Web Concepts

By Mitch “Mr. Organization” Keeler

Not many of you might of realized that yesterday was the first day of Spring. That means that soon the birds will start chirping, the grass will turn green and summer will be coming up pretty quickly. So as with any other Spring tradition, it is now time to start thinking about Spring cleaning.

How do you do spring cleaning with your web site though? Well here are ten spring cleaning tips for your web site or online business that might help you get started.

1. Update Any Scripts and Plugins - Look at WordPress, Joomla and any other scripts or services you have installed and see if it is time to give them an upgrade. You should be doing this more often than every spring but now is a good time to check and make sure.
2. Do Your E-mail Addresses Work? - I recently got an e-mail from a friend who told me, “Sorry I didn’t get back to you I just figured out I had major problems with my e-mail account”. Send yourself a dummy message to make sure you don’t fall into the same boat.
3. Clean up Your Sidebars - This ‘bit of advice would be mainly for blogs. I have seen some people become really addicted to having sidebar widgets and gadgets. If you have more than five per sidebar, might be time to ditch some or at least make them look pretty again.
4. Review your Terms of Service - Make sure your terms of service and acceptable use policy are up to date and include everything you wish to include there. You may have made some changes to your web site and business since the last time you reviewed it so check it out now to make sure all your bases are still covered.
5. Check and Update your Sitemaps - If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, it might be a good time to login and check to make sure Google didn’t find any errors, which would keep them from indexing certain parts of your web site.
6. Is Your Contact Information Correct? - Check out your contact page and make sure that the numbers, e-mail addresses and postal addresses listed there are up to date and show the correct information.
7. Renew Your Domains - When does your domain name run out of date? Might need to check and also be sure that you have all your hosting bills paid up too. This also makes for a good time to upgrade your hosting account to one with a few more perks.
8. Test Your Web Site Links - Are all your web site links working? Check your error logs in your various stats packages to see where people are finding 404s and try to fix all the broken links or non-existent pages you can find.
9. How Out of Date is Your “About Us” Section? - Checking out my own about us page on one of my other web sites I see I pretty much haven’t updated it since the launch of the site. Always good to keep this up to date because well, this is how people lean more about you and what you do.
10. Spellcheck Your Web Site Content - How many grammar errors can you find on your web site? If you don’t want to read through everything you have posted - you might try just going through a few of the most popular ones and making sure they are correct. Bad spelling really peeves some people, so best not to get on anybody’s bad side.

Have any more suggestion? Be sure to leave a comment to share with the rest of us.

&copy Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch "Finding Freebies" Keeler

I am always happy to help when we get a question in here to the Lunartics blog to answer.  This time around we were asked if we knew of any free background resources?  Here are a few of the best ones I have found.

• DinPattern
• Squidfingers
• Pattern4U
• Citrus Moon Patterns
• Photoshop Support
• Tile Machine
• Kalibe�

Backgrounds can often add flair and class to a usually boring and mundane web site.  Know of another great place to find your tiled or large web site backgrounds?

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “cPanel is Your Friend” Keeler

Your .htaccess file, with any Apache based server or hosting account is a very powerful tool that if you can learn to use for your advantage can help you complete many time consuming or difficult tasks with ease. How do you create one though for your web hosting account? This is a question that we get here time to time, and here is your solution.

Login to your cPanel with your user name and password, then once you have made it in, head over to your File Manager. Now the File Manager’s interface is a very familiar Windows-styled look at your files on your hosting account. You will want to click on your folder icon next to your public_html link next, that will take you to the insides of the public_html folder.

Inside you will see all your web site files. You need to scan down the page till you see the bold text, Create a New File. Click that and you should get in the upper-right corner a box with a few more setting to fill in. In the empty text box, put in .htaccess. Keep the drop down box on Text Document and then hit the Create button.

Now you have your .htaccess file inside of your public_html folder all with the help of cPanel and your helpful File Manger.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blo⡕

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “The Transfererer” Keeler

One of the web hosting basics that all must eventually learn about and master is the art of FTP. FTP stands for file transfer protocol and acts as a way for you to move files and folders from your PC to your hosting account Online. With any of the Lunarpages web hosting accounts - this option is available to you.

Some of my top choices for FTP clients would be:

• FileZilla - One of if not the most popular open source FTP client out there today. Highly suggested solution for your file transferring needs.
• CoreFTP - Another awesome free and paid FTP program that features site file transfers, auto try failed transfers, one click transfers, keep alive functionality and more.
• SmartFTP - The best looking of the free FTP programs out there that you could use. SmartFTP is also a name you can trust, as they have been providing a good service for years.

When filling out your account information, this is what you should put in each box:

Hostname: For this, you would need to put in yourdomain.com (where yourdomain.com is your actual domain name) or servername.lunarpages.com (also where it says lunarpages.com this information might also change. See your welcome e-mail for more information).

User Name: This would be your account user name that you put in. This is the same one you use to login to your control panel.

Password: The password you can use, is the same one you use to login to your control panel.

That should be it. Try it out and see if it connects. If not, you might double check to make sure that you got all of your connection information correct. Yet again, this would be a good time to check back with your welcome e-mail to make sure that your information matches there with what you put in.

Also as a bonus we have a number of video tutorials to help you get your FTP account up and running.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Your Talent Agent” Keeler

If you have a nack for writing or helping other people out please feel free to submit your own work to us. We are looking to feature one customer written article per month in our web hosting newsletter. The only thing that we ask is that the work is your own and does not belong to anybody else. Each month, month after month we will select one to toss into the Newsletter for the month.

Interested? Submit your articles to mitch.keeler@lunarpages.com with the title “LP Newsletter Article Submission”. Also be sure to include your Lunarpages hosted URL and name so that we can give you a shout out for your fabulous work. Starting next month we will feature one customer article per newsletter. If we don’t use your article one month, we will keep it on record and we may use it the next month.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch "WordPress Guru" Keeler

WordPress might be one of the more popular blogging tools and scripts out there today, but there are still many unanswered questions about it.  Over the next few weeks I thought it might be a good idea to tackle some of these questions right here.  If you have a general WordPress question that has been keeping you up at night, feel free to send it my way to mitch.keeler@lunarpages.com.  Make sure you put in the title &quotLunartics WordPress Question" so I can be sure to see it and also include your name and your Lunarpages hosted web site (if yo have one). 

As an example, lets tackle the question of changing your blog’s title. 

To change the name or title of your blog, you will need to login to the WordPress admin interface, usually found at:

yourdomain.com/wp-admin/

From there, click on Options and then the General tab. 

To change the title of your blog, find where it says "Blog title:" and put your own title into the text box next to it.  You can also change your in the text box under your title box.  Once you have done that, hit the "update options" button and you are done.

Remember to keep your questions general if possible, so that way everybody can get something out of the answer.  Have a WordPress question?  Send it my way and see it answered right here!

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Link Crawler” Keeler

Finding broken or inactive links in your web site can be a painful thing for any big web site to do. If only you had your own little crawler that would check through all of the links to make sure that all of them were in working order. Well thankfully there is such a free program, or I would have lost my sanity doing this by hand a long time ago.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a free program, that does a great job checking web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets.

Xenu Link Sleuth Pro: Makes a painful process a whole lot easier.

Xenu Link Sleuth Con: Could use a more user friendly interface.

Download Xenu Link Sleuth! | Visit Xenu Link Sleuth’s Web Site

If you need any help in installing or using the product, be sure to check their official web site for more information in that regard. I think that Xenu Link Sleuth is yet another freeware download you can not miss if you spend a lot of time and money managing your own digital empire on the Web.

+ Check Out More Freeware and Open Source Applications!

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch "Mr. Organization" Keeler

There is no doubt that when you sign on the dotted line and get your hosting plan of any type, shape or size (you know, we do that sort of thing here at Lunarpages web hosting) you are given a lot of links to keep track of.  You have the link to your customer account page, to your own domain, to manage your domains.  Now the Customer Account Page does a good job for most at centralizing all your Lunarpages goodies but I thought I would share my way of doing things.

In your browser’s bookmarks make a folder named projects and a folder named admin.  In the projects folder I want you to create a new folder for each domain you are hosting.  Inside of this folder you would put all the links you want quick reference to (such as actual domain links, cPanel links, stats and more).  It should look something like this:

Projects Folder

     YourDomain1.com Folder

           - Control Panel Link

           - Actual Domain Link

           - Stats

Now if you put all the important links by domain inside of the projects folder then what is the admin folder for?  This would be for the domain links that you use the most.  For an example, if you installed WordPress you would be logging in there more often than cPanel, right? Just fill this folder with links for the admin interface for the scripts you have installed on your hosting account.  Here is an example of that:

Admin Folder

     - YourDomaiэ.com WordPress Admin

     - Your2ndDomain.com SMF Admin Screen

Then you can go on and on from there.  What organizational tips do you use to manage your own web site links?  I’d love to hear them if you have any that are really unique.  

&copy Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Tipster” Keeler

Think of it as one of those sticky fly traps you hang outside in the summer to keep the flying insects away from your BB&Q. You don’t want to just lead people to your site, you want to lead them to it - get them interested and then catch them. Don’t let them go because they might not come back. Hooking visitors is a sweet science I am not sure anybody has really mastered to a T (or Mr. T). These tips should help you get on the right track though when it comes making your visitors come back.

Social Interaction - Add something like the AddThis.com or ShareThis.com badges to your web site so that people can share that information with others in the way that suits them best.

Vote - Don’t overlook the idea of adding polls to your web site layout. Giving your viewers something to do will keep them on your web site a little longer. One easy way of getting a poll up and running would be via PollDaddy.com.

Blog it - Think your web site is a little light weight, and could use some more “meat and potatoes”? A blog would be a great way to fill your web site out a little more and keep your visitors coming back for more. I would highly suggest installing WordPress for your blogging needs, but there are many alternatives.

Build a Community - Forums always come in handy to help build a community or start one. SMF is probably the most reliable of the bunch in my opinion. With it your visitors can talk with you and each other.

Syndication - If you can, toss in some RSS feeds for your visitors to grab. This way they can subscribe to your web site’s content, get updates about your latest news, and have a trail back to your web site past that first visit. Once you do get an RSS feed going hook it up with a service like FeedBurner to track how many people are subscribing.

Know of anymore helpful tips to make you web site viewers come back for more? I’d love to hear ‘em.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blo⡕

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “All About the Tabs” Keeler

When it comes to having a solid navigation, that looks good as well you can get no better than a few well styled tabs. Now with the power of HTML and tossing in some CSS you can have awesome tabs on the side or top of your web page. With CSS Tab Designer though, you won’t have to lift a finger to get them made.

CSS Tab Designer takes all the hard work out of designing your own CSS styled tabs for your web site navigation. You can pick from over 60+ styles and colors, and it generates strict XHTML compliant code to copy into your domain.

CSS Tab Designer Pro: Makes creating CSS powered lists as easy as picking what you want and filling in the blanks.

CSS Tab Designer Con: I wish I could create a whole web site like this.

Download CSS Tab Designer! | Visit the CSS Tab Designer Web Site

Truly a unique freeware download, this software will help you create a CSS powered list and tab that will require you learning absolutely no programing or designing knowledge. When your friends and family go check it out, they will think you are a web designing master and as long as you don’t blab, you don’t have to tell them about our secret.

+ Check Out More Freeware and Open Source Applications!

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blo⡕

Original post by Mitch