If you are building a new website or blog, or rebranding an existing site, you’ll need to choose and register a domain name. So, where do you start? Your domain name does not have to be tied to your hosting provider. Not everyone realises this. You can register a domain name and have it redirected to your host.

But more importantly, how do choose the actual name itself? If it’s a rebranding exercise or a new site, your choice is only limited by your imagination. Or, is it? There are different ways you can approach this task, or you can even mix and match approaches. You can choose based on keywords, brands or themes.

Improve your search engine ranking

When giving advice most marketers will tell you choose one or more keywords for your domain name. This is because the keywords in your domain name are near the top of google’s list of ranking factors. Assuming you have some content already, analyse the home page content and choose the top 2 or 3 keywords. Can you combine these into a domain name, perhaps with a benefit or result your readers are seeking.

Take a look at the article by Rand Fish of seomoz on the 12 rules for choosing the right domain name. As well as brainstorming your tops 5 keywords, he recommends coming up with names that are short, easy to remember and easy to type. If you have a brand that’s known , use it. And pick a .com suffix for your domain name.

Domain names to promote your brand

Nike says just do it. As a brand, it’s short and sweet. And with Nike’s consumer profile we all understand this message. But Nike spends a lot of money on branding. There are few who have the deep pockets to build a brand like that. But brands can be created on the internet. Look at copyblogger. Anyone who writes on the internet knows about copyblogger. And google lists 450,000 search results for this made-up word.

A brand is lot more than just the domain name. It’s the entire look and feel of a businesses’ communications. It comprises colour, typography, logo and design. So, if you have a brand name already, then you should incorporate this into the domain name. The best way to achieve this is with design, name and tagline.

In James Chartrand’s article for copyblogger how to create a rock solid tagline that truly works he suggests a tagline should be your mission, promise and brand. So, if you create a tagline that includes your mission, a benefit and a little pizzazz, your domain name must contrast or match it. A simple example might be the doamin name www.energyteas.com with a tagline “soothing iced tea to revitalize your life”.

Creating a theme-based domain name

In the lifehack article by Craig Childs on how to brainstorm domain names he asks some important questions of any ideas you come up with. What image does the name convey? Is it original and unique? Can you spell it? Can you remember it? The last two might seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many sites have created what they consider to be clever names, that nobody can remember or spell. Be clear, not clever.

So, you have all these tactics and you’ve read all the advice, but how do come up with a perfect name? The first action is to brainstorm, preferably with other people, because you can bounce ideas off each other. What is your theme? What is the site or blog all about? Is there an overarching theme to your content? Can you find two or three words to summarise your theme? Use a thesaurus to look for different words. You can also use web-based tools to give you ideas, such as nameboy, featured in this week’s video on choosing a domain name.

Domain name practicalities

Once you’ve chosen a name, you need to check if it already exists. Most domain name registrar’s can check this quickly, such as godaddy. In fact godaddy is the largest domain name registrar. Their prices are very competitive. Your best bet is to choose a .com extension or suffix. But there are other choices. If your site will appeal to a particular geographic audience, you can choose a country suffix. Here are a list of suffixes.

If you register your domain name with godaddy, you have two choices, you can either host your site with them or redirect your new domain name to your preferred hosting provider. Godaddy call it mapping your domain name and it simply means using their site-based DNS manager to point to your host. And how do you know where to point it to? Your own hosting provider’s dashboard will provide the URL.

So, you must configure both places, the domain registrar and your hosting provider. It can take up to 48 hours for the change to propagate around the internet. Once it is, your perfect domain name is born.

The last time I looked at the statistics, there were over 100 million blogs. That’s an awful lot of blogs and with so many to choose from how is it only a small fraction of these grab the lion’s share of readers while the rest get a small trickle of visitors or no visitors at all? Building a popular blog demands 4 essential activities.

And the skills you need or activities you must do to make your blog successful are not obvious. But this is where we can learn from successful bloggers who have grown a sizable following of fans and readers. When you study them, you can spot what they are all doing. In fact, some of them tell you exactly what they do.

The 4 step blog success strategy

I’ve taken the time and trouble to find out what they do that works so well and there are 4 key activities. You must do all of these, and if you do them well, you’ll get results. They are,

• Create a well designed blog with a strong focus or USP
• Produce well written, unique, quality content and publish it regularly
• Write guest posts or articles for B-list and A-list bloggers in your niche
• Network with people, engage with bloggers and reach out to influential people

It doesn’t matter if you are starting a new blog, publishing an old one or it’s attached to your business website, the components for success are the same. If you think it’s a lot of effort, you’d be right. It certainly is. But with so much competition for eyeballs, the most successful bloggers are continually raising the bar.

Successful bloggers we can learn from

The example blogs I’m going to show you all come from the internet marketing or related niches, but then it’s a very competitive space and difficult subject to gain traction and followers. This doesn’t mean, however, it’s the only niche where you can build a successful blog. In fact, it’s probably easier with most other topics.

Corbett Barr use to work 60 hour weeks helping new start-ups in a corporate environment before he discovered blogging and new lifestyle spending the winter months in Mexico and travelling. His blog for adventurous entrepreneurs has 5421 subscribers. Pretty good for a personal blog.

Corbett’s blog think traffic gets 21,942 monthly readers. He is quite open about how he gets those readers with monthly traffic reports where he shows you his google analytics statistics. He shares with us how he gets traffic and readers, and it isn’t about a bunch of different traffic techniques either.

Pat Flynn’s blog smart passive income gets 30,709 regular readers and 51,274 twitter followers, and the blog hasn’t been around that long either. The articles and posts on his site are excellent, which is a clue to his success. And he is also very open about how the blog earns income with his monthly reports.

Glen Allsopp’s blog viperchill gets 90,000 monthly visitors and it took him only 6 months to grow it to 6000 subscribers. Glen is known for publishing his ultimate guides and although he’s worked in the corporate world as a marketer, which gives him valuable knowledge, it’s still an amazingly fast growing blog.

Firepole marketing runs training programs and coaching for small businesses. It’s an internet business and associated blog run by experienced entrepreneurs Danny Iny and Peter Vogopoulos. Their blog gets 7883 monthly readers and is a great example of a successful web business-based blog.

James Clear’s blog passive panda is only 8 moths old yet gets 120,000 unique visitors a months. That is amazing growth. But when you look at his blog you can see why. He is the perfect model for a successful blogger and talks about what he did to achieve these results in a recent video interview.

Start with a strong focus and good design

The very first step is to define your audience. You want to have a clear idea of who you are aiming at with the content you publish. Corbett aims at adventurous entrepreneurs who like to travel. Firepole marketing aims to be the definitive resource for entrepreneurs, small businesses and non-marketers. What is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)? You may not be selling anything yet, but must know what makes your blog different.

Start by reading Corbett’s ultimate guide to finding your unique selling proposition. This should get you on the right track. You should be able to write a tagline that perfectly summarises what makes your blog unique and useful. You want the reader to get what you’re blog is all about within seconds of landing on the home page.

First impressions count. You may not think that’s always fair, but it’s always true. The outcome of many job interviews are decided within minutes. The impression your blog gives takes just seconds and a professional looking design can give it a great start in your reader’s mind. If you have the money, pay for a designer to create a custom theme, or if you haven’t, at least buy a professional looking theme.

Read my recent article on 7 steps for finding the best web designer for your project. You can get great designers for very low rates on odesk and other freelance sites.  And if you want to buy a professional looking template or theme, take a look at woo themes. They sell plenty of great wordpress themes and create new ones constantly.

Write and publish quality content

What does quality content mean? It’s articles, videos or audios (yes, you can publish using different media types) people read and want to share with their friends or work colleagues. Corbett tells us to write epic shit, a colouful and unique way of saying the same thing. Make sure you create great content.

This takes time and effort. Glen from viperchill spends many hours researching and writing the long and very useful articles he publishes. Read his article on creating viral content for a complete step-by-step to writing excellent blog posts and headlines. Or, read master the art of article writing for my 7 step method.

When James Clear from passive panda wrote the article 99 interview tips that actually help you get a job, he spent 25 hours interviewing recruitment experts and writing an amazing blog post. That’s 3 days of work! But then that one article alone got 414 tweets, 769 facebook likes, 157 linkedin shares and generated 556 emails.

Article writing and guest posting

If you subscribe to many of the A-list blogs, such as problogger or copyblogger, you will notice they publish quite a lot of guest posts. And after a while you will spot the B-list bloggers who guest post. All of the successful bloggers I’m using as examples guest blog. In fact many reckon guest blogging gave them their big break.

These big blogs have many thousands of regular readers and an article published by you with a link back to your blog can result in a huge traffic spike and a ton of new readers for your blog. It’s a win-win. The A-list blogger gets some great, free content for their blog, you get noticed and your blog gets traffic.

Read Glen’s article on guest blogging: the ultimate guide for some tips on why you should guest blog, how to find sites and writing publish-worthy posts. You will need to write guest posts often and you want to use your best material. This is your showcase to the armyof people who read blogs regularly.

Reaching out to other people

Are you a natural networker? Some people are and some are not. If you are, you have probably realised what I’m about to tell you already. If not, listen closely as this is crucial to your blog’s success. You need to have a strategy for reaching out to people, blog owners and influential people in your niche.

Start by targetting blogs where you would like to see your content published as a guest post. Read the posts they publish and write useful, insightful comments. Do this continuously. Make sure you have a gravatar or provide a face to your name. In time you will be noticed by the blog owners. Then ask them if you can post an article.

On your own blog, make sure you reply to all comments and encourage engagement. There are wordpress blog plugins, like commentluv, which promotes commentors. Or you could feature regular commentors on your blog on your home page so they get noticed by other people. Everyone like to be seen.

Once your face is known in your niche, reach out to other bloggers and influential people in your space. You should know who they are by now if you’ve spent the time to network with others. Email is a great way to reach out. In his recent video interview with Corbett Barr, James Clear describes how he does this. Or you could buy his course on how to email important people for $99.

Putting it all together

Publishing a blog as a hobby or to express yourself is very different from using a blog to create a business or promote a business. Does it take a lot of effort to build a popular blog? You bet it does. And you may wonder why anyone would spend so much time and effort, especially when you are not making money.

But this is where you need to be strategic. Most successful bloggers have a plan. Once their blog has been launched and is building an audience, they introduce products or a service. That’s when the payback starts. Now that you know what it takes, it’s not knowledge that’ll bring success, it’s effort. Lots of it.

How do you optimise your website or blog and how do you know if you’ve succeeded? Optimisation is a practical process, and although it may not be simple to implement, it is easy to understand. Knowing if you’ve succeeded is a little trickier. You need to know how you rank in the search engines for each keyword. You can search on your keywords and find which page your website is on, or there are tools available to do this.

There is a simpler way – study your website statistics. Google analytics will tell you how many visits each page of your website is getting from the search engines. If page visits from google increases steadily over 3 to 6 months, then the page’s ranking is improving in google’s index. But to start, you need to optimise your pages.

What you should be optimising

As google is the internet world’s most popular search engine, the way google ranks your website content is really all you need to be concerned about. And as their ranking algorithm is a closely guarded secret, how do you know which are the most important factors out of the hundreds google employs? Use the combined knowledge of 132 SEO professionals. SEOmoz does this every year in the search engine rankings report.  The top 5 are,

Keyword-focussed anchor text -  when linking to a web page, ensure the text includes a keyword that tells the search engine what the page is about. This includes your navigation as well as off-site links.

External link popularity – the more links to your website, the higher google will rank your pages. Viral content, or linkbait articles (which means very useful, popular articles) or engagement with blogs on your topic (which means leaving comments and joining conversations) are reported as effective link-building tactics.

Diversity of link sources – one way links are best, grown organically (appear slowly over time) from other sites and people who like your content. You want your links to come from a wide variety of sources. Google regards this as a natural link profile and gives your pages more ranking weight.

Keyword in the title tag – this is easy to achieve. Just make sure when you create a new page for your website, the name of your page includes the most important keyword for that page. The title tag appears in the bar at the top of the page. There is more on this in the discussion on meta tags.

Domain trustworthiness – this is tricky to define. We know google places a lot of trust in links from authority sites, like yahoo or facebook. Google also looks at how long your domain has been online and if your domain name has been registered for multiple years.

Optimising your home page

Content is the best way to optimise your home page. Google’s search engine robot, or googlebot, will enter your site from the home page. It regards this page as the most important on your website. A sales letter is good content or an introductory page. Use your primary or top 3 keywords and add them to the title or headline and at least the first paragraph. If you don’t know your keywords, read wordtracker’s keyword research guide.

You may not want either a sales letter or an introductory page if your home page is a gateway into all the content on your site. You want to entice the reader inside, but you want to entice the googlebot too. Instead, try to weave description, commentary and plenty of words, sprinkled with the important keywords. Tell the reader all about your niche topic. The more words you use, the easier it is for googlebot to know what your site’s about.

Do you still need meta tags?

There are 3 meta tags and they can be seen by looking at the source code from a browser window. They are hidden html tags embedded in the web page between the <head> and </head> tags. They are title, description and keywords. The title tag is the most important and appears in the bar at the top of your browser. An example of a title tag for a fly fishing website would be <title>fly fishing reviews</title>.

The description tag is also important, but not for ranking, for your visitors. If a meta description is provided, google will often use it as a description in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) under your page title. This is what searchers will read and it should entice them into your website. Create a 150-200 word description or snippet. Longer descriptions will be truncated by google.

An example for the fly fishing site could be <meta name=”description” content=”fly fishing reviews, rods, tackle, bait and everything for the angler”>. Make sure your keywords are included. If you use a CMS (Content Management System) or the thesis theme on wordpress, you can enter the description in a simple box. If you have a wordpress blog, watch John Chow’s video on-page seo trick on how to do this with the thesis theme.

The keywords tag is no longer useful. In the early days, webmasters would use the keywords meta tag to spam the search engines with keywords, whether they were relevant or not. So, google does not look at this tag.

Are there other important factors?

The domain name is important to google. If it has your primary keyword in the name, then your site will be ranked better for the keyword. This makes sense. Using our earlier example of the fly fishing website, if it had the name www.flyfishingreviews.com it’ll be a much better match to the content.

Google is also paying more attention to social networking sites and what it calls social signals. If there is much conversation about your content and your site on social networks like facebook, twitter or linkedin, then google will consider your site to have more authority, because everyone is talking about you.

And quite recently, during the latest search engine algorithm update (Panda update), google now places a lot more importance on the loading speed of your webpages. This is harder to fix. Take a look at the article by Adriana on 5 ways to speed up the loading time for your web pages. Optimising your image sizes should be your top activity. Google has plenty of advice on how to do this for your website.

Finding the best resources

There are quite a few excellent and free primers or guides on search engine optimisation. SEO fast start is a 6 step web-based guide created by Dan Thies, who has been optimising websites for more than 10 years. And where better to start than google’s own search engine optimisation starter guide. This is a downloadable PDF.

I find the articles, videos and advice from SEOmoz to be excellent. It’s worth subscribing to their regular articles and watching their whiteboard Friday videos. This week’s featured video is learn SEO by Rand Fishkin.

Optimising your website or blog is all about following a process. If you haven’t started, then today is a good time. The sooner you are optimising your site, the faster it will move up the search engine rankings.

There are thousands of web designers and an infinite number of projects a designer could design. How can you find the perfect designer for your project? Let’s be honest, we all want the same results. A well designed, professional look and feel, in double quick time and at a reasonable cost.

But how do you find that elusive web professional? Recommendations from friends or colleagues is the way most people prefer to find any worker. The spectre of poor results, a bad worker or paying too much money means we will go for the safe option every time. However, what if you can’t get any recommendations?

The following 7 step process will help you turn a perfect stranger into the amazing find you tell everyone about.

Scope the work – the secret to getting the results you want from any worker you employ are the 3 P’s; planning, preparation and precision. Before taking any action think carefully about exactly what you want to achieve. You need to be crystal clear on this. It’s no good saying ‘I’m not sure. I’ll know when I see it’. Although there is a way to overcome this, as you’ll see when I talk about choosing your marketplace. You will need to know,

• Do you want both design and coding done? They are separate skills. You can employ a designer and a programmer, or you can get both done by the same person or organisation
• Do you want search engine optimised design? They are also separate skills and you could employ an SEO professional. I recommend SEO optimised design
• Is it a website or a blog? If it’s a website, you will need a CMS (Content Management System), unless you want to pay the designer every time you want to change anything on your website. With a CMS, you are in control
• If the design is for a blog, which platform do you want to use? I recommend wordpress
• Do you know what content you will add to your site? The content is more important than the design, so the content should come first. Know what will be on the site before you design it
• Will you need hosting or do you already have your own web host? Many designers and design firms can provide you with hosting
• Do you have a domain name or do you want the designer to find one? I recommend you choose the name yourself. A search on godaddy will tell you if your name idea is available. If you get the designer to register the domain name, make sure it’s registered in your name, not his.

Choose your marketplace – there are many different ways of employing a designer, but I’ll keep the discussion to three ways, and then focus on what I think is the best method. You could use a design firm, a freelance designer or a design contest. The design firm is usually more expensive, but then they can take care of everything. I don’t recommend this unless you really have no clue about websites or have a big budget.

Employing a freelancer to complete your project is the cheapest option and you can get outstanding results. There are pitfalls for the unwary, but then this 7 step process will take care of them. There are thousands of web design professionals ready to work for you and this is the method I recommend and will use as an example.

There are several marketplaces to find freelancers. elance was the the first with over 500, 000 contractors for hire. peopleperhour is perfect for small businesses. They have more than 150,000 freelancers for projects of any size. And odesk has nearly a million contractors and a unique way of working. To learn more watch this week’s featured video or see my article on the odesk advantage. I will use odesk to show you how the process works as I have experience of using this site.

Design contests are a relatively new way of getting freelancers, or web design firms, to compete for your business. 99designs runs contests and it’s easy. You compile your design brief, review and provide feedback, then pick a winner. After you describe your requirements, dozens of designers submit web page design concepts and you only pay for the web page design you like the best. You also choose the price, which starts at $495. And if you really are not sure what you want, a design contest will give you plenty of ideas.

Prepare a brief – this a short but concise description of what you want. It doesn’t matter if you use a freelancer, design contest or design firm, you want to write a brief. It needs to be committed to paper, not in your head. Several paragraphs should be sufficient. Don’t make it war and peace. You should include,

• A broad but concise description of the website niche, number of pages and audience
• The scope of the work – design, coding, CMS, domain name registration, etc
• The ideal visitor profile and what he or she will expect to find or do
• Content types, such as video, audio, articles, images, documents
• Style or ‘look and feel’ you would like – provide example websites you like
• How long you think it should take and your budget

The last item is a little tricky. You may not have a budget or know how long it should take.  My advice is to study other people’s briefs and projects and see what they have done. You could hedge your bets by quoting a price range or give a rough estimate. Difficult or not, you must set clear guidelines on cost and time.

Submit your brief – the process will vary depending upon the marketplace. If you submit a brief to odesk, within hours you will get many contractors bid on your project. This is where thorough research is needed on your part. Don’t rush this bit. You want to study each contractor and their complete profile.

Odesk is excellent and provides a ton of crucial information. You get a photo, a name, an overview of their skills and experience, recent work history and client feedback, tests taken & results obtained, recent job applications, resume and details of their portfolio for you to study. And you get the rate they are offering. You should know that odesk will add 10% to this rate. So, if they offer $10 an hour, you will pay odesk $11. You also know where they live, how many contracts they’ve completed, how many hours they have worked and a client feedback rating system where 5 stars is the best. This is enough to give you a complete picture.

Study every contractor who bids on your project and then choose a shortlist. Now it’s time to make contact with them. I like to call this the evaluation stage.

Evaluate – staying with odesk, they have a messaging system, which is email-based. This is an opportunity for you to satisfy yourself that a contractor has the skills and can do the work in a timely fashion. Ask questions. Dig a little deeper. This is the trick to finding a good fit for you and your project. For example,

• What is your greatest skill?
• Which part of web design work do you love the most?
• Can you create good quality work to a deadline?
• Have you done any design projects in this niche before?

Now you think of some questions. Make sure the replies give you a feeling of confidence. You want to be confident you’ve chosen the right person for the job. Once you’ve asked your questions, I recommend either organising an interview or setting a test task. The interview could be done with skype. Geography should not be a barrier. Or you could set a simple test task and offer to pay so you can see the results before deciding.

Set expectations – once you’ve chosen your web designer, now you need to set clear expectations. This is the precision part of the 3 Ps. It will benefit both parties. The contractor will know exactly what he must provide and you will know you’ve been clear about the results you expect. How do you achieve it? With a working document or blueprint. Yes, more writing. You could record an audio or a video instead. What should it include?

Start with the brief you’ve already written and expand it. The brief was a summary document and the blueprint is a detailed description of what you want to achieve. I would also recommend providing the designer with,

• A simple line drawing or description of how you want the home page to look (a video would work)
• The structure of the intended navigation and each of the pages of the site
• A copy of the logo in photoshop or fireworks format, if you already have one, or a detailed description of your ideal logo if you want the designer to create one for the website
• Either the actual content you want on the home page or some boilerplate content
• A checklist of what you expect; 15 pages, SEO optimised, domain name, CMS, logo, etc

This may seem like a lot of work, but believe me, the clearer and more precise you make your work instructions, the better the results will be. Only the creative elements should be left to the skill of the designer to decide.

Provide feedback – if there are several elements to the design, or even if it’s just a home page design, there will be communication between you and the designer before the job is delivered. Always give positive feedback at every opportunity. Designers are people, and like us, they want to know they are doing a good job. Let them know. Don’t wait until it’s delivered and then grumble that it’s not what you wanted. Stay involved.

With design contests, you should be watching as designers create your project and actively give feedback. You will get much better results that are closer to what you envisaged. If you have engaged a web professional on odesk, you are able to look at the work they are doing. It’s unique to odesk and a part of their management system. Take an interest in what they’ve done every day and provide feedback to them. Keep them on-track.

Before you know it, you’ll have exactly the results you want, instead of being disappointed. And it’s no mystery, because you’ve taken control every step of the way, and made sure what you want is crystal clear.

This is how you find the best web designer for your project.

There is both an art and a science to writing great articles, whether it’s for your blog, website, print media or any other purpose. The art is in the skill of writing, which often eludes many would-be writers. I think the trick to learning skillful writing, and it can be learned, is to read a lot and often. Most published books and articles are well written and you learn by osmosis.

The science of article writing is about planning, preparation and methodology. And this is a little easier to grasp, but few people plan and prepare for almost anything, so you will write a better article if you do. If you are researching on the internet and writing articles for a blog or website, you’re in luck as I have a 7 step method to share with you.

The Art of Writing

The brief – start by writing a ‘placeholder headline’. This is just the topic as the last step will be to craft a great headline. The brief should only be 5 or 6 bullets with short, concise heading you want to research or maybe a few questions. You need to focus your mind before researching or writing.

Research – I recommend capturing your research in either OneNote, which is part of Microsoft Office 2010, or Evernote. Both allow you to capture text, audio, video, images or practically anything you find on the web. Google is amazing for research and the best place to start. But don’t forget youtube, stumbleupon favourites, delicious, yahoo answers, forums, twitter and amazon. If one source yields little or nothing, you then have other options.

What to look for – I have a checklist of information types to search for, which includes personal stories, real life experiences and opinions, the biggest problems people face, case studies, problems and solutions, inspiration, debates and discussions, checklists, cheat sheets, free ebooks and reports, products and services, videos, courses, guides, lists of benefits, worked examples, quotes from experts, reviews and comparisons, facts and statistics and resource lists. You may think of your own types too.

Introduction – this is where you crack open your favourite editor, which could be word or as I write for blogs, it’s WLW (Windows Live Writer). IMHO it’s the best offline blog post editor. Oh, and it’s free. The introduction must support the headline and grab the reader’s attention. It could include interesting facts, a teaser that’s tackled later in the article, a question or maybe use reverse psychology (opposite of what the reader expects).

Article body – Always list or make your most important points first. Journalists and newspapers do this all the time. Then prove your claims, state your facts, add a story based on experience, provide evidence and examples and above all, keep your message simple. Stick to one idea for the entire article – don’t confuse the reader.

Summary – end with a powerful statement, start a discussion, summarise your article or finish with a checklist. The best writing is circular – you end by writing about what you started with. If you started the article with a question, answer the question in summary or concisely. If there are any resources or it’s a step-by-step, finish with a checklist the reader can use.

Headline – now rewrite the headline. This is the most important part of your article as most people on the internet do not read past the headline. You need to grab them by the eyeballs. There are plenty of resources for writing excellent headlines. Read Glen’s article on how to get hundreds of links to your next post, copyblogger’s how to write magnetic headlines and my own article on writing great headlines. Don’t rush this bit, it’s too important.

If you take the time to separate each of these steps and do your best work with each, you will have mastered the art of article writing. Don’t forget to watch this week’s featured video from ezinearticles on 7 tips to get into the article writing zone.

Just how do you choose a reliable, inexpensive web hosting provider that’s perfect for your needs? Or perhaps you’re painfully aware your current host does not pass muster. Choosing can be confusing, especially if you don’t really understand all the technical features you find in the marketing blurb.

Are you guilty of sticking the tail on the donkey, and now regret it? Many people jump on the cheapest offer they see, but it’s not a good idea to allow price to be the deciding factor. And then there are the technical support horror stories you hear about from a colleague or friend.

So, you need a host or want to change, what next?

What’s important when choosing a host?

Price – Expect to pay between $5 and $50 a month for a small web hosting package of 20-50MBytes of storage space. Like most things in life you get what you pay for, and hosting is no different. The lowest price may mean 100’s of users packed onto one server, lower cost server hardware and outsourced technical support. Don’t be fooled by a long list of features.

Think twice about web hosts with appealing yearly prices. If you pay for a year of hosting and you are dissatisfied with the service, you are less likely to swap. It’s always best to pay monthly.

Storage space – most hosting providers offer a range of packages with different storage options. Start small but ensure you can upgrade if your site grows faster than you thought it would. Don’t be suckered into thinking you must have unlimited disk space. There is no such thing! Most web sites need less than 10Mbytes. Most hosting providers offer more than enough space.

A good example is dreamhost, who recently offered unlimited disk space and bandwidth for $5.95 a month. For this price and specification you will be sharing a server with hundreds of other customers, all using the same CPU and memory, which could result in slower site loading times.

If you did use up many Gigabytes of space, perhaps with a video hosting website, your host may charge you more or even suggest finding another host. Aim for 10-25Mbytes of space and leave room for growth.

Bandwidth and site load times – the bandwidth is a measurable statistic. The more visitors you have the more bandwidth you will need. Start small and ensure you can upgrade. Most sites use less than 3GBytes a month. If there is a monthly bandwidth limit, check how much the provider will charge you for exceeding this. You don’t want any surprise charges.

Just as with storage, you don’t need unlimited bandwidth. Hosting providers use data centres with high capacity, resilient T1 and T3 connections to the internet. You will only need a tiny fraction of this. The more video, audio and animated graphics you have on your site, the higher your bandwidth needs.

The host’s server performance is important, but not always quoted. In particular, the processor speed affects the quality of video and audio streaming, and affects your site load times. Web site load times are now a part the search engine optimisation equation. Google measures your site load times and will reduce your page rank if it’s slow.

Reliability & uptime – these are both important factors. Most hosts provide a figure for measured uptime. Aim for 99.9% or better. Many hosting providers use data centres, which are highly resilient and robust. When your site is down, you could lose new and old visitors alike. Downtime does happen occasionally, perhaps for maintenance, but when it does you want to know how it’s handled and how quickly your site is up again.

Look for feedback from other users on a host’s reliability. A search through google can often find reliability and uptime testing and comparisons for different providers. I use AN hosting for this blog, and their reliability isn’t great. In the last 2 years my site has gone down at least 3 times.

Technical support – this is a biggie. When your website goes down for some unknown reason, can you call up and get a real, live support person on the phone? And can they find out what’s wrong and fix it, or at least tell you when your site will be back online. How many ways can you contact them? email, toll-free phone, live chat? Are they staffed 24/7?

Test their support by calling or emailing them, perhaps on a Saturday night or early Sunday morning. Measure how long they take to respond and gauge their technical competence. You want to aim for good customer service with lots of help and FAQ pages, 24/7 toll-free telephone support, 24-48 hour reply email support and, ideally, live chat.

A user with iPage hosting says,

their technical team is very courteous and skilled, and offer solutions to issues fast. They are accessible 24 hours a day 7 days a week and you can contact them via email, online chat or phone. Your calls are answered by them in just a few minutes. Rapid response times is one of their inspiring features. They have an extensive online help and ticketing system. they offer step-by-step tutorials that teach you how to use the account easily.

Free software and utilities – it’s not a question of what do they provide, but what software and utilities does your web site actually need? You’ll need the basics like email accounts, FTP access, web traffic monitoring tools and maybe a website builder or templates. A blog will need an SQL database. You may also need a shopping cart and domain name registration.

Ease of use – look for tools to make your life easier. This is true whether you are tech-savvy or not. If you want to install a wordpress blog on your site, look for the cpanel control manager and the fantastico software installer, which will install a wordpress blog with just a few clicks.

Managers like cpanel make setting up email addresses and SQL databases easy. Always find out what kind of back-end interface your host uses. You want plenty of help pages, a large FAQs and video tutorials for everything.

The deciding factors – even when you take all these factors into consideration, there may still be no obvious winner. Ask yourself what makes this hosting company special? Do they have regular backups, free domain registration, strong security, fast servers? Do they stand out?

A reputation for excellent customer support would swing it for me. When your site is down, the last thing you need is unresponsive support, or worse, stony silence. Don’t be suckered in by the free software, that you may not need, or the tempting discount offers with conditions in tiny print.

User feedback – opinion from existing users is crucial. You want to know what users think of the service they get. Do a google search on the provider. Look them up on twitter. Visit a few webmaster forums and reads the posts. Or, if you have a big following on twitter or facebook, ask them for their opinions on their web hosting provider. This will root out the bad ones.

Bad news travels much faster and further than good news. Another question to ask a provider is how long have they been in business? You want to see a proven track record of success. Have they been growing, stagnating or declining? Ask other people how long they’ve been using their host.

Read lots of reviews and take note of reviewer opinions. Make sure they are not biased because they get an affiliate commission. Here is a good example of web hosts compared. You’ll find plenty more by searching on google.

Shining a spotlight on Hostgator

Hostgator is one of the world’s largest hosting providers, with hundreds of thousands of customers. They are known for their guaranteed 99.9% uptime. And this is because they use big data centres with high specification hardware, high capacity internet connections, redundancy and resilience.

They offer a 45 day money-back guarantee on all of their web hosting plans, should you not be satisfied with their service. Their best web hosting plans are Hatchling, Baby and Business. The hatchling plan is only $3.96 a month. That’s hard to beat. Here is a review of their service.

They use the cpanel control manager and fantastico deluxe. During testing they showed good response and uptime, handling 6 simultaneous ftp uploads. They offer free sitebuilder and site studio, 4,500 free website templates, domain transfer, MySQL databases and 52 free scripts.

Hostgator have 750 support employees and offer 24/7/365 phone support, online chat, fax and peer support groups. In June 2008 a customer survey reported 90% of hostgator customers were satisfied with the service they received. They also provide an online support portal with more than 500 video tutorials and 680+ helpful articles for newbie webmasters.

Here is what a user said,

Their customer support is great, always online, and you get a response within a minute, two minutes max. Speed of their server is fantastic and the price is absolutely great. I’ve hosted with them for 6 months and never noticed any downtime at all.

I’ve used hostgator too. What you get for the money is excellent. The only downside was when I wanted to cancel my account (this was not because of the service but because I was closing the website for good). They didn’t seem to like me cancelling the account and ignored my emails!

You need a checklist

This is how you find the perfect web host. You need to research each service provider and measure them against each important factor. And in my opinion, you need a checklist. Many people hate making checklists, but I think they deliver outstanding results when used correctly.

• Price – between $5 and $50 a month for small web hosting package
• Storage – between 10 and 30MBytes is plenty for a single web site
• Bandwidth – approximately 3Gbytes a month is sufficient
• Performance – how fast are the servers, and your site load times?
• Reliability & uptime – go for data centres and 99.9% uptime
• Technical support – 27/7/365, multiple methods, competent staff
• Software & utilities – work out what your website actually needs
• Ease of use – the control panel, help pages, FAQs, videos
• User feedback – search google, twitter & forums for user opinion
• Deciding factors – are there any provider benefits that stand out?

If you do your homework, you’ll be rewarded with a reliable and inexpensive web hosting provider that’s perfect for your needs.

Facebook says it’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. As corporate mission statements go, it appeals to just about everyone on the planet.

Facebook’s press room has some unbelievable figures. There are more than 750 million active users, and 50% of these users tune into the site on any given day. The average user has 130 friends and spends more than 23 billion minutes  a day uploading photos, posting messages, joining groups and finding friends. Mark Zuckerberg said,

If facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria

Facebook has become part of our lives

Over it’s relatively short lifetime, facebook has been the focus of much research resulting in some amazing statistics,

• 92% of marketers use facebook and 75% have increased their use
• 44% of US companies see facebook as important or even critical to their marketing plans
• 31% of facebook users are on the site several times a day
• 24% of consumers consult facebook friends before making a purchase
• 53% of facebook users would recommend brands to friends
• 70% of users are outside the US
• the fastest growing user demographic are those aged 35 or older

There are a few observations and insights that businesses everywhere should be noticing. Almost all marketers are on facebook – the people who promote the products and services all businesses sell. Nearly half of all US companies see facebook as part of their marketing plans.

Your customers are almost all on facebook, every day, sometimes several times a day. They ask friends opinions before buying. They will often recommend products & services to friends. Even the older generation, often computer shy, are now on facebook.

What can you read into this? Every business should be on facebook.

Why is facebook so addictive?

So many people spending so much time on one website looks like an addiction to me. But why is facebook so addictive?

A revolutionary change in socialising – facebook was the first usable, interactive social website, where you could connect with just about anyone. It’s the real-time interactivity, like the news feed, that made it fun and addictive. And it’s simple and easy to use, so everyone can use it. Experts say the rise of facebook is due to people moving away from impersonal search engines and searching for more online interaction with people.

Apps, games and having fun – facebook has a huge variety of applications and games to while away the hours and have a little fun. The farmville game has more than 33 million players. And over 12 million people pay for games each month. It accounts for only 1.6% of users but is enough to create a social game industry, where companies like Zynga generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per quarter.

Everyone is on facebook – it’s passed it’s critical mass or ‘tipping point’, a term coined by Malcolm Gladwell, where if you’re not on it, you might miss what’s happening with your friends. In most developed countries it’s difficult to find an 18-30 year old who hasn’t signed up. You can now arrange, parties, meetings or get-together’s just on facebook alone.

A one-stop shop -  It’s fast reaching the point where you can do just about anything with other people. It’s become a universe people inhabit. You can chat and instant message with others online, find out what all your friends are doing, arrange events, share your photos, join a group with the same interests or even start a group. And now you can upload personal videos.

Sharing photos & memorabilia – facebook is now the most popular site on the web for sharing photos, with more than 14 million uploaded daily. You can add tags, so you know when friends upload a picture of you, and you can add comments to on your friend’s photos. This all adds to the fun.

Is there psychology at work?

A cure for loneliness – most people want a little attention from others and facebook is the perfect formula for delivering attention. If you are feeling lonely you can spend hours sending messages to friends, commenting on pictures or on their news feeds. We all live such disconnected lives these days, where we can live around people but still be lonely.

Dr. Megan Moreno, from the University of Winsconsin and a specialist in adolescent medicine, says the use of facebook improves social connection between young people, especially those prone to depression.

Overcoming insecurity and jealosy – facebook is great for sufferers with it’s ability to track conversations and events. You could solve your jealosy issues by stalking your target! Or you could just peek into people’s lives without them ever knowing it. Who isn’t curious to know more about one of your facebook friends? Curiosity is a strong emotion.

Improve your self-worth through your profile – most people need a sense of self worth. This can come from your job, achievements, or family, but it could also come from your facebook profile. It’s a way of showcasing who are, what interests you have and what you like. And other people can like you by clicking a simple button. And who doesn’t like to be liked?

How can businesses use facebook?

If you are a business and you’re not on facebook yet, or you think you’re not using it to your best advantage, how can you change this?

A facebook page – this is the first step for all businesses and organisations. It is separate from your personal profile, but there is a developing art and science to creating an effective facebook page. There are some excellent resources to help you from Pat flynn’s how to create a facebook landing page to Amy Porterfield’s how to create a facebook fan page guide.

Comprehensive profile – make sure you build a comprehensive profile. Facebook is all about personal connections and your profile is public. Anyone can see it. Make sure you present yourself how you want prospective customers to see you, and there is a synergy with your business.

Facebook page insights – this is facebook analytics. It provides feedback by showing you information such as impressions per post and a full demographic breakdown of your fans and page visitors. It gives you the information you need to improve your facebook marketing efforts.

PPC advertising – facebook ads are small PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising boxes that will often see when you are on facebook. With over 60 million active subscribers paying for ads, it must be working. Facebook rather cleverly use the extensive profile data to match the ad to the person.

Like button – facebook offer a number of promotional tools, but the like button is arguably the best. It’s gone viral. 2.5 million websites have added the like button to their website. When someone likes your content or website, they are endorsing it to all their facebook friends, as it will appear on their news feed. There is plenty of advice available on how to install it.

Start a facebook group – what is your business about? You could start a group on facebook matching the kind of people you want as customers? Starting a group is easy and joining one even easier. There are millions of groups, so there is bound to be a match. Participate in discussion and post content your group would find interesting, and you’ll be seen as an expert.

Promote to your friends – here is a simple idea. Make more than 100 friends (users have an average of 130 friends), share your best content with them, then ask them to share your website link with their friends.

Network with prospects – instead of just finding existing friends and family to connect with, search for potential prospects and other professionals in your industry or business. Facebook make searching easy and even suggest people you might like to connect with.

The reasons why facebook is such a hit are many and varied. But one thing is for sure, facebook will continue to grow. How big is anyone’s guess.

Which is the best web-based email service – google mail, windows live hotmail or yahoo mail? Why would you even want to use web-based email? Don’t ISP’s provide an email service you can use?

When you sign up for Internet access with your local ISP (Internet Service Provider) you usually get an email address too. And if you have an email client on your PC, such as Microsoft outlook, you can start sending and receiving emails instantly. But you may have noticed you don’t have access to your email when you’re not connected to the Internet through your ISP.

We are all so mobile these days and want access to email from anywhere. That’s where web-based email services are useful. But which one should you choose? Is there one service that stands out from all the rest? Are they really free? Are they secure and easy to use? How much storage do you get? What features do they provide? How intuitive is the interface? All good questions.

What you get with ISP email

I think the first benefit of an ISP email service is customer support. You are paying for being connected to the internet. So if you have problems with your email you can contact technical support and get answers. This is something free web-based email services don’t offer. With millions of online customers, free service providers are not worried about losing a user or two.

Most ISP email services use either POP3 or IMAP protocols, which means they can be easily configured to work with most email programs, such as outlook, windows mail, thunderbird, Incredimail, zimbra and others. And your local ISP has strong protection against virus threats or hacking. They are also inherently more private because you need to be connected to gain access to your email account. Not so with web-based email.

But there are a few disadvantages with ISP accounts. You can only access your email from home, or the office or wherever you have your internet connection installed. If your service provider goes bust, your account and email address are gone. This is less likely than moving your location to where your current ISP does not offer a service. You then lose your email address. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are not likely to disappear anytime soon.

What are email clients or programs?

Email clients or programs run on your PC or MAC, such as Microsoft outlook, thunderbird, windows mail and others. As an example, outlook is very popular both at home and at work, but it will cost you money to buy it. Although windows mail often comes bundled with a new PC. Outlook will download your emails from an Internet-based mail server to your PC, where you can read and archive your emails offline or online.

Outlook will allow you to work with calendars and task lists, but it’s proprietary, which means it cannot be integrated easily with web-based calendars like google calendar. Many people complain outlook provides too much functionality, which can make it difficult to perform simple tasks. And useful features may be hidden or obscured unless you read the manual. And how often do people read manuals? Everyone wants software to be intuitive.

If you have a different operating system, such as Linux or Apple OS, you will probably need to find another email client. Outlook is designed to run on Windows XP, Vista and windows 7. However, web-based email runs in your browser, so it really doesn’t matter what kind of hardware you use or operating system it has. It just works.

Google mail integrates your email addresses

Most google mail users enjoy the speed, ease of use, excellent features and unobtrusive text ads you’d hardly even notice. It’s generally faster than other web-mail providers, with some offline access but also has a hidden feature. It can pull together all of your email addresses and integrate them into one service. This includes ISP based POP3 and IMAP services. This is the reason I use google mail. I wanted one interface with one list of emails to read.

It’s easy to sign up for google mail. All you need is a google username and password. The user interface is intuitive and simple to use. It doesn’t organise your mail by folders but by labels and tags instead, which I don’t find to be as useful as folders. You can assign coloured labels to your emails and Gmail automatically organises related messages into threads, just like the way posts are shown on forums.

It can handle lots of daily emails with ease and you can access it through desktop email clients, such as outlook, Windows mail or Apple mail. When you compose an email there is no full preview pane, but you can attach documents up to 25Mbytes in size.

Email storage is not unlimited, but I get 7620Mbytes on my free account, which is bigger than most people will ever need. I’ve only ever used up 3%. Google mail is updated frequently with lots of new features.

You can find a more detailed gmail feature list at consumer search.

Easy customisation with Windows live hotmail

Windows hotmail allows easy user display customisation. You can choose your colours and move the reading pane to suit. You can also switch between different email accounts with hotmail. When composing emails, it offers a full preview, which Gmail does not. There is a paid version called hotmail plus (around $20/year), which increases your email storage and removes the ads. With your free account you get 5 Gigabytes of email storage.

To complement the customisable display, hotmail has drag and drop folders too. And as you might expect, it has good integration with the windows live application, which is very popular with fans of facebook and instant messaging. It looks and works more like outlook, which can be a good thing, if you’re comfortable using Microsoft’s de facto email client.

A handy reading pane allows you to quickly view emails from known senders or safely view questionable emails from unknown senders, by blocking images, which avoids notifying spammers. You can also automatically view your emails on web-enabled mobiles or PDAs. Hotmail has a feature called safety bars. The top of each message is shown in one of three colours. Red means it’s spam, yellow means it’s from a person who is not in your contact list and white is from a known contact.

You can find a more detailed hotmail feature list at consumer search.

Unlimited storage with Yahoo mail

Yahoo mail is the only service out of the three to provide unlimited email storage, although I don’t think unlimited storage is to be encouraged. It’s good practice to stay on top of your emails by replying, archiving or deleting messages on a regular basis. If there is a limit to how many emails you can receive, it forces you to be more organised.

Yahoo mail also provides drag and drop folders for organising your emails. It has a user interface that looks a lot like outlook and there is excellent integration with other services. You can upgrade your Yahoo email account, which adds POP3 support so you can download emails to your desktop email client, which is good for integrating work, home and travel access.

You can attach files of up to 10Mbytes in size to your messages and these can be word documents, spreadsheets, audio files, images or even web pages. Yahoo mail works with any internet-enabled devices like iPhone, Android or iPad. And you can send instant messages to your friends. Spam filtering is not as good as hotmail or gmail.

You can find a more detailed Yahoo mail feature list at consumer search.

So, which is the best free email?

There’s no easy answer. It just depends on what you want. The best approach is to make a list of features important to you and choose the closest match. All three services are solid and well established, supporting millions of users, but there is no stand-out solution. What differentiates each service? Gmail has excellent integration and is fast. Hotmail is highly customisable and Yahoo has unlimited email storage.

But, whichever one you pick, you will be able to access it from anywhere. That’s the biggest benefit.

Most webmasters know they should be designing accessible websites, in fact many countries have web accessibility written into their laws, but did you know making your website design accessible can also improve your search engine optimisation? Not many people know that, or they would pay more attention. Accessible design can kill two birds with one stone.

But what exactly does designing accessible websites mean? Although there is lots of advice on the web from many authority sites, such as the web content accessibility guidelines 1.0 from the w3c, most explanations are highly technical and they leave you wondering what you should do. I think many people need a simple introduction and a few tips.

Accessibility means designing all aspects of your site so people with physical disabilities can still read your content. The disabilities can include blindness or poor vision, hearing or motor disabilities. Braille readers or tools to help disabled people don’t read images, imagemaps, javascript programs or other programming devices on the web page. Your content must standalone without them. You need to ensure your page works when they are disabled.

And guess what? Search engine spiders don’t read images, imagemaps, javascript programs or page-based programming devices either. If you design your site with accessibility in mind you are helping the google spider bots to crawl and index your site easier, and if it’s easier for google to see your site clearly it will be ranked better. Watch this week’s featured video for a short introduction to the subject of accessibility and here are 5 ways to make your website more accessible.

• Make images visible – always use the alt tag on images. The alt tag shows what you decide is the name of your image when your mouse hovers over it. The readers used by disabled visitors can see this tag and so can google, so if your page is about fishing and your image is about fishing, your alt tag should include the word fishing. For example, <img src=”troutfishing.jpg” alt=”trout fishing on the river esk” />
• Describe your links – your hyperlinks are best when they are relevant keywords, but even if they are not, you should use the title attribute. When your mouse hovers over the link a small description box will appear, which the readers and google can both see. For example, <a href=”about us.html” title=”About trout fishing experts”>About Us</a>
• To script or not – use programming devices on your pages or your navigation sparingly, or better still, not at all. Or if you must use them, ensure your page can be read and makes sense when they are disabled
• Say what you mean – probably one of the most important pearls of wisdom from accessibility guidelines is to use clear and simple language, which funnily enough is exactly what all of your visitors and google is looking for. Use a keyword tool, such as wordtracker or the google keyword tool to align the words you use with the topic of the page
• Simple navigation – the w3c accessibility guidelines says make a site with clear hierarchy and text links so every page is reachable from at least one static text link. Hypertext links can be seen by every person, reader and spiderbot. Offer a site map to your users and to google. You will help both to navigate your site easier and more completely

Do you think your website or blog will pass the accessibility test? To find out, use the web-based wave accessibility tool. It’s free and will tell you if there are any problems with your site and make suggestions for improvements. Ask your web designer how they design for accessibility and listen carefully to the reply. They should be able to tell you.

So, if you want your site to be friendlier to google search bots, make sure it’s designed with accessibility in mind.

Listen to my podcast below or subscribe to webdesignability podcast in iTunes. Or you can subscribe to my RSS feed and get it delivered to your favourite feed reader. Don’t have a feed reader? I recommend google reader.

Download the mp3 podcast

With constant updates from facebook, twitter, linkedin and email, information overload can be a big problem. Surfing the web for solutions or just day-to-day information gathering  is no better. In a very short time you have tons of web pages and data that needs sifting and sorting. How do you get what you want quickly?

There are plenty of web-based tools and here are 5 that will save you time, increase your productivity or just make you look smart. Your friends and collegues will wonder how you are able to find people, information and solutions so fast. Or, maybe they will just think you’re clever. I won’t tell.

Strawberry jam – this is a new application and it’s still in beta, but I think it’s a great way to cut through all the clutter from your social networks. If you have 500 or 1000 followers on twitter, you’ve probably noticed how fast the live stream of tweets moves. Take a comfort break and you will miss a lot! It’s too much to take in. You can’t see the wood for the trees.

What’s clever about this application is you see the most discussed content from your stream, and it does it by showing you the links your followers share the most. It also compiles saved searches by most mentioned. And you can even get a daily update delivered to your email inbox.

Gist – gist allows you to access and organise all your contacts. It pulls together your email, social networks and mobile phone contact lists. You might say ‘what’s new about that – plaxo has been doing this for years’, but gist will also get the latest news, blog posts and tweets for everyone in your network. You can see everything about your contacts and share stuff with them too. One user said “…it’s a complete picture of your contacts”.

This is real intelligence. From your gist dashboard you can pull up a customer, collegue or friend and see their email, phone numbers, work and personal details in one handy place. You can join in a discussion they are already having online, comment on their blog post or congratulate them on their recent promotion. Very smart.

Evernote – I don’t know about you, but when I surf the internet for information I am quickly overloaded. Often I will find something, slightly off-topic, or that’s so interesting I want to go back to it later. But then later arrives and I cannot find it. Sometimes I want to keep all the data I find and go through it later too. But staying organised can be a headache.

But not with evernote. It’s really quick and simple to capture content from the web in any format. It could be a photo, web page, some text, an audio file or a document. Evernote can capture it all. You can then access your data from your mobile or PC. Your data is indexed and made searchable. You can search by keyword or tag, and organise it into notebooks too.

Wunderlist – it always amazes me how few people work with lists. You are lucky if you can remember more than 7 things at a time. In my work I can have 10 to 20 tasks to do over several weeks and all of them must be remembered. Lists are a simple and effective way to do this. Yet so few people do it and most forget stuff, which makes them look stupid or inept.

Wunderlist is a free and easy to use task manager. It’s beauty lies in it’s simplicity and intuitive use. It works on iphone, android, ipad, PC or Mac. It can send you reminders and notifications for date-based tasks or deadlines, and you can share your list with others. This is excellent if you are working in a team or collaborating with people half a world away.

Subjot – this application is also in beta, so it’s quite new. And it’s a new idea too. If you go back to your twitter feed. Doubtless you are following people because they are interested in what you’re interested in. But people have many interests; personal, hobbies, sports, work, and they will often tweet about all of them, but you might not want to read all of them.

This is where subjot comes in. You can fine-tune your feeds so you only see posts from your network on the subjects that interest you. It’s a simple but effective idea. Talk about your favourite subjects, let your friends choose what to follow and follow your frinds only in the subjects that interest you.

It’s amazing how good you can look to others when you have a few tools like these working for you. And you will save time and become a lot more productive. It’s time to cut the clutter and get selective.

Listen to my podcast below or subscribe to webdesignability podcast in iTunes. Or you can subscribe to my RSS feed and get it delivered to your favourite feed reader. Don’t have a feed reader? I recommend google reader.

Download the mp3 podcast