Articles by John V. W. Howe on ArticleSnatch.com

Web Host for Beginners

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

You are just beginning to explore the Internet and you have decided that you need a website on the Internet to be successful. You researched the many web hosts that all claim to have the best features and you are over whelmed by all the possibilities. Let's discuss what a book for beginners should tell you. Most of the time, people looking for a web host asks all the wrong questions about the web host. Since the Internet is considered "technical", it seems that people automatically start looking at how many gigs of memory and how much bandwidth each web host provides for the price. They read that they can get 10,000 email addresses, 1,000 FTP accounts, and 1,000 mailing lists (Isn't that a joke? Walmart might need that kind of support, but a starting website? I don't think so!) They consider what software is provided? .ASP, Perl, PHP, .NET, Cold Fusion, etc. (Yes, "etc." is not software).** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Stack the Deck in Your Favor Find the Right Web Host

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Stacking the deck refers to prearranging the cards in the deck so the best cards are dealt to you so you can win the hand. In games of chance such as cards this is illegal. In the Old Wild West, you would be shot if you were caught doing it. Business is somewhat like a game of chance. To some extent, statistics govern your chances for success. If you have a good location on a busy street, traffic statistics indicate that your business will be exposed to enough potential customers to get your market share of the customers which will generate the necessary sales. This is stacking the deck. If you are well capitalized, capitalization statistics say that you will probably have enough money to last through the first few business years when you usually lose money. This is stacking the deck. In business, there is no law against stacking the deck in your favor. It is called prior planning and preparation. When you start a business on the Internet, you really need to stack the deck in your favor (plan well) since statistics say that over 90 percent of online home businesses fail.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Retirement Calculators - Before and After Retirement

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Calculating Our Finances Before Retirement It seems that most of the retirement calculators on the Internet are designed by investment and securities firms whose goal is to make you invest with them and make them money. These calculators do not necessarily give you the true picture of your retirement finances. If you plan to work after retirement and the calculator does not allow for income from a retirement job, your retirement financial projections will be off by a mile. Income from a retirement job can have a very positive impact on your retirement finances. While researching retirement calculators on the Internet, we found three (there may be more) that include income from work after retirement. These are listed at the end of the article so keep reading. Even these calculators have a weakness since they ask for the amount of annual income from a job after retirement, but do not ask for the age when that income will stop. They assume the income will continue until death which is not accurate. We are all living longer, but I doubt if many of us will still have a job at 90.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance (PPPPP) - Building a Successful Website

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Anyone who has been in business for any time knows the meaning of PPPPP. It is the mantra that a person should learn early in their lives to be successful. Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance (PPPPP) is a simple yet elegant reminder that one must invest time to plan projects. The more time spent planning, the more successful the results. Building a website is no exception to this rule. Too many times a person gets a flash of brilliance on a topic for a website. Without properly checking the level of competition or without checking the popularity of the keywords for the topic, he/she picks a web host and throws up the website. Unfortunately, the odds say that the website has about a ten percent chance of succeeding. I first heard about the "5P" (PPPPP) concept when I was a young lieutenant in the Army. My commanding officer was a stickler for planning, and I observed that his projects went smoothly, were completed on time, and were within budget due to his prior planning. Building a website is a perfect example where the 5P concept works very well.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Make Your Site Easy for Your Visitors to Navigate

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

I had a good laugh the other day while researching this topic when I read that websites should be designed so even your grandmother or grandfather can find their way through it. I laughed since I am a grandfather which indicates that the site must be REALLY easy to navigate. LOL. What caused me to focus on this subject came from working on a particular website. Like most websites, it started with only a few pages and was easy to navigate. And like most websites, it grew and became more complex which complicated the site navigation. The original site navigation pattern was a circular pattern where the reader would follow the links from one page to the next until he/she arrived back at the starting page. This works fine as long as there is never a break. However, we all know that during surfing, you have to get up and tend to something or you go off on a tangent to another page. When you return, it is sometimes difficult to determine exactly where you were. If the reader has to follow several page links back to the continuation point, frustration sets in and "click" the reader is gone.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Looking for Hosting in All the Wrong Places

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

"Looking for Hosting in All the Wrong Places" Sounds like the old country and western song by Johnny Lee from the movie "Urban Cowboy"? Well, most people are looking for web hosting in all the wrong places. They enter "web hosting" into Google or Yahoo and are inundated by all of the advertising for web hosts. When you read what they have to offer, it is all the same thing. There is really not one iota of difference between any of them. Each web host tout bandwidth, gigs of storage, free domain names, great support, free software, etc. They have fancy websites done by professional graphic designers made to catch your eye and get you to sign up. Another "wrong place" is under the search term "web host review". These sites are built to make the site owner money by referring people to the web host for which the reviewer receives an affiliate commission. Odds are the reviewer has never hosted a website on any of the reviewed sites. The reviewer is using second hand knowledge to post information about the sites. The best web host is the one that provides you with the best chance of success.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

How to Build a Successful Website

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Learning how to build a successful website can be a daunting task for anyone starting on the Internet. To do this, you need all the help you can get. You need a web host to help you to research your market to see where you can find a keyword niche that you can carve out for yourself. If you attack a really popular keyword, you will be fighting an uphill battle against old established websites.If you are not on the first couple of search engine results pages of Google or Yahoo, you are probably doomed to failure unless you find an alternative way to drive traffic to your site. This is a major answer to the question, "How to Build a Successful Website". You need help in planning your website construction so it flows well and your user can navigate it easily.If the viewer encounters any difficulty, "click" and "poof" the viewer is gone. You need a way to easily build good web pages even though you do not know HTML code. This includes a way to construct the page and view it before posting it live.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Gigabytes and Bandwidth Are Not Measurements for the Best Web Host

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

All over the Internet, you read ads for web hosting that tout the number of gigabytes of storage and the bandwidth that the particular web host will supply to you. Do you think this is the real measure of what make the best web host? These are measurements of hardware capacity and can be provided by any web host, good or bad. Web hosts that advertise in this manner are a dime a dozen. Many of them come and go in the Internet business. Some of these are resellers of web hosting that do not own their own hardware, but resell space on the server of another web host and you do not even know it. You sign on with them, they go out of business, and you are faced with a problem. Any web host can provide gigabytes and bandwidth since these are necessary for a web site to function on the Internet. However, there are many other services that the best web host should provide. The best web site host should offer the following services: 1. Fast, reliable hosting 2. Reasonable cost for services provided 3. No initial set up fee 4.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

"Free" Is Not Free

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

"Free" is Not Free "FREE" -- You see it everywhere on the Net. When you dig deeper, you always find that whatever the offer, it is not really free. It will usually cost you your name and email address on a sign up form for a newsletter or some such offer. At the very least, it takes your time to even check it out. A classic use of "free" on the Net is in web hosting. There are many sites that advertise free web hosting. Now who can turn down a bargain like that? Being a frugal person of Scots heritage, I for one considered it until I really dug down past the top layer. Historically, many of these hosts have started up and disappeared quickly. Poof, there goes the hard work you invested in setting up your website. Now you have to find another host and go through the process again. Another group of the free web hosts began as free hosts, and then started charging for services with the hope that the users would pay rather than go through the hassle of moving their website.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Fire Your Web Host

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

There seem to be an infinite number of web hosts on the Internet. It is impossible to really get a fix on the number since new ones enter the market and soon disappear. It is an extremely competitive market. You probably picked your web host based on a review that you read on the Net. It showed how many gigabytes of storage and how much bandwidth the host provided for a low price and you signed up. Unfortunately, the technical specs for a web host are not the best way to evaluate the best web host. You should demand much more from a web host if you expect to succeed in the competitive environment of the Internet (and the competition becomes fiercer each year). The main attribute that separates the best web host from the "also rans" is a research tool that allows you to perform detailed prior planning of your keywords and to research the competition. You need to know how difficult it will be to place on the first search engine results page for your keywords before you start the battle.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Definition of Site Build It

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Writing a definition of Site Build It is a challenge since it is so many different things combined under one name. To define SBI, I prefer to step back away from the Internet and the technology and define it as a business model or business system. There are several definitions of system: Â¢ a group of independent but interrelated elements comprising a unified whole. Â¢ a procedure or process for obtaining an objective Â¢ organization: an ordered manner; orderliness by virtue of being methodical and well organized. Â¢ a group of elements, components, or devices that are assembled to serve a common purpose. In a technological system, this refers to all hardware, software, networks, cables, peripheral equipment, information, data, personnel, and procedures (ie, all technology resources) that comprise a computer environment. All of these apply to SBI. Too many people only associate SBI with web hosting. In their minds, SBI provides memory on a server, bandwidth for access, and software to create and post web pages for access on the Internet. SBI is so much more than that. It is a system or method for creating successful businesses.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

CRON Automatically Run Jobs on Your Website

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

CRON is a function in Unix and Linux operating systems which allows you to schedule a job and the job will run at the date and time scheduled until you delete the CRON statement. Initially, you may consider this to be too technical for you, but not so if you will carefully read this article. It is a function of which you should be aware. Even if you do not need it now, remember about CRON for the day you will need it. Apache server includes this function and it is easy to use with the graphical interface. The format for CRON is CRON * * * * * Command to execute" Each asterisk represents a field in the command and can contain the following values. If you do not want to specify a value for that particular field, leave the asterisk in that position in the CRON statement line. Each of the five fields is separated by white space.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Cookie Cutter Websites

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

One of the best services that I could do for mankind on the Internet is to shout from the mountain top, "Do not buy ready made, "cookie cutter" websites". These usually only make the seller any money. A "cookie cutter" site is one that the builder creates so the title of the site can be easily changed to your domain name and the sites can be stamped out like using a "cookie cutter". The site is sold under the pretense that all you have to do to make LOTS of money is buy the site and pay to have it hosted on the Internet. The site has ready made links to products and services from which you are told will make a commission each time a person clicks a link. Usually the products and services are sold by the company that developed the website so they make most of the money if you do get a sale. They keep telling you, "Just think how much money you will make by having a site like this on the Internet". For those of you who have "cookie cutter" sites, it's time for true confessions.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Choosing the Best Web Host for A Content Website

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The success of your content website depends on how much traffic you can attract to your site. Your website search engine rank for your keywords will dictate your success or failure. If you are "above the fold" on the first search engine results page for your keywords, you will probably succeed. If you are not "above the fold" on the first page of the search engine results, you are invisible and will probably fail. If you are not experienced in search engine optimization and you do not know all the steps that it takes to make your site rank high on the search engines, you need the best web host that will guide you through the process and provide the necessary assistance to make your site appear on the first page of the search engines. The best web host should offer the following services: 1. Fast, reliable hosting 2. Reasonable cost for services provided 3. No initial set up fee 4. Domain registration included in hosting charge 5. Unlimited data transfer 6. Email customer support 7. Telephone customer support 8. Point and click page building 9. Unlimited web pages 10.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Beware of Investment Company Retirement Calculators

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

As a part of your retirement planning, have you considered a post retirement job? Continued income from a post retirement job can have a very positive impact on your retirement finances. Let's do a fast calculation to see the positive impact of a post retirement job. Let's calculate the amount of investment that you need to generate a monthly income of $1,000 per month. To do this we must make a few assumptions. Assume the income generation rate of your investments is five percent (5%). Let's assume that we are not going to take any principle from your investments to do this. This will leave the principle intact for use later after you have stopped working in your retirement job. The calculation is how much principle is needed to generate $12,000 per year ($1,000 per month). The formula is principle divided by the income interest rate ($12,000/.05 = $240,000). I think you will agree that is a large amount necessary to generate $1,000 of income per month. However, a thousand dollars per month is not too large an amount to expect to make in a post retirement job.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

A Great Retirement Job - Consultant

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

You have worked for years at your full time job and you have developed experience and knowledge that will be invaluable to other people. Now it is time to take advantage of all that accumulated knowledge and create retirement income at the same time. When you really analyze what you must do, you realize that YOU are what YOU are selling.You must market yourself and convince others that you have the answers to their problems; that you have already faced the problems and conquered them. One of the best ways to gain respect is to publish articles about your area of expertise. When you include authorÂ in your bio, you immediately command additional respect. Start by publishing your articles on href="www.ezinearticles.com">www.ezinearticles.com In my opinion, it is the premier article site on the Net. Once your article is accepted and published on Ezinearticles, you can easily publish it on over 100 other business article sites. You can do this yourself or there are services that will do it for you for a very reasonable price. At the end of each article, your bio will point back to your website.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an father, and grandfather.He is an expert in website creation and web hosting. He has published over 60 articles on the Internet covering diverse topics.

Using Excel to Organize Your Browsing Discoveries

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Judging from the large market share that Micosoft owns on the Internet, a large majority of Internet users have Excel available on their computers. Excel is a great, versatile tool and can be used for any number of uses. Many people consider Excel a program for number crunching and formulas. It is much more than that. An Excel workbook (contains more than one worksheet) can be created to record interesting information or websites to which one wants to return later. Nothing is more frustrating than to discover a great site with super content and not be able to find your way back to it. An easy way to use Excel for this is to create an icon for the workbook and put it in the "Quick Launch" area of the tool bar on the bottom of the page to the right of the Start Button. When you are browsing and find a "gem", you can quickly open the workbook and record the gem and its URL. This workbook will probably stay open a lot of the time that you are on the Net.** End Summary**

About the Author:
John V. W. Howe is an entrepreneur, author, inventor, patent holder, husband, father, and grandfather. He has been involved in entrepreneurial activities for over 40 years. He founded www.boomer-ezine.com and www.retirement-jobs-online.com to help Boomers (baby boomers) become entrepreneurs when they retire

The Value of Detailed Web Site Traffic Statistics

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Many web hosts provide basic traffic statistics as part of your web hosting fee. These sites create logs on your site that hold the raw traffic data. They then employ packages such as Webalizer or Modlogan among others to present the data in user friendly graphic and tabular format. These packages provide a fairly standard set of statistics: Â¢ Daily and weekly hits, files, pages and visits Â¢ Hourly traffic stats Â¢ Top URLs in site (by hits) Â¢ Top entry pages Â¢ Top exit pages Â¢ Top referring sites Â¢ Top keyword search strings Â¢ Top browsers used Â¢ Top operating system of visitors Â¢ Top countries of visitors All this data is great, but it does not answer the questions, "How does a visitor move through my website?" How long does he/she take on my website? This is very important so you can understand if your site navigation plan is working. Let's say that you have a particular sales page on your site that you want to move your visitor toward. How do you know if your planned pre-sell plan is working so the visitor will click on the link to the sales page?** End Summary**

The Best Retirement Job - Become an Entrepreneur

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

You have worked hard and planned for retirement and here it is staring you squarely in the face. Reaching this point can be a blessing and a curse. You eagerly anticipated retirement, but you have some nagging doubts about what retirement holds for you. Perhaps, the major doubt you have is financial. Modern medicine has had a major impact on your retirement planning. When you formulated your retirement savings plan 30 years ago, you did not think that you might live as long as you probably will. You want to live a long, healthy life, but in doing so, you could potentially outlive your retirement savings. The answer to this dilemma - become an entrepreneur. Working after retirement can substantially extend your retirement savings. Well, if you become an entrepreneur after retirement you will be in good company. Several studies show that the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs are aged 60 and older. Just what is an entrepreneur? The word comes from the French word "entreprendre", which means "to undertake". Let's get a definition from the Merriam Webster Dictionary. It defines entrepreneur as "one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business enterprise.** End Summary**

Social Bookmarking - What Is It?

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Do you have an account on (http://) del.icio.us? What! You say to yourself, that is a crazy name and it does not even look like a valid name for a website. Well, it is a real site with an Alexa rank of 123 which is in the stratosphere for web site rankings. Let's use old, dependable Wikipedia for a definition of del.icio.us: "The website del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site came online in late 2003 and was founded by Joshua Schachter, co-maintainer of Memepool. It is now part of Yahoo!" A social bookmarking site is one where you can establish an account and store your favorites. You can make these bookmarks private for your own use, or make them available to anyone on the Web. You have your favorites listed in folders on your browser, but that information is available only to you on your home computer. If you open a bookmark site (and there are many others in addition to del.icio.us), you can share these bookmarks with any reader on the Web. Why do this?** End Summary**

Social Bookmarking - How To Use It To Promote Your Website

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

A quick definition of social bookmarking... It is a website where you can post your favorites and access them from any computer with an Internet connection. It is also a way to drive traffic to your website or blog. Another use of social bookmarking is for research. You can go to del.icio.us and enter a search tag and find the sites that other people have tagged for that term. This way you are tapping into the research that many others have done before you. This article will concentrate on using social bookmarking to drive traffic to websites. We previously used the term "tag". Just what is that? A tag is the word or term that you would use to search for the topic on a search engine. On most of the bookmarking sites, it is a single word separated by spaces. This makes it difficult for the search terms that are multiple words. It seems there are several ways that people are creating multiple word tags. Some are just running the words together "retirementjobs". Some are using hyphens between words "retirement-jobs. And some are using periods between words "retirement.jobs".** End Summary**

Page Rank

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

A quick definition of Page Rank - a numerical value to measure the relative importance of the web page within the Internet. Wikipedia has a more detailed explanation at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank. Put http:// in front for the full URL. Article sites do not allow an active link in the first paragraph. Page Rank was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as part of a research for a new search engine. Guess what the name of that search engine is? Yep, Google. The rank of pages in a website is a major factor that Google uses to rank a website. I commented in early December 2006 that the traffic to the RJO site had suddenly increased. This was due to RJO making it to the first page of the search engines. This was the same time that Google raised the page rank for the RJO home page to a page rank 3. How do you find the page rank for a page? If you install the Google toolbar on your browser, the page rank will be displayed on the tool bar. Each time you look at a web page, the display will show you the page rank.** End Summary**

Live Above the Fold - Die Below the Fold

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Living Above the Fold Above the fold is the term used for the top part of a web page that is visible when the page first loads. Conversely, the part of the page that you have to scroll down to see is "below the fold". Your really "grabbing" content must be above the fold to really be effective. Otherwise, it is invisible unless you have some really strong content that entices your reader to scroll down below the fold. Where the fold falls on your page is dependent on the screen resolution of the monitor that your viewer is using. A resolution of 800X600 will make the fold higher up on the page than a resolution of 1024X768 since more information will fit on the monitor with the higher resolution. Current statistics on the Net show that 22% of the people use the lower 800X600 resolution. Approximately half of the people on the Net use 1024X768 resolution. The rest use higher than 1024X768. With approximately half of your viewers using 1024X768, use that resolution as the target resolution for your pages. The fold will move down the page for the other viewers with higher resolutions.** End Summary**

Finding the Number of Backlinks to Your Site

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

One of the measurements of your website's popularity is the number of backlinks that point to it. A backlink is a link on another website that links to a page on your site. To measure this, you need a tool to tell you what the numbers are. Well, the tools are free if you know where to look for them. If you want to use Yahoo for your count, enter a search in Yahoo in the following format replacing "your-website-name.com" with the website name on which you want a banklink count. linkdomain:www.your-website-name.com -site:www.your-website-name.com There is a space between the first ".com" and the "-site". Your search will not work without it. Look at the top of the search page where Yahoo will conveniently tell you how many links it has for your site. To find what Windows Live Search knows about your site, go to http://search.live.com enter the same search string that you used in Yahoo above. The results do not tell you the number of links, but it will tell you the number of pages it returned.** End Summary**

Establishing Your Identity on the Internet

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

If your business plan involves establishing a personal identity on the Internet, this requires some advanced planning. You say, "I am who I am so why do I have to plan who I will be?" Good question. But let me give you an example - myself, John Howe. As part of my business plan, I decided that I would become established as an expert on the Internet dealing with the Boomer generation. I launched off on that quest. All was going well for a while until I googled "John Howe". I found that the first several Google pages were full of information on John Howe, but alas, it was not yours truly. The John Howe who occupies the first several pages of Google is an illustrator from Vancouver, BC, Canada. He is best known for his illustrations based on J. R. R. Tolkien's worlds (Middle-Earth). His website is http://www.john-howe.com. He was the lead illustrator for the very popular "Lord of the Rings" Trilogy. You know the old saying, "If you are going to have to fight a battle, choose your own battlefield". Well, my parents took care of that for me by giving me two middle initials.** End Summary**