Hightide Web Resources Articles, News, and Reviews

by Timothy Tye

One of the things I love to do first thing every morning is to check the Internet, to find out how much money I made over the night. Like a fisherman checking on his trap, I am thrilled to see money accumulating in my account while I sleep. The beauty of earning an income from the Internet is that my websites continue make money for me from all parts of the world. I can actually know where the money come from, and how much, and test the pages to continue improving them. Wouldn’t you want that too?

Before you get the wrong idea, let me clear the air about how I make money from the web. HappyJoblessGuy is NOT about earning money from some online pyramid schemes. It is not about Multi-Level Marketing (even though I have no issue about people earning through MLM). It is not about online forex trading. I am going to show you an honest way of generating income from the web but it’s going to involve a degree of hard work from you. For sure, nothing comes easy, and that includes building a machine that makes money online.

Do not have your website hosted by PBase, Tripod, Blogger, even though it can be done an hour. If you intend to earn serious, long-time income, that is not the way to do it. You want something that is 100% your own. Once you have your own website (not an account with Blogger, PBase, etc.), you will realise the amount of freedom in your hands.

If you were to ask me, what are the tools you need to build a great website, I can count them with the fingers of one hand. You can hire a web programmer to build a whole website for you, bypassing the need to be acquainted with any tool. But to own a really great website, I would urge you to do it yourself. You can’t be the captain of your own ship if you can’t tell stern from starboard. I have received emails from people asking to give them personal coaching. I am sorry, but I do not have time to do that, even if you’re willing to pay me money.

In the next five pages of this chapter, I will go through each essential tool one by one. At the end of this chapter I will recap what we have learned. You will realise, if you haven’t yet, that earning a living without holding a job requires you to learn skills that you may not have learned before. On the other hand, you may have built many websites, and are wondering what’s new that I want to share. Once again, I urge you to be patient as the topics are developed.

Now, without further ado, let’s look at the 5 Essential Tools:

The first tool you need to build a great website is a HTML Editor.

A HTML Editor is a software application to write web pages. There are several brands in the market, including Microsoft Frontpage, Adobe Dreamweaver and so on. Personally I would encourage you not to use Microsoft Frontpage, as it tends to add proprietary codes to your pages, making it difficult to be edited with a different HTML Editor. The one I use is called Homesite, also from Adobe. I learned to write webpages with Homesite. With a HTML Editor, you write the content of your pages by keying in the HTML Codes, and then checking it with the Preview function. If you do not have a HTML Editor presently installed in your computer, I strongly suggest you get one immediately and start fiddling with it. Get used to all the functions. Learn what to click to make the text bold, italics, underlined, etc., how to hyperlink, how to insert picture, and so on. A good HTML Editor does a lot of work for you, so that you can concentrate on putting together a great website. It doesn’t matter which one you use, as long as you get familiar with it. The second Essential Tool you need is knowledge of HTML Codes.

As mentioned in the previous page, you need to learn coding. To be exact, HTML Codes. HTML Codes are instructions you tell the Internet how you want to format your webpages. The basic HTML codes you need to know are: Title, Body, Head, Html, Headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.), Bold, Italic, Underline, Hyperlink, and Table.

In addition to the above, it would do you good to learn how to format size and colour of your font, background, border. More advanced features such as CSS would be helpful too, but are still all together very easy, that even a dummy could learn it (so if you have to, find a book for dummies and learn all about it).

The third Essential Tool is a Domain Name.

The domain name, also called the hostname or sitename, is the basic name of your website. For example, www.happyjoblessguy.com. As you probably have known, the domain name has an ending such as .com, .net, .org, etc. To use it to earn an income, I would suggest you go for .com. It is the most popular, hence, the most difficult to get. Nonetheless, you should try to get domain names with .com.

You probably will not get the first domain name of your choice, and will need to try a few times before landing on one that is still available. This is a very important exercise, so take all the time you need.

Registering and keeping a domain name will cost you approximately US$10 per year or even lower. That is peanuts if you can earn the amount back. For now, look for the domain name but don’t register it yet. Instead go to Essential Tool #4 to read about Web hosting.

The fourth Essential Tool is Web hosting.

To get web hosting means you rent space on a server that will host your website. You do not need to purchase a server - you don’t even need to know how a server works. All you need to know is that you need to host your website on it. The Webhost provides you the space and the interface for you to manage your website.

Think of web hosting as a safe deposit box, and the domain name as the safe deposit box number. When you register for web hosting, you are buying space in a safe deposit box. The amount you pay should determine the amount of space you need. For that reason, the web hosting fee is directly related to the amount of space you purchase. The safe deposit box number remains the same, regardless the amount of space you use. In a similar sense, the fee for domain name is fixed regardless the amount of content you have on the web.

When you start your website, the amount of space you need will most likely be pretty low, less than 1GB, so do not pay for a lot of space that you are not going to use. You can always buy more space as your needs grow. If you pay for 5GB per year, and throughout the course of that year, you never use more than 1GB, then the balance 4GB is money wasted.

The fifth and final Essential Tool you need to build a great website is an FTP Software.

An FTP Software is an application that enables you to transfer data from your computer to your website on the Internet, and vice versa. There are many other ways to do it, including using an online interface provided by your webhost, but usually, using an FTP Software is the swiftest way.

The FTP Software allows you to upload new pages to your website as well as update existing pages. The FTP Software that I use is called WS FTP, which stands for WinSock File Transfer Protocol. To download it, google “Free FTP Download” to see what comes up.

In the next chapter, we will look at Building a Profit-Making Website. As of now, I want you to be familiar with the five Essential Tools in this chapter. Please go ahead and register your web hosting and obtain your domain name, but once again, let me urge you to give the domain name a good thinking through before decided which. If you choose a wrong one at the beginning stage, fine, it only costs another US$10 or so to register another. But you need to make sure it is a domain name you want to own for years and years to come. Who knows, one day you may even sell that domain and the whole web business for $1 million? So, choose carefully.

For more topics on how to earn a living without holding a job, go to http://www.happyjoblessguy.com

About the Author:
Timothy Tye began earning an income from the web when he launched his first website four years ago. Since then, he has started several successful websites that allow him to earn an income without holding a job. He believes that anybody can do it and shares useful tips and knowledge in his website, http://www.happyjoblessguy.com.

by Robert Griggs

There are many aspects in regards to search engine optimisation. There are on-page procedures such as optimising meta tags, titles, page copy, urls, alt tags and the like. We also know that another important aspect is off-page seo whereby a lot of time and effort is put in in order to obtain quality inbound links to your site. This normally takes the shape of directory submission, article writing and submission, competition analysis, social media marketing and blogging to name a few.

These are all crucial elements of search engine optimisation and are a major part of any seo specialists daily chors.

One element of SEO that can be easily overlooked is the building of a web site that is not only “user friendly” but also “search friendly”. By “search friendly” we mean that the search engines can crawl and spider your site unimpeded which will enable it to extract all of your content and in turn index it within the search engines database. After all, what use is getting thousands of inbound one way links to your site, if your site is not user or search friendly?

There are a number of things worth considering when building a user and search engine friendly web site. They are:-

1. Use as much text as possible in the form of HTML - Search engines love plain text. They are not able to read images, video files, audio files or flash, so try to not use too much of these in your site design.

Another thing to consider is that some sites make users log in in order to view certain content or use a form to find content. Both of these are bad. Spiders/crawlers do not know how to log in to your site or fill out a form in order to find your content. So if you want your content to be indexed by the search engines, stay away from this. If you MUST do this, try to produce a snippet of the content to entice users to log in. That way the spider at least has something to chew on.

2. Make your urls understandable - This means creating urls such as www.mysite.com/how-to-bring-up-your-children.html and NOT www.mysite.com/children/article-09876R-YTUR-4tr.html As you can see the first url is not only “user friendly” but is also “search engine friendly” meaning that the search engines read more meaning and relevance into this url than the second one. Dont forget also that if you were to copy the second url into an email, your signature or post on a blog etc it wouldnt be totally clear where the link was going. This cannot be said for the first url.

3. Structure your site well - This means making your site as flat as possible. Instead of structuring your site in way that means a user has to click 10 times before reaching their target make the content a maximum of 4 clicks away or less.

4. Design your site for users NOT search engines - As much as possible treat the search engines as if they were human beings manually scouring your site for content to index. If it is easy for humans to find what they are looking for on your site, logic says that the spiders will also find what they are looking for and index it. The more “speadbumps” you put in the way of spiders, the slower your site will be crawled and indexed(if at all).

5. Content is king - One of my favorite expressions which is so true. Great content has many benefits, after all, its what we are all after, even the search engines. The search engines job is to find “relevant” search data. When the search engine starts dishing out “irrelevant” results, thats the time when it is going to become out of favour with web users who will move onto another engine.

Having great site content has many benefits such as if your content is good and original, people will want to link to it and your site, so its a good way of building natural links which is something that google likes. If you write good genuine creative content on your topic you will start to become an authority in your chosen field meaning more links and brand/site awareness.

The more content you have the more opportunity you will have of inserting your keywords making it look as natural as possible to the search engines. Although keyword density is no longer a major factor with search engines, it is something that needs to be done.

Well, thats the end of this article with some tips on making your site not only “user friendly” but just as importantly “search friendly”. It is something that can be easily overlooked especially as gaining backlinks is viewed as THE most important SEO practice at the moment.

Overlook it at your peril!!

Until next time…

About the Author:
Rob Griggs is an SEO specialist based in Spain. For further information on his web design and seo services, please visit his search engine optimisation spain web site.

by John Parker

1. Avoid creating menu on the left-hand side of a website. If unavoidable, an alternative way is to put some text with rich keywords at the top or above the left-hand menu so that this text will be the first thing to read by search engines.

2. Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines. To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.

3. Every page should contain the “title” and “description” tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines.

4. Try not to use Flash when possible. Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and makes people run away

5. Think twice on how to use graphics. Make them relevant to your content and use an Alt tag containing the relevant keyword(s).

6. Do not only use images to link out. You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though.

7. Avoid using frames. Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.

8. Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.

9. Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster. It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.

10. Use standard HTML. Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than it needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that can’t be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or not index the whole web page. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html.

About the Author:
The author is a Writer working with a leading software development company, which deals with software outsourcing, offshore outsourcing and offshore software development. Get more valuable information at http://www.a1technology.com.

by bas

Web design is graphic curriculum subject for customize and analyze a face of web site for straight with follow wanted of online people. The people which enter to training about web design will learn about using more program and learn about computer language and more trick which use in organize working combine to manage more composition is correct and appropriate.

The people which enter to training in web design curriculum will can bring a knowledge go to analyze and customize web site of organization for take have an interesting increase very much.

Web design curriculum fit with…

1. HTML language

Knowledge about structure of HTML language and Tag which often used. Creating a web site which tect editor for is a basic in customizing web site with help for creating a web site.

2. Macromedia Dreamweaver

Knowledge exercise one’s authority and stage in working Dreamweaver MX whcih is program for creating a web site for profession which have popularity very much. Since basic in creating home page to tectique in manage web in more tectique such as Layout, Frame, Table, Layer and bring your web site online on internet.

3. Adobe Photoshop

Knowledge about using for upgrade which use with customize a web site all to customize Layout and creating a button with Photoshop.

About the Author:
http://designsweb.blogspot.com

http://websdesigner.blogspot.com

by Mark Greenway

When trying to create a successful website, there are three simple steps that you should take. By following these steps, you will not only make the building of your site a lot easier but you will also create a website that gets noticed by search engines and has many return visitors, and with return visitors comes the potential to earn money from your website.

When you look at the most successful websites you will notice that they all have a couple of things in common, they are organised and not over complicated. If you try and over complicate your site by adding all the latest bells and whistles or you have a layout that is un-organized then you will greatly increase your chance of failure. Remember, keep it simple and organised and you will succeed.

1 - Planning

It is very important to plan what your website will be about and how you would like to present it. For example if you have an interest in golf and want to create a website on this subject then it is highly likely that you will be competing against thousands, if not millions of other golf sites. You may be happy with this, but to give yourself a greater chance of being noticed, try narrowing down the focus of your site to something more specific, like improving your golf swing or the history of the golf club. Remember, the more tightly focused the theme of your website is, the more chance you have of getting it noticed and making it a success. If you want to cover a broader subject then consider break the subject down into several different themes and creating a website for each of those themes.

2 - Content

Filling your site with content can be a daunting task, and whilst it may be a good idea to write the content for the main pages yourself, the job can be greatly simplified by using articles from ezine directories and private label sites like infogoround.com (See http://www.spaceboyfox.com/article-link/infogoround.php for more information). The more relevant content you add to your site the better, plus it is also a good idea to add more articles and information to your site on a regular basis, say every week or once a month. By keeping the content fresh and interesting, you greatly improve the chances of your visitors returning to your site and wanting to link to you.

3 - Promotion

Once you have successfully created your website, filled it with content and have a plan to regularly add more information to it, you just need to get your site noticed and create a stream of visitors. There are many ways to get your site, you can submit your site to the main search engines and wait for them to visit your site and add it to there index. You can get other relevant websites to link to you, so in our golf example above, you would find other golf related sites and ask the webmaster to add a link to your site and in return you will add a link on your site to theirs. You can write articles relating to the subject of your site and submit these to article directories, remembering to add a link to your website in the article content and authors biography box. You can post to forums relating to the subject of your website and add a link to your site in your signature. You can add a link to your website in the signature of all the emails you send out. You can even use word of mouth and just tell people about how great your site is. By doing some research on the internet, you will also find many other ways to promote you website.

By following the three simple steps above, you will greatly increase the chance of making your website successful.

One other thing, by adding in Google AdSense elements to your pages your web site will generate cash for you. The more content rich and highly focused your site, the better the response you’ll get to the adverts you carry. And that means more money paid to you by Google.

About the Author:
For more information on designing a website, using adsense and more promoting your website, take a look at http://www.i-want-to-know.net

It’s pretty funny that we find this particular article after we bought a new server. One of life’s ironies that rears up and bites you on the butt cheeks.

Anyway, our move is one and done - but not without pain, agony, terror….okay, I’m exagerrating a little. The lesson we brought away is this: Stay on top of each and every detail. Don’t be afraid of making a total “pest” of yourself with whomever you buy the server from. It’s your money! If something doesn’t work perfectly, say so…and keep saying so until it does.

HERE’s an article dealing with 5 particular mistakes to avoid.

Good luck!

About 7 years ago, our family started a Web Design and Publishing business (Hightide Web). When blogging caught fire, we launched 14 blogs and recently added Blog Configuration and Hosting to our Hightide services.

Blogging is a whole different ballgame from web design/web publishing. Just when we reached ownership status with html, php shows up at the door. Along with it, comes all sorts of headaches like rss (migraine), content management, databases, etc.

To get my mind around blogs, I put my first one on Blogger. I didn’t have any bad experiences with them - aside from the fact that I didn’t have my own domain name, and the strip at the top annoyed me. But the rest of the experience was a breeze.

When I felt like I could take the training wheels off, I researched the heck out of TypePad and WordPress. I went with WordPress and have never, ever regretted it. All of our blogs are WordPress blogs, and we’ve never encountered any reason(s) to change that status. WordPress is even more of a breeze than Blogger, and it’s 100% easier for readers to leave comments on than the others.

My favorite part is all the great plug-ins you have at your disposal with WordPress blogs - they’re really amazing! The techlicious brainpower that goes behind developing these themes makes my jaw hit the carpet. (If you’re a plugin developer, you pretty much rock!)

FeedBurner is another gift from the blogging gods - if not for them, I’d be decked out in a white jacket today - the one that ties in the back. And I haven’t nearly enough of a tan to pull white off yet. Like WordPress, FeedBurner has a style and approach that is impossible not to catch. IF you read their site thoroughly and ask questions when they arise, you’re home free.

If you currently use WordPress, I wanted to throw you a few links you may or may not be aware of. There’s a wealth of information here and is more than worthy of printing out and reading through:

WordPress Advanced Topics
WordPress Terminology
WordPress Lessons

Blogging isn’t going anywhere - in fact it’s just getting hotter and hotter. Companies aren’t ditching their websites (as a web designer I breath a huge sigh right about here), but they are adding blogs to their sites. It’s getting to where Blog is one of the first things I look for on a website - and if I don’t see it in the navigational column or tabbed menu, I kind of wonder why they’re out of step!

If you have any questions about blogs or blogging that I could answer, feel free to shoot me an e-mail - joi@hightide-web.com.