Stock images, rightly or wrongly, are one of the best ways of spicing up an otherwise dull website page.

Pictures speak to the emotions and portray a specific image - in fact, as any advertising agency would probably want to tell you 'image is everything'.

In the web design world this is actually not true and I can get really frustrated with the idea that the actual graphic design aspects are placed on some type of pedestal and that it is a case of 'graphics über alles' - actually, if your website content matches up to what your website visitors are looking for then the actual design of the site does not really matter that much. No really!

Nevertheless, for a corporate website or a brochure type site, stock images can be used very effectively to add interest to a web page.

Click on the read more link below to find some good sources for stock images to use on your site.

This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of web design degrees. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.  

We've all come across it at some time or the other and accepted it at face value, that is, at least until the actual reality proves to be otherwise. Web hosts who claim an uptime of 99.99 percent are putting up those numbers on their advertisements because they know how important uptime is to a vast majority of sites that jostle for space and attention on the World Wide Web. No one goes so far as to explain how they came up with all those nines on the number, but they do know that if they end up keeping your site down for too long or one too many times, they'll end up losing an existing customer and many more potential ones.

And that's because it's an age where uptime has taken on more meaning than ever before - with Web 2.0 and social networking sites, blogs and the like taking up oodles of storage space and lots of bandwidth, they cannot afford more than planned, or at the very worst, semi-planned downtime. While the first refers to times your host plans maintenance tasks, periods that are announced well in advance, the second denotes times that important security updates and patches have to be installed, with the time period being announced as soon as possible but not as soon as clients would normally like.

But the third and most unsettling of downtimes is that which happens without the hint of an announcement - unless you have the resources to monitor your site at all times, you may not even be aware of such outages until some well-meaning friend brings it to your attention. This happens for various reasons - traffic bursts on a few sites on shared servers can cause other sites on the same server to shut down for lack of bandwidth; hardware or software malfunctions on the server are likely to cause outages; and the worst, malicious software could be used to target your site and prevent others from accessing it.

The last kind of downtime is the one that Web 2.0 sites are keen to avoid - they maintain a large number of servers and databases, and a denial of service attack is the last thing they need. The downside of popularity, if you can call it that, is to have to be constantly on the lookout for anything that could jeopardize their site's uptime, the feature that all websites want a hundred percent of.

There are many tools available to make the Internet Marketer's live easier. Some of these can be positively dangerous in the hands of the wrong person. And no, I am not even talking of black hat SEO, spamming or anything as overtly dangerous like that.

There is something available on the market called 'content spinners'. These tools take an existing piece of text, preferrably a Private Label article that you want to change so that the article is more unique, and 'spin' it so that the end result does not resemble the original.

Now, sometimes unscrupulous people take other people's content and also try to spin it. This is content that they really do not have any rights over. Luckily for the original author (me), the end result was, well..., less than what they expected it to be.

Some kind soul traced this article back to the original one that I wrote, (have no idea how she managed to do that, the feat in itself is worthy of Sherlock Holmes...) and emailed the mangled piece of work back to me. 

My original article is posted in various article directories, you can read the original article on this link, for example:

http://www.articletrader.com/internet/a-hosting-review-can-help-you-find-the-right-web-hosting-provider.html 

The same article that was spin doctored can be read below - enjoy! 

The most difficult thing in CSS to get right is the layout of your site. Here are a couple of tips dealing just with that.

Tip 1 : Clear out the default padding and margin settings before you start working. Different browsers have different default margins so you want to start with a clean slate, so to speak. Use this command:
*
    {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    border: 0;
}
to clear all margins. Also note the border, which is set to 0. Please note that if you do this, you will also get rid of the pesky purple border round clickable images, although some people argue that the purple border is neccessary for accessibility and usability. But lots of people do not like the purple border round images, and this is one way that you can get rid of it in one fell swoop.

Tip 2 : To center your layout, use a container div to contain all your content. Declare it as follows:
#container
 {
  margin: 0 auto;
  width: xyzpx;
 }
There are a couple of points here to take note of. DO NOT declare the width to be 100%. This defeats the whole object since you will just have to declare the sub elements within the container and then center THEM using margin : 0 auto. This is VERY BAD since it means that instead of declaring the central layout once, you will have to declare it in multiple places.

Tip 3 :  Work from the top down, and declare your CSS commands on the highest level possible and try and declare something once only and let it cascade throughout. Only override the commands at a lower level when strictly neccessary. This prevents a verbose CSS file that is difficult to maintain and understand. For example, if you have margin : 0 auto settings on each and every sub div within your container - you are in trouble.

Tip 4 : Document what you are doing and use Firebug and the Firefox browser to debug
You are not writing your CSS code just for yourself, some day some poor sod will have to debug it. Make numerous comments inside your CSS file to explain why you are doing things in a specific way.

Fitting in with this, you might find yourself having to fix someone else's CSS more often than you think (or even your own, for that matter). Use the Firebug add-on for Firefox to debug your CSS. This is a life-saver with regards to giving you an insight into exactly where your design might be broken and why.

The only problem with this is that your design might work perfectly in Firefox, but not in IE5, IE6 or IE7. This brings us to the next tip.

Tip 5 : Decide which browsers you are going to build your CSS for. Some purists insist on making sure that your website work for all possible browsers, others only make it work for the 'major' browsers. How do you know exactly which browsers are used the most? Once again W3 Schools come to the rescue. On the following page, you can see which browsers are the most popular: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp. From this page you can see that something like IE5 is only used by about 1.1% of browsers. It is up to you whether you consider it worthwhile to build your CSS to be compatible with this browser, or whether you are just going to test your compatibility with IE6, IE7 and Firefox, for example. Whatever you do, when you start building your CSS, start from the top, and test each and every setting in each of the browsers as you go along. There is nothing worse than building a perfect website in Firefox, then finding out right after you have coded a 1000 line css file that it is broken in IE6. To then debug and fix your code after thefact is a nightmare.

Tip 6 : Here is an embarrasing little tip for fixing your CSS in IE6 or IE7. Let's say your design works perfectly in Firefox, but is broken in IE6. You cannot use Firebug to determine where the problem might be since it WORKS in Firefox. You do not have the luxury of using Firebug in IE6, so how do you debug an IE6 or IE7 stylesheet? I often found that it helps to add {border : 1 px solid red} or border : 1 px solid purple} to the problematic elements. This way you can often seewhy certain elements do not fit into the space available. It is an embarrasing little tip since it is so primitive and simple, but it works!

Tip 7 : Understand floats
Floating of elements is essential to understand, especially in the context of getting your floated elements to work in the different browsers!
Basically elements such as divs are floated to the left or the right (never to the top or the bottom, only sideways). Here are a couple of things to take into consideration with floated elements. Each floated element must have an explicit width specified. If you are making use of floated divs to create a 3 column or a 2 column layout, rather specify the widths in terms of percentages rather than fixed widths, and if you do use percentages, make sure that the percentages do not add up to 100%, this will often cause the right most column to drop below the rest, clearly indicating that you are trying to fit something into the available space that is too wide for it. Rather use percentages that add up to slightly below 100%, such as 25%, 49%, 24% for a left column, middle column and right column.

Floating elements can be extremely complex to understand and it is worth while to spend some time on good sites that provide specific guidelines and tips. A good page with lots of links to relevant other pages is:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/01/css-float-theory-things-you-should-know/

or

http://www.positioniseverything.net/

Tip 8 : Faux columns. One of the frustrating things about using DIVs for layout is that if you are trying to create a page with different coloured columns you will end up with the situation where the one column might be longer than the other since a div is only as big as the content in it, and you might have a short left-hand menu column with a longer column on the right containing your content. This could result in something like this:

To fix this so that the blue column extends all the way to the bottom is to tile a thin slice of image vertically in the body.

The image that you would tile would be 1 or 2 pixles high, and would look like this (excluding the grey backgound - and also note, this is not to scale!):

The command would then be something like this:

body

{

background: #ffffff url(../images/background.gif) repeat-y 0 0;

}

where you are specifying that the image should repeat downwards. This wil make the left-most column (blue) float downwards to fit in with the longest content. You can then float a left column div over the image.

We completed the Ignite Products website just in time for the National Braai day, held on 24 September 2007 to commemorate National Heritage Day in South Africa.

Ignite Products ideal for supermarkets and convenience stores and just thing that you need to get your braai going.

The funny thing about building this website was that it was extremely difficult to get pictures of people 'braaiing' together. Strangely enough the stock photo websites were all geared up and presented lots of pictures when you looked for 'braai', which is essentially a South African word for barbeque. But the pictures were all of flames and food - not of people!

Phil the copywriter, another client of ours, did the copywriting for the website.

OK, so you are looking for affordable and inexpensive hosting for hosting your domain or domains?

Let's take a look at what we mean exactly with web hosting and how it works to host your webpage or your domain.

Firstly, you will need a domain name. Read more about the importance of selecting the right domain name here. Your domain name will be your 'address' on the Internet.

Secondly, you need to select a website design company. Very often website design companies (like us) offer hosting for the websites that they design, or they are affiliated with good web hosting companies and offer hosting through these companies. In this case, the website design company becomes the first line of support for all hosting issues and interface on your behalf with the hosting company.

The web design company can also advise on the best type of hosting required for the particular type of website that they will design for you. They will be able to calculate how much disk space you require, advise on the amount of bandwidth that you will require depending on the type of content that you want to host (for example, videos and large download files will require more bandwidth than just text) and also ensure that you have all the other features that you might require.

For example, if you want a website with e-commerce functionality you are going to require a database to store your products in. The web design company will then ensure that your hosting package include a MySQL or other database.

Read here more about the features that a web hosting company should offer you. But often it is the best to let the web design company manage the hosting for you.

So the LAST thing therefore that you need to select is the actual hosting company! That being said, it is very important to choose the RIGHT hosting company since your website needs a stable platform to be hosted on. To find out more about how everything related to domain names, hosting and the Internet fit together, you might find this article on 'website hosting explained' useful. It compares setting up a website on the Internet with setting up a business in the 'real' world.

We offer website design and development services and also the right type of hosting for these webpages - so why not contact us to find out what we can do to get your website online in no time!

Domain name registration is the most important step to take when setting up a website, although not actually the first step. The first step to take is to choose a good domain name! (You should also read this article on domain name registration and how to choose a good domain name) 

Your domain name is the name of your online presence. Care must be put into choosing a good domain name, since it will live with you forever (while you are on the Internet!). Remember that a domain name is inextricably linked to your website. You cannot have the one without the other. I once had clients who registered a website in their company name and wanted me to change it after a couple of months to the shorter abbreviation of the company name. This cannot be done without harming your online presence! If you had put any effort at all into building your website and marketing it on the Internet so that it becomes visible; and if you have started to see those efforts pay off in the form of targeted visitors who came to your website looking for the specific products and/or services that you are offering, be prepared to lose some of that if you really want to take the radical step of changing your domain name after your website has already been established.

Sure, the technical boffins will talk to you about permanent redirects so that all traffic previously going to your old website will go to the new one, but there are other factors to keep in mind.

1. Your presence has been established through other websites linking to you and using your domain name in the link. Suddenly these links are now pointing to the old website and not the new one. Yes, setting up a permanent redirect will prevent the problem of visitors clicking through and not being able to find your website, but all those lovely links coming in to your website and voting for you will take a dip. The search engine gurus will tell you that Google knows about permanent redirects and all the good karma that you built up by having links pointing to the old site will now be transferred to the new...but why take the chance?

2. One of the factors that Google also takes into consideration when deciding where to rank your website in its results is the age of your site. If you suddenly decide after a couple of months or years to change your domain name, you are basically setting up a new website from scratch.

3. Any branding awareness that you might have built up around your website name will take a knock.

4. Setting up redirect commands so that they work correctly is a tedious and laborious task and errors can creep in. The site will have to be moved with all the file names and page names intact. Changing file names and page names at this point can be very detrimental to your rankings in the search engines.

5. Google has taken the lead with being able to understand redirect commands, but not all the search engines do. Traffic that you might have received from other search engines could therefore be negatively impacted.

6. You will have to maintain two hosting accounts, one for the old one and one for the new, in order to make sure that the traffic going to the old one keeps on being redirected to the new one. If you do not go through the trouble of contacting webmasters (possibly thousands of them) and asking them to change the URL in all their links on their websites, you will probably have to keep these two URLs running in parallel for ever. You never know how many people have bookmarked your site (or has kept your old email address in their contacts folder). You might get visitors trying to visit the old website or use the old email address for a long time after you have made the move.

The conclusion is that if you choose a domain name - put a lot of thought into it since changing your domain name after you have already been established on the Internet is frankly not worth the trouble. If, however, you have to do it for legal reasons, such as a company name change or takeover, for example, you will need to understand that keeping the old name and using a permanent redirect using htaccess is the best way for keeping the continuity and traffic to your website.

Contact us for your domain name registration requirements and prevent making a costly mistake in registering your domain name!

Web design can be quite a daunting prospect if you are new to the Internet. You would like to create your own website but have no idea where to start. Html? Photoshop? Fireworks? FrontPage? Dreamweaver?

If you have the incliniation, the passion and the energy it is quite possible to create and maintain your own website. But there is a learning curve involved.

Here are some tips and some shortcuts to get you started.

Here are a couple of mistakes that newcomers to the Internet tend to make. See this as a learning opportunity and a way to avoid making these mistakes, since making them will really be detrimental to the success of your website.

There are two types of mistakes that are common: Technical mistakes and Management mistakes. Let's take a look at both and how they can be avoided.