5 Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are five important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls should be made available.


Source:- northwestvoice.com/

Search Engine Marketing-How it Differs from Search Engine Optimization

Non-profit organizations, universities, political parties, and the government can all benefit from search engine marketing. Businesses that sell products and/or services online can use search engine marketing to help improve their sales figures.

Some of the goals of search engine marketing are to develop a brand, generate media coverage, and enhancing a reputation, and to drive business to a physical location.

If you do not feel confident enough to try your own search engine marketing there are several companies that will microfiber upholstery cleaning to help you out for a price. If you decide to go with a search engine marketing company take your time and shop around, find a company that really suits your own businesses search engine marketing needs.

Stay away from companies that promise top rankings. Most companies that promise tope ranking are more interested in your money then they are in keeping your business. Quite often this upholstery cleaner company of company will charge you top doller, spend a few days making sure your website has a few basic requirements and that is the last you hear from them. This type of search engine marketing company is not really interested in repeat customers.

Tread carefully around companies that promise first page rankings on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Make sure these sofa cleaner are talking about sponsored listings and not just natural listings. Companies that are only after natural listings traditionally charge a large monthly fee, using a small portion of the money on sponsored listings, and pocketing the remainder.

The false promise most commonly used by shady search engine marketing companies is the money back guarantee. Generally if you read the contract very carefully you will lean that these companies have a very strange idea of major short term memory loss wiki engine. Companies that have a money back guarantee typically don't deal with the search engine movers and shakers like Google and Yahoo, instead they use small obscure search engines that are hardly ever used.

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) was created in 2003 to offer the public educational resources about search engine marketing and to also promote search engine marketing. Currently SEMPO represents over 500 global search engine marketing companies. Sempo is happy to offer their resources to the public for free. SEMPO has offers upholstery cleaner company engine marketing training courses for any and all interested parties who would like to expand their knowledge of search engine marketing. SEMPO's objectives are to teach search engine marketing strategies, techniques, and successful practices, to increase the availability and quality f its professionals, and to offer training courses that will help to establish a benchmark for search engine marketing. The cost of a SEMPO training course can range anywhere from five hundred dollars for a fundamentals of search marketing class, to over two thousand dollars for an advanced search advertising course.


Source:- corsavoo.com/

Small Business Server 2008 Hits Metal

Microsoft released Windows Small Business Server 2008 (SBS 2008) to hardware manufacturers, with an eye toward achieving a full product launch on November 12. The release was slightly ahead of the September RTM date predicted at the July Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston.

The new server offering is part of the Microsoft Windows Essential Business Server 2008 product line. It's an integrated server offering that encompasses a number of Microsoft technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007 and SharePoint Services 3.0. It also includes security and online apps.

SBS 2008 will be sold in two editions, Standard and Premium. The Premium Edition adds a second Windows Server 2008 to the mix, plus a copy of SQL Server 2008.

Microsoft produced the Premium Edition to meet the line-of-business demands of customers and partners, explained Joel Sider, senior product manager of Microsoft's Windows Essential Server Solutions, in a July interview.

SBS 2008 is designed for businesses with up to 75 users and perhaps little to no internal IT support. Microsoft's large community of partners will play a big role in providing support for the product.

SBS 2008, formerly code-named "Cougar," is essentially new technology. It was "rebuilt from the ground up," according to Microsoft's official blog. Microsoft's earlier product, SBS 2003 R2, is about six years old and based on 32-bit technology.

When released in the fall, SBS 2008 will be available only as 64-bit technology. Microsoft is claiming a number of improvements in the product, including easier setup and administration, faster backups, improved remote access, and more flexible licensing. Each edition of SBS will include five Client Access Licenses (CALs). Customers can buy additional CALs, as needed, when they add users or device connections to SBS 2008.

Source:- redmondmag.com/

SugarCRM Named Best Open Source Technology by CRM Magazine

SugarCRM Recognized for Providing a Sophisticated Alternative to Proprietary Software

SugarCRM, the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced today that the company was named the winner of CRM magazine's 2008 Market Awards in the open source category. SugarCRM was also named a "leader" in the small business suite category. Heralded for its flexibility and multiple deployment options, these awards highlight the innovative features of SugarCRM's technology and its ability to service organizations of all sizes.

SugarCRM offers a robust, Web-based human interaction management platform, well suited for companies of all sizes in any industry. SugarCRM's suite consists of: Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. Sugar Community Edition is available under the GPL v3 at SugarForge www.sugarforge.org, SugarCRM's community development Web site. Both Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise can be deployed on-site, or delivered over the Web via the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. SugarCRM also allows businesses to design and build custom applications in support of business processes outside the realm of CRM, such as HR and PR functions.

"SugarCRM outpaced all other contenders in every criterion to win this award," said Joshua Weinberger, managing editor for CRM magazine. "The company's ongoing success was a major factor in our decision to introduce this category this year, and while others have followed in its footsteps, SugarCRM is likely to lead the way as open source CRM continues its explosive growth."

"Our goal at SugarCRM is to provide a higher quality alternative to the predatory lock-in of proprietary CRM vendors," said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. "SugarCRM is proud to be named CRM magazine's open source leader and will continue to deliver customizable, scalable CRM solutions for organizations of all sizes."

The 2008 Market Awards are included in the September issue of CRM magazine and available at http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/crmmedia/crm0908/index.php#/0.

About SugarCRM

SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. SugarCRM easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications. SugarCRM's open source architecture allows companies to more easily customize and integrate customer-facing business processes in order to build and maintain more profitable relationships. SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions to suit customers' security, integration and configuration needs.

For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 877 SUGARCRM tollfree in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com.

About CRM Magazine

CRM magazine is the publication of record covering the field of customer relationship management. It offers executives a unique blend of strategic business information, case studies, and in-depth analysis. It is written, edited, and produced by our award winning staff of journalists and designers. Our editorial and circulation strategy targets three main categories of readers: Executive management; sales, marketing, and customer service management; and, IT management -- all important at different stages of a CRM program's life cycle.


Source:- marketwatch.com/

Startup Hacks: 5 Tips for Offshore Outsourcing

Outsourcing product development offshore sounds like a good idea at the time. After all, you can augment your dev group quickly and on the cheap. But it only seems to work under certain conditions; mileage does vary depending on the company. Longer-term enterprise development projects tend to be better suited for outsourcing than shorter-term consumer Internet projects for example (I learned this the hard way). It has to do with development cycles, level of skill required for tasks, time to market, and the ability to iterate.

Arguably, you shouldn’t ever completely outsource your product development. Some things are just too strategic to lose control over. If you do decide to outsource some parts, here are some tips.

1. Hire one of them

Hire someone locally who was originally from the country you’re outsourcing to. Oftentimes different languages or dialects exist in other countries, so be sure your guy speaks the lingo. Also be tuned into other cultural nuances (for example, make sure there aren’t centuries-old bad blood between your guy and the people at the firm you use).

2. Nurture them

You’ll want to take the time and make the investment in having an occasional call or even a visit to the offshore location. Offering a face and voice from the top helps gain buy-in, support and motivation for the project. Obviously if you have to do too much of this, it’s not worth it.

3. Package the tasks

Be mindful not to overwhelm them with a complex project with multiple touch points and dependencies. Have a baked, signed off spec completed and committed to and assign straightforward pieces of it. When you assign something, ask for a time/cost estimate which you can measure back to later. Once the work has been verified and tested you’ll be able to establish a baseline level of quality and performance; from there you’ll be able to give them more rope.

4. Top grade

Offshore dev shops tend to assign you a mixed team of some good folks, some ok folks, and some green folks. These proportions are simply part of their business model. Just don’t let it get the best of your development cycle and product quality. Ask for resumes and interviews of the people they’re assigning to your team.

5. Communicate with one voic

Use the guy from #1 to funnel all communications between your team and theirs. Besides language and time zone issues, there are project management and accountability requirements. The more chiefs you have, the more fingers you have pointing. You can’t afford the he said/she said.

Source:- mashable.com/

NetSuite - A Leading Silicon Valley ERP, CRM and Ecommerce Software Company

A leading vendor of on-demand, integrated business management software suites for mid-market enterprises and divisions of large companies, today announced the details of its expansion in the Denver, Colorado metro area, including the opening of a new sales and services facility in the city of Centennial. The announcement came at a NetSuite-sponsored event held at the Denver Ritz Carlton and hosted by NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson for NetSuite customers, prospects, local government officials and members of the media.

"Our Denver presence is a strategic investment that we believe will accelerate our growth," said Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. "The information technology sector is growing rapidly in the Greater Denver and Centennial areas, due in no small part to the region's highly qualified and educated work force. We hope to leverage this expertise and regional location to service our growing customer base in the central region with world-class sales and professional services teams."

NetSuite's new office is located at 8000 S. Chester Street, Suite 100, in Centennial, Colorado. The office will augment NetSuite's sales and consulting teams located at its headquarters in San Mateo, California. Marc Huffman, formerly General Manager of Canadian operations for NetSuite, has been appointed General Manager for NetSuite's Denver office and will oversee all Denver area operations. NetSuite expects to have over 65 employees in the Denver office by year end, with continued expansion through 2009.

"I am so pleased to have NetSuite, a leading Silicon Valley software company, join our strong and dynamic business community in Centennial like other top employers such as Ceridian, Pitney-Bowes and TEKsystems," said Centennial Mayor Randy Pye. "Centennial and the metro Denver area are known for their highly-qualified, educated work forces and are recognized centers for expertise and growth in the information technology sector. We expect that NetSuite will be extremely successful by taking advantage of our attractive business environment."

NetSuite has a growing list of customers in Colorado from a wide range of industries, including online retail, distribution, professional services and non-profits. At NetSuite's Denver launch event today, three Denver-area based companies described how they benefit from using NetSuite to run their businesses. These customers include:

-- Imagine! -- a non-profit business with approximately 650 employees serving and supporting individuals with developmental disabilities and their families throughout the greater Denver area. Imagine! uses NetSuite to manage its business -- from tracking and supporting the over 2,000 consumers of its services to coordinating the 250 providers that are part of its network to

giving families self-service capabilities for managing key insurance information and service authorizations.

-- RLE Technologies -- a manufacturer and distributor of monitoring systems for data centers has been in business for over 23 years in the Denver area. RLE Technologies uses NetSuite for tracking its work orders through the sales process with its ever growing network of distributors, to integration with its Materials Resource Planning system, to managing its billing and financials.

-- Accuvant -- offers Internet security products such as anti-virus and managed solutions to its customers, in addition to maintaining a healthy security services consulting business. Headquartered in Denver, Accuvant has over 150 employees in offices throughout the West and Central regions and uses NetSuite to manage sales, marketing and finance operations. Particularly, consulting personnel enter time and expenses that are billed to clients and the sales teams track orders for both product and services. Accuvant finds the ability to have visibility into its commissions as soon as an order is submitted particularly helpful.

Source:- foxbusiness.com/

Ecommerce solutions advice

Online retailers have been offered advice for ecommerce solutions in a new report.

The study by Retail Systems Research found that innovations in web design, like featuring comprehensive reviews and video, should be embraced.

"Ecommerce winners will be the ones to invent something new, not track what customers tell them they want," the report says.

As more and more shoppers are going online, retailers can not afford to be lazy.

"Today, retailers can no longer assume that their sites are able to easily handle increased holiday volume or that customers will stick around to wait for a web page to load," the report adds.

"Delivering quality web experiences while using advanced web technologies is now a competitive necessity."

The report clearly thinks that innovation - and proper testing of that innovation - is the way forward in ecommerce solutions.

But isn't it better to have a simple website that lets users easily interact with a company, or will such a site look amateurish and affect sales?

Business Feet deliver targeted results through internet marketing and SEO web design

Source:- businessfeet.com/

Easier Content Management Deployment With Pharos Mediator 4

The Pharos Mediator 4 platform now enables content management to be rolled-out in easy stages. A new range of Mediator 4 Task Packs cover specific roles in each area of operations from ingest to playout.

Operations covered include Library, Ingest, QC, Promotions, Compliance, Approvals, Playout and New Media (VOD, IPTV and Mobile). Each Task Pack presents a sequential set of tasks empowering operators to manage their workload as efficiently as possible. Every Task Pack is an enterprise license for a specific area of operations and can be used concurrently by any number of Mediator users.

"Content management systems need to work across the enterprise, unifying operations and making content searchable, accessible and usable by everyone," comments Russell Grute at Pharos. "Every user from the library to playout is affected during installation or migration. Rolling out a content management solution is often considered to be a big problem and all too often seen as an impractical project. Mediator 4 offers a step by step approach to rolling content management and workflow across the enterprise. With a powerful core architecture and Task Packs for each area of operations, our projects teams are deploying Mediator systems in weeks and not months"

Mediator 4's secure and efficient workflow aligns users, roles and tasks in all areas of operations. Every Mediator user has desktop Browse and Search Tools where required. Mediator 4 also provides an audit trail of actions and workflow states whilst managing all underlying file transfers and third-party infrastructure such as routing, storage and transcode sub-systems.

New Task Packs for IBC include New Media Workflow and Subtitling Workflow.
Mediator can manage content for VOD, Mobile and Internet based delivery can be managed side by side with linear distribution. This option deals with all the necessary file transfers and transcoding. It can generate and recover additional platform specific content such as stills for an EPG or metadata such as a VOD synopsis.

Mediator 4 directly integrates the management of subtitles and voice-overs for international distribution at the optimal stage in the workflow.


Source:- broadcastbuyer.tv/

BreakingPoint Publishes Deep Packet Inspection Testing Methodology

Videos and Documentation Detail Techniques for Testing Deep Packet Inspection Functionality Using Stateful Application and Malicious Traffic

BreakingPoint Systems, Inc., today released a detailed test methodology and video series that enables network engineers to test the deep packet inspection (DPI) features of content-aware network devices.

BreakingPoint's testing methodologies, videos and documentation can be found at www.breakingpointsystems.com/resources/testmethodologies.

DPI functionality allows network devices such as content-aware switches and routers, next generation firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and application delivery controllers to inspect and take action based on the contents and context of packets as they travel across the network. DPI is heavily leveraged in helping to prevent buffer overflow attacks, denial of service (DoS) attacks and intrusions. Effective testing of DPI functionality requires an authentic blend of application traffic, combined with live security strikes, at speeds of 10 gigabits per second.

Dennis Cox, BreakingPoint CTO, commented:

"Deep packet inspection receives a lot of attention, primarily due to the controversy over privacy concerns and P2P bandwidth shaping. Often, these debates overshadow the important role of DPI in providing value for increased security, tiered services and data loss prevention. Testing DPI functionality is critical for network equipment manufacturers producing these devices and service providers offering these services. The BreakingPoint DPI Test Methodology and video guide was our chance to demonstrate the steps for testing DPI functionality."

BreakingPoint Test Methodologies were developed by the team at BreakingPoint Labs based on their experience developing and testing a variety of high-performance content-aware network equipment. BreakingPoint's testing platform enables network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) to realize a 50% reduction in time-to-test and ultimately accelerate the development of next generation network devices.

About BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint is the only company exclusively focused on application, performance, and security testing for content-aware devices. By delivering the industry's most accurate, fast, responsive and easy-to-use testing solutions, BreakingPoint helps network equipment manufacturers, services providers, and other organizations accelerate the development of high performance content-aware networks and network devices. BreakingPoint was founded in 2005 by engineers with deep experience developing high speed networking devices at companies such as NetWorth, NetSpeed, Cisco, TippingPoint, and 3Com. The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices and customers in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, and China. For more information, visit www.breakingpointsystems.com.

Source:- marketwatch.com/

Top 10 Resources for Search Engine Optimizers

Having been in the search-marketing field for quite some time, I typically write about topics that assume readers are familiar with SEO (define). Lately, I've had requests for some information on SEO basics to get Web sites to rank better in search engine results. That got me thinking that in any field, there are always newbies looking for access to good information and resources.

If you're relatively new to SEO or just about to undertake SEO on your Web site for the first time, you're likely looking for some key resources. For the benefit of SEO newbies, here's a short list of some top online resources for SEO -- in no particular order.

* Google Webmaster Guidelines. Right from the horse's mouth, these are the guidelines Google suggests you follow to help your site rank in its listings.

* Yahoo Search Content Quality Guidelines. Same concept as with Google, but for Yahoo.

* MSN Guidelines for Successful Indexing. See above.

* Google Keyword Tool. This is the best and cheapest (free) tool around to help you identify potential keywords to optimize your site for. Supplement the information on volume with the advertiser competition estimates to get a sense for how much competition you might face for those terms in the organic listings. Although the competition estimates are for paid search advertisers, typically a term with a high amount of paid search competition will also have steep organic ranking competition.

* SEOmoz Tools. An ever-growing list of handy tools for search marketers, SEOmoz helps you to do just about anything when it comes to SEO, including measure the SEO strength of your site (Trifecta tool), find out how well your site is targeted to your keywords (Term Target tool), and evaluate the feasibility of achieving ranking those keywords (Keyword Difficulty tool), as well as check site inclusion, back links, PageRank, and much more with the SEO ToolBox. The only downer is that for access to the advanced features of the tools, you have to pay a subscription fee.

* SEO Book.com tools. Downloading these free tools to your computer can reduce the labor required to evaluate and track your SEO efforts. SEO for Firefox automatically displays the relevant SEO info for each site (e.g. PR, inbound links, etc.) alongside your search engine results, the Rank Checker automates the pesky tacking of positioning, and the Keyword Tool (while not the greatest) gives you a long list of links to keyword tools to get suggestions for your search term.

* Bruce Clay Search Engine Relationship Chart. Learn how the search engines are connected to each other. Knowing who the big engines are can help you focus your SEO efforts and avoid wasting time on improving your rankings in an engine that is really fed results from another.

* SEO Chat Forums. This is a key forum for exclusively SEO-related topics and discussions with information for rookies and veterans alike. SEO Chat also has an abundance of useful tools and articles. Newbies should check out a recent posting: An SEO's Experience: 21 Rules for Performing SEO.

* SEMPO Learning Center. The Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization is dedicated to providing education in the area of search marketing. Although it's supposed to be for pros, the information in its learning center is directed more at those starting out in the field. The SEMPO Institute offers online training in all aspects of search marketing, including both beginner and advanced courses in search engine optimizations.

* Intro to Search Engine Optimization. A great Search 101 primer on Search Engine Watch (ClickZ's sister site) by one of the most recognizable names in search, Danny Sullivan, formerly of SEW. Read this to get a good overall sense for what SEO is, how it works, what are the key factors used to rank sites, and more.


source:- clickz.com/