Webmaster Tips – Page 2 – Webmaster Tips

3 Must Have Upgrades For Your Blog In 2017

May 17, 2023September 2, 2017 by Webmaster Tips

Like all forms of technology today, the moment you think you have gotten your blog to that point of ultimate perfection…..the whole blogosphere changes again! Maybe there is a new type of malware sweeping across the Internet. Or perhaps shareable content made easier is now the “it” addition to serious blogs. Perhaps the “hamburger” menu button is out and infinite scrolling has already replaced it.

Here, 2017 is no different from other years. Change is on the horizon yet again, and the blogger who wants to start a blog and stay competitive needs to update and upgrade as needed. In this article, learn about three of the top must-have upgrades for your blog this year.

1. Content-Based Upgrades.

While actual numbers can vary from day to day, the current working estimate suggests that there may be as many as 173 million blogs registered online. That is a lot of blogs! Of those blogs, estimates indicate as many as 1.13 million new posts go live every day.

Point being, your blog is competing with a LOT of others for those coveted sets of reader eyes. You are competing even harder for subscribers – readers who like your blog enough to give you their email address and permit you to send them updates. As the blogosphere continues to expand, you need ever-better incentives to nab that all-access pass to your readers’ inboxes during the 30 seconds or so they are surfing around your blog.

The hands-down best incentive for 2017 is “content upgrades.” What exactly does this mean?

Content upgrades are freebies that readers ONLY get when they give you their email address by entering it in the little box and subscribing to your email newsletter. So you want to make them VERY alluring. You want your free content upgrades to be so enticing a reader who leaves without registering to receive it will navigate back to you later to sign up so they don’t miss out.

The top content upgrades for 2017 are shaping up to be:

– Bonus materials that enhance knowledge gained from a popular blog post. An example might be a blog post you wrote about how to make your blog more visually appealing to readers. At the end, you offer a content upgrade featuring the list of the top five colors readers are most responsive to.

– Templates readers can use to recreate your success. If you have achieved great success with a particular infographic layout or a certain video format, you can bet your readers want to know how to do it too!

– Free plugins to increase conversions and sales. Let’s say you write a blog post about how using a certain plugin on your blog took your readership from zero to 500 in 15 days. A content upgrade at the end of the post might be an invitation to receive a free resource list of the best plugins of this type for each blog platform.

4 must-haves for user-friendly Magento store

October 21, 2024January 30, 2016 by Webmaster Tips

There is no doubt that user-friendliness adds value to your store. In a good online store, customers can quickly find what they need; see a good presentation of product colours, options, etc.; add the product to the cart without unnecessary clicks and go through an easy and understandable checkout process.

In a bad online store, people have to struggle to achieve what they need, and most of them would leave a messy store without a purchase.

I bet that as an online store owner, you want your shop to be user-friendly and conversions-oriented, right? Then there are some things you should know.

Site Navigation
When you see your store many times a day, and you know which products you have as you spend much time adding and editing them, it’s hard to have a brand new look at your store. This means you are not always objective when it comes to your store usability and to the navigation in particular.

The goal here is to ensure as seamless a shopping experience as possible, so make sure your site structure is logical and easily understood.

What is A/B Split Testing and How You Can Use it to Improve Your E-Commerce?

May 17, 2023October 22, 2015 by Webmaster Tips

How A/B Split Testing Helps Your E-Commerce Website and Business

Identifying Changes in Web Pages and Effect on Customer Experience – How do we measure customer experience, and how do we know what is effective in our e-commerce design and implementation? These are questions that can be answered with statistics produced from A/B split testing experiments. For example, if you currently have a web page design and see high bounce rates and low click-through rates, you may want to identify why users are either not staying on your site or are not buying from your product or service selection. By changing everything in your design, you’ll never know what works and what doesn’t work – what is attracting users and what is shunning them away. Therefore, A/B split testing expresses statistical evidence created from incremental changes in your design or website’s effectiveness.

Understanding Your Purchase Funnel – With e-commerce website checkout pages, many internet marketers will look at the purchase funnel effectiveness using A/B split testing for different designs and routing patterns. The highest conversions will result in the implementation of either scenario A or B. The beauty of A/B split testing is that you are able to see what the change in design style or buying experience does to your click-through rates, overall sales, and bounce rates over the course of a couple of weeks. Design two different versions of your purchasing experience, make incremental changes along the way and measure the results of the action taken. Over the course of three to six months, you will fully understand the best strategy that creates the most interest.

Why and How to Improve your Web-Site Speed

May 17, 2023June 16, 2015 by Webmaster Tips

Now, Google offers the so called Page Speed Service, and it is said to be something that “automatically speeds up the loading speed of your web-site”. With this service, Google asks you to send them the entire web project, and they will “have it optimized” for you. Namely, they modify it in various ways, and, in the end, the version of the web-site that they make does load faster. The service is free, but there is a rumour that this will not last forever. You can say that it is only logical that, after some time passes, Google will be able to charge for their optimizing services, again, due to the constant development of this company.

First of all, it is important to state that the load time of any page is dependent on many factors. However, the most important ones are connected to images, animations, and other web-design experiments. So, here is a list of some tools where you can check your site speed:

Pingdom Tools

On this web-site, you can test the load time of every object that you have on your web page (like, for example, HTML, CSS, every image, Javascript, and so on) individually, so you can see which object loads the slowest. That way, you know what to work on.

GTmetrix

This web-site can be used as a tool to analyze the performance of your page. It combines Firefox performance add-ons like Yslow with Google Page Speed. The site also gives suggestions on how to improve your site both in terms of speed and some other things.

4 Cybersecurity Threats That You Should Know and Protect Against

October 16, 2024February 21, 2015 by Webmaster Tips

As the digital world grows and evolves, so do cybersecurity threats and attacks that you face as an online business owner. With cyber-criminals devising more sophisticated methods to infiltrate your system and steal highly-sensitive data, it can be challenging to secure your business from all sides. The good news is there are some excellent ways to keep your business and your customers protected against cyber-attacks. In this post, we’ll cover these four cybersecurity threats you should know and protect against to keep your business’ and customers’ interests protected.

1. Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS)
A DDoS attack crashes your network or server by flooding them with unwanted traffic. This makes it impossible for your website and its services to stop working. An attack like this can cause downtime that might cost your business sales opportunities and crash your website to the point that your business ceases to exist. If that’s not serious enough, there is the risk of your private data being breached since DDoS attacks are also used by cybercriminals to extort money and information from their victims.

However, there is a solution to help you stop this kind of attack in its tracks, and that is by adopting a cyber kill chain model in your cybersecurity strategy. This preventive measure helps you make a complete and detailed assessment of your security to identify your weak spots. Think of it as getting inside the mind of a hacker, where you take a “first-person view” of the steps to carry out a cyber attack. With a cyber kill chain, you can see the layout and process of a successful cyber attack from start to finish and identify the stage where a potential threat is most likely to occur. Doing a preventive assessment through a cyber kill chain helps you reinforce your cyber security strategies, secure your business from all corners, and get the peace of mind to run your business smoothly.

UI Design Photoshop tutorials that are bound to be handy

May 17, 2023November 16, 2013 by Webmaster Tips

1. Create Dynamic iOS 7 Style Background Blur

2. Create an Instagram Style Photo Filter

3. Design an iOS 7-inspired iPhone App Screen

4. Create a detailed audio rotary knob control

5. Create texture patterns

6. Create an embossed metal tag

7. Create an iOS7 Email App

Get Started With iOS 7: Freebies

April 11, 2023September 23, 2013 by Webmaster Tips

1. iOS 7 GUI PSD

Full iOS 7 graphical user interface (GUI) PSD based on the Beta 1 release will help you create an app prototype and pitch it to stakeholders.

2. Tab Bar Icons iOS 7

A nice collection of iOS 7 inspired icons in two different styles: full color and stroke. Initially designed to be used for the tab bars, suitable in any other context.

3. iPad iOS 7 Keyboard Portrait

Daniel Crystal has designed iOS 7 iPad keyboards, both light and dark versions. Useful for creating app previews or showing the interaction of the app.

4. Start making iOS 7 Icons with the App Icon Template 3.0

The new iOS 7 came out with slightly different icon dimensions and requirements. This free app icon template will serve you in the process of updating your current icon or creating a new one.

5. Template for iOS 7 App Icons

Another app icon template includes some time-saving features like slices for fast png export, a new vector grid, smart objects for easy preview of different sizes and a vector mask of the icon body with new rounded corners.

How to Setup a cPanel-based VPS For Your Website

May 17, 2023December 12, 2012 by Webmaster Tips

VPS hosting refers to a Virtual Private Server that’s sold as a service to customers by a hosting service company. It imitates a dedicated server in a shared hosting environment and is technically considered both dedicated and shared hosting.

A VPS kind of hosting is just one of many types of web hosting accounts to choose from in order to get your website up and running online. To get a website online, you need to store the files for your website on an actual web server. But, setting up and subsequently managing a web server can be very costly as well as difficult. On the other hand, purchasing web hosting enables a person to rent adequate space on a web server, which makes it much easier since the only thing that’s required is to simply upload their website files. Today, there are three main types of available web hosting accounts, including the following:

• VPS Hosting
• Shared Hosting
• Dedicated Server Hosting

Each one of these different types of hosting accounts varies, everything from their setup to the level of customization and various features each one offers.

What’s the Difference Between VPS, Shared, and Dedicated Hosting?

With a dedicated server, the customer rents the whole server. Usually, this is for individuals that have incredibly high volumes of traffic to their sites and require that their server be setup in a certain way. However, most people don’t need an entire server to themselves. By renting just a small part of the server, you can save a great deal of money if you’re just starting out. Shared hosting refers to sharing a part of the server with other people rather than renting a whole server alone.

The 10 Best Free Webmaster Tools

May 17, 2023October 29, 2012 by Webmaster Tips

iWebTool Web Tools

iWebTool showcases the top Web tools, which also include useful webmaster tools. There are Search Engine tools to help you check for important things like backlinks, cloaking, PageRank, keyword density, URL redirects, etc. The Domain Checkups tools will help you check your traffic rank, server status, website speed, broken links, reciprocal links, and more.

Plus, there are HTML and Miscellaneous tools that include generators, optimizers, viewers, extractors, cleaners, calculators, and testers.

Search Engine Optimization Webmaster Tools

Are you clueless about SEO and would rather try to figure it out yourself instead of hiring a professional? Submit Express offers you a wide range of free SEO tools that can be used to help boost your search engine rankings and website traffic.

You’ll have access to the following tools: meta tag and keyword analyzer, link popularity checker, XML sitemap submitter, keyword suggester, keyword traffic estimator, SEO dictionary, meta tags generator, PageRank checker, page snooper, broken link checker, link counter and reciprocal link checker.

Webmaster Toolkit

Just as the name implies, the Webmaster Toolkit is the ultimate stop for free webmaster tools and resources. This suite of tools includes SEO tools, Web utilities, domain tools, HTML tools, and resources. The large selection of SEO tools includes keyword research, keyword analysis, a search position checker, a search engine simulator, a meta tag generator and a Web page analyzer.

Attacat – A Great Tool to Audit Cookies

May 17, 2023November 21, 2011 by Webmaster Tips

If you are looking for a great tool to help you audit your website’s cookies and check if the website complies with the cookie directive, then check out Attacat. Some of the advantages of using this tool are the fact that it does not require any registration, it is simple, and, furthermore, it is free.

What this tool does is: find and identify cookies on your site, check if there are any cookies from third parties (that you might not know about) and help you comply with the cookie regulations.

After you have installed the extension in your Google Chrome, all you need to do is to make a few simple steps to generate the report.

First, open only one window and tab and clear the cookie history from your Chrome. Then open the extension in the browser and click on the “Start Recording” button. As you have activated the recording, go to your website and do everything an average user would do (browse, buy, register etc.). After you are finished, click on the “Stop Recording” button and then “View Report”. Easy as that.

Biggest mistakes in choosing a host for your WordPress blog

May 17, 2023October 10, 2010 by Webmaster Tips

Although WordPress is one of the most ubiquitous platforms that is available for blogging and other Internet functions, it is not universally compatible with all web hosts. They are not all created equal! Here are a few of the biggest mistakes that webmasters make when choosing a WordPress host for a blog.

1. First, you must understand your own needs when it comes to hosting.

Different kinds of WordPress blog websites require different types of hosting solutions. What kind of blog are you building? Do you need to incorporate third-party applications into your site in order to make it work? Most importantly, what do you expect the size of your audience to be now and in the future?

Answering these questions will allow you to understand the resource allocation that you will need. In turn, this will determine the kind of web host that you take on.

2. Choosing a hosting platform based on price is a huge mistake.

Many people will pick the wrong type of website based solely on the price of the service. If your budget is your bottleneck, then you need to hold back your selection of a web host until you have enough money to afford any package. Your main concern should be a customer acquisition strategy and research and development for your product.

If you pick a plan that does not have the resource allocation that you need, you will obviously lose customers. These customers will never come back. When a server gets overloaded, a host will find a way to bottleneck your information flow. Because people come to the Internet for information primarily, they will simply go somewhere else. You will lose the respect of your audience. This does not take long to do if your potential customers see a 404 screen when they come to your page.

3. WordPress does not have proper internal security; do not rely on it.

Many people believe that the WordPress platform itself is somehow protected from outside malicious threats. This is not true. Most of the protection that you receive will come from the web host that you choose. There are some basic things that you should know about different web hosting packages and the security that they offer.

10 Important Factors To Choosing Plug-Ins For Your Blog

May 17, 2023September 19, 2009 by Webmaster Tips

Blogging may have once been a great way to share your passions with the world or expel some excess thoughts in your free time, but these days having a corner of the Internet to call your own has become closer to a necessity than ever.

Of course, merely having a blog is no longer quite the status symbol that it used to be in the professional world. Instead, you need a blog that will stand out. One that represents both you and your qualifications in the best way possible.

In short, you need to master the use of plug-ins.

The trade-off to a higher level of expectations regarding blog design quality is that even the most user-friendly websites can produce incredible results if they are used to their full potential. Oftentimes, that full potential will only be realized by those that master the use of website plug-ins to increase both the effectiveness and visual appeal of their site.

So if you’re just starting to dip your toes into online waters and are looking for blog advice – or if you’d like a refresher on what is hot right now in the plug-in world – consider this 10 factors when choosing your next plug-in.

1. Start With Necessity

Comb over your web host features briefly and really consider what is – and, more importantly, what isn’t – available to you. Should there be any feature that is missing from our backend that is either of necessity to your particular website model or generally needed, these will be your first plugin downloads. Everything else that will come afterwards will be built around these features design-wise, so you want to have them in place ASAP.

Awesome Quora Answers to Logo Design Questions

April 12, 2023June 26, 2007 by Webmaster Tips

Logo design is a topic relevant to any business — whether it’s a small business that needs a logo design to establish its brand or a larger company seeking to market a new product or service. The need for good design may be universal, but it can be hard to know where to start. On Quora.com, you can find answers to questions about design work as well as many other topics. Here are some of the best Quora answers to logo design questions.

What Makes a Great Logo Design?

The reason this answer is so great is that it goes into detail about the various components that make up a logo. Instead of offering an answer that only lists the components, each component is explained. This Quora logo design answer breaks down each element into detail, which makes it extremely informative.

What Makes a Logo Design Effective?

This answer is awesome because it discusses all of the various elements that make a logo design effective. It begins by breaking down the effectiveness of models into three types of stimuli and then describes how these models can be used to provoke an emotional response. This answer also discusses different ways you can achieve these responses. Its value as an answer is directly reflected by how thorough the author was when answering the question.

What is the Thinking behind Cutaway Logo Designs?

The top answer to this question is to the point. It goes on to discuss Gestalt visual theory, the completion of simple shapes, and the time the brain uses to process the visual. The best part about this answer is the author’s take on the logo, which is spot-on. It will be interesting to see if cutaway logo design is a passing trend or a tactic that will withstand the test of time.

Build your own mobile application – 10 Helpful Tools

May 17, 2023February 22, 2007 by Webmaster Tips

1. PhoneGap

PhoneGap provides you with tools that support 7 various mobile platforms giving you an opportunity to create applications for popular mobile OS such as iOS, Windows, Android etc.

2. DHTMLX Touch

If you are eager to build HTML5-based mobile web application then you should definitely take a look at this open source JavaScript library that produces a sterling framework with a lot of features and facilities.

3. JQUERY MOBILE 1.1.1

JQUERY MOBILE is really easy to use toolkit that make use of basic HTML5 interface system. Moreover, touch-optimized web framework provides you with drag-and-drop UI builder in order to save your precious time and make your experience pleasant.

4. WebApp

WebApp supplies with both light-weight and powerful mobile framework aimed at quick building professional mobile web applications with a great deal of ready to use stencils.

Create Professional Resumes – Online Tools

May 17, 2023January 11, 2007 by Webmaster Tips

1. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a good place to start building your portfolio/resume.

2. DoYouBuzz

DoYouBuzz – an online resume builder, is known for its extreme simplicity and enjoyable user experience. You can design your resume to the color scheme you desire or choose pre-made templates.

3. Resume.com

Store your resume online (resume.com/username ). Edit your resume online, or use an easy wizard to create a new one

4. CV Maker

CV Maker uses a very simple format and customizable editor, which lets you rearrange sections (Work Experiences, Qualifications, Education).

15 Recommended Android Apps For Multitasking – Android Multitasking To The Max

May 17, 2023December 20, 2006 by Webmaster Tips

1. Taskbar task switcher

Slide your taskbar and select the previous task you were doing to get back to it immediately. Additional (optional) “return to desktop” button – you can do everything without pressing the home button. Half a second. Simple yet powerful.

2. Swapps

Swapps! launcher is always there. When you play, read or listen, you can always swipe and switch to another app.

3. Visual Task Switcher Free

Quickly switch between running apps by choosing from a thumbnail view containing screenshots of the currently running tasks

4. Notification Toggle

Notification Toggle creates notifications in the Android status bar to let you quickly switch WiFi, Bluetooth, Silent mode, Screen rotation and Flight mode on and off or to adjust the screen brightness (and many more…)

5. 1Tap QuickBar

1Tap Quick Bar is the best notification customization app for Android. It helps you to do most common tasks in a shorter time, such as changing Wifi settings, calling your wife, adding an event, launch a favourite game with just in 1-click. It also offers a way to create a beautiful notification bar.

Easy Logo Design Tips – Do’s and Don’ts

May 17, 2023November 8, 2006 by Webmaster Tips

1. Figure out the brand

Whoever ordered a logo has some brand he/she’s trying to establish – find out just what it is that they’re advertising, selling or trying to make popular. The first step in making a logo is figuring out what is appropriate. A well designed and carefully laid out bunny logo can be a masterpiece, but it will just not look well on a site of a funeral home.

Talk with the client, ask him what does his brand represent, what are the best points of it, what are it’s weak points (You want to avoid that. Imagine if, for instance, EA Sports reinvented it’s logo in the form of a friendly handshake, when they’ve done nothing but annoy their customers with poor customer support and poor overall attitude towards their customers. That would do more harm than good, even with the sound reasoning behind the idea).

Do not ask the customer what kind of logo does he/she want – it is the designer’s job to create something, and if you know your job, you will present a good logo. You can use the already existing logo as a basis if it is any good, but designing a logo is not something a customer should be a part of.

2. Do the research

Look at what the competing brands have done in the field, and think about what they did wrong and what can you do better than them. Are their logos too colourful? Did they pick the appropriate typeset? All of these things must be taken into account when designing a logo.

Feel free to look around for some inspiration. Logo Moose is a great place for you to look at the works of others and figure out if you can do something like that and if the brand you’re working with can use some of the things you see.