When discussing the role of a business coach, there is one thing that must be cleared up immediately. Your team is composed of all people depending on you for direction. Obviously the higher you are in the organisation, the deeper and wider your team will be.

What this means is a business coach who is a CEO has the entire organisation counting on him or her for direction. The manager of a sales call centre will coach the staff working on the telephones who contact customers. A project team leader is a coach for team members. Even a lone business employee, who has no one answering to him or her, must successfully coach personal performance in a way that leads to successful production on the job.

What many organisational people forget is that they must also be their own coach and not rely only on those to whom they report for direction. It is the equivalent of a football team. The coach provides direction and feedback but it is the team members who play the game and must make on-the-spot decisions leading the team to victory or loss.

Coaching and Personal Performance

A leader’s effectiveness is directly tied to personal performance of course. But does this mean that a person only has to worry about their own specific actions and not the performance of others? Absolutely not! Personal performance actually encompasses much more when you are a manager or team leader. It refers to the ability of a leader to successfully manage teams and team members in a way that leads to a positive work environment focused on fulfilling the company vision effectively and efficiently.

That may seem like a mouthful, but personal performance is a core or basic issue that determines a leader’s ability to successfully take control. Some leaders are born to lead, but most need personal coaching and must be taught how to effectively coach others to success also.

Coaching is a concept that has become a trendy idea, but don’t think it lacks value just because it seems at times to be a new age approach to business. Being a coach is a role that all business leaders assume whether they realise it or not. It is even buried in the manager’s job description as “must have ability to lead others.”

Lead them where? Lead them to personal success on the job. Coaching goes full circle in a sense. A leader develops personal management skills and abilities and then coaches others to develop their skills and abilities too. What then occurs in the most successful companies is people with proven and developed leadership abilities are then cultivated to be the new managers. The new managers then concentrate on improving personal management skills and abilities and so it goes on and on.

The Interrogator

To be a good coach, you must be willing to ask a lot of questions of yourself and others. The questions asked are designed to help you explore your personal skills and how you convert them into success. They include the following.

* What are the time management issues? * What will the company gain or lose based on personal performance of team leaders and their team members? * Which seemingly unsolvable problems can be solved with new attitudes and approaches? * Is work organised in ways that enables goals to be met or are there barriers in place limiting efficiency and effectiveness? * Is work prioritised appropriately? * How can particular personality traits be matched to particular positions to maximise benefits to employees and company? * Can time management concepts be instituted to improve productivity and probability of job or project success?

Being a coach to yourself means recognizing the need for training that can enhance personal skills. Being a coach to others means using that training to help others develop their personal skills on the job. Using a business training expert is highly recommended because a qualified trainer can see through the self-imposed barriers organisations unintentionally build that slow down or prevent success.

Being a coach means being an interrogator who asks all the right questions over and over again.

About the Author: Timothy Millett, head trainer at i perform, has extensive expertise in performance training, sales training and customer service training. Tim has helped participants from organisations such as SWIFT and UBS achieve peak levels of personal performance. For more information please visit Leadership Training.

Your website is where your business resides – it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go

About the Author:

Amazing Minisite Template at Great Affordable Price.
http://www.nicetemplate.com

I have created an extremely simple example of creating a text shadow using simple CSS code.

The CSS:

body {
font: Helvetica, Arial, Sans-serif;
text-align: center; color: #000;
text-shadow: 0px 10px 10px #333;
}
h1 {

font: bold 65px/60px Helvetica, Arial, Sans-serif;
text-align: center; color: #000;
text-shadow: 0px 2px 6px #333;

}

Internet Explorer CSS Text Shadow Hack

.text_shadow{
filter: Shadow(Color=#999999, Direction=135, Strength=5);
height: 1%;
}

It was really that simple. Either add it to your stlye sheet or in the head section of your page and you’re set to go.

There is an example here.

Short and simple

I’ve been testing and using several jQuery plugins for a while now. I look for the best ones to add to my website projects and implement them to the best of my knowledge and ability. I decided that I should make some available to readers, so here goes…

AJAX Fancy Captcha

This is one of my personal favourites although I have not used it in a project yet.

jQuery Cycle

The jQuery Cycle Plugin is a lightweight slideshow plugin. Its implementation is based on the InnerFade Plugin by Torsten Baldes, the Slideshow Plugin by Matt Oakes, and the jqShuffle Plugin by Benjamin Sterling. It supports pause-on-hover, auto-stop, auto-fit, before/after callbacks, click triggers and many transition effects. It also supports, but does not require, the Metadata Plugin and the Easing Plugin.

jQuery Filterable Portfolio

Make an Ajax Image Hosting Site With PHP and jQuery

jQuery Tools – Scrollable Image Menu

Together with The Proniit Group I have put together this great list of more than 1800 free one way text link directories to advertise and market your website. Remember that it is all free. You should be able to send to all of these directories unless some have been removed or abandoned since this post. Please pass this on to your friends and family that would need this awesome resource.

Download Now!

If you found this useful, please vote and/or add this link to your social network using the icons below. Thanks!

I have bee following Google’s Webmaster help on YouTube and I have noticed one very common statement from all of the staff at Google.

For almost any question asked the usual answer is that webmasters should be paying careful and close attention to quality content.

This probably isn’t the first time that you have heard this. It is almost always emphasized that high quality and unique content will certainly bring you up in Search Engine Rank Positioning (SERP’s), it will impact highly on your page rank and it would thus inevitably bring you more traffic thereby increasing your ability to generate revenue.

What baffles me is that most people still DO NOT adhere to this, simple, effective and concise bit of information. The question remains, “Why?”, why wont people listen? Instead they still find ways to con the system in order to get higher page rank and more visitors; they will spend thousands in advertising; spend hours in marketing and never realize that all they have to do is following a few simple guidelines! As the question remains – the answer will still be unclear.

I advise that high quality content should be coupled with meaningful link building and good titles.

There are many very ethical ways to ensure that you will build a good site and market it properly without spending a lot of time and money and the bottom line is that you should just continue to go with this flow and move with the internet.

Page rank, link building and quality content will ensure that you web site is noticed and that you continue to receive the very best leads from search engines. However, it takes time, perseverance and a powerful mind set to keep it going, and it really is an on going process. Updating regularly wouldn’t hurt either!

Don’t give up! And don’t give into temptation with ‘get rich quick schemes’ and schemes that claim to bring you more traffic! (“,)

It’s such a lazy Sunday sitting outside with my laptop in the cold feeling as miserable as ever. I was brainstorming the best way to implement some of the better photo gallery scripts into some of my projects and boy oh boy, did I ever come across some of the most amazing ones that I have ever seen. I thought that I should share it with the visitors to this site as an informative piece of useful information.

Below you will find a list of the best free and open source photo gallery scripts that I have come across today:

1. http://www.plogger.org/

2. http://coppermine-gallery.net/

3. http://www.greepit.com/2009/04/08/open-source-photo-gallery-script-gmfoto/

4. http://www.thefreecountry.com/php/photo-galleries.shtml

5. http://fennecfoxen.org/pyxy/gallery

6. http://www.gallarific.com/

These are the six that I enjoyed the most and have either just used or will use in due course. However, I advise that you exercise caution whilst using these and always read the licenses before implementing them in any projects whether it is personal or commercial.

Also, I have not listed them in any order of preference so have a look at all f them and their functionality before use.

I have to add that my favorite place to search for any thing free and open source had to be hotscripts.com. I have always found what I needed on there and it was always something better than when I Googled for the same things. Their site is brilliant, easy to use and full of information that just keeps getting better

Most of all, enjoy the scripts!

The design behind our online store and it’s backend are almost finalized. We are taking extra precautions to ensure that this is done without any hiccups as we expect the store to soar upon it’s release.

We are still looking for more designers to join the store and sell their fashion online. If you are such a designer please feel free to contact me and if you know of anyone please send them my details.

You can find the store here: http://www.devilishlysaintful.co.za/

Journeys through the internet have revealed so much to me on so many different levels. People offer so much of non sense on the internet to make a quick buck that the innocent surfer might get caught up coughing up money for something that doesn’t work in any way what so ever. The solution, DIY! There is no better way. Period. Thankfully open source and other free-to-use sources of information give the best alternative to premium options.

I am going to keep this short as it is my first post and offer you the download of the book.

My SEO GUIDE

If you have any questions, give me a shout. Join me on my social networks detailed on my About Me page to keep up to date with what I have been up to… and speaking of what I have been up to… I wouldn’t know where to start! There are so many personal and business projects that I have been working on that I cannot keep up with myself and let’ss not forget the full time job that I have. I recently received a gift – the new Samsung SyncMaster 2494HS 23.6″ monitor for my PC and I must say that this monitor works wonders for my creativity and productivity! You can find a list of most of my projects here.

A lot of the online world is still new to me and I hope that I can make good progress and learn a lot more than I already know as time passes.

I hope you will all keep in contact with me and continue to follow my projects online!

Forgive me for being so excited that I managed to implement the open source social network, Pligg, on a site aptly named Boys Will Be Boys.

The reason I took the time to develop this network is simple my passion for design and implementation of worthy websites and the fact that I love creating things that have meaning.

The network is creating for like minded men to share their stories online, socialize with like minded men, give advice to younger generations and learn from each other by sharing.

i love the simplicity of what I have done with it and I hope that men of all ages all over the world would use this platform as they wish, with integrity and common sense.

The idea was to keep it within a niche and I hope that I accomplished that. The domain name isn’t even registered yet (you can access it via the sub-domain) but there already forthy three registered users! I hope that this network will be a success.

If you are interested in this network please join here and let us guys make a success of this little idea of mine.