Photo galleries can really apply to just about every website, since it allows you to let anybody add pictures for others to see. Just about every website that exists on the Internet is focused on a certain subject, making your photo gallery related to that subject can dramatically increase your amount of visitors.

So how do you go about doing this? Well you could always hire a web designer or web design company to do it for you, like us :), but in the end adding a photo gallery is pretty simple with the tools available today.

First off you need to know what purpose you want your photo gallery to serve. Whether you just want it to show only pictures that you upload, or go all out and allow anybody to upload photos, you need to know before you begin.

Once you have that figured out, we can move onto choosing your photo gallery software.

Photo Gallery Software

When it comes to photo gallery software, you actually have a lot of options to choose from on the Internet these days. Obviously over time more will come and go, but for now I will give you the run down of the best free, open source, photo galleries on the Internet today. Because you know, who the heck wants to pay for anything!

First off, if you want a simple photo gallery where only photos you add will be displayed, like a family website or something along those lines, then I recommend Plogger. Now keep in mind, in my opinion Plogger is not the best photo gallery software available for free on the Internet, but it is perfect for simple websites that only want to showcase their photos.

Now if you want a complete photo gallery, one that allows anybody to join and upload photos, then I recommend Gallery.

I know it sounds like such a simple name, but I assure you the software is anything but. I mean it is simple for people to use, but the amount of options and features you get is simply unbelievable. They even have a shopping cart integrated into the photo gallery so people can buy your photos!

So as far as photo gallery software goes, those two are really the premiere ones available on the Internet at this time for free. Of course as time goes on, I suspect more will come and go, but to me it seems Gallery will be around forever with the huge community that they already have.

Installing and Setting Up Your Photo Gallery

This is where it gets tricky, unless of course you already have some web designing and coding experience. Also, I am only going to be able to explain the general outline of what you need to do too install your photo gallery, the complete process varies from software to software, so be sure to read the documentation for whatever one you choose.

Step 1: Ok, so first you need to have put all of the photo gallery software files in a sub folder of your website, which I suggest you name photos. Just to let you know though, you can also put your photo gallery at the root level of your website, if you plan on making the entire website dedicated to photos. But since most are not, I figured you should just put all of the files in a folder called photos, so the gallery has it’s own section. And keep in mind, you can name the folder whatever you want, photos just seems the most logical to me.

Please Note: To get the photo gallery software on your websites server, you need to upload them all. Depending on your connection speed, this could take some time.

Step 2: Now that all of the files are uploaded you can install your photo gallery software. Like I said before, this process varies from software to software, but most just require you to type in the URL of the install file which you uploaded with the rest of the files, and then just fill in the blanks with your PHP database name, username, password and other information in the form.

Once this information is filled in correctly, you can install your photo gallery. If all of your information was correct, then it should install without a hitch. If it has a problem, double check everything is correct.

Please Note: Whatever photo gallery you install, one thing is for sure, you will have to set folder and file permissions. This basically means you need to connect to your websites server via FTP, and set the permission for the files and folders it tells you to, too the correct number. For example, one folder might have to be changed to 777 CHMOD or 755.

Step 3: Once it is all installed, and you have the security part complete by changing the file and folder permissions, you can customize your photo gallery. This is really the last step, and is pretty easy.

Basically to customize your photo gallery, all you need to do is apply your template to the main file that your photo gallery uses. Usually this is the index.php file, or the index.php file of a certain built in theme of your photo gallery. Wherever it may be, apply your header part of your template above the photo gallery code, and the footer part below.

Now of course if your website is uniquely designed, you might have to play around with it a little bit to make everything look just right.

After that, all you need to do is make sure you create a .htaccess file with this code in it “DirectoryIndex FILE.php” with FILE.php being the main page of your photo gallery. This way whenever someone goes to “www.yourdoamin.com/photos” it will redirect them to the main page of your photo gallery, not a directory listing.

Once all of that is done, just type in www.yourdomain.com/photos or just yourdomain.com, depending on whether you put it in a sub folder, and make sure everything works fine. Play around with the options and settings to customize it to your liking.

Well that basically sums up the process of finding, installing and customizing your own photo gallery for your website. Just remember that the setup instructions vary from software to software, so be sure to read the instruction manual!

Many of our clients run e-commerce businesses and need a reliable shopping cart platform to not only manage their inventory, but allow for easy use and purchase ability for customers.

Sometimes they come to us with the shopping cart solution they want already in mind, or paid for and ready to go. And sometimes they come to us just with questions about what they should use, and preferably one they will not have to pay for.

Well the good news is that there are shopping cart solutions that are free, and in my opinion they are better then ones that cost money.

First off let me show you the free shopping cart solutions:

Zen Cart - Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. The e commerce web site design program is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e commerce web design could be and should be done differently.

OSCommerce - OSCommerce is an Open Source based online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved.

OpenCart - OpenCart is an open source PHP-based online shopping cart system. A robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost.

Now that you know the free solutions, which ones is the best you ask? Well it is hard to determine the best one when it all really depends on what you want it to do, but in my experience Zen Cart is the best, most reliable shopping cart solution that doesn’t cost a dime to use.

Zen Cart works on a template system that allows you to easily control the look of your website, and if you already have a template made up, you can just apply it to the index dot php page and it will surround your entire store with your template. You will have to tweak the header information, like the meta tags and style sheets, so it only appears once and not twice inside of the template, but besides that it should only take a few minutes.

Installing Your Free Shopping Cart

Many business owners think “Ok, it’s free but installing and maintaining it must be a pain in the butt!” Well the fact of the matter is, Zen cart, and the others have an easy self install process, and practically maintain themselves. All you need to really make sure is that you backup your website files and the MySQL database used for your shopping cart, at least once a week.

This ensures that if your cart software ever becomes corrupted, or hacked into, you just change the passwords for the website and databases, then just re upload your backup to your web sites server (host).

Setting Up Payment Processing

After you install your shopping cart, and have products added for people to buy, you need to setup your payment processing. With those free shopping carts I mentioned above, the setup process for this is really easy and requires you to just input your information for your credit card processor or PayPal.

You are also allowed to let your customers pay you by check or money order, so you can enable that too and just input the business address that you want to receive the check or money order. When setting this up, you also want to make sure you input your local and tax information, along with your shipping rates.

Important Reminders

One thing to keep in mind about shopping carts is that if you want to process the transactions on your actual website, you will need a dedicated secure connection, along with a security certificate for it. This basically means that when your customers are checking out, they will be at your secure domain, which would look like this: https://www.yourwebsite.com

Now of course you are not required to have a secure connection or certificate, but you are going to have a hard time gaining your visitors trust if you don’t. Plus they only cost around two hundred dollars this day in age, so it really is not that big of deal to buy one.

There are a few cheap ways around it though, for example buying a cheap shared hosting account, and having your secure connection shared, not dedicated. This basically means instead of having it say “www.yourwebsite.com” in the address bar, it will usually display your web servers directory structure, which is usually something like “/username/public_html/subfolder”.

Another way is to just use a third party payment processor like PayPal to process your transactions. This means whenever the customer is about to pay for your product or service on your website, they will be taken to a secure PayPal page to pay.

Either way is fine really for new businesses, but in the long run it is almost a must to have a secure domain and certificate for your shopping cart.

Paid For Shopping Cart Solution

If you would still feel better about paying for shopping cart software, or just don’t want to deal with installing and maintaining it, then I recommend you go with the 3DCart shopping cart software.

What is a site map?

A site map is a collection on URL’s of every web page on your website, laid out in a list.

Generating a site map for your website is actually a pretty important step in doing proper search engine optimization, and is often overlooked by amateurs. The reason most people don’t create one though, is because they want to do it manually, and for a website that has thousands of pages it is darn near impossible.

That is where a site map generator comes in and does all of the work for you. A site map generator is basically the same website crawling robot that all of the search engines use. It starts off on your home page, and follows every link to every page, until it has visited them all. It then takes the URL’s of all those pages, along with the page title, and puts them in a site map dot XML file.

This file can be uploaded to your websites root level, and then submitted to Google, Yahoo and MSN so they can just visit the site map file and grab and add all of your pages to their search results. Using a site map makes sure that the search engines index every page, and find out about it as soon as possible, which means you will be added sooner.

Most site map generators can also make an HTML site map for your visitors to visit, and see all that your website holds on a single page, or spread out over several pages. Not many visitors will use your HTML site map to get around, but it is sometimes nice to have so the search engines can also look at it.

If you are looking for a great site map generator that I myself use, check out the XML site map generator to learn more about their handy little script

One thing you should know about site map generators, and search engines in general, is that they can only crawl what you link to. If you make a page on your website, upload it and everything, but don’t connect it to another page, then it is just a lonely page that nobody can find, not even a web bot!

So for the site map generator to work correctly, and to get better search engine rankings with more pages included, make sure you always keep every new page connected to another page that is already indexed in the site map.

One thing that I get asked by a lot of people, is how do I incorporate a forum into my website, so that it blends and functions well. Well in all honesty, to add a forum to your website is really not as hard as it may seem. The hard part is customizing it so it looks the same as every other page on your website, or at least have a similar color and layout.

Before we begin talking about installing and customizing your forum, you need to know where to get it from. First off, a very popular option that businesses use, is to hire a freelance coder to make the forum software. This can work out good if you have a lot of money, and a good web programmer. The problem is though, good web programmers are somewhat hard to find, and not everyone wants to spend thousands of dollars on something they don’t even know will work or not!

That is where the open source solutions come in. The two best open source PHP forum scripts that exist on the internet today, is SimpleMachines and PHPBB. Both of these forums are free to use, so long as you keep a link back to their website in the footer, and are pretty easy to install. Out of the two though, I would have to say SimpleMachines is by far the best, and easiest to install. In fact the installation is basically on autopilot, and all you have to do is upload the files to your websites server.

Installation of your Forum

This will obviously vary depending on what forum script you install, but the main procedure for all of them is uploading the files to a sub directory on your website, or at the root level if you wanted your website to be dedicated entirely to the forum. You then just type in the web address of the index file, of your forum. That is really as much as I can tell you about that, because like I said, the installation procedure varies.

One thing is for sure though, most forum software uses PHP, so you will need to also set up a database for your forum, using your PHP my admin or hosting provider tools.

Forum Customization

So like I was saying before, the really hard part is customizing your forum. Now if you don’t have really good experience in web programming or the PHP/Javascript language, or you don’t want to spend a lot of your time doing it, then I recommend you hire a freelancer to do it for you. In fact, our services can include forum installation and customization if you wanted us to do it for you.

If you do want to do it yourself though, the best forum software that allows easy customization is the SimpleMachines forum. They basically have one file that controls the layout of your forum, so when you want to change something, or make it better, you only have to change it in that one file. It cannot get much easier then that!

As for customizing other forum software though, I could really not tell you at this point, since I have not needed to customize another type of forum yet. I can only hope though that it will only involve tweaking one file, so updating will be clean and easy.

Whether you design websites, or just own one, you are bound to make some mistakes at some point in time. The internet is an ever changing place, and keeping up is hard. Below I will list the 5 biggest mistakes new website designers/owners make, and how to fix them. I hope they help you avoid making them, and if you have anything you want to add, just leave a comment.

Mistake Number 1: Bad Hosting - Perhaps because hosting has become such a cheap commodity, people think all hosting companies are the same and they all just work the same. Well the fact of the matter is, they don’t all just work, and sometimes a bad host can destroy your business.

For example, if your hosting company takes down your website everyday for a little downtime, it could be during your busiest visiting hours and will make your visitors angry, since they cannot access your website when they wanted to. You wouldn’t think a host would do that, but I have been through several of them that have cost me thousands of dollars in lost customers and advertising revenue.

There are also other factors to consider, like your website getting put on the front page of a social media website, or another highly trafficked website. This in return will get your website bombarded by thousands of visitors in a short amount of time. With a bad hosting company, your websites server will crash and show an error immediately afterwards that will require you to fix it before your visitors can see your site again.

Not to mention that getting all these visitors takes up more bandwidth, which in return cost more money. If you go over your host’s bandwidth quota, your website will no longer display and it will just show an error message. For good hosting though, that meets all of the criteria I mention, I recommend Host Gator, especially their dedicated server option, which allows you to have your very own web server, not having to share it with another one.

Mistake Number 2: Messy HTML/CSS Coding - As a general rule of thumb, good programmers know to make their code neatly organized and readable with the human eye. Messy code can make your website and online forms/applications take longer to load and process. This in return makes for an unpleasant visitor experience, and they most likely will not be back.

Mistake Number 3: Not Optimizing Your Website for the Search Engines - Most beginners know this one, but still do not do it correctly. It’s real simple you see, if you are selling “computer desks” on your website, then on the main page you would write content, and display products that had the word “computer desks” in it. You also would continually add more pages to your website, that are on the topics of and have the keywords of related categories to “computer desks”.

Simply put, just keep building onto your website, adding more and more content. Whether that content be text, videos, music, animations, more products, or whatever else fits. It’s your website, get creative, or let us for you.

Mistake Number 4: No link trade directory - Link trading one on one with other websites may now not be as effective as it use to be, since the search engines caught on and look for one way incoming links now. But these days people are smarter and doing things like having another website in which they put the websites link details on that they are trading with.

The site they are trading with then puts a link on their website, linking to your original website that you really care about. This way each website gets a one way link pointing towards it, which is what the search engines love.

It may seem like cheating the system, but really niche link directories are useful resources for internet surfers, and anyways once your website gets on a roll with continually getting visitors, people will start linking to your website naturally, and you would no longer have to trade links that way. If your website isn’t good enough though, then less people will link to your website naturally, which means it will be less successful.

Mistake Number 5: No easy Contact Method - Depending on what your website is for, an easy to fill out and use contact form can make or break your success with customers or clients. While this mainly matters for local service websites, or international businesses that perform services and really need to make contact with the customer, even an informational website should allow for the visitors to contact the owner or support technician easily.

Getting information from a website, while also knowing their is a live person behind it all, really makes a lot of visitors feel nice, which entices them to return for more.

Well I hope you enjoyed my list, and be sure to add anything else you think I have forgotten. Like I said, the internet is always changing, and eventually this blog post will be out of date

When a search engine tries to determine how popular your website is, what do you think they use as a rating factor? Links from other websites. Of course that is not the only factor they consider, but is definitely one that tells them an awful lot about your website.

Think about it, if somebody on a message board says “hey, check out this thread at http://www.example.com/thread-title, it helped solve my problem”, isn’t that really a vote for that website?

Well it is considered one, and is perhaps the best way to tell how great any website is. Becuase let’s face it, nobody is going to put a link on their website to another website that isn’t helpful, or at least can provide some sort of service to people.

So with this is mind you may be wondering how do you make this happen for your website? Well there are many ways of accomplishing it, but to sum it up in a few words I would say “BUILD A WEBSITE THAT IS USEFUL!”

If your website isn’t going to help anybody, then why would the search engines want you in there listings? Afterall, there main objective is to please the visitor.

The next thing that is probably running through your mind is how to make your website useful. You can do things like add a forum, write and maintain a blog, or even just publish articles on a daily basis, which you can also submit to various article directories.

Those methods are really the best ways to kick start a website and get people visiting it, so they then can start talking about it on other websites, to other friends and more.

Always remember though, if you make a useful website, then why wouldn’t visitors want to come back?

One of the biggest challenges today’s web designers have to deal with is making a website that displays properly in all the different browsers that people can use today.

Out of all these browsers, the most popular one is Internet Explorer, but unfortunately is also the most problematic one. You can build a website that looks fine in FireFox, Safari, Opera and other browsers, but then you go and look at it in Internet Explorer and it looks different.

There are many reasons that Internet Explorer displays things differently, but those really are not important. The important thing is how to fix them properly and quickly.

Well the best way that I have figured out how to fix Internet Explorer display problems, is by using the “if” statement in my CSS.

Now the reason I only say CSS, is because that is where the display problems go wrong, not in your standard HTML code, but the “if” statement still can be used in HTML. So then you may be thinking that you shouldn’t use CSS, but the fact is that hardly a website is built today without using CSS, and if you want the site to look really good it is a smart idea to use it.

So anyways the “if” statement in your CSS code will tell the browser to only load the CSS in between the statement if it is that browser. For example, the code below would be an “if” statement that would only be displayed in Internet Explorer version 6:

<!–[if IE 6]>
style {
CSS
}
<![endif]–>

Now if you wanted it to use that CSS code only on Internet Explorer versions 5 and up, you would put this in:

<!–[if gte IE 5]>
style {
CSS
}
<![endif]–>

The “gte” means greater then or equal to, so it will display in Internet Explorer versions 5 and up. If you want it to be just greater than, you would just put “gt”.

With this conditional statement you can fix most display problems that occur with Internet Explorer.

Optimizing your website for the search engines can be a huge benefit to your website business by bringing you free visitors. These visitors are not only free though, they are also more interested in what you are selling or talking about, then a visitor from a paid for advertisement.

So what is the trick you ask? The trick is to not use tricks! Yep, you heard me right, the best way to get in the search engines, and stay there, is to use honest tactics that genuinely benefit your visitor. By not doing so, it is almost guaranteed that the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN will drop your website.

So then what are these honest techniques? It’s simple, fill your website up with pages upon pages of genuine and unique content (new articles, blog posts, etc.) that your visitor will actually learn something from and appreciate.

Now your next question is probably why does pages upon pages of unique content like that bring me visitors? Well as long as you submit your URL to be crawled by Google, Yahoo and MSN, then it will be crawled by them using their digital spiders that scan your website pages and reads all of the words on them.

Then these words that the spider has read on every page of your website, are added to their search database, and when someone types in a string of words or a phrase that is in your unique content, they can find you. That is the real challenge though, is getting your page on the first page of search results when someone types the main keyword for that page.

The way to defeat this challenge is to keep adding more and more content to your website, which in turn will bring you more visitors, which in turn will also build your inbound links from other websites, which search engines also use to determine what page of the results your website will be on. So basically it is a building and waiting game, where you just keep adding more and more everyday.

But it really doesn’t stop their though, because even if your page doesn’t get in the first page of results for a main keyword, it can still be found by a person searching for a unique string of words and phrases. For example, let’s say in one of your articles you have a sentence that says this “The part of your computer that stores all of your data is called your hard drive, and it’s reading speed is determined by the RPM (Rotations Per Minute) speed of the hard drive.”

Now let’s say that a person on the search engines searched for this “what part stores data on a computer”, then they would most likely find your website because you have those words stringed together near each other on your page. These type of searches are called “unique searches”, and I have heard once, awhile ago, that Google alone has about 100 million unique searches a day on their search engine.

So yeah, now you see why Search Engine Optimization is so powerful and why the more pages you have, the more visitors you can get. Just make sure that you do not make a website that is solely for the purpose of just making money, you need to make one that will actually help your visitors, and by doing that you will be sure to succeed.