Saturday, May 10, 2008

Free Mini Site Templates

What Are Free Mini Site Templates
By Scott Riefler

Many Internet based business owners enjoy the flexibility that mini sites add to their online empire. Mini sites can stand alone, or they can be linked to your main website. They can be used for a certain promotion or length of time and taken down when no longer have needed or have value. They are micro, tiny and fun to operate but, powerful in terms of delivering your message and purpose one can expect from a single page site.

Mini sites can be used as the landing pages or squeeze pages by linking them from your main product webpage. They can also be used to run seasonal specials or to promote a side product away from the main product on your site. Currently, I am using several themed mini sites as free product promotional sites and they are also great to use them for product presentation pages on auction sites and classified sites.

If you can a new product or service you would like to test, mini sites are a great way to test a new product without 100% attaching in to your main site. You can also use them for a side product when changing a big site requires big coding changes. Sometimes I see them on big hotel sites to offer wifi on the side. This way, the new service doesn't take away from the main business of selling you a room.

Mini sites are great for affiliate programs and other niche market product sites. Mini sites are also useful to determine how popular a new product is to your market niche, based on the number of hits the mini site receives. It is very fast and simple to make changes to the content on the mini site to improve the conversion rate on the page. You can set up two pages and easily A/B test the landing to see which one works better. Easy to make changes to a mini sites single page layout and retest again. Google AdWords has built in A/B testing tools to make conversion testing on mini pages very simple and you can have feedback within hours instead of days like normal searches.
Mini sites do not require the expense of outsourcing great web design by a professional web developer. With the wide range and many free templates on the market, the average webmaster with a little Photoshop skills can create a great looking website within a few minutes. I made one on my laptop sitting in a taxi cab once coming back from the airport. I had the whole site finished in about 30 minutes and was able to upload from a free wifi connection signal the laptop was picking up. The best part about it was the site was a free download load and made a great landing page that enjoys several visitors every day.

If you would like to have some free templates to design your own, feel free to download them from our website. The best part about them is they are free for all to use and they are great looking templates.

Scott Riefler is the author of several e-books and online resources. I have
put together a collection of landing pages and you can download for free. With
them you change the copy to your own and upload them to your web site. If you
would like them, please visit my Download link by going to my web site at: mini site templates

or read my ebook at: Make Money Online selling information

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Scott_Riefler http://www.EzineArticles.com/?What-Are-Free-Mini-Site-Templates&id=1130574

Create Drupal Sites

3 Steps to Create Drupal Sites
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Sean_Raymond]Sean Raymond

Drupal is one of the most easy to use and powerful content management system in the world. It's open source and a lot of people contribute to it from application development, theme development and module development perspective. And the most important one to us is that they are all free.

Want to setup an Drupal site, below are the 3 steps you can follow.

1. Find a Reliable Affordable Web Hosting

If you have chosen Drupal CMS for your website, it is very important to find a reliable Drupal-specialized host which will tend to provide expert hosting services. Usually, as for a beginner, a charge lower than $7/month should be good enough for your hosting. You can consider to upgrade them to VPS or dedicated server once your site gains enough traffic.

2. Installation

Installing an Drupal instance is not hard. You can go to Drupal.org, download the installation scripts, and upload them to your web hosting directory. The installation process can be done via Web. So you need to type in the URL in the Browser where you upload the scripts to, and system will automatically guide you through how to create the site. One thing you need to do ahead is to create a Database instance which will be used during the installation

Right now, Drupal has become more and more popular that some web hosting service providers start to include the installation scripts in their service package, by which you can it setup by just some simple clicks.

3. Choose an Appropriate Theme

Theme is used to decide the outlook of your site, everyone want to get an attractive theme for it. If you are technical enough (some CSS and php knowledge), you can create your own theme. Or you can download the theme the other open source contributors have built. A more realistic way is that you can download a free theme and make some adjustment to theme to make it work better to you. You can go to [http://drupal.org/project/Themes/ ]drupal.org/project/Themes/ to find a list of great and free template.

Congratulations! You have owned a Drupal site now. Considering there are many other great features haven't been included in the initial scripts, in order to better leverage the functions of it, some knowledge of the modules will be needed, you can get to know more about addition modules at drupal.org/project/Modules, but for a beginner, above 3 steps will good enough for you to own a powerful CMS site.

Reference: [http://www.webhostingclue.com/best-drupal-web-hosting/]Best Drupal Web Hosting [http://www.webhostingclue.com/top-10-web-hosting/]Top 10 Web Hosting [http://www.webhostingclue.com/ ]Reliable Affordable Web Hosting Review, Guide and Awards

Sean.Raymond is an expert on online business. He has more than 10 years working experience of guiding people to create their own online business. webhostingclue.com is his web site where he shares the knowledge about how to find appropriate web hosting solution for a small online business and promote it online.

And you can contact sean.ray@webhostingclue.com if you have any question about this article.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_Raymond http://EzineArticles.com/?3-Steps-to-Create-Drupal-Sites&id=1152338

CMS When Do You Really Need It

CMS - When Do You Really Need It?
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Bob_Rose]Bob Rose

Marketers today make a strong case for a content management system (CMS), extolling its virtues in no uncertain terms. But it probably makes sense to take a step back and think: does your organization really need an advanced CMS? If your current in-house team is effectively managing your Website, can you justify a CMS investment to your management team? But at the same time, can your existing solution scale quickly enough to handle expected and unexpected growth?

The real issue here is deciding when to stop ad-hoc manual processes and invest in a CMS. And this decision must be based on 3 things: your business goals, the capabilities of your current solution, and the ROI associated with change.

So let's look at when you should consider a CMS.

Invest in a CMS when:

Your Website looks and reads like a blast from the past

An outdated Website is clearly bad for business. Small Website teams typically comprise of a few HTML and developer experts who present and publish content in the right place with the right design. Hiring more people is not a viable option as work volumes are never consistent and additional costs are hard to justify.

Given a sudden need to scale - like a new branding campaign that mandates style, design, and content changes - delivery timelines become hard to keep. Manual processes will not deliver the desired need for business agility.

Your content information landscape looks like a jungle

Inconsistent categorizing, organizing, and publishing can frustrate business users looking for content. Webmasters may change, but nomenclatures and processes cannot. A clear strategy is thus essential to avoid knowledge silos and mixed-up information architectures.

A CMS can help you:

• Maintain consistency across Website pages

• Control design-and more importantly branding-to the level desired with style sheets, templates, and more

• Assure a consistent, professional experience for visitors, regardless of who is responsible for content

Your organization struggles to put up a simple press release

It is not uncommon to encounter inordinate delays with simple content revisions. Press releases and product updates need to be timely, precise, and deliver value. With the right CMS, your subject matter experts can actively participate in making the Website reflect organizational goals. Without dependency on personnel trained in HTML, you can accelerate Website publishing by giving subject matter experts simple, intuitive tools to easily create, edit and publish content themselves.

Your users constantly complain of missing links

Missing links and Website maintenance struggles are sure signs of the need for a CMS. The right solution can help you maintain essential link integrity, and significantly improve the experience of business users.

Your organization lacks programming and design skills and expertise

If a developer or external expertise is required to correct simple spelling errors or change Website structure, a CMS can surely help. The right solution empowers your non-technical staff to create and modify content as well as design without programming expertise.

Your organization is unable to manage the information explosion

What part of the burgeoning volume of information is actually valuable? How easily is this accessible to users? Serving and managing content served in multiple forms is another challenge--especially in dealing with blogs, Wikis, or Podcasts.

An effective CMS can:

• Manage this from a single point of control

• Quickly identify, tag, compose, and assemble content automatically

• Reduce information duplication, and encourage content reuse

Your organization struggles to ensure quality and freshness of content

Manual systems are seldom effective in ensuring content quality and freshness. A typical manual process involves:

• The marketing/communications team tracking down section owners, and requesting content updates

• Dispatched as a Word document, this content then goes through a long and tedious approval process from various stakeholders

• The content upload team, in dealing with inconsistencies, shifts the workflow back to the content department

It is easy to see how this process can be inefficient and time-consuming.

A CMS can provide complete system auditing and reporting, giving you the ability to manage and track the history of all work done. Every file can be given a full document lifecycle, including check-in, check-out, versioning, rollback, approvals, and scheduling. Intelligent workflow automation ensures that content passes through the appropriate quality gates before publishing.
You can also use the CMS's configurable workflows to assign tasks to any person, and that escalate in case defined thresholds are crossed. For example, e-mail alerts can be sent to content owners of specific sections on a Website, to ensure timely section updates. Once these rules are established, you can make sure that section owners are more responsive in assuring content quality and freshness.

Conclusion

If your Web presence is experiencing any of the above difficulties, it is safe to say that a CMS solution is a necessity. As with any technology purchase it is important to factor in the total-cost-of-ownership before investing. But like we've all heard many times before, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

This article is contributed by Rob Rose - Vice President of Crownpeak. If your Web presence is experiencing any of the above difficulties, it is safe to say that a [http://www.crownpeak.com/]CMS solution is a necessity. As with any technology purchase it is important to factor in the total-cost-of-ownership before investing. But like we've all heard many times before, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bob_Rose http://EzineArticles.com/?CMS---When-Do-You-Really-Need-It?&id=1154131

Building A Web 2.0 Website

Benefits Of Building A Web 2.0 Website!
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Shilpi_C]Shilpi C

Web 2.0 is the new buzz in the world of internet technology. It might sound like some new software as it has the tag of 2.0 attached to it, but, it is nothing even close to a software product, in fact, Web 2.0 has a wider approach to it. It is a set of new internet tools all compiled under one platform just like Internet Explorer. The website design of this platform targets to get more viewers to come together and explore this whole new world. Apart from this, the viewers can give their valuable inputs and share their knowledge on how to make this website a better one.

Web 2.0 has also given website development and hosting a whole new meaning with the number of different tools combined for the usage of the internet. This platform allows people to communicate with each other that benefit both the reader as well as the person uploading the subject. Let us take the example, if a writer is providing details about a certain software or gadget such as an iPod. With the help of the new tools available on Web 2.0, he/she can put a suggestion box where people can provide valuable feedback and how this information can be made more useful.

Don't you want your website to convey the real sense as well as the main objective? Isn't the basic structure as well as the website design important? Just to reiterate what the advantages of using Web 2.0 technology are - as mentioned earlier it's not a new technology, but a new perspective to look at internet-based tools as a revolutionary add-on to enhance and develop your business, as well as integrate it with your general business practices. This gives website design development more options to improve the layout of the website.

Web 2.0 gives you double-edged sword - to directly interact with users to give you a comprehensive feedback to make your website far more user-friendly, easy-to-use and of course a far more than a 'normal website'. There are means and ways where you can just enter your information into the sign up form and click submit to get and operate single blog solutions in a matter of minutes! You can also customize your own Standalone weblog software through which you can control management screens, where you can conduct various administrative tasks using relatively easy interfaces.

The author is a web specialist and Internet Marketing expert with vast experience in the field of online marketing. She is presently associated as Internet Marketing Manager with an [http://www.idslogic.com/]offshore outsourcing India company providing web based solutions including [http://www.idslogic.com/web-design-development.html]web design India and [http://www.idslogic.com/seo-services.html]SEO services India to global clients.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shilpi_C [http://ezinearticles.com/?Benefits-Of-Building-A-Web-2.0-Website!&id=1159707 ]http://EzineArticles.com/?Benefits-Of-Building-A-Web-2.0-Website!&id=1159707

Content Management System Website Template

Content Management System Website Template Hybrid
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Dan_M_Peterson]Dan M Peterson

Purchasing a website template is a sure way to reduce development cost and time of your website. Typically, website templates are HTML based or contained in a Flash environment. To adapt the newly purchased website template, you must open the document in an HTML or Flash editor, and insert your content in the website template. If you are a proficient web specialist, you can have the website template and its unique content activated in your web server in a short time.

Unfortunately, there are many disadvantages to this web development route. Not everyone who wants a website is a proficient web specialist. Special editors, such as Dreamweaver and Flash, are required to edit the website template. Secondly, each time a new content needs to be added or edited, you have to reopen the document in those specialized web editors.

From a different perspective, a website can easily be developed from a Content Management System (CMS). Examples of popular Content Management Systems include Joomla, Mambo, and Drupal. Many Content Management Systems are free to download and use. Using a CMS, you can insert your content and graphics with ease. If you have skills using a basic word processor and proficient in computer use, you can develop a website using a CMS. The disadvantage of using a CMS is completely the opposite of the disadvantage of using a website template. Typically, CMS will not have the graphics and styling that you want for your website. It will require a proficient web designer to modify the layout and styling of the CMS.

What if you can have the best of both worlds? The next generation web development system is a hybrid that combines the style and beauty of a website template, and the ease of use of a Content Management System. With the Simple Web Development System (SWDS), you can choose the website layout template from hundreds of design, insert your customized content, and upload it all in your web server, without the specialized skills of a web developer.

The Simple Web Development System is currently under development at Marseno Web. Soon, anyone, who needs a web site developed, can choose from hundreds of web site templates that do not require technical skills to develop. For more details description of the Simple Web Development System, please visit my complete [http://www.marseno.com/article-Simple-Web-Development-System.htm]article at Marseno Web.

About Me: I'm a web designer and developer. I'm developing the next generation Web Development System at Marseno Web. Please view my work and progress at http://www.marseno.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dan_M_Peterson http://EzineArticles.com/?Content-Management-System-Website-Template-Hybrid&id=1158194