WestHost Webmaster Connection September 13th, 2007

Special    End of Summer Special—Our Best Ever!  Web Development Tips    Quick Accessibility Testing  Marketing Tips    How to Get Started With Google AdWords  Notable Site    Tutorialized(TM)  Quote of the Week    How often are you supremely satisfied?

Special

The End of Summer Special--the best plan ever at WestHost! Extended for a limited time, the End of Summer Special offers 25,000 MB of disk space, 500 GB of bandwidth per month, 500 e-mail accounts and lets you host up to 50 Web sites. It's by far the best special ever offered by WestHost. The plan also includes the osCommerce shopping cart, free shared SSL certificate and compatibility with most any merchant account, among many other applications and services. Take advantage of this valuable offer yourself, or tell your friends and family about the incredible deal available right now at WestHost (and also get that referral credit)! Visit http://www.westhost.com/end-of-summer-special.html for more information. To upgrade your account to the End of Summer Special, use this special form: https://corp2.westhost.com/0807upgrade. back to top

Web Development Tips

Quick Accessibility Testing By: Emil Stenstrom A recent project of mine required me to do a quick review of the accessibility level of a site. Nothing serious, just to show what was possible to test and where the site scored right now. I managed to assemble a small list of tools that I believe did a rather good job. This article is a list of those tools, and some tips on how to use them. First off, to do a real accessibility test, you need real people, with real tasks to accomplish. These are not tools to replace people. Instead, they can give you a quick rundown on where you stand, and find things you've missed. I like to compare it with HTML validation: Validation is a great way to find your errors, but just because you validate does not mean you have good code. Oh, by the way, I limited this to only free tools. Thought you'd like that.Also, for your enjoyment, I've split this article into three parts (you're just soooo spoiled): Automatic testing Semi-automatic testing Manual testing Automatic testing Automatic testing is one of the quickest way you can check your site's accessibility. What the authors of the below tools have done is to go through the available standards, and tried to find things that a computer can check. The tools will not find every error, but the things they do find, they find quickly. This is why I like to start with these. (Click Here to continue reading this article) back to top

Marketing Tips

How to Get Started With Google AdWords By: Stephen Ashton Google AdWords innovative pay per click advertising engine is one of the best and most useful tools currently available. Although not the only program offering this service, it is by far the best simply because it reaches so many people. By advertising with AdWords, you have access to the 100 million Google users that use their search engine. By leveraging Adsense as well you are getting access to millions more targeted visitors. Another key is that Google rewards you with more clicks for less as you write better and create more optimized ads! More on this later... Getting Started It costs $5 to sign up and get started with AdWords. Once you've signed up, you need to select your keywords. This step is very important as it will be these keywords that will launch your ads. Select keywords that target your product or service. Make sure you do some research before you start entering in your keywords to ensure that people are using these search terms to look for your product. The more popular the keyword, the more Google charges for each click. To help keep track of the performance of your ad campaigns it is useful to manage the selected keywords in multiple AdGroups and this will also help you to use ad text specific to each keyword. Your next step is to decide where to target your ads. You can choose to have your ads only appearing on Google's search page and their network of partner sites. When people perform a search that is related to your keywords, your ad will appear either on top or on the right hand side bar. You can also choose to have your ads appear on Google's Adsense network. These are web site publishers who have allowed Google to display ads within the content of their web sites. You must also select which geographic locations you would like your ad to appear. If you are selling a service that is only useful in the UK then you don't want to be wasting money by paying for clicks from US users! Again, it can be useful to create AdGroups or campaigns for each individual country if you are selling world wide. (Click Here to continue reading this article) Did you know you that WestHost provides business account clients $25 of Google Adwords credit free! You can read more about this valuable offer here: http://www.westhost.com/google-adwords-credit.html To access your Google AdWords credit, log in to your Site Manager control panel, select Install and Manage under Site Applications and then click the Google AdWords Credit 1.0 installation button. back to top

Notable Site

Tutorialized(TM) Need a quick tutorial on creating 3D text graphics in Photoshop? Or perhaps you need a PHP script to manage your site's content? If you'd rather not run to the store for an entire book on the subject, click on over to tutorialized.com. Always free, these community contributed tutorials cover every aspect of Web site design, tools and development. Sign up today to cut down the learning curve and get your project completed in no time. You can even share your shortcuts and insight with a grateful community of Web developers just like yourself. To find out more, please visit http://www.tutorialized.com/ back to top

Quote of the Week

How often are you supremely satisfied? "Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it." - Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female Prime Minister       back to top

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