Before Buying Software

Be Prepared Before Buying Software

 by: Christopher Curtis

Before you go to the store to buy software write down your computers specifications. You'll need the type and speed of the processor. How much ram your computer has. What kind of video card? How much disk space is available? Usually, these things are easy to find on your computer.

On Windows you can navigate to "Programs >Accessories >System Tools." Then click on "System Information" and you should see a summary containing your computers operating system, processor, and memory information. Next click on the plus sign to expand the "Components" category. There under "Display" you will find your computers video card specifications. You may also need to know what kind of sound card is installed. Select "Sound Device" to see the name and manufacturer of this device. Under "Storage" you can select Drives to check how much available disk space you have. This will be labeled "free Space." Other information you may need, depending on the type of program, are network and modem specs.

Once You have selected a piece of software make sure that it is compatible with your computer. Most software programs come on CDs now and will include their minimum requirements somewhere on the packaging. They may require that you have a special video card or adapter. It may require that you have a particular type of processor, so make sure that your computers processor is equal or better. Make sure you have enough ram to run the program. Usually, they will give a minimum and a recommended amount, but I have always found that it is best to go with the recommended amount.

Another thing to take into account is pricing. Sometimes you can save a lot of money by purchasing an earlier version of a particular piece of software. Just make sure that it has all the features that you want and that it is compatible with your computer. The best place to look is on the Internet. You can compare pricing without having to run all over town. 

 

Go to your favorite search site, and search for the software that you are looking for. Sometimes you can buy online for less, but make sure you check the shipping costs.

About the author:

Chris Curtis is the owner of C-Double Web Development and has been doing web design and development since 1997. He began offering affordable web hosting and design in 1999 when he started his own business. http://www.c-double.com

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Design by Yourself

Do It Yourself Website

 by: David Andrew Smith

If you are just starting out in your new business and you decide that a website could be a valuable addition to this business how do you go about getting one up and running? You have two basic options really. Do it yourself or employ an individual or company to do it for you. Which option you take depends upon your own confidence in acquiring the skills necessary and the amount of funds you can divert to hiring in a company. If you have sufficient funds then hire in a company as this will enable you to devout all your time to developing your core business. If you don’t then you will have to do it yourself. So how do you go about it?

You will require no or little knowledge of HTML as you can purchase a whole package from a web hosting company which should include some form of website developing software and your domain name plus the hosting of your website. Give some thought to your domain name. It should be easy for people to type in and remember. Not too long, succinct and preferably no hyphens. 

 

So you have chosen your domain name and your hosting service now you must develop your site. Again give some thought to this. How many pages you are likely to produce, how many links you will need. What sort of information is going on each page. If you are completely new to this then I would suggest that using your site editor software you produce a first draft and publish it. You can always modify everything later as you go along. This will give you your first website which you can then submit to the search engines albeit not exactly what you want or one that is going to attract visitors.

Now you need to do quite a lot of research on the internet as to how to make your site visitor friendly and search engine friendly. Here you will discover the importance of good content, changing content, appropriate keywords, backward links, article writing and good copy on the website. 

 

Taking this information on board will enable you to restructure and rewrite your site over a period of time, probably many times. However all the time this learning process is going on your site is actually published on the Web so is likely to start being trawled by search engines and getting indexed even if it doesn’t sky rocket through the rankings. The most important thing to do from the outset is to write good content that will be of interest to your visitors. If it holds the attention of your visitors and gets them to contact you then it will likely be of equal interest to the search engines. Do not produce a site that is written with the search engines in mind. 

 

It is your visitors who are important and by following a few simple rules that are published all over the Web your site can become very attractive to visitors and to search engines also. Keep the site textually based, there is no point in having very flashy graphics as these are not noticed by the search engines and often annoy visitors who want to get at the information they are after as quickly as possible and not have to wait for some animated introduction to finish before they can enter the actual site.

Having put into practice all the advice that is out there you should have put together a pleasing and appealing website that visitors and search engines like. Each day or week you add more content and develop more links and you will gradually climb up the rankings. The last piece of advice I would give is start writing and submitting articles. One or two a week would be excellent over a year or two. 

 

Once your articles start being published you will see an immediate leap in the number of links back to your site and a subsequent rise in the rankings if your content is also good. Aim to produce over time several hundred articles if possible. The more you write the more links back to your site you will develop and the more visitors you will get as well as boost your rankings in the search engines.
 

About the author:

David Smith is the owner of http://wesparkle.co.uka contract cleaning company which specialises in the care and maintenance of natural stone flooring and tiles

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Domain Registration

Domain Registration: How Many Extension Should You Register

 by: Stanley Spencer

When it comes to selection of a domain name, people are often inundated with several questions. One of the most important of them is which extension should I choose - dot-com or dot-net or dot-biz?

There are circumstances when you will think it is fit to register more than one extension. This article is aimed at helping you to make the right decision.

A common problem is that people usually type in .com all the time on net and land up on various other sites. This could be troublesome both for the business and the customer.
 

When you select a domain name, you are always given a list of different extensions to choose from. These extensions can help specify the type of products or services you are offering online or your geographical location.

To begin this article, I am giving some basic definitions of the extensions you can choose from:

* .com signifies "commercial". It is the most well-known extension and preferred by all commercial enterprises. The acute scarcity of unforgettable .com domain names has led to creation of several other extensions.

* .net signifies “network". It is generally used by internet service providers, web hosting companies, or other firms related to network or internet services.

* .org signifies "organization". It is commonly used by non-commercial web sites. But, at present, many businesses register their matching .org extension to their .com domain names.

* .biz signifies “business”. It is used for business web sites. There are more chances of you getting this extension because of its low current penetration.

* .info signifies “information”. It is generally used for information sharing web sites. This too like .biz is gradually growing in popularity and there is more likelihood of you getting it.

Your first aim should be to get a perfect domain name for your business. Once you have done that you should then consider registering other extensions for the same domain name.

It is up to you to decide which extensions are most relevant for your business. It depends a lot on your customer base, range of products/services, and also your brand image.You should always use domain forwarding service to redirect visitors from your other domains to your primary domain. This is quite essential since visitors may get confused about your web site address and may reach your competitor’s web site. For example, you domain name is home-appliances.net and your potential customers may reach home-appliances.com, which is your competitor.

Prevention is always better than cure. So, instead of buying a rival domain name from someone (at a high cost), it is always preferable to register that domain name yourself (at a low cost).We find that name protection and greater coverage are the two key forces driving the need for registering more than one domain name. The accessibility of the site increases by registering more than one extension for a domain name.

There are other advantages of multiple domain name registration. It helps in creating a demand for similar domain names due to people realizing that so many domain names are available related to the primary one.But some observers in the industry have a different viewpoint. They think that having more than one domain extension is very confusing for the visitors to these sites.

In conclusion, I would like to say that your primary target should be .com and thereafter, find out the relevant extensions for your business and try to register them also. I recommend you to register all relevant extensions so as to guarantee maximum coverage and minimum misguided competition.
 

About the author:
Copyright © Active-Domain.com's domain registration (http://www.active-domain.com) service. All rights reserved. This article may be reprinted freely as long as an active link is maintained to http://www.active-domain.com

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Web Hosting

How to Choose a Right Web Hosting Service?

Indeed, choosing a right web hosting service for your website is not an easy task especially when there are thousands of web hosting providers all offering almost identical web hosting packages. Therefore, it is important to know few major considerations even before
you start your web hosting search. Below are three major criteria for web host seeker:

Web hosting features requirement

This is probably the most important consideration to start finding a host for your site. You need to decide the technical requirements for your website, this including:

a) Server platform and hardware requirements

If you plan to set up a website that uses programming environments such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic scripts, Cold Fusion or Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL database, in this case, you will need to find a web hosting service that supports Windows platform such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers. Likewise, if you plan to use programming languages such as Perl, CGI, SSI, PHP or mySQL database, then any web hosting plans that
support Unix/Linux platform should be sufficient to meet your hosting requirements. Once you have these server platform and hardware requirements in mind, you can decide the best web hosting plans for your need. For more information, you can read "How to select a web server and server platform?"

b) Disk space & Bandwidth requirement

Here is another technical requirement that you need to consider before selecting a web hosting plan, i.e. disk space and bandwidth. If you intend to publish a website that does not have a lot of contents (meaning, web pages), then the disk space requirement may not be a big concern to you. In general, a disk space with 200MB to 500MB should be enough to meet your hosting requirement. In contrast, if you plan to host a website with enormous amount of graphic pictures, mp3 or video files, then you should consider a web hosting plan that provide huge disk space, for example, 500 MB to 1,000 MB.Similarly, the bandwidth requirement will depend on your site traffic estimation. Obviously, a website that expect to attract high traffic will consume the monthly bandwidth allowance very fast. If so, you will need to find one web hosting service that offer huge bandwidth with
40 GB to 100 GB per month. 

Depending upon your website requirement, choosing a web hosting service that provide sufficient amount of disk space and bandwidth is crucial consideration to prevent paying extra costs in the future should you overuse the monthly disk space and bandwidth allowance.

c) Other hosting features

While the above requirements are utmost important, there are other hosting features that you have to consider too. Can web hosting provider support video clips on your website, if you have? Is the web hosting service compatible with Dreamweaver or FrontPage web authoring tool? Do you plan to set up a virtual store online? Can the host support the e-commerce features without adding extra cost to your monthly payments? On top of that, you may also want to find out the number of email accounts provided, number of FTP accounts, web statistic software (analyze your web traffic), type of control panel supported (manage your web hosting account), database and scripting languages supported and etc.

Reliability and scalability

A first-class web hosting provider offers reliable server up timeand fast Internet connection. You should only choose a web hosting service that guarantee at least 99% server uptime with high-speed Internet backbones using at least OC3 (Optical Carrier) lines (155 Megabits per second) or above instead of T1 or T3 lines. A reliable web hosting provider usually invests heavily on their data center infrastructure with high performance servers, high speed multiple backbones providers with fail-over redundancy, backup power generators and firewall software protection in place to ensure they meet the uptime guarantee specified in the terms of service.

Similarly, you should choose a web hosting service with hardware facilities that designed for scalability, so that they can grow with your business. For example, if you need to increase more disk space, bandwidth or number of mySQL databases, you should be able to upgrade as needed without any problems.

Customer service and support

The last major consideration in choosing a web hosting service is to find a web hosting providers that offers excellent customer service and support. You should always search for a web hosting provider that offers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week technical support that fielded with highly experience technicians, so that any web hosting problems will be resolved within a reasonable amount of time. You may also want to consider to test how responsive is their customer support by sending few inquiry emails to the web hosting provider. In general, any response in less than 24 hours is considered acceptable. 

It is a sign of poor customer support if they take more than one day to response.In addition, a web hosting provider with excellent support should also provide multiple support channels, such as toll-free phone support, 24/7 email support, live chat, online knowledgebase, Interactive flash tutorials and FAQ.

Above are few major considerations before you choose your web hosting service. In addition, how long has the web hosting provider in business and the number of customers that they currently have are also a good indication of the quality of their hosting products as well as the stability of the company. 

Even though cost of the web hosting service is also important but it should not be your major consideration. Because the price of a web hosting service has been declining over the years due to competition, as a result, the price of most of the web hosting services offering quality hosting features has been converging to less than US$10 per month. If you can't afford less than $10 per month, you probably isn't in the online business for the long haul. Therefore, price should not be a major deciding factor.

On the other hand, it is more important to ensure the web hosting service that you choose is able to meet your website hosting requirements, guarantee your website is always accessible with satisfying speed, provide scalability to grow and expand your website as well as offer excellent customer supports. Depending on your web hosting requirement, you can take advantage of our site,

Cheap Web Hosting Review to find the recommended web hosting services that can match the three major criteria above. Good luck to your search.Andrew Loh is the owner of

Web Hosting Services, a website that provides complete and detail reviews on web hosting services. You can visit his website at:http://www.lowest-price-web-hosting.com/