1. Facebook

More often than not, people aren’t using search engines to discover new content online. Instead, they’re turning to their friends. And with its new “Like” button appearing all over the web, Facebook is becoming an ever-more-important source of finding content online.

Rather than using Google or Yahoo! to find information on a topic, users are asking their Facebook friends and groups about whatever information they need. People also trust this information more, as it’s coming from people they know, rather than just being returned in what often seems like a random pattern.

According to a latest research it’s been indicated that Facebook has currently More than 500 Million active users. If Facebook were a physical nation than this would make them the third most populous country in the world, after China and India.

And if the service continues to grow as rapidly as in the three months to July, it will reach one billion in about 15 months—almost the size of India.

What You Should Be Doing — Facebook opens up a host of possibilities for driving traffic to your website. Incorporating a “Like” button on your site should be your first step if you want your visitors to be able to easily share your site. You’ll also want to create a page or group for your company or website, and encourage people to join. You can put a link to the group on your website, as well as send out recommendations to your current FB friends. Another option with FB is targeted advertising, which can be relatively inexpensive.

Be careful not to use Facebook to spam your fans, though. Post information on your page or group that is relevant to your niche and will also be useful to your fans. If all you do is post about your company or product, you’ll drive away fans.

2. Social Bookmarking and News Sites

A lot of people are actively involved in social bookmarking and news sites. Sometimes these are niche sites devoted to a particular industry, while other times they’re more general. In many cases, it’s more effective to turn to sites like this when looking for information on current events or information of interest than it is to use search engines.

Really involved users might turn to their social bookmarking and news sites when looking for virtually any information. Because of tagging and built-in search functionality on these sites, it’s easy for users to find pretty much anything. And the fact that someone else has already looked over something and decided it was worth saving for later reference or sharing with others, the sites found in this manner are considered more trustworthy.

What You Should Be Doing — Adding social bookmarking links to your website is a great way to encourage your visitors to promote your pages for you. You’ll also want to set up accounts on the major social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon), as well as any sites specific to your niche. Promote relevant content both from your website and elsewhere; otherwise you might be viewed as a spam account.

3. Better Search Engine Algorithms

Search engines get smarter every day. SEO tactics that worked brilliantly years or even months ago don’t work as well now. Search engines know how to weed out the obvious SEO tactics to get at the meat of a site’s content. Because of this, SEO tactics are becoming less and less effective.

As search engines get even more intelligent, on-site SEO strategies will only get less effective. While search engines will still recognize good, relevant content, there will be few strategies that will give sites a boost outside of providing good content. Off-site SEO strategies will likely still work for quite a while longer, but search engines are aware of many of the tactics used to make sites appear more popular than they actually are. It’s a trend that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future, at least.

What You Should Be Doing — This one is pretty obvious: you need to provide high-quality, relevant content on your site. Forget about keyword stuffing and writing with SEO in mind. Just provide content that’s important and useful to your target visitor and trust that search engines will be able to sort out the best sites in a given niche.

4. Blog Roundups and Showcases

There are blogs for virtually every niche in existence. And many of these blogs post roundups of content from various sources online. These roundups are a fantastic way of finding information about a given topic without having to wade through search results.

Again, one reason people turn to these types of posts is the idea that someone has already been through the content featured and has weeded out the content that isn’t any good.

What You Should Be Doing — There are two ways to approach this type of content and promotion. First, if you have a blog, you’ll want to do a couple of these roundups. Include both resources from your own site and elsewhere. These types of posts get bookmarked and passed around for months after they’re written.

The second thing you’ll want to do is create content that’s well-suited to being included in these types of posts. Email bloggers who write about your topic and make sure they’re aware of your site (but also make sure you don’t nag them or become annoying). Getting featured in a post like this can drive traffic to your site for months.

5. Twitters

When looking for information about a topic, a lot of users turn to Twitter. It’s easier to ask a question there than it is to do a search, and you often get much better results. In a lot of cases, people have more Twitter followers than they do friends on other social networking sites, and so there’s more chance to find the information they’re looking for. Plus, Twitter lets anyone see your updates (unless your feed is private, of course), which opens up some great opportunities for promotion.

Twitter is used for everything from breaking news to research. Trending topics give us insight into what’s going on at that moment, and what’s being talked about. Hashtags let us focus on particular topics and see what people are saying whether we’re following them or not. Twitter is a giant conversation, among both strangers and friends, that anyone can become a part of.

What You Should Be Doing — Every business should have a presence on Twitter. Businesses should set up Twitter accounts to interact with their customers and prospective customers, and to see what’s happening in their industry. Businesses should also use Twitter as a proactive customer service tool. You can see the experiences users are having with your business almost in real-time. You’ll also want to follow relevant hashtags related to your industry and answer questions being posed by other users. This can be a great way to pick up new followers. If the information you provide is useful and relevant, people will view you as an expert and will turn to you next time they have questions.

6. People Already Have Their Favorite Sites

Because the Internet has become such an integral part of the lives of so many people, most regular Internet users already know their favorite sites for certain things. If they’re looking for an apartment to rent, for example, they’ll go to Craigslist without bothering to search elsewhere. If they’re looking for a book, they might go straight to Amazon or Abe Books. What they won’t do is use a search engine.

Internet users find websites they’re comfortable with and are hesitant to deal with a new site, especially when it comes to actually purchasing something. When they do business with a new site, they often do so based on the advice of someone else, not based on search engine results.

What You Should Be Doing — Figure out who the big sites are in your niche and then figure out how you can get your content featured on them. With some sites this is pretty easy. If you’re a local business, put ads up on Craigslist that direct people to your website. If you sell a product, see if you can become an Amazon Associate to sell through their website. If all else fails, see if you can place an ad on the site that leads your industry, or see if they’d be interested in featuring some of your content.

7. More Savvy Searchers

Internet users are much more savvy than they were ten or even five years ago. When someone goes to a search engine to find something, they often know exactly what keywords will yield the best results and can quickly weed through the results that don’t offer what they need.

Search volume also plays into this. Searchers can use very specific search terms and still often get thousands or millions of results returned. Because of this, they’re not afraid to search for very specific things, since they know they’ll still likely get enough relevant results. This is where the long-tail comes in, and the long-tail is harder to optimize for effectively, since you never really know how someone is going to reach your site, or what search terms they’ll use.

What You Should Be Doing — Again, this comes down to providing great, relevant content. Stop trying to game the search engines and simply put the best content on your website that you can get. Search engine traffic is becoming a smaller and smaller part of traffic for more established websites, as they get more incoming links and referrals. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay any attention to how searchers are finding your site. And by all means, if you find some obscure search term is sending you significant amounts of traffic, consider adding more content around that term.

Origin of Flash

Flash was first established in 1996, and was a part of Macromedia. According to Wikipedia, “The precursor to the Flash application was SmartSketch, a drawing application for pen computers running the Pinpoint OS developed by Jonathan Gay, who began working on it in college and extended the idea for Silicon Beach Software and its successors. When PenPoint failed in the marketplace, SmartSketch was ported to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. With the Internet becoming more popular, SmartSketch was re-released as FutureSplash, a vector-based Web animation in competition with Macromedia Shockwave. In 1995, SmartSketch was further modified with frame-by-frame animation features and re-released as FutureSplash Animator on multiple platforms. The product was offered to Adobe and used by Microsoft in its early work with the Internet (MSN). In 1996, FutureSplash was acquired by Macromedia and released as Flash, contracting “Future” and “Splash”.”

Jump to present day and, “Flash has indeed spread to near-ubiquity on computers, with better than 98 percent penetration, according to Adobe’s statistics.” reports Stephen Shankland of CNET. Flash is used for more than just video files, and can create great looking graphics that can make a page pop.

The problem with flash is that it can affect a pages loading time depending on the size of the file. This could be a mere half of a second to a few seconds, which can feel like an eternity on the user end. A great web designer usually knows how to work out these problems and create a loading time that is good for them and their client.

Adobe and Apple

You may or may not know that back in the early days of Adobe, Apple actually worked very closely with the company. According to Steve Jobs, “Apple was their [Adobe] first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times.”

Now, their relationship is not so great, and Jobs has decided to ban Flash from Apple’s hand held devices—including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. He doesn’t feel that Adobe’s business model is “open” for the web. Jobs on the other hand do believe that HTML5 is open enough. HTML5 is getting more and more attention, but isn’t supported in all browsers yet making the leap for commercial use not quite ready. HTML5 has a myriad of new developments, one of which is a video tag. Jobs has come out to say he believes this is the future of the Internet, not Flash files—which have dominated the web design scene for years.

Adobe feels the accusations Jobs made, such as they are not as “open” as they say they are. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, told the Wall Street Journal that, “that the difference is that Adobe believes in open content. He says that their Creative Suite software was designed to work on multiple devices and that Apple’s “recent behavior show[s] that they are concerned about Adobe being able” to provide this product that works across multiple platforms.” He goes on to tell the WSJ that, “The technology problems that Mr. Jobs mentions in his essay are “really a smokescreen, “Mr. Narayen says. He says more than 100 applications that used Adobe’s software were accepted in the App Store. When you resort to licensing language to restrict this sort of development, it has nothing to do with technology.”

HTML5

The main competitor against Flash is HTML5. The newest form of HTML has many new upgrades. The advantage Flash has over HTML5 is that it isn’t quite ready for release. Internet Explorer for example won’t be compatible with HTML5 until the release of IE9, which isn’t released yet, but is scheduled to be in beta by late September.

The new technique most people seem to be fixating on is the video tag. Without this tag, there would be no debate where Flash is concerned. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) last month declared HTML5 in a “last call” phase. Comparing Flash and the capabilities of HTML5’s video tag is like comparing apples to oranges. Flash has been around for numerous years, allowing for many upgrades and fixes to bugs. HTML5, although a great new option, is still in its infancy age and will probably need a few years to be a better competitor for Adobe.

A big step for HTML5 is YouTube’s upgrade to support HTML5’s video tag. Back in January YouTube rolled out an HTML5 compatible version to their site. PC Magazine reported in Jan. that, “You can sign up for the beta simply by visiting YouTube’s HTML5 page and start enjoying HTML5 videos today, but there are restrictions: videos with captions, annotations, or ads will still be rendered by the Flash player, and fullscreen mode isn’t supported.”

This month Wired is reporting that YouTube now has a mobile version of their HTML5 videos available, “the mobile version of Google’s video-sharing website received an upgrade Thursday. The new m.youtube.com has a bunch of new features, including high-quality video playback in the browser using HTML5.”

Mobile

Where mobile is concerned, Flash isn’t the best option, and could be its Achilles heel. Flash 10.1 is now available on mobile devices but only on certain operating systems. Below is a screenshot from Adobe’s page outlining compatible mobile OS.

RIM (BlackBerry OS) and the iPhone still do not support Flash. The newest phone from BlackBerry, the BlackBerry Tourch will have, “Webkit browser supports HTML5, which has been a selling point by Apple and Google on their mobile devices,” reports CNET. There are other reports speculating that BlackBerry is working on its Flash compatibility, but nothing has been confirmed or denied from the company.

Neilson reported this month that, “Android’s share of new smartphone subscribers surged past new iPhone subscribers in the U.S. during the second quarter, commanding 27 percent of recent smartphone purchases compared to 23 percent for the iPhone.” Good news for Adobe, although these numbers are not including the iPhone 4 sales, which were staggering.

The above chart outlines the sales for multiple mobile OS and shows Android’s rapid growth. Whether it will continue to grow is hard to say, but it is showing promise.

According to TFTS, “a recent Wall Street Journal report says that more and more programmers and web designers are considering dropping Flash as their clients want their products and websites to be compatible with the iPhone and the iPad.”

Jailbreaking Just Became Legal

The U.S. Copyright Office amended the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and is now saying jailbreaking your phone is legal. Meaning you can legally hack into your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and make changes. Allowing a user to download apps not in the app store, and use Flash if they want.

Many users of Apple products may not share its stance regarding Flash and Adobe in general. Now that jailbreaking is legal, it could open the door for people who just can’t live without Flash. For those of you who are thinking about jailbreaking your phone, you should consider the following :

• Doing so will exclude you from any warranty you have with the phone
• It could stop your phone from working all together (or bricked in Apple jargon)
• Apple service stores won’t fix your device if it is jailbroken

Why Flash Won’t Be Going Anywhere

One reason is that most designers use Flash. It is one of the best programs out there for creating great graphics and video platforms. HTML5 is looking to be a great competitor, but it will be a long time before it is at the same level as Flash, if that ever happens.

Flash is also compatible in all browsers—a HUGE advantage over HTML5. Many companies are concerned about reaching their audience, not using the latest web code upgrade.

An advantage CNET points out is that, “Flash video can use a variety of “codecs” for encoding and decoding video as it’s sent from server to viewer. Viewers don’t need to know anything beyond how to click a video’s “play” button, a contrast to Net video’s incompatibility-fraught early days. But with HTML5, though, there are two prevailing codecs right now: H.264, supported by Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome, and Ogg Theora, supported by Firefox, Chrome, and, according to plan, Opera. IE, the dominant browser doesn’t support any at HTML5 video at present.”

Companies that rival Apple are also jumping at the bit to make devices to rival the iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone. Motorola for example, is taking a stab into the tablet industry and creating their own tablet device (with the help of Verizon). Motorola has decided it will “be access to Verizon’s FiOS cable service [and] support Adobe Flash, a platform of choice for more than 90 percent of web videos,” according to the International Business Times.

With more and more companies wanting to rival Apple in these verticals, it will make Flash more appealing for other companies to embrace. That is the great thing about being on the other side of the debate—other companies will embrace the Flash technology to market against Apple’s products.

Not Everyone Who Buys Apple Products Feels The Same Way About Flash

According to the Inquirer, “researchers at Changewave found that the most common dislike among Ipad owners was the device’s lack of Flash support. Given that over 80 per cent of respondents in the report claim to use their Ipads for web browsing and almost 50 per cent for viewing video, areas in which Flash are particularly pervasive, it’s not surprising that users find lack of support for the format annoying.”

The FTC is also reported to be looking into the ban on Flash. 9 to 5 Mac is reporting that, “Apple may face an FTC investigation into its refusal to allow Flash support on the iOS platform. This is speculation based on a recent refusal on the part of the FTC to grant Wired access to the 200 pages of complaints against Apple filed by Adobe.” It is too soon to tell if this speculation is true however, but something to keep an eye out for.

Even with these complaints, it doesn’t seem to be enough from people buying Apple’s products. The iPad sold over a million units in 28 days, and the iPhone 4 sold 1.7 million units in 3 days.

Moving Forward

It isn’t an issue of who is going to move forward in the debate, but what platform works best for your clients. Right now Flash is more compatible with the many different browsers, but HTML5 will catch up eventually. Flash may also deliver better images and quality video, but HTML5 can do a lot, and doesn’t need expensive software to do so. In the end I think a hybrid of the two will be what web designers will be using. Some clients will be Flash crazy, while others will favor HTML5 in the future.

The point is that Flash, which hasn’t had a real competitor, will eventually have one with HTML5. This just means Adobe is going to have to step up their game to deliver better quality results than HTML5 or it is going to lose clients. People can be on team Adobe or team Apple, but it is going to come down to who can render the best results over multiple platforms at a low cost. End of story. The business model isn’t changing, Adobe is just getting a competitor.

It is far too early for HTML5 to be a viable competitor, but in a few years from now we could be seeing it catch fast. You don’t have to take Steve Job’s rigid stance on the subject, but instead have a more open ended approach. Decide what works best on a case by case situation. Does your client need a fast loading time? Are they implementing too many videos onto the site? Do their visitors use a HTML5 compatible browser? All of these are points you need to consider before using HTML5. In the future browser compatibility will be a non-issue and level the playing ground.

Step 1: Creating New File

We are going to start by creating a new file using Photoshop CS4. After opening Photoshop go to File >> New… or you can just use Ctrl+N. Use the settings in the image below for your new file.

Step 2: Setting Up The Background

Now lets set the background layer Blending Options to the settings in the image below for Gradient Overlay.

Step 3: Creating the Phone Body – Create The Shape Layer

So, now after the background layer is ready we can start creating the phone shape layer. Select the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) and set shape color to Black and 20px radius of rounded corners as shown in the image below. Then draw a rectangle shape with a fixed size of 360px*560px for this tutorial, but you are free to choose the size you like for your version. Then rename your new shape layer to “phone”.

Step 4: Creating the Phone Body – Applying Layer Styles

After creating the shape layer for the phone we will have the following result. Now press Ctrl+A while your “phone” layer is selected and then choose the Move Tool (V) and then go to Layer >> Align Layers to Selection >> Vertical Centers then Horizontal Centers this will make our phone aligned to the middle of our canvas.

Now open the “phone” layer blending options and use the settings in the images below for Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Inner Glow, Gradient Overlay, Pattern Overlay (use the Brushed Metal Wallpaper as a pattern. Or, you can create your own Metal texture via this photoshop tutorial), and Stroke.

Importing The Brushed Metal Wallpaper as Pattern

You can create a pattern from the wallpaper by simply opening the wallpaper in Photoshop and then goto Edit >> Define Pattern… and then give it a name that you like.

If you got everything right the “phone” shape layer should look exactly as the image below.

Step 5: Creating The Phone Screen – Create The Shape Layers

We can now start creating the screen shape layers. Select the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) and set shape color to Black and 10px radius of rounded corners as shown in the image below. Then draw a rectangle shape with a fixed size of 300px*400px. Then rename your new shape layer to “screen 1″.

Now align the “screen 1″ shape layer horizontally to the canvas as we did with phone shape layer in Step 4, but don’t align it vertically just move it vertically so that most of the lower third of the phone shape is clear. You can use the image below as a guideline.

Step 6: Creating The Phone Screen – Duplicating The Shape Layer

Now we are going to duplicate the “screen 1″ shaper layer 3 Three times by going to Layer >> Duplicate Layer… and call the new layers “screen 2″, “screen 3″ and “screen 4″.

Step 7: Creating The Phone Screen – Applying Layer Styles

Now that we have four similar screen shape layers we are going to apply styles to every layer. Select “screen 1″ shape layer and then select Blending Options and apply the settings in the images below for Inner Shadow, Gradient Overlay and Stroke.

The “screen 1″ layer should look like the image below.

Now we are going to apply styles to “screen 2″ layer. Select “screen 2″ shape layer and then select Blending Options and apply the settings in the images below for Fill Opacity, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow and Gradient Overlay (I used the same gradient colors as in layer “screen 1″).

The “screen 2″ layer should look like the image below.

Now we are going to apply styles to “screen 3″ layer. Select “screen 3″ shape layer and then select Blending Options and apply the settings in the images below for Fill Opacity and Satin.

The “screen 3″ layer should look like the image below.

Now we are going to apply styles to “screen 4″ layer. Select “screen 4″ shape layer and then select Blending Options and apply the settings in the images below for Fill Opacity and Bevel and Emboss.

The “screen 4″ layer should look like the image below.

Step 8: Creating The Phone Screen – Create Screen Light Reflection

Now let’s add a little light reflection to the screen to make it more realistic. Create the Shape layer as shown in the image below. Rename the new layer to “screen reflection”.

Select “screen reflection” shape layer and then go to Blending Options and use the settings in the images below for Fill Opacity and Gradient Overlay.

Now you should have a result similar to image below.

Step 9: Creating The Phone Navigation Dial – Create Shape Layers

Using the Ellipse Tool (U) create a circle shape with a fixed size of 85px*85px, set shape color to Black and rename the layer to “navigation 1″, duplicate the shape layer as “navigation 2″. Place the Shape layers as shown in the image below.

Step 10: Creating The Phone Navigation Dial – Applying Layer Styles

Now, select layer “navigation 1″ and then Blending Options and use the settings in the images below for Blend Mode, Bevel and Emboss, Gradient Overlay and Stroke.

Layer “navigation 1″ should look like the image below.

Now, select layer “navigation 2″ and then Blending Options and use the settings in the images below for Inner Glow, Bevel and Emboss, Gradient Overlay and Stroke.

Layer “navigation 2″ should look like the image below.

Step 11: Creating The Phone Command Buttons – Create Shape Layers

Using the Pen Tool (P) create a shape similar to the image below, set shape color to Black, top right corner radius to 10px and rename the layer to “command 1″, duplicate the shape layer as “command 2″, “end call” and “accept call”. Place the Shape layers as shown in the image below.

Step 12: Creating The Phone Command Buttons – Apply Layer Styles

Now apply the Inner Glow, Gradient Overlay and Stroke to all four command layers as in the images below.

Now apply the Bevel and Emboss style for layers “command 1″, “end call”, “command 2″ and “accept call” as the images below consecutively.

The result should be as in the image below.

Step 13: Creating The Phone Command Buttons – Create Command Buttons Engravings

Now we finish command buttons by creating the engravings on them. Using Line Tool (U) create with a weight of 3px and a width of 30px and set layer color to Black. Duplicate the Layers 3 times and align them to each command button as in the image below.

Step 14: Creating The Phone Command Buttons – Apply Style to Engravings

Apply the Blending Options settings for all layers for Inner Shadow, and apply Blending Options settings to each layer as in the images below. Apply the red styles to the end call button engraving, green styles to the accept call button engraving and blue to “command 1″ and “command 2″ engravings.

Step 15: Creating The Phone Navigation – Create Engravings

Now using Pencil Tool (B) with a master diameter of 3px, then create a new empty layer by going to Layer >> New >> Layer… or use the shortcut Shift+Ctrl+N, and then draw a shape like the one in the image below (use Black as color). Repeat the same step on a new layer but use White as color.

Step 16: Creating The Phone Navigation – Create Engravings

Now align the two layers to “navigation 2″ layer to the center horizontally and then move the white layer one time to the bottom. Then duplicate the layers and rotate them 90 degree CW by going to Edit >> Transform >> Rotate 90 CW and repeat this 2 times, and distribute each two sets on the dial as in the image below.

Step 17: Creating The Phone Speaker

Now we are going to create the speaker using Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) with fixed width and height of 100px*8px and using the settings in the image below.

Create using the settings two shape layers call the lower layer “speaker back” and the hight layer “speaker”. Position both layers to center of the phone horizontally and at the top of the phone above the screen in the space available, just like the image below.

Step 18: Styling The Phone Speaker

Select the “speaker back” layer and open Blending Options and use the settings in the image below for Bevel and Emboss.

Select the “speaker” layer and open Blending Options and use the settings in the images below for Blend Mode, Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Inner Glow, Bevel and Emboss and Contour.

You should have a result like the image below.

Step 19: Creating Phone Shadow

Now, after we finished the phone we will start on making the shadow. Select the background layer (the first layer we created in this tutorial) then using Pen Tool (P) and the color Black create a shape under the phone similar to the image below with a width of about 400px, then rename the layer to “shadow”.

Now select the “shadow” layer and goto Layer >> Rasterize >> Shape, so that we can apply a filter on the shape layer. Now goto Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur… and use the settings in the image below.

Applying Filters to Shape Layers

You can apply filters to Shape layers in two ways: First, by rasterizing the shape layer but in this case you lose the qualities of resizable shape layers. Second, by converting the shape layer to smart object and keep all the qualities of resizable shape layers. You can convert a shape layer to a smart object by first selecting the layer and then goto Layer >> Smart Objects >> Convert To Smart Object.

You would have the result in the image below.

Now move the “shadow” layer just like the image and set its Opacity to 60%.

Step 20: Creating Phone Reflection

Now, select and duplicate the “phone” layer select the “phone” layer again and goto Layer >> Group Layers or you can just use Ctrl+G and name the group “reflection”, move the group just under the phone like in the image below.

Now we can apply a layer mask to the group, select the “reflection” group and then goto Layer >> Layer Mask >> Reveal All, then select the Gradient Tool (G) and set gradient from Black to White and Drag from the lower third of the phone to the bottom.
You can use the below image as a guideline.

Now, if you have followed the tutorial step by step then you should have a result similar to the final image below (Click on the image for the full resolution image).

Problem: Healthy (mental and physical)

Many people believe that the Internet has a negative influence, because it captures the free time of all users (especially the young ones became addicted to it). Spending so many hours in front of the PC can cause multiple diseases, some of them with severe effects.

On the other hand, spending every minute of your life surfing on www can transform you in a person who has no connection with reality, a stranger in your own life. In these conditions unfortunately human being is not a natural creature; he becomes a digital addicted one.

Replay:

All of us forget a crucial piece of information (some on purpose, some by mistakes): the Internet is only an instrument, not a creature, a diabolic entity or something like that. It is simple to realize: if you shut down your PC, there is no Internet. Being addicted to the Internet is not the guilty of it; only the addicted person is guilty. I am seeing this problem so clear that I do not have any doubts: it is the same situation as a criminal shooting his victim and defending himself by saying that the bullet was killing the victim; he only triggered the gun… so the trial should punish the bullet. The same situation is happening with the consumption of alcohol; shouldn’t we produce alcohol to not drink in an abusive manner or just punish the people who drink in excess (and of course interact in a negative way with other people)? Thinking in this wrong mentality we should travel with horses and camels because cars have greater speed and if you have an accident the injuries are more severe compared to the ones resulting from an accident with a horse.

Regarding the problem of socialization the answer is the same: a moderate use of the Internet is the best solution. A new kind of making friends and socialization was born after a few years of the Internet development: the socialization networks increase constantly their number and their application; I can’t imagine a normal user of Internet without an account on Facebook, Twitter or Hi5.

It is true that ten years old children spent many hours in front of the PC and parents are somehow worried about it. Another very important point in this problem is the modality of how Internet is used: you can use it for entertainment, to find news, listen to music, watch videos and so on and so forth. As a parent you should guide your children for appropriate websites. Once again, Internet is a very powerful instrument and in few years probably a person without knowledge in surfing on the www will be considered an analphabet. Your children can use Internet as a modality to find out who was Albert Einstein and that is very good, but it can be also used it to get access to xxx websites. I am not a parent yet and my advices are superficial but surely good: protect your family from these websites, but consider the Internet as an object of study. I bet you: in ten years in all societies the use of Internet will be considered something as compared to writing (I know that in some country this level was already reached but I mentioned all societies, including the poor regions of the Earth).

In conclusion to this cons: shut down your PC and you will see that it can’t do anything to come back. Addiction is the problem of the addicted one not of the source of addiction, the key of this situation is moderation.

Conclusion: Internet is a great instrument but you should know how to use it, otherwise it can be sometimes a dangerous enemy.

Problem: Hackers

According to Wikipedia, a hacker “is a person who breaks into computers and computer networks, either for profit or motivated by the challenge”. Many business and enormous amounts of money are being moved from one party to another on the Internet and this is a great come-on for users with experience; simply break a password and get access to many accounts and obviously you take some money from these. I totally agree, the Internet needs more security, it is vital for future; much more if we look at statistics we will see that the online trade and financial transfers are increasing in a manner that could scary some elderly people.

Replay:

This is only my opinion (if you subscribe to it, it’s perfect or if you do not agree with me let me know your opinion in a comment) but hackers should be divide in two categories: Larceners and Specialists

• Larceners: The larceners are the people who deserve to be put in prison because they steal. Even if the account which was broken by him is owned by a corrupt person it is not his right to take money…in this case he is also a scoundrel. I really hate people who use the Internet to make robberies; indeed for these persons an online police is needed.

• Specialists: I see hacking as a good thing and I am conscious about what I wrote. The real hacking is very good, once again. A true hacker never takes money or produces negative effects for users from his work, he wants only to show that some financial algorithms are very weak and somebody with bad intentions can profit very easy. The hackers find a very good way to show their ideas and problems: break the main websites and put their message to be read by all potential surfers. It is a controversial problem with a group of hackers from Romania called Romanian National Security that broke the online editions of Daily Telegraph, Corriere de la Serra, La Stampa, RAI, Le Monde. It truly produced significant loss of traffic and that means a decrease of profit, but the message posted was more important than money. The idea of the messages was to not offence Romanian people and to not categorize them as gypsies or beggars; I want to emphasize their message “Romanian are not gypsies” and detail it, no one in Romania hates or discriminates a person because he is gipsy, we as Romanian (I come from Romania) do not like to be put equal to a person who kills, robs, rapes etc. in Western Europe or elsewhere. In this situation an attack of this team is a bad thing but the purpose is good, they try to show the truth.

  All the attacked agencies recognized that the attack was one of the most efficient ones and done in a very professional way- it really shows that the hackers are very intelligent.

  Another important attack of hackers was committed by a Greek team who broke all the passwords and security codes at the most important scientific experiment ever seen called “The experiment of century” which was hold last year/this year in Switzerland. Breaking all the passwords gave full access to the hackers and if they intervened in this project the effects would have been unbelievable and the word “catastrophe” probably wouldn’t be enough. The good part of this attack was that the Greek team wanted only to highlight that the security measures weren’t barricades for them. They posted that they weren’t following a financial motivation; the main idea was that such an important and dangerous project needed more security and attention. I believe that it was a very interesting point of view: the authorities confirmed that all the measures are unbreakable but it wasn’t true. The team raises an important idea: what could have happened if a group of hackers with bad intentions would have broken the codes and passwords? I really do not know…

Conclusion: hackers are very intelligent so we should pay attention to their ideas sometimes; only the ones who want to profit from their activities by e.g. stealing should be punished and forced to stay in prison.

Problem: Everything Will be Online

The entire population of the Earth is moving towards an online life, to a world where www applications will be the new laws and everything depends only on two clicks. A failure of this huge network won’t be as a nuclear bomb? The authorities of USA recognized that even if they spend uncountable amounts of money for safety of their information a very powerful and successful hackers’ attack would have apocalyptical effects.

Replay:

It can’t be exactly predicted how the future will look like, surely the Internet has its role but we should be prepared for the next level: how will the world behave with the invention or discovery of a new internet network? I am sure that some companies prepare in secret a new internet network…sounds like a little bit of conspiracy, but this is my point of view. Anyway the men behind the Internet are smart enough to solve all the potential problems and the tendency of being online can’t be removed.

Conclusion: We are still the leader of our life and even if the Internet is super powerful, it can’t conquer us. Who is afraid about it is afraid about evolution.

Clean Your Code

This is an easy step, and should be something you have in the back of your mind when coding a new site. You don’t want your code to look messy, or have any extra div files. The more basic your code is, the faster the loading time. It should look clean crisp and white.

“For a more definitive marker, if your page HTML is over 30kB-50kB, then you have an issue you need to address. This can be checked in the Web Developer extension for Firefox and Chrome,” says Kristine Schachinger of SearchEngineWatch.

HTML is not the only code that should be clean—make sure your style sheets are in order as well. Keeping things neat and organized should ensure a faster loading time. When implementing large photo files, use a compressed file instead. This will also keep your CSS more clean and help with loading time.

HTTP Requests

This is a big one. The more HTTP requests you have the longer your loading time. Below is a screenshot to help you better visualize how HTTP requests work.

The more times your page requires these types of requests from the server, the longer it will take for the browser to display the page. Using AJAX is one way to help streamline your process, but as Aaron Hopkins points out, “for many sites that reference dozens of external objects, the majority of the page load time is spent in separate HTTP requests for images, javascript, and stylesheets. AJAX probably could help, but speeding up or eliminating these separate HTTP requests might help more. ”

Hopkins goes on to say that most DSL/cable Internet connections, “have asymmetric bandwidth, at rates like 1.5Mbit down/128Kbit up, 6Mbit down/512Kbit up, etc. Ratios of download to upload bandwidth are commonly in the 5:1 to 20:1 range. ” To summarize, this means the requests can take the same amount of time to send as it would to display an object that is 5-20 times the request size.

One way to speed up your site if you do have multiple images is to set your keepalive active. “The Keep-Alive extension to HTTP/1.0 and the persistent connection feature of HTTP/1.1 provide long-lived HTTP sessions which allow multiple requests to be sent over the same TCP connection. In some cases this has been shown to result in an almost 50% speedup in latency times for HTML documents with many images. Toenable Keep-Alive connections, set KeepAlive On,” according to apache.org.

Caching

When sending HTTP requests, many people implement caches to help with load time. This can be a great fix, but if you update your images and other cached items, it could actually take longer. “Even though the browser has the logo, it doesn’t know whether the image can be used. After all, the file may have changed on the server and there could be an updated version,” reports betterexplained.com.

You can get around this however in a few different ways. One being with an ETAg—which, “allows a client to make conditional requests. This allows caches to be more efficient, and potentially saves bandwidth, as a web server does not need to send a full response if the content has not changed. ”’

You can also have it figured so that the browser checks for the date of when the file was last modified. This can be a good fix, but the ETag is more preferred because of situations such as day light savings, the initial clock was wrong when programming etc.

Javascript and CSS Files

When looking at your Javascript make sure you are putting your files on the external .js file. If you use JQuery, make sure you don’t have any unwanted script in your code. JQuery is known to have libraries of scripts you never use.

When using XHTML you can streamline your code to ensure your HTTP requests are limited. An example of this is below:

So this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/fonts.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/nav.css" />
<script src="/js/functions.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 
<script src="/js/validation.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Becomes this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/combined.css" />
<script src="/js/combined.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Even better, XSSI these files directly into high traffic pages, like this:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
<!--#include virtual="/css/combined.css" -->
-->
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
<--
<!--#include virtual="/js/combined.js" --> 
// -->
</script>

Don’t write in Old Time

You don’t have to mimic 400 year old style; if you want to appeal to today’s audience you must go through today’s authors and check out their writing style and dramatic style, see JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series is not just a children book, it’s hell more than that.

Do not write Long Paragraphs

Writing long paragraph and putting stories in full blocks actually kills the reader’s interest. People who read on internet are looking for more of fun reading and little shots of information along the way is well accepted. Make small paragraphs, looks well presented and easy to read.

Don’t make up Tough Scenarios

You need not beat around the bush for any reason at all, many times this is seen and it’s a total blunder as nobody likes to get caught in a puzzle. Making such scenarios as to get the reader more absorbed, actually takes the reader away from you.

Don’t stick to Stereotype Style, be Innovative

You need not stick to one format and style; stereotypes have overcome our world today. Same design, same format, same cloth and same sense make life boring. Innovation needs no boundaries and no rules as well.

Hear yourself and Write the way You Want

Listen to the “inner voice”, write what you think and how you think, many times the employer puts constraints which makes the writer feel lost in his own land. Writer should know how to deliver while hanging on to his ways.

Try to Stick to some Old Practice, Don’t just go on Hearsay

Here I am contradicting my statement, but not without a reason. Safe play may let you go a long way, so you may sometimes stick to those practices which are proven and undoubtedly beneficial.

Keep your Titles Short, and use Easy Language

Keeping long titles and complex language may look good but makes an idiot of you as very few read it and even fewer would undnd ierstat.

Don’t ignore your Readers, Peers, Social Media

Often writers ignore their readers and peers; they write complete text and publish it giving less notice to what their peers have to say about it, Social media comments need to be taken seriously enough to alter it totally or be proud of it. Listen to the readers review, ignoring that may get you out of business.

Leave your Ego Aside

Some people high on ego reflect their ego in their writings, know your client wants your writing and not your ego. Some might argue that such a thing as ego as helped them rise but if it’s not kept down I am pretty sure it will get them down even faster.

Grammatical Mistakes

Putting down the most common (at least for me) grammatical mistakes done while writing. Go through these well as nobody could be perfect with each of these (unless with a degree in English).

• Your vs. You’re

  Your means “The forms of the possessive case of the personal pronoun you”.

  Usage > your book

  You’re, is a contraction for “you are”.

  Usage > you’re not doing this right.

• It’s vs. Its

  Its, means “Possessive form of the pronoun it”.

  Usage > this page has lost its attraction.

  It’s, is the Contraction for “it is” or “it has”.

  Usage > It’s very important to use correct English.

• There vs. Their

  There as noun means “a location other than here” also an adverb.

  Usage > there are many people in this field.

  Their means “The possessive case of the personal pronoun they”.

  Usage > their opinion is also important.

• Affect vs. Effect

  Affect as verb means “act physically on”.

  Usage > Communication skill immensely affects the income.

  Effect as noun means “the central meaning or theme of a speech or literary work”.

  Usage > the effect of communication skill is immense on income.

• Loose vs. Lose

  Loose as verb means “become loose or looser or less tight”.

  Usage > See that your pants aren’t too loose.

  Lose as verb means “allow to go out of sight”.

  Usage > don’t lose your wallet.

• Who’s vs. whose

  Whose means “The possessive case of who or which”.

  Usage > whose game is over?

  Who’s is contraction for “who is”.

  Usage > who’s coming home with me?”)

NOTE: All word meanings are taken from onelook.com

• Pay-per-click: With pay-per-click ads, publishers are paid when one of their visitors clicks on an ad appearing on their site. The amount of payment varies widely, depending on the individual advertiser and the competition within their niche (higher competition niches generally have higher ad payouts).
• Pay-per-impression: With pay-per-impression ads, publishers are paid whenever a visitor lands on a page containing the ad. No further action on the part of the visitor is necessary.
• Contextual Ads: Contextual ads are served automatically based on the content within a particular page. These ads could be text-based, banners, or in-line ads. Google AdSense ads are one example of contextual ads.
• Text Link Ads: These ads are simple text links placed on specific pages. They’re often seen in sidebars.
• Banner Ads: Like text link ads, banner ads are generally placed on a specific page, and are common in sidebars, headers, and in individual posts. Banner ads can also be used in contextual advertising programs, and with all revenue models. 125×125 pixel ads are particularly popular on many blogs.
• Pay-per-action: With pay-per-action ads, publishers are paid when a visitor clicks on an ad from their blog and then performs some kind of action, like requesting information or purchasing something.
• Affiliate Ads: These are a type of pay-per-action ad. For a publisher to get paid, a visitor has to click on an ad and then purchase a product. Amazon and Ebay both offer affiliate ad programs.
• Direct Ads: Direct ads are sold by bloggers directly to advertisers, without going through any kind of affiliate or advertising network. They could be text link ads or banner ads, or even reviews.
• Reviews: Paid reviews are a popular form of blog advertising where an advertiser pays the blogger for a review of their product or company. Ethically, bloggers should disclose when a post is paid for by a company, and in some countries it’s required by law (including the U.S.). Some companies that currently offer brokering of paid reviews are PayPerPost and SponsoredReviews.com.
• Feed Ads: Feed ads are ads that appear in the RSS feed of a blog. These are almost always text-based. Sometimes they’re sold separately from on-site ads, while other times they’re included in an ad package.

Ad placement makes a big difference in not only how much an ad costs, but also how effective it is. There are a number of common ad locations on most blogs:

• Above the Header: This is a popular place for banner ads and is generally the most expensive position.
• Below the Header: This is another popular place for banner ads, and also for contextual text ads.
• Within Posts: There are three positions here, really: at the top of the post, generally with the post text wrapped around the ad; between paragraphs in the post (usually the first and second or second and third paragraphs); and at the end of the post, usually before the comment form. In-post ads can be sold on a per-post basis or throughout all the posts on the site. Inline text ads are also placed within posts.
• Between Posts on the Home Page: This is another popular spot for either banner or text-based ads. They’re usually placed between the first and second posts on the home page, or directly under a featured post.
• Sidebar: This is one of the most common spots for both banners and text link ads, as well as for contextual ads like AdSense. Sidebar ads, if they appear near the top of the page, can be effective and can rival other ads on the home page.
• Footer: This is generally the lowest-impact ad space on a blog, but some blogs only include ads in their footers. It’s also generally the least expensive position.
• Page-Specific: Sometimes a blog will allow advertising on specific pages of their blog, such as the archive page or category pages. The cost and effectivenenss for these can vary widely based on traffic for the particular page/category and the ad format.

• Do you even want ads? Not every blog out there needs to have ads on it. If you’re not comfortable having ads on your blog, or if you just don’t feel like having them, then don’t.
• Are ads appropriate? If you have a professional blog related to your job, you may not want ads on your blog, or at the least you may want to retain complete control over those ads. In these cases, direct ad sales are probably best, or just leave ads off altogether.
• What type of ads are best-suited for your design? Consider what kinds of ads will fit within your current theme. If there’s no room for banners, consider in-line contextual ads or text link ads. A very minimalist design might not be well-suited to banner ads either. On the other hand, a design with a lot of colorful graphics might not be well-suited to text link ads.
• How many ads do you want? This is something that will be largely dependent on your blog’s theme, but how many ads do you want to include on each page? Realize that the more ads you include, the less you’ll be able to charge for each ad. But you can make up for it in volume if you manage to sell all the available ad space.

Direct Sales or Network?

You’ll need to decide whether you want to sell ads directly to advertisers or join a blog network. In many cases, you may want to do both. Join a network like Google’s AdSense for some spaces and then sell other spaces directly.

Realize that a network may take anywhere from 10% to 50% of more of your advertising revenue. But they can also be much more effective at filling your ad spaces than you might be on your own, especially if you don’t have a particularly high-traffic blog.

If you opt to go the direct sales route, set up a page for advertising on your blog and link to it prominently. On that page you should include your rates, ad sizes available, and information about the kinds of ads you will or will not accept. Make sure you include a contact form here, or better yet: an ad order form.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs can be a great way to make money from your blog if you don’t really want to incorporate traditional ads. Find specific products you believe in and see if there’s an affiliate program associated with them. It’s important you disclose that they’re affiliate links, but as long as you make your policy clear (that you only include products you’ve personally used or had recommended to you, or something similar), many of your readers won’t mind a bit.

If you blog with WordPress, there’s a plugin (the Amazon Associate Filter) available to automatically convert Amazon product links to include your referral ID, so you get commission on any sales. Plugins like this streamline the affiliate process and make it easy to implement on your blog. Just don’t forget to acknowledge that it’s an affiliate link any time you include a link to Amazon.

Special Blog Themes

The majority of blog platforms out there have themes that already have specific spaces set aside for advertising. The benefit of these is that they’re often already optimized for programs like AdSense or affiliate programs, and make integration with those programs much easier, even for those who aren’t particularly tech-savvy.

The other advantage to some of these themes is that they’ve placed ads in optimal positions within the theme to maximize the number of people who click on those ads. While not all themes do this (some just put the ad space wherever they need a filler graphic), it’s worth looking around for themes that seem to have considered optimal ad placement.

If you’re looking to advertise your company or product online, blogs can be a great avenue on which to do so. But figuring out which blogs to advertise on and which format is best for your company and product can be tricky. After all, there are millions of blogs out there, and probably thousands or tens of thousands that target visitors who might be interested in your product.

It’s all a bit overwhelming. But there are some specific things to consider when deciding where and how to advertise. Here’s a guide:

Finding the Right Blogs

Choosing which blogs to advertise on can sometimes seem overwhelming. After all, there are thousands out there that might be appropriate for you to advertise on. How do you narrow it down?

The first thing you need to do is find all the appropriate blogs that might be a good fit. Now, when I say “appropriate” I don’t mean every blog out there that caters to your prospective customers. Rather you want blogs that:

• Are updated regularly
• Have reasonable traffic levels
• And have engaged readers (you can tell this by the number of comments on each post; higher numbers are better)

There are a few methods for finding good blogs. First, you can check out blog directories that organize blogs by category. You can try searching for “best of” lists in your niche (for example, if you have a financial product you want to advertise, you might search for “best finance blogs” or something similar). And you can also ask around. Ask your current customers what blogs they read regularly, or ask around on Twitter or Facebook what people’s favorite blogs are related to your product.

You should probably end up with between 50 and 100 blogs to consider, though it will vary depending on the niche you’re looking at. Once you have this list, it’s time to go through each one and determine whether it’s a good fit or not. Things to look for include:

• Do they accept advertising?
• Do your competitors advertise with them?
• Are their rates within your budget?
• Do they publish their traffic or subscriber numbers?
• What types of ads do they accept?

Based on the answers to those questions, you’ll probably be able to eliminate half the blogs on your list, or maybe more. From there, consider which blogs are the best value for the rates they’re charging, and start with those.

Consider Related Blogs

You don’t have to stick to blogs that cater specifically to your product’s niche. Consider other kinds of blogs that are likely to attract your target customer. For example, if you sell luxury goods, you might target finance blogs, or vice versa. Or if you sell camping equipment, you might target blogs that cater to people who mountain bike or rock climb, as those people likely spend a lot of time outdoors and there’s probably some overlap.

Think outside the box when it comes to where to place your ads, especially if there aren’t a huge number of blogs in your particular niche. You may find you get even better results when advertising on related blogs, and you may find there are fewer ads from your direct competitors on those blogs.

Choosing an Ad Format

We covered the different kinds of ads at the beginning of this post. But you’re probably wondering which kind is best for your particular product or company. There are a couple of things to consider:

• Your budget. Text ads are going to be least expensive, while banner ads will be more. Pay-per-impression ads are often more expensive than pay-per-click or pay-per-action ads, especially when compared to the number of viewers who take action.
• Your goals. Banner ads can be more effective at building brand awareness than text-only ads and are often a better solution for emerging brands.

Evaluate Results

Once you’ve placed some ads, you’ll want to monitor how effective they are. If you have a good website analytics program (like Google Analytics), this is relatively easy. You’ll want to look at how many visitors click through to your site from each ad you’ve placed, and then how many of those go on to make purchases or otherwise perform a desired action.

Once people do when they reach your site is just as important as having them click on your ad. If they’re not going on to make purchases, you may need to rethink your ad. Is it misleading in some way? Or is it that those who are on the particular blog you’re advertising on not ready to make a purchase? Either one requires some adjustment. In the first case, you’ll need to consider redesigning your ad. In the second, you may want to either change your expectations or consider advertising elsewhere.

Don’t be afraid to do some A/B testing or otherwise experiment with your ad formats, the blogs on which you advertise, and other aspects of your online advertising campaign. Regularly reviewing your results and adjusting your efforts will lead to a more successful advertising campaign.

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine has ten ad spaces in the sidebar on their home page. They also have a space for a horizontal banner ad just above the main article section. On individual post pages, they have larger square ads below the post title. There’s a good balance of ads-to-content on the site.

Official Link

HongKiat.com

HongKiat.com has ad space above and within their header, as well as in the sidebar, with larger ads at the top and two columns of smaller ads below. It’s an effective layout that doesn’t overwhelm and still leaves plenty of emphasis on the content.

Official Link

Webdesigner Depot

Webdesigner Depot has space for ads in their sidebar, with the largest ads on top and smaller ads below. There’s also space for a square ad on the individual post pages, which appears directly below the post title. Keeping ads out of the header strengthens the site’s branding.

Official Link

Noupe

Noupe has space for a single horizontal banner ad under the header, as well as for plenty of smaller ads in the sidebar. Noupe differs from many other sites, though, by placing the smaller ads on the top of the sidebar and the largest ad at the bottom of the ad space.

Official Link

Mashable

Mashable has space for ads in their header, alongside their logo, as well as plenty of space in their sidebar. The sidebar ads include small square ads in two columns, larger square ads, and even Google AdSense ads. By keeping all of their ads in the sidebar and header, though, they keep the content area of the site uncluttered.

Official Link

The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post has a limited number of ads on their site. The main portal page has no ads. Each main section page has a banner ad in the header and then a limited number of other ads interspersed with the page’s content. Article pages have header ads, an ad about midway through each post, and ads in the sidebar. Limiting the ads contributes to the credibility of the site.

Official Link

Gothamist

Gothamist offers banner ads above the header, in the sidebar, and within the content. As shown in the screenshot, all three ads can be bought in conjunction with each other, which can be a great option for advertisers with larger budgets.

Official Link

Boy Genius Report

Boy Genius Report offers both sidebar ads and header ads. The limited number of ads makes each one stand out more.

Official Link

GigaOm

GigaOm has a very limited number of ads on their site. They offer three ad spaces on their home page—two in the sidebar and one within the article list. Within individual posts, they offer the same two ad spaces in the sidebar, as well as an ad between the post and the comments section. The ad density works well with the overall clean design of the site.

Official Link

Lifehacker

Lifehacker offers a skyscraper-type banner ad in their sidebar and a square ad in their header on both their home page and on individual posts. The limited number of ads raises their value.

Official Link

CrunchGear

CrunchGear has an ad in their header, as well as a few in their sidebar and a block of 125×125 pixel ads under the first main article on their home page, and then again further down the page. Individual posts have the same ad spaces, with the 125×125 pixel ads appearing between the post content and the comments.

Official Link

ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb offers ads in their sidebar as well as between posts on their home page. Larger ads are placed at the top of the sidebar, with smaller ads in two columns underneath. Individual posts have sidebar ads, as well as ads between the post content and the comments, and below the comment form. It’s a lot of ads for one site, but they’re placed in such a way that they each remain highly visible.

Official Link

TechCrunch

TechCrunch has basically the same ad layout as CrunchGear, and again, it works well in the design. The 125×125 pixel ads included between the articles on the home page work especially well, as there’s plenty of white space between them, making each one stand out.

Official Link

Boing Boing

BoingBoing offers a header ad as well as a square ad at the top of their sidebar. They also have ad space further down in the sidebar. It’s a limited amount of advertising, and combined with the excellent placement, has great visibility.

Official Link

Engadget

Engadget has a banner ad above the header, a large square ad at the top of their sidebar, and an ad among the posts on the home page. On individual post pages, there’s an ad in the header and one at the top of the sidebar. Again, with limited advertising like this, the value of each ad space increases.

Official Link

The Time Zone Advantage:

A business owner can outsource any aspect of his online business to providers in a different time zone in the evening, and presto! the work will be in the company Inbox the next morning.

The Global Employee Pool:

A business owner who outsources tasks can tap into a network of literally thousands upon thousands of employees, the vast majority of whom are eager to do the work assigned. This is a treat for those employers who have tenured employees in the office, who grumble when given any new project.

The Clone Factor:

Ask yourself the following question: “What could you be doing if you, as the . . . . . (fill in your job title here). . . , if you were not working so hard? “What other revenue-generating ventures could I explore if someone else was doing some of my work?”.

Outsourcing often leads to Unethical Outsourcing

The no. 1 danger of outsourcing today, in 2010, is that quickly becomes unethical. There is a disturbing, albeit increasingly commonplace trend, whereby outsourcers pay $2 an hour or their own ‘next-to-nothing’ salary to a team of providers who do the bulk of their work for them, and then they pocket a difference that subsidizes trips luxury lifestyles, yatch trips and exotic 4-star holidays.

Outsourcing often leads to Unethical Outsourcing on a Mass Scale

Take for example, the new breed of Online Marketers today, who are making money by selling the concept of outsourcing at $2 an hour. Essentially, they rack in literally thousands, while trafficking the idea that there is absolutely nothing immoral about paying another person $2 an hour.

Outsourcing often leads to Unpaid Work

Another disturbing trend, on a micro-scale compared to the $2 an hour elephant-in-the-room, is that some outsourcers feel entitled to ask for sample work for free. I am willing to bet my last 2-cents that these outsourcers would seldom, if never, agree to provide sample work for free, and would certainly never work under the conditions they are endorsing.

Outsourcing is Damaging to Local and National Economy

In recent years, outsourcing hit the headlines with a vengeance. There was an out lash against outsourcing, with the main arguments used including that it does not support the local and national economy, it reduces wages, and it costs local jobs. Other opponents raised the red alert flag that outsourcing would have negative impact on future generations.

Outsourcing May Incur in Mediocre Results

If you outsource, you have no guarantee that the results will be up to your standards and expectations. Some provider’s work is quite simply average or below average.

Outsourcing Begs the Question of Legal Liability

The concern about possible mediocre work, albeit a valid one, is no match for the legal and copyright issues a company can encounter. If you outsource confidential work, such as payroll, private financial records, and secure transactions, speak with your company lawyer first. If you hire a provider to write your marketing copy or the company blog, research up on the question of who holds authorship. And assume that if the provider writes erroneous content, and you end up putting it on your website, you will hold ultimate liability.

Outsourcing May Result in Intellectual Theft

Another concern may be that the provider just loves your ideas, copies them and beats you to the finish line first. And quite honestly, good luck with dealing with intellectual property theft, especially if you are paying your outsource providers $2-an-hour.

Start by Outsourcing Your No. 1 Repeat Task You Do in a Workday

You want to outsource the jobs that you do repeatedly and avoid, where possible, outsourcing ‘one-off’ jobs. Here’s the logic. Each new job or task needs some explanation. If you have one job, you’ll need to do some explaining once. If you have five different jobs, you’ll need to do some explaining five times. And so on. . . The ideal scenario really is to find a good provider, to explain the job that needs doing once, and then to call upon this person whenever you need their services to do that specific task.

Breakdown Your Tasks into Mini-Tasks

It may be harder to manage the outsourcing service providers, as they obviously are not in the same office space, and more often than not, not even in the same geographical location or in the same time zone. And you do have to be as careful, when hiring an outsource provider, as when hiring any employee. There are providers who will accept to do a job and then disappear, thus delaying the process. In other cases, the provider accepts payment in advance, or periodic payments, and then the end results are substandard. The best way is to start off by breaking down any bigger jobs into smaller ones, so that you can establish how you work best together and to establish a level of mutual trust.

Ask For and Give Regular Feedback

Under no circumstances is it acceptable to allow someone to complete hours of labour and not to pay them. The best way to ensure that you are paying for what you want is to give regular feedback so that the end result really does match what you are looking for.

Do Not Pay Sub-Standard Wages Under Any Circumstances

If you outsource, outsource in a way that doesn’t involve sub-standard wages. Use the minimum wage in your country as a guideline. Pay your online employees the hourly salary that you would want your partner or child(ren) to be paid for the same job. We are putting in place a employment system that will impact generations to come. What if your son or daughter joins this ‘oComony’? Would you want them to be paid $2 an hour? Paying sub-standard wages falls under the category of unethical outsourcing on a major scale. Not paying for work completed falls under the category of unethical outsourcing on a more minor scale. You can certainly ask a provider to show you their portfolio of work. Do not ask them to do any new work for free.

Act As If Adequate Compliance Measures Were In Place

We can expect more compliance measures, although it may take an Enron-incident for appropriate controls to be put into place. One day, maybe all website owners will be audited on their outsourcing practises, to ensure universal standards of Ethical Outsourcing are applied. Imagine that this were the case today and that all websites were red-flagged (or not) according to whether or not the company directors or entrepreneur(s) behind the scenes were adhering to fair and ethical outsourcing practises. Would your website be red-flagged? One sure-fire way to help ensure you are outsourcing ethically is to write an Ethical Outsourcing Compliance Code which you adhere to, and that you post for others to see.

Be Careful About the West-East Debate

Anyone who hires an Indian or Chinese or Pakistani technical solution provider, for example, may attempt to justify paying low rates by saying something like: “It’s fair to pay sub-standard wages to providers in some countries because the cost of living is less in those countries”. The truth of the matter is that North Americans and Europeans are now dropping their hourly rates just to compete with their counterparts in countries with lower living standards. This argument, of course, is what we can call ‘losing sight of the real issues’. Who cares whether the outsource provider is Indian or American, $2 an hour is simply an unethical rate.

Imagine the Employee Working at the Same Table as You

Let’s go back to the online marketer mentioned earlier who made a video sharing his ‘secret’ of how to hire employees for $2 an hour. Not surprisingly, he had over 1000 views overnight of his video clip. Let’s do the math, here. This marketer is obviously aiming to launch an Information product – be it an e-book, a software program or a video tutorial. And we can safely assume, he plans to outsource as much of the content as possible. If Marketer X converts only 10% of his following to purchasers of his e-book or software or video tutorial, this would still represent, for example, 10% x 1000 followers times, let’s say, $49.99 per Info. Product, and this would generate a round-about $5 000 for one video in one day. That’s pretty decent turn-over for someone who’s only paying $2 an hour. Could you sit down to dinner having pocketed $5000 in a day with the person you are paying $2 an hour? And even if you can, would other people want to eat with you, if they knew your business practises?

Treat Your Outsource Provider as a Partner

Create a win-win working relationship or partnership of sorts, and one that is as transparent as possible. Take for example, the outsourcer who works in the domain of website creation or design, server administration, SEO and article content. There are outsourcing companies that will bid for jobs and then outsource the work to individuals who will work at lower rates. That this pecking order happens is not surprising – some individuals strive to put themselves in project management or managerial roles while others seek task-driven assignments. In this particular scenario, being transparent would involve saying: “We are getting paid this much per website or article. We will pay you this % of our share to do the actual work”. A side benefit of creating a genuine win-win working relationship is that typically it requires you to exhibit less managerial control.

Be an Advocate for your Outsource Provider

A good employer acts as an advocate for his or her employees, and helps them evolve. One way to act as an advocate for your outsource provider is to promote their services on your website or to refer work to them. Another is to offer, where appropriate, to help the provider profile himself or herself better so that they can charge a higher hourly rate with their other clients. For example, you are working with this provider because they are able to provide a service you need. Can you spot a way they may get more business at higher rates? And if you see a strength that the provider is not tapping into, can you help reveal it to them through your feedback? Failing this, a periodic bonus or coffee break cash is a good way to show appreciation.

Ask Yourself: “Is There Anything that Should Bother Me about My Outsourcing Practises?”

At the end of the day, it all comes down to a simple question of conscience. Can you sleep at night while the providers who make your ideas successful, are earning a mili-fraction of what you are pocketing. Ask yourself regularly: “Do my outsourcing practises feel right (fair, ethical. . . )? Is there anything that bothers me (should bother me) about my outsourcing practises?”.

Advantages of E-commerce:

• Time saving – is the reason number one for using electronic commerce. People now have access to their money and what they need to buy from home and work all from a desktop computer.
• Consumers have an access to a wider range of products – company now can use internet sites as shop fronts, so consumers can browse, buy from many different sellers and making it easier to find exactly what they are looking for.
• Allows small businesses to mix with the big business online – with a relatively small cost, a new business can set its self up to conduct transactions online.
• Provide benefits to suppliers of goods and services – company now can target a wider variety of consumers even take the product or service international, allowing them a means of supplying their goods to places that were before unreachable.
• Business is Open 24 x 7 x 364 7/8 – it works while you play or sleep. They are open for business every hour of the day, every day of the week, every week of the year. Your receptionist, greeter and front people are always working for you because they are your website. They do not complain about the long hours.
• Messages spreading (world wide market space) – advertising on the web can make a big or small firm’s promotional message reach out to potential customers all over the world quickly and small cost as an online marketing strategy.
• Help protect against frauds and theft losses – electronic payments can be easier to monitor than payments are made by cheques.
• Thinking Outside the Globe – selling something made by someone else, shipped by yet another and the money handled by yet another is the heart of the advantages e commerce brings to the business world. You can even employ an international staff. Some work you may need done can be more effectively done by companies or even individuals in other countries.

Disadvantages of E-commerce:

• Purchase to Delivery – when making a purchase at a brick and mortar business, you get the product when you pay for it. On the web, there may be a time lag from purchase to actually being able to consume. The consumer will have to wait for delivery of physical goods.
• Inability to Feel the Physical – it is nearly impossible to sell things like furniture and tires online. Furniture is something people like to sit on and know the feel. Tires need to be installed once purchased. The old tires also need to be disposed of. In both instances, there is a need for real actions to fulfill the reason for the purchase. That’s why things like food, jewelry, antiques etc. can never turn to E-commerce.
• Trouble recruiting and retaining employees – the company needs well-expert and skilled staff to keep up and create the ecommerce facilities of the company. Many companies favor to outsource their improvement and programming tasks to decrease labor costs.
• Consumers feel less confident with their credit card numbers – most of the consumers are still not confident in providing their credit card numbers for making payments on  the website while shopping on the Internet.
• Not every company can take the benefit – some of the small companies may not be able to take the benefit of E-commerce for example the lack of expertise and lack of technology. The legal environment in which E-commerce is conducted is full of unclear and conflicting laws. It should be noted that mostly these disadvantages stem from the newness and rapidly growth of the technology.

• Purpose – at the very top of the list is what you want the purpose of your website to be. While this may seem basic, many people jump into building a website that they have glorified in their head only to find weeks later that the idea looked better in their head than on paper when it comes to actually making money. Try to creating list of categories that would be included on your site and range age of your consumer as target markets. Such as Converse, which only provides shoes that consists of several categories and 8 years to 35 years are their target markets. You got my point?
• It will need long learning curve – what profitable things in life do not require learning? Additionally, web success is a constantly moving target. Success will require continuous education. Try to learn and make some study case from big players that have goods and valueable services and how they can long run in this industry. Give more your attention for what condition and criteria of goods and services that consumers wants from your site. Stay hungry, stay foolish just like Steve Jobs said. This phrase means we should always want more, never be content and when you want to do something that others say is foolish, but you need and you believe it, do it anyways!
• It will need long start to success time – at the minimum it will take 6 months to get recognized by the Google search engine. Some have found that it may take up to 2 years to make a minimum income of a few hundred a month. Many if they do make an income will only make a few to several thousand dollars a month. If you just want instant success, this industry is not for you. Just go check out one of the get rich quick schemes out there! So, are you ready to be a part of this industry, ask yourself again.
• Marketing – how are your potential customers going to find your online store? While it’s true that search engines will provide some traffic, to be successful requires advertising your online business just as if it were a physical location. Building awareness for your product, brand, or store takes time and money. It will often take as much or more than the website development costs. Some key components of a good Internet marketing plan include search engine marketing, website advertising, social media, and offline advertising. And don’t forget to create email marketing for effectiveness online marketing strategies while spreading your messages, promotion or anything. Need resources? You can find here, Bulletproof Email Marketing: Overview, Tips and Tools that I’ve written previously on InstantShift.
• Logistics – an E-commerce website is your storefront. So, where is your warehouse? Where will you store and fulfill the inventory? Who will manage this process? Anyone with retail experience will tell you that inventory control will make or break your business. The other logistical challenge that can have a huge impact is shipping. The shipping carriers you utilize and your shipping charges should be determined based on the type of products and your target market.
• Customer Service – the best E-commerce businesses collect and use customer feedback. Feedback it possible to understand, anticipate and meet changing internet customer needs and wants because people come to your E-commerce web for goods and other information. The various aspects of customer needs can be provided as a resource to solve many customer service issues. It does not stop there. Sometimes a living human touch is needed. What better way to handle customer service than actually having customers who have solved complicated problems themselves help. Yes, you need good customer service to begin.
• Security – even with the enhancements with knowledge encryption, there may be still the hazard of somebody getting a maintain of your personal and financial information. Remember, it’s better to prevent than cure your system. Always making sure your customer knows that your website is secure and that their privacy will never be compromised goes back to the issue of trust. It does not take much effort to display a message telling your customers that they are safe in your hands just because a footer link to your privacy policy is not always enough.

And why do I need WordPress for E-commerce site?

As we already know that WordPress is one of the best open platform for now. Because it’s free, which has become one of our point in the advantages section that I’ve mentioned above, SEO friendly and the flexibility of WordPress has always been its strong point. The fact that you can tweak and twist (easy installation, easy customization and maintenance) it to your own will with just a bit of knowledge and an extraordinary support from a large community of developers and blogger (plugins and themes) transformed what initially was a blogging tool into a powerful website CMS, may it be a blog, photoblog, portfolio, simple presentation website, or even your E-commerce site.

• Keep it simple.
  Many people cite overly complicated navigation or too many pages in the purchase path as reasons they don’t complete their online sale or abandon their shopping cart. Successful eCommerce sites simplify the checkout process and display clear pricing and shipping information. Putting your brick and mortar store’s phone number in a visible place on your Web site is a good idea.
• Optimize your headings layout.
  Headings are the main place where you can persuade users to stay on your website for another few seconds. If your heading is too informational or puts them to sleep you have missed your chance. Use clear, descriptive headings that get to the point and provide users with a source of relevancy.
• Make payment processing easy.
  After all, it is easy to set up a website that shows off your product, but unless you have a way for customers to pay, there is no use in doing so. You can accept credit card payments with either a PayPal account or an online merchant account. PayPal is ideal for anyone trying out the E-commerce waters since there’s less of an upfront commitment, but you may end up paying more per transaction. The thing to note about PayPal is that both the buyer and the seller need a PayPal account, but that’s hardly a barrier to entry. It’s so easy to create a PayPal account that more than 96 million consumer accounts have been created at PayPal since it was founded in 1998.
• Optimize your internal site search.
  This is more of a usability tip, but it applies perfectly within the context of E-commerce SEO. Because your visitor found your site via a search engine, they will likely expect your internal site search to work as well. I’ve found that many first time visitors landing your site from a SERP will search for the exact same term they typed into Google.
• Provide professional product images
  One of the best parts about walking into a brick and mortar store to make a purchase is that you are physically able to pick up and examine a product. By giving users multiple images online allows us to overcome this barrier. On top of giving users multiple images, give them professional images from different angles and in different environments. Show them a shirt from the front, back, side, as well as on a model.
• Leave a trail.
  Incorporate “breadcrumb navigation” into your online catalogue pages. This will show where in the site hierarchy the currently viewed web page is located and it will give the visitor shortcuts to instantly jump higher up the hierarchy. It’s good practice for usability and for Search Engine Optimization.
• Product reviews.
  A great strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user generated content from your customers. Allow customers to review products they’ve purchased or comment on one’s they haven’t.
• Market your site once it’s live.
  It’s not enough to just build a Web site. You need to make an effort to market and promote your Web site to new and existing customers. Collect email addresses on your site to help you keep in touch with customers and consider creating a newsletter that I’ve mentioned on things to consider section above.
• Study your customer’s every move.
  Watch how your customers use your website and learn what frustrates them. Analyze your visitor’s traffic patterns, invite customers to complete a survey after they purchase and have informal brainstorming sessions with your most valuable customers. More research, more effective to learn habits from your customers.

Fox Cubs

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Incase

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Cosmicsoda

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Threadless

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Djin

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Pure Volume Store

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Brand Nuesense

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Emptees

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Victoria’s secret

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Archiduchesse

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Me & Mommy-to-be

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Bridge 55

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Itself

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Mozilla Store

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Decoder

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Nicholas Deakins Clothing

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Designbyhuman

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Clever Craft

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HelmetDress

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Free People Clothing Boutique

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WP Store [$65 for single use license]

Official Link Live Demo

e-Commerce [$65 for single use license]

Official Link Live Demo

Kidz Store [$65 for single user license]

Official Link Live Demo

eShop [$65 for single user license]

Official Link Live Demo

ArtShop [price $30]

Official Link Live Demo

AppCloud [Free License]

Official Link Live Demo

AppCloud Premium [price $35]

Official Link Live Demo

Kelontong WordPress E-Commerce Theme [price $35]

Official Link Live Demo

Dangdoot online music store theme [price $35]

Official Link Live Demo

ShopAholic [price $25]

Official Link Live Demo

Ecommerce WordPress Theme [price $75.95]

Official Link Live Demo

Crafty Cart [Free License]

Official Link Live Demo

The Clothes Shop [$42]

Official Link Live Demo

The Furniture Store [$47]

Official Link Live Demo

WPShop Reloaded [$37]

Official Link Live Demo

Vanilla Cart [Free License]

Official Link Live Demo

SimpleCart(js) [Free License]

Official Link Live Demo

wpStore [Free License]

Official Link Live Demo

• WP e-Commerce – is a very popular and free plug-in and can be installed right from the plug-in section of your hosted WordPress admin tool. There are several modules for this product including drop shipping, digital downloads, members only, and an affiliate option. These modules are reasonably priced, but can add up if your trying to be cost conscious.
• Shopp plug-in for ecommerce – this plug-in is not free, and you will pay for enhanced features. But the thing you really like about this product is it’s breadth of features. From the WordPress Dashboard integration to the drag and drop functionality of putting products in the shopping cart. You’ll find advanced features like inventory management, multiple shipping types, data export for Excel and Quickbooks, and various language translations through this plugin.
• YAK for WordPress – is another free and simple shopping cart plugin which allows you to run WordPress as a shopping cart. There is a whole long procedure of setting up the plugin and how to configure it, to ensure that you can display the products and receive payments through cheque, deposit, credit card form or through PayPal.
• eShop – this is WordPress 2.5 and above compatible shopping cart, which is actively developed at the moment and has got some of the most wonderful options. It’s one of my first suggestions to anyone, who wants to use WordPress as a shopping cart too.
• Tribulant – costs $49.99 is a full shopping cart plugin to help you get an online shop going, you can categorize, organize and add categories fairy easily. It works with PayPal, 2checkout, moneybookers, bankwire, and credit card.
• ShopperPress – pretty darn good its a shopping cart theme, so not just a plugin but an entire theme making the whole process of getting setup very very quick and it works with every payment gateway you can imagine! There is a free trial version costs you nothing to download, a vip version which is $69 and developer version which is $175 I would highly recommend checking this out if your looking for a fast solution that looks good.
• Quick Shop – QuickShop supports any WordPress that has the Sidebar Widgets installed, really. It adds a SideBar widget that shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to remove the items, not to mention a TinyMCE button to easily allow you to add products to your posts/pages.
• Wp Live Shopping – this widget enables you to display all relevant live shopping offers within your WordPress blog in one single widget. You can add the widget to your sidebar and customize its appearance as you like inside the boundaries of LiveShoppingWidgets presentation options.
• Are PayPal – this plugin is used to monetize WordPress blog content using PayPal. It is designed to sell your knowledge. Seems to be having issues right now. Basically it works with PayPal.
• StorePress – is a full e-commerce WordPress plugin that accepts PayPal, Authorize.net, and 2Checkout out of the box. It includes multiple widgets, dashboard widgets, shortcodes, and works using WordPress pages to keep everything nice and simple. Costs $49 very similar to shopper press, works with PayPal and its a theme and cart together.
• Paypal Shortcodes – let you to insert PayPal buttons in posts or pages using short code, no management panel though.
• ArtPal – ArtPal is a free (GPL) WordPress plugin, originally written for Artists, to seemlessly integrate PayPal with their WordPress blogs so that they can sell their work online. It’s totally free.
• Market Theme – costs $55 or $150 for developers, is a theme and cart. It works with PayPal only though, though there is a Google checkout module available.
• WPosCommerce – or the WP.osC plugin for WordPress is a modified version of the popular ecommerce solution osCommerce. WP.osC allows you to integrate osCommerce with existing WordPress website. The plugin displays latest products, random products, top 10 best sellers all on your WordPress blog post page. It adds a dynamic widget in your blogs sidebar to display the products.

Other Plugins

Well, the above mentioned plugins are good enough when it comes to setting up the shopping cart, however there are several things for which you may not need a e-commerce solution. Here are some of them which have nothing to do as far as e-Commerce sites are concerned but are worth to mention.

• WP BankRoll – this is a free/premium plugin, which allows you to earn money by allowing you to sell reviews on your blog. This plugin integrates with PayPal and if installed you get the ability to sell the reviews and also even lets you configure things in a way that an advertiser can write the post himself. Ah! that’s a neat thing, isn’t it ?
• Zencart & WordPress integration – this plugin is not a shopping cart however, it integrates wonderful and open source shopping cart software i.e. ZenCart with WordPress.
• EasyPayPal – if you want to charge for your content, then you can do that with the help of this plugin. It also lets you help in creating various other type of payment pages which completely depends on your need. Without mentioning this plugin, this post would have been incomplete.

glossy eCommerce icons

Free for private and commercial use, featuring the so needed shopping cart, money signs and credit cards.

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FRESH Add-on

Business icon pack featuring some must-have pieces.

Official Link Download

WP WooTheme Icon Set

This is the first release of the WP WooThemes Ultimate Icon Set and the idea is to expand and build on the set (which contains 79 icons at the moment) in the coming months. The free download contains all 79 icons, sized at 256×256 pixels and available in both PNG and GIF formats. As an added bonus to our users, they will also be able to download Nishan’s Illustrator file, which will give them high-res, vector copies of the icons.

Official Link Download

Ecommerce Payment Icon Pack

A free set of icons including credit card and popular payment gateway symbols in a mini format that’s perfect for ecommerce websites and online payment stores.

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Payment Option Icons

This set contains 20 icons for popular payment methods such as MasterCard, PayPal, Visa, American Express, Diner’s Club and much more. All icons are in PNG format and come in three different sizes: big (130×80), small (80×49) and tiny (50×31).

Official Link Download

Payment type icons and buttons

Collection of payment type icons (buttons) which you can embed into your website or online storefront to show which payment types that you accept.

Official Link Download

Chalkwork Payments

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Credit Card Images and Test Numbers

Official Link

Free E-commerce Vector Icons

The set includes five icons that were created for use in e-commerce websites. The icons are free for personal or commercial use.

Official Link Download

Exclusive E-commerce Icons

Available e-commerce icons may be used in any projects, whether commercial or private nature.

Official Link Download

Free Checkout Process Vector Icons

Set of 6 free icons in sizes 16×16, 32×32 and 48×48 in PNG and ICO format. Vector source file also included.

Official Link Download

Shopping Basket Icon

Official Link Download

Shopping Cart and Basket Icons

Official Link Download

CSS Globe Icon Set

CSS Globe offers an icon set that includes shopping cart icons.

Official Link Download

Shopping Cart Icons

Official Link

Money Icons Set

There are 10 icons in this set.

Official Link Download

Milky – A free stock vector iconset

Official Link Download

243 Country Flag Icons

With such a large selection, you are sure to be able to find the flag you are looking for. These are free to use for personal and commercial projects.

Official Link Download

1. Know Your Target Audience

Problem — Many times designers are not sure of their target audience and they mistakenly target the entire domain. A logo design specialist needs to identify people/corporations who are in the area of logo design on various networks (social).

Solution — Getting to know your real target audience is equally important as to be master of your trade, because then you can get to them and eventually make potential clients. One way to do that is going in social forums and networks and start following them on conversations and participating with them, this makes a certain trust and people start noticing you and you get in touch with your desired audience. Community based news groups as in ‘LinkedIn’ can offer great help.

It’s really important to know the target audience for your work and accordingly you need to present your online portfolio. If you have a broad client base or you are looking to make new clients, generally both is the case, you need to constantly keep upgrading your content with your new projects and of course the front-end must be catchy enough to hold newer clients for long. When people start viewing your portfolio, it’s your job to turn viewers into potential clients.

2. Choose the Perfect Environment

Problem — Most new designers are not sure of the technology they want to use or the processes they want to employ for building there online portfolio. Such mistake often turns out critical at times.

Solution — Now before making your online portfolio you should think of your needs and accordingly choose the platform for your website such as WordPress, joomla, Drupal or simple CSS/HTML. Each one has its own pros and cons. The websites must be light and they must be cross browser friendly they must not take time to open and must not come with hassles.

One more important thing is that you need to update your websites quite often, so make it less complex and get in touch with technology blogs or news where you can learn the simplest ways to do changes and all.

3. Keep Your Content Simple and Take Straight Approach

Problem — What is the use of a webpage where people have to go through a tutorial to surf through it? Navigation in a webpage must be kept as simple as possible, many times one cannot find decent information even with heaps of data loaded on the page, keep it simple.

Solution — It’s important to make simple pages in portfolio and present it in a straight forward manner, do not make others, to see your creativity even when they don’t want to as most of the time the employers don’t have enough time for that. Try to follow the approach where navigation is done from top to bottom and with details mentioned as of Home, News, About, Contact etc so that anybody at first visit to the webpage should have a complete idea and can navigate very easily.

The kind of media you have used in your portfolio and how quickly it loads is critical. Flash sites are now being replaced by HTML pages, mostly for this reason only and they are also in no way lesser in visual appeal after CSS and AJAX code in HTML sites than Flash sites.

4. Define Your Style and Design

Problem — A photographer on his portfolio will have to put image gallery, slide shows depicting his work and more and art interests, suppose he makes a portfolio with rows and columns of thumbnail images and a write-up, who will hire him?

Solution — It’s very important to clearly define the strategies for the design part and according to needs you can employ them.

• When a lot of data is to be put in a single page Grid and Column technique Designs are used.
• Someone who is looking for a job can focus on past projects and support it with some creative writing.
• Updating of portfolios should be timely undertaken.
• Professionals generally exhibit their work and create a network and go for highly attractive designs, rather “Out of the box” designs.

5. Make an Effective Presentation and be Available Always

Problem — Just start counting the number of designers who are working in the same domain as you, how many are going to be champs? All those who can leave an impression on their viewers apart from many other factors of course will get the pie. Are you Approachable 24/7 ?

Solution — All those who can leave an impression on their visitors or give away some freebies to download and install or do anything which will a make them remember their potential clients can expect better conversion into clients. You need to be approachable when working internationally, time difference creates difficulty but emails can always be sent over and time may be set for meeting over skype or set up a chat. You should always keep your location updated on social networks and as already told earlier follow various groups like Yahoo, linkedIn or Twitter List.

Remember that your potential employer may just visit your portfolio once but that one visit should leave a mark on him and you must make your portfolio unique enough to make him remember this and make him download the PDF of your portfolio to be viewed offline.

6. Finding the Right Hosting

Problem — What good will be a portfolio webpage when you pay higher in rents than you are earning or even when the hosting is so bad that it gets crashed quite frequently.

Solution — Choosing the write hosting firm is critical in any organization, as in case of the very big firms they spend millions on it as they can’t afford to be down for even a moment but when a designer who’s looking to get employed seeks his hosting then “cost and relative efficiency” both must be balanced.

7. Know What to Show

Problem — Don’t put heaps of work and get your viewer in a tizzy, what good would a portfolio be when all categorizing has to be done by viewers will while surfing through hundreds of designs.

Solution — Your portfolio should not look like a ‘garbage can’. You should not put all your work on your portfolio and don’t stack it with a huge number of designs as hardly any potential client will go through them all. Put your “selected” OR “recent” work on display, this way you are making very easy for your potential clients to choose from and eventually for you to get work.

Focus on the skills you are selling and your portfolio should speak of them; make it clear what your expertise are and how passionately you take up your job.

8. You Can Go for Multiple Portfolios

Problem — Why not have multiple Portfolios, When you can?

Solution — Post your portfolio on Community portfolio sites such Deviant Art and Behance they will get you the attention and more people, but to be noticed it’s important that you should have a proper link back to your website where detailed work could be viewed by interested clients.

Go for multiple portfolios for the different services you offer, focus on individual expertise and target specific markets, it’s better to show products to your clients categorically. Create different portfolio for corporate clients and keep your “more creative” work aside for the experimental once.

9. Don’t Neglect the Benefits of SEO

Problem — When you want to land up higher in search results, get greater credibility and confidence what’s better than best SEO practices.

Solution — Do take care while designing your portfolio that it has all the words coming in at your website’s title bar or at even at different places so that it comes up in probable searches, SEO can get you great traffic if properly utilized.

If your focused more on ‘downtown’ area then make sure your putting that in ‘About’ page and it should come naturally quite a number of times to get noticed by searches and consequently your webpage will get higher priority if ‘downtown’ is the keyword used in search. Taking about search engine optimization, you should know that ‘HTML based’ websites are more search engine friendly rather than ‘Flash based’ sites.

10. People Like to Hear Stories

Problem — You need to include real life instances and latest happenings so that they may understand your work better.

Solution — Do your own branding, your portfolio should reflect your work and expertise as this (portfolio) is like the first project which your potential clients will be viewing. Make your portfolio speak of your work and connect with the people.

Clients who are viewing your portfolio may not be in the design field and they may be just random people having little appreciation for design work, you need to tell them about your work and the creativity involved. Quite often people are interested in knowing about your previous work or even see the content you share, you can tell them stories about your work you did where you have got appreciation or even about those design changes that got much more traffic coming in, or even a story you made to digg front page.

11. Test Your Site Thoroughly

Problem — It important to test all functionalities of your website well before launching. When something goes wrong then there a very less probability that someone might inform about it.

Solution — You need to make sure that your online portfolio is compatible in all working environment and do cross browser test effectively for all available updates of various browsers. You never know how a particular change you made will appear in a particular environment and negligence in this may result in losing clients, because if they find even a minor fault maybe because they were using some older version of the browser, loss would be yours.

01. Studio7designs

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02. Ndesign-studio

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03. Concentric-studio

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04. Floridaflourish

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05. 45royale

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06. Squaredeye

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07. Alexarts

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08. Pasti

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09. Thisbythem

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10. Markmcgall

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11. Charliegentle

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12. Awpexpress

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13. Joolz

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14. Trevorclarkphoto

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15. Puppetbrain

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16. Branded07

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17. Carsonified

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18. Happycog

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19. Indofolio

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