Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: The Best Time To Schedule Your Exam
July 31, 2007
Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: The Best Time To Schedule Your Exam
by: Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
In preparing for CCNA exam success, one of the basic steps is to schedule your exam! And when should you do that?
Schedule your exam NOW.
I can hear you now — ” Why should I schedule my exam now? I haven’t started studying yet!”
From experience, I can tell you that this technique works. People complain about timetables and deadlines, but the truth is that people do their best work with a deadline. “Stress” is not the dirty word that we’ve made it out to be. A diamond is only a lump of coal that was put under pressure.
I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard this:
“I’ll schedule my exam when I’m ready.”
You know when “ready” is? For many people, NEVER. I know someone who’s been preparing for his CCNA for years - literally! He’s going to schedule that exam when he’s ready. He’s been getting ready for years!
Build or Buy a CMS?
July 30, 2007
Creating a content management system either from scratch, or using pre-existing building blocks, may sound like the ultimate way to get the exact solution you require.
However, careful analyses often reveals dangerous pitfalls and serious short comings with many custom built content management systems.
In comparison to today’s mature, tested and carefully designed products, most home-grown systems are quirky, poorly thought-out, and difficult to maintain.
However, even now many will seriously consider custom development. Like any IT custom development project, you could be taking on serious risk when it comes to delivering your project on time and budget, not to mention the downside of expensive support and the lack of upgrades in the future.
Two main reasons organisations choose to build
Perceived Flexibility
The decision to build rather than buy is frequently based on the assertion that no off-the-shelf product could possibly meet the specific business needs of the organisation.
For many developers, customisation efforts quickly mean abandoning consistent architectures, or processes, in favour of meeting seemingly complex requirements. Such an approach is short-sighted, paying no respect to the need for change, and a consistent model to ensure scalability, security and true-flexibility.
Computer Tech School Tutorial: Your Most Valuable Resource
July 29, 2007
Computer Tech School Tutorial: Your Most Valuable Resource
by: Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Making the decision to attend a computer tech school can be one of the best decisions of your life. Another great decision is to tap a hidden wealth of knowledge that is right before every student at schools such as ECPI and ITT, but very few students take advantage of it.
When you’re attending a computer training school, you must avoid the mentality that some other students will have - “I gotta go to school, I gotta be here, I can’t wait to leave and go home”. When you’re preparing for a career working with computers, you’ve got to take advantage of every learning experience you can get, and that includes getting to know the most valuable resource at your school - your teachers!
Your teachers have busy schedules, but it was my experience that every single time I asked for help or had questions outside of class, my teachers went the extra mile to help me. I’m sure yours will do the same for you, but you have to let them know you want that help!
Tips to Bounce-Proof Your Email List
July 29, 2007
Keeping your email lists fresh is critical to the success of your online marketing and e-commerce efforts. In the early days of the Internet, the novelty of web sites and free e-newsletters made acquiring customers online all too easy. With customers signing up in droves to hear your latest offers, there was no need to worry about email address attrition rates or errors during registration.
Unfortunately, those days are over! Due to error-ridden databases, privacy concerns, excess spam, and the high turnover of email addresses, many companies are now finding they are losing email addresses faster than they can gain them. Customer retention has reemerged as the key to profits.
Here is what you can do to bounce-proof your email lists and increase your customer retention rate:
DON’T LET ERRORS GET INTO YOUR LIST
Utilize a double-entry system during registration
This will reduce typos and help your customers recognize how important an accurate email address is to you.
Validate email addresses at the point of registration
Examine your current methods for validating email addresses at the point of registration. Consider upgrading your software or using a real time validation service so you can catch your prospects when they want you most.
Ten Tips for Getting More Sales From Your Website
July 28, 2007
(1) Create a Direct Response Website, with the minimum number of pages possible (e.g. an Index Page, a Contact Page, and an Order Page).
(2) Make sure your sales copy is positive and inspiring - people buy things because they want to improve their lives.
(3) Identify a problem and show people how and why your product or service solves the problem.
(4) Keep your paragraphs short - no more than 2 sentences per paragraph.
(5) Use bold headings to break up your sales copy into short chunks of text.
(6) Use a bulleted list to itemize the benefits of your product or service. Start each benefit with an action word: “turn”, “make”, “triple”, “grab”, “create”, “build”, “convert”, “start”, “change”, “drive”, “organize”, “promote”, “develop”, “learn”, “compel”, “fill”, “attract”, “get”, “earn”, “take”, “discover”, “produce”, “find”, “generate”, “acquire”. “inspire”, “send”, “blast”.
(7) Give your visitors at least 3 order links (e.g. 1/3rd of the way down your page, 2/3rds the way down, and at the bottom). But don’t stop there - turn some of your key phrases into hyperlinks that go to your order page. Here are some examples of phrases that you could link to your order page: “increase your sales”, “take advantage of this offer”, “try it risk-free for 30 days”, “get the following 5 bonuses”, “the competitive edge you need”, “this risk-free offer”.
Website Basics
July 27, 2007
The Basics
You have a flourishing business ? everything is in its place. You just miss one important piece of marketing: an Internet Presence a website. Like everything in business, getting a website needs planning. Getting an effective website needs even more planning.
Here are some basic things to know and plan:
The WWW
What is the www or the internet? Basically a network of websites from all over the world you can access via your computer for which you need an internet connection and a browser. Internet connections are available from ISPs, and most of the popular browsers are free downloads from the internet. Just like writing/typing an address on a postal envelope, you type the website address in the browser beginning with http://www. and ending with either .com, .net, .org, .biz, .nz, .uk, etc. So if you want to access the microsoft website, you would type http://www.microsoft.com in the browser and hey, presto! You get all the information about microsoft and its products on your browser. Just click on the available links and you are on your way.
Your Website
How Popular Are You,… Online That Is?
July 26, 2007
With the web today you “sorta haveta” have a rank in the major search engines if you want to be seen. I mean with 250,000,000, yes 250 million searches a day on Google? alone, how are your visitors and potential customers going to find you?
Now, there are numerous ways in which a Search Engine ranks a website; by keyword density, relevancy, content, etc. etc.. But Link Popularity is an ever growing statistic in how the Search Engines continue to rank websites.
Link popularity, is how “popular” your website is. That is how popular your site is compared to other websites. To put it another way; it is the number of “other websites” that have a link on their website to your website. Did you get that? 
Now, although Link Popularity “building” is a large science and art in itself, I’ll briefly touch on a couple ways in which you can see how popular you are and how to go about improving your link popularity.
A small side note though, is link popularity is a BIG way in which Google? ranks their search results. They refer to this as “PageRank”. With the Search Engine, FAST, they call it “link score”.
Beyond Hits!
July 25, 2007
Your Website visitor reports are a goldmine of information. If you don’t review these on a regular basis, you can’t fully evaluate the return on your Web investment. And, you could miss critical clues as to how user-friendly your site is, how effectively your message reaches your visitors, and what unmet needs they may have.
But the reports can be overwhelming - a confusing mass of graphs, numbers and URL’s. How can you find the information that you really need, how do you know what to look for, and how do you make strategic decisions using the answers that you obtain?
Step 1: Knowing your markets
First, identify all the different types of visitor to your site, together with the reasons that they might be coming to you.
This may sound obvious, but in my experience there are nearly always visitor segments that are overlooked. Here are my starting suggestions for an association site:
* Current and prospective members* Board members and staff* Current and potential vendors, advertisers and sponsors* Media* Content seekers* Job seekers* Your competition!
A Beginners Guide to Web Hosting
July 24, 2007
What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website.
Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.
A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to ’store’ the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called ‘data center’. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.
Projector Buying Tips: The Best Projector Shopping Guide
July 24, 2007
Projector Buying Tips: The Best Projector Shopping Guide
by: Robert Thatcher
Technology has always been known to make people’s lives better. In fact, some surveys said that 8 out of 10 people who were interviewed showed significant representation of people who were relieved to have the best technology in their lives.
One of the primary reasons why technology is deemed as life’s enhancers is because it can unleash the limits set upon the rigidity of previous inventions.
This goes to show that with the new trend of technology, people can expect a better life because it provides a hundred and one ways of making the impossible doable.
Take for example the case of projectors. Before, projectors are known to be used in movie theaters and during business presentations or seminars.
But with the continuous technological advancement and development, projectors are now known to be used even at home. This is especially true to those who want to create a home-based theater of their own.
Technically speaking, projectors work in a way that the visual aspects that are limited on the tube of a television are directly converted into a bigger screen. This is where the graphics and images are unleashed on a bigger view and where space is no longer constrained in a tube.
