EigenGraphs

What is the best way for you to get cheap internet access that still suits the needs of people like me? Getting access to the internet in today’s world is almost a necessity. I know I could never live without my internet access. At the same time, though, if you are like me you don’t want to spend a fortune on your internet. Getting cheap internet access is possible. You just need to know where to look and how to get it.

Whether it is the purchase of cheap internet access or anything else, you need to first assess your needs. How much time are you going to be spending on line? How often will you need to log on and how fast do you need to get on once you get to your computer? These are questions you need to ask yourself so that when you go looking for cheap internet access you will know what you need to look for. Cheap is relative and will depend on what your needs are. For instance, you can certainly find a cheaper internet connection that is dial up and pay by the minute than if you need a high speed connection. Once you have figured out what you need out of your cheap internet connection, you can move on to your search.

Ironically, the best place to look for cheap internet access is on the internet. In order to start your search, find a connection somewhere. Check your local library or university to get on line and begin looking. Go to your favorite search engine and type in “cheap internet access” and see what comes up. Start sifting through the top sites and see if anything tickles your fancy in the way of service and price. If you know you need high speed connection, or want dial up, or some other specific need put that in your search as well to get the services more specific to your immediate needs.

The second thing you can do is check for local internet service providers. Many local providers offer cheap internet access that will have a local connection. With a local company you may have better access to tech support or customer service should you have a problem with your cheap internet access. The other place you should probably check is with local schools and businesses who may offer cheap internet access on the side in order to offset server prices. It may be a bit of a long shot, but you may be surprised how many businesses offer cheap internet access, but don’t advertise that they have it.

Finding internet access, and maybe even cheap internet access, is almost a necessity today. We communicate through email, research on websites, and seek out old friends on alumni message boards. Each time, though, we have to get on line first without breaking the bank. Cheap internet access is obtainable you just have to know what you are doing. Figure out what your needs are then begin with an online search. Also, check out local service providers and businesses to see if they offer cheap internet access to the public. Once you have done that, you will have your internet before you know it.

If you would like to view more of my articles on broadband internet, please feel free to visit my website on cheap internet providers!

The world of business is a very competitive one with each
executive competing with the other to get the best of sales,
profits and customers for their business. This means that all
businesses interested in becoming successful have to concentrate
in developing their corporate image and identity to improve in
their business. Corporate identity is actually the image or
identity by which the business wants to be perceived by their
customers or the physical manifestation of the brand.

Corporate identity is very much achieved by the brand
building and marketing strategies of the company. So how
actually is a brand built? It is done through the help of
branding tools like logo designs, business cards and brochures.
Brochures and advertisements are the most powerful communication
branding tools as you get to distribute them to anyone around
your locality. you can make brochures describing your company,
it’s specialties and services to the public, thus making them
aware of your presence! Once more people get to know about your
services and facilities, more people come to you to try them
out, thus making your company a better success!

It should be made sure that all marketing
communication material has the corporate logo on it, thus
enhancing your credibility as a professional enterprise. The
reason for the need of all marketing communication having a
corporate logo is that this is the thing that will be handed
over to the public as an advertisement. You hand out business
cards for potential clients for them to remember you and your
company, there will be incidents wherein you have to send
letters to different companies. If you send these letters
through letters using letterheads with your company logo, the
recipient company will remember you better for future
correspondence and dealings. Therefore, it can be seen that to
enhance the corporate identity, the brand has to be enhanced or
built. We do this through marketing strategies, thus
incorporating that corporate identity is a very powerful
communication-branding tool.

When getting the corporate logo done, it is best to have it done
by a professional, as logos made by amateurs may ruin the
credibility of the business in no time, while a logo done by a
professional logo designer helps to add value to the business. A
professional logo designer is not only a graphic designer, he is
one who has idea about your branding and positioning of
business. He is one who creates a logo for you based on your
requirements to exude the nature of your business and to meet
all modes of your usage of the logo, on web, print, TV
commercials or in a mixture of all of this. It should be
remembered that logos and marketing materials are very important
parts of a company’s brand building strategy. Logo designs are
such an important communication tool for the corporate as it can
make people perceive your company to be a large corporate house,
when in fact; only one man runs it!

How do I know a good web hosting service from a bad one? What features should I be looking for when choosing a web host? What is bandwidth or transfer? How much storage space do I really need? What tools should they offer me and which ones do I need?

In this article I will attempt to give you the short version of answers to those questions for you to use as a reference. A lot about choosing a web-hosting provider depends on what your website needs and every website has different needs.

First question was “How do I know a good web hosting service from a bad one?” Before doing business with anyone on the web that is going to be as important to your business as a web hosting company, you should do a search on the name of the company and look for criticisms, complaints, etc. Keep in mind no one has 100% satisfied customers and finding just one complaint on the web doesn’t mean that the company is a bad one. However if you find a lot of complaints, I would move on to the next provider.

Now about the bandwidth and transfer question I mentioned above. Bandwidth and transfer are basically the same thing. Some tech guy might know a difference I’m not aware of, but it won’t be much difference. This is the number of times each file in your website is downloaded for the web host’s server to the visitors computer.

In other words, the size of you webpages in kilobytes plus the size of each graphic or other type of file that is served to the users computer is the amount of transfer you are using. If your website will have a lot of graphics, movies, downloads, etc., make sure you choose a web-hosting plan that offers you a lot of bandwidth. The average website doesn’t need more than 2-5 gigabytes of transfer per month.

How much storage space do I need? The storage space is no different than your computer’s hard drive. If the web host offers 100 megabytes of storage space that is just like having a 100-megabyte hard drive. If your files are not more than 100 megabytes then that is plenty of storage. Most web hosting companies offer plenty of storage space, more than the average website will ever use.

The question, “What features should I look for and which tools do I need?” are ones that I can answer together.

What about the web host’s support policy. Do they offer 24/7 tech support? Do you think you will need 24/7 tech support? This is one area that is important for you to consider. The Internet is 24 hours per day. Your website is online 24 hours per day. So it is possible you might need 24/7 tech support.

How do you contact tech support there? Just email? Is there a phone number? Do they use support tickets? Do they have a chatroom or forum for tech support? How accessible your web hosting tech support is will determine how fast things get fixed when you have a problem. See if you can send in a tech support query before signing up. See how fast you get an email back or if they answer the phone when you call them.

Those three important issues, bandwidth, storage space, and tech support are not the only things you need to consider. Do they offer Cpanel or an easy-to-use control panel for managing your website? Can they show you a sample of the control panel before you sign up? If you choose a web host that does not have an easy-to-use control panel are you tech-savvy enough to get around in the root files?

How many databases can be created on your web hosting plan. How many do they allow? Do they offer instant-install or install-on-demand features like picture galleries, content management systems, forums, blogs, or other website enhancements?

These are all questions you need to ask before you sign up with any web hosting service. If they do not give you all that information on the automatic signup page, email them and ask them questions. Their response may be all you need to know about whether to choose them as your web hosting provider or not.

I hope this article has helped you to learn about some of the things you need to consider when choosing a web hosting service. Cheap is not always good. This is your online business. Treat it well and choose a web hosting serviee that makes things easier for you.

D. David Dugan recommends the web hosting solutions offered by DD&C at http://hosting.dugancom.com Hosting popular sites like the article directory http://www.acceleratedtraffic.com is one of their specialties.

See how you can create graphic effects on text with PHP and GD - drop shadows, arcs, fonts and colors.

Problem

A-tec Signs and Sraphics Inc. launched a web site with the idea to sell decals online. To achieve better customers ineterest the website had to integrate online decal builder. The company is offering also decals for vehicles which brought some specific requirements to the builder like having the decal text turning arround 4 types of arcs.

Goals

• Provide users with preview area

• Allow visitors to choose font and color

• Allow adding drop shadow and selecting drop shadow color

• Allow turning the text into arcs

• Real Time calculating

Solution

Because of the need for increasing customers interest we had to think about not for perfect math formulas when showing the graphs in the preview area, but for the people who will look at them.

As we will reaveal below, there were few problems going arround human appreceptions for something ‘perfectly smooth’ and the matchematical perfect figures.

Methodology

We were going to extensively use PHP GD library for the text effects. It provided easy changing of fonts and colors, adding drop shawdows and rotating the texts.

We had also to create color palletes which to appear when user click and disappear when color is selected (You can personally try the decals creating here). Using hidden layers and javascript was supposed to do the work.

The main problem in this site was to create 4 types of arcs so when the user selects one of them the text is created arround imaginary arc (like in the vector graphical softwares). We were going to study Bezie’s formulas and create these arcs with its help.

Implementation

PIM Team Bulgaria had the task to build the full functional online decals builder with the following features:

- Decal background

Some users were supposed to have their decals placed on colored background. We had to allow the preview area to be painted in a selected background. First we created the image in temp folder:

// the name of destination image

$dest=’decals/’.time().’.jpg’;

//the background

imagefilledrectangle ( $im, 0, 0, 590, 60, $colors[$_POST[’bcolors’]]);

$colors array contains the available color which are stored by the administrator in the database.

Thus, when the visitor selects a background it is passed as parametter to imagefilledrectangle function.

- Font selection

Users should be able to select fonts for their future decals. Knowing that we can’t consider all the fonts will be available on all visitor’s computers we had to upload them on the web server directory.

We allowed the admin to manage the fonts, adding their names and uploading files in admin area.

The fonts in the select box came from the database. Selected font was passed in the call to imagettftext funtion which is drawing on the previously created image.

- Color Selections

The color selections had to be a palettes which appear when user clicks and disappear when color is selected. The palette had to look as a table with colors and these colors are also defined in the

admin area so they had to come dynamicly. We had to seed a static javascript function with dynamic content.

We created a PHP cycle which was taking the colors from the database and then creating a string for HTML table. This table is then passed to a javascript function which creates the palletes with the help of hidden layers:

function showTable(table)

{

mouseX = window.event.x + document.body.scrollLeft+25;

if(table==’background’)

{

var content=”";

var y=460;

}

if(table==’fonts’)

{

var content=”";

var y=690;

}

if(table==’shadows’)

{

var content=”";

var y=810;

}

document.getElementById(’tabler’).style.pixelLeft=mouseX;

document.getElementById(’tabler’).style.pixelTop=y;

document.getElementById(’tabler’).style.visibility=’visible’;

document.getElementById(’tabler’).innerHTML=content;

}

Of course, once the user select the desired color we had to hide the pallette:

function setColor(elid,color,fromid,shc)

{

document.getElementById(elid).value=color;

document.getElementById(’tabler’).style.visibility=’hidden’;

}

Thus we created nice palettes which appear and disappear on a single click and don’t take much space on the screen.

- Drop Shawdows

The decals offered has the ability to have a drop shadow added so we had to add this option to the online builder. PHP however didn’t offered a nice function for that. We created a procedure which draws the texts twice - once the original 100% saturated text and once the shadow with a percentage of the color and appropriate displacement. Of course the shadow was drawn on the image before the main text.

@imagettftext($img, 20, $gr[$i], $x+$dx, $ys[$i]+$dy, $scolors[$shadowcolor], “fonts/”.$_POST[’fonts’],$word[$i]);

- Arcs

The main problem came when we had to ‘rotate’ the texts thru arcs. First we created perfect Bezie funtion which to draw the curves and adjust the letter above them. But what a surprise - the curves looked perfect alone, but when we adjusted the letters above them they seemed rough.

After studying this problem we realised that the rough screen resolution and the disability to antialise the images wouldn’t allow us to create nice arcs. We were standing against insoluble problem.

We decided to create few arcs with a graphical software (CorelDraw) and to see what could be wrong.

We noticed that Corel’s curves were looking great after they are manually adjusted. However you can’t just leave the program to create perfect curves automaticly. A human eye was needed to judge when a curve looks right and when not.

We got a totally different direction. There wasn’t an universal function to help us. The solution we found was to ‘manually’ adjust each letter. We created a procedure with cases which were adjusting each letter on the appropriate place and with appropriate rotation depending on how long was the text. It worked!

We created 2 arrays for each arc type - one array with the positions and one array with the rotations.

The rest was simple:

if($arctype)

{

$start=(35-$l)/2;

if($start%2) $start+=1;

$gr=array_slice($gr,$start,$l);

$ys=array_slice($ys,$start,$l);

}

if(!$arctype)

{

$ys=array();

$gr=array();

//making the arrays

for($i=0;$i

You can go on the atec’s site and try the arcs we achieved (http://atecsigns.com/decal/step_1.php).

Results

Now A-tec Sings’s web builder creates perfect decals with graphs, calculates the price and allows you to add the decals to your shopping cart and chgeckout (the shopping cart software is also created by PIM Team Bulgaria).

The builder allows the visitor to create the desired decals with any color, dropped shadow, background and shape, to preview it and to calculate the cost for different sizes and quantities.

The website and builder were promoted with massive radio advertising company. At that time it was the only decal builder which allowed creating texts arround arcs.

Conclusions

• Use GD to create text effects

• Do not forget that you can create you own functions for what GD does not offer

• Do not always search for math perfect formulas. The graphical effects are intended to the human eye

• Load fonts in the server

• Use javascript and hidden layers to achieve great flexibility

About The Author

Bobby Handzhiev is a senior developer in PIM Team Bulgaria

http://pimteam.net

admin@pimteam.net

Why is it important to your online business that you use an internet merchant account? I am told that if I do business online, then I must have an internet merchant account. The truth is that they are right. If my customers can’t pay for my services or merchandise with their credit cards or their own merchant accounts, then I am unlikely to be successful. Online business and shopping are prevalent, but only if credit cards can be used to make purchases.

So what exactly is an internet merchant account? It is generally a service set up by an online merchant account provider so that an online business can accept credit cards and e-checks as payment. The provider will then authorize e-checks and credit cards for payments in exchange for either a flat per transaction rate or a small percentage of the money involved in the transaction.

As a rule, banks do not offer merchant accounts for use online to their customers. This is where the recent influx in internet merchant account providers comes from. There are a number of services available online that offer these services specifically to online business owners and individuals in need of internet merchant accounts for various reasons. When a business is online, obviously there is no human contact between that merchant and customers. Without human contact, cash cannot change hands. Because of that, an internet merchant account is absolutely necessary for your online business. First, though, you must choose one.

As valuable as they are, you should make sure you have a good relationship with your internet merchant account provider, since they will be handling so much of your money. A good internet merchant account provider will offer you speedy credit card sales processing as well as other services that will aid your business. You also want to make sure there is some flexibility in that the provider works with all credit card brands and possibly even other payment methods. You also will want your internet merchant account provider to handle customer service issues quickly. Remember, this is your business and your money, you have every right to demand top notch service.

The last thing you should take into account when choosing an internet merchant account: costs. There are costs associated with them, as was mentioned earlier. However, you need to take the time to find out all costs and cost combos the provider has. Some charge the percentage, others charge flat rate, and still others charge a small flat rate plus a small percentage. Only you will know how much is too much, so think about your business and the volume you will do versus the costs to help make your final decision.

If you are opening an online business, you certainly aren’t going to be able to take cash payments for your products or services. Therefore, you will need to be able to take credit cards, e-checks, and perhaps other forms of payment. To make that happen, associate yourself with an internet merchant account provider. Screen carefully, though, because you are talking about a service that will handle most of your company’s revenue.

If you would like to view more of my personal articles on online merchants, please visit my computing site.

It’s a fact, we all need visitors to achieve certain success parameters for our business. So let’s take a look at two important elements.

Landing Page

A crucial factor in the conversion process is the landing page selection. When searching for a service or product, customers will want to land on the page that will give them precise information about what they are looking for.

It doesn’t matter if visitors are coming from organic search or paid advertising, landing pages must contain rich content and an appropriate look and feel to convince them to go to the next level: Take an action - buy a product or submit a contact form.

Shopping Carts and Contact Forms

Thousands of versions are available on the internet, offering lower cost, free maintenance, higher security and other advantages.

Besides those characteristics, you need to see how friendly the selected shopping cart is. When it comes to fill in a form with private information, your clients will not feel comfortable if they are being requested to input many information or not relevant details as for example birth date, home and office address or phone numbers.

As a suggestion, if you plan to create a database with your clients’ information, after you receive their basic data and they accept receiving correspondence, you can send them an automated email (immediately or after some days, depending on your requirements) asking for further details and explaining what for.

Service and informative web sites may not count with shopping carts as it may not be relevant for their purposes, but a clean contact form is essential for both commercial and non-commercial web sites.

Mr. Daniel Katz is the Business Development Manager at Compucall Web Marketing Ltd - experts in International Web Marketing and Marketing Strategies.

The Fox Internet Marketing Solutions
A Division of the Fox Advertising Agency, Inc.
9114 58th Dr. East, Suite 103
Bradenton, FL 34202
Phone: 941.758.2404
FAX: 941.756.6484
Email: info@foxadv.com
Website: www.foxadv.com

I stumbled across this quite by accident. I knew it was there
because I’d seen it before but I forgot about it until today.

So I did some checking to see if it still does work and based on
my limited test it appears that it does.

What I’m about to explain to you may not only help get sandboxed
sites indexed and ranking quicker, it can even make the site
owner a little money.

I’ve been blogging for a few years now. I started it as a hobby
and the blog I had was actually a blog before there were blogs.
In other words I was “blogging” with a regular website.

Then a friend turned me on to Movable Type. It is a software
which allows me to automate the publishing of content on my
website.

I was having problems getting my website/blog indexed by Google
back then - this was about 3 years ago.

It was also around this time that I heard of a new program
called Google Adsense ( HREF=https://www.google.com/adsense rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/adsens
e) in which one could place code on their web pages that
would display ads, and the website owner would earn money on
every click.

I thought “what a cool idea” so I immediately applied for an
account. 48 hours later I was placing ads on my blog.

Shortly after this while reviewing my server logs I noticed that
I was getting Google referrals! That’s right, within days of
placing the ads on my site, it had been fully indexed by Google
and it was actually ranking quite highly for terms related to
the content I was posting.

I couldn’t believe my luck. Here I thought all I was going to do
was make a little money on the side yet I found that the Adsense
may have actually helped get my site indexed.

Remember, this was before the Sandbox, but it was a time when
link popularity ruled the web. But since it was only a hobby I
wasn’t worried about building links. Because I already had a few
loyal readers, I wasn’t trying to position this site.

Flash forward to December 2005 and a friend asks me to help him
set up his own blog. Actually he wants two of them - each with
their own topics, and both very different in nature.

I consult with him and on February 1, 2006 we register two new
domains for him.

He proceeds to build out his blogs and as he’s doing this I
suggest placing ads on them. At the time I wasn’t thinking that
it would help with indexing, just another way to increase
exposure of the ads to generate more revenue for me and him.

We agree to split the money and he places the ads on the two new
sites.

I didn’t think much of it until his visitor traffic started
going up. He also placed Google Analytics code on the sites and
gave me access to them so I could take a look to see where all
this traffic is coming from.

Turns out, he’s getting a few Google organic referrals.

Imagine that - two brand new sites, with no incoming links, but
somehow they have managed to sneak out of the Google Sandbox in
3 weeks?

Imagine my surprise, considering I have another site that I
started over a year ago, and have been dutifully building
content and links, yet I can’t get it out of the sandbox. In
fact, the current Google cache is of pages that no longer exist,
and haven’t for months.

My explanation, however “out there” it seems to be is that
somehow the Google Ads have allowed the site to bypass the
sandbox and move into the index almost immediately.

The first Google organic referral came last week, just two short
weeks after the site was tagged with the Google Adsense code.
Since then, both sites have received a handful of Google organic
referrals.

Based on this very small and somewhat limited test case, my gut
is telling me that one way out of the sandbox and into the SERPs
is to apply for and install Google AdSense onto your site.

At the very least you’ll make some money - maybe not a lot, just
a few dollars a month (Google only pays out in $100 increments
mind you, so it may take a while to get that first Google check)
and the best case is that you’ll bypass the sandbox, get indexed
quickly and even start driving organic referrals to your site.

Like I said, this isn’t anything near a scientific study but it
seems pretty clear to me that what has helped these two sites
become indexed so quickly are the ads.

So if you’re stuck in the sandbox, perhaps applying for AdSense
is a good idea.

I know I’m going to be placing ads on my other site to see what
effect (if any it has). My guess is that within a few days it
too will start ranking.

An interesting eCommerce success factor that isn’t precisely overlooked, but which is often thought about more in terms of being a way of feeding the search engine spiders has to do with providing content. In a very real sense the customer’s job is to consume. That’s why you’re in business.

Think in terms of providing the information your customers need to do their job of consuming. What does that mean? Consider what you sell. The content on your site needs to focus on your products - whatever they happen to be. Reviews and comparative information on the items available through your web site can help focus and direct your customer to what they need, want and can afford.

Too often eCommerce sites use only marginally relevant information as content - or content that may match the general theme of the site but has nothing to do with what’s being sold, promoted, etc. That could be more or less adequate as spider food, but it isn’t going to help your customers do their job of consuming your products.

The better you combine these two goals - informing your customers and feeding the spiders - the better you’ll do at both. Irrelevant search listings are pretty much a waste of your bandwidth. What you want is highly targeted customers interested in what you’re offering and since the search engines love focused content and integrated sites, make that work for you.

And I’m not suggesting blatant repetitive hyped up sales copy. You want to inform, compare, offer added information that will help focus your customers. Use your content to develop desire and provide comparative information on similar products at varying price levels. Remember: desire not need.

While we all need things - and while you may be convinced everyone absolutely needs your product - we mostly buy based on desire - because we want it. The better you do at turning that need into immediate desire, the better your site will perform.

Again, not a fevered sales pitch. That’s likely to turn off a large number of customers. Examples, stories and carefully chosen (and real) testimonials can support the process, too. Using video and/or audio can have a dramatic impact. Let your customers draw the obvious conclusions.

Along with providing plenty of comparison and review data, good search facilities are essential for a large eCommerce site. This also means that if you use a searchable product database that your keys and descriptions must be well-chosen and the links from search results to pages work smoothly and easily.

While we’ve talked earlier in this series about the importance of providing various ways to enhance the social aspect of your site, it’s also important that customers be capable of using it without assistance. Never over complicate your site or your processes to the point that it’s no longer obvious what to do to buy something (or complete whatever desired action you are focusing on).

A typical customer should be able to go from front page to product page to order page to thank you page easily and without hesitation or confusion. The simpler and cleaner the process, the better for you.

If you can manage it, test with 4 or 5 basically internet illiterate people. Watch carefully what they do, where they hesitate, what seems to cause confusion - but don’t talk or help during the process. Then go over everything with them in detail working with your observations and their thoughts and feelings. Your site may be obvious to you, but is it obvious to anyone else?

And when you think you’ve covered anything, a few pairs of new eyes (or checking out your competitors’ sites) can give you a whole new to-do list.

Your eCommerce site is an intentional business creation. Every aspect should be organized around what you want the site to do, what kind of visitors you want and what you want them to do. Everything on your site should be there for a specific reason that contributes to your goals for the site. And everything should be tested to be certain that it actually does contribute.

It’s your site and your business so never take anything for granted, never assume something works if it can be tested. And never stop testing. With careful attention to detail and on-going testing you’ll be able to make incremental improvements over time that will vastly improve the productivity of your eCommerce web site.

Copyright 2005 Richard Keir

Aside from writing, Richard teaches, trains and consults, on and off-line, on business and professional presentations, eCommerce, site building and programming.

Visit http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites.com for eCommerce articles, information, resources and links and check our blog at http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites/blog for opinion and ideas.