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D-Mack Articles

Choosing the Right Domain Name for Your Company

When choosing your domain name, there are several things you need to consider. The most important thing, one you cannot get around, is whether your choice is free or already taken.

Which TLD (Top Level Domain)
Are you an international company, or do you operate in more than 1 country, then the best TLD is most likely .com. If you operate in 1 country only, and have no plans for going internationally, then the TLD for your country gives your customers more information (they immediately know they are dealing with a local company). Nothing stops you from registering both the .com and the country domain.

Keywords into your domain
When you have considered the TLD, your next step is to find the domain itself. 1 very important consideration to make is how your potential visitors are supposed to find your site...

Read more: Choosing the Right Domain Name for Your Company

Making the Leap from Bricks to Clicks

The Internet is a gold mine. I’m sure you’ve heard that by now, right? Or perhaps you’ve heard the other lie – Nothing makes money on the Internet (except… well, you know).

Almost every small business owner I’ve talked to with no web presence is a firm believer in one or the other. It’s either “Man, I HAVE to get in on this Internet thing” or “Nobody is looking for a [insert product or service here] on the Internet.” There never seems to be any middle ground. But the truth is, there’s more middle ground than anything else.

Now I’m not going to sit here in my tiny office and try to convince any successful retailer or service provider that I know more about their industry than they do. I don’t. But I do know that, like Jell-O, there’s always room in your business for a website.

Read more: Making the Leap from Bricks to Clicks

CSS Stylesheet Basics for Your Website

Web sites can contain hundreds of pages, even thousands. You have spent your time making a look and brand for your web site, using different font sizes, colors, margins etc all within each web page.

Later on you decide that you want to change the background color of the website, and then realize that you will have to edit every single web page and change the background color in the body tag.......

This is where stylesheets come into play, by simply putting all the web page formatting into a single file and then called upon by each web page, you are able to make changes to your web sites layout in just a few seconds!...
 

Try an Online Contest to get More Site Visitors

A very easy way to get more people to your site and also more interested in what you offer is to start your own online contest. It is something that is very easy to do. You probably can even get other companies to become sponsors in return for posting their logo and link to their website on your contest page. This will also help you bring in more viewers but if you get sponsors you will now have a wider selection of prizes to offer. Also see if the sponsor will post the contest link on their site as well.

It is actually an interesting thing that many other sites don't do it. Not only is it a good way to increase the amount of visitors to your website but it also rewards people for coming to your website...

Read more: Try an Online Contest to get More Site Visitors

PHP Redirects and How to Use Them

Usually a PHP redirect is much more reliable than other form of redirects like HTTP redirect or JavaScript based redirects.

A PHP Redirect automatically transfers a web user from one URL to another. For example, typing foo.com in the browser automatically transfers the user to another URL bar.com.

The PHP Redirect command:

<?php
  header("location: [some-url]");
?>

Replace [some-url] with the URL where you want the redirection to take place.

For example,

header("location: ./version2/index.html");
=>redirect to "index.html" page in subfolder called "version2"

Read more: PHP Redirects and How to Use Them

PHP Includes 101 - Basic Introduction

PHP includes can save webmasters literally hundreds of hours coding and recoding every time they need to make a simple change to a sites, some of which can have hundreds of pages!

For simplicity sake, lets say you have a website with 10 or so pages, and you want to update the navigation. You don't want the hassle of updating every single page. That's where includes come in handy.

Your basic include will look like this.

<?php include ( 'includes/navigation.php' ); ?>

That's it! What I typically do is design a page as usual, then begin breaking sections up into includes. To use this effectively:

Read more: PHP Includes 101 - Basic Introduction

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