Internet Marketing, Web Technologies & News – Best Web Ezy

A forum is a web application that holds discussions and postings.  Unlike a blog, this is generally a community with lots of user inputs.

A little history – the earliest web forum was started in the 1996.  (Feel that I am getting old.) 

Each forum has an administrator looking after the whole forum.  The bigger forums would have a few sections, looked after by a few moderators as well. 

You can always find useful information and 2nd (up to probably 100th) opinions of any topic that you can think of. 

Forums are written in various languages, driven by a robust database.  The most popular ones are PHP and ASP. 

Most of the time, inputting in a forum does require membership.  You have to be a member of the forum to place a post.  And the members have to visit the forum to know what’s going on.  This builds up loyalty among the group as well.

Online marketers – yes it is possible to advertise on forums.  But look for:

• popularity (indicated by number of visitors at any time)
• search-engine-visibility (indicated by page rank and inbound links)

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New standard of the World Wide Web has increased again.  Not many people are familiar with HTML 4 yet, and now HTML 5 is released.

The main difference of HTML 5 from version 4 is as below:

• New parsing rules
• New elements – section, video, progress
• New Input attributes – time, email, url
• New attributes – ping, charset, async
• Global attributes (that can be applied for every element) – id, tabindex, repeat
• Elements no longer compatible with HTML 4 – a, hr, strong (what?  no HR?)
• Elements dropped – center, frame, strike (who use frame anyway)

The HTML 5 project is powered by WHATWG started 2004 (really) and was adopted by W3C in 2007 as the new standard of the markup language.  The standard was originally named Web Applications 1.0. 

Fellow web designers – some more fun stuff to play with

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Have you employed email marketing?  If not, why not try it now?

The beauty of it is that you can keep on selling to your customers (subscribers only please) every month or even every week!  And they won’t feel annoyed – because they signed up to receive news from you!

If you have, then good on you!  But is your emails converting?  Remember, the focus is to sell your product / service, not to tell your customers that your boss just gave birth to twins.

Email marketing is not like sending a 1,500 word essay to your customer.  Remember internet users do not have patience.  Therefore, your design should be:

• Straight to the point – bullet pointed features would be useful
• Use thumbnails – if you have products for sale, put a pretty thumbnail of the product to attract them
• Upselling – try to offer some more things.  Let’s say if you have received an order, why don’t you send a thank you email and offer some related / extension products? 

(Guidelines of HTML email design)

Happy emailing

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2009, Council Bluffs, Iowa.

How much is Google planning to spend?  Aweful lot of money – US$600 million.

It is still under construction, and is going to bring 200+ jobs to the US, including datacentre managers, Linux administrators and technology assistants.

This is also built to support the growing demand for its online services. 

Since last month, the Google Datacentre (and similar services) is going to be exempted from sales tax.  Google is going to pay ~US$65 million property tax for the next 15 years, US$6 million in sales taxes in the next 2 years from the purchase of building materials, and another lots for other fees, payroll and income taxes.

And 2 more Datacentres coming up – The Dalles, Ore and Lenoir, NC.

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Many people (the legitimate ones) write blogs off their own brain and hands.  It is honestly a hard work.

Therefore, they do deserve a cup of coffee / a jug of beer (according to your interest) from time to time.

Many people find having the “buy me a cup of coffee” icon at the bottom of a post, asking for a donation, is actually quite a good source of income.  Thank God that WordPress does have this plug-in, making everyone’s life simplier.

And you can change the icon to whatever you like.  You can put sushi, sandwich, buffet (!!), juice…. you name it.

Note: If you would like to buy me a drink, you can also send me your blog URL and tell me the anchor text that you’d like me to link on.  I’ll add you to my list, if our team (that’s me) finds your blog is with appropriate/legitimate content.

If you don’t have a blog, well, it does not hurt to know a good friend, too.

So, would you like to buy me a cup of coffee?

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