3 Reasons Web Designers & Developers Need Reseller Hosting

Posted on 30th January 2012 in Web Designers

There are so many different types of Hosting packages out there. We often get people contacting us here at HostNine and asking us, “I need hosting- but I just don’t know what kind of hosting is suitable for my needs. Can you help?” While a standard shared hosting plan might seem feasible for a majority of folks, it might not be the best fit for those who do work on the web. For Web Designers and Developers-
Reseller Hosting is the way to go.

Here are 3 reasons why:
1) It makes managing your customers WAY easier.

When you finish work for a client, often times you point them in the direction of a hosting provider to host their website. Sometimes the client comes back to you and wants you to revise something and they painfully try to tell you where it is located and how their hosting is setup. Well, no more! As a Reseller you keep all your clients in one place, can log in to their accounts when instructed to fix something, and remove the headache of the hundreds of emails you would receive outside your reseller account.

2) You make a healthy profit.

As a Reseller, you determine the price for hosting that you want to charge your customers. Why? because you have the relationship with your customers and we put you in a position to own a hassle-free, hosting service.  Here is example of how you can be profitable:

If you buy in to the lowest price Reseller package (at $24.95/month) that we offer, you are granted 100 domains, certain bandwidth and memory, and a bunch of other features. If you decide to charge each of the domain holders/your clients our lowest shared hosting price, this would be your return:

100 domains x $3.95= $395/month

$395- $24.95 (cost per month) = $370.05 per month profit!
                                                      =  $4,441 annual profit!

These are general estimates, but it shows the power and potential of creating a profitable hosting service.
3)  You get robust features at your finger tips.

With other reseller hosting providers,  they often give you features that need a good amount of assistance from the providers support team, to actually use. With all our plans, our features put you in the driver seat.  Need to move a customer’s domain to another location, in another country? No problem- point and click. Need to send an invoice to a customer for a billable item? We got you covered (you also have the ability to collect payments with a recurring payment model). These are just a few actions you can take with little to no assistance from our team.

In the coming weeks, We will be writing more blog posts on how we can help different types of individuals get the most out of reseller hosting. Stay tuned.


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Why web designers rely on Lorem Ipsum

Posted on 24th January 2012 in web design

Wikipedia defines the term Lorem Ipsum as placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the graphics elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography and layout. The Lorem Ipsum text is typically a section of a Latin text by Cicero with words altered, added and removed that make it nonsensical in meaning and not proper Latin. It was derived from a Latin statement, titled De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, by author Cicero. The “What” (Source: Wikipedia).

So why does the web design industry rely so heavily on Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is a unique style of writing and is used because it is nonsensical text which does not detract from the aesthetic presentation of a design. In addition, the variations of Lorem Ipsum that are put out by Lorem Ipsum generators do a good job of estimating a normal distribution of English words and spaces. Today, many web designers and web design companies who use this dummy text, obtain it from special online or software-based text generators.

You may think it odd using this Latin text, but it actually has no meaning. It looks like a sample of Latin words. However, in reality the Lorem Ipsum is just a sample of letters in words with many letters being omitted. So, in reality this made up Latin text consists of many words that do not exist in the actual Latin language.

For anyone who is involved with building a website, this style of text generation is very important. Why you may ask? It is important because it shows exactly what the live site will look like once text has been added. Without the Lorem Ipsum a web designer would have to spend huge amounts of time typing in irrelevant text which would be a waste of time and resource.

Hopefully, this blog has explained Lorem Ipsum in a nutshell. If you found this post useful, please leave a comment below. Why not subscribe to our great weekly blog which is full of great content, information and tips. Please also join in the conversation with us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook too.

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Understanding Web Design

Posted on 10th January 2012 in web design

The web design is used as a general term to describe any of the various tasks in creating a website.

The site consists of thousands of pages through which a presentation of information using different technologies that are linked together with hyperlinks.There are two basic aspects of any website on the Internet. The first is a presentation to the user interacts with, usually visually, while the second is a back-end that includes information for non-human browsers.

From a technical standpoint, the act of designing web pages can be very difficult.Unlike traditional print media, HTML has a number of variable factors. For starters, not all browsers interpret HTML according to standards established by the regulatory body. The World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3.

This means that while a piece of web design as the designer wishes to appear in a browser, it may seem totally different in another. Take the example of someone who is in charge of web design hotels, the designer can make a very good graphics and textual presentation and test it in a browser like Firefox, but when the same website is opened in Internet Explorer, can have large differences in how to see their images and texts.

Another limiting factor of web design is the large number of formats in which a site can be seen. While graphic designers know exactly how big the piece of paper it is printed advertising piece, a web designer must take into account the different sizes of different monitors and display settings.

Continuing with the example of the hotels, it is possible that making a website of a hotel and insert an image of a specific room, two users with different size monitors, can see the presentation of information in a totally different . So in these cases when the manager of web design hotels should keep in mind that its establishment should be planned to look good on any computer.

Together, these concerns often make room for a web designer to incorporate dynamic accomplish enough to make a website attractive to a wide range of sizes.

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Text effects with CSS text-shadow

Posted on 5th January 2012 in css

Text effects with CSS text-shadow

Text effects are a great way to enhance your web designs, and with just one CSS property you can replicate effects that were only possible before by using images of text. Text-shadow is supported in all major browsers except IE, and along with RGBa colours, allows us to replicate some popular effects.

Text-shadow is easy to use and gives you a lot of control, letting you specify values for:

  • The shadows colour (RGBa is great for subtle effects).
  • The X position of the shadow, offset from the text.
  • The Y position of the shadow, offset from the text.
  • The blur radius or spread of the shadow.

And the syntax looks like this:

text-shadow: colour, x, y, radius;< /pre>

For example:

text-shadow: #FFF 0px 1px 0px;


And the best part? You can have multiple shadows!

text-shadow: #FFF 0px 1px 0px, #555 0px -1px 0px;

Here are some examples for uses of text-shadow.


The obvious use


CSS text shadow


Even a simple shadow is an easy way to add depth.


text-shadow: #999 1px 2px 3px;


Inset text


CSS inset text effect


By using a sharp shadow (or two) with a tiny offset, you can give the impression of inset text.


text-shadow: #FFF 0px 1px 0px, #555 0px -1px 0px;


3D


3D text effect with CSS


Multiple shadows with incremental offsets can be used to give your text thickness.


text-shadow: #00417f 0px 1px 0px, #00417f 0px 2px 0px, #00417f 0px 3px 0px;


Blur


CSS text blur


While blurry text is hard to read, it could be used in some cases for effect.


text-shadow: #095eae 0px 0px 3px, #095eae 0px 0px 6px;


3D anaglyphic


Anaglyphic text with CSS


This one is a novelty effect, but shows just how flexible the text-shadow property is. The colour of the text needs to be set as well, and RGBa is used so the text and shadow blend where they overlap.


color: rgba(0,255,255,0.5);
text-shadow: rgba(255,0,0,0.5) -5px 0px 0px;


As you can see, text-shadow can be used in lots of interesting ways. Have you used the text-shadow property to enhance your web designs, and if so what effects did you use?
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How to Increase Facebook Fans

Posted on 23rd December 2011 in Uncategorized

As a Creative  Marketing  Company we pride ourselves on understanding how to make the most out of social media. So when one of our clients, a new forest spa came to us with the brief of helping their Facebook campaign and in particlular their Facebook fan numbers we were delighted to devise a strategy to improve their social media profile.

We made many changes to improve the presence and content on their social media profiles. Alongside installing plugins to publish all content over all social media platforms we devised a simple but effective push to increase Facebook fan numbers. The push involved changing the landing pages, Facebook branding, content published and engagement strategy. Below is a table showing the life time fans (the darker blue represents our involvement in their Facebook campaign)

http://blog.beetleweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Lifetime-Likes.jpg

As you can see from the above graph since our involvement their Facebook like rates have increased. After doing the math their likes have increased by an impressive 37.93%. Alongside this we’ve started an engagement strategy to make the most out of their increased fans whilst trying to achieve the long term brand goals.

So if you want to make the most out of Social Mediaor just need advice on Digital Marketing, give us a call as we’d love to hear from you.

 

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Free SEO iPad Apps

Posted on 5th May 2011 in web design

Now that Apple iPad’s consumer base has grown, webmasters need to find a way to step up their game and adjust to new SEO techniques in order to suit the iPad’s new design and features. They can do so by employing a few types of SEO apps. However, before tinkering with iPad SEO in particular, they must first learn about the nature of mobile SEO.

Before choosing the right kinds of SEO apps to download to enhance their iPad SEO, however, webmasters must first understand that mobile search engines are designed differently from traditional search engines. Both types of search engines employ different kinds of bots and algorithms. Additionally, before webmasters delve into mobile SEO, they should know that mobile search engines are not really as finely tuned as compared to the traditional search engines.

After learning these basic things about mobile SEO, webmasters must also understand the difference between traditional SEO and iPad SEO.

  • One of the most important things they need to know is that flash is non-searchable using the iPad. Therefore, contents embedded in flash can’t be properly indexed by Google.
  • Another thing they need to consider is that the iPad’s new architecture is probably going to make an impact, or at least a few changes, to the field of Advertising. As most people may have noticed already, Apple and Google are both pushing towards mobile advertising. So webmasters might want to look deeper into that aspect as well, if they want to optimize their sites, especially among iPad or mobile phone users.

Moving on to free SEO apps for iPads, here’s a review of the most efficient tools.

  • Google Analytics for iPad

This is one of the most widely used SEO apps, mainly because it’s free and it provides a comprehensive report. Additionally, this free application for iPad SEO also offers users with an impressive touch interface dedicated to showing reports derived from Google Analytics itself. This tool is ideal for webmasters who are planning to do a quick presentation to various people, or perhaps to important clients, with the use of their top keyboard. Apart from that, this tool can also be used to simply run a thorough search engine report.

  • VNC

This particular application for better mobile SEO can efficiently serve as an ideal back-up just in case a person forgets any important file or data that’s stored in his/her home desktop while he/she is away. The VNC Server Lite basically enables users to enjoy easy access to their desktop files even when they are miles away from the computer. However, that’s not all that VNC can do. This application can also function as a workaround whenever the person finds the need to view a Flash website using the iPad. So it’s not only beneficial to web optimizers, but for the general base of consumers as well.

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HTML5 – The New Trendz of Designing

Posted on 4th May 2011 in web design

HTML5 will be the new standard for HTML, XHTML, and the HTML DOM and is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, a core technology of the Internet. The previous version of HTML came in 1999. HTML5 offers new features to provide not only rich media support but also enhanced support for creating web applications that can interact with the user, his or her local data, and servers more easily and effectively and is still in the design stage, changes to the specification are inevitable. Because of this, not all of its features are supported yet by any browser. However, Gecko (and by extension, Firefox) has very good initial support for HTML5, and work continues toward supporting more and more of its features. , Gecko began supporting some HTML5 features in version 1.8.1. However, most modern browsers have some HTML5 support.

How Did HTML5 Get Started?

HTML5 is a cooperation between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG).

WHATWG was working with web forms and applications, and W3C was working with XHTML 2.0. In 2006, they decided to cooperate and create a new version of HTML.

Some rules for HTML5 were established:

  • New features should be based on HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript
  • Reduce the need for external plugins (like Flash)
  • Better error handling
  • More markup to replace scripting
  • HTML5 should be device independent
  • The development process should be visible to the public

New Features

Some of the most interesting new features in HTML5:

  • The canvas element for drawing
  • The video and audio elements for media playback
  • Better support for local offline storage
  • New content specific elements, like article, footer, header, nav, section
  • New form controls, like calendar, date, time, email, url, search

New Elements in HTML5

  • The internet has changed a lot since HTML 4.01 became a standard in 1999.
  • Today, some elements in HTML 4.01 are obsolete, never used, or not used the way they were intended to. These elements are deleted or re-written in HTML5.
  • To better handle today’s internet use, HTML5 also includes new elements for better structure, drawing, media content, and better form handling.

New Markup Elements

New elements for better structure:

Tag Description
<article> For external content, like text from a news-article, blog, forum, or any other content from an external source
<aside> For content aside from the content it is placed in. The aside content should be related to the surrounding content
<command> A button, or a radiobutton, or a checkbox
<details> For describing details about a document, or parts of a document
<summary> A caption, or summary, inside the details element
<figure> For grouping a section of stand-alone content, could be a video
<figcaption> The caption of the figure section
<footer> For a footer of a document or section, could include the name of the author, the date of the document, contact information, or copyright information
<header> For an introduction of a document or section, could include navigation
<hgroup> For a section of headings, using <h1> to <h6>, where the largest is the main heading of the section, and the others are sub-headings
<mark> For text that should be highlighted
<meter> For a measurement, used only if the maximum and minimum values are known
<nav> For a section of navigation
<progress> The state of a work in progress
<ruby> For ruby annotation (Chinese notes or characters)
<rt> For explanation of the ruby annotation
<rp> What to show browsers that do not support the ruby element
<section> For a section in a document. Such as chapters, headers, footers, or any other sections of the document
<time> For defining a time or a date, or both
<wbr> Word break. For defining a line-break opportunity.

New Media Elements

HTML5 provides a new standard for media content:

Tag Description
<audio> For multimedia content, sounds, music or other audio streams
<video> For video content, such as a movie clip or other video streams
<source> For media resources for media elements, defined inside video or audio elements
<embed> For embedded content, such as a plug-in

The Canvas Element

The canvas element uses JavaScript to make drawings on a web page.

Tag Description
<canvas> For making graphics with a script

New Form Elements

HTML5 offers more form elements, with more functionality:

Tag Description
<datalist> A list of options for input values
<keygen> Generate keys to authenticate users
<output> For different types of output, such as output written by a script

New Input Type Attribute Values

Also, the input element’s type attribute has many new values, for better input control before sending it to the server:

Type Description
tel The input value is of type telephone number
search The input field is a search field
url The input value is a URL
email The input value is one or more email addresses
datetime The input value is a date and/or time
date The input value is a date
month The input value is a month
week The input value is a week
time The input value is of type time
datetime-local The input value is a local date/time
number The input value is a number
range The input value is a number in a given range
color The input value is a hexadecimal color, like #FF8800

The HTML5 doctype

The doctype for HTML5 is very simple. To indicate that your HTML content uses HTML5, simply use:

<!DOCTYPE html>

This very simple doctype will cause even browsers that don’t presently support HTML5 to enter into standards mode, which means they’ll interpret the long-established parts of HTML in an HTML5-compliant way while ignoring the new features of HTML5 they don’t support.

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Most Important Parts of Web Design

Posted on 4th January 2011 in Uncategorized

When you take your business online, you are choosing to distribute your product line or services to the world. It is essential to make sure that your website is welcoming and gives visitors all of the information that they would require if they were in the market for your goods or services.

If a person encounters a website that looks as if the information will be difficult to find or a site that is difficult to read due to the color scheme or various other reasons, that person will move on to another site containing the same or similar information. You will want potential customers to stay on your website. One of the is the layout of your page. The main page will be the page that most people will encounter first when visiting your website. This page should most importantly let people know what your company is and give a general explanation of what you have to offer the consumer. The main page will also contain links that will take visitors to other parts of your website that they will find relevant to the information they are seeking. Cluttering your main page with too much information is one of the most fatal flaws in web design.

Another important aspect of your webpage is making sure that it is easily found. Search engines have a process in which they frequently scan information all across the internet and collect information for their search results. This process is basically looking for what each webpage is about so that when internet users utilize the search, they will find exactly what they are looking for. Filling your webpage with content that is specifically designed to catch the attention of these search engines is extremely important.

A third aspect of web design that can make your webpage a success or a failure is ease of use. Many internet users want a site where they can find what they need quickly and without having to follow too many links. They want to easily see what you have to offer and be able to easily find your products, services or other information. If it takes a user too long to find what they want, they will most likely move on to another webpage that may be more user friendly than yours.

Drawing visitors to your website is only the first part of having a successful site. You want visitors to stay at your site and find what they are looking for. Your webpage is your face to the world. Every person that visits your website will receive a first impression that will either cause them to look elsewhere or they will return to your site again and again.

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Better Web Design with CSS Inheritance

Posted on 14th December 2010 in web design

As we travel throughout the world, accumulating assets, money and experience we gradually turn our thoughts to what we will be passing down for the next generation to help them on their way and ensure that things are that little bit easier for them. CSS is too, most thoughtful in this sense, as it ensures that parent divs are looking out for the child divs that they have loved and nurtured. If asked what my experience in web design has taught me, one of the most useful tips I would give would be the importance of understanding inheritance in CSS. If I look at my own understanding, it is something that I’ve worked on and developed over the past few years. If you are new to website design, or you are just looking to enhance your CSS skills and understanding then be sure to look into this important characteristic.

The Benefits of understanding inheritance are…

  • Better Understanding of CSS
  • Faster & More Efficient Website Design Coding
  • Reduced Code-to-Content Ratio in HTML
  • Smaller Files and Faster Loading Pages

How does it work then?

When we consider that CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, are by their very nature ‘cascading’, it is an integral part of working with and understanding how the inheritance works. It can be very easy to look at CSS as a one dimensional declaration, where every element has a style and if the styles are the same use the same class.

But CSS was never designed in this way. When you are styling selectors, certain properties are passed down from the parent div. For example if you were looking to change the overall colour of text on your website to blue, then setting the color property in the body tag, would mean that this style would be passed on to all other tags such as you h1, h2, p, a, li etc.

With this in mind, you are only using your CSS to define styles that are different from what has already been globally declared.

Here is a common example that I see quite regularly in website design were the font-family is defined several times instead of one global declaration.

/* CSS BEFORE */

body        { font-size:62.5%; }

h1 { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#FF0000; font-size:1.8em; }

h2 { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#FF0000; font-size:1.6em; }

h3 { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#FF0000; font-size:1.4em; }

p{ font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#CCCCCC; font-size:1.2em; }

/* CSS AFTER */

body{ font-size:62.5%; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#FF0000;}

h1 { font-size:1.8em; }

h2 { font-size:1.6em; }

h3 { font-size:1.4em; }

p{ color:#CCCCCC; font-size:1.2em; }

Simplified layouts using inherited widths

In order to achieve better layouts across all different browser platforms, layouts should be kept in their most simplest form. If you are looking to create a two column layout, then all you require is two columns of specified widths, both containing a float property, namely float:left and float:right respectively.

If these columns were then to contain a series of boxes, of the same width, then let the inheritance of the parent width do the work. There is no need for you to specify a width on each child div.

To avoid cross browser compatibility issues, add padding to the contain div rather than padding / margins each child element.

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Design Your Website For Seo

Posted on 26th November 2010 in Internet, web design

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is meant to get a higher rank for your website and thus enhance the business prospects. In order to get a decent ranking for your website what you need to do is to obtain quality link. It is the prime aspect which is possible through the procedure of  back link building with the help of a link building service from the very first day of launching your website. Other websites will voluntarily hyperlink to your site only if your site contains something considerably more valuable than they have.

Getting quality links from other sites are also important. The more links your site gets, more valuable it becomes. At first you must examine your competitor’s website to track from where did they acquire the quality links. And then make a study as to how did they achieve the same. And you can update your website through the exact SEO link building strategy that your competitor had used. Another point to be remembered is that if you think that your website needs some updation and overhauling, then you should do it properly. The way you have built up your website and its contents are very much counted when it comes to the question of website’s reputation. This is important. It is not suggestible to keep any of the pages as `under construction’ label as it will reduce your website’s worth. You should try for links only after finishing the construction of your website.

The prime thing you should do in order to keep your site live and dynamic is to make its contents well developed. This will add to the reputation of your website. Moreover, if you feel that overhauling your site will do you more good, then go for it. At the same time it should be worth remembering that in the event if you did not finish creating your website, do it only after having all the links got completed. Building the pages of your sites with great inner linking structure is very important. The SEO service of your website should include all the pages including the home page so that they will be indexed by the search engine at a quicker pace. Getting back links will improve the traffic to your website improving your conversion ratio and simultaneously boosting your sales.

Last but not the least process is to submit your website to your website directories  to improve the reputation. This will enable you to get more and more clicks from the interested customers. Links from other sites is a sign of approval from other people that your particular website is approved by other people as a legitimate site worthy of linking.

Thus link building is one of the prime aspects of Search Engine Optimization techniques garnering income in the long term. The point to be remembered is that the links that you have made and maintaining are related, of high quality and permanent. This is the right way to professionalism in SEO. Our technical team at the Design Direct with their immense exposure and competitive edge in the field will make your website live and dynamic and place it at the top slot.

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