Reliable web hosting from home saves money for future business growth. Once a business is profitable and website traffic increases, it may become necessary to pay for professional hosting.

A computer with a high speed Internet connection is required to host a website. This computer will act as a server and needs to be kept online at all times.

Web servers

The first step in creating reliable web hosting from home is to install a web server on the computer. This can be done with any operating system but most professional hosts use the Linux platform. Most computer users use Windows which has a web server application built in. This program runs in the background and listens to requests from people on the Internet. It finds the website saved on the computer and sends it to the users requesting it.

Next, computers with a local area network are required to configure their router to enable web access. This can be done in the router’s control panel by forwarding outside web requests to the web server’s port. The default port for web requests is 80.

Domain name

In order for remote computers to connect to the web server, a domain is necessary. This is the name of computer’s server on the Internet. Many sites offer free subdomain and domain name selection cost less than $10 a year.

Most services offer free updating of IP addresses, which is important if the computer’s Internet connection does not have a static IP address. It is crucial to know the computer’s external IP address and have a way to update the domain’s DNS records.

DNS Records

Configuring the DNS record allows remote access to the web server by typing in the domain name chosen for the web site. Internet connections with a static IP address simply have to input the IP address once into the DNS records.

Connections with a dynamic IP address require the use of a service similar to DynDns. This is a utility that updates the DNS record every time the IP address changes. All that is required is the creation of an account, selection of the preferred domain name and choosing a name to use as a sub-domain.

Security

The last step in creating reliable web hosting from home is to secure the computer from malicious software and attacks. Updated antivirus and anti-spyware programs and a firewall are necessary for good web hosting. Create rules in the firewall to allow the port chosen earlier access to the Internet, as well as any other programs commonly used.

Hosting from Home

Home-based web hosting is an increasingly common occurrence for new business owners and hobby or professional webmasters alike. Reliable hosting websites can be found for free if the proper steps are taken and security issues are resolved. Installing the right software, configuring each program, creating a domain name and creating a website are all that’s needed for free web hosting from home.

You may have heard the buzz around Google+ and the infamous Google+1. It was introduced only a few months ago, April 1st to be exact, and has been dubbed a “Facebook killer”.

It’s a small +1 button or icon that can be found on search results. You can also integrate it into your web pages (quite easily I might add). Once clicked upon it tells Google that you like that particular page or search listing.

So it essentially gives Google your “vote” for a particular web page. Since Google revolves their business model on giving searchers the results that are “voted” best. You can imagine how this will help your web site to come up a bit higher than other web sites.

And if that wasn’t good enough there’s more benefit. Each +1 is front page displayed on a Google user’s profile for all of their friends to see (which could be thousands). Good recommendations, as you might already know, are some of the best types of advertising. That makes these very positive posts. And can you guess what the best part is? It’s totally free.

Enough choice, but, what choice is best? Photo by Allen Rockwell

Instant voting

Since this is tied already into Google’s network of sites. Google receives this vote instantly. Other votes, like Facebook’s “like” button, must be discovered by Google’s search engine crawlers. These crawlers scan the web tirelessly looking for content, but if it doesn’t find your “like” or “vote” then your Google results can’t have any positive impact. Also it weights these likes or “votes” based on the pages they are on. So Google may not give someone’s Facebook “like” or Digg.com’s “digg” very much value at all.

With Google+1 your rating is passed directly to Google for processing. One other thing to note is that it doesn’t appear as much of a social media or techy / nerdy installation. It has Google’s all ages and all industries feel. Unlike some of these networks out there that are associated with the tech world or younger generation like Foursquare, Gowalla, Reddit and Digg. It has some clear advantages.

How to implement

Integrate Google’s Plus 1 in Your Site is extremely easy. You just copy and paste one line of code into the any page. Google does the rest. You will notice Google’s webmaster tools has reporting for your current +1 status.

{code type=html}


{/code}

{code type=html}


{/code}

There are some potential pitfalls

As with anything that relates to Google’s search results. They will eventually be manipulated. There are already web sites selling Google +1s. One site was selling 1000 +1s for $250. Claiming they are all real users and would be delivered in one week. Abuse by your competitors could give them an unfair advantage. Especially before Google works out good methods for identifying cheaters.

Why You will need Google+

The following video will explain the basic concepts of Google+.

Video by Epipheo Studios

Conclusion

So… What are you waiting for? As with all internet trends you must strike while the iron is hot! Get in first and you will have an advantage. The later you get in the more you will have to play catch up. And no one likes to come in last place.

Dubbed Gershwin to honor the famous pianist and composer, most known for his ability to mesh both classical and jazz musical genres together to create great musical classics like Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris.

Well, here’s the rub, this latest version is actually a lot like Gershwin’s music. It’s simple and smooth but very sophisticated behind the scenes.

330,000 Gershwin Downloads in 24 hours

WordPress has been gaining exponential popularity among web content creators. Earlier in 2011, WordPress 3.1 was downloaded over 15 million times in less than 5 months. Hold on to your horses, WordPress 3.2 was downloaded over 330,000 times in the first 24 hours.

This does give the impression that WordPress users were waiting and ready for this newest release. For most users, the biggest improvement is that Gershwin is lighter and faster as inconsequential code has been removed and queries used for speed optimization have been redone.

Gershwin + WordPress, simple and sophisticated.

On the User Interface Side

For those familiar with WordPress, the user interface is now using a new styled ‘Full Screen’ mode that is called DFW (Distraction Free Writing). When you go into the full-screen mode, all the tools and widgets located on the dashboard fade into the background for a much simpler and less cluttered writing experience. When you need them, you just click back up into the faded area and they reappear. Users seem to love it!

New Default Theme

With the release of 3.2 there is a new default theme. The theme called Twenty-Eleven is incredible simple and offers far more customization than the earlier versions. It has been build from the ground up with HTML5 and CSS3. This theme sets the new standards in theme world and most importantly, it provides the users with a great-looking and customizable theme. Take a look at the theme options.

The Twenty Eleven theme can be customized to your likings.

Dropped support for IE 6

The mother ship seems to rarely thank other companies for what they do, but this time Microsoft did. When it was announced that Gershwin would not support Internet Explorer 6.0, Microsoft thanked WordPress for their move in supporting users globally to use up to date browsers by no longer supporting outdated browser technologies like IE6.

For more information on dropping support for IE6, check the IE6Countdown and IE6 No More.

Gershwin Gives Credit to Its Parents

If you helped to incubate and give life to this bouncing new baby version of WordPress, you can now get your credit. A credit screen is available from footer in the dashboard, and it gives credit to each person who contributed to Gershwin, along with a link to their WordPress.org profile.

The credit’s list starts with project leads, then goes to the extended core team, then recent rock stars, and finally at the bottom of the list are the remaining core contributors. Pat yourselves on the back!

PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5 Now Required

On a more technical note, a change that’s been coming down the pipe for quite a while is that WordPress 3.2 has minimum requirements that include PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL5. It basically means that support for earlier versions of both pieces of software will no longer be supported.

You can actually check to see if your server has the correct versions of both pieces of software by going to the plugin called, WordPress Requirements Check.

Downloads and more information

If you are already using WordPress, please log on to your administration section and update your version of WordPress to the latest. If you are new to WordPress, please take a look at the following resources.

• WordPress.org
• WordPress.org / download
• WordPress.org / themes
• WordPress.org / plugins

I was getting inspired and stumbled on a beautiful painting by Tierno Beauregard. It addressed the feeling I had when I went back to the forest perfectly. Returning to our roots. Homecoming. Retour aux sources.

Enjoy the painting.

• Author: Tierno Beauregard
• Title: Retour aux sources
• Year: 2010
• Website

I always feel that the winter is taking one month too long. The first couple of cold months are actually quite fun, but the last month always makes me grumpy.

When browsing DeviantArt, I stumbled upon a great illustration. A woman is resting together with a young deer, beautifully crafted. This crafts exactly the relaxed feeling I have with the spring.

Designer: Graphic-Staff
Link to Art: Maya Spring III

WordPress is an award winning CMS. It won Packt open source CMS award in 2007 and best open source CMS award in 2009. It is an open source project which means hundreds of people are working on it.

If offers thousands of widgets, plug-ins and themes. It is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything. It is an affordable software since most of the themes are free. When it comes to deployment, WordPress can be deployed using various methods on a hosting environment.

It provides users with the option to download the current version of WordPress from WordPress.org. WordPress can also be installed via Packet management system. You can also deploy a ready to use Turnkey WordPress appliance which does not require any manual set up.

Features of WordPress

• Local Install: WordPress is designed to be installed on your own web server, or shared hosting account, which gives you complete control over the web log. You can easily access and modify everything related to the web log. This is not possible in third party hosted services.
• Portable Core: It allows you to have the tree of WordPress related files. This forms the back-end of your publicly displayed web log.
• UTC friendly: It allows you to define your time as an offset from Universal Co-ordinate time (UTC). This allows all the time-related elements stored in the database to be stored as GMT values. It also helps you to display the correct time on your web log, even if your host server is located in a different time zone.
• User management: It uses user levels to control user-access to different features. This gives you the ability of allowing individual users to create or modify content in your web log, by changing their user-level.
• User profiles: Every user on your website can define a profile, with details such as their email address, instant messaging aliases etc, if they want to. Users can also select the way in which their details are displayed on the web log.
• Easy installation and upgrade: It hardly takes five minutes to install WordPress and it is extremely simple to do that. Also you can easily upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and it takes even less time to install.
• Dynamic page generation: With WordPress you do not need to rebuild all your pages every time you update your web log or any other feature. Whenever a viewer request a page from your web log, all pages are generated using the database and the templates. This makes updating your web log, or its design as fast as possible, and required server storage space usage is minimal.
• Internationalization and Localization: WordPress allows you to create a web log which is localized in a way you want with a language of your choice. To localize the WordPress, get text method is used.
• RSS feeds: WordPress fully supports RSS1.0 and RSS 2.0. It provides feeds for the latest posts, for categories, comments, well, like we said earlier, for anything you want. If you have more options for your readers to keep track of different sections of your web log, the easier it is for you to spread the word around the world.

Writing, publishing, editing posts have never been easier in the smooth and easy to use Administration section: WP-Admin.

• Cruft free permalinks: It makes the URLs of all the pages in your web log conform to a standard, cruft-free system. All the links are structured, sensible, and understandable to human and machines, including search engines. Clean URLs are a prerequisite for search engine optimization and an improved user experience.
• Inter-blog communication: WordPress comes ready for PingBack and TrackBack. These two are very useful ways of connecting with other web logs.
• Template driven design: WordPress makes use of templates to generate pages dynamically. You can modify the presentation of content by editing the templates using the template editor tool and template tags.
• Template and file editor: With the help of file editor you can edit your templates and other WordPress related files, right in your browser without having to worry about downloading and uploading the files in order to edit them.
• Template tags: These tags make it easier to design the content and information displayed on your web log. You need not have any knowledge of PHP to design your web log.
• Themes: You can skin your web log using readily available themes, or styles. You can also create and share your own themes.
• Plug-ins: Plug-ins enhance the functionality of your web log. Using these plug-ins, you can do anything you want to with your web design.
• Password protection: This allows you to share specific things with certain people.
• File/Picture uploading: it allows you to upload pictures or files, and link to them or display them in your articles. You can also create thumbnails of pictures when you upload them.
• Categories: This allows you to organize your posts into categories, sub-categories and sub-sub-categories.
• Save drafts: You can save your unfinished articles and work on them later. You can publish them later when you are done with them.
• Previewing posts: Before publishing you can preview the articles and check how it will look like.
• Desktop tools: You do not require a browser to update your weblog; you can use any desktop blogging tool that supports the Metaweblog or Blogger API.
• Sidebar: It provides a friendly browser sidebar.
• Formatting: WordPress makes your web pages smoother and appealing. It has text-formatting plug-ins that cleans up your content and adds typographic features to your articles.

Benefits of WordPress

The number of highly useful features WordPress offers is incredible.The benefits are less in number but most definitely interesting.

• Highly affordable: WordPress is highly affordable. Most of its features can be used for free. If you want to make use of some more features, you can buy them at an affordable price.
• SEO friendly: WordPress helps to optimize your website by adding tags to all your pages and posts. It is also very easy to update regularly, and Google loves fresh content!
• Customization: you can easily change the color and look of your website in just few clicks. WordPress provides an editor which is easy to use, along with many different themes.
• Social Media: WordPress is completely compatible with all forms of social media like Facebook, You tube and twitter.
• No Spam: You need not worry about Spam as WordPress has Akismet pre-installed which blocks all the Spam.
• Automatic backups: it keeps backing up your website automatically and you do not have to do the daily backup on your own.
• Free support: WordPress community has a lot of active members to guide you if you require any help to fix any issue.

With plethora of features and benefits, WordPress has surpassed other content management systems. Using WordPress design boosts your site’s performance and helps your business to generate more revenue. All you need to do is to hire a professional WordPress designer who guarantees best results.

Enjoy using WordPress for your own adventures.

WordPress

• WordPress.org
• WordPress.com (Hosted solutions)
• Download / WordPress.org
• Themes / WordPress.org
• Plugins / WordPress.org

Resources

• WP Beginner
• 25+ Essential Articles for WordPress Beginners
• 10 Essential WordPress Plugins For New WordPress Installation
• 20 WordPress Theme Frameworks and Starting Resources
• All You Need to Know to Design and Code WordPress Themes
• Cheat Sheet For WordPress Theme Designers
• 70+ Top Quality FREE WordPress Theme Resource
• 15 Tips And Plugins To Monitor, Speed Up And Optimize Your WordPress Blog
• Best Mobile Applications To Manage Your WordPress Blog

Totally awesome Gold Pendant Necklaces available at LusterForever jewelers stores.

• Author: Werner Kunz
• Date: November 28, 2009
• Camera:Nikon D90

The colors are really intense and fit beautifully together. The contrast is also awesome. I believe this photo editing work has been done in Photomatix, a plugin for all the major photo-editing programs, which allows a photographer to create high-contrast photographs. Interesting.

Anyway, enjoy the photograph! And if you are in the area, you know where to go to relax.

Some of the things you consider include:

1. Disk Space

This is the amount of space that will be allocated by the web hosting company for your website. The amount of space you require will be determined by the size of the files in your website. If you have a simple website with a few images and text content only, you will not require a large disk space. A 500MB space will be ideal.

On the other hand, if you plan to host large files such as audio and video files as well as large e-books, you should get a larger disk space. Depending on the files you are hosting, you can opt for 5GB, 10GB or even unlimited hosting. With unlimited hosting, there is no space limit to the size of files you can host.

2. Bandwidth

This refers to the amount of traffic that will be allowed to access your website each month. Some site hosting companies refer to it as monthly data transfer. Simple websites that are not targeted for the mass market may not require a huge bandwidth allocation. On the other hand, if you are marketing to a wider audience and anticipate huge amounts of traffic to your website, getting unlimited bandwidth is your best option.

3. Server Uptime

Keeping your Website Online is Important — Photo by Fatcow

Server uptime refers to the amount of time the web hosting company’s servers remain functional. Anytime the server fails to function, your website will not be accessible. Ideally, you should choose a company that offers a minimum of 99.7% uptime and above for 3 consecutive months. No company can claim to offer 100% server uptime as there are many human and natural causes that can lead to server downtimes.

4. Price

Price is also a major thing to consider when choosing a hosting package. Compare prices from different web hosting companies to find one that is affordable. However, as you compare the price, look for other features in the package too.

The following points are important in your web hosting account; this is what makes your price.

• Disk space
• Bandwidth
• Number of domains that can be hosted
• Number of email accounts allowed

5. Type of Web Hosting

There are two major types of web hosting packages you can go for: shared hosting or dedicated hosting. Most websites are hosted on shared servers and they work well. However, if your website has e-commerce capabilities such as a shopping cart and you need to provide a secure gateway to your customers who will be buying online, you will have to get dedicated hosting.

Web Hosting solutions for any purpose — Photo by Fatcow

Shared hosting is typically cheaper than dedicated hosting. However, your website is hosted together with other websites on the same server. This means that if there is a problem with one of the other websites, e.g. a sudden surge of unusual traffic such that the server fails, your website will also be affected.

With dedicated hosting, your website is hosted on its own secure server and there are fewer chances of it getting downtimes.

The above are some of the things you should consider when you are looking for a good web hosting company. Above all, get a company that offers good customer support.

Looking for cheap business cards?

Chinese is the second language of the web with 444.9 million users in 2010 and looks set to continue growing through 2011 with other languages such as Spanish and Japanese also catching up. If your website is in the business of making money or selling you are missing out on a potential 78% of all internet users by providing an English only version of your website.

In many cases an English only website will suffice for small and local businesses, but if you are looking to reach out to users in other cultures using their native languages then follow some of our top tips for cross-cultural web design.

Performing Keyword Research

Proper keyword research is probably the most important aspect of launching a website in another language, especially for e-commerce and businesses selling products or services. Many will be tempted into simply translating their English based keywords for products into the target language which is a definite step on the road to failure.

A classic example of bad keyword translation is for ‘Car Insurance’; Google Translate gives the result of ‘l’assurance automobile’ in French. While this translation is accurate it is not a typical search term that French users would use, whereas they would most likely use something along the lines of ‘assurance voiture’.

Language specific keyword research should be approached in much the same way as English keyword research by researching popular search terms using tools such as Wordtracker and Google Insight, while also employing a professional translator to help brainstorm for synonyms and popular keywords for your sector.

Choosing the Right Domain

This age old debate never fails to arise on discussions of multi-lingual websites. Is it better to use a country code top level domain (ccTLD) or a sub domain of your main domain?

Both choices have their ups and downs, for instance using a ccTLD such as www.yourdomain.it may make your site look slightly more authoritative in Italy to local search engines and visitors than a .com/.net address. Although there is much debate as to whether this is truly the case.

Using ccTLD’s is useful if you are looking to target countries or regions, but don’t get caught in the trap if you simply want to provide alternative languages for your site. There are many countries that speak the same language; you wouldn’t really want your Spanish .es site serving your South American visitors would you? Add in the cost of some ccTLD’s, maintainability issues of separate domains and hosting and you have to ask yourself if you targeting a specific language or a specific country.

The alternative is to use a sub domain of your main domain such as www.it.yourdomain.com or even www.yourdomain.com/it. This method is more practical if you are looking to provide alternative languages of your content, yet are not solely focused on selling products or services in a specific country or region.

Localizing your Website – Cross-Cultural Content

Much in the same way that keywords require research, multilingual content should be correctly optimized and localized if you are serious about making money or adding value to your visitors on your foreign language sites.

Different cultures around the world have different perceptions of viewing content and design issues, both design and content layout issues should be taken into account when designing for foreign audiences. A UK visitor may respond better to content that is in a less formal, almost ‘chatty’ tone; German visitors may respond positively to clean, modern designs and a more corporate tone.

Getting international design and content right can involve a lot of trial and error, so use tools at your disposal such as Google Website Optimiser to create A/B or Multivariate tests to try out different combinations of layout or content on your visitors. You may well be surprised with the results.

Manage your Translations

You probably have hundreds of pages of content on your site, and are probably asking yourself how you will manage so many different page and languages? Well management of translated content needs careful consideration straight from the design stage.

Many CMS systems have the capability already built in to manage translations, while systems such as WordPress have readily available third party plugins that can help manage translations.

Managing translated content can be challenging, especially if you are dealing in many languages, what happens when the English source content is changed? Do you re-translate all of the other language content translated?

There are other efficient ways of working with translated content including the open source GNU gettext, which allows your professional translators to work from easy to use .po message files.

Statistics Analyses

Google Analytics should never be ignored; first you should make sure you have a separate account for each domain or sub domain you have running. This will help to segment and break down the analysis of each site to help draw conclusions on how each country or language version is performing and where to improve.

You should be able to see clear statistics about where your main target audiences are coming from and where you can refine content and landing pages to improve visitor bounce rates. Read more on analyzing your statistics.

Research, Refine & Re-write!

Visit PsPrint and learn how you can create effective and excellent-looking business cards.