With free templates there are many issues that can come up. First many of these templates are not going to be of high quality. Secondly you will notice that the developers place their links in the bottom of their templates. This is the cost of using the template as it helps increase the back links to their website.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

So how do we avoid the common mistakes that many people make when using templates? First do not choose a template that is very popular. This can often happen with free templates that have been well done. What happens when the template gets over the web is that people start getting used to it. This means that your site will lose the appeal that it has. The site looks generic and loses credibility to the eyes of other people. No matter the content on the site it will be hard for people to look at as unique because people see the template.

The next biggest problem is that people use the templates without changing them. This is why many of the sites don’t look unique. There are plenty of options when altering a template. Often times there are many images that come with a template. A quick and easy way to change to format is by altering these images. If you are using a free template make sure you have the option to change these images. Often times the creator will never know, but in the agreement they can ask you to take it down if they do find out.

Purchasing Website Templates

As you go to purchasing website templates look for sites that distribute them in limited amounts, instead of ones that distribute an unlimited amount. Often times the cost of these are not very different at all. Another added benefit is that these templates can be used across many different types of niches. This allows your site to still look unique to people searching around in your niche.

The biggest mistake people make is choosing a template that does not meet their site’s needs. Templates are meant to be appealing to the eyes. This is how they sell and distribute their website templates. What happens if you pick one that is not suited to your content is that the information gets lost. People will only stay so long on your site if they cannot access the information they were looking for.

There are a few keys to look for when looking for a website template. First, get a limited edition template. Secondly, look for one that loads quickly and is appealing to the eyes. Finally, make sure you can customize it and add the content you want to keep people coming back.

Introduction

Copyright is a protection to the work done by the author. It gives the author of the original work an exclusive right regarding that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation for a certain predefined period after which the work is said to enter the public domain. Copyright is the right granted for the expression of the idea. Thus, it is different from a patent which is a far more strict right granted for the protection of new inventions.

What May be Copyrighted?

A copyrightable work must be

• fixed in a tangible medium of expression and
• original

Copyrights do not protect ideas, procedures, processes, systems, methods of operation, concepts, principles, or discoveries: they only protect physical representations, thus expression.

Who May Hold a Copyright?

A copyright generally lies with the creator or creators of a work (known as the author(s)), and is inherited as ordinary property. Copyrights are freely transferrable as property, by the sole decision of the owner. In some cases, however, the actual creator is not considered the owner of the work for copyright purposes. This is the case when the work is done or created by an employee during the course of his employment under the employer. Here the employer, not the employee, gets the ownership over the copyright work. In case the employer is working for a govt. agency or an organization, then the govt. or the organization will get the ownership over the copyright work.

Rights Protected by Copyright?

• the right of reproduction (i.e., copying)
• the right to create derivative works,
• the right to distribution,
• the right to performance,
• the right to display
• The digital transmission performance right.

Copyright in different countries

Different countries have different copyright laws. The major differences lie in:

• whether or not the government work falls under copyright,
• how much longer copyright lasts after the author dies or after the work is created or published, and
• what is and what is not fair use

Because of these differences, a certain piece of work may be under copyright in one country, and in the public domain in another. However the copyright laws of all the countries are in tune with the Bern Convention, 1886 or Universal Copyright convention, 1952 which provide a standardization of the national copyright laws of different countries.

Length of Copyright Protection

The copyright protection period varies from country to country, however it is usually over 50 years. When the period of copyright protection has ended, the written document, musical composition, book, picture, or other creative work enters the public domain. This means that everyone is free to copy, use and change the work without any prior permission of the owner.

Getting the copyright

To obtain a copyright is not a tough task once you are clear with the concept of copyright. In most countries, you can avail this protection right with a simple 3 step procedure to follow. For e.g. in the US to obtain a copyright on your work the 3 steps are a) filing an application b) submitting a nominal fee (usually 45$) and c) mailing the work to be copyrighted, which will not be returned. To be honest every work created gets automatically copyrighted, the above procedure is just to be on the safer side to avoid any dispute regarding ownership.

Differing Ways to Place Ads

Placing ads on your site can be done in numerous ways. First you need to find ads to place on your site. You can go one or two ways when looks for ads. The first way is to sell advertising on your website. You can place information on your site or look for publishers that are looking to pay for banner ads. One way to set rates is to display the traffic that comes to your website. There are scripts that can help maintain this process. You will be able to take payments and allow advertisers to upload banners to your site.

The most common way to add ads is through Google Adsense or through many of the competitors that are available. These sites make it easy to get ads integrated onto your site. They will have a simple sign up with some having an approval process to take part. Since Adsense is the most common we will go over using Adsense.

Benefiting from Google Adsense

With Adsense you will be able to build groups to manage your ads. Through Adsense you can customize the advertisements to fit the layout of your site. This can be done with colors and different sizes. With Adsense you do not need to worry about the ads matching your content. The program is able to match ads to the content on your website. Once you have made the ad, Google will give you the html code you will need to add to your site.

Where to Place Ads

When placing ads it is important to make them a part of your website. Think of times when you visited websites when ads were just thrown at you. Our natural reaction is to ignore these ads. When integrating ads it is important to make these ads look like part of the content. With most advertising sites like Adsense you will be paid per click. So if your ads are not receiving any clicks they become useless.

Color scheme is critical to blending your ads. Make the background the same in your ads and your website. Placing ads in the middle of your content also is a great way to achieve clicks. Depending on the platform for your site this can be done many different ways. Remember to mix in the size of your ads also. One final thing, make sure to use only one or two ads per page. Well placed ads will work much better than a site full of ads.

There are numerous routes for people to be able to get traffic. There is no magic bullet to suddenly get free traffic to your site so stop looking for one. You can look into search engine optimization, pay per click, social networking, article marketing and more. Often time’s webmasters make the mistake of picking one method for traffic and not diversifying their sources.

Pay Per Click Traffic

The quickest way to get traffic to your website is with pay per click traffic. This is also one of the most expensive sources of traffic. Now many people have been very successful with pay per click so don’t think I’m scaring you off. If you are entering a new product market often times the keywords you bid on will be cheap. As the product gets more popular there will be more competitors in the market. When this happens your cost per click then goes up. Over time the amount might go so high that you are not turning a profit. If you have not spent time building up another traffic source then your money maker just went away. The same thing can happen with all forms of traffic. Make sure you spend the time to get different sources of traffic even though one is being productive for you.

Success Does Not Happen Overnight

Another common mistake you find is people giving up before they truly get started. Just like any other business it can be difficult to get started. However, you’re not going to get any walk up traffic like you can with a retail store. When we refer to traffic it takes time to build up affective sources of traffic. Don’t give up on a site too quickly, especially after investing money to get the site up.

Treat your Business like a Business

Let me get to the biggest problem people have with E-Commerce. Often time’s people look at making money online as a hobby instead of a business. Like with any business you have to spend money to make money. This means you need to stop trying to do everything yourself and there are many people that you can outsource the work to.

This is in terms of building the site and building up authority on the web. You often times hear of people doing it all themselves. Great for them, but most people don’t have the time or the skills to do all of the work needed. First when building a site look for someone to create it for you as the costs will be far less over time. If you want to get better rankings in the search engines look to outsource the project. Consider yourself the manager of the store instead of a worker. The manager isn’t going to mop the floors. You shouldn’t be building back links. Invest some money in your site and let it pay you back.

Affiliate Marketing

Writing reviews for products of different firms on various products can fetch you a good amount of money. In case you have your own website, you should put a few banners on the download page.

Blogging

Blogging is another good way of earning income online. This method of earning income has picked up an abrupt acceleration and is very popular among the people working online. Once you have established a good blog, with lot of adsense ads on is, you can then hire people for making blog posts at a very reasonable salary. This will reduce your workload and will result in an automated revenue generation business which needs very little involvement from your side.

Article Writing

Those who can boast good written English skills, and feel that their words carry the power to make an impact, can earn a lot by writing for websites. You can easily make 1000$ a month in the beginning by writing 5 articles per day. This income gets multiplied quite substantially once your reputation as a writer increases. Thus, all budding writers have a great future on the internet, as it is all about content and content writers are the indispensible need of the virtual word.

Technical Ways to Earn Money

If you have some field of specialization that may be technical or any other field, you can offer your services on various forums like Digital Point or Site Point. You can bid on projects, negotiate your rate and then the recruiter, on the basis of the bids and your experience, will pick you and you can garner a decent wage and get money deposited into your PayPal account.

Website Business

You can build up several one page websites which are easy to handle and are based on some evergreen concepts so that you need not update it frequently. You can put various advertisement banners on them. If you have good traffic to your websites, you can earn a lot as the traffic will click on the ads. If you don’t have much traffic to your website, you can consider buying good traffic on these sites as an initial investment. In this manner you can fill your pockets with loads of money once these sites get crowded. You can also consider selling these websites along with the traffic at a much higher price than what you initially invested. There are millions of people generating income from this sort of blog flipping.

Well there are ways to make money online there are a lot of people involved in trading online. Due to this there is also a good fraction of scammers as well, and thus you have to be very cautious especially when you are offering your services or looking to hire someone else. The above ways of earning money are very handy and once you get into the swing of things, up your determination and get inspired you will be well on your way.

CSS refers to Cascading Style Sheets. It provides an advantage over normal HTML/XHTML that we use, here you can customize your basic tags according to your “style” and store them in separate files called “style sheets”. Then you can inherit these files into the document you are preparing and it will change the style of the document accordingly.

Now what makes it different from the normal HTML we use is that here we need to define the “style” only once, and the same can then be inherited anywhere in the page, whereas in HTML, to change a particular scheme of tags you need to make your way through the entire document to do so. Also, CSS provides more detailed attributes which can be used to change the look and feel of your pages.

Categorization

Style sheets can be of different types depending on the way they are defined.

• External style sheets
• Internal style sheets (in the head section on your html page)
• Inline style (inside a particular html element)

Now we can use one or all of these styles sheets in a particular HTML document depending on our choice and need. In the case of using multiple sheets, all styles will cascade into one another and the resulting style will be an amalgamation of all of them.

To store style sheets externally, we can do so by placing them in files with an extension (*.css).

Syntax

Here we show you a basic style sheet and how it can be used in various HTML pages. The basic syntax of CSS consists of three parts – a selector, a property and a value.

Selector { property : value}

The selector is normally the HTML element/tag you wish to define, the property is the attribute you wish to change, and each property can be assigned different values according to choice. The property and value are separated by a colon, and surrounded by curly braces. Various “property : value” sets are separated by semi colons.

For example,

p
{
text-align : left;
color : red;
font-family : calibri
}

Using different Style Sheets

Now as we have discussed above there are different types of style sheets we can use – external, internal and inline. The ways of using these styles differ as such;

External Sheets

We can inherit external sheets into HTML pages by using the <link> tag in the <head> section of the HTML document. These are most useful when the same style is to be given to multiple pages, and instead of defining it individually in every page, we can simple define it once outside as a .css file. The linking is done as,

<head>                                                                  <link rel=”stylesheet”             href=”demostyle.css” />
</head>

Here, “demostyle.css” is the external style sheet.

Internal Sheets

These are most useful when the same style is to be used at different places, but in the same html document. So instead of defining it at each place in the document, we define it once in the <head> tag,

<head>
<style>
p {margin-left : 20px; color : red}
body {background-image : url(”space.jpg”)}
</style>
</head>

Inline Style

To use inline style, the style is defined inside an HTML tag. This modifies the look and feel of only the particular tag it is defined for. In case, there are also some other styles defined for this tag by internal or external style sheets, the inline style overshadows the effect of all of these,

<p style=” color:red; margin-left:10px “>This is a paragraph.</p>

This concludes all about the basics of how to create and embed style sheets into plain HTML pages and use them effectively to make these pages more presentable and effective to the end user. Now with all the above discussion, the only reason not to use CSS in your design is not knowing how to!!

The question about whether it is an all important factor is difficult to answer. With new sites there are certain goals that all sites look to achieve for SEO purposes. The fact of the matter is that there is no better direct traffic than with being ranked on the top of search engines for quality keywords. Also many webmasters talk about reaching two goals with Alexa. The first is to get into the top 100,000 sites and then secondly into the top 50,000. This gives your site some authority on the web. The question is how these rankings help with Google to get us more traffic. This is of course is important in the end game as traffic is key for any website to be successful.

Google and Alexa

There is a relationship between Google and Alexa which is what truly makes Alexa important. First if you install the Alexa toolbar you will notice that they have implemented Google search into the toolbar. The exact relationship is unknown to the web public. This is not uncommon as Google does not give out information on its search engines algorithm. The algorithm is what ranks sites in the search engines for Google. It is thought that the Alexa ratings have an impact with the Google rankings. This alone makes it important to have a higher Alexa rating. The effect of Google Trends as a competitor to the traffic stats on Alexa currently is unknown.

Also Alexa is part of the Amazon Company. When a user reviews your site it becomes linked to their Amazon profile. For people who are selling products through Amazon’s affiliate program this can be a great advantage. This is just another way that Alexa can help bring traffic to your website.

Growth of Alexa

In recent years Alexa has become more important as a status simple to webmasters. You see many sites proudly displaying their rankings on Alexa on their homepage. This shows their achievement against other competitors on the web. You will find many sites offering people to download the toolbar from their site. We have briefly mentioned the redone tool and now it also has added a powerful popup blocker that makes it more valuable to users. With more and more people installing the toolbar again it increases Alexa’s ranking. Think of it this way, if more and more of your visitors have the toolbar your rankings in Alexa will increase. With the relationship with Google this will just further increase your rankings.

Now back to the original question, is Alexa really an all important factor? Alexa is an important factor but not the main factor in your sites creation. While Alexa can help with rankings it does not seem to be the most important factor.

Even though it is an “HTML editor”, you can use it very easily, even if you are not at all familiar with HTML. The simple interface gives you everything at your fingertips.

Views:

Before starting with FrontPage, you need to be familiar with the 4 views in it. These views can be switched from the left-bottom of the page.

·         Design View: On this page, you can add your layers, text, images etc by simple drag n drop.

You can design your page pretty easily without worrying about the HTML code (Let FrontPage take care of that). The toolbar above, which is pretty much the same as the one in Microsoft Word or Excel, can be used to format text and other objects on your page.

·         Code View: This Page gives you the HTML code of what you designed on the design page. You can edit your code just like in any text editor and the changes will reflect in your design or preview view.

·         Preview View: Selecting the preview view shows you how your webpage will look in a web browser. The preview view will be pretty much the same as you designed it in the design page. That’s why we call it the what-you-see-is-what-you-get-type editor.

·         Split view: Split view just splits the screen into two portions, the top portion shows the code view and the bottom portion shows the design page, just in case you need to keep an eye on both simultaneously.

Hyperlinks:

After you have designed a few pages, you will need to link them to make it look like a website. Hyperlinks can be made easily by just selecting the object you want to link to and pressing Ctrl+k (or selecting the HyperLink option in the Insert Menu). Now you just need to give the address of the destination page or file which opens when you click on the link.

Layers:

It is always advisable to create a webpage in layers. This way you can divide each section of the webpage into a different layer. You can insert a layer by clicking on Layer in the Insert Menu. Adjust the position and size of the layer by simply dragging it and pulling it across the design page. Editting a layer is the same as editing the page.

Interactive Buttons:

Even if you are not so good at Photoshop or photo editing, you need not worry. Frontpage provides you with attractive interactive buttons to be used as hyperlinks. Click on Interactive Buttons in the Insert Menu and just select the button design which suits your page. Provide the name to be displayed on the button in the ‘Text’ field and the address of the page or file to be linked with the button in the ‘Link’ field. You can easily adjust the position of the button now, by dragging it on the page.

Forms:

You can easily insert a form on your webpage with Frontpage. Select the form item you want to insert from the Form group under the Insert Menu. You can insert Checkboxes, Radio buttons, Text Fields, Drop down boxes etc. pretty easily and adjust their properties by simply clicking on them and a professional looking form is ready within minutes without any kind of coding.

FrontPage makes webpage creation child’s play. No wonder the internet is over-flooded with web sites.

To first understand web hosting lets define it before we go on. Web hosting is basically renting data storage and bandwidth on the web for you to be able to publish a website. There are thousands of different companies around the world offering hosting with a variety of different packages offered at most sites.

Cost of Web Hosting

You can find web hosting for free to hundreds of dollars a month. You might be asking, what is the reason for these varied costs? It is all dependent on the resources your website requires. Of course they will try to sell you a package which is more than you need, so you need to be on top of your hosting requirements. Finding a company that has a number of differing packages is the first step for success. Popular companies online such as Cirtex are often the best place to start.

Hosting Reliability

The first thing you need to look into with web hosting is the reliability of the provider. I’m sure you have been frustrated in the past when you have gone to a website and it has been down. If your hosting goes down, so does your site and then so do your sales. There are enough web hosting providers that guarantee uptime of 99.9% of the time. There is no reason to go with a company that does not. Before you jump in because of the guarantee, ask for a record of uptime history. This can give you peace of mind.

Variations on Web Hosting

You need to understand the different types of servers that web hosting companies provide. In basic terms you are offered shared servers and dedicated servers. Shared servers are when people share a server with other people to host their sites. You will not see any other people’s site and it will be like a partition on your HD. These packages usually have low costs and can be great for new sites that do not have a lot of traffic yet.

When you get a dedicated server you often have more options. You usually can pick the software and the operating system it will run. You also should expect a higher level of support from the web hosting company. As you would expect, these costs are higher than with shared servers. You will not need a dedicated server unless you have large bandwidth concerns or substantial traffic. It is recommended to start with a shared server then move to dedicated in time. Many companies offer a seamless transition to dedicated hosting. Cirtex Hosting offers one of the best seamless transitions that can be found online these days, at a very competitive price.

Informing Yourself in Terms of Bandwidth

To understand the level of hosting you need to estimate the disk space you will need and the bandwidth that your site will require. For people that have built sites in the past it is easier to determine.  If you are not going to be hosting video or large downloads you will probably not use anything near your initial thoughts. Look at the size of your site and it probably does not take up more than a Meg or two. With this fact you do not need to purchase 1 gig of space to start. Often times it is best to start off with the most basic plan and then move up.

Quality web hosting is key for a successful site. Look for reviews and then make an informed decision.

Based upon ECMA Script, Actionscript is the scripting language of Macromedia Flash. A scripting language is a way to communicate with a program; you can use it to instruct the Flash what to do and to ask it to interact with other programs. Hence it opens Vista to create interactive movies.

Actionscript finds a wide amount of uses in the industry of website and software development. Besides, Actionscript is also quite handy in database applications and elementary robotics.

Programming Fundamentals

• Ø Variables and constants

In ActionScript, a variable is composed of three different parts:

• variable name
• type of data that the variable can store
• actual value stored in the computer’s memory

E.g. var value1:Number = 19;

In this case, we’ve created a variable named value1, which will hold only Number data=19

On the similar lines we have a constant .The difference between a constant and a variable is that a constant can only be assigned a value only once in a program. The syntax for declaring a constant is almost the same as that of a variable, the only change being the use of keyword const in spite of var.

E.g. const Pie:Number = 3.14;

Ø Data Types

ActionScript is rich in data types. For Example: number, int, uint, Boolean

A few complex types are: Movieclip, TextField, SimpleButton and Date.

How to make an application in ActionScript

The creation of an application through ActionScript can be best gasped by an illustration. Although you may find it hard to comprehend it at once, a repeated insight will help you to understand the process quite easily.

• Ø Here we are going to illustrate an animation portfolio piece in which we will add interactive behavior to animation. This will be done by adding two buttons which the user can click: one of them is to start the animation, and the other to navigate to a separate URL. The process of creating this piece can be divided into these main sections:

1. Prepare an FLA file
2. Creation and addition of the buttons.
3. Write the code.

Prepare an FLA File: Open the FLA file and chose where you want the buttons on the screen. Now place a new layer for addition of buttons, above the other layers in the Timeline; name it as buttons. Now add a new layer on similar lines but this time add actionscript code, above the buttons layer, and name it actions.

Creation and addition of the buttons: Create and add two buttons and name them as playButton and homeButton.

Write the ActionScript code:

Code to cease the play head when it enters Frame 1:

1. Select the key frame on Frame 1 of the actions layer.
2. To open the Actions panel, from the main menu, choose Window > Actions.
3. Enter the following code in the script pane:

                  Stop ();

Code to start the animation when the play button is clicked:

Enter the following code at the bottom of the script:

function startMovie(event:MouseEvent):void

{

    this.play();

      }

Now add

            playButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, startMovie);

Code to send the browser to a URL when the home page button is clicked:

Enter the following code at the bottom of the script:

function gotoDesiredPage(event:MouseEvent):void

{

    var targetURL:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://example.com/");

    navigateToURL(targetURL);

}

The above code defines a function called gotoDesiredPage(). This function first creates a URLRequest instance representing the URL http://example.com/, and then passes that URL to the navigateToURL() function, causing the user’s browser to open that URL.

Now enter this line of code:

homeButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gotoDesiredPage);

Thus with the use of functions you can split your program into various sub problems and programming becomes easy.
It is the same with any other programming language. It also reduces the redundancy in the code.

The bottom-line is- ActionScript runs on similar lines as that of other Object Oriented Programming Languages with similar class structures, flow control, packages and so on.