A great site full of tutorials and tips for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Abduzeedo is full of inspirations for those of you eager to design fetching and beautiful websites. While focusing on the most used tools, the site also deals with other less known software and web design all with the aim of helping people get the most visually from their websites.

Colorburned

Similar to Abduzeedo, Colorburned also provides free vectors, textures and brushes for a wide variety of image software. Along with tutorials for a wide range of topics on all skill levels, Colorburned is a must have guidebook for any web designer.

CSS Tricks

Not just a website, but a whole community CSS Tricks provides Articles, Videos, free download, handy code snippets and even an active user forum for discussion. All of this is geared towards the coding side of web design as opposed to the visual aspect. Used in tandem with the above websites, CSS Tricks can help you get on your way to hugely successful websites.

FreelanceSwitch

As well as providing hints and tips for any aspiring Freelancer, FreelanceSwitch also allows for people to post ads on their Wanted Board for freelancers to find. So if you want someone to take care of the coding while you do the graphics this is the place to go. Or for the aspiring Freelancer a wide array of articles and resources are available, as well as forum to talk with other freelancers or to find work.

Mashable

Mashable helps you get your website up and running and getting visitors after all the coding and design is done. Teaching web developers how to use Social Media such as Digg and Twitter to your advantage, Mashable also has a number of articles with useful collections of HTML and Wordpress templates. A site for all sorts of help and resources, Mashable is probably the most important and multi-purpose site on this list.

They become wrong marketing channels when you try to push your products to uninterested audience. If your blog is about affiliate marketing and you try to push your e-book on weight loss, you can potentially lose your blog readership. When you post promotional messages at others’ inboxes at social networking sites, you will be labeled a pest.

Doing so is wasting your time and energy. You also waste others’ time. Others will also start you calling a spammer. Do you want such a thing to happen to you? I think not.

Buying mailing lists en-masse is another crime you can avoid. You have no idea how old the mailing list is. You also have no idea what kind of products the individuals seek.

I love all the three marketing channels as described above. They are extremely powerful. They also sell products without any Adwords purchases. However, it is also important you make sure the readers are looking for products similar to the ones you promote.

The right way is to build your blog readership. Build your mailing list. And build your social network. It takes time. However, it is fully worth it. If you look for shortcuts, your affiliate marketing plans will crash before they can take flight.

Put in efforts to build your readership – email, blog or social media. First sell useful ideas to your target readership. You can gain status as an unbiased authority figure. From that point, your readers will be eager to accept your recommendations. Then, they will buy the products your recommend.

You can also use Adwords all the way – the beginning of your affiliate marketing plans, in the middle and after you had become a maven. Adwords is a good marketing channel any time. If you do it right, you can always attract almost everyone who would buy from you. If you do not capture them and sell to them, someone else will.

Read the first part: Affiliate Marketing Mistake 1: Choosing a Bad Product

Gaming sites, payday loans and credit cards are all good products. They put big commissions into your pocket. The customers do not generally claim a refund.

Such products are there in every niche. They come in large numbers in information products market. However, if most of the customers claim a refund, it is a bad product. You are not going to make any money out of it.

How to Identify a Good Clickbank Product

ClickBank has four numbers attached to every product in the marketplace. The most important numbers are $Earned/Sale and Gravity. If the dollar earned per sale is significantly lower than what the merchant offers as commission, there will be something bad. A lot of customers might be asking for a refund.

Gravity refers to the number of affiliates earning a commission from that product. The higher the gravity, the better it is for you. All the four numbers are important. Dollars earned per sale should be close to the percentage of commission the merchant offers. It also needs to have high gravity.

Is the Product Hot Now?

There is a good time and a bad time to promote any product. If some product is highly popular now, it will stay that way for some time. Drop the product if its popularity is dropping.

The message is clear. Sticking to a bad product is the worst affiliate-marketing mistake you can make. If an affiliate product does not make you profit, drop it immediately.

There are four more affiliate-marketing mistakes, which you can avoid. You can read them in the coming days.

No brainer here. Everyone knows it. With a budget of less than $100, you can instantly drive people to your affiliate websites. I don’t think there is a need to explain it in further detail.

Adwords Makes You a Better Writer

You have very limited space to tell and attract your target customers. The headline is just 25 characters including space. The two lines are 35 characters each. You have one more line for display URL. At first this appears very restrictive. However, with practice, you know the 25 and 35×2 characters are enough to attract the attention of anyone who will be interested in your offer.

The lack of freedom forces you to edit and edit your ad copy, till you get optimum results. In addition, Adwords also takes guesswork out of question. You can know identify the headlines and ad copy that work and the ones that don’t.

Adwords allows you to run multiple ads under one campaign. You can test similar looking headlines and ad text. Soon, you will know if your choice of words works or not. You can then use the headlines that work in other places too – like a headline for an article, a blog post, or as the subject of an email.

Thus, you are forced to tweak your writing, until you get the results you want.

Discover Profitable Niches with Adwords Keyword Research

This happens mainly because of the Google™ Adwords keyword tool. It is free for advertisers. Enter the keywords related to the affiliate products you promote. Google will return keywords related to the ones you have entered. You can soon find keywords, which open doors to new niches, which you can cash in. When you discover a new niche, it is only a matter of time before you can dig out some e-books or information products to promote through Clickbank.com.

Most likely, you will soon find the Adwords Keyword tool not enough for you. You can then use a piece of software called Keyword Elite. This powerful tool discovers profitable niches and keywords. When playing with Adwords, this is a handy tool.

This animated GIF  http://www.mayhemstudios.com/HOWIES/images/designer.gif is a rather old image, and it’s quality is poor but it illustrates an exceptional point of view. Along time ago (I was fresh out of college) a friend of my fathers asked if I could create a website and do a few other design jobs. I have no problem helping out but I wanted to make sure we had one thing strait. Even as a friend, I don’t hand out freebies. I told him of this story:

“A car dealer asks a graphic designer friend of his if he could create a website for free, for his business. The graphic designer could put a link to his website on the bottom of the car salesman website for publicity. The exposure will ensure greater success. So the designer thinks about it for a minute. He asks if the car dealer could give him a car for free. It’s only fair. He’ll put a sticker at the bottom of the bumper with his logo and website. It will be excellent exposure. Everyone will know it was his quality car.”

Of course not. No sane car dealer will hand out cars for publicity. That’s how you make a living. He agreed and I was set to receive $25 per hour for my services as a graphic designer for his paralegal business. however hours dragged on for days, days turned to weeks and weeks into months. Finally the guy racked up $4000 in service. I had enough and it was time to collect what was owed me. I asked where my money was, we had an agreement. his reply: “what agreement”?

There are 2 morals to this story. First: don’t ever go into business with someone you think is a friend. Second: even if both parties has an understanding of what was agreed upon, you better have a signed contract (especially dealing with paralegals and lawyers). One side is always looking to get something for nothing. It’s for this reason, to this day I require full up front payment upon signing of a legally binding contract.

Let’s call the site called “www.MY-SITE.com” that you want to add a SEARCH bar to.  Visitors to “MY-SITE.com” are greeted by the page “index.html” as per the normal manner of web pages. This is the page that you want to have a SEARCH bar on. This is your main or home page where all the links to other pages and documents in your site are listed either in a navigation bar or as a list of title links to other pages.

First Step : Create a Simple FORM for your index.html Page

In your html document “index.html” where you want your SEARCH bar to appear, place the following code: (without the whitespace after/before the angle-brackets)

< form action=”google.php” method=”post” >
< input type=”text” name=”search” />
< input type=”submit” value=”Search” />
< /form>

Style the form however you wish with padding, width, margin, etc. Let’s add some style to this, as follows: (again, without the whitespace after/before the angle-brackets)

< form action=”google.php” method=”post” style=”width:300px; margin:0 auto 3px;” >
< input type=”text” name=”search” style=”width:230px; border:1px solid silver; padding:2px 2px 6px” />
< input type=”submit” value=”Search” />
< /form >

This will give a length of 300 pixels and will be centered on your page. This “300px” allows for the width of the input bar AND the “submit” button that we are creating with “input type=”submit” value=”Search” and for good measure, a few pixels left over.

The user-input box (SEARCH box) will be 230 pixels wide and have a 1-pixel silver border around it and a visually pleasing padding around the blank space where the user will type in the text s/he wishes to search for. SAVE this page with the current name “index.html” and upload this to your domain “www.MY-SITE.com.”

Next you need to create a *php document that we will call “google” since we are using the Google search engine for the SEARCH bar.

Second Step : Create a PHP Document

Open a blank document in your html or text-editor and paste the following code with no other text or comments on the page. Don’t try to re-type it, it is too easy to make an error :

< ?

$website = “www.MY-SITE.com”;
$search = $_POST['search'];
$search = str_replace(” “,”+”,$search);
$search = stripslashes($search);
header(”Location: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A$website+%22$search%22&btnG=Google+Search”);

? >

(again, without the ‘whitespace’ between the “<” & “?” and the “?” & “>“

Note the first line which cites your domain “www.MY-SITE.com.” This is important as it will instruct Google from where to SEARCH for pages to return upon user request.
SAVE this short document as “google.php” and upload this to the same directory as your “index.html” page. Make sure that your html editor or host does not change the extension by default to “google.php3” as this will not work. The page must end with *php. If it is changed to *php3, manually rename the extension to be “.php“

We’re done with this part now.

Next, we have to submit your domain (”www.MY-SITE.com”) to Google to get your links indexed and make this “SEARCH FORM” work. For Google to return results from your page, googlebot must first crawl & index all the links and pages in your domain from the information in the *php page that you created (specifically, from the information provided in the first line $website = “www.MY-SITE.com”; of the document “google.php”)

Your site may already be indexed by Google and this next step may be unnecessary but it is better to suggest it anyway and get this working as soon as you can.

Third Step : Submit Your Site URL to Google

(screen capture image by author)

Go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ and add your domain (in this case, www.MY-SITE.com, complete with the http://” as per instruction) to the URL box, shown in the image and link given above.

Now, wait a few days for googlebot to find and index your site and all the URLs therein. It is not guaranteed that Google will in fact index your pages but it is highly probable that Google will do so. From their site, Google says this on the matter of crawling/indexing your suggested URL:

“Only the top-level page from a host is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual page. Our crawler, Googlebot, will be able to find the rest. Google updates its index on a regular basis, so updated or outdated link submissions are not necessary. Dead links will ‘fade out’ of our index on our next crawl when we update our entire index. “

In short, googlebot will find “index.html” in the suggested URL “www.MY-SITE.com” and, if it is deemed worthy, will crawl and index all (or many/most) of the links therein. You do not have to submit every link on the index page to Google. It will find them and know of their existence in time, and any URL links removed from “index.html” will eventually be ‘dropped’ from these indexes as well.

Within a few days, the SEARCH bar on your site will return a URL result on any searched term that is a match and only from the links that exist in your site. This is a fairly easy way to install a SEARCH bar feature to your site without having to do extensive backend coding and it gets your pages indexed fairly fast. Being ‘found’ on Google is helpful in its own right, and this makes your pages be ‘SEARCHable’ from your site.

I hope you find this tutorial useful.

Maximum Confusion

The Internet and computers are befuddling. Where do you start with something that seems so large and difficult to appreciate if you have little experience?

Some things that you should do before considering your Web site:

•  Write down what you want.  For example – I want to keep in touch with my children, I just want to promote my writing or I need an e-commerce Web site. Thinking it all on paper means you are clear.
• Talk to people who already have a Web site
•  Ask someone who is savvy with computers, to gain extra insights. This will save you time and give you ideas that you never thought you had.

Patchwork Model vs. Professional Model

The Web is growing with more people joining daily. Did you know that most just want the computer to write emails and play? Many people just want to find out the latest gossip on social sites or are looking for educational or interesting things to talk about. Not important information. Therefore, you may just want to start your Web design as, “a patchwork,” of free sites – a Triond site here, an eBay site there and a facebook site all patched together at not a cent to pay. 

If you are serious and want to launch a fully -grown Web site then you will have to spend money, doing it all properly, the professional way.

Web Design vs. Web Development

Web design entails:

• Having a Web site designer create a Web site for you
• The designed site presents your writing or art in a clear way that looks stylish
• Web design is ideal for individuals and small businesses.

Web development entails:

• Large scale electronic commerce for medium-sized businesses
• Is more akin to airline company sites, eBay or bank sites
• Web development is the big brother of Web design.

Get a Qualified Designer

Unless you decide to go down the patchwork path and do-it-yourself, you will need to hire a qualified Web designer.  The reason is that someone who claims to be able to design your site, without qualifications, is really ripping you off. Web design requires special skills. These are best learned as a proper certified course. So many things can go wrong. Hire a true professional who understands this complicated and new field of endeavor. Check their qualifications prior to engaging them.

Things to Avoid When Considering Hiring a Web Designer

“I’ll just knock it up in Dreamweaver.” If you hear this you are being taken for a ride. Your Web designer should be able to properly hand-code your Web site without relying on external software programs. These programs, in fact, add hidden and unnecessary codes that will only slow down your Web site and cause problems.

A great Web site designer must be able to, “clean-code,” or, “hand-code,” your Web site using XHTML, CSS and for Web development – C#. Also, check the designer’s work. Do they already have some sites on-line? Check and recheck their references.  Web design is a complex field and you need someone who can have your site up and running on time and to your taste and with minimum fuss.

Know Thy Market

Every Search Engine Optimizer cannot state this enough. Who will be reading your Web page? Who will visit it and what are their tastes? Finding out your Web market helps you choose the design. One example would be using pink and floral designs for a young girls market. Using grays and monotones in your Web site with large readable fonts is ideal for an older wiser market. The Web site should always be hunting for a client and tailored to their needs.

Image via Wikipedia

Conclusion

Like any field you want to know that you are getting what you paid for. Start the process by buying your domain name. Your domain name is your brand and your Web address.

In brief:

•  Hire a qualified Web developer or designer
•  Check and recheck their credentials and examples of their work
•  Do your research – it will save you money and time.

Good Luck.

Other Web related articles by this author:

The Computing Hour Glass

The Cookie Monster is Crunching Through Your Computer

Is Your Computer’s Screen Dirty

Secure Your Domain Name

Below you will find (in no particular order) 4 double-edged choices with their benefit as well as flaws.

Google Analytics Code Placement After the Body Tag

There are two main places to locate your GA code. It used to always be just before the closing body tag – . However recently there has been a movement towards placing it just after the opening body tag at the top of the document.

Pros

By keeping it that high in the source you make sure it is loaded immediately when a user visits your page.  This in turn provides more accurate statistics.

Cons

Because the script is loaded before your content it can cause delay and in fact turn your visitors away because of the increased load time. In worst case if for some reason the script could not be loaded you would be facing a long time before the browser proceeds with rendering your page.

CSS Sprites

Sprites are a popular name for putting several graphics into one image file. Using a grid

Pros

They are great for icon sets or storing more than one state of an image in one place. It saves loading time (by reducing the number of http requests) as well as image file size. They also help to keep your stylesheets more organized.

Cons

As with many other techniques you should be aware of their limitations – they work best with similar colour pallets of all the graphics in a sprite. Also they require at least one dimension (width or height) to be fixed. Lastly you should bear in mind that even when the file size is small the browser decompresses the image into memory, meaning if your sprite is big dimension wise it can cause problems.

Optimizing Article Content Length

 For quite a while now there seems to have been established a trend in content writing that both for SEO purposes as well as matching the average visitor’s attention span the article length should be somewhere between 350-500 words.

Pros

This length does seem to be the established best performing article. It ensures you are not posting two-sentence news, while not producing essays too long for most online readers either.

Cons

If you are serious about you content, and are not providing quick, fact-laden news stories, than this size will obviously limit the depth of your article. If you do have a lot to say on a topic, rather than trying to cram it into the ‘accepted’ size try splitting it into pages.

Displaying Dates with Your Content

When blogging it is quite common that each article / entry has a time and date next to it. However you might want to rethink your dating strategy.

Pros

When your articles are time sensitive having the date reassures the reader about the freshness of your data.  It can also help to show that the website is still alive and new updates come regularly and frequently – meaning the site is worth coming back to.

Cons

While all these points are valid for an established site with regular input, they might actually harm a small less frequently updated websites. If you have timeless content which you want to keep providing but do not intend to update regularly seeing that the site was last updated 5 years ago might turn away your visitors.

When thinking about the layout of the site, there are a few things you’ll need to ask yourself:

• What type of website am I making?
• How can I make it easy to understand and navigate?
• What sections need to be attention-grabbing?

What type of website is it?

The first main thing that is required is that you understand the type of website you are creating so that you can produce an appropriate layout for the design. Choosing the right layout for the type of website you are designing is a crucial step in the development of any web page because different layouts are suited for different websites. For example, the layout for a portfolio site will be completely different than for an e-commerce site as portfolios tend to be very clean with intricate design, and e-commerce websites are usually packed full of advertising and information trying to sell their products. An example of this is below:     

Portfolio Website: http://www.design2work.net/

E-commerce Website: http://www.amazon.co.uk/

How can I make it easy to understand and navigate?

Creating a website that is easy for the user to understand and navigate isn’t an easy job, and is probably the most important aspect to consider when coming up with a layout for the website. This is because the user won’t want to struggle in navigating through the site to find what they want as they are likely to lose patience and leave the website. Therefore, the use of clear buttons and links to each part of the website and clear headings for each section on the page will greatly aid the user in understanding using the site.

What sections need to be attention-grabbing?

Deciding upon which sections of the website you want to be attention-grabbing can be vital to a businesses’ survival as they are there to promote the company and try to persuade the visitor to use their services. This can be achieved by the use of bigger, uniquely styled boxes that stand out when the user first looks at the page are great to use to for advertising, displaying special deals, letting the visitor know why your site is so special, and so on.

I have drawn up a quick layout sketch and labelled some key elements in it that are worth noting:

Conclusion – Part One

Hopefully, you have managed to take most of this into account and understand the importance of having a good layout. So now get your pens and pencils out and start drawing down some basic ideas of how you want the website to be displayed. Don’t worry about getting it perfect, just some rough sketches to outline key areas is all you need at this stage. The following sections of the article will help you to design the graphical elements of the website so keep watching for any updates.

Getting Started

There are a few things that you need to get started such as a text editor. You could use the standard notepad/wordpad but that lacks some real nice features. Below is a list of some tools that will help you out while web developing.

1. Dreamweaver - Although quite costly, it is a great WYSIWYG, it has very nice features such as live view, InContext Editing, code hinting and more. There are also discounts for students or educators.
2. Notepad++ - Another nice editor, it is nice and easy to use, free, search and replace, able to edit many documents at once, and much more.
3. Intype – Yet another code editor, this one is also free although still in development, it seems like it will be a real good editor once its done.
4. Coda – This is a code editor for the Mac. I have never used it but it seems like it would be a good editor. It looks sleek and seems to have some good features
5. Firebug - A nice addon for FireFox. It allows you to view your source code in browser and make changes to it and see it update almost instantly.
6. WAMP (windows) or MAMP (mac) – Both are web development environments which allow you to create web applications with Apache, PHP and the MySQL database. This allows you to test your applications on your computer without having to upload them to a web server.
7. Browsers – Last but not least, browsers. Get all the main ones, Safari, IE, FireFox, and also Chrome. Those are some the the main browsers that people use and that you should be testing on.
8. mage editor – You should also get a program were you can create images and edit them such as photoshop. This is so you can create the images to make your applications look nice.

Learning a language

Learning a new language can be hard. But all that you have to do is keep focused and read lots of material covering what you are learning, be it HTML, PHP, etc. Just read tutorials, articles, books, or whatever else you can find. Here is a list of some info that will help you along.

1. w3schools.com - This site is great to start learning HTML, that have some good information that shows you what the code is, what it does, and gives you a chance to try it out. They also have a quiz at the end to see how much you learned.
2. kirupa.com – For many different web development tutorials check out what is at kirupa.com he really makes sure to explain it in detail and guides you along.
3. netTuts+ – Here is an amazing site, it contains articles and tutorials written by web developers themselves. There are so many different kinds of things that you can learn here. And for just a few bucks you can gain access to even more information.
4. HTML & XHTML: The Definitive guide – Here is what Amazon says about this book:

“Plenty of books can teach you HTML quickly, getting you up to speed and hacking out Web pages in no time. HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide offers a more comprehensive and pragmatic look at the de facto markup language of today, as well as the emerging next step…”

Check out the link for more detail on the book and how you can buy it.

Showing Off Your Work

Now who doesn’t like showing off to others? That is what you need to do to get better. You will never learn anything if you are the only person to critique your work. Have a friend, coworker, spouse, neighbor, kid, just whoever you can find look at what you have made and have them tell you what is good and what you should change. Also go to forums and post it and ask people to tell you what you did good and what needs improvement. 

Keep Practicing

This is another must, you should always be practicing, getting better, learning new material. If you don’t practice your skills will get rusty and you will lose whatever improvements you might of made. Just go and google some html tutorials and follow them, create sites for the Coca-Cola company, create sits for a fake company. Read a book. Just keep learning and improving your skills. You can even improve your own skills by helping others out. You can even try making a few bucks out of it.

$$$

And here is the best part right? Making the big bucks. Web development is a big business, people all over the world are seeking web developers. There are also many sites that will allow you to sell your works such as Themeforest.net. Go and check out that site and you will see hundreds of different items for sale such as HTML templates, PSD templates, PHP scripts, and much more. Just know that they only except high quality stuff. Also check out http://jobs.freelanceswitch.com/jobs for some job listings for web developers. It costs money to be able to fully apply to the listings but it is a small price to pay for a big payoff.

Must Read Articles

Here is a list of what I believe should be read by those who wish to learn how to become a web developer.

20 Tools to Make the Life of a Web Developer Easier
18 Wonderful IDEs for Windows, Mac, and Linux
22 Neat Code Editors for Windows
50 Must-read Books on Web Development
How to Become a Freelance Web Developer
15 CSS Tricks That Must Be Learned
6 Firefox Extensions That Will Massively Improve Your Productivity

A side note

Thank you for reading my article and I hope that I helped you out even a tiny bit get started in web development. Good luck to you all!

Copyright Notice: All images are copyrighted by their respective owners.