deals are viable or not. Free services can also bring other unwanted things that you have to deal with when you sign up for the service. Usually, you have to submit to advertising and surveys by filling out a form before you can get your free service. Be sure that you read the user agreements that come with the free services.

You can go on the cheap and don’t want advertisements running on your site, you can get a service similar to free hosting but you would have to pay a small fee to keep your web page ad-free. Some of these providers will offer you a service for $2.95 a month with 100MB of web space if that’s all that you need, and you can always upgrade your packages.

There’s a lot of competition for your Web site hosting dollars, and you can find some pretty good deals if you look hard enough.

Does the length of your website’s domain name registration affect search engine optimization and results?

Should you renew your domain name for a long period of time? And if so, how long is long enough? If you want to stay ahead of your competition, then you might consider looking at the length of time your competitors have registered their domain names. If your competitors have generally renewed their domain names for one or two years, you might consider registering your domain name for 5 or 10 years. While putting off your domain name’s expiration date might help your search engine rankings, keep in mind that this may be only a small victory when it comes to search engine rankings.

Its good business sense to register a domain for at least 10 years. You don’t want to deal with the process annual process of renewing them every year. It’s best to obtain the domain names that you want to keep for a while and renew then on a 5 to 10 year plan.

If your domain name expires, there’s a good chance that someone will register your domain name immediately after it expires. If, for whatever reason, you don’t renew your domain name, someone watching a ‘watch list’ of expiring domain names will try to capitalize on the online business that you’ve built over the years. They know that there is potential website traffic they can have simply by renewing your old domain name. By renewing your domain name for several years, your domain name won’t expire for a while, and it won’t be opened up to expired domain name buyers.

If you really want to stay ahead of the competition, you might consider registering or renewing your domain name for 100 years. Currently, Network Solutions (www.netsol.com) is the only registrar offering the 100 year option, which costs $999.00. MKW-Ind.Biz (www.mkw-ind.biz/domains/), currently offers to renew or register a domain name for 10 years, at a discount of $6.95 per year.
Yes, you can lose critical positioning in the search engines if you don’t reregister your domain name in time. You may have to start the SEO process all over again!

Cold Fusion Hosting is all about databases, really. Cold Fusion, a software suite brought to us by the fine folks at Macromedia, which allows web-interactivity with databases. With Cold Fusion web hosting, you can now query, update, index, and chart databases from any web browser.

Cold Fusion hosting adds versatility and interactivity to ecommerce sites. Cold Fusion allows you to publish and then have automatically removed from your site time-sensitive content, such as flight schedules or event calendars. It adds functionality to creating and managing mailing lists and business reports. It allows you to offer your visitors printable content and customized menus.

Anytime you see .cfm as the extension on a web page, as opposed to .htm or .asp for example, you know you\’re dealing with Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML).

Though cold fusion is built on the Java platform, CFML allows web developers the benefits of Java without its inherent technical complexities. You need not know Java scripting in order to use cold fusion. CFML is a tag-based language quite similar to HTML and XML which makes it easy for anyone with even the most basic knowledge of web scripting to learn.

Cold Fusion is a server-side language which means that any web pages using CFML are read and interpreted by the Cold Fusion hosting company\’s server and converted into an HTML page prior to being sent back to the user\’s browser.

Cold Fusion web hosting can be significantly more expensive than other forms of web hosting, and should therefore only really be considered if its unique set of tools are relevant for your site\’s intended uses. Cold Fusion hosting is usually run on Windows 2000/NT/2003 operating systems, though you can also find support for Cold Fusion hosting on Linux and Sun servers.

In addition to all the usual factors you must consider when choosing any web host – cost, disk space, bandwidth, uptime, scalability, support – you now also have to consider certain factors specific to cold fusion hosting, including: potential tag restrictions, additional security concerns, whether the cold fusion hosting company provides database support, and which version of Cold Fusion they\’re using.

One type of tag restriction that is also a security concern is “high risk” tags, such as those that can be used to find and erase selected files from a server. For some larger businesses, this functionality is crucial to their operation, though potentially detrimental if accessed by the wrong hands, in which case a dedicated server is probably in order. Fortunately, cold fusion hosting is offered on shared, virtual, and dedicated servers.

Cold Fusion is well worth considering if you\’d like the functionality of the Java platform with the facility of a comparatively autonomous and user-friendly software system. Especially if your website is expected to generate an income, you may find that the intimidating price tag, in the long run, turned out to be a bargain.

Windows/XP Web hosting provides web hosting on Windows operating system platform. Microsoft Corporation provides host based software operating system for servers. Windows XP web hosting programs are considered to be easy to cope with, reliable and inexpensive.

The simplicity of the Windows XP operating system is what stands out with these applications. Windows provides its users with friendly, familiar environment that is easy to work with. Today as so much work has been done by developers it\’s very easy to administrate your site with using Windows/ Server Side operating system. The Windows/NT platform is also reliable. You also should know that reliability of any platform, same as Windows/NT platform, depends mainly on maintenance and technical knowledge.

Windows/XP platform is scalable and very cost-effective because at a relatively low price you can set up a fully functional Internet server with Windows XP in a matter of hours.

The big question is what do you want your web-site to do? Interactive websites usually rely on ASP (Active Server Pages which allow scripts on a web page to be run on the server before the files are transmitted to the client), PHP, or Perl (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language which is a scripting language used for receive and process data stored on web page forms).
And if you prefer ASP most of all Windows/ XP – based web hosting is the perfect choice for you. There are also some more only Windows available applications such as Access, MS SQL, Windows Media and Virtual Basic scripts. Windows XP offers benefits over other operating systems. Using these benefits gives you an opportunity to be productive and publish your information on the Internet rapidly developing your website or web application.

Windows XP server packages have great programs for individuals who are familiar with MS Windows XP software. The server package for hosting even allows for optimization of hard disk space and RAM which eliminates computer lock-ups while loading web applications.

Your domain name could be stolen or given up to the evil entity known as the Cyber squatters whose main mission is to steal your web identity and this is how they do it. They could register YourDomainName.org, and do the same thing with YourDomainName.biz, therefore contacting you and try to sell you those names at advanced prices. If that doesn’t work, then the following events could happen.

They will allow your competitor to get a domain that sounds like yours, and allow him to cause confusion or try to steal your hard-earned traffic, business and clients.

Take these steps right now to halt the cyber squatters.

Have people go through you for authorization: Go through your domain name registrar and fill in a form that locks in authorized entities of your claim of other domain names. You can buy these names and keep them under your roof. It will provide you information to include, such as contact information, who should be contacted if someone wants to register your domain, the character string you are claiming (this must be an EXACT match), description of your current products/services, when you began using that domain name.

You have a small window to accomplish filling out an authorized entry form. Check with your domain registrar for time frame windows in filling out an authorized entry form Failure to enter a claim during a certain time frame means the registering entities will not check to see if there is an equivalent .com, .net or .org name. They will not check the IP Claim Service database. Meaning, you could lose your .info or net-version of your domain name.

Don’t let cyber squatters shake you down and ruin what you have built up on the net. Get the rights and the authorization to similar or like names to your main domain name!

Files that are loaded to or from servers uses internet bandwidth to push files along the network at various speeds. Every time you upload a file to your ISP, surf the web or use an audio application, you are using bandwidth.

Bandwidth is a bunch of wires or fibers connecting servers to a network. Depending on the grade of the wire it determines how much data is coming across the network where your web-site is hosted. When someone attempts to get more data than can be handled by the network, the whole network slows down.

ISP’s can put a limitation on bandwidth at certain times during peak periods or charge you a flat fee per month for bandwidth usage. If you go over the flat fee, then they charge you extra for using extra bandwidth. Some ISP’s will shut down the transmissions until traffic is more stable on the network.

You can load most files (images, sound files, videos and flash scripts and other programs) in your web site. This excludes, of course, banners and pop ups and specific documents and images which are supposed to be loaded from a central server.

Bandwidth bandits link to images and other files directly to some other server instead of putting them on their local server. There are various reasons as to why they do this but one reason is to get as much bandwidth as possible to show their links and images. So they “steal” images or audio files each time the site is initialized meaning that they steal the bandwidth.

There’s certain ways that you can stop the person from stealing your bandwidth allocation. If they have an email, I would contact them personally or go through Network Solutions and do an IP lookup which will give you information on the person and who the site is registered to. You can always get in touch with the company that hosts their site too.

Bandwidth can be expensive and the last thing that you want is someone stealing it.