Steps 1 :
Motivate people. Why are the employees there? What keeps them with your organization and stops them from going somewhere else? What makes the good days good? What makes them stick with the organization after a bad day or a bad week? Don’t assume it’s money–most people aren’t that one-dimensional. Ask the employees how they’re liking their job on a regular basis. Encourage them to be honest with you. Be a good listener. Then take action based upon what they tell you. If health is important to them, give them time to go to the gym and work out. If their family is important, respect the time they may need to send their kids off to school in the morning or pick them up in the afternoon. Remember, our values are what makes us “tick”. If you manage by respecting your team’s values, they will give you 110% of their effort.
Steps 2 :
Delegate. You’re a manager because you’re good at what you do, but that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to do it ALL. Your job as a manager is to teach other people how to do a good job. If you’re uncomfortable with delegating, however, this can be a huge leap of faith for you. One way to overcome this is to start small. Give people tasks that, if performed incorrectly, can be fixed. Take the opportunity to teach and empower your employees. Then gradually give them tasks with greater responsibility as you come to understand their strengths and weaknesses and learn how to anticipate any problems they might have so you can coach them properly before they begin.
Steps 3 :
Keep the door open. Always remind people that if they have any questions or concerns, you’re ready and willing to listen. Don’t be one of those managers who inadvertently makes an employee feel like they’re “bothering” you when they bring up a question or concern. Instead of seeing it as another crisis to manage, look at it as an opportunity to show your employee how much you want this organization to be a fulfilling place to work. Never minimize or dismiss their concerns, and always make sure that you’ve answered their questions completely.
Steps 4 :
Let people make mistakes. As a manager, you take responsibility for other people’s actions, so the last thing you want to do is be responsible for someone else’s mistakes. In an attempt to be proactive and prevent mistakes, you might give careful instructions and create clear, strict standards. But are you making people afraid of mistakes? Do they always check with you about every little thing, reluctant to make their own decisions because they might not do it correctly? That ends up making the employees more dependent on you, which makes them less effective and unnecessarily drains a significant portion of your time. In order for people to think for themselves, they need to learn, and in order to learn, sometimes we need to make mistakes. Trust them, and give them a fair margin of error.
Steps 5 :
Learn from your own mistakes. When things don’t turn out the way you expected, recognize what you could’ve done differently and verbalize this realization to your employees. This shows them that you make mistakes, too, and it also shows them how they should handle their own mistakes. Whenever you’re doing something correctly after having done it incorrectly in the past, let whoever is watching know. E.g. “The reason I know to press this button is because this happened to me when I first started out, and I made the mistake of pressing the blue button, thinking ‘This will shut down the system, which should resolve the issue’ and I found out–the hard way–that it makes the issue even worse!”
Steps 6 :
Treat everyone equally. Most of us aren’t as egalitarian as we’d like to be. Many times, favoritism happens on a subconscious level. The tendency is to give more positive recognition to the people who remind us of ourselves somehow and who actually like us, rather than to the people who make the biggest contributions to the organization.[1] In the long run, it’s people in the latter group who will make the most progress in achieving the organization’s goals, so monitor your own behavior carefully and make sure you’re not accidentally short-changing them, even if they give you the impression that your positive regard doesn’t affect them. Some people shy away from positive feedback but appreciate it nonetheless.
There are thousands of design resources on the web which can lead to an overwhelming experience when looking for inspiration or ideas, so I created a list of resources that I use on a regular basis. Here is a list of 50 design resources that can be helpful to any designer or marketer.
CSS Galleries
Sometimes it can be hard to come up with design inspiration. CSS galleries are a great place to get design inspiration and they can also be leveraged as a great source of traffic. If you can get your design on these galleries it can drive thousands of visitors to your website.
Unmatchedstyle
cssBeauty
cssvault
Stylegala
CSS Drive
css thesis
Styleboost
CSSElite
CSS Import
Web Creme
CSS Mania
DesignShack
Web Standards
Designing with web standards is a great way to keep your code clean and search engine friendly. Why design a site with a 1000 lines of code when it can be done in 100 lines of code.
Developing With Web Standards – This document explains how and why using web standards will let you build websites in a way that saves time and money for the developer and provides a better experience for the visitor. Also discussed are other methods, guidelines and best practices that will help produce high-quality websites that are accessible to as many as possible.
Roadmap to Standards
Web Standards Project – The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Web Standards Checklist
Importance of Web Standards
Validators
Now that you know all about web standards, here are some tools that can help check if your site is compliant. These tools will also help you find errors in your code.
HTML & XHTML Validator
CSS Validator
Usability
Usability is probably the most important factor in a website design. Making your website usable can help improve the experience for your visitors as well as help improve your conversion rate.
What is usability
Usability First – An approach to web design which emphasizes usability.
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes – Blogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.
Web Design & Usability Guidelines – An 18 part online book that goes over usability and design guidelines.
Web usability – the basics
The Culture of Usability – How to spend less and get more from your usability-testing program.
90% of All Usability Testing is Useless
Ten deadly sins of web design – A list of ten huge mistakes no web designer or developer should be caught making.
Information architecture resources
Usability Views – Usability with a twist.
Blogs/Resources
Blogs are a great resource for up-to-date information on design and usability. Here is a list of blogs that you may want to subscribe to or read on a regular basis.
Stopdesign
Signal vs. Noise Blog – A design and usability blog by 37signals.
Digital Web Magazine – Digital Web Magazine is an online magazine intended for professional web designers, web developers and information architects. The magazine consists primarily of work contributed by web authors, as well as by others who occasionally delve into the web realm. We put emphasis on and provide recognition for contributed work. The Magazine is recognized by nearly all of the major web design agencies in the industry.
A List Apart – A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
456 Berea Street – This is a site by Roger Johansson who writes articles on web standards, accessibility, or usability in one way or another.
mezzoblue – A semi-daily expository and exploratory on all things web, design, and typographic. It is also a personal portfolio site with works in any creative discipline the owner feels fit to publicize.
Adaptive Path
Jesse James Garrett – The blog of the founder of Adaptive Path.
Jeffrey Veen
Your Total Site – YourTotalSite touchs on a wide range of subjects that include usability, accessibility, visual design, online marketing, (X)HTML & CSS, JavaScript, Information Architecture, and more.
IxDG Resource Library – A repository of information about interaction design.
Apples to Oranges – A blog by Ryan Nichols.
Demystifying Usability – A blog by Frank Spillers, a usability consultant.
Color Resources
Color is an important factor in design. Color can separate your site from your competition and it can also convey a specific message to your visitors. If you provide a personalized service you may want to choose colors that are soft and personal or if you want a corporate look and feel you may want to pick hard colors. Here are several resources that I use to help me make color decisions.
Color Schemer – Online color scheme generator.
Color Meaning – An article that explains the symbolism and meaning of different color types.
The Meaning of Color in Web Design – How colors influence audiences when marketing products through the Internet.
Symbolism of Color
Color Matters – Explore how color affects emotions, appetite, vision, sexuality, design, and art.
Typography
There are many different types of fonts and they can greatly affect how readable your site is, so choose wisely.
1001 Free Fonts – A large selection of true type fonts for Windows and Macintosh.
The Anatomy of Web Fonts
Typetester – Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its’ primary role is to make web designer’s life easier.
Google Page rank is based on back links. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.
1. Join forums, forums are a great way to achieve links to your website. In most forums you are allowed to have a signature and in your signature you can put a link to your website. But another important note to look on is making sure the forum is somewhat related to your website. You will still get credit if it’s not, but if it’s related to your website than you will be accomplishing two tasks at once.
You will be advertising for your website (bringing in targeted traffic) You will also be building your websites presence.
Your websites presence is very important to your survival. The more people see, or hear about your website the more credibility you will have and this increases your chances of having these visitors come back and possibly become leads.
2. Submit to search engine directories. Search engine directories are a good way to get a free link to your website. They also increase your chances at being listed higher on popular search engines like Google, and overture.
Most search engine directories allow you to submit to their website for free. This will allow you to increase your web presence by being listed on another search engine, and it will also be a free link.
Remember the more links you have the higher your PR will be
3. Using ezine ads (or newsletters). Creating an ezine will probably be the most beneficial step you can take to increasing your web presence. When you create an ezine you will be able to keep visitors coming back to your website for more by using signatures and giving special deals.
Ezine’s will also allow you to increase your back links. By creating an ezine you can submit your information about your ezine to an ezine directory. This directory will than link to your website(thus giving you a free link).
4. Creating and publishing articles. Articles are an easy source of generating new traffic. You can include your signature in your article. This will bring in more traffic from article submission directories.
Your signature usually consists of 4 to 8 lines. Usually the first line would be the title of the website that you are trying to advertise. The last line would be the link to the website and the lines in between these would be a sales pitch to draw your viewers into your website.
5. Links from related websites. Gaining links from related websites can be one of the most frustrating tasks you can attempt.
They are very easy to find, but can be somewhat difficult to obtain links from.
To find related websites, all you have to do is go to a search engine… say Google… and type in your subject. Maybe your website is based on ford mustangs.
You go to Google and type in ford mustangs, than you look around for pages that are somewhat related to your website. After you have done this (which should be very easy) you have to contact them in some way to get your link posted on their website. This can be the most difficult task because a lot of webmasters ignore e-mail’s from people requesting links because they don’t see the importance of it at the time. Some other reasons could be that they are rarely online, or they delete spam mail and sometimes delete their important emails in the process.
Important note: When looking for link partners don’t just link with websites that have a page rank of 4 or higher. Link with anyone and everyone you get a chance to. If you link to someone that has a page rank of zero, this will not hurt your page rank. It will only increase it because you are getting a link back to your website. Google doesn’t look at your back links page ranks to determine what yours is going to be. It simply looks at how many back links you have.
So if Google one day decided to link to a website that was just created and this website has a page rank of 0 and has a domain that goes something like this: mywebsite.geocities.com it’s page rank wouldn’t increase even though Google’s page rank is 10, it’s rank would still be zero because it would only have that one back link.
Setting up a directory structure
To make the most basic template, create a new folder in the “templates” folder. Name this folder after your template i.e. “mynewtemplate”.
Using a text editor (or dedicated editor such as Adobe Dreamweaver) create the files “index.php” and “templateDetails.xml”
To keep things organized, make 2 new folders called “images” and “css”. Inside the “css” folder create a file called “style.css”.
Although it is fine to place all your CSS code directly in your “index.php” file to start, many web developers prefer to place their CSS code in a separate file that can be linked from multiple pages using the “link” tag.
This is the most basic practical setup.
Outline of folder and file structure:
* mynewtemplate/
- css/
+ style.css
- images/
- index.php
- component.php
- templateDetails.xml
Creating a basic templateDetails.xml file
The templateDetails.xml file is essential. Without it, your template won’t be seen by Joomla!. The file holds key “metadata” about the template.
Lets look at an example:
<code>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE install PUBLIC "-//Joomla! 1.5//DTD template 1.0//EN" "http://www.joomla.org/xml/dtd/1.5/template-install.dtd">
<install version="1.5" type="template">
<name>mynewtemplate</name>
<creationDate>2008-05-01</creationDate>
<author>John Doe</author>
<authorEmail>john@example.com</authorEmail>
<authorUrl>http://www.example.com</authorUrl>
<copyright>John Doe 2008</copyright>
<license>GNU/GPL</license>
<version>1.0.2</version>
<description>My New Template</description>
<files>
<filename>index.php</filename>
<filename>component.php</filename>
<filename>templateDetails.xml</filename>
<filename>template_thumbnail.png</filename>
<filename>images/background.png</filename>
<filename>css/style.css</filename>
</files>
<positions>
<position>breadcrumb</position>
<position>left</position>
<position>right</position>
<position>top</position>
<position>user1</position>
<position>user2</position>
<position>user3</position>
<position>user4</position>
<position>footer</position>
</positions>
</install>
</code>
So, as you can see, we have a set of information between markup tags ( the <code><thing></code>). Your best approach is to cut and paste this into your “templateDetails.xml” file and change the relevant bits (such as <code><name> <author></code> ).
The part should contain all the files that you use – you possibly don’t know what they are called yet – don’t worry update it later.
Leave the positions as they are – these are a common set so you will be able to switch easily from the standard templates.
Creating a basic index.php file
The index.php file becomes the core of every page that Joomla! delivers. Essentially, you make a page (like any html page) but place PHP code where the content of your site should go. Here is the bare-bones code ready for you to cut and paste.
Lets start at the top:
<code>
<?php defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xml:lang="<?php echo $this->language; ?>" lang="<?php echo $this->language; ?>" >
</code>
The first line stops naughty people looking at your coding and getting up to bad things. The second tells the browser (and webbots) what sort of page it is. The third line says what language the site is in.
Now the header for real:
<code>
<head> <jdoc:include type="head" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/system/css/system.css" type="text/css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/system/css/general.css" type="text/css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template?>/css/style.css" type="text/css" /> </head>
</code>
The first line gets Joomla to put the correct header information in. This includes the page title, meta information as well as system JavaScript. The rest creates links to two system style sheets and to your own style sheet (if it’s named style.css and is located in the css folder).
Now for the main body:
<code>
<body> <jdoc:include type="modules" name="top" /> <jdoc:include type="component" /> <jdoc:include type="modules" name="bottom" /> </body>
</code>
Amazingly, this will suffice! Yes, its a very basic layout, but it will do the job. Everything else will be done by Joomla!. Note: you will need to ensure your menu is set to go into the “top” module position.
Finish it off – one last bit:
<code>
</html>
</code>
Full template source code:
<code>
<?php defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="<?php echo $this->language; ?>" lang="<?php echo $this->language; ?>" > <head> <jdoc:include type="head" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/mynewtemplate/css/style.css" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <jdoc:include type="modules" name="top" /> <jdoc:include type="component" /> <jdoc:include type="modules" name="bottom" /> </body> </html>
</code>
Packaging the template for installation
A directory with several loose files is not a convenient package for distribution. So the final step is to make a package. This is a compressed archive containing the directory structure and all the files. The package can be in ZIP format (with a .zip extension), in TAR-gzip format (with a .tar.gz extension), or in TAR-bz2 format (with a .tar.bz2 extension).
If your template is in a directory mytemplate/ then to make the package you can connect to that directory and use commands like:
* tar cvvzf ../mytemplate.tar.gz *
* zip -a -r ..\mytemplate.zip *.*
Note to Mac OS X users
Note to template developers using Mac OS X systems: the Finder’s “compress” menu item produces a usable ZIP format package, but with one catch. It stores the files in AppleDouble format, adding extra files with names beginning with “._”. Thus it adds a file named “._templateDetails.xml, which Joomla 1.5.x can sometimes misinterpret. The symptom is an error message, “XML Parsing Error at 1:1. Error 4: Empty document”. The workaround is to compress from the command line, and set a shell environment variable “COPYFILE_DISABLE” to “true” before using “compress” or “tar”. See the AppleDouble article for more information.
To set an environment variable on a Mac, open a terminal window and type:
<code>
export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true
</code>
Then in the same terminal window, change directories into where your template files reside and issue the zip command. For instance, if your template files have been built in a folder in your personal directory called myTemplate, then you would do the following:
<code>
cd myTemplate zip -r myTemplate.zip *
</code>
Conclusion
You should now have created a template that works. It won’t look like much yet. The best thing to do now is start experimenting with the layout.
Animated Navigation with CSS & jQuery
How to Make a Smooth Animated Menu with jQuery
Create a Cool Animated Navigation with CSS and jQuery
Lava Lamp for Jquery Lovers
Animated Navigation Item Using Jquery
Animated Jquery Image Menu
Garagedoor Effect Using Javascript – jQuery Edition
Animated Menus Using jQuery
Create an apple style menu and improve it via jQuery
Sexy Drop Down Menu w/ jQuery & CSS
Create Vimeo-like top navigation
Horizontal Scrolling Menu with CSS and jQuery
Fading Menu – Replacing Content
Using jQuery for Background Image Animations
Creating an Outlook Navigation Bar using the ListView and Accordion Controls
1. Yii is a component-based high-performance PHP framework for developing large-scale Web applications. Yii is written in strict OOP and comes with thorough class reference and comprehensive tutorials. From MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, widgets, caching, hierarchical RBAC, Web services, to theming, I18N and L10N, Yii provides nearly every feature needed by today’s Web 2.0 application development. And all these come without incurring much overhead. As a matter of fact, Yii is one of the most efficient PHP frameworks around.
2. CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework – a toolkit – for people who build web sites using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.
3. CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.
4. PHPDevShell is an Open Source (GNU/LGPL) Rapid Application Development framework written using only PHP with no Javascript and comes with a complete GUI admin interface. It is aimed at developing admin based applications as plugins, where speed, security, stability and flexibility are essentials. It is designed to have a very easy learning curve without complicated new terms to learn. The need for a light, fully functional GUI with limitless configuration brought forward PHPDevShell. We strive to keep direction and focus in our development according to our moto.
5. Akelos is a web application development platform based on the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern. Based on good practices, it allows you to:
* Write views using Ajax easily
* Control requests and responses through a controller
* Manage internationalized applications
* Communicate models and the database using simple conventions.
Your Akelos based applications can run on most shared hosting service providers since Akelos only requires that PHP be available at the server. This means that the Akelos PHP Framework is the ideal candidate for distributing standalone web applications as it does not require any non-standard PHP configuration to run.
6. Symfony is a web application framework for PHP5 projects. It aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure.
The very small number of prerequisites make symfony easy to install on any configuration; you just need Unix or Windows with a web server and PHP 5 installed. It is compatible with almost every database system. In addition, it has a very small overhead, so the benefits of the framework don’t come at the cost of an increase of hosting costs.
Using symfony is so natural and easy for people used to PHP and the design patterns of Internet applications that the learning curve is reduced to less than a day. The clean design and code readability will keep your delays short. Developers can apply agile development principles (such as DRY, KISS or the XP philosophy) and focus on applicative logic without losing time to write endless XML configuration files.
Symfony is aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context. This means that you have full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized. To match your enterprise’s development guidelines, symfony is bundled with additional tools helping you to test, debug and document your project.
7. Prado is a team of PRADO enthusiasts who develop and promote the PRADO framework and the related projects.
Team Members
* Qiang Xue – founder of PRADO framework, core development
* Xiang Wei Zhuo – core development (javascripts, active controls, DB controls, tests)
* Jason Ragsdale – site and forum administration
* Knut Urdalen – test, marketing
* Carl G. Mathisen – design and document comment system
* Christophe Boulain – component development, test
* Michael Hartl – component development, test
* Eirik Hoem – core development
* Yves Berkholz – core development
Past Team Members
Alex Flint, Brian Luft, John Teague, Todd Patrick, Pim van der Zwet, Tim Evans, Alban Hanry, Marcus Nyeholt
History of PRADO
The very original inspiration of PRADO came from Apache Tapestry. During the design and implementation, I borrowed many ideas from Borland Delphi and Microsoft ASP.NET. The first version of PRADO came out in June 2004 and was written in PHP 4. Driven by the Zend PHP 5 coding contest, I rewrote PRADO in PHP 5, which proved to be a wise move, thanks to the new object model provided by PHP 5. PRADO won the grand prize in the Zend contest, earning high votes both from the public and from the judges’ panel.
In August 2004, PRADO was hosted on SourceForge as an open source project. Soon after, the project site xisc.com was announced to public. With the fantastic support of PRADO developer team and PRADO users, PRADO evolved to version 2.0 in mid 2005. In this version, Wei Zhuo contributed to PRADO with the excellent I18 and L10N support.
In May 2005, we decided to completely rewrite the PRADO framework to resolve a few fundamental issues found in version 2.0 and to catch up with some cool features available in Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0. After nearly a year’s hard work with over 50,000 lines of new code, version 3.0 was finally made available in April 2006.
Starting from version 3.0, significant efforts are allocated to ensure the quality and stability of PRADO. If we say PRADO v2.x and v1.x are proof-of-concept work, we can say PRADO 3.x has grown up to a serious project that is suitable for business application development.
8. Zend Framework is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing, and a rigorously tested agile codebase. Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services, and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr, as well as API providers and cataloguers like StrikeIron and ProgrammableWeb. Expanding on these core themes, we have implemented Zend Framework to embody extreme simplicity & productivity, the latest Web 2.0 features, simple corporate-friendly licensing, and an agile well-tested code base that your enterprise can depend upon.
9. ZooP The Zoop Object Oriented Php Framework (The Zoop PHP Framework for short). A framework written in and for php.
The Zoop PHP Framework is stable, scalable and portable. It has been in production use for the last 5 years and has been used in many production environments. The Zoop PHP Framework is designed to be fast, efficient and clean. It is easily extendable and you choose to include only the functionality you use.
With Zoop an inexperienced coder can make secure web applications quickly. A more experienced coder will really appreciate how flexible The Zoop PHP Framework is. Both experienced and inexperienced coders alike will appreciate the automations that are at his/her disposal to handle mundane tasks.
The Zoop PHP Framework encourages separation of display, logic and data layers(MVC).
The Zoop PHP Framework is made up of many components and integrates many different projects including smarty (http://smarty.php.net) and the prototype AJAX framework. It also makes use of PEAR modules (http://pear.php.net). The efficient core components handle many of the functions you would have to code yourselves. Zoop’s integrated error handling can be configured to log errors for production environments, and is highly informative and readable which makes bugs easy to find and squash.
Zoop has been designed to make the developers life easier by providing tools to make efficient use of his/her time. On of our more unique and notable features is our implementation of GuiControls, a revolutionary idea in PHP that provides many form widgets with validation completely integrated, as well as a framework to develop your own guiControls extremely easily.
10.QPHP stands for Quick PHP and is a MVC framework similar as architecture to ASP.NET.
I, as the author of the project, have spent the last 8 years working on web projects using various Java frameworks, ASP.NET and PHP. This framework tries to get the best of the above platforms as well as to avoid the problematic parts.
Basically it:
* Brings the elegance of Java and C#
* Drops all Perl like bizzare statements that other PHP frameworks use
* Relies extensively on OOP concepts Code-behind approach is used, so every webpage consists of 2 files:
* .PHP – presentation logic
* .PHP.SCRIPT – business/programming logic FACTS ABOUT QPHP
* Less than 70 classes
* Less than 300K in size
* 3 years of internal use
* Works with PHP4/PHP5
* Easy database access
* Fast and stable * Event driven, component based
* AJAX compatible
* I18N support
* View/Session/Application states
* Simple input validation * 5 menu controls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M11SvDtPBhA
How do I get started with Alexa?
There are two easy ways to start using Alexa. If you are using Internet Explorer, visit this page and download the Alexa Toolbar. If you’re using Firefox, download the SearchStatus extension which displays the Alexa Rank, Google PageRank as well as other useful features.
I highly recommend that you use Firefox and SearchStatus instead of Alexa toolbar, which I find to be more bulky and less useful.
It is important to emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your site audience alongside integrated implementation of any of the following tips below.
- Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
- Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.
- Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.
- Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
- Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.
- Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.
- Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.
- Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
- Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.doshdosh.com . Replace doshdosh.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.
- Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.
- Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.
- Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.
- Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.
- Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.
- Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
- Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.
- Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.
- Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.
- Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.
- Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.
