Don’t let some minor mistakes stop YOUR Site from functioning optimally!

As a web designer, you should Design YOUR websites to give YOUR visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience.. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world — if YOUR Web Site is poorly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off YOUR Web Site by the lousy design..

When I’m talking about a “good design”, I’m not only talking about a good graphical design.. A professional web Design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good Web Site Design – accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience Design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design..

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I’ve come across.. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against YOUR own Site as a checklist and if anything on YOUR Site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!

• 1) Background music

Unless you are running a Web Site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto YOUR Web Site.. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big Web Site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on YOUR site, the background music starts playing again.. If I were YOUR visitor, I’d just turn off my speakers or leave YOUR Web Site.. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing YOUR Web Site – users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view YOUR Web Site as it is meant to be viewed..

• 2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to Web Site Design than purely graphics – user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should Design the text on YOUR Web Site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable YOUR visitors to read it without straining their eyes.. No matter how good the content of YOUR Web Site or YOUR sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything!

• 3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen.. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor’s screen.. Your Web Site loses its function immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster YOUR job is to make sure YOUR Web Site does what it’s meant to do effectively.. Don’t let some minor mistakes stop YOUR Site from functioning optimally!

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With normal spoofing a scammer tries to get personal information by sending fraudulent emails masquerading as an official website an individual might be working with. While some fall for the deception, many know better since the domain name in the email doesn’t resemble the domain name they usually use to access whatever site. However, what happens if a domain name looks exactly like an official website?

This, in combination with a more ‘professional’ email, could trick someone into giving away all of their personal data. And when this happens they will eventually become victims of identity theft. But, how can a scammer acquire a domain name that looks official? It’s through the unfortunate practice of the homograph attack.

What is a homograph attack? A homograph attack is when a person makes an internationalized domain name, (also known as an IDN), look like a traditional domain name associated with a popular website. They are able to do this because of the way internationalized Domain names work. Basically, internationalized domain systems use a different type of coding system than the ASCII-based Domain names Americans are used to.

However, even with a different coding system, some languages have characters that look similar to characters used in American English. Scammers exploit this by taking these letters and creating Domain names that look ‘new’ to browsers and servers, at least in terms of coding. To the human eye, these fraudulent Domain names appear to already be taken, which is exactly what a scammer wants. They cause further confusion by creating sites that look pretty much like the sites associated with the original domain name that the scammers are spoofing.

Before and even after internationalized Domain names became popular, homograph attacks were expressed through spoofing just English characters.

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Businesses are fooling themselves if they think they can continue to conduct business without a website. This is because in today’s age, having a website makes many think a company is ‘official.’ But a website by itself doesn’t mean anything without a decent domain name. Granted, a company can try to cut costs by using a free domain name or a third level domain name offered by free web hosting companies, but visitors won’t view their site as being genuine.

Long, complicated Domain names are associated with affiliate marketing or even scammers, so businesses need to try and stay away from them as much as possible. The best solution involves getting a normal domain name from a reputable domain name company. One of the best domain name companies around is Yahoo Domain names.

Yahoo Domain names is a great alternative for individuals who do not know much about Domain names or website hosting. In fact, with Yahoo Domain names, a person can get a domain name free should they decide to buy one of their hosting packages. The cheapest hosting package available is $11.95 a month plus a startup fee of $25. With this along with any other Yahoo Domain Name hosting package, webmasters get an online website builder. Basically, all they have to do is enter in their information and the site is created for them instantly.

Another reason one should choose Yahoo Domain names is because of their domain name locking system. This helps prevent hijackers from stealing the domain name. With Yahoo Domain names, the process of domain name locking is as simple as clicking a button. Webmasters can check to make sure their domain name has been locked by looking up their Whois information. If it says Status: Registrar-Lock, (which it will since Yahoo Domain