Cross-Browser compatibility means compatibility with all of the major web browser software. If a web page is completely cross-browser compatible, it will look more or less the same in all of the existing web browsers. The most commonly used browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox and Opera. Depending on the web browser used and the version of that web browser, a web page can be interpreted very differently. This is because different web browsers are compatible with different technologies and some have different syntax for the same technologies. Therefore it is important that your website is cross-browser compatible.

The general tips to create a cross browser compatible site would be

Use only standard compliant code
Do not use browser specific HTML tags and features as these only work in the browser they were created for.
Validate your HTML/XHTML coding and your cascading style sheets using W3C free validation service.

Once you finish the development and the design of the site, before going live you can use a browser check service for your site to checkout the screenshots of your site in popular browsers. Although some of these services are not free to use but they do offer a free trial.

It’s true, creating a site that is compatible with a wide range of browsers can be an arduous task but the benefits translate into more visitors and if you are an ecommerce based site, this will translate into increased sales.

Every internet marketer and webmaster knows that to generate maximum traffic potential and the most profit opportunities, it is imperative to get his/her website to the first page of the Google Search engine result pages for it’s targetted keywords. Google is the best search engine and can greatly increase you profits if you know what to do. But the real question is, How do you get there?

The more search engine friendly your web pages are, the better your chances of rising to the top of the search engines result pages. A properly optimized and search engine friendly web page can easily show up on the first page of the top search engines. This is called organic search engine traffic. But how do you make your web pages search engine friendly?

In order to get top Google ranking websites, what you need is a plan for search engine optimization, or SEO. Proper search engine optimization will result in organic search engine traffic for your website. Organic search engine traffic is what you want because it’s a form of advertising for your website that doesn’t cost you. One of the easiest ways to get organic search engine traffic is with a good piece of website generating software.

If you can program in multiple computer languages, you probably don’t need website generating software. But, for others, website generating software can cut both the learning curve and the level of frustration associated with building websites for internet marketing.

A good website generating software program should meet the following criteria. It should be easy to use. It should enable you to be indexed in all the major search engines. It should properly optimize your web pages for MSN, Yahoo and Google. It should allow you to get on the first or second page of most of the search engines within 30 days or less. It should allow you to test and tweak your webpages in order to get optimal results. A really great software program will also allow you to see what your competition is doing and let you manipulate your web pages in order to get ahead of them.

There are many good website generating software programs on the market and many of them work well enough to get top ranking Google websites. Consistency and testing are the keys to making the most of your website generating software programs.

Since people associate particular colors with different emotions, the colors used on your website can have a psychological effect on visitors to your site. By using specific colors geared towards the emotion you want to invoke, you can actually increase product sales.

Here are some colors along with the emotions and symbols they stimulate:

1) WHITE- purity, innocence, peace, perfection, chastity, sterility, cleanliness. In general, white creates a cool and refreshing feeling.

2) BLACK- night, space, authority, sturdiness, reliability, power, constancy, prudence, wisdom, classy, elegance, submission, mourning, demons, witches. Black is a controversial color as it can symbolize both good and evil.

3) RED- love, excitement, warmth, heat, fire, blood, passion, power, aggression, action. Red color can be used as an attention grabber. It works better as an accent color rather than a background one.

4) PINK- romantic, affection, sensuality, tenderness, calm, soft hearted, softness, femininity. Pink tends to reduce aggression.

5) BLUE- sky, ocean, water, temperature, ice, coolness, mist, shadow, travel, freedom, truth, solitude, wisdom, trust, loyalty, peaceful, calmness, intelligence, dedication, masculinity. Different shades of blue convey opposite meanings. Light blue is peaceful while dark blue is depressing.

6) PURPLE- royalty, dignity, luxury, wealth, sophistication, feminine, passion, romance, sensitivity, coolness, mist, shadows, mysterious, mystic.

7) GREEN- money, calm, envy, greed, nature, life, youth, renewal, hope, vigor, fertility, rebirth, freedom, guilt. Different shades of green have different meanings. Dark green-cool. masculine, conservative, wealth. Emerald green- immortality. Olive green- peace. Green is the easiest color on the eye.

Yellow- light, purity, understanding, brightness, warmth, playfulness, creativity. Lemon yellow is the most eye fatiguing color. Yellow can increase irritability so yellow should not be used as a main color, only as an accent. Yellow enhances concentration.

9) ORANGE- autumn, youthful, fire, warmth, contentment, fruitfulness, wholesomeness, strong, generous, endurance, strength, ambition. Orange is the color most associated with appetite so it would be a good color choice for a website selling food products. Orange also makes a product seem more suitable for everyone and more affordable.

10) BROWN- wood, comfort, strength, earth, solid, reliable, credible, maturity, humility, conservancy. Light brown conveys genuineness.

11) GRAY- exclusivity. Enhances the psychological response of other colors.

In general, red, orange, and yellow are exciting colors while purple, blue and green are calming ones.

Use the color that symbolizes the emotion you want to convey as the primary color on your website. Add 1-2 other colors to reinforce this emotion. The colors used for your background, header, graphics, text, highlighting, headlines, etc. will all contribute to your website’s influence on your visitors.

There are a lot of factors involved in search engine optimization of a new site. The domain name of the site is one of them.

Search engine optimization is a process to get your site’s pages to rank high in the natural or organic listings on various search engines with Google, Yahoo and MSN being the most important. Optimizing your site for online marketing requires a lot of planning, patience and effort. Picking the right domain name is the first step of the optimization process.

Selecting a domain name is often viewed as a simple process. Most online businesses simply use their offline business name as their domain name. Others try to pick something that is catchy, so visitors would hopefully remember the name and visit the site again to buy more. If you are concentrating on search engine optimization of your site, these approaches won’t harm you but, there is a better way to pick your domain.

One of the interesting things about some search engines is that they put a significant amount of value on the words in the root of a domain name. Root means the words between www and the dot com, net or whichever tld you are using.  A good optimization effort will usually lead to the site appearing high under the phrase in the domain name. So it is important to think long and hard about the domain you choose for your business.

One approach used by many people doing search engine optimization is to match keyword phrases and domains. The idea is to research keyword phrases being used by people in your particular field and then buy domains matching those phrases. For example, consider the fact that many people search for web hosting would type ‘web hosting company’. If you want to build a site offering web hosting services, you would ideally want to buy the most relevant domain.

Obviously, domains with the popular keyword phrases with tons of traffic have already been taken. This should not be a discouragement for you. Work your way down the phrases identified by whatever research tool you are using. You will be surprised to find that many of the phrases are available. Build a site on one of the domains and you should find your optimization efforts leading to successful results.

How fast does your website load and how fast should it be? It is often said that sites that load that load in a split second are more popular and attract more attention. But how many websites actually load in a split second?

The most popular websites on the web today do load quickly. For example, yahoo.com and google.com which contain simple text and a few small images load on average in 1 second which is incredible. Amazon.com which has dynamic content and numerous images loads in about  5 seconds on average and the popular online auction house, eBay.com, can take even longer to load.

Many big brand websites don’t meet the standard of page load response times; therefore, should you be worried that your website doesn’t load in a split second? The bottom-line is it depends on you. You need to take into consideration business objectives for your website before deciding to have your web pages load as quickly as possible.

E-commerce websites, which have more images and use a database back-end, will take longer to render a web page. For websites that contain pages with more than 10 images shown on a web page, consider two suggestions:

First, host images on a separate web server than the main web server. This allows a web page to load quickly in the client’s browser. To the user, the page will appear to load very quickly, even though the entire page has not completely loaded all of the images.

Second, don’t run the database server for the website on the same machine as the web server. When push comes to shove for machine resources, both the web server and database server will slug it out and slow all operations down.

For all websites, consider server side caching your best friend. The .NET framework includes useful built-in caching to conserve server resources and offers a considerable boost in performance over standard ASP driven websites. Also recommended is Port 80 Software’s httpZip which can handle web pages, regardless of how they are created whether it is ASP, ASP.NET, PHP , or HTML.

Take into account all of the pieces of software needed to create the pages on your website and constantly work on different aspects to achieve performance gains.

Web standards refer to standards for creating web sites that are internationally agreed on as the best practices, established by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and other standards bodies. Web Standards are basically open standards which are primarlity used on the World Wide Web. These include HTML, JavaScript and CSS. In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. Therefore, to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential, protocols and guidelines have been developed that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

How does a business benefit by adopting web standards

Lower development costs due to simpler development and maintenance using more semantic and structured HTML. The site would work with all major browsers.

Lower hosting costs - Less HTML results in smaller file sizes and quicker downloads. Smaller file sizes mean lower bandwidth which will eventually lower the site’s hosting costs.

Increase in usability - The pages download faster due to the smaller file size. This will keep your site’s visitors interested and encourage them to checkout what you have to offer in your business.

Increase in accessibility - Semantic HTML, where structure is separated from presentation, makes it easier for screen readers and alternative browsing devices to decipher the content.

Increase in search ability - Semantic HTML, where structure is separated from presentation, makes the content represent a larger part of the total file content. Combined with semantic markup this will improve search engine rankings. As your site’s search ability increases, so is your potential clients.

Better brand control - When presentation is separated by content, you have much better control over the branding of your sites. Your sites that channels content to conventional browsers, on PDA and mobile phones can be controlled by just changing the style sheet(s).

Does your web site looks cluttered? Do your site’s visitors have trouble finding content they are looking for? You may have come accross sites whose pages are completely without organization or structure. This is where an effective website navigation comes into picture. The primary purpose of website navigation is to help the visitors move forward and help them find the pages of information they are looking for. This is incredibly important from the marketing and promotion perspective of the site.

The navigation should be easy and user friendly so that the visitors can easily browse through the site and move from one page to another without getting lost or confused. This again is very important if you want to get repeat visitors to your site. If the site’s navigation is user friendly and a visitor can easily find the information he needs, chances are he might come back to your site later.

A few tips to make your website navigation effective-

1. While Designing the website navigation try and avoid special effects like Flash, Java and Javascript in it.

2. Keep the navigation meaningful and be precise with the text on it so that users know immediately where the link will take them.

3. The navigation should appear on every page of your site. Although there’s no need to have identical navigation, the basic structure should be the same throughout the site, with changes only to indicate location within the hierarchy.

Everybody related to the internet wants to get a basic ranking in the Search engines. It has become imperative to better empower a site in order to attract Search engine bots to your site. Sitemap is a simple approach to interact with Search engine bots. When a bot sent by a Search Engine first visit your website, a Sitemap helps it to find your resources that you have in your website. With this information, it can determine a lot of other details about your site. A Sitemap helps the Search engine robot to analyze each page you are hosting in your web site.

Sitemap will assist the Search engine to identify your site and index it properly. There are many automatic tools to create a Sitemap for your site. You just have to specify your website URL and the XML content will be generated. After you finish generating the sitemap, copy it a notepad file and save it as Sitemap.xml. Upload this file to the root folder of your web server where your Index page resides.

For a commercial or an ecommerce, the checkout page is the most important page of your website. The checkout is the main reason to build a website, to make profit & sales revenues. But most of the times, this main page receives the least of attention. A checkout page must have an easy & secure feel. But most of the websites clutter the checkout page with numerous offers, thus losing the easy factor & hence losing the customer.

A checkout page must offer a host of features that simplify the buyer’s shopping experience. A checkout site must not restrict its payment offer to one or two ways different payment options. The more payment convenience you offer, the more clients will prefer your site. Secondly, place easy directions for checkout & limit the checkout procedure. Having higher checkout pages may cost you your client. A good web hosting site must have a secure checkout.

Place major emphasis on the security of the site, this page is a hot target for hackers worldwide as it also contains sensitive information, client details, credit card numbers, etc. Clients expect high features as encryption; SSL, hardware- and software-based firewalls, virus detection, spam killers, etc make sure validate their expectations.

With increasing frequency over the past three months, All the webmasters are in a thought of how they can database their growing site. This article won’t tell you everything that you need to do, step by step. But rather, it will introduce you to the technologies and options available to you in this endeavor.

1.) What does it take?

I’ll start by saying this: It isn’t going to be easy. Unless you have a knack for programming and database design, and a lot of experience to boot, you’ll either have to end up hire a database programmer, or spend hundreds of hours learning how to do it yourself. Before you start a project of this magnitude, ask yourself whether it is really necessary. Is the time and/or money that you invest in the databasing of the site going to pay off within a few months? Could you make-do with a couple of Server Side Include calls instead? Keep in mind that if you want to add features such as real-time inventory status, extensive product catalogs, or personalization, you have no choice but to go with a database.

2.) What are my options?

You have a few options open to you:

i.) Do it all yourself
If you have programming experience in a language such as PERL, you shouldn’t have many problems databasing your site, although you might have to spend a couple dozen hours learning to work with mySQL and design a database.

On the other hand, if you have little or no relevant programming experience, learning how to design a database, work with mySQL/mSQL/Access and program in a language like PHP will consume a considerable amount of time.

ii.) Do some of it yourself, and outsource some parts of it!!
If you’re short on time, and you have some programming experience you may want to consider doing some of the simpler tasks yourself and outsourcing the rest. Be aware though that good database programmers are not cheap. Be prepared to pay!!

iii.) Hire someone to do everything for you
If you have some cash to burn, hire a professional to do it all for you. Depending on your needs, you’ll end up paying for a complete database.

3.) The technologies that you have available

The first thing that you need to do is decide whether the site will be hosted on an NT or Linux/Unix server. I won’t get into the pros and cons here. I’ll sum it up like this: Doing databases on an NT server is easier than database programming for Linux, but it’s going to cost you a lot more.

4.) Links 2.0 may be all you need

Links 2.0 is a set of highly-customizable PERL scripts that allow you to maintain a Yahoo style directory. It allows you to add/delete/edit/approve sites via a web interface, add/create categories and sub-categories, and more.