One of the important factors of a successful and effective websites is the ability to attract traffic. But to know exactly how much traffic arrived to your websites, you need to have some form of traffic monitoring.

One free online resource I highly recommend is Statcounter.com. However, the “disadvantage” of using Statcounter to monitor WordPress blog traffic is that you’ll have to log in to Statcounter to see your statistics.

If you’d prefer to check out your traffic statistics directly at your WordPress Dashboard, one of the very best WordPress plugins to to that is WassUp … check it out.

I’ve recently had a look at Facebook API for developer and my attention was immediately captured by Facebook Connect.

In fact, I’ve been looking at Single Sign On (SSO) solution for multiple portals for quite some time. It seems like Facebook Connect might just be the holy grail. Check it out at http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php.

Imagine having Facebook users to register for your site and set up a profile using their Facebook account. These days, almost everyone has a Facebook account. With Facebook Connect, you eliminate the hassle of the normal registration at your new sites. And according to Facebook, using Facebook Connect will increase your registration rate by 15%!

For those setting up bigger websites that require member registration, such as a community site, game site etc., integrating Facebook Connect is definitely a great idea! I’ll be looking closely into this and feedback the result here.

Designing a website or blog effectively to make money online is by no mean an easy task. The good news is, it is not rocket science either.

It doesn’t matter if the website has the most beautiful look and visual appeal, it will be an utterly useless website if it got no traffic. Traffic is the essence and life-blood of a website. A website (earning) potential will only be maximized if it is properly designed and monetized with high amount of traffic.

To design web effectively, keyword analysis (aka keyword research) must be performed. In fact, keyword analysis is the most important element of my online success. Basically all websites and blogs I’ve done these days rank extremely well in the search engine; all because of the investment of time to conduct proper and thorough keyword analysis. The tool I use is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool which is free and it is the best one (it’s from Google themselves!).

After you’ve identified the list of keywords targeted to create the website, the next consideration is to choose the right platform – osCommerce if it’s an e-shop, WordPress if it’s a blog, phpBB if you’d intended to start a forum, or simply a PHP script which you’re installing. If you’ve no idea what to start, I’d always recommend to start a WordPress blog. WordPress is simply powerful and when it’s properly configured, it’s a search engine magnet.

To further maximize the power of WordPress, the theme plays a vital role. The theme I’m using for this Designing Web blog is FlexSqueeze – highly recommended! Not to forget the truckload of free plugins which you can install in your WordPress blog to make it amazingly effectively.

I’ll be touching more on the essential WordPress plugins here for effective blog creation. Stay tuned …

An avatar is cartoon representation of a computer or internet user. It is an alter ego iconic image of the user which is used commonly in forums and social community portals such as Facebook.

Avatar is normally used when the user prefer not to use his/her own real picture in online social media and wish to have some form of privacy or simply for fun of seeing themselves in cartoon form.

There are quite many avatar creators online but these 2 are the best IMHO :

DoppelMe – Very intuitive and fun avatar creator. This is my personal favorite as it can create great looking avatar at the shortest possible time.

Portrait Illustration Maker – Another great avatar creator which gives you more options for a close representation of yourself.

Now, if you’re not using your own real picture in forums and social media, go ahead and create a nice looking avatar for yourself.

I’ve lately tried out several ClickBank storefronts – 1stpromotions, cbmall, cbdealer, cbproads and a couple others. The reason why I spent the time to try them out is because I’m going to convert one of my domain InfoProductsMart.com to the best ClickBank storefront. The verdict is out.

The winner – CBProAds! And here are the pointers that why CBProAds emerges to be the selected choice :-

• It has the best contextual ads formats.

• Other than contextual ads, it has block image ads, list image ads, slide show ads, scroll ads and banner ads. All are great alternatives to AdSense.
• It has the BEST storefront compared to the others and you can easily customize the storefront ie. http://InfoProductsMart.com.
• Beside earning as an affiliate via ClickBank, CBProAds has an attractive affiliate program itself which gives you a good extra earning opportunity.
• It has a vault of free bonuses (with MRR; master resell rights) which you can earn 100% of the profits selling them.

So what are the negatives? Well, you’ll have to upgrade to PRO account in order to have your ClickBank ID embedded 100% into the ads links and storefront. Else, as a free member, you only have 50% embedding of your ClickBank nickname.

To maximize the earning power of CBProAds, I’d strongly recommend to go for the Lifetime upgrade at $79.95. But wait! Don’t sign up immediately after you’ve joined. In another couple of days/week, you’ll receive email from them with a discount code which you can grab your Lifetime upgrade at a cheaper rate ~$55. The good thing about opting for Lifetime upgrade is that it is only a one-time purchase instead of recurring payments.

The next natural thing for you to do next is to copy-n-paste the ads to all your other blogs and websites to skyrocket your affiliate earnings.

Now, take note that ClickBank do offer contextual ads itself! But why do I still recommend CBProAds? The answer is simple. CBProAds has a much better ads formats and variety. Hence, it gives you an edge to display more attention-capturing ads on your websites which will entice higher CTR (click through rate). With a greater flexibility and a versatile storefront, I give CBProAds two thumbs up.

I recently purchased a report online and I got frustrated when my broadband somehow was unable to complete the downloads.

However, the main reason for my frustration and total waste of time is because the product owner actually zipped the small report (which is the main product) together with the bonuses (of no interest to me) into a huge >130MB file!

The owner claimed that I’m the only one with the download problem except for another buyer with dial-up. That’s not the point. You should never assume every one is on broadband; even so, it doesn’t imply download will be okay. It is webmastering best practice to always make download size small.

If you’re selling an ebook or report together with tons of bonuses, you should provide separates download links for your ebook (which is the main product) and link(s) for your bonuses. In this case, the buyers can simply download the report first and choose to decide whether to also download the bonuses or come back another time for the bonuses.

I’ve recently developed an e-learning portal for my institute. After an extensive online research and trial on several other e-learning platforms, I’ve settled down on MOODLE which stands for Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. MOODLE proves to be the best e-learning platforms which is also an opensource (I’m an avid opensource fan) – meaning, it’s free (under GPL).

The purpose of this post is to share with you a “horrifying” experience in the development of this portal. Now, the e-coursewares were developed using Powerpoints and I’ve bought a software PPT2Flash Pro to convert the Powerpoints to Flash .swf files for embedding into MOODLE. It works seamlessly when I use my primary browser, Firefox, to view the embedded Flash. To my horror, many of my colleagues are using Internet Explorer and they claimed they can’t view the content. I first disregard this as I thought it could be some settings in their IE that caused this “glitch”. But when 6 of my colleagues claimed they can’t view the Flash, that’s where the red flag was raised.

I combed through MOODLE forums and search all over Google to find out why IE can’t view those Flash in MOODLE. The horror kicks in when I saw some news online that due to the infamous Eolas lawsuit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas) on IP regarding embedded thingy, IE was unable to autoplay/activate embedded object.

If you’re a webmaster and you’re facing the same dire situation of not seeing .swf in IE, fret not. I’ve spent hours to test out many ways to play, in this case, .swf in MOODLE and I’ve solved the issue. The answer is SWFObject found in code.google.com (http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/). Just go through the documentation (yes, I know it’s seems daunting) and follow the steps to make .swf viewable in IE. The good news is – it works!

So what is the essence of this post? As webmaster, you really got to do 100% UAT (user acceptance test) on both Firefox as well as IE (and possibly also Google Chrome).