Domains at Retail: Domain Names and Web Hosting

Start Your Domain Name Search!

Please Sign in or Register

July 31, 2007

WebSite Tonight has Evolved to 4.0!

Filed under: Web Hosting, Website Design, WebSite Tonight

Our customers using WebSite Tonight to dynamically create their own web sites will see a change over the next two-week period.

An upgrade has been completed to the WebSite Tonight application, and we are now going 4.0. Yes, version 4.0 of WebSite Tonight will be deployed to current customers using WebSite Tonight in a staggered format, and you will see it show up in your account within the two-week period.

What does this mean for you, the user of WebSite Tonight?

Better Editing Capabilities

Long gone are the days of quick or advanced edit. We have now raised the bar, right to the top for easy access. Click the content box you want to update, make the changes, click OK and you’re done. It’s that easy.

Everything you need is in a box to the left. That’s where you’ll find all the page / site editing tools you need to make your own dynamically built web site. No more expensive web designer fees — you make the changes, add the tools you need and publish the site. No turnaround time — instant updates made by yourself!

What else? Everyone hates too many popups right? We developed the new version with fewer pop-up windows, better image size constraining and resolved content formatting issues.

Well what does it look like? Here is a screen cap for inquiring minds:

Click for larger View

If you’re using WST tonight already, you’ll enjoy the enhancements.

Not using WebSite Tonight? What are you waiting for — try it out and see what you are missing.

July 23, 2007

Design your Web Site using the Best Practices

Filed under: Website Design

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to use the bestpractices good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

If you design your web site using the Best Practices, you will only stand to make your online real estate location a success!

July 10, 2007

Not Using Viral Marketing Could Kill Your Business!

Filed under: Marketing, Web Site Promotion

Creativity is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

If you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter! You are not going to make it big. Worse of all, your business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that help boost your site’s popularity rating. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing. While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because of the relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pass on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and will likey go ahead and open it.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization, Viral Marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story - many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz. Many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them more popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

July 4, 2007

Best methods for Free Web Site Promotion

Filed under: Marketing, Web Site Promotion

You have completed building your own website. You have introduced your company’s products and services. You have added promotions to catch your target audience’s attention. You have achieved the do’s and don’ts of building a company web site. But why isn’t your website a major success?

Maybe you’re not planning the key to the best promotion of your web site. Here are some guidelines on how to acquire free web site promotion for your company’s success.

Keep your website promotion constant. If you promote your site with persistence, it will catch your audience’s attention.

Be patient. Try each free promotion method until you acquire the best results. You have to accept trial and error for your web site to reach the top.

There are many ways for your web site to be seen. A few of the best ways for free web site promotions you could try are listed below:

  • Free promotions such as search engines and directories would give your web site the deserved traffic you always wanted. Make sure to check your web site’s ranking to know whether or not this type of free promotion is right for you.
  • Make a deal with other web sites on trading links which could help both web sites. Make sure to use words that could easily interest the audience.
  • Find free classified ads that could boost the promotion of your web site. These ads could be seen by other people who you are not targeting for, but may as well be interested in your services.
  • Sign up to forums related to the Topic of your web site. Make quality posts and include a forum signature that directs other interested forum users to your web site

If your web site and its free promotion did not work even after accomplishing these methods, analyze your web site. Track down all visitors, advertisements, and transactions. Then locate errors in your web site. Upload new files to your web site continuously for audience to return for new products and services. Monitor your own web site if it’s up in the market or down.

Then be ready to try the methods again and surely it will work.

It has always been said that the best things in life are free. Yes they are. And as soon as your free web site promotion proves to the audience its worth, then you’ll believe it’s true.

Keep your web site promotion activities consistent and they will surely pay off in the long run.

Domains at Retail offers a full range of Internet Web Site Service products including the ability for you to register your domain name, purchase web hosting to host your files, build your web site with Website Tonight and promote your site with tools like Traffic Blazer and Express Email Marketing.