Today I added bullet images to the H3 tags on my blog. It’s a very simple process:
The best way to start your online presence/business is with a blog. Create a blog and get used to being a webmaster as supposed to only an internet user. Get your foot wet and start from basics. Even if you don’t know what to write about at least you will learn the basic ins and outs of internet world without having to do anything too technical.
To start a blog:
I use GoDaddy. Registering a domain name costs less than $10 a year. If you can afford it, get a unique URL rather than a free blog hosted on blogspot and elsewhere. Those are great, but a unique address will give you much more credibility.
I use HostGator. You can find free hostings too, but nowadays you can find a good hosting account for small websites for about $8/month. If you use a different hosting provider than the place you registered the URL, you have to set the DNS of the address to point to your server.
Wordpress. Wordpress is the most popular and powerful blogging software. The best thing is that it is free. Download it and install it on your server. If you can’t do this, simply ask people on the various webmaster forums and people will be happy to help you.
In the beginning of your blog’s life its not that important what you write about. Just start posting and learn the basics of blogging and being a webmaster. Your posts will mature as time goes on.
Deciding whether to make your website’s design fixed width or fluid width is the issue many of us think about every time we start a new website or change a current website’s design. Not only this bugs us all the time, if we go with fixed width , we have to decide what width we actually want to go with.
In short, I have experienced that as I develop my websites further and upgrade them I tend to change the designs to fixed width. I still have websites with fluid width (Cancer Forums), but all of my better websites are fixed width.
Fixed width allows you to better manage the elements of design and therefore have less un-used or wrongly used spaces as the resolution of the visitor’s monitor changes. When designing for fluid width, you usually have to design such that smaller monitors (ex. 1024) can still view the whole page without scrolling sideways. So why not just make a fixed width that shows the same page to everyone?
Fixed width can also give your website more credibility as it has a consistent look every time the visitor goes on it (and the fact that the elements of design are more organized). So if your website is an e-commerce site, I definitely suggest using a fixed width.
Fluid width can still be good for Forums as more space is always useful when reading posts and threads. Also there are usually not much design elements in the forums body. The graphics are usually in the header and/or footer only.
Deciding on the actual width of the design is tricky as well. I tend to make my designs 980px wide. I don’t try to make the site fit in 800×600 resolutions monitors anymore.Firstly there are very few of those left and people who do use them are usually older people still using their 10 year old PC which are not my targeted audience.
I tend to adjust my sites to 1024×768 resolutions. I actually go for 980px to leave some spaces for the side up and down scrolls.
I have owned Nima Directory for a while now (over a year). I haven’t done too much marketing for it - mostly webmaster forums and such. I do offer a number of extra features such as deep links and detailed detail pages. However, I never really invested in marketing it outside SEO practices.
I have now stopped mass submissions to directories and link buying to comply with Google’s policies and started to do actual marketing for it. As first step I purchased a 468×60 banner on DirectoryCritic, a popular resource to find good directories. The banner is located in top right of the website and is in rotation with two other banners. I paid $120 for one month for it.
I bought the banner in the begining of October. It has not started returning its investment, but it is still too early to say that. Even if it returns just the $120 investment, I will purchase it for a second month and possibly more banners on other websites.
I have also taken all non-family friendly links such as gambling related links out of Nima Directory to again comply with Google’s policies.
About 3 month ago Nima Heydarian blog lost its PageRank. I’m not really sure why though. I never sold text links on this blog or tried any outrageous SEO tactics for the blog. I had used some SEO strategies and perhaps Google had picked up on them and dropped my PageRank.
I have now fixed all that I could think of that wouldn’t comply with Google’s policies and have requested a reconsideration from Google. I never really lost ranking on Google though, just the PageRank.
Some of the reasons that could have been the reason for Google’s decision that I have now fixed are:
1- I used to use TLA Ads plugins. I have uninstalled it and don’t use them anymore.
2- I used to (a long time ago) sponsor some Wordpress and phpLD themes. I don’t do that anymore.
3- I never really sold links on my blog, but used to list my personal websites as site-wide links. Google might have thought they were paid links. So I removed them.
4- I used to use directory submission software and services. It has been a long time since I have done that and don’t plan to anymore either.
So I hope Google reconsiders their decision and give me my PageRank back. Even though I don’t think PageRank has any importance in SEO rankings anymore, it is still widely considered as a measure of credibility of websites by advertisers.
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