Washed It!

There any number of reasons why you may want to redesign your personal or business website. Whether you want to improve its performance as the online presence of your business, increase your traffic or simply to enhance its functionality or aesthetic appeal, there are a lot of situations which may call for bringing in a web design firm or taking on the job yourself if you have some website building skills.

Whether or not you cite it as your primary objective for redesigning your site, increasing the amount of visitors to your site is the most important goal to accomplish. If your website is for your business, then this should be obvious enough; the more visitors (which is to say, prospective customers) you bring in, the more sales you will ultimately make. Your website is part of your brand and is integral to your company’s marketing strategy and as such, it is a potential source of direct or indirect revenue which should be treated as such.

If your business lends itself to it, your redesign project may include adding ecommerce capabilities to the site or upgrading your current system for online purchases. Being able to make sales directly from your website is something that any business whose products are shippable should have and the easier your shopping cart system is to use, the better off you’ll be. Naturally, if your business is one which only serves consumers in your immediate vicinity (like a restaurant or most contractors, for instance) then ecommerce probably isn’t in the plans, though that doesn’t mean that having some web design work done on your site isn’t a good idea.

Whether or not online shopping is part of your business’ web strategy, making your website more attractive and offering a better user experience to visitors can help to drive sales. Along with local search optimization techniques, a redesigned website can help your business to reach more potential customers in your area and encourage them to call or visit your business. It should be noted that local search should always be included in your chicago web design and search engine optimization strategy, since being visible to consumers in local search gives your business another chance to reach potential buyers.

Every aspect of your site’s design and functionality should be looked at in light of your website’s most important goal: attracting as large of an audience as possible and if it’s a business oriented site, driving sales.

While your site content may not technically fall under the umbrella of web design proper, but it is very important and especially for business oriented sites, content should be approached as if it was. If you’re upgrading or redesigning your website, take this opportunity to revamp your content.

You can edit your old content, rewriting it to be more concise and compelling to visitors and incorporating your site’s primary keywords where possible without overdoing it. You might also want to go ahead and have all new content created and put together a plan for adding more content on a continual basis. The more content your site has to offer visitors, the more chances you’ll have to attract visitors; and with every new piece of content you add to your site, your site will be reindexed by the search engines and give your site another opportunity to be found. While it’s by no means universally the case, a website with 50 pages of content will be more popular than a site which has only ten pages of content. Planning for this kind of growth is something which should be built into your web design or redesign strategy to ensure that your online presence and your business can keep growing.

One thing to keep in mind as you redesign your site is that you shouldn’t necessarily start over from square one. If there are things about your website which are popular with your existing customer base and are performing well for your business, keep them. Your website is like any other part of your marketing strategy; you need to keep what works and replace what doesn’t. The other point to be taken from thinking about your web design as part of your marketing strategy is that it’s an ongoing process. You’ll need to continually test out new ideas, watch the metrics and make changes accordingly. The web moves fast and if you don’t want to be left behind, you need to keep on top of your online presence, whether it’s a personal page or a part of your business.

At Sami Abu Hossein’s cramped bookstore, the hundred or so book titles listed on a wall aren’t bestsellers. They’re banned.

And the cheery Abu Hossein can you get you any of them, sometimes in the few minutes it takes to sit down and drink a cup of thick-brewed Turkish coffee.

“There are three no-nos,” the owner of Al Taliya Books explains with a big smile. “Sex, politics and religion. Unfortunately, that’s all anyone ever wants to read about.”

He laughs uproariously.

“These are all the banned ones,” he says, gesturing to the list taped to the wall above the store entrance, books on sexuality to ones that critically examine the life and times of the prophet Muhammad, the most taboo topic in the Arab world.

“We have them,” he says, grinning broadly, “but don’t tell anyone.”

The tubby father of five seems to get a tremendous kick out of bucking the rules. (Not that they’re strictly enforced; he’s never been arrested or even summoned by the authorities.)

His partner in thought crime is Hossein Yassin, a self-described Marxist in a worn beige linen suit. Abu Hossein summons his wiry 48-year-old comrade in for the really tough jobs.

Yassin jokes that he’s the Special Forces for getting banned or hard-to-find books. He makes allusions to a murky past as an underground revolutionary. He says he calls upon a network that stretches across the Middle East to locate and transport hard-to-find titles.

“I can get any book,” he boasts. “But don’t ask how I get them.”

The most widely requested banned book remains “The Satanic Verses,” the 1988 novel that suggested some parts of the Koran weren’t God’s words and thereby earned its author, Salman Rushdie, a fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the hatred of pious Muslims worldwide.

Other top requests include “23 Years,” by the Iranian scholar Ali Dashti, which questions miracles ascribed to Muhammad in the Koran; and “The Joke in the Arab World,” by the Egyptian writer Khaled Qashtin, a sarcastic view of the Middle East, its rulers and customs.

Abu Hossein’s shop, in the capital’s rambling but lively downtown, also sells nonblacklisted books. His shelves are filled with titles from serious political studies about the Middle East to romance novels and pirated software manuals.

But his shop is known as the place in Amman to get forbidden fruits of knowledge.

Censoring books in the age of the Internet may seem like a quaint idea. Even the government official in charge of restricting them recently announced in a newspaper article that “stopping books from reaching the people is a page we’ve turned.”

The censor, Abdullah Abu Roman, occasionally stops by the bookstore to hobnob with Abu Hossein. So do plainclothes security officials. Abu Hossein serves them his Turkish coffee. They very politely ask him for the copies of the forbidden books. He hands them over. It’s all very civilized.

“Allah maakon,” he bids them farewell. God be with you.

“They are very sensitive to politics and criticism of politicians,” says Abu Hossein, who has been working at his family shop for decades. “But there are some books that are banned arbitrarily. Sometimes a censor will ban a book for a sentence he doesn’t like.”

A thickly bearded man wearing a headdress and flowing white dishdasha walks in. He’s one of the regulars, a Saudi religious scholar named Thaer Balawi who perhaps enjoys the challenge of subjecting his puritanical Salafist beliefs to the scrutiny of critical intellects. “You can’t stop an idea by censoring it,” he says.

“Mamnoueh maqroubieh,” goes the Arabic proverb. All that is forbidden is desired.

Abu Hossein recalls a memoir by a former interior minister that the censors immediately forbade for its sensitive revelations. It became a bestseller. But later, the political sands shifted, and the book was removed from the blacklist. Now it hardly sells.

In walks Raed Toguj, iPod ear buds firmly in place, a Web designer in his 20s with a penchant for philosophy and social theory. Censorship, he says, is a product of political ideology. “What I see as the solution is critical thinking,” he says.

Toguj acknowledges that the Internet has made his task superfluous. Many banned books are already available for download, and those with money can order copies from online bookstores abroad.

But Abu Hossein and his customers insisted that there’s something special about holding a book in your hand, feeling its pages, gabbing with the bookseller and fellow seekers of knowledge, like Carol Kaplanian, a 29-year-old doctoral student writing a thesis on honor killings of women in the Middle East, picking through a pile of books on gender relations.

The afternoon wears on. Abu Hossein keeps serving cups of coffee for his guests, the Salafist, the communist, the feminist and the Web dude with a passion for philosophy. They sift through titles and chat quietly, their murmurs softened by the stacks of books surrounding them.

daragahi@latimes.com
In Jordan, a bookstore devoted to forbidden titles

Tutorials are self-explanatory which can be learnt from home.  For instance, if you wish to learn about Dreamweaver, you can search for a free tutorial and download the same. Now begin to read each tutorial on daily basis, so that you get a good understanding about the application of dreamweaver.  You should never be in a hurry to complete the tutorial but you should be steady and slow in learning so that,  you are thorough in knowledge.  Similarly,  once you finish understanding tutorial  you can now begin to practice what you have learnt in tutorial.

Now you can download free version of dreamweaver or purchase full version of dreamweaver and consider the guidance of tutorial when to begin to practice web designing on it.  Ensure that you get good picture quality and perfect designing that matches with your ideas.  Once you complete your sample of web design, you get good confidence that you are capable of web designing.  Now the actual work area and experience in your field will begin to help you by attending to the needs of your customers.

Some of the best advantages of web designing tutorials are, it is very simple to download. Secondly, tutorial are very easy to read and thirdly very simple to understand and practice.  Apart from this, you do not have to spend lot of money in learning web design. You have your own computer and an Internet connection at home. Whether you are a student or a housewife aspiring to become a web designer you can become a great web designer and can easily work from home as you get lot of projects of web designing from Internet. But this effort goes well only when you have taken a thorough tutorial lesson from Internet by downloading free lessons and also by getting a good knowledge as to how it should be worked on.

Tutorials are the best to work with and these can be of very good use for the beginners and for those who are already in the profession. This will help in slow learning or fast learning or for those who wish to have reference guide through tutorials. This is the safest method to learn about web design and also low in cost.  Reading, learning, understanding and implementing is the only criteria to gain expertise in web design and this can be easily attained by tutorial learning.

But while choosing the tutorial download, what are the basic lessons offered in it for learning web design and also the level of knowledge provided in the download.  Because  the tutorial can be suitable for beginners, professionals and for experts. Therefore depending on your requirement of learning, you need to download the tutorial for learning web design.

Yeah, its Globalization time and we all are looking for the up-to-the-minute technology to acquire the platform that will have a global access to the information you intend to convey. We assure you to provide you the platform where you would give you the break to transform your mind-numbing hoardings, web pages etc. into interactive and fascinating videos.

We provide a creative solution for the video production of your concept. Our team at Orlando video production is creative, experienced, and commendable for the task of enhancing the way of communicating with your audience.  Beginning with the analysis of your requirement in order to prepare a draft of the concept to the final production of your concept in digital format is what we excel in.

Patron contentment

It is essential for us to satisfy each our client belonging to any sector of the industry therefore we open our arms to people belonging to health, education, corporate, government etc. If this wasn’t the real side of the story, then we would say that is true because the entire concept is developed in terms of stages. So, what we recommend you to do is have a clear picture of the entire concept as to provide you with the exact solution in order to achieve the best from production content. In a click, we use the digital storyboards to have your content in order that we can have exchange of thoughts online as well. For the face to face interaction, we make use of the physical storyboards. If you are not satisfied even at the initial stage, we move on to the other after making sure that the first step is cleared. We guarantee you to provide you with the realistic platform that would provide you with unlimited opportunity to promote.

Wider Spectrum

Let us give you a picture of the fact to what extent can you make use of this internet and then even distribute it wisely. According to what your requirement is, you can make use of video production at every occasion, whether you plan to live telecast the speech behind the speaker, or the stage live telecast or the conference or the recording of weddings, any sort of events, marketing of your products and services, corporate training, or shooting of videos.

Now with this new found collaborator for your company, trust us and start sending your requirements so that we are at your door as soon as possible. You would love the journey and the product at the end of the video production!

Moving a Website to a New Domain but Keep the Page Rank

Google Page Rank is important to a lot of people, and many base their decisions around it. There is now no excuse to stay with an underperforming or useless domain name if you can move it and keep the rank.

There are many reasons why you might want to move domain names. Two have already been mentioned. Usefulness is a big factor, one that most of the webmasters out there are keen to compete on. Underperforming is something else entirely. Some domain names just work, they do. They are either perfectly descriptive, niche names or you got there before everyone else did. If you have a page that appears high on the SERP, you may put up with bad ones in order to retain the result. Well no longer do you have to.

I have tried this one myself, which is why I’m writing about it now. I moved a site from a .com domain to a .org a little over three months ago. It had a Page Rank of four before the move, and I was a little apprehensive that all my good work would have been for naught. However, the new site is now back at four, right where we started from!

So here is what I did.

Firstly, and obviously I did a 301 redirect on the old domain and pointed it to the new one. Then I pointed the new .org domain to the website directory. Within that directory I created a folder called “com-site.” The name could have been anything but the descriptive title would remind me what it was if I was having a blonde day.

Within the “com-site” directory I created a new .htaccess file in order to tell browsers, and search engines what to do. The code I used was:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.websitename.org/$1

Then I tested from every browser that typing in the old .com address it redirected to the .org one. It may have been overkill, trying each browser, but it’s a habit I got into when first starting out in web design.

Then I pointed the old domain to the “com-site” directory and tested again with each browser. It didn’t work at first, but after a couple of hours it got picked up and started working properly. My patience was tested, as I was ready to take action and undo it all, but luckily I was interrupted by some work, and by the time I went back it was working.

I then updated the sitemap.xml file to reflect the new domain name and deleted the sitemap from Google. I replaced it with a new one and sat back to wait. Approximately three months later, after many days with the Google toolbar, it showed PR4 again. Not trusting the toolbar on its own, I went to Webmaster Central, and lo and behold, I was PR4 again!

I’m sure most of you out there already know this one, but I was so pleased it worked that I just had to share.

Next year's news about the news: What we'll be fighting about in …

I've helped organize a lot of future of journalism conferences this year, and have done some research for a few policy-oriented future of journalism white.

Coldplay LP5 News – Stereogum

Grab your Revolutionary War garb, Coldplay's “holed up in a dilapidated north London church” working on a new album for release next year. Brian Eno's back, but to avoid being a “huge stadium act” (?), they're going in “a stripped-down, …

Tesco to offer iPhone in UK on December 14th | iLounge News

According to a report from BBC News, British department store Tesco will begin to sell the iPhone in the UK starting on December 14th on a twelve-month contract. The lowest rate plan is expected to be £20 per month (US$32.50), …

/**
* MyBB 1.4.9
* Copyright © 2009 MyBB Plus, All Rights Reserved
* Redirect Link Hit Counter
**/

Information:
This displays a hit counter for forums that you have set up as a URL Redirect, in the same way IPB does.

Example:

   

Support:
http://mybb.ithium.net

Install:
You may need to CHMOD inc/functions_forumlist.php to 777

Upload redirect.php to your forums root directory (where index.php is)

Upload the plugin to the plugins directory (inc/plugins)

Download:

  redirecturl.zip (Size: 19.46 KB / Downloads: 25)

Donate:

Server rules should work
You should be able to set what files are interpreted as php so you could do something like
mysite.com/your.name/FILENAME
If you have Linix/Unix server you can create .htaccess file to interpret .name files with this declaration
AddType application/x-httpd-php .name
Here is a tutorialhttp://www.translatum.gr/forum/index.php…
If you are on a virtual server or shared host you may or may not be able to do this
Another way to do it is as a rewrite rule:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^name/.+$ /name.php?filename=$1
for something like
mysite.com/name/FILENAME
will be taken to
mysite.com/name.php? filename=FILENAME

Déplacement d'un site vers un nouveau domaine mais garder le Page Rank Google Page Rank est important pour beaucoup de gens, et la base de beaucoup de leurs décisions autour d'elle. Il n'ya maintenant aucune excuse pour rester avec un sous-performants ou nom de domaine inutile si vous pouvez le déplacer et à maintenir le rang. Il ya plusieurs raisons pour lesquelles vous pouvez renommer les noms de domaine. Deux ont déjà été mentionnées. L'utilité est un facteur important, celui que la plupart des webmasters là-bas sont désireux de concourir sur. Sous-performant est tout autre chose. Certains noms de domaine de travail juste, ils le font. Ils sont soit parfaitement descriptive, les noms de niche ou vous y êtes arrivé avant tout le monde fait. Si vous avez une page qui semble élevé sur les SERP, vous mai mis en place avec les mauvaises, afin de conserver le résultat. Eh bien non plus le faire vous devez.

The arrival of the Internet and the creation of the World Wide Web brought something different in the lives of men. A lot of things became convenient particularly communication. We used to contend and gripe about slow paced postal mails which came to be known as snail-mails. Today, we cannot imagine a world without Internet connectivity in our midst because a lot of our businesses depend greatly in our emails. Until we learned to create a blog which we used to communicate our thoughts to whoever would be interested to read it.

To create a blog site could be easy if you know where to find the right tools you could use as well as understand the different applications. A blog site which is opposed to a website contains mostly your personal views. Later on, Google made it all easy when this Internet giant provided the user not only the use of free emails, but also free resources to create a blog site. Google's Blogger, is quite user friendly, dispensing of the need to go into tutorials just to create a blog site where you could post just about anything.

Google also made it possible to create a blog site to earn some form of income, when they included adwords and adsense features to the Blogger. Later on, the use of keywords became significant especially when thinking up of your blog title should you decide to create your own blog site. Since the Google advertising tools also made use of keywords to install their ad spots, the blogger then became conscious that keywords are necessary tools, if they are to create a blog to fill up their site. Search engines include just about any keyword related content and your earning potentials are enhanced if a lot of people were to visit your blog site.

To create a blog content, there are no limitations to the topic you choose to discuss for as long as they are not pornographic or illegal in nature. A dashboard is provided at your disposal where you can create a blog to post and publish as your content with very little need for a formal tutoring. “WYSIWYG” or “What You See is What You Get” is the term used to describe the Blogger's dashboard. The individual blogger is not required to be knowledgeable about HTML just to publish and create a blog content. Simply paste your blog draft whether from text pad or Word Document and the “WYSIWYG” will take care of the rest.

You can explore all other features when you create a blog site, like changing the templates, fonts, inserting links or adding images since they can be previewed or easily deleted in case your first try turns out awry. The Blogger's basic tools for adding widgets and all other popular gadgets are also very accessible and user friendly.

The Internet user has come a long way in harnessing the World Wide Web to make his existence known all across the globe. He only needs to create a blog site and let everyone know what he thinks about himself, his family and friends, his religion, his work, about the US President, about wars, or even contribute his knowledge about health, love, parenting, and just about everything and anything under the sun.

 

Just six years ago, the web was dominated by one browser: Internet Explorer (), specifically Internet Explorer 6. Without Netscape to compete against it and the ability to bundle its browser with Windows XP, Microsoft experienced superior market share – up to 95% at the peak. Today though, we have far superior browsers like Firefox (), Safari (), Opera (), and Chrome (), as well as Internet Explorer 8.

So why is 15 to 25 percent of the world’s browsing still done in a browser created in the digital Stone Age (aka 2001)? As a coder, designer, and UI guy, it’s difficult to put into words how many extra man hours I and others have dedicated to make websites compatible with the outdated browser.

Despite the difficulty presented by IE6 though, the web’s done alright. But with the coming release of HTML 5, we’re about to hit a breaking point where innovation will be stifled if websites must continue to cater to this browser. Here’s what’s happening in the next few months and, more importantly, why we must force ourselves off IE6 if the web is to grow.

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The Issue with Internet Explorer 6

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Yeah…Facebook doesn’t like IE6…You might be asking yourself two questions right about now: What’s so bad about IE6? And why do so many people still use it? The answer to the first question is relatively simple: Internet Explorer 6 is outdated technology in a rapidly-changing Internet landscape. Imagine trying to use the social web, Microsoft Office, iTunes, IM, your video games, and all of your desktop apps…with a computer from 2001 (20 GB of space, 256 MB of RAM, anyone?). It’s the same thing: a great deal of new web technology is simply incompatible with IE6. A short list of things IE6 does not support, of which coders probably know them all:

- CSS v2 (Cascading Style Sheets): This is the code that enables almost all design on the web. In other words, designers have to hack up websites just to make them load in IE6.

- PNG Transparency: A great deal of .png images don’t display correctly in IE6. It basically kills using them in design work.

- General Security: Just like not updating your virus software can get you riddled with spyware, not updating your browser can be a gateway to attacks. There are even code snippets that will shut down IE6. I won’t tell you what they are, but you can find them on Wikipedia. It’s unstable.

- Digg (), Facebook (), and YouTube () (soon): Both Digg and YouTube have announced that they’re cutting back on IE6 support. Facebook already gives you suggestions for better browsers if you try to log in with IE6. You won’t be able to Digg articles or browse YouTube via IE6 in the near future.

Other companies have cited IE6 as holding them back as well. 37Signals, the maker of some of the most popular web-based business apps around (i.e. Basecamp ()) very publicly cut support for IE6 because according to them, “continued support of IE 6 means that we can’t optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps.”

Now, if you’re wondering why people still use the outdated IE6 browser, there are two primary reasons most people point to: the fact that it is the standard browser of Windows XP (which is still the most used operating system around), and the fact that many corporate IT departments don’t see the need to upgrade – and find upgrading to be too much of a hassle. Without a significant event like Google not loading in IE6, people have stayed content with their current browser.

Still, the web has somehow gotten by with these IE6-imposed limitations. However, there’s a new technology that will take over the web. It’s also one that IE6 will not be able to handle at all: HTML 5.

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The Next Step: HTML 5

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HTML (hypertext markup language) is the code that helps shape the world wide web – you’ve all probably used an HTML tag (especially if you blog) or played with HTML at some point. HTML 5 is the next revision of the HTML language, and the features that are coming with it are a doozy, especially since its core spec editors (Ian Hickson and Dave Hyatt) are from Google () and Apple respectively.

Google in particular is pushing it because it can really enhance the usability and possibilities of web development. At this year’s Google I/O conference, they presented some of the things it will be able to do. Some of the coolest:

- Video Tag: By tagging a video with < video >, you can embed a video straight through HTML. Because of this, you can really control the look and feel of the video.

- Audio Tag: The same thing as video, audio embedding becomes a lot easier.

- Time: The tag will help browsers recognize time in HTML pages. There’s also < meter > for numeric values.

- Drag and Drop: While there’s still wrangling on this point, with HTML 5 you will eventually be able to drag and drop files right on the browser. This is most notable for Google’s upcoming communication product, Google Wave (), a big reason why Google’s pushing hard for this.

- Local Storage: Web apps work just like desktop apps nowadays, except they can’t easily save work right to your computer. HTML 5 fixes that problem.

- Geolocation: With HTML 5, you should be able to make web apps that can determine your location and provide you more relevant information. With the rise of location-based mobile services, this is important.

- Canvas: The canvas HTML element allows for scriptable bitmaps. What that means is that you can create beautiful graphics or imagery on the fly within HTML, meaning the interface of many web apps can become a lot more dynamic and richer. Mozilla Bespin is a big project for code editing using HTML 5, one that – you guessed it – won’t work in IE6.

Like any good language, more functionality will be added to HTML 5 as time goes on. If you want to have a more complete overview of HTML 5, I suggest reading the IBM Technical Library, but the point is this: while old browsers will still work with websites in HTML 5, they will simply not get anywhere near the same functionality. And with more and more companies dropping support for IE6, its users are going to be left out.

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IE6 Has Stifled Innovation Long Enough

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We’ve sputtered on with the dead weight of IE6 since 2001, but we’re just now reaching a breaking point, and companies are starting to feel it. YouTube and Digg clearly believe that it’s not in their best interests to continue supporting the outdated browser and thus have put the word out about their plans to phase out support. More and more companies will take their lead as it becomes harder and harder to justify the cost of keeping a site running correctly in Microsoft’s old browser.

But looking forward, HTML 5 standards will enable the building of richer web applications. More and more of our lives are on the web, and our use of web apps like Facebook has skyrocketed. Google’s even announced Google Chrome OS, an operating system that will run web apps instantaneously because it is built on the browser. But projects as rich as Google Wave will not realize their full potential (or run at all) if they must cater to a browser that runs on outdated standards.

IE6 was fine enough for use in 2001, but for web apps to evolve and grow into tools that run just as seamlessly as desktop apps, the browser that requires the most hacks, time, and energy to make things work must be set aside. The only way at this point that people will upgrade is if their favorite web tools don’t work in IE6 and for new technologies to look forward to HTML 5, and not backwards to outdated technologies.

In short, we’re at a crossroads, and for us to get past them, IE6 must go away as a browser and as a concern for developers and users everywhere.