If someone doesn’t know - EntreCard is a social network for bloggers that supposed to help building traffic to your blog. The way it works - you “drop” your card into the EntreCard widget on any site you see it (look in the dark sidebar to the right on my blog) and get credit for it. The owner of the site where you dropped card will also get credit for it and your banner will appear on his EntreCard member dashboard. He may return the favor and visit your site.

After you generate some credits (you also have an option to purchase credits directly from EntreCard) you can use it to buy one-day banner ad on the website of your choice. The prices for these ads are determined by how many people are paid and waiting for theirs turn to display the banner. Also every website owner have an option to decline any ads.

Ideally this system should work and if used properly could generate quality targeted traffic. The problem is - not every one understands meaning of Targeted Quality Traffic…
(more…)

It is becoming more and more popular to include a lot of different widgets on websites, especially blogs to make it look better.

For starters - “Widget” usually is some kind of image, providing statistics or adding interactivity to your site. In most cases it’s powered by java script located on the server of the widget provider. On my site you can see four examples - PayPerPost direct and EntreCard widgets in the gray sidebar, FeedBurner subscribers in the right sidebar and MyBlogLog Latest Visitors in the bottom area of the page.

I don’t see anything wrong with using widgets but some people are taking it to the extreme - they use each and every widget they can find no matter if serves any purpose…

The main drawback with using widgets, like I stated above, it’s hosted on the remote server of widget provider and in many cases - very busy servers. If some of those servers are busy or experience some kind of problems - your own site may freeze or take forever to load.

My advise - before adding any new widgets to your website or blog ask yourself a simple question: is it worth loosing visitors??? Yes this is correct - if your site takes more than 10-20 seconds to load at least half of potential visitors will hit “back” button! (more…)

Today I found an interesting post on UK Webmaster forum about something new in the domain industry - City of Los Angeles decided to create it.s own top level domain extension .LA. As it turned out this is actually not so new according to Temi’s SEO Blog.
Will it become a new popular movement with many other extensions to follow?

The interesting part that all most popular names that could be in high demand were reserved and already offered for sale at the premium price anywhere from $1000 to $50,000 . For example “girls.la” or “star.la” are priced at the highest $50K while “kids.la” or “gifts.la” could be acquired for only $1K.

Personally I think these new TLD extensions would work for a local business and can actually be kind of useful to identify company as local. It may be even cute to have your name registered as a domain with local extension if you want to show off where you live…

For the website looking for global exposure this new local domain in my opinion will do no good…

When designing a layout for your website it is essential to check it in multiple browsers.

Few years back over 90% of web surfers were using Microsoft Internet Explorer but nowadays other browsers fast gaining share of the market. Most popular are Mozilla Fairfox and Opera.

Even Internet Explorer has released new version (IE7) which works much different from the preceding version (IE6).

Layout and styles configured to work fine in IE may appear all broken or not readable in other browsers. I can guarantee - no one will open another browser just to see your site, so you will loose potential customer.

Multiple browsers can be easily installed on your computer without any interference with exception of IE versions - you can have only one version running.

This is even more important if your site has anything to do with web design services. Recently I did some research on local web design companies just to check competition and found very interesting thing… Some of those companies are claiming to be in web design and development business for years and display tons of feedback from so-called happy customers. Amazingly many of their own sites appears to be very poorly styled and appear broken in Fairfox… Would you consider to hire one of those companies to develop your site? I don’t think so!

So… Take your time to make website multi browser compatible or hire someone to do it for you - you will appreciate it later.