Technique: Search Engine Optimization with Subdomain or Subdirectory

Search Engine Optimization requires your website to fulfill many criteria, and the website URL should contain your keyword that reflects the web page’s theme. This keyword or key-phrase should be present in the URL as the domain name, the subdomain name, the subdirectory name, or the filename.

A profitable niche website will be able to create a serious online income for you, but to create real wealth opportunities on the Internet even if one of your niche website fails to perform well, you must create multiple websites with many different niche topics.

To create hundreds of different niche websites, you will need to either:

• Procure different domain names for each niche topic (for example, www.dog-care.com, www.HealthAndFitness.info, www.WeightLoss.com, etc),
• Or, create different subdirectory for each niche topics under your existing website (like, Website.com/dog-care/, MainSite.com/HealthAndFitness/, MainSite.com/WeightLoss/, etc),
• Or, create different subdomain (like, dog-care. MainSite.com, HealthAndFitness.MainSite.com, WeightLoss.MainSite.com, etc) for each niche topics.

Although the first option is the best SEO option, the cost of procuring so many different domain names, even if they are just approximately about $8 a piece, will definitely be a financial burden. Every year, you will have to incur the re-registration fees for all those domains, and also remember to register at their different due dates.

The second and the third options mentioned above are obviously the better choices, considering that you will have the option of having the best keywords or key-phrases as the subdirectory or the subdomain names. This also removes the obstacle of the best keyword or key-phrase domain names being unavailable to you. As these keywords or key-phrase are used only as the subdomain or subdirectory names, you can freely use them for your search engine optimization requirements.

The third option of using the subdomain depends up on your website hosting company’s policies of either making that option available to you or not. Normally, most of the web hosting companies does allow their clients to create unlimited subdomain names. So, it depends up on you to use these options for creating the many niche websites. If this option is unavailable to you, then you can create niche websites using the subdirectories option.

Many people who are unaware that the name of the subdomain or the subdirectory can play an important role in search engine optimization, can now optimize their niche websites in the best possible ways where the domain names are concerned.

They can now create a lot of separate niche websites using the subdomain and the subdirectory options freely, and generate more profit opportunities with them. Even if one or some of those niche websites fail to generate any income, they can still depend up on plenty of other niche websites that were created with the above options.

The subdomain part of the URL is completely separate from the main site as far as the search engines are concerned. The various search engines, especially Google, does not treat the subdomains as part of the main website. This causes your subdomains to be treated as a separate website and gets all benefits of the major search engines’ benefits, including the search engine optimization factors.

You can study the success of about.com, which has utilized this method of using the subdomains and creating thousands of different niche websites under one main website, about.com. Its various high ranking niche topics are created as subdomains and interlinked across the entire subdomains to create a very successful brand name.

Of course, maintaining such a huge website with hundreds of subdomains can be a daunting task. Yet, the magnitude of the success achieved through this method can well be duplicated by you and others quite easily.

By using the subdomain or the subdirectory options, you get all these benefits without incurring the additional costs of purchasing separate domain names and paying their annual charges too. The hosting costs are also paid only once for the entire website because all the subdomains and the subdirectories are just the extensions of the main website.

With all these benefits, you have separate niche websites without additional costs and thus save hundreds of dollars worth of domain name purchase and their annual fees.

The downside to using the subdomain is that, as it is treated as a separate website by the search engines, you will have to create all search engine optimization techniques like creating back links to each subdomain separately along with other SEO techniques like submitting to website submission directories, creating additional subdomain-specific forum-related signature and external blog links, creating on-page and off-page optimization, separate niche specific content on vastly different niche topics, possibly different website designing to make each subdomain look unique. Other factors of web designing, development, and optimization will have to be undertaken as many times for each niche subdomain website.

The possibilities of creating new forums, paid or free membership sites, adsense ready sites, affiliate websites, and even powerful mini-sites are the additional benefits if you opt for niche subdomain sites. If some of these subdomains become very popular, then your online income opportunities will get a huge boost because your total expenditure is considerably low as you are using only one main website. The niche subdomains act as multiple revenue generating sites from different niche topics.

Although each different niche will require different content, you can acquire the help of expert writers to write them. The internet provides you with many websites where freelance content writers can be hired for nominal fees to write great content for your different topics. The internet itself is filled with content on every possible topic that can be researched to create high quality unique content for your different niche sites.

You can also use the control panel of your main site to create different platforms to create your subdomains.

For example, one niche site can use WordPress, while other can be based on Joomla, which is a very popular content management system (CMS). Another site can be a community forum, while yet another subdomain can an eCommerce website. You can also use the cPanel and Fantastico’s “Site Builder” option to quickly create entire sites.

As the subdomains are nothing but the subdirectories on your main website, the cPanel of your main website can be used to manage all the subdomains residing on the website as actual subdirectories of the main website. The cPanel can also be used to manage other normal subdirectories as well. Hence, the cPanel’s “Addon Domains” option can be used to create the subdirectory for each acquired domain name, and the “FTP Manager” and the “File Manager” can be used to populate those subdomains with the content pages.

The same “MySQL Database” function can be used to create databases for each subdomain, and the “Web/FTP Stats” can be used to view the statistics of every subdomain. In this way, you can use the main website to create multiple niche websites – each subdomain is treated as a separate website by the search engines – which broaden your opportunities of creating multiple online income earning opportunities.

With these options of creating additional websites by using the subdomains and the subdirectories and using creative and successful search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for these sites, your main website’s horizons grow exponentially in every direction. While creating these multiple websites, you must also take care to calculate your web space needs for all the sites, and any future growths expected.

Hence, it is also worthwhile to watch the performance of every site that has been created, especially those sites that are showing growth in popularity and the web traffic that it is getting periodically. Using the cPanel, you must also watch and record the monthly bandwidth used, the disk space usage, and the disk space that is still available.

This will reveal how your websites are performing monthly, and especially reveal the time of the year when your websites are are getting more web traffic. Your website would have more than sufficient resources if it is revealing signs of good growth.

You must also plan for future additions to these websites, and calculate the approximate disk space that will be required in future. It can be a difficult task, but this method will also reveal when you should plan to upgrade your existing hosting plan and get greater hosting resources like the disk space and bandwidth.

Hence, this mode of search engine optimization (through using the subdomain and subdirectory) is not an easy one, but the careful efforts are worth the successful results!

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E-Commerce Shopping Cart Hosting

One of the main things which many people and businesses want to add to their websites these days are shops so that they are able to sell their products or services via the internet; this is because that many are discovering what a powerful selling tool the internet can be for them, thus meaning that they want to sell their products via the internet as well just face to face or through their retail store since it gives them an extra source of income. The number of online shops has started to grow over the last few years since adding one to your website has become much easier than it previously was since there are now methods which allow you to add a shop to your website yourself which mean that you don’t have to pay a website designer or developer to install the application for you.

By adding an online shop or e-commerce store to your website, you are giving yourself an extra source of income since it means that you are able to sell the products which you might otherwise sell through your retail store or face to face directly to be public, meaning that you are also able to grab yourself another audience which might otherwise not be aware of your brand and the products that you sell. By optimizing your website and online shop with the use of previous articles within this blog, you are able to make sure that visitors who are looking for a product or service which you happen to sell or provide find your website and online shop through the use of a keyword search on a search engine that your website happens to be listed; this means that you are able to get customers which you might not otherwise get if you were to not have an online shop, and were to sell only through your retail store if you have one, or just face to face if that is the sales method which you use.

When setting up an online shop for your website, the main decision that you will come across is choosing the application that you want to base your online shop on; although this decision might sound like a basic one, it can be a fairly hard one to make because there are many different shop applications that might meet your needs in some areas, but not in others – you might also have limitations that you will have to take into consideration when choosing a shop application, although most are designed to function in range of different environments.

The main items that you will take into consideration when choosing a shop application for your website will include how many products or services you are able to list within your chosen shop application, whether it is commercial or open source and how it compares to other shop applications that are available; these features are important to consider since you don’t want to keep on adding new products or services to your online shop and then find that you aren’t able to add any more since you have reached the limit in that area, you also want to check whether the application which you want to use is open source or commercial – and if it is commercial you should consider the cost of it, and finally you should always see how your chosen shop application compares to other both commercial and open source applications since you might want to purchase a commercial application since it meets the needs of you or your business but there might be an open source application which is just what you want and suits you or your business’s needs more.

You should also consider whether or not your chosen shop application makes SEO friendly URLs with the use of a URL rewriting program out of your product listings to ensure that search engines see your product pages as search engine friendly, thus increasing the amount of visitors that search engines deliver to your website; you should also consider whether or not your chosen application has a search facility to ensure that your customers can easily search through your products or services if you happen to have many listed – this also means that your visitors and customers will be able to find their way around your online shop hassle free.

SEO Friendliness

One major feature that you should consider within a shop application is how search engine friendly it is, since if your chosen shop application isn’t that search engine friendly then search engines might not take kindly to it thus giving up on indexing your shop at a certain point, or might end up lowering the score that they gave you after your first crawl; if you happen to choose a search engine friendly shop application then you will find that search engines will take more of a liking to your online shop, meaning that they will give you a higher score thus giving your website and online shop more visitors which might even mean that you receive more sales through your shop in turn increasing the amount of money which you are able to earn from your shop.

The most basic SEO function which most shop applications under take is the generating of search engine friendly URLs for categories and products which are keyword rich to ensure that they are related to the content of the page that they have been generated for – the page titles of the pages for categories and products are also keyword rich as well since it gives visitors an idea of what they are about to view without having to wait for the entire page to load; both of these basic SEO methods are favoured by search engines since they allow search engines to match your website to more keyword searches that are made through them, meaning that search engines are more likely to place your shop higher up in the search engine results for certain keyword searches that are made by people who are looking for a shop or website which happens to be along the same lines as yours.

You personally should also try and ensure that the descriptions for your products are as keyword rich as possible, since search engines will also favour this since as is the case with keyword rich title tags and URLs, because of the fact that they can then relate them with more keyword searches thus providing your website and shop with a higher rank in the results page as well as an increased search engines score; this means that ensuring that your new online shop is search engine friendly is something which you have to make sure of as well, meaning that you can’t rely on the built in functions of the shop systems that you have chosen to use.

Choosing the Application that You are Going to Use

Choosing a shop application which you are going to use for your website can be a hard decision to make, since there are many different factors that you should take into consideration based on your requirements within this type of application; you should always ensure that you make your final decision based on information that you have read on your chosen application – this is especially important if you are planning to purchase a commercial application since you might not be able to get a refund if you purchase the application but then realize that it isn’t what you want.

The main factor which you should consider when choosing a shop application is whether it will run within your hosting environment or not – this is especially important since you don’t want to purchase an application but then find that it won’t run within your hosting environment, in this case you will probably not be able to get your money back; this means that you should always start out by using open source shopping applications, since you are then able to gain the knowledge of the hosting environment in which your hosting account resides, meaning that you know what kind of specifications to look out for when you look to upgrade to a commercial shop application in the future – this also means that if you decide to use an application that isn’t compatible with your hosting environment, you won’t loose any money since you haven’t paid anything for the right to use the application since it is open source meaning that anyone is able to use it for free.

You should look around at the different applications that are available for you to use as a shop on your website, since some may meet your needs in certain areas whilst others do in the areas which aren’t covered by some shop applications; you should always look around at both commercial and open source applications, meaning that you shouldn’t dismiss open source applications if you have the money to spend on a commercial application, and shouldn’t dismiss commercial applications if you want to use an open source applications but do have the necessary funds to cover the cost of a commercial application.

Conclusion

In conclusion, with the use of SEO friendly shop application, you will be able to bring more visitors to your main website as well – but you can’t just rely on the application itself to be SEO friendly, since it is up to you to make sure that your product and category descriptions are keyword rich since it will give search engines something else to favour in your website.

You should also be aware of the many factors that you should take on board when considering a shop application that you want to use on your website – the most important factor being whether you want to pay for the application that you are going to use, or whether you just want to use a free one which you can easily setup; this is because you don’t want to purchase a shop application for your website but then find that it doesn’t suit your needs, or find an open source application which happens to meet your requirements more than the commercial application does – however, one thing to note in this situation would be that you will not be able to get a refund on the license that you have purchased for the commercial application that you were using.

You should also make sure that before you purchase any application, or before you try and install any shop application within your hosting space, that the application which you want to use is actually usable within your hosting environment – whether you’re on a shared, VPS or dedicated hosting package; this is because if you want to use a commercial application but find that it doesn’t work, you won’t be able to get your money back and you could cause yourself a lot of frustration if you don’t use the right type of package.

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Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines

Submitting Your Website to Search Engines and Directories

One of the most important but easiest ways of bringing traffic to your website is via the use of publicly available search engines and directories on the internet where you are able to submit your website to so that others are able to find it. For those who don’t know, search engines are websites where people are able to enter keywords which the search engine then processes to provide the visitor with pages of results which contain links to website which fit the visitor’s search criteria; directories on the other hand do allow people to search through them, but websites are normally categorized meaning that you are usually able to find a website in the subject area that you want without having to search for it.

Most people seem to think that submitting your website to search engines is a complicated task, and that you have to pay to have your website listed – that is actually incorrect since in most cases you can submit your website to the major search engines for free, meaning that your largest source of traffic can be gained without having to pay a penny; on the other hand, you might have to pay to submit your website to directories in some cases, although basic submissions are normally free and you only have to pay if you want to have your website ‘featured’ so that it is shown off to more people who are browsing the directory website concerned looking for a website such as the one which you run. In the cases of the larger search engines, you don’t always have to manually submit your website or individual pages to the engine to make sure that they are displayed within the search engine’s results pages; this is because search engines employ ‘bot’ technology which means that computers automatically find your website and then index the content and pages of it – this means that the crawled and indexed content is displayed to people who enter search terms which are related to content on your website.

The good thing with search engine bots is that they generally automatically pick up any changes within the content of your website meaning that they automatically crawl it again to update the indexed data; this is because bots will come and crawl your website at least once a month – if your website is one which has regularly updated content then you might find that they will come and index your data much more often, and less often if the content of your website is rarely updated. Although the bots of the larger search engines will come and index your website, smaller search engines will require that you manually submit your website to them in order for their bots to detect and index the content of your website; larger search engines with bots will also provide web based submission forms if you wish to have your website indexed more quickly rather than having to wait for a bot to come and index your content.

Unfortunately, submitting your website to search engines is not a method that you can class under building up back links, since search engines are actually the ones who will be basic the score which they give your website on the number of back links you have; directories on the other hand are a site which you can use to build up the number of back links which you have to your website – this is because directories will not give you any score, and that directories will automatically create a separate detail page for your website once you have submitted it to the directories which you have chosen to. To ensure that your work in submitting your website to search engines so that people who are looking for a website which meets the same specification or subject as yours, you should use the other techniques that have been mentioned in part 1 of this series of articles to ensure that your website is placed as near the top of the results pages as possible; this is because people who are using search engines don’t tend to go any further than the third page of their search when they are looking for something in particular.

URL Optimization

Another method which you can use to help optimize your website for search engines is to optimize your actual URLs and file names within your website; although this method may sound like one which won’t work, the renaming of your directories and page file names to reflect the subject of the content which is contained within the page can help improve the score that search engines decide to give you. One technique which most people don’t know about is to use URL rewriting programs which will automatically create search engine friendly URLs from the existing content that you already have on your website; if your website is a CMS based one or uses dynamic pages to call data from data bases, then you should deploy a URL rewriting program which will make the URL to the content more search engine friendly, if your website uses static pages and folders then you have no need to use a URL rewriting program since you can easily rename your web pages or folders through the control panel that has been provided with your hosting account or via a standard FTP connection.

If you run a blog or other CMS based system such as an online shop, then you will find that you most probably already have some sort of URL rewriting system deployed on your website; for example you will probably find that the directory which preceedes the actual file name of the file which is trying to be reached will probably be named after the category which you have placed your shop product or blog post in, the file name will then most likely be the title of the product or blog post which you have added to your shop or blog. By relating the file name and directory name of the file which is trying to be accessed to the subject of the content which is contained within the file which is trying to be accessed, search engines are able to see that you have put in the effort to ensure that both your URLs and content are keyword rich; if both the content and URLs are keyword rich then search engines will find it much easier to match your website to searches made by people with certain keywords which are related to your website. Another method which is part of URL optimization is to use a URL rewriting program to remove the file extensions of files within your website – you aren’t removing the actual file extension, but when a visitor looks at the file name within their browser’s address bar, they will not see any file extension for the file which they are viewing; this means that you are able to create much cleaner looking URLs which only contain keywords which are related to the subject and content of your website.

You should always try and make your URLs as keyword rich as possible, this is because the more keywords which are related to the subject and content of your website which you use, then the higher the score a search engine will give you and the more visitors that you will receive to your website through searches from search engines which have used keywords that you have used on your website; you should also ensure that the keywords you have used within the URL for your web pages are repeated within the title tag of the pages which you have designed for your website.

As mentioned previously, most content management systems choose to employ URL rewriting technology to ensure that the URLs which they produce are as search engine friendly as possible; this is because that without the URL rewriting technology the URLs which were produced by a CMS system wouldn’t be SEO friendly since they would contain query strings and other pieces of content which are not related to the subject and content of your website, and no keywords related to the subject and content of your website at all. One thing to note when optimizing your website’s URLs is that you don’t want to make them too long since long URLs are not liked that much by search engines, since they take into account that it would take a human a while to type in such a long URL.

Hiring a Professional

If you feel that you don’t have the necessary knowledge to carry out the work needed to ensure that your website is a success with the extra SEO work, then you should consider hiring a professional who has both the time and the knowledge to carry out the work needed to ensure that your website is able to benefit from the effect that search engines are able to have on the amount of traffic which you receive to your website; one thing to bare in mind though is that hiring a professional can cost you a lot of money, even hundreds of pounds in some cases.

Although it will cost a lot, it is important that you take into consideration the benefits that professional search engine optimization will have on your website; for example, if you are running an online shop then you should take into consideration that the amount of money which you earn from selling your products online will increase if the amount of visitors which you receive who are looking for a website just like yours. In some cases, the experts which you hire to carry out your SEO work for you will know people who work for the big search engines, this in turn means that they might be able to give your upper hand when it comes to being shown at the top of results pages for searches involving certain keywords; at the end of the day, the higher up in the search engine results your website is then the higher the amount of visitors which you receive from search engines will be, since you should always take into account that most people don’t go any further than the third page of results when they are looking for a website on a specific subject.

Professionals will also be able to do a better job than amateurs when it comes to search engine optimization, since it is something which they have probably done a numerous amount of times; this means that you should always take a look at the portfolio of an SEO expert before you ask them to do any work for you, since you want ensure that you are guaranteed success from what you are paying the expert to do for you. SEO professionals are also able to use other techniques which have not been listed in this article to ensure that your website reaches the top of the rankings and receives a high search engine score from the search engines that choose to index your content. Another thing to consider is that search engine optimization professionals might have premium accounts for certain directories, meaning that they can easily submit your website to the directory concerned so that it can be displayed in a featured place to the visitors of the directory concerned; this means that if someone has come to a directory to specifically search for a website which meets the same criteria as yours, then they will come across your website first since it will most likely be a featured one.

If you don’t have the money to hire a professional to optimize your website for you, then you can use the basic methods as outlined in this article to optimize your website by yourself, although this will not achieve the same results as a professional would, you will still increase the amount of visitors which you receive to your website, and in the case of an online shop your revenue as well; this means that if you successfully optimize your site then you could do it for others at a small fee, and start to charge more as you build up a successful portfolio.

Conclusion

It is hoped that with the help of this article, you have been able to optimize your site to ensure that you increase the number of visitors which it receives, and in turn increasing the revenue which you receive from your website in the case that you run a shop alongside it or you have chosen to place adverts alongside your content to help monetize your website. With the use of this article you should have learnt where you appropriately place back links to your website so that more visitors come and see your content; this will mean that the visitor count of your website will increase but at the same time ensure that search engines pick the back links up meaning that they will see your content is of back link quality since they will think that someone else has gone to the trouble of linking to your content since they have taken a liking to it. You should have also learnt where to place keywords within your content as well as in the title bar and how you should use keywords within the addresses to the files and directories within your website to show that the content of your the directory or file which is trying to be accessed is related to both the title (the page title) and address bar (the actual URL) content.

Another SEO technique which you should have taken on board is the design and layout techniques which you should use in the development of your website to ensure that search engines can easily crawl and index the actual content of your website; without the use of these tags, search engines might just give up trying to index your content after a certain point since it starts to become hard for them to read, just as it would for a human. You should have also learnt that you can easily hire a professional for a fee if you find that you don’t have the time or necessary knowledge to optimize your website – this should however be following with caution since if you don’t optimize your site correctly then you could end up reducing the amount of visitors which your website receives; at the end of the day, you don’t want to reduce the amount of visitors which you website receives since you will only give yourself or an expert more work to do when you get around to optimizing your site properly in order to increase the amount of visitors which you receive.

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When searching for a third party application of any type which you are wanting to use within your website, you will often come across applications which can be categorized fairly easy; these two categories are commercial and open source applications – commercial applications being ones which you have to purchase a license for so that you have proof of permission that allow you to use them, and open source applications being ones which are ‘free’ which means that you don’t have to purchase anything to be able to use them within your website. The choice of either an open source or commercial application can be a big one, since it can affect your ability to be able to accept any more visitors to your website, especially the part where you have chosen to use the third party application in the future; this is because some applications are only able to handle a certain amount of members or visitors that are able to use it, meaning that if this limit is crossed then the application in question will most likely be slow to use and might cause quite a bit of frustration for both you and your website visitors since the application will be more or less unusable – one further thing to add is that commercial applications can generally handle more visitors or members than their open source counterparts. Commercial applications generally come with guaranteed support, which makes them perfect for you if you are a webmaster who is in control of a website which has a fairly large user base, since in some situations you might require the expertise of someone who knows the application inside out, and who is more or less guaranteed able to help you solve the problem; open source applications on the other hand don’t come with any guaranteed or official support, which means that you will have to rely on the official documentation of the application concerned if you happen to run into a problem with it for some reason or another – in some cases there might be dedicated forums or message boards where you might be able to receive a good level of support and advice from experienced developers who have been using the application in question for a long time – however, both methods of support for open source applications are not guaranteed to help you solve your problem. Although open source applications are always available free of charge, it is recommended that you donate a small amount of money (if a donation scheme is being run for the application concerned) to the developers of the application, if you find it useful and good to use and that you don’t think that there are any major problems with it; this is because the developers of open source applications are normally giving up their free time to develop the application in question, and normally spend their own money where appropriate, but since the application is free, they never normally receive any money in return – only thanks from the community which chooses to use the application.

Scalability

Scalability is normally referred to as how many visitors or members a certain application is able to hold before it starts slowing up or before it becomes completely unusable; for example, commercial applications are more scalable than open source applications which means that they are able to cope with a large visitor or member demand and in most cases will never slow down or become completely unusable since they have built in mechanisms to help them cope if a sudden surge in demand. If you run a small website which doesn’t receive many visitors, and don’t expect the amount of visitors which you receive to rise by a large margin, then you should be fine with an open source application – this is because that although open source application aren’t as scalable as commercial ones, they are still scalable to a reasonable amount of visitors or members which should be above what you currently receive to your small website; commercial applications on the other hand are more tailored towards larger websites who receive thousands of visitors daily, which mean that they are highly scalable and able to cope with an increase in demand; this means that if you run a large website which receives thousands of visitors daily, then you should consider a commercial application since if your website was to experience a surge in demand then the third party application which you are using would be able to keep up with demand and wouldn’t slow down or become usable in any sense. In some cases, you might have originally chosen an open source application to use for your website, because at the time your website didn’t receive many visitors which means that you didn’t have the need for a commercial application since it wouldn’t have been any benefit to you – you might have then found that the amount of visitors to your website was starting to increase slightly, but over time the application which you had chosen to use wasn’t starting to slow down as it wasn’t able to keep up with the visitor demand; in this situation you would have to upgrade to a commercial application which was able to keep up with the demand of your website’s visitors, and wouldn’t slow down if there was a sudden surge in demand – if you were using an application such as a forum which contained large portions of content which couldn’t be manually ported over then you could utilize a third party migration tool that should be able to export and convert your database for use by the commercial application which you have chosen to use in place of the open source application that you were using to ensure that your visitors can still access the application concerned in times of high demand. One other thing about scalability is that you should always see how scalable the application which you have chosen to use is; this is because you might end up choosing a commercial application which isn’t scalable to the amount that you need it to be which might leave you at a dead end.

Support

If you are new to the web development world, and the idea of using third party applications to expand your website and the interactivity that your visitors are able to have with it, then you should always choose an open source application, since they are free and you can mess around with them and change them to your hearts content, although the amount of support available for them is relatively limited; on the other hand if you are an experienced person with a well established website who wants to expand it professionally, then you should consider a commercial application – this is because they are relatively scalable and normally come with official support which is provided by the company from which you purchased the application. Support is big thing for experienced web developers, since in some cases the source code of the application that they have purchased is encrypted, which means that they are unable to view and in turn change it for themselves; this means that if there is a problem with the code itself then they are unable to solve it since they don’t have access to the source of it so that they are able to change it for themselves – in this case they would have to source support from the company from which the application was purchased, and in turn notify them of the problem and receive the necessary support to ensure that they are able to solve the problem. On the other hand, if you are new the world of web development and like to solve problems yourself, then you should consider an open source application; this is because they are free and normally allow you access to their source code so that you can change the program to work the way that you want it to – this means that if there is a problem then you can easily solve it yourself, which is good since their is normally little to no support available for open source applications – the fact that there is more or less no support available for open source applications means that you should have a good amount of knowledge before deploying an open source application into a live environment where it is going to be used since you will need the necessary technical knowledge to fix the application if something was to go wrong with it. One thing to note is that the support available for commercial applications is only available at an extra cost in some cases; for example most commercial applications come with a years worth of unlimited free support via phone and email, but after that year you have to have a small amount to renew your right to have access to the support which is provided. On the other hand with support for open source applications, you should always ensure that the documentation for your chosen application is of high quality to ensure that you are able to familiarize yourself with the application without the need for trial and error; you should also check out the quality of the forum support which might be available for the applications which you are looking at before making a final decision.

Conclusion

In conclusion, your choice of whether to use either a commercial or open source third party application for your website is dependent on your need for support as well as on the size of your website, and whether or not you expect the amount of visitors that you receive to your website to increase or not; this means that if you are new to the world of web development, then you should consider an open source application that suits your needs appropriately, and if you are an experienced website developer who is running a well established website, you should consider a commercial third a party application which suits your needs appropriately. With the use of this article you should have learnt that if your website receives a large amount of visitors, or you plan on receiving a surge in the amount of visitors that you receive then you should consider a commercial application for your needs since they are a lot more scalable in terms of the amount of visitors or members that they are able to handle and process; you should have also learnt that if you run a small website that doesn’t receive many visitors, you should consider an open source application for you needs since they are free which means that you don’t have to fork out for something that most likely won’t be used much by either you or your website’s visitors. If you do choose to use a commercial application, then you should be prepared to pay at least $100 per year each year after you have purchased the application to ensure that you can still access the official support which is provided as well as to ensure that you are able to receive the necessary security updates to ensure that your install of the commercial application concerned is secure against hackers or any other malicious attackers. In terms of open source application support, you should be prepared to read the long documentation to ensure that you know your chosen application inside out; this then means that you should be able to customize the application to the way that you want it to be, and even fix any problems that you find with it if necessary – you should also check out the forum support that might be available for your chosen open source application to ensure that if the information that is provided in the documentation is not enough, you still have another source of support that is able to help you out in the case that you run into some sort of problem, you should also consider tutorials for the application concerned which might be able to set you in the right direction to fix a problem.

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When you are setting up your a blog – whether it be your first or another one to add to your collection, one of the main factors that you will end up considering is the blog application which you are going to install within your web space to allow you to write the blog articles that you want others to be able to openly view and comment on if they wish; there are many smaller factors which can affect your decision in relation to the blog application which you choose to base either your blog or website – and in some cases, both – this article should help you in the decision making process since the main factors affecting your decision will be discussed in depth. Blogs are in most cases special websites where people write articles or posts on any subject, although some blogs are dedicated to specific subjects which means that the posts which they contain are normally much more specialized than those which are contained on other blogs which are located on the internet; blogs also let visitors and readers comment on the articles in most cases, this means that a reader can easily suggest an improvement for the article or post a comment arguing a point which had been made by the author or ‘blogger’ who wrote the post for their blog or for the blog that they work for, or post their articles on. You can also use blog software to build your website on, since a blog application will allow you to manage the content of your website with ease on the fly from any internet computer or location – this means that you can use the blog application which you choose to use in the same way as you would use a CMS system, you are also able to add add-ons to your blog application of choice in most cases which means that you can easily extend its features and usability; this also means that you can use the blog application which you choose to use to create a dynamic website to which you can allow your visitors to have more interactivity with – this means features such as the ability to comment on the individual pages with which you have populated your website with, this in turn means that your visitors can see each others comments and respond to each other with their own opinions without the need for a forum – which can help create a sense of community within your website. Other factors which can affect your choice of blog software can include the price of it if you choose to go with a commercial application, the required environment to ensure that the chosen application is able to function without any ill effects – if you are new to this area of web hosting/web design then you should also consider the type and amount of support which is available for your chosen application – this is because if you need help installing the application, then you might not be able to get the necessary helpful support if you choose to go with a lesser known application, but if you go with a better known application then you should be able to receive the support that you need to ensure that you are able to get your new blog started up successfully.

Administration Features

The first and main feature that you should consider when choosing a blog application to use is how far the administration settings in the administration panel of the application concerned stretch; these features include the WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor as well as other settings which let you configure how the application which your blog is based on manages certain things as well as how advanced other administration features of the application which you have chosen to use are. The WYSIWYG editor which should be supplied with your chosen blog application is what you use to write posts and articles which you will then post onto your blog for your visitors and readers to read – and if you have the facility enabled, your visitors and readers should be able to comment on your content; the WYSIWYG editor is an important administration feature of your chosen application since the features between the different editors can differ, and the more features that are available within a WYSIWYG editor the more content and wider range of content that you can add to your posts – for example some WYSIWYG editors allow you to add flash content and images to your posts which means that you can create multimedia posts and articles alongside your regular text based articles, this itself can help distinguish your blog or website amongst others which might be using the same application or design. Other administration features of any basic blog application should allow you to manage and install add-ons to your application, which means that with the use of add-ons you can easily expand the capabilities of your chosen application both in terms of the general front end which your users and visitors will see as well as the administration area which you will use to manage your blog as well as where you will be able to create new posts and articles from; with the use of add-ons you can also make your blog much more interactive and usable for the visitors and readers that you receive to your blog – this means that your existing visitors and readers are more likely to refer others to your website which in turn means that your visitor numbers will easily rise as time goes on. Some blogs contain administration features that can determine how you post your posts or articles that will then be displayed on the front page of your blog for your visitors and readers to view; for example, in most cases you can configure your chosen blog application to pull emails from a certain email account and them automatically post them to the blog as if they were articles – this means that if you’re not at a computer to write you’re article, you can easily use a portable device with email capabilities such as a mobile phone to email through what you want to post, it will then be automatically processed by your blog application and posted into your blog so that your visitors and readers can see it – this is perfect for you if you have a job such as a journalist who need to keep their blog or website updated regularly but doesn’t have constant internet access but always has some sort of mobile device with them.

Add-Ons

Add-ons can help extend the default capabilities, as well as give the ability to create new abilities for the blog application which you choose to use for either your blog or your website; this means that you should always make sure that the blog application which you choose to use has the ability to accept third party add-ons, and that it has a good repository of third party add-ons since you might want to take advantage of this feature, and because of this you want to make sure that there is a good selection of add-ons for you to choose from. The fact that add-ons are able to expand the capabilities, and in turn the possibilities of what you could use your install of your chosen blog application mean that you can use your install for a mass of activities, which means that you are able to create a highly interactive environment for your readers, or if you choose to use you chosen blog application as a CMS system, website for your visitors so that they are able to search and view content much more easily; this means that you might be able to increase the number of visitors which you receive to your website. However, add-ons don’t have to be about increasing the interactivity that readers or visitors can have with your blog or website, nor do they have to be about making the administration area much better for you as the webmaster, or increasing the look of your blog or website in general, as most people tend to think they are; for example, in most cases you are able to get add-ons for blog applications which are known as ‘SEO add-ons’ – these have the power to help increase your search engine ranking, and in turn increasing your visitor count since more people will be able to find your website through search engine keyword searches.

Commercial or Open Source

One main factor that can affect your choice of blog software is the fact of whether the pieces of software that you have been looking at are open source or commercial; commercial piece of blog software are ones which will cost you to have the ability to use them since you will have to buy a license in order for you to be allowed to use them, open source pieces of blog software on the other hand are completely free meaning that you can even download the source code for them so that you can construct your own add-ons based around their infrastructure so that the piece of blog software which you have chosen to use functions in the way that you want it to – this wouldn’t be possible with commercial blog applications since in most cases, you aren’t given access to their source code. In terms of support, you are normally given phone support with commercial applications, since you have paid them money and in turn will provide you with one to one professional support – in most cases this will only last a year meaning that you will have to renew your cover for it when you’re six months is up; there is no official support for open source blog applications since you are not paying anyone for the right to use it, meaning that there isn’t the money there to pay people to provide telephone support for the piece of blog software concerned – however, there are normally dedicated blogs which are normally able to provide you with a good level of support if you are new to the world of blog software, and have come across some sort of problem – whether it be not being able to install the application correctly or forgetting the administrator account’s password and not being able to reset by yourself for whatever reason. In most cases you will find that commercial pieces of blog software are much more secure than their open source counterparts – this is because you are paying for a license which means that there are paid developers who are there developing the product day in and day out, which means that if a security flaw is found in the application then it can be rectified by the paid developers more or less immediately; open source pieces of blog software on the other hand are usually much less secure than their commercial counterparts, this is because there is nothing to pay for a team of developers to develop the application day in and day out, which goes along with the idea that these applications are normally developed by a few developers within their spare time – this means that is a security flaw is found within a piece of open source blog software, then it isn’t going to be rectified immediately since the developers don’t have the time to stop their paid job to correct the problem concerned.

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