If you want Flash elements on your webpage you can design them or buy a flash template, but you must remember that to be able to see your Flash online the visitor will need the appropriate Flash player installed into their Browser. So, if you add a movie in Flash 5 the visitor will need the Flash 5 Player - or a more recent version.

If you create a Flash MX movie the Browser needs the Flash 6 Player and Flash MX 2004 needs the Flash 7 Player. Standard browsers like Internet Explorer come with a Flash Player installed. Of course there is no guarantee it will be the most recent version. When Macromedia brings out a new version of Flash they also bring out a new version of the Flash Player. Nobody has the new Player at first.  The average visitor will not go out of their way to get the new Player or even know what a Flash Player is.

Aside from Flash problems with SEO crawlers, it is often well worth the down side to get the excellent looks that Flash can
deliver.  Does this mean you must create movies in the latest versions of Flash?  The answer is no.  Personally I always use the most widespread technology so that anyone can see it, but push the creativity end of it until it is as hot as I want.

Flash Template #15581
This means build movies in the oldest version of Flash that will be supported in old and new versions of Flash players.  It
can still be a high impact Flash display - and almost everybody sees it without the new download doldrums.

The Uncle Grandpa of Flash,
Arthur Browning

Online boutiques, specialty shops and stores, can make a good profit. Webpages that sell something, especially unique, antique, customized or designed by commission can sell worldwide with little if any overhead. Why? They do not have direct competition and they do not need a storefront.

WordPress Theme # 12958

WordPress Themes are especially good because they are attractive, functional, inexpensive and fully supported by the WordPress organization with absolutely FREE hosting. WordPress Themes give a great look online for your specialty store or shop. You can see WordPress Themes at Template Monster for specialty shops, online stores and boutiques.  A large selection of Wordpress Themes for all purposes can be found here.

A major reason for growth of webpage sites is that small businesses, especially specialty shops and online stores can do so well regionally, nationally and internationally. Specialty shops and stores that are online can easily become well known businesses in their area of offerings.

Surfing With Abandon,
Arthur Browning

Good SEO is important if you want to build traffic and customers form the search engines.  The work is worth it if you observe some helpful points.  These points will help you get it done right.

Link Popularity with Internal Links - Yes! It is important, your internal links that point to your own target page can build popularity. You can increase the target page’s rank by linking to it from your homepage or other strong pages.

Age of Website - The date of the first indexable content texts were read by the search engines. The older your website is the more status you get in page rank.

Keyword Used in Texts - Focus on your keywords with content and vice versa. Adding unrelated content is not good for your readers or search engines.

Anchor Text of the Inbound Links – The Anchor text of the inbound link is an important assessment of what your website
is all about.

Keywords Use In Your Title Tags – HTML title tags should contain the key terms that you want for your page’s content,
descriptions, and other tags.

Global Link Popularity - Get links from websites with a higher Page Rank. Alexa’s page ranking system works on the basis of a 0 to 10 ranking. Getting a 5 is good - a 6 is better - a 7 is best. If you can get higher than that consider yourself lucky.

Rate for Adding New Inbound Links - The timing and rate of adding of external links to your domain – try to add links steadily. If possible get links that bring traffic from quality sites.

Link Popularity for Your Market - The link weight or authority of a target website amongst its topical peers in the online world goes up strongly when a link is gotten from a top site for your particular keywords.

Relevance of Inbound Links Topics - Websites who link to you with tags, anchors, and other textual content that is relevant to your keywords give you a better result.

High Gas Taxes - Not Even Enough to Fund the War to Keep Oil Profits High,
Arthur Browning

Bed and Breakfast businesses have sprung up all over the country in urban, suburban and rural locales. Small niche hotels and bed and breakfast establishments are usually a family owned business. These small business hotels and bed and breakfasts are popular not only with travelers but with corporations as meeting places.

Flash Template # 13518

Some married couples and fiancees go to many bed and breakfasts as a hobby. Taking photos, communicating with friends who also travel and collect niche hotel and bed and breakfast experiences. Because of this niche hotels and bed and breakfasts have often been chosen over a local motel.

In addition, these bed and breakfast hobbyists may visit the same niche hotel but stay in different rooms each time because of decor and theme specializations of each room. And there are many foodies who visit because of the menus on which some of these little hotels and bed and breakfasts base their notoritey.

Corporations are more frequently selecting niche hotels and bed and breakfasts as meeting places for conferences, luncheons or local negotiations for a nearby project. These small businesses are often more accomodating and sometimes more friendly to business meetings and providing lodging to attendees.

What can a website offer to these businsses? VERY much. Couples and corporations like to see the place they may potentially meet - to know why it would be better than staying at the Ramada or Hyatt, or having to commute back and forth from a project site to lodging. A good website built with a webpage template is cost effective and very persuasive if based on a Flash template or other type of template.

The example above is a Flash template, designed just for niche hotels and bed and breakfasts. Flash templates make a big visual and audio impact to visitors, but other types of webpage templates are available. To see a selection of Flash templates look at this webpage. To see the whole collection of webpage templates for bed and breakfasts and small hotels look at this page, all low cost options with beautiful and functional design.

Keeper of the Inn,
Arthur Browning

We can’t all be SEO experts but here is a list of 13 ways to give your SEO a boost from the experts.

1) Search Engine Crawl Error Pages - It’s important to check search engine crawl errors reports to stay on top of your site and its pages performance. Checking the error reports can help you determine when and where Googlebot or other crawler is having trouble indexing your content - which can help you find a solution to the problem.

2) Create/update robots.txt and sitemap files - These files are supported by major search engines and are very useful tools for ensuring that crawlers index your site content while avoiding those sections/files that you feel are unimportant or cause problems in the crawl process. In some cases you will see the proper use of these files make all a big difference between total crawl failure and a full index of the content pages which makes them crucial from an SEO standpoint.

3) Check Googlebot activity reports - These reports tell you how long it’s taking Googlebot to access your pages. If it is taking search engine crawlers a long time to index your pages it may be that there are times when they “time out” and stop trying. If the crawlers are unable to call your pages up quickly there is a good chance that users are experiencing the same lag in load times.

4) Check how your site looks to browsers without image and JavaScript support - One of the best ways to determine just what your site looks like to a search engine crawler is to view your pages in a browser with image and JavaScript support disabled. Mozilla’s Firefox browser has a plug-in available called the “Web Developer Toolbar” that adds this functionality and a lot more to the popular standards-compliant browser. If after turning off image and JavaScript support you aren’t able to make sense of your pages at all it is a good sign that your site is not well-optimized for search.

5) Make sure that all navigation is in HTML, not images - A common mistake in web design is to use images for site navigation. For some companies SEO is not a concern, for anyone worried about having well-optimized pages this should be the first thing to go. Not only will it render your site navigation basically valueless for search engine crawlers, but within reason very similar effects can usually be achieved with CSS roll-overs that maintain the aesthetic impact while still providing valuable and relevant link text to search engines.

6) Check that all images include ALT text - This is another place to optimize your pages. Search engines can only see your
ALT text, if you’ve provided it.

7) Use Flash content sparingly - From an SEO standpoint Flash files might as well be spacer GIFs - they’re empty. Search engines are not able to index text/content within a Flash file. For this reason, while Flash can do a lot for presentation, from an accessibility and SEO standpoint it should be used very sparingly and only on non-crucial content.

8) Make sure each page has a unique < title > and meta description tag - Optimization of < title > tags is one of the most important on-page SEO points. Many webmasters are apparently unaware and use either duplicate < title > tags for multiple pages or do not target search traffic at all within this valuable tag. Run a search on a competitive keyword of your choice on Google - click on the first few links that show up and see what text appears in the title bar for the window. You should see right away that this is a key place to include target keywords for your pages.

9) Make sure that important page elements are HTML - Crawlers are basically only looking at your source code. Anything you’ve put together in a Flash movie, an image or any other multimedia component is likely to be invisible to search engines. With that in mind it should be clear that the most important elements of your page, where the heart of your content will lie, should be presented in clean, standards-compliant and optimized HTML source code.

10) Be sure to target keywords in your page content - Some webmasters publish their pages in hopes that they will rank well for competitive keywords within their topic or niche. This will simply never happen unless you include your target keywords in the page content. This means creating well-optimized content that mentions these keywords frequently without triggering spam filters.

11) Don’t use frames - There is still some debate as to whether frames are absolutely horrible for SEO or whether they are simply just not the best choice. Either way, you probably don’t want to use frames. Crawlers can have trouble getting through to your content and effectively indexing individual pages, for one thing. For another, most functionalities that the use of frames allows is easily duplicated using proper CSS coding.

12) Make sure that your server is returning a 404 error code for unfound pages - While broken links that point to these pages should definitely be avoided you also don’t want to create a “custom error page” to replace this page. Why? If you generate a custom error page then crawlers can spend time following broken links that they won’t know are broken. A 404 error page is easily recognizable, and search engine crawlers are programmed to stop following links that generate this page.

13) Make sure crawlers will not fall into infinite loops - Many webmasters use scripting languages, such as PERL, PHP and ASP to add interactive functionality to their web pages. However, what some webmasters don’t realize is that unless they use robots.txt files or take other preventative measures search engine crawlers can fall into what are called “infinite loops” in their pages. They are built to recognize when they’ve run into an “infinite loop” situation like this, and they will simply stop indexing pages at a site that is flagged for this error.

Search - A Way of Life,
Arthur Browning

Hosting is steadily moving to dedicated hosting, and that movement will continue for the next few years. Need for a consistent online presence for any business will demand webpage updates or a new website.

When webpages are designed or improved hosting services have to be reviewed also. Should the website remain in shared hosting (also known as virtual hosting) - or should the website switch to dedicated hosting.

Dedicated hosting is more dependable and a real asset to websites that generate revenue directly form their 24/7 online presence. Dedicated hosting has traditionally been delivered by an many providers, but dedicated hosting is a real specialty that requires special skills to provide the types of hosting products necessary with stability.

Demand for dedicated hosting is increasing. Dedicated hosting services accounts had been slow and complex to set up and to change, for both the ISP and the customer. Determining what hardware, burn testing, server OS configuration, application configuration, IDC installation and connectivity configuration all had to be discussed.

It had been a time consuming and expensive affair for all the parties involved. But new virtualization tech is now ready to make dedicated hosting simpler and faster by eliminating the complexity while bringing additional virtual hosting benefits that did not exist previously. Servers give scalable, dedicated hosting services now quickly and easily.

This new tech eliminates hardware, hardware drivers and hardware upgrades for customers and it delivers higher levels of availability which allows clones of production environments to be created for a unified process.

As a service provider or a customer, it’s necessary to know the many different types of server virtualisation which have different prices and levels of resource control as well as base-OS independence.

VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 seems to head the class in these criteria, combining the very highest resource control with the elimination of hardware drivers. Infrastructure 3 also allows intelligent redistribution of VMs from any failed physical servers to the remaining healthy servers.

Server virtualisation technology is expanding its customer base because virtualised hosting service providers and customers see the possibilities for a high-quality virtualised hosting.

Moving In All the Right Circles,
Arthur Browning

WordPress is the logical solution to small businesses on a budget.  Even a home-based small business can use a website, and there is no more cost effective advertising because WordPress provides free website hosting.  Small businesses can make a big impression with a good looking WordPress website.                                                                             
WordPress Theme # 14835

Whatever the theme of your small business website, WordPress Themes are made for you.  You can choose a WordPress Theme with an exclusive look for next to nothing.  Bargains at $40 to $70, you get a professionally designed WordPress Theme that has beautiful graphics and easy to use navigationm for your website.  Then your small business will have a more exclusive look with a new WordPress Theme like the one above.

No matter what type of small business you have you must see the large collection of WordPress Themes at Template Monster before you make your decisions for your small business website.

Reshaping Your Reality,
Arthur Browning