Custom Website Design - Web Links Directory - Software Development

People review and evaluate Content Management Systems (CMS) for a variety of reasons. Perhaps you are starting a new web project for yourself or a client. Maybe you are taking over responsibility for a site and want to improve and enhance it. Or maybe you run a consulting firm and are hoping to standardize on one development platform after having tried or recommended several different ones. In any case, a good CMS can be so vital to the ease and success of a project that it’s an important decision, and you need to make a good one.

Of the literally thousands available, there probably is no single CMS that will fit everyone’s needs. Various systems offer both drawbacks and benefits, naturally, depending on the precise needs. Obviously, you need to choose the CMS that has the proper set of characteristics to meet your online publishing needs. However, you need to do this in such a way that you also advance your business strategy. The right CMS will support you in these ways, while the wrong one can bog you down and create more problems than you originally had. What do you expect? You must carefully and precisely define your needs (and/or your customers’) or you can waste time and money.
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While reducing the costs is still the number one reason for the outsourcing trend, another key factor is that companies are looking to free up internal resources to focus on more critical initiatives. Globalization creates new opportunities for those businesses that know how to establish sophisticated and interdependent relationships with their offshore vendors. These enhancements relationships are typically for the maturity phase of IT outsourcing.

At its maturity phase, outsourcing advances beyond the conventional project model: offshore vendors provide their customers with exclusive full-time dedicated resources on a long-term basis. An Offshore Dedicated Team (ODT) customized to the customer’s requirements, practices, and even culture operates as an extension of the in-house staff. The ODT model sets the customer free from such problems as incorporation, recruitment, office lease, infrastructure set-up and maintenance. Using an ODT, a business can reduce development costs, get access to specific skills, gain better control over the entire development process, achieve easy scalability, and have the accumulated expertise transferred back in-house.
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After Google, YouTube is now apparently the most-used search engine in the world. YouTube now allegedly sees more searches than either Yahoo or MSN. I think that’s amazing. And I also think it is an amazing opportunity for those of us who want to increase traffic to our websites.

But does YouTube really represent a realistic option for increasing traffic to your site? Last year I set out to test this very theory because, frankly, I was a little cynical. My own suspicions were that most of these searches were from teenage kids looking for clips of their favourite bands or stupid stunts and I doubted that YouTube could be effectively harnessed for the sake of marketers.

So I created a small number of short (2-5 minute) videos on a topic related to one of my websites and published them to see what happened.
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What is it?
In a nutshell local search involves the use of specialized search engines specifically created to focus on a selected geographic region to find local businesses and websites focused on your area.

Local search is commonly utilized as a directory, where users select their location, and narrow their search by categories till they find the listing they want. In many cases local search engines also guess at the users’ location by using their IP, so when you visit the site and search, for example, “Chinese restaurants” you automatically see results specific to your location.

Google has been doing this for a while to one degree or another. When you perform a search in Google using a geographic modifier the map comes up with results specific to that location. You can also take it one step further and search Google Local specifically.
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1. URL canonicalization and 301 re-dirs. One of the first things I look for on any domain I am giving a health check on is the URL canonicalization. In My Opinion it does not matter if you pick proper URL canonicalization pointing to the www’s or non-www’s, but you need to pick one and stick to it. I personally always choose the www’s because more people (from my experience) tend to link to you with the full URL. So you need to get into your .htaccess file and make a few edits. Any variation of the homepage URL needs to be done this way too - for example you need to have the /index.php also re-direct to the main URL (however you have it set up) Bottom line here, you need to make sure all variations of your URL point to the same way you set it up.

Any extension of your URL like:
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Most websites conform to the traditional ‘brochure’ style where you present your services and yourself to potential new clients, as well as asking them to sign up and give you their contact details.

* Information capture as a sole purpose

If you’re serious about growing your mailing list, though, there’s a route you can take which involves turning your home page into what is known as an opt-in or squeeze page. The one and only purpose of an opt-in page is to get visitors to sign up. Its job is to squeeze contact details out of your website visitors!

Websites with an opt-in page as the home page appear to the visitor as a one-page site. There are no links to other pages, nothing to browse, and nothing for the visitor to do but sign up. Of course, you have to offer a reasonably generous reward for them to do so, and present it with a degree of compelling urgency. As a technique for growing your mailing list, though, it really works and it sure gets you focused!
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