Having your own website means freedom of speech, your own personal place to rant and rave, or somewhere just to setup shop. No matter what the intention, you can do just about anything you need to do online.

Before you start planning and spending the money to get the ball rolling, take a few moments to think about what its real purpose is. You may be surprised to know that many services and products related to websites are free and ultimately can save you lots of time and headaches. Before we talk about those, let’s first describe the website checklist;

Requirements:

–        a product or service

–        domain name

–        hosting and email

–        marketing and promotion

–        ongoing maintenance, webpage updates

–        more marketing and promotion!

–        More updates…

I’ll not get into the details of a business plan and research. We’ll assume you are 100% convinced and are ready to take the plunge. The first step is coming up with a domain name. You need to come up with many, and alternative spellings, etc. A good place to search for names is domains bot. .com domain names cost about $8 US each. Each domain name type has a different price, and there are no set prices. Shop around!

If you need to generate names, try dnwiz. Once you have a name, then you need to give it an address. Every webpage on the internet has an address. Think of it as a postal address. People need to be able to find it. It’s address is called an IP address. An IP address will be automatically assigned by the hosting domain registrar – which is where you “pays your money, and gets your name”

Once you have purchased the domain name, you have an address, but no house to put your website. The next step is to find a host. We hosting is typically a company with a room full of network servers split into many shared websites. One server could house thousands of separate websites, all completely independent of each other. This is called shared hosting, and typically runs about $3 – 20 per month for the average hosting package. Watch out for the setup fees;  where the hosting is charged monthly, as well as an annual setup fee. Most setup fees can be waived if you purchase hosting by the year.

Hosting packages are defined by many factors, including:

-          storage space you will need for your website (how many gigabytes)

-          bandwidth requirements (how many visitors will you have each month, and what are they doing at your site? Reading, or getting data, music, or other files from you? (again, measured in gigabytes)

-          Uploading – can people give you files and put them on your website?

-          Number of email accounts you need

-          Storefront (e-commerce, shopping cart, can you accept credit cards)

-          Database – will users register to login, will they store any personal information, or interact with your website in any way

-          Support for creating and publishing the website with Microsoft FrontPage, or Adobe Dreamweaver (you need special software on the server to allow you to publish the website from your own computer, directly to the internet)

To locate a hosting package you will need to shop around, and may look at hostsearch.

To be continued tomorrow…

Microsoft Office – Give it the Boot! Microsoft PowerPoint is a component of Microsoft Office. It is used for presentations and slideshows. Microsoft Office itself is a complete suite of applications similar to Lotus 123 for spreadsheets, and WordPerfect for word processing. The problem with Microsoft Office and other proprietary data formats is compatibility – or the lack thereof. The computer industry has very few standards that benefit the consumer. There are thousands of standards for the computer workings and components to make a computer but diddly- squat for the end user. Microsoft would like to have their Office product line be the standard, Corel would like WordPerfect and so on and so on. In the bustle and haste leaves you and I scratching our heads to keep up. Which package do we purchase with our hard earned dollars? What if we don’t like it, or if it doesn’t work for our purposes? Can I return it? Guess What – no. Although to be fair, that is not a blanket statement. Most retailers will put up a fuss for software returns, and will not accept them. But not all of them will refuse.

The issue is what’s to stop us from buying it, installing it, copying it and registering it – only to return it and get our money back – while still having a fully functioning copy at homer? Imagine the next person to purchase your returned item – when they try to register it and it fails the registration. Of course You can call software support, but would still be an annoyance. As with anything successful, there is always something new to come along and copy it, or try to improve upon it. The case being alternatives to Microsoft Office, well to Microsoft – but that’s another story – Two relatively new players in the game are Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and OpenOffice.org. Google’s solution offers a word processor, and a spreadsheet solution. Both are completely free! Open Office has slightly more applications in their suite, including a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a slideshow and presentation program and a drawing utility.

Google’s offering doesn’t require any downloads or installation of software, while Open Office does. Once again though, it’s free. If you absolutely must have Microsoft Office applications, you may download the free viewers for Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access. If you need to edit them, then use the free solutions from Google and OpenOffice.

Most ISP’s allow you to send attachments of up to 5Mb per email. Some ISP’s have increased this to 10MB. This is great for Mp3’s and pictures, but terrible for everything else. Let’s say you have an Adobe Photoshop graphic to send to your favorite printing company, chances are it’s over 5Mb. You may be fortunate enough to have a graphics designer that is savvy in splitting the file into sections – and most likely this is a common occurrence for designers to send their files to the printer. What do you do if you don’t have this magical graphics designer?

Further to the dilemma, most ISP’s only allow a certain amount of storage space for your emails, so you can easily exceed your storage quote with 1 large email, worse yet – if you have a slower internet connection, you will have to wait for the email and it’s attachment to arrive at it’s destination. You then receive that dreaded deliver failure report email – your email didn’t make it through because you misspelled the address, or the email address is no longer used.

Email systems were never designed for high speed transfers, and large attachments. These should be done through ftp, or regular http transfers to begin with. The problem lies in the ability to send large files quickly and easily. FTP (file transfer protocol) programs require a special server and a client software, as well as a specific username and password to allow people to upload their files. This means someone has to administer the FTP server. The sender’s will also have to know a little about FTP clients to be able to upload files to the server. HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) or the web – as it is commonly called nowadays is the best method, however there was no easy way to send files from a web browser. This also requires some behind the scenes magic, and a host of applications and software to create a place to put the uploaded files, a method to accept the uploaded files, and finally – someone to manage the server.

The good news is there is a solution. With the ever evolving internet, several companies have developed the means to allow us to send large files. It is not uncommon to be able to send an entire CD to another person. There are basically two methods available. The first method requires the installation of proprietary software. Which is often a free version, limited in some way to either control you upload and download speeds, file size maximum’s, or possibly riddled with advertisements. Pando is one example, although you may purchase a subscription to avert all the advertising.

You may also just visit a website such as dropsend and use the regular interface with no additional software installation, however you can bet there will be advertisements.  A third option is to upload the files to an online sharing and storage storage website, such as box.net however services such as these typical limit the attachment file sizes. You may store several Gigabytes of data, however you have to split them into parts using Winzip, or Winrar.

This then resembles websites and web mail services such as gmail, msn, and yahoo, typically offering 2 Gigabytes of storage, however in 5Mb or 10Mb pieces.

The best option seems to be web based uploading and sharing – even with the occasional advertisement. Here is a list of some of the few companies offering this type of service;

Dropfiles – Want to email large files? We’ve got the answer
Send files of up to 1 GB – store files online.

Fileden – Free File Hosting and Online Storage
With File Den’s free file hosting service it’s easy to share files across the internet with friends, family, work associates or anyone else. FileDEN allows their users to direct link to their files also giving you the opportunity to also embed your files into your webpages, myspace or other social networking profiles

Quickeo – Private File Sharing
Quickeo is an application for people who want to share their private digital photos, videos, music and other files with their friends, family and community – not the whole world. It simplifies the transfer of private multi-media files for both the sender (no uploading to a server necessary) and the receiver (no downloading necessary)

Fileho – Host – Transfer – Deliver
FileHo is an online one click file-hosting service. It allows users to upload, host and share files for free. FileHo offers unlimited speeds, unlimited file-size, unlimited lifetime of files and unlimited disk space for any of your needs. Also, FileHo is an ad-free site! That’s why downloading process has never been so easy and fast.

Mediafire – Free File Hosting Made Simple
MediaFire is truly 100% free and unlimited file host. Unlimited uploads, unlimited downloads, unlimited bandwidth, multiple simultaneous downloads and no sign up required

Dliveo – Send and Track any size file
Dliveo solves the problem of how to easily send and track large files over the Internet. The most advanced Internet file delivery service, Dliveo delivers your very large and important files to one or many people and you always know when they arrive. No file is too big!

Zapr – Share Stuff with your Friends
Zapr is an application which lets you create links to any files on your PC. You can then send these links to friends (via email or IM) and they can get the files directly from your computer via their browser. It’s safe and secure.

Omnidrive – File access anywhere, anytime and from any platform
Omnidrive is what you expect hosted storage to be – easy to use, accessible from anywhere and unrestrictive. Omnidrive will make your life easier by allowing you to store, access and stream your files from almost any web connected platform.

Mailbigfile – Send large files when email won’t, with MailBigFile
Many ISP’s limit the size of files that can be attached to an email, often as little as 10 or 20 MB’s is the maximum size. Or perhaps you’ve received a large file by email in the past and found that you have to wait whilst it downloads before you can see the rest of your emails? Well, now there’s an alternative – and it won’t cost you a penny.

Pando – Send and Receive Large Files
Pando is free personal P2P software that makes sending and receiving large files and folders a breeze. Need to email large attachments, IM a folder or publish your downloadable videos to the web? Meet Pando.

Today search engine optimization has become the hottest game on internet. Many companies have come into this field with skilled staff having high qualification in the form of 642-432 and 642-162 certifications. Other than this lots of work is being done in the field of network software by companies which has created many new jobs for professional having VCP-310 certification. Some of these companies are also offering free voip to clients in order to promote their new network softwares.

Apogee-Search.com is largest leading Search Engine Marketing which was founded in 2001 and is a part of Leads Customers Growth, LLC the company headquarters is located in Austin, Texas. long recognized as a center of Internet innovation and expertise. Apogee turns your website into revenue engine. And not only that this site is a Google Adwords Qualified Comapany. Apogee really drives a huge, unique, targeted visitors traffic to business to business(B2B) and business to company(B2C) websites for more leads, customers, revenues and profits.

Apogee offers a wide number of search engine tools and resoures to help you in your search engine optimization quest.  Here are just a few tools that we think are valuable.

Apogee Search Tools & Resources

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GoogleFight.com is web application launched for targeting results on google for specfic keywords. just enter the two keywords and hit Fight then it will show which keyword has most results just give it a try. It likely looks like Google Tends but with a interesting fight between keywords.
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1. CTRL + Mousewheel up/down: It will change the font size in a conversation window.

2. CTRL + E: Center text

3. CTRL + R: Right justify text

4. CTRL + L: Left justify text

5. F11: Start a call

6. F12: Stop the call

7. ESC: Close the current window

8. For minimizing the current window press ALT + ESC.

9. Some smileys are converted by Google Talk: , :-O, , , , , , B-).

10. To write bold text, type the text like this *TEXT*.

11. To write italic text, type _your gtalk message_

Some secret parameters which you can add to G Talk for performing different functions:

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Google has a special name for creating logos for special occasion and now it had created a ice blue logo but we had to know the reason behind it!