WebMastersLoom

ActiveX uses an interesting method for enforcing security … it doesn’t. Well, that’s not exactly true. What happens is when a web page requests an ActiveX control the browser determines if that control is already loaded onto your system. If it is the ActiveX control is executed. If not, the user is asked if it is okay to install the control. Additional information about where the control came from and it’s security implications is also included.

The theory behind this security model is the user knows what’s best for his system. In my humble opinion, this is pure hogwash (a stronger expletive came to mind but this is a family site). Is your average web surfer really knowledgeable enough to make a decision like this? Look at it this way, by installing an ActiveX control you are assuming it is secure, won’t damage your system and is bug-free. You are basically trusting completely the company which created the control, the developers and the people distributing the image.

Yes there are security certificates involved, but those are relatively easy to get. Also remember how many security problems have been reported involving ActiveX controls.

I don’t know about you, but when I get that little box stating a site wants to install an ActiveX control, my first impulse is to hit the NO box, quickly followed by the BACK key. This may seem a bit paranoid, but I use my computer all day long and I depend upon it for business and pleasure. Why would I want to put it at any risk for some silly little ActiveX control? The web is a huge place and there are plenty of other sites to look at.

My advice to anyone is generally don’t allow ActiveX controls to be installed from anywhere except for really big sites like Microsoft. It’s just too difficult to judge how safe or unsafe the control happens to be.

How is this different from Java? Well, Java has an entirely different security model which does not make the assumption that the user has been educated about the specific Java applet. Java sets specific rules to what an applet can and cannot do, and generally these rules do an excellent job of preventing damage to a system (there have been bugs but no where near as many as with ActiveX).

On top of the security concerns, ActiveX only works in Internet Explorer. Yes, I know there is a plug in for Netscape but it’s slow and not very usable. Besides, most Netscape users don’t have it installed. If you are designing a web site, please consider this very carefully. If you include ActiveX controls you are losing as many as 50 percent of your visitors. Perhaps more, depending upon your market. Is any functionality that you might gain worth that cost?

Of course, if you are creating an Intranet (a web local to a company) then by all means use all of the ActiveX controls that you want. In this case, you have far more control over the user environment that you have on the web.

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets allow you to implement a few neat effects on your webpages easily. You can implement these CSS effects on your site by simply copying and pasting the code.

ROLLOVER COLOR TEXT LINKS

Have your text links change color when the mouse passes over them by inserting this code into the HEAD of your document:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
A:hover {color:red}
-->
</style>

LINKS WITH NO UNDERLINE

Remove the underline from any or all of the links on your page by putting this in the HEAD of your document:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
A:link {text-decoration:none}
A:visited {text-decoration:none}
-->
</style>

Or, remove the underline form individual links by forming them like this:

<a href="page.html" style="text-decoration: none">link</a>

LINKS WITH A LINE ABOVE AND BELOW THEM

This is an interesting look that works especially well as a hover attribute for your links, but can also be applied to all of your links. It will show the normal underline and a line above the link:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
A:hover {text-decoration:overline underline}
-->
</style>

HIGHLIGHTED TEXT

Highlight important text on your page or words you want to stand out, easily:

<span style="background-color:yellow">highlighted text</span>

Try adding it to your link hover for a neat effect:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
A:hover {background-color: orange}
-->
</style>

BACKGROUND IMAGE THAT ISNT TILED

This will create a background image that doesn’t repeat:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
BODY {background: #ffffff url(bg.gif) no-repeat}
-->
</style>

You can also center it, however it will be centered as the background of the entire document, not centered on the screenful:

<style type="text/css">
<!--
BODY {background: #ffffff url(bg.gif) no-repeat center}
-->
</style>

One of the challenges of moving a web site up from good to excellent is transforming it from just a bunch of web pages and graphics to an interactive experience. Another term for this is community – a place where people can come to communicate with others. The very best web sites have mastered this transformation, thus attracting return visitors again and again.

The whole point of a web site is to communicate ideas and concepts to other people. If you are just putting up pages and graphics, then you are performing half of a communication. You are telling people what you think, want, desire or need.

The other half of communication is listening. That’s why merely adding an email form (or link) and a guestbook go a long way to improve your visitor’s experience with your web site. You are giving them the opportunity to tell you what’s on their mind. If you also take the time to answer their messages and perhaps even get involved in an online communication – then you may very well have a friend for life.

You can add even more value (and get a few more visitors as well) by adding a “tell-a-friend” capability to your site. This adds a third and very interesting (although seemingly trivial) element to your site: the ability to add others to the communication.

Look at it this way. Someone surfed to your site and actually found something that was interesting. That’s actually not an incredibly common occurrence on the internet (consider how many stupid, boring or just plain silly sites you’ve visited). Okay, they’ve found something interesting, perhaps very interesting, and they want to tell someone. You would be very wise to give them this capability. This is not just because it gains you another visitor, but it makes people feel better. Why? Because people like to share good experiences with each other.

You want to increase the ante? Include a message board! Now you’ve added another form of conversation to your website. People can jump on your board and leave messages for each other, answer questions and generally have discussions about whatever subject appeals to you. Some advice about message boards: be sure and actively moderate the board. Why? Some unscrupulous people have a tendency to leave advertisements, pornography, curses and flames on message boards. Unless that’s what your board is about, none of this serves your purpose: to get people to talk about your subject and come back to your website.

Another good reason to moderate the board is it puts you in control, which is where you should be. It’s your board and naturally conversations should be about subjects in which you are interested. The purpose of the board is to improve your site and your visitor experience – not ruin their good time.

Another great interactive feature which is not so obvious is running an awards program. What this accomplishes is simple: you are inviting people to submit their sites to you for review. By giving them the opportunity to apply for the award you are increasing the value of your site to them, and improving your chances of getting them back for more.

Perhaps one of the very best interactive features is hosting your own custom made e-cards. These are extremely popular and greatly improve your visitors experience on your site. Better yet, they give your visitors an opportunity to communicate (by sending cards) with their friends – and their friends may visit your site also.

Other features which increase your site’s desirability even more is polls and surveys, interactive stories (to see our own interactive story, visit http://www.internet-tips.net/cgi-bin/story/story.pl – and add your own chapter), ezines and even chat rooms.

By adding these and other features, you are increasing your value to people who visit your site. If there is one thing that people like to do (and must do to survive well) it’s communicate. By giving people many different ways to communicate, you are making it more likely that they will visit your site, stick around, and recommend it to their friends.

If you are anything like me, your website is a reflection of yourself. It contains your thoughts and communications, exposed to the entire world at all times. Look at virtually any non-commercial web site and you will get a glimpse at the person behind the monitor.

I look at web sites all day long, and I am constantly amazed by the things that people reveal about themselves without saying anything. Is the website well organized or just a jumble of images and text thrown up at a moments notice? Is the site alive with color or just dull and lifeless black and white? Is the site exploding at the seams with content or is it just a collection of ads, banners or links?

All of these and many other clues tell me more about the webmaster than any of those 50 question psychological quizzes.

One clue that tells me more than anything else is whether or not the site is kept up-to-date. Sometimes I will see a beautiful web page – a work of art that comes from the heart and soul of a human being. I fall in love with the page and want to learn more, then click on a link and bam, page not found. I shrug, as every webmaster has a bad link now and then. Click on another, and another, and more than half of the links are dead. I sigh, then move on.

Or I’m reading wonderful stories about a person’s life experiences and find, well, these are all years out of date. A little looking around the site and I find that nothing has been updated since 1997. I always feel a little sad when I see this – it’s as if something inside the webmaster died. I wonder, did she grow tired of it all? Get married and lose interest? Perhaps even died? Who knows, there is no clue on the site at all. It’s just … abandoned.

Another clue to a neglected site – the person created a webring and got several hundred people to join. The ring is obviously a creation of love as it’s not easy to get so many sites to join up. The ring graphics are wonderful, the join page is beautifully written, and I am actually very impressed. I start to surf the ring and quickly find that over half the sites no longer exist. Another dozen have removed the ring code. How sad. It’s one thing to lose interest in a webring … but to just abandon it? I wonder what changed in a person’s life caused this work of love and community to just be discarded so easily.

Or it could be that a person and simply doesn’t update their site very often. There is a wonderful comic book site which is simply beautiful, yet sometimes months go by without a single update! It’s so frustrating as I really am intrigued and want to come back to visit this guy’s private world. I haven’t checked in a long time – why bother, since the site is updated so infrequently?

My feeling is simple. Create the best website that you can with the knowledge that you have. You will never be finished, as there will always be more to say and show. You are a living, breathing human and you are learning more every day. Thus, there should always be something of value that you can add to your web site.Presumably, you’ve created your web site to communicate something to the rest of the world. It could be that you want to write up your life story, explain about the mythology of the Greeks and Romans, or simply compile a list of the best blonde jokes. It’s possible that you even want to make a few dollars now and then by selling a nice product. Why settle for just getting someone to read what you’ve got to say and move on? Why not continually update your message so that your readers come back time after time to find out what new and wonderful things you’ve posted this week.

Think you’ve said everything that can be said about your subject? There are many options to this method of continual updates. You could add a message board to start virtual conversations with your visitors. Or perhaps you could add a weekly column (and associated ezine) to get people to come back. Even if you’ve said everything there is to say, perhaps you can add pictures, sound and videos or change the layout or presentation.

Be sure and let people know what’s new by including a “What’s New” section right on your front page. This serves to your visitors right to the new content immediately. It also lets them know that you are updating the site all of the time, which means they will want to come back again and again just to see what you have written or changed.

A periodic ezine is another way to stay in contact with your readers, letting them know what’s going on at your special website. Another great way to get people to come back is to become active in newsgroups or email discussion lists (such as egroups and topica). By posting useful information at these places you will get people wanting to come to your site to find out what else you’ve got to say.

Which, of course, leads back to the original premise of this article. If you want people to come back to your site, you had better be keeping it up-to-date, accurate and adding new content all of the time. Otherwise, your readers will grow tired and move on to greener pastures.

And that’s the saddest thing of all … an abandoned creation of love and passion.

When designing elements for your webpage, you will often be called upon to specify a color. For example, the code for a span shown below specifies that the color of the text within the span will be yellow.

<span style=”color:yellow;”>Text</span>

Colors can be specified according to their names, for example “yellow”, “green”, or “blue”. In many cases, these simple color names will work. But what if you want to specify a more sophisticated color like “cornflowerblue”? A particular browser may not recognize a particular color name. It’s more reliable to specify colors with an “RGB triplet”.

An RGB triplet specifies a color based upon the amounts of red, green, and blue, on a scale from 0 to 255, required to create the color. For example, to create the color cornflowerblue you need red=100, green=149, and blue=237. We could then specify the color of the text within a span using the rgb function as shown below.

<span style=”color:rgb(100,149,237);”>Text</span>

This will work fine with style notation, but what if you want to use straight html. Html doesn’t recognize the rgb function. In that case, you can specify color using “hexadecimal” notation. Whereas the decimal numbering system uses the characters 0 through 9 to get 10 values, the hexadecimal numbering system uses the characters 0 through f to get 16 values. (After 9 the characters a, b, c, d, e and f are used, as shown below.)

Decimal Hexidecimal Equivilants

dec hex
0 = 0
1 = 1
2 = 2
3 = 3
4 = 4
5 = 5
6 = 6
7 = 7
8 = 8
9 = 9
10 = A
11 = B
12 = C
13 = D
14 = E
15 = F

On first appearance, this looks pretty simple but you need two hexadecimal characters to represent all decimal values from 0 to 255. When you increment decimal 9 by 1, you change the 9 to 0 and put 1 in the ten’s place. When you increment hexidecimal F by one, you change the F to 0 and put 1 in the “sixteens” place. Sometimes it’s not easy to convert between decimal and hexadecimal in your head.

RGB Triplet for Cornflowerblue

color   dec   hex
red     100    64
green   149    95
blue    237    ED

We could then specify the color of text within a span using the hexadecimal notation as shown below.

<span style=”color:#6495ed;”>Text</span>

Note that when we indicate the use of hexadecimal notation by placing a pound (#) sign in front of the number, and we don’t use commas to separate the color components.

If it’s not easy to convert between decimal and hexadecimal in your head, then how do you do it? You can use a calculator that has a decimal to hexadecimal coversion function, or you can learn to think in hexadecimal. For example, what’s the next number after CE? That would be CF. what’s the next number after CF? That would be D0. Which hexadecimal number is higher 99 or B2? B2 would be higher than 99. It gets easier with experience.

Here’s Java Script code for a simple decimal to hexidecimal color converter

function convert(decvalue)
{
var num = parseInt(decvalue);
if(num >= 0 && num < 256)
{
var hexnum = num.toString(16);
alert("#" + hexnum);
}
else {alert("Error!");}
}

It’s important to use hexadecimal notation to specify colors when you use DHTML with visual effects, because to create a dynamic color change you have to increment or add a value to a color. The vast amount of color specification on webpages is in hexadecimal notation, so it would be wise to become familiar with it.

Copyright(C) Bucaro TecHelp.

Permission is granted for the below article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and the byline, copyright, and the resource box below is included.

We’ve all seen them, you’ve been browsing a website and you click a link and nothing loads apart from the words ‘404 Error’ along with the usual stuff.

So what is a 404 Error page? The 404 Error page, basically informs the user that the server cannot find the file they are looking for. However, instead of using the default 404 Error page you can create your own, this is how you do it.

First, you need your .htaccess file which should be within your web site directory. If you cannot find it you will need to create one. You will have to contact your host asking them how you would go about creating or editing this file. They may want you to use a text editor and then upload it, or they may want you to use a PICO editor and create or edit the file on the server.

How you have access to the .htaccess file lets edit it. Add this line to the .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yourdomain.com/404page.html

Make sure this line is kept on online. This is where your 404 Error page is kept.

Now you’ve change the .htaccess file you need to create the page. This is simply a normal HTML document. Once you’ve created the HTML document, save it and call it 404page.html. Now the next step is to upload the .htaccess file and the page to the server.

Now that is done your next step is to turn it on. This is done by setting the CHMOD attribute to 644. You can do this via telnet or some FTP programs. If your going to telnet into your server, use the following command:

chmod 644 .htaccess

Now test to see if it’s worked. Just go to a page that doesn’t exist on your server and you should see your new 404 Error page. If not, then make sure the CHMOD is set correctly, and if that doesn’t help, you may want to ask your hosting company for support.

The Basics of Linux & Windows :

Linux (and its close relation Unix) and Windows 2000 (and its close cousin Windows NT) are types of software (known as operating systems) that web servers use to do the kind of things that web servers do. You do not need to know any real detail of either to make a decision as to which you need but here a few guidelines.

Just because you use a windows desktop PC doesn’t mean you have to opt for Windows web hosting (and the reverse is true as well). The operating system you use on your desktop has little to do with your choice of web hosts. As long as you understand how to use your FTP or web publishing software, your can use either operating system.

But what is important is that you know what you want your website to do and what you want to offer on it. This is what will ultimately help determine the type of web hosting that will work best for you. As mentioned earlier, interactive websites usually rely on ASP, PHP, or Perl type languages.

Linux Web Hosting or Windows 2000 Web Hosting ? Make your Choice !

When it comes to Web hosting, Linux has, for some time, been widely considered the best OS for Web servers. It’s typically found to be the most reliable, stable and efficient system and, as such, it’s commonly used for the demanding environment of Web and mail servers. Indeed,Most of the clients websites of aalpha NET runs on the Linux OS precisely because of this traditional stability.

The million-dollar question is what application are you looking to use for your hosting? Consider the tools and scripting languages you plan to use – if you use PHP, Perl or MySQL, Linux is the way forward. If apps are Microsoft-specific, then Windows is what you need.

If your site, like most web sites, is what might be termed “brochure-ware” then Linux servers are ideal. By brochure-ware I mean a site that offers the kind of information that in the past might have been provided on paper in the form of brochures, newsletters or data sheets. Brochure-ware sites will offer some interaction through enquiry forms and can certainly incorporate online purchasing and other routine e-commerce functions.

If however your site incorporates an online searchable database or interactive chat facilities then Windows 2000 or NT will be a better bet in most cases. It will cost a bit more but you’ll get that back in reduced development time and simply better functionality.

The following are the advantages of using Linux based web server compared to Windows based web server :

Stable: Linux/Unix operating systems has traditionally been believed to be very stable and robust. A web site housed on a Linux operating system will have very high up-time (of the order of 99.9%). Of course, other factors such as power supply, network admin skills, and network load etc. also matter when it comes to maintaining the system uptime.

Low cost of ownership: The Linux OS comes free of cost (or at very insignificant cost, usually cost of distribution). Also, it has full fledged server, and desk top applications that comes free along with the OS. These server applications (such as FTP, Web Server, DNS Server, File Server etc.) being free, are also very stable.

Ease of use : When it comes to web hosting, it is easy to host on Linux web servers. The process of uploading and hosting is almost same for both Linux and Windows web servers. If you want to use a Windows based tool such as Front Page for uploading a web site on to a Linux based web server, make sure that the Front Page extensions are enabled. This is only required if you are uploading using HTTP feature (http://www.yourwebsite.com) of Front Page. Front Page also makes it possible to upload a web site using FTP. You need to select ftp://www.yourwebsite.com for up loading using front page FTP option. Note that if you select “Front Page Extensions” during web site design, you must enable Front Page extensions on a Linux web server also. These days, all Linux web servers are coming with installable Front Page extensions, and this should pose no problem for hosting on a Linux platform.

You can use almost all types of file extensions (or scripts) when using Linux web server. Commonly, the following extensions are supported:

Basically it means that you can host web sites that use different types of server side scripts including .cgi, .pl, .php, and .asp (with plug-in).

Easy to move between hosts : A web site designed to be hosted on a Linux based web server can be hosted on a Windows web server easily, where as the reverse is not always true.

Most widely used : Linux/Unix based web hosting is most widely used compared to Windows based web hosting.

Scalability : A web site is dynamic. Usually, a web site starts with a few pages of html and grows over a period of time to suit the customers requirements. It is preferable to design a web site keeping this requirements in mind. A web site designed for compatibility with a Linux/Unix based web server meets the scalability requirement easily without making any site wide design changes.

On the downside, Linux based web server is not fully compatible with Microsoft technologies. If you are using any specialized applications or VB for development of your web site, it is preferable to host with a Windows based web server.

However if you are not sure then email me or call Teeyes Siva on 00 91 452 3105858 and I’ll help you decide by talking through the issues.

Does your website make a good first impression? Is the navigation intuitive? Is the content appropriate for your audience? You’ve had your website up and running for a while now but you’ve always had a nagging suspicion that your website is lacking effectiveness and you just can’t put your finger on it. You’ve dabbled with colors, added/removed images re-written the text but it still feels as if everything just isn’t working together. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a way to sort things out? Well now you do!

Find out if your website has power, energy and the right stuff to help your business succeed. You’ll be able to find out if the navigation; advertising, optimization, imagery and look are combining to make your home page an effective tool. Each section has a number of questions that help define, in detail, all the important areas of a well designed website. Just run through the list starting at the top. When you’re finished just click the “Total Score” button at the bottom.

Just use the simple Q and A form here: http://www.learn2design.net/login/secure/interface/eval.php to see if your website meets established design standards. Using this checklist form you can rate your website (or anyone’s) to make sure you’ve got all the essentials covered effectively.

Now the hard part; you have to answer the questions honestly and objectively! I know, it’s your baby; you’ve spent countless hours nursing it to stardom. But now is the time to make an honest assessment. (Pretend its someone else’s website if that helps.)

The form should only take 5 to 10 minutes to complete and at the end there is a brief description of what your score means and what you can do to improve your site.

If you are going to be placing ads on your website, you’ll want to put some thought into how you’ll integrate them. Poor integration of ads into your website will cause visitors to click away fast. Successful integration of ads into your site can be highly profitable. Before I show you where to position ads, I want to mention a few important points about ads.

1. Ratio of ads to content

How many ads should you place on your website? There is an optimum ratio of ads to content. If your website has too high a proportion of advertising relative to content, the traffic on your website will suffer and you will lose money. If your website has too low a portion of advertising relative to content, the sales on your website will suffer and you will lose money.

What is the optimum ratio of ads to content? I can’t point to any studies, but I feel the optimum ratio is somewhere around 20 to 25 percent ads relative to content. Go much above that ratio and, despite more ads, the revenue from your site goes down. But, there are ways to exceed that ratio and still make more money.

Ads as a service

Advertisements can provide useful information, as well as content. In that case, the ads become content. Here’s an example. Rather than post ads that pay you the highest commission, post ads that provide the best value to the visitors to your website. These are ads where the value is so good you might respond to the ad yourself. This type of ad is more of a service than an advertisement.

Another example is ads for gifts around the holidays. People expect and are not turned off by an increase in ads around the holidays. Finding gifts for everyone on your list is difficult work, and people appreciate gift ideas. Again, this type of ad is more of a service than an advertisement.

You can safely exceed the normal ratio of ads to content if you hide the ads in the content. An example of this is product “reviews”. For example, computer magazines are almost 100 percent advertising posing as product reviews.

2. Repetition of ads and ad management

I have seen websites that display the exact same banner on every page. If I didn’t respond to the banner on the first page, what makes them think I will repond to it on the second, third … hundredth page?

Displaying the same banner on every page of your website is annoying to your website’s visitors, and a money losing propostion for you. Keep your ads fresh. Ads are boring enough without repeating the same ad over and over. Display a variety of ads, and use an ad management system. An example of an ad management system is a banner rotator.

3. Ad type relative to response rate

I have heard claims that text ads receive the highest reponse. I’m sure these results are not related to whether the ad is text or graphics, but more likely related to the fact that text ads are usually placed in the more responsive areas of a webpage. All thing being equal, a graphic ad will always get better response than a text ad.

A graphic ad will get higher response than a text ad, and an animated graphic ad will get higher response than a static graphic ad. But animation can be taken to an extreme. Some types of animation are annoying and not only does the ad get a low response, but it also causes visitors to click away from your website.

Examples of annoying animated ads are banners that flash or jiggle or do something else that distracts the visitor so they can’t read the webpage content. Those visitors that don’t click away will scroll the webpage so this type of ad goes off screen while they try to read the webpage.

A secret few advertising designers know is that the graphic that will get the most attention is a picture of a human face. People are genetically predisposed to look at a human face in their view area. Try it yourself while you’re browsing the web. If a webpage has a human face on it, that’s the first thing you will look at.

Where to position ads on your webpage

To discuss where to place ads on a webpage, we need to divide a page into five sections as listed below.

1. Header
2. Footer
3. Left Margin
4. Right Margin
5. Center column

Note: There is a sixth area of the webpage which is the popup window. There are many forms of popup windows; pop-over, pop-under, delayed, and exit. The polite way to use popup windows is the self-closing popup window. Because of popup window blockers, popup windows are much less effective today, and, from my own experience, when I tried using popup windows, the page views on my website dropped by 50 percent.

The most common position to place advertising banners is in the header section of a webpage. Web users have programmed themselves to ignore banners in this position. The response rate of banners in the header section of webpages has dropped to something like .0001 percent. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has tried to overcome this problem by defining giant (what I call “battleship size”) banners. I don’t know of any studies that show this works.

Using banners in the head section of your webpage is a waste of processor time, but most webpages still use them. Making a sale this way is a long shot. Banners in the footer section of a webpage are even less responsive.

Actually Web users have programmed themselves to ignore all advertising on the web. However, from my own experience, you can get some response from ads in the left and right margins of a webpage. Most websites are designed with the menu in the left margin and possibly ads in the right margin. This means if the user has a low resolution display, depending upon the width of the webpage, the advertising may be off the screen.

Place your menu in the right margin and use the left margin for advertising. This places the user with a low resolution display in the positon of having to scroll to view the menu. Too bad. They should get a bigger display. Website revenue comes first.

The most responsive position to put your ads is in the center column of the webpage along with the content. As visitors are reading the article on the webpage, they come upon the ad. It’s unavoidable.

If you imagine the center column of your webpage divided into three parts; top, middle, and bottom, the most responsive position for your ad will be right in the middle. As the visitors are reading the article on the webpage, they are forced to look at the ad as they continue to the lower part of the article. This might be a little annoying to the reader, but let’s hope your content is worth that slight annoyance.

I would recommend placing your ad at the bottom of the center column. As visitors read the article on the webpage, they end up looking at your ad. This is almost as effective as placing the ad in the middle of the column, and a lot less annoying to the reader.

As you can see, how you integrate advertising into your webpages has a major impact on your ability to produce revenue from your website. Poor ad integration will cause visitors to click away. Proper integration can make your website highly profitable. But, ad positon is not the only determining factor, don’t forget the ratio of ads to content, ad management, and ad type relative to response rate.

Copyright(C) 2004 Bucaro TecHelp.

Permission is granted for the below article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and the byline, copyright, and the resource box below is included.

How much holiday shopping did you do on-line this year? If you are reading this, then chances are good that you made at least one purchase on-line. Over 54% of all Americans did it [1]. A much higher percentage (>80%) of Internet users did it.

Not only did you do it, you liked it! Less than 7% of on-line shoppers reported a bad experience with 88% reporting they were satisfied or very satisfied [2]. It is clear that on-line shopping has come of age with such a high level of participation and satisfaction. It appears that past issues of trust, security, and bad ecommerce websites are replaced with good ecommerce sites, higher trust, better security, and just plain better execution and service by on-line retailers. Quick, easy, and convenient shopping overcomes the concerns people have had in the past.

With a whopping 35% increase in on-line holiday sales this year, up to $18 billion [3], one analyst calls it “a fantastic season for on-line retailers.” [4] This is the third straight season of record growth for on-line shopping. This year, 2004, is expected to follow the trend. US on-line sales are expected to grow from $55 billion in 2003 to $73 billion in 2004 [5].

In searching for some bad news, it was hard to find. The worst news was that 3.6% of on-line shoppers had a very bad experience where either the merchandise was not delivered on time or was delivered in poor condition. This is a small fraction even compared to traditional retail sales.

Can the news and trends about ecommerce retailing really be that good? The answer seems to be a resounding YES! Some of the more popular on-line markets have double digit penetration now. That means some on-line retailers are reaping over 10% of total market share in their industries with a rising trend. In addition, more on-line retailers are showing profits. In 2002, about 50% of on-line retailers showed a profit from their on-line operations while 70% did in 2003 [5].

So, if you are one of those 70% of on-line retailers making profits in 2003, sit back, breathe a big sigh of relief, and relish the moment. There won’t be much time to relax and enjoy your successes. New business is right around the corner.

If you are a business and don’t yet have an on-line sales presense, then it’s never too early to get started. To get ready for the 2004 holiday season, it’s best to start now.

• Create ecommerce plan – 4/15/04
• Select ecommerce software & consultant (NetSource can help) – 5/15/04
• Build the website – 7/15/04
• Put the website into operation, start selling- 8/15/04
• Create on-line marketing plan – 8/15/04
• Execute the marketing plan – 9/15/04
• Ready for holiday sales – 11/15/04

It can be done quicker than the schedule suggested above, but, to do it right requires thought, planning, and time.

References:

[1] Nashville Business Journal, 12/4/03

[2] ASD/AMD Marketwatch E-Newsletter, 12/24/03

[3] eSpending Report, Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive, Nielsen/Netratings, 1/5/04

[4] Abha Bhagat, Nielsen/NetRating, COMPUTERWORLD, 1/6/04

[5] ASD/AMD MarketWatch E-Newsletter, 10/16/03