There are a couple minor draw backs to flash forms.  A web developer has to work within the bounds of flash forms. A developer can still change background colors and fonts just like any other form; they just aren’t as easy to manipulate as HTML forms, but the extra steps are worth the benefit.  Also, when you pull up a page that has a flash form you do have to wait a couple of seconds for the form to load.  With really long forms this could be an issue but with most forms the wait isn’t an issue, and the user gets a little loading box to let them know the form is loading.  The benefits outweigh the minor wait and flash forms are a good addition to any website.

I purchased the Delaware.Net and Delaware.com domains about 7 years ago, and I used the Delaware.Net domain for our web development company, and I’ve always had a plan to use the Delaware.com domain for a local portal. That plan is being put into motion as I write this post.

The real estate directory is but one of many features that are going to be launched in the site this spring. For example, this week we plan to launch a business directory CMS module that will contain thousands of Delaware area businesses when it launches. Our new Content Management System that just launched also feeds into the Delaware.com portal. This means that area businesses will be able to post jobs, syndicate their products, and market their businesses in new ways - AUTOMATICALLY.

Combined with our exceptional Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work that we perform for our clients, we can now provide our local clients a Delaware-Centric portal that will greatly enhance their local marketing efforts. With our best-possible local domain name (Delaware.com), our cutting-edge database applications, and our reasonable advertising pricing, we feel that we can offer a much better value than other Delaware-area portals.

If you are interested in marketing your company on Delaware.com, or if you have a question about the new portal, post a response below and I will answer your questions.

Adding an extra step like pins cards or biometric readers don’t hurt either, a lot of traders in the banking industry tend to use what we call Bloomberg keyboards.

These keyboards are biometric readers. It will be very hard for a hacker to crack into your system if he can’t get past the first step, your fingerprint! Bloomberg keyboards and other devices like a biometric laptop are on the expensive side but it can be a necessary investment to ensure the confidentiality of your data.

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssh,
http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1537

Content Management Systems Explained

More and more customers want to control the content in their web sites. Recently, you would have to use a web design program to be able to change the content in your web site. No more. Today, There are many choices of template-based web page building sites, and other more elaborate Content Management Systems, or “CMS” systems as they are more commonly known in our industry.

Why Page Builders are Bad

The template-based web page builder sites don’t have good search engine features, so the pages that they build don’t come up high in search engines. Their designs are also limited to the design templates provided. You can also forget about adding additional programs to these sites. These sites are like those yellow pages web sites that you can get for a nominal fee, or the starter pages that some domain registrars offer.

Why “Full-Blown” CMS Systems are also not the answer

If you want everyone in your organization to be able to edit content in your public web site or Intranet, you might need a very powerful CMS system that allows everyone to edit the pages. This can get VERY expensive, and we have witnessed a company that spent over $100K USD to install a company-wide CMS system. Systems like this are typically an all-or-nothing approach as well, so they don’t lend themselves to customization or customized graphics.

Our Solution - Team-Logic CMS

To better serve Delaware.Net hosting and web design customers, we have built a new solution that bridges the gap between template-style page builders, full-blown CMS systems, and custom-built web site applications.

Team-Logic CMS Features

• Info Panels - Add information boxes anywhere in your site that you can control with a rich text editor. You can write your content (i.e. your hours of operation) in Microsoft Word, then paste the content into the Info Panel builder and upload them to your web site.
• News Postings - Post news, alerts, and articles to your web site easily. Includes archiving, file attachments, and an RSS feed for your site’s news so that your web site visitors can subscribe to your news.
• Flash News Ticker - You can now post scrolling flash news tickers to your site to display important information.
• Event Calendars - With many different calendar styles, we can give your web site the calendar design that you want, with the ability to create event calendars for different sections and departments in your organization.
• Page Builder - You can now build pages and links in your navigation of your web site. We’ve seen other systems that combine everything into a store engine, and ours is more flexible.
• Link Manager - When you want to create a resources page for your web site with links, you can now add them easily and get more search engine benefits (top secret) for your site.
• File Manager / Media Manager - You can now manage files in your web site so that your customers can download important forms, PDFs, or any other type of file or media.
• Article Manager - We build a lot of web sites for cities and towns, and they all need to make sure that the latest meeting minutes are available in their web sites. With this application, it is possible to organize the articles and make them searchable.
• Email Newsletter Integration - you can now choose how you would like to add users to your newsletter server by creating custom forms that allow them to subscribe easily.
• Quick Deployment - All of these new CMS modules run on Team-Logic, our hosting framework for applications. This allows us to deploy them instantly for our web design and hosting customers.
• More to come - We will add screen captures and pricing to our web site shortly. These applications are complete and are being installed in our latest web development projects. If you just can’t wait and you need these applications right away, please contact Delaware.net for more information at 888-432-7965.

Bridge® was first introduced to Adobe®’s lineup of design applications when Creative Suite® 2 was released. Back then it was a basic image manager that many people overlooked, despite its more useful features: working with RAW images without opening Photoshop and organizing features such as keywords and searches.

When Adobe® upgraded their programs to CS3, Bridge® was also upgraded with some new and useful features to manage your media files, and more.

One useful tool in Bridge® is the Adobe Photo Downloader. This tool allows you to select the images to download from your camera, where to download them to, rename images on download and automatically append metadata, like copyright information, to the images as they get imported to your computer. Even if you are not a fan of using Bridge normally, the Adobe Photo Downloader is a great way to import your images.

Another new tool is the ability to group images together in stacks, as seen in Apple Aperture®. The stacks show the number of images they store. A cool thing about the stacks is that you do not have to expand them to view the images. You can play the images in the stack as a mini-slideshow, or use the slider to move to the image you want. When you expand the stack, that image is selected in the Content panel.

As far as Bridge®’s capability to find files, there are some useful tools, including using filters. Bridge® CS3 gives you an always available Filter panel to search for images. Click on any tags in the filter panel to narrow the number of images shown in thumbnail view to only those that fit your criteria. Also, for organization, it is possible to bookmark folders you access often, or are currently working in, so that they are easily accessible in the sidebar.

Bridge® also has a really neat section called Bridge Home. On the main page you can find Adobe® Spotlights, upcoming Adobe® events, links to inspiring interviews and sites and free downloads to use in Adobe®’s products. From this page you can access mini sites for all of the programs in Adobe® CS3. You can find tutorials and other resources specific to each program.

Although I do not use Bridge® all the time to manage my files, it offers many unique and useful features to help designers in their day to day tasks and is definitely worth trying. See how it works for you, you may find that it becomes an integral part of your file management.

Today, web-based video has never been easier to view. The majority of users on the Internet are accessing the web with high-bandwidth connections, allowing much faster downloads for music and video. With this standard high-bandwidth connection, the demand for video on the web is huge. In light of this, web developers are moving toward a video standard, Adobe Flash Video (FLV).

Adobe Flash Video allows the video to play directly in the page, which is good news considering Adobe Flash Player is installed on more than 96% of computers accessing the Internet. This will allow Internet users to view videos directly on a webpage with a click of a button. Today, newscasts, weather reports, music videos, and short films can be viewed online.

Don’t have Adobe Flash software? Many other programs can be used to convert other video formats into FLV such as, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple QuickTime Pro, among others. This compact file can then be easily uploaded onto your site.

As a designer, the greatest part about using Adobe Flash Video is that it can be seamlessly integrated into a site. This means your video player and controls can be fully customized to match your website’s look — No Windows Media Player or QuickTime logo intruding in on your design.

Technology has come a long way, and is rapidly changing on a daily basis. As a web designer, staying current with techniques and current trends is crucial. As a web design and hosting company, Delaware.Net continues to maintain knowledge on up-and-coming products, and continues to have a reputation of excellence in the web development industry.

Passwords protect personal information – information we don’t want anyone and everyone to know! In our personal lives, this means confidential information like financial information, private letters, and legal documents. In the corporate world this may encompass anything from personal computers to mainframe servers.

Avoid Dictionary Words
However tempting it may be, using passwords that can be found in the dictionary is not good. If someone really wanted to crack that password they could use a very simple key logger, or brute force program to crack the password. The Brute force attack is a method of defeating a cryptographic scheme by trying a large number of possibilities; for example, exhaustively working through all possible keys in order to decrypt a message. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force) And finding a Brute Force program is almost as easy as buying milk.

No Personal Information
Personal Information should be avoided at all costs. Think about it, why create a password that identifies very thing you’re trying to protect!? Social Engineering is a way for someone to get confidential information by manipulating users. For example a user could get personal information by impersonating a telemarketer and ask for your birth date to verify information. A lot of users like to use special events, birthdays or social security numbers as passwords for simplicity. Password security is very important and should be just as important as keeping your social security number from strangers.

References
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force
http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1537

Finally, Adobe has gotten tired of watching Apple iTunes and Google’s YouTube (we call it GooTube for fun) get all of the media coverage. So they just released their new video player, named AMP. Adobe was smart to embed the new AMP player with downloads of its ubiquitous Acrobat Reader. So the next time you upgrade Acrobat, you will have an option to get AMP with it.

You can download the free AMP player here: http://get.adobe.com/amp/

Adobe has partnered with MTV, FoodTV, CBS, Comedy Central, HGTV, and many other publishers to put streaming TV shows into the player. I am very impressed with the video quality, but some videos are larger (height and width) than others, and some have the volume up louder than others. MTV’s movies are VERY small, while HGTV’s videos look gorgeous.

Nonetheless, there is a lot to like here, and the list of publishers partnering with Adobe is sure to grow, as they have embedded copyright protection into the player.

Take a look at the new AMP player, and tell me what you think.

Keyword research is not as easy as throwing down a bunch of words which users may search for. People today commonly use advanced tools to find appropriate keywords. Wordtracker, Overture Search Suggestion Tool and Keyword Discovery are just some of the commonly used tools. Tools like these will not only assist you in finding keywords but will also help you determine the competition these keywords attract.

Using generic terms to hone your site and links is not a smart idea. Generic keywords, which are most commonly searched for, will be used by thousands of websites; rivalry with already established websites may not increase your page rank at all. It is essential that you choose keywords that are not overly used. Choose keywords which receive a good number of searches but have little competition. Incorporate these keywords into your website and once you have established yourself, you will have the liberty to adding more general keywords. It does not end with optimizing your site only once; you wil have to continually analyze keyword popularity and make suitable changes to your website.

Keyword research plays a major role when building links. Instead of a “Click Here”, prime keywords can be used to make the link more user-friendly as well as help the search engine detect what the link is connecting to. This can be helpful in a higher ranking for those specific keywords included in your link. It carries extra weight as another site is recommending your page for a particular keyword as well. Including relevant keywords in your title text and anchor text can improve your search engine placement tremendously.

Building links is necessary to increase more traffic and obtain a high ranking on search engines. But building links which are effectively optimized can rack you up extra points. Search engines analyze links on several elements, one being the text of the links themselves. If your linking text (also known as anchor text) contains pertinent keywords it indicates clearly what the link is connecting to. Same goes for your page titles for each page should be defined clearly with relevant keywords.

These tools will help you determine synonyms or other similar words which fall into your category. When selecting less searched keywords, you may run the risk of less traffic. But this may be better than no traffic at all if the keywords used are highly competed for. One way to solve this problem is to get as specific as possible with your keyword selection. Instead of general terms such as ‘cars’, you narrow it down by specifying make or model or any other factor which clearly distinguishes what you cater to. Today’s web searchers are smarter and are capable of conducting searches for specific keywords and terms.

While a business targets public interest on printed materials, I target “spiderbots”. Generally clients do not understand that the internet is a different marketing tool. Most people come to Delaware.Net and think the more appealing a website looks with the pictures, the design and the color, the more the website will get “noticed”. This is a common misconception.

Clients ask me to write their website content frequently. Others like to write the content themselves, and then have me make the necessary changes. Either way, as long as clients understand internet marketing strategies, and how/why keywords should be used properly, their website will be more successful. I have seen many clients utilize my services for copy editing, and when clients send me their text (usually from their company brochures, magazines, etc.), I change everything about it for their website content. Most clients need explanation on why I’ve make these necessary changes. I simply have to explain SEO. (Search Engine Optimization)

Writing text for a website is not an easy task. There is a lot of research to be done to analyze specific keywords (that are different for each website…because websites are never the same). Once the research is complete, then the text should be written using keywords for “spiderbots”, all while keeping the text appealing to the audience, or readers. Please understand no matter what your text says or how glamorous your website is, if spiderbots do not think your text is relevant to your website, and the website keywords are not strategically embedded in the text, chances are your website is going to rank very low on search engine result pages (Google, MSN, & Yahoo) - therefore your website will not be successful.

It has been proven that the higher your website is listed in a results page, the more traffic a website will get and in turn should generate higher sales from viewing your website.

My copy writing services is just one of the benefits included when choosing Delaware.Net to design and customize your web site.