Web Design Galway – Web Design, SEO, and Internet Marketing

Archive for February, 2011

It is important that your web host has all the greatest features and technologies. However, you may not be aware of what you should look for in a web host. They all say they are the best, most reliable, etc. but how do you decipher who is really telling the truth? How do you find out what is really important when choosing a web host? In this article you will find the 5 things your web host must have. When you are researching a web host and you come across one that does not have these 5 things just click away to find one that does have what you need.

5 Features Your Web Host Must Have –

1. Greatest Control Panel: The control panel is the place you will be visiting most often, so it should be easy to use, have all the features you need, etc. You can find a great control panel with cPanel, which provides one of the best control panel user experiences among all of the others. CPanel offers more than 42 different icons, 50 of the most used PHP scripts, shopping carts, forums, and even a WordPress blog – one of the best blog hosts out there. cPanel also provides an easy to use layout and navigation so when you do use it you can forget about frustration.

2. On 24-7: Your web host should be working for you around the clock. This will keep your website up and running 99.9% of the time, and the server should be able to locate and repair any problems as soon as they appear. It is rare that a server could become inactive, but if/when it does happen, you do not want it to happen to your website. That could mean lost sales, lost visitors, and maybe even lost customers for life. No one wants that. The web host should be working all of the time – no exceptions. It should constantly monitor your website at least every few minutes for problems, check your server load and RAM, and be able to let administrators know immediately so they can instantaneously fix the problem. Your web host should also provide a fire wall to keep your website safe from hackers, viruses, and anything else that could effect your website.

3. An Outstanding Server: If you want to avoid regular problems and too much downtime (all that can be avoided) you need to find a web host with a reliable server. The web host’s server should have multiple hard drives, good RAM, the latest CPUs, the best power supply, quality motherboards, a great cooling system, and a testing system for all new servers.

4. Linux Servers: No, you do not need windows servers. You should get a web host that uses Linux only. You don’t need to have Linux on your own computer to have a web host that uses Linux. Linux has been shown to be more reliable and able to handle larger loads than other server operating systems. It is even better at virus protection and has a better uptime than others.

5. Free Features: Your web host should provide you with a variety of free features, or features that you can use for a small fee. These features should include things that you can use for your website such as graphics, blogs, paid pages, sub domains, interesting facts to add to your website, forums, and more.

Designers especially the newbies go frantic on how to go about it. It has to be attractive, engrossing, user-friendly and functional. Thus, unraveling the secrets will definitely bind the website.

So, what are these layout secrets?

Together let us unfold them one after another…

1. Centering it all is no good. The secret is doing the contrary and not centering everything. The latter will just make the page disorganized, strewn and drab. The alignment may also seem weak and wanting.

2. The use and mastery of contrast is indispensable. Contrast is one thing that makes the page attractive. The use and mastery of it in color, value, size and weight will greatly affect the site’s appearance and edge. In fact a typeface may appear bigger with the use of contrast in color. The latter can also affect the look of organization of the page. At a glance, a page may appear organized or the exact opposite. That is the secret of contrast.

3. Apply deviations if necessary. Most of the designers practice nowadays is to develop a ‘uniform-pages’ look. They try to use same background colors and other peculiarities to establish similarities to the homepage or other pages. But the fact is that viewers can be easily bored with that scheme. Viewers always want something new and by giving them a repetitious work, they are pissed off and transfer to another site where they can feast both their eyes and mind.

Placing lines in between contents also manifests division. Instead of using these lines, use blank ‘buffer zones’. This way what are created are invisible lines to make the effect subtle.

4. Do not forget that functionality is the king of web development. Moreover, keep the content and information full, tight and pretty useful. Use the space, don’t waste. Only leave a small percentage for blank spaces. Use the space cleverly in order for the website not to look crowded at the same time loose. Multiple columns are also advisable in order to maximize space.

These four topmost secrets in page layout are so crucial that to break them may spell disaster or the end of your precious site.

Your quest for cheap web hosting has finally come to an end, because if you keep reading you would get to know not only how to find cheap web hosts around every corner on the internet but also how to find cheap web hosts who are also good service providers, have a large customer database, extensive support and professional security, too good to be true? Read on.

Balance is the key, find the balance of services and the price they are offered at. Finding the right balance makes the most difference. The problem with most web hosting beginners is that it is not as easy task all the time to find a web hosting provider with proper balance. But if you are looking for a web hosting providers who are in your pocket’s range and you still want to make the best of them, look for the following elements, which you must acquire in your affordable package to get the maximum out of your web hosting experience.

The four ‘S’ of cheap web hosting, the Speed, Security, Services and Support.

Speed:
Speed is the first and foremost factor to be considered when buying a web hosting package that already seems compromised in financial terms. How to tell if your web site is going to be speedy enough ‘before’ purchasing the web space? simple, just observe the downloading and response speed of the web hosting provider’s web site, which obviously (and its never wrong) is hosted on their own web servers. If the provider’s web site is working fine and loading fast and is very responsive then chances are that by choosing those hosts, your website would have the same attributes.

Security:
Now if you don’t have corporate money in your pockets, do not mean you have to compromise on the security of your data, and your website. Security is a key issue when deciding to chose a web host. Read as much as is available on the host’s web site about their security measures and preferences. Talk to their customer representatives and ask them questions about their security. Find out about some of the previous customers of the company and send them and email requesting information about the web hosting performance of the said company. Gather as much information as you can, remember, the more you know, the more secure you are.

Services:
Your affordable web host must offer you some of the very essential services without any additional fees. These services would include features like Control Panel; the front-end software to manage the whole of your account in a point and click manner, additional domains, sufficient disk space, comfortable bandwidth, email addresses, built in scripts and programs e.g. the message board, website statistics. Some web hosts even provide search engine submission services on very low cost shared web hosting solutions. So what is basically required here is just a proper research on the available options and their comparison with each other.

Support:

And last but not least is the support. The web hosting support must be 24/7 and the service must be online with beginner help and FAQs. This ensures that the web host have a huge customer database and they are manned enough to cater to the needs of there customers and offer them quality product and services not to mention top notch security. Though you must not forget to document all the contact information about your web host off of their website and somewhere with you, this is because incase of a web server downtime you would know where to contact the web hosts off site, because there own web site may probably be hosted on the same web server and may be down along with all the rest of the websites.

When you find all the above specifications along with a good price in a web host you would definitely know that you have finally found a good web host. You would be certain about this discovery of yours when you have the best speed, top security, user friendly interface, option of additional scripts and software and the most important, you would be happy about the price.

I have reviewed and experienced many web hosting providers. I have used expensive and cheap and found out that some of the very best ones were the cheap ones. So you must also be always on the hunt for the next best company out there offering just a tad more than what you are getting now, maybe in the same price or maybe even in less because they do exist. Go ahead and do your basic research to find a cheap web hosting company with all the above qualities, that way you will not only just save money, you will be having a rare and pleasant time doing it all.