Why is my website so small? There is so much space to right and the left, why is this? Most of the people I know having laptops / computers with wide screens.

Sure, those customers have a point; the average computer equipment becomes still better. They are faster, having modern web browsers and most of all they have faster Internet connections.

But what is the future of the Internet?
A few years ago if someone asked me to use my mobile phone to surf the Internet I answered: ”No, I don’t like to hurt my eyes with this tiny screen”.

Since the last years there are bigger displays for mobile phones and there are PDA’s and handheld PC’s. At least since my wife got her new LG mobile phone I like to surf the net by phone (more…)

Interlinking your blog posts

Since your blog should be topically related anyway, you should have no problem referencing previous post from time to time in new blog postings. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to edit your older blog postings to include topically related links for new posts. Not only does this help to improve your internal linking structure, it can also help improve keyword relevancy for certain pages if you’re using keyword focused, or descriptive, anchor text for your internal URL’s.

Another approach to boost the link popularity and improve the visibility of your blogs internal pages is to offer a sitemap, one which will benefit users and work to help with search engine spidering. (more…)

The payment / notification process is shown via the following graphic:

Inside the form there are several required values to process a payment. PayPal gives the advice to post them all to get everything working. The following variables get some special attention: (more…)

There’s no denying it, Google is the powerhouse of the internet; more than capable of showering targeted visitors on your website like a torrential downpour backed by gale-force winds. That is, if you happen to be in Google’s good graces and rank highly for popular keywords.

Bloggers often times find themselves in the position to receive great traffic from Google simply because of the way that blogs work; namely, they allow for quick inclusion into major search engines even when using the default setup. Being the most popular blogging software on the planet, Wordpress blogs are the content management system (CMS) of choice for bloggers due to ease of use and the large community of supporters that help to develop plugins for this open source blogging software.

However, just because Wordpress blogs can help websites to get noticed by the major search engines easily, this doesn’t mean that they are inherently search engine friendly; in fact, the default settings for Wordpress blogs almost guarantee that, if left untouched, your blog will end up suffering from the duplicate content penalty.

The duplicate content penalty and Wordpress blogs

The duplicate content penalty is a term that is used to describe what happens when a web page is removed from the primary search results for a certain keyword phrase due to identical content elsewhere on the internet. In Google, the lower-ranking websites and individual pages that contain the duplicate content are hidden, and this phrase is displayed instead: (more…)

What are Wordpress widgets?

“Wordpress widgets” is a term that is used to describe the easy-to-use sidebar functions in any of the widget ready Wordpress themes. From within your Wordpress blog’s administration area, through the use of client-side scripting languages; Ajax and JavaScript, users can “click and drag” certain sidebar elements and rearrange them to meet their ideal sidebar setup. These elements include the blog search box, links, pages, meta (containing admin login links, rss feed links), categories, most recent posts and text-box elements.

Today, nearly all up-to-date Wordpress themes are widget ready, meaning that instead of manually having to modify code in the sidebar.php file for your active Wordpress template to get your desired look, in order to modify the look of your Wordpress themes’ sidebar, you only need to click on the desired element to add it to the sidebar or re-arrange the elements in any widget ready theme. (more…)

People need to register only ones at finalwebsites.com to download the PHP classes and to get help via the forum while using the scripts. It’s not the idea to create a new PHP forum, but to offer an easy and fast way to provide information on the right place. (more…)

Enough about this, there are new features!

Managing Ads via the Adsense control panel

Since a few days it’s possible to use this great feature to maintain existing ad code without changing your HTML. Just create a first (new) ad zone and place some standard Adsense code into your HTML (yeah I’m talking about an account from a publisher in Europe). If you need to change the colors, ad dimensions or ad channel on a later moment, just do it within your Adsense control panel. This is really a time safer! This way it’s easy to change for example the color for multiple pages from your website with just a few mouse clicks. (more…)

The release information:

This is an important (security related) update, in previous versions hackers can guess common and repeating passwords from user. While the “forgotten password” function was based on the password and the user id, it could be possible to change the password for some user (if the hacker knows the users id and the right password). The risk is not very high for most installations but could be work out some trouble. The new version doesn’t use the password for validation anymore. The login name (encrypted) is used together with some “secret” secret string. AU class user can replace the class file but need to update the method calls in the activate password script. You need to add the constant variable SECRET_STRING to the db_config.php file.

Download the updated version from the PHP class here.

For further questions about the class post them to the official support forum.

A few days ago the “old” Google web search API has stopped working for the web public. Not a big surprise after the release of the AJAX web search API. A customer of mine is using search results in his mini sites to give them a little more body. This is why I needed to look for some alternative. During the Zend PHP conference earlier this year, I got in touch with the Zend framework and learned that there is already a class to obtain results from the Yahoo search engine. The class has features to search the Yahoo API for web sites, image, news and the local search results.

Installing the library

I decided some time before to use the classes from the Zend framework for future projects because the classes are well written in PHP5. If you like to do the same you should install the lib on a central place on your web server to get access to the framework from all your websites. After uploading the files I added this row to .htaccess file for the website I’m working on:

php_value include_path ".:/home/mylocation_for_zend_framework/"

This way you’re able to access the classes without to think about the class paths. Of course you are free to add this include path to the php.ini file or to your apache configuration. (more…)

However, before outright buying a shopping cart system for your website, there is something that you should consider. Mainly, whether you will run the shopping cart from your website or whether you will purchase, or “rent”, a shopping cart system from a third party website.

Remotely hosted shopping cart solution

Usually a hosted shopping cart solution requires little technical knowhow and less setup time than a shopping cart that you would run from your own website. Other than adding products, defining prices and setting up the shopping cart template, if this is an option, you’ll be up and running in a few days to as little as a few hours.

Some hosted shopping cart solutions offer optional marketing packages which may (or may not) help you drive targeted traffic to your shopping website. While these all-in-one shopping cart packages are normally pricey, they can certainly help the new online shop to get the most out of their new website right away without having to take the time to learn how to market on their own. (more…)