You may be familiar with the more commonly used software, such as control panels, and content management systems. However, many people don’t realize that these site management tools are expandable in a practically infinite nature. The functionality and features of both control panels and content management systems can be greatly enhanced with the use of web applications. Web applications let you modify an already fully functional site administration software, and transform it into a solution that is capable of carrying out brilliant automated tasks and improving the overall appearance and functionality of your website.

Using Web Applications to Improve Content

Perhaps the most basic advantage offered by web applications is the ability to automate or simplify content creation, uploading, organization and editing. There are a literally hundreds of content-oriented web applications available that can be installed to your control panel within a few short steps, especially if you have cPanel with Fantastico. By optimizing your site’s content automatically, you’ll be boosting the productivity of your online business and saving employee cost by cutting out unnecessary outsourcing. In fact, with the right web applications, you can manage literally hundreds of websites easily within the same user interface. If you did need to outsource work, it would be minimal, and you may only need to contract a developer temporarily to create a new web application that you can use to boost productivity even more!

Using Web Applications to Enhance Your Site’s Design

You can also use web applications to change, create, organize and find templates and themes for you web pages. In fact, you can even eliminate the need for a web designer altogether! Some web applications will remove the complex HTML editing that is usually associated with site design, and will let you complete the site customization process with an automated system that inputs HTML coding for you based on your preferences. You can even set up cron jobs and have the applications complete tasks automatically on a scheduled basis, which allows you to focus on more important aspects of your online business while the software works for you.

Using Web Applications to Generate Traffic

Of course, while the above to advantages of web applications will most definitely contribute to a busier website, you can also generate traffic with certain web application regardless of your site’s appearance or relevance! Perhaps the most beneficial use of web applications would be their ability to market to a wide audience through social networks and RSS feeds. There are web applications available that will actually submit every post on your website to multiple social bookmarking sites simultaneously. There are also applications that will post comments on related blogs and attract visitors in this fashion. With so many ways to generate traffic using web applications, it would be impossible to mention all of them.

Conclusion

Although it may take a little bit of experience to master all of the web applications at your disposal, usually the most novice website owners can learn the functions of these programs with ease. In fact, most web applications are designed specifically with the novice user in mind. If you are having trouble managing your website efficiently, you may want to consider installing a few useful web applications to help you out.

A fantastic option for brand new small businesses attempting to establish their online presence is the utilization of drag-and-drop web site creation.  While there are numerous offline program solutions in this regard, the number of online services offering this along with web hosting is a bit on the smaller side.  One web site that offers both easy to use web site creation using drag-and-drop features along with full-blown web site hosting is SnapPages.

Creation

Founded in 2007, SnapPages was created with one main purpose – an easy to use web site creation program that utilizes online applications.  The creators of SnapPages felt that many new web site owners often shied away from using some really great web site applications due to the complexity and often high learning curve.  By implementing a drag-and-drop user interface, a lot of frustration and confusion has been eliminated for SnapPages customers.

Account types

The web site company offers two accounts – free and Pro.  Upon signing up for free, customers can immediately begin to create a full web site catered to their particular needs.  The built-in Website Manager allows customers to quickly create and edit their web site pages without the need for any coding or design experience.

Templates

Given a choice of several themes, SnapPages customers can create web pages by choosing pre-made template pages or completely creating new pages from scratch.  All page layouts can be altered – allowing for different view types on different pages, if needed.  The entire design of a web site can be changed by clicking a mouse.  Photos, flash billboards, and videos are easily embedded by dragging and dropping the appropriate tool.

Other tools

Beyond web site and page creation, SnapPages offers photo organization, an online calendar, and the ability to set up private areas for family and friends.  The showcase area of SnapPages gives customers a good view of exactly what can be accomplished by using their service.

Support

The web site offers some great support as well.  The Help Center houses a user forum, FAQs, bug reporting, video tutorials and a ticketed support system.  Support tickets are answered in a timely manner (24-48 hours) and are attended to in a very business-like but personable manner.

Features

Personal free accounts come with 5 custom pages, 1 gigabyte of storage, photo gallery, calendars, contact forms, a personalized sub-domain, and customizable themes.  For $8 a month, customers can upgrade to Pro accounts.  Pro accounts include all of the free account features plus quite a lot more – HTML/Javascript snippets, 3D photo galleries, access to premium themes, custom branding, custom domain name, and SEO and analytical integration.  Additionally, each Pro account receives a bump up to 10 gigabytes of total allowed storage.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to a great online web site creation tool that doubles as a web hosting provider, SnapPages fits the bill rather nicely.  Quickly create a beautiful, full-featured web site in minutes with no fuss and no muss thanks to SnapPages.

In recent years, online video has continued to become a dominant force. Recently, Ipsos Media CT, a media research firm, reported that in July 2009 the number of videos viewed online in America exceeded the twenty-one billion mark.  With that kind of statistic and others like it, more and more entrepreneurs are looking to make room in their budget for web video promotions.

Although web video has been around for a while, it hasn’t always been available to the “average Joe.” The development of video sharing sites like YouTube (2005) helped increase the popularity of web video. It also made way for the development of more low-cost, user-friendly methods of producing web video. As more people began searching for web video, Google began to index and rank video content with incredible speed. Considered as a “new media” item, web video was also given preference over other web content like text and images.

Around 2007, some of the most savvy internet marketers (IMs) took notice of how videos were getting priority ranking with Google. They began testing their theories and tracking the results. The results were so amazing that initially they were considered “top secret.” By 2008, many of the IMs got together with their favorite software designers to create systems that would put the video submission process on auto-pilot. With this new software, it was easy to turn the labor intensive video submission process into a manageable task. Since then, video sharing sites and video submission software programs have cropped up everywhere.

There are lots of great features in web video marketing software. Whether you are a “do-it-your-selfer” or intend to outsource your project, here are a few important web video marketing software features you will want to have:

Quick Video Creation Tips and Tools – There are many end-users with limited knowledge about how to make a video and get it uploaded to the web. A good program will address the basic video creation steps and give the user a few easy options for creating a video fast. A sample of quick video strategies may include how to do it with images, PowerPoint slides or even by combining a static image with an audio file.

SEO Recommendations – The main purpose of web video marketing for many entrepreneurs is to increase their search engine ranking. A good web video marketing system will give important search engine optimization (SEO) pointers on creating keyword-rich titles, descriptions and tags.

Easy Interface with Sharing Sites – A prominent feature of any good web video marketing software is that it easily interfaces with today’s most popular video sharing and social media sites. You can log-on and upload to sharing sites without ever leaving your software dashboard. Within some software systems, you can also monitor the success of your video upload as well as your viewing statistics.

Video Tutorials – What good is a web “video” marketing software system without “video” tutorials? Hopefully, you won’t find any like that. Video tutorials help shorten the learning curve dramatically. Often times, text or audio instructions leave out important steps. With a video lesson, you can visually catch that important tidbit that the audio left out. After viewing a tutorial, implementation time is typically shorter and results are often better.

How to Avoid a “Google Slap” – Along with the secret to how to increase your search engine ranking, it’s important to know “what-not-to-do”. Many overzealous internet marketers have gotten their videos banned by straying too far away from Google’s rules. A good web video program will fill you in on proper protocol.

Web video marketing software is a fantastic tool for leveraging your time. With a little due diligence, you can find one that fits your needs and your budget perfectly.

It’s common knowledge among education professionals that the Camtasia Studio software by TechSmith is a great teaching tool. But did you know that it is an even more fantastic tool to use as you grow your business? The options for using Camtasia Studio to enhance your business are as limitless as your imagination.

What is Camtasia Studio? – Camtasia Studio is an affordable, user-friendly software that is best known for its screen recording capability. With the push of a button, Camtasia Studio allows you to capture and record all of the activity on your computer screen. Instead of trying to tell someone how to perform a pc-related function, Camtasia Studio allows you to show them. You can add voice narration, audio or music clips. You can even produce a picture-in-picture effect with a split screen that shows you and the screen capture content at the same time.

Business owners who use Camtasia Studio in their business will definitely get a lot of bang for their buck. At less than three hundred dollars, it comes with incredible features that you normally only find in rapid authoring software programs that sell for one thousand dollars or more. While Camtasia Studio is famous the world over for screen recording, it can be used for so much more. Here are a few creative ways to use Camtasia Studio to help your business evolve and increase your revenue:

Audio CDs and digital downloads made easy –You can expand your product line very quickly by re-purposing existing content. It’s easy to enhance the value of a video program you offer by providing a CD version or an mp3 download to go with it. Camtasia Studio makes this incredibly easy to do. You simply import your full video file and republish it in Camtasia Studio as a CD-ready or mp3 file. If you want a physical product, print a custom label on the CD and use a word processing template for a quick case cover design.

Commercials for websites and social media portals – You can upload a video into Camtasia Studio and create a commercial for the web that has a professional look and feel. With the editing feature you can add title clips, transitions and captions to bring your message to life. Best of all, Camtasia Studio lets you produce your content in a variety internet-ready formats including flash and iPod movie files.

Training and Consulting – If you’re in the seminar business and wish you could expand your outreach without the physical drain, you can use Camtasia Studio to do just that. Using the Microsoft^® PowerPoint^® interface, a video import and narration, you can create powerful business training and consulting tools.  You can even step it up a notch by adding interactivity with Camtasia Studio’s flash quiz and survey feature. When you’re all done with your creation, you can make it available on your website or use TechSmith’s partner site that allows you to easily upload and share your content with the world.

From employee training to product development, Camtasia Studio does it all quickly and easily. You are very likely to find it as a favorite resource among many tech-savvy entrepreneurs.

The open source groupware, Open-Xchange, recently released improvements on the software that allows for easier aggregation of e-mail and contact information all while incorporating the use of social networking tools.  This all-in-one piece of software is a boon to those business web site owners who happen to be just about everywhere when it comes to social media outlets.

Background

With offices in New York and Germany, Open-Xchange has been in the business of creating collaboration software tools for quite some time.  The company works with technology partners such as Novell, Red Hat and Parallels to enable it to bring SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to providers from around the globe.

Beginning in 2001, Open-Xchange combined forces with SUSE Linux (now a Novell business) to create the Openexchange server – one of the top selling Linux-based groupware solutions around.  Over 3,500 businesses in 65 countries now run Open-Xchange solutions.

Dealing with 1&1 Internet, Network Solutions, Dotster and Hostpoint has brought Open-Xchange over 15 million paid mailboxes this year alone.  This is a quadrupled increase from the company’s previous year.  Open-Xchange shows no signs of stopping now.

Solutions

Because no two businesses are exactly alike, Open-Xchange offers several solutions to fit one’s particular business requirements.  Each offering allows for a free testing period prior to purchasing – the perfect way to figure which solution is the right one.

The Appliance solution offered is perfect for small and medium-sized businesses who require a document and e-mail server without the need for an internet expert on hand.

The Server edition is geared more toward mid-sized businesses and is available in two versions – the standard server edition and the edition built for the Univention Corporate Server (UCS).  The later is perfect for those businesses wishing to combine the CRM tool with an entire IT infrastructure or those already running the UCS server.

For those not wanting to completely overhaul and start with an entirely new solution, Open-Xchange offers the Hosting edition of their software.  This solution allows users to keep their existing e-mail setup without the need to completely migrate over to a new system.

The Open-Xchange Server 5 steps things up from mere e-mail solution to a full-blown collaboration tool – e-mail, documents, calendars, tasks, and contacts.  This CRM offering allows businesses to grow from webmail to complete groupware.

The company also offers mobility solutions and migration services.  Open-Xchange completes the fullness of its software by also including a Mac OS version of its collaboration tool.

What is unique about all the company’s offerings is that a wizard has been incorporated into the software that searches and gathers information from several online sources, including social media sites.  Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn as well as many others are thoroughly scoured and the pertinent data is fed back into the groupware solution chosen.  A great way to gather all one’s social media contacts into one neat package.

Final Thoughts

A good business will not only rely on its standard CRM tools but also social media outlets.  Open-Xchange offers some fabulous open source CRM solutions that combines both of these items into one very powerful and useful groupware solution.

When it comes to having a profitable business online, there are dozens of small and large items owners need to attend to when ensuring high visibility.  One extremely valuable asset to ensuring a popular business web site is the incorporation of social media tools.  Twitter, Facebook and even blogs have proven to be effective tools when keeping in contact with one’s customers and clients.

It is all well and fine to purchase a domain, rent some web space, create a web site and toss in some social media links.  The work actually begins when trying to keep in touch with customers and in tracking how effective different social media outlets are proving themselves to be.  As there is already enough work simply in keeping a business web site running properly, there is not enough time to go to every social media site to trend and conversation watch.  What is the solution?

The solution

uberVU aims to be the perfect solution for cross site and multiple social media tool tracking.  This web site tracks conversations as they occur across many different sites.  For example, a product announcement may be sent out via a business blog and, once read by an avid customer, its web link is sent out to Twitter.  Another Twitter user and happy customer may come across the sent tweet and post this out to his or her Facebook announcement area.  There is now one product announcement generated across three different social media types.

The beauty of uberVU is its simplicity and ease of use.  Signing up for uberVU is a quick and painless operation made even simpler by allowing new users to login using either a Twitter, Facebook or Google account.  Already time is saved within the sign up process with this web site.

How it works

Once signed up with uberVU, users can type in a URL or keyword(s) into a search bar and efficiently and quickly track exactly what they desire.  The site incorporates analytics to see which social media types are being used most often.  These analytics can be downloaded and used in presentations or PDF files (paid users only).  Each conversation that pertains to the URL or keyword can be followed through to each social media site.  Searches can be saved (1 for free users, more for paid users) for continuous monitoring purposes.  The time saved alone is worth the cost of a paid account.

The uberVU web site offers four types of accounts.  The free account allows for one saved search, does not allow for analytic information to be downloaded, and any reply from within uberVU to any part of the searched conversations will contain a URL link back to the uberVU web site.  The three paid accounts range from $19.99 to $149.99 a month and allow for larger numbers of saved searches, varying amounts of analytical data that can be downloaded, and each paid account is free of any URL links within replies.

Final Thoughts

Knowing how effective an online business is can be key to ensuring an increase in new customers and knowing that existing customers are satisfied.  Effectively using social media within a business web site and monitoring the outcome of these tools is a step in this direction.  Take uberVU for a test drive with a free account and see what this trend tracking web site can do for your online business.

One of the more popular CMS (content management system) programs available on the web is Joomla.  Thousands of web sites viewable on the internet are powered by this extremely versatile and easy to use CMS program. The software has a rather extensive list of extensions available to add onto the product and one of the more popular types downloaded by many businesses is those that pertain to social networking and social media.

About Joomla

With its original creation back in 2000, Joomla has grown as an open source content management solution to encompass an ever-growing list of extensions, themes and a community of over 200,000 users and contributors all helping make it one of the best bits of programming available.

Joomla is the perfect solution for many different styles of web sites.  Whether commercial, media-specific, government, educational or as an intranet solution, Joomla can easily tackle the task at hand.

The program is very simple to setup and Joomla’s site is crammed with information with regard to how to setup the program and getting started using the program.  Additionally, the company’s web site includes an online demonstration to try out in case of uncertainty.

Social media for business

The latest and greatest medium available for businesses to interact with their customers and clients is social media.  Social media comes in various forms and each form caters to a specific kind of media (graphic, text, video, audio, etc.).  Businesses are quickly finding out that utilizing different types of social media is the key to garnering new customers, keeping old customers and getting feedback from customers.

Two of the more popular types of social media are micro-blogging and blogging.  Sites such as Twitter and Identi.ca are examples of micro-blogging – communication mediums that only allow for small amounts of text to be published.  On the other end of this spectrum is blogging.  Blogging allows for much longer bits of text and allows for incorporation of other social media types such as YouTube video inclusion.

Social networking related Joomla extensions

Among the hundreds upon hundreds of extensions available to add onto Joomla, there are a number of great social networking specific modules to be found.  For those businesses who have Facebook and Gmail that they would like integrated into their web site, Jbolo is a perfect addition.  Users adding this module onto their Joomla site will enable the two sites to integrate easily.  If wanting to embed videos but maybe not wanting to embed those from YouTube, hwdVideoShare is a great little module that is getting quite a lot of reviews and positive feedback.

The list of social media modules and extensions available can be found simply by going to the Joomla site Extensions area and typing in “social network” within the search bar.  At last check, there were 38 different social media extensions available for downloading.

Final Assessment

When it comes to easy web site administration and content management, Joomla has got businesses covered.  Once ready to take the social media plunge, it’s nice to know that Joomla also has businesses covered with its array of social media add-ons available to the public.  Make your business web site social networking savvy and check out Joomla today.

100% green web hosting, eco-friendly servers, solar and wind powered services – the list of environmentally friendly products is growing every day.  One of the newest hot phrases flung around lately is “organic software.”  Exactly what is organic software and how is it implemented into hosted web sites?

The actual meaning

The term “organic software” is simply a rephrasing of open source software that is available to download off of the internet.  The software is designed, developed and distributed freely all the while offering complete accessibility to its source code.  Because it is available for free download, there is no manufacturing process put into the creation of software disks.  You are left with software that makes no carbon footprint or impact on the environment.  When we think of the word “organic” we are left with the impressions of something home-grown, without the use of chemicals.  In a bit of a leap, the word organic in this case is used to convey simply “home-grown”.  So, instead of the mouthful of “free to download open source software,” we can use the term “organic software.”

Software that is organic

Armed with our new, shorter and more eco-friendly phrase, we can now go on the hunt for software that fits this bill.  In the realm of web hosting, there are literally thousands of programs out there that could be classified as organic software.  Drupal is one such program – a content management system that is developed and designed by a community of developers and is available to freely download.  vTiger is an organic customer relationship management piece of software.  Some examples of organic design programs are Gimp, Picasa2 and Nvu.  A fantastic web server program that definitely can be categorized as organic software is WAMP – Windows Apache MySQL PHP combined into an easy and simple to use server program.  All of these programs are open source and are all free to download.

Firefox is the newest to proclaim

Mozilla Firefox has recently put out to the public that it is a 100% piece of organic software.  The company states that it can claim this due to Firefox having been created by thousands spanning the globe, the company itself is non-profit and it completely exposes the internal workings (code) of its product.  Mozilla firmly believes that by ensuring that the developing community has access to Firefox’s coding, it can only continue to become a better and better product and this benefits all Firefox browser users.

Same song, different dance

It certainly seems like organic software really isn’t something new.  Open source technology and programs have been available for many years.  However, the reasoning behind the new phraseology lays within the push to be greener, more ecologically friendly.  Businesses, software creators, software programmers and even web hosting companies are quickly realizing this is a hot issue and are doing their level best to jump on the bandwagon.  What it all comes down to is organic software is just the newest spin on an already eco-friendly system called open source programming.

A quick Google search online for e-commerce solutions will garner a huge number of software solutions available for free or commercial use.  Among the free solutions available, and slowly losing its initial popularity, is osCommerce.  osCommerce is an extensive and quite possibly one of the most thorough out-of-the-box pieces of software you can find.  However, as all-encompassing as it may be, it is in severe need of a major overhaul to place it at the same level as its peers.

How it all began

osCommerce got its start in March of 2000.  Created by Harald Ponce de Leon and originally called “The Exchange Project”, osCommerce quickly began to grow in both initial popularity and capabilities.  The software is created with PHP and uses MySQL for its database core.  It can be installed on any server that utilizes these two pieces of programming.  For the past nine years, the program has been in the development stage.  Officially, as of March 2009, osCommerce released its production ready alpha product.  This release, Merchant V 3.0, includes a template system, an object-oriented backend and the ability to define the administration user name and password upon installation.  To date, the osCommerce site claims over 12,000 online stores currently using their product.

The current problems

While it is a very good and all-encompassing shopping cart program, osCommerce is not without its issues.  Installation of the program by a novice may prove to be a daunting task as a basic knowledge of MySQL as well as other web server technologies should be at the ready.  The default SSL option is initially and automatically set to “no” which is practically an open door to nefarious entities trying to gather secure information on customers.  Adding new shopping cart products is no simple task either – there are several options and features that need to be dealt with before adding in a new product, quite possibly the quickest way to creating a lot of confusion.  When you do have the program installed and your cart up and running with all of its products, adding any additional modules or templating takes quite a bit of work and may end up breaking the core of the program.  Not to mention the creators of the software do explicitly state that additions to the core are not always endorsed.

One of the best ways to avoid a lot of this hassle is to either have a seasoned osCommerce professional install the program for you or, if your web host has this option, have it installed by your hosting company.

Conclusion

If you are in need of a shopping cart program that is capable of being search engine optimized, fully featured and very robust, osCommerce is a good choice.  However, it still needs quite a bit of work in as far as installation and add-on capabilities before it can be considered a simple ecommerce program of choice.  OsCommerce is ideal for the knowledgeable and seasoned web developer, not for the novice nor the faint of heart.

Beginning as merely a solution to a need for dynamic scripting for a personal web page and named pLog at that time, LifeType was born.  Its developers, Oscar Renalias and Francesc Pla, have continuously enhanced the blogging software to its current release (LifeType 1.2.9).  Their goal is to create a stable multi-user and multi-blog platform and so far they are succeeding rather well with a program that has something for everyone.

For users

For those on the using end of things, LifeType has several great features.  An easy to use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor allows users to add graphics with a click of a button.  Upon initially logging in, the user is presented with a dashboard giving them all the crucial information needed at a glance.  Allowing you to stand out in the crowd, LifeType can be configured with many different and free web site templates and if you have a need for a feature not installed with the standard set of features, you can choose from over 80 additional and free plugins.  One of the best features available within LifeType is the ability to have multiple users for each blog giving users the ability to create a collaborative site.

For administrators

On the administration side of things, LifeType is configured to allow multiple blogs.  It allows for multiple domains, multiple blogs and multiple users – all of which are separated and administered as separate blogs.  The software has an easy four step process for each new blog and even has a centralized location showcasing the more popular blogs.  In addition to multiple domains, the administrator can also provide users with sub-domains via the software.  If the need to localize arises, LifeType is capable of this as well – it supports any encoding and has been translated to German, French, Spanish and many other languages.  System overloading is not an issue as the program utilizes template and data caching making it a high performance and reliable piece of programming.

For geeks

SEO friendly URLs are easily available, ensuring the sites hosted are search engine index capable.  The coding within LifeType is based on the “model-view-controller” type framework and is completely documented using Doxygen and the LifeType site always has the most current API available.  As all of the templates within the program are XHTML 1.0 strict, users will not have to worry about whether or not their sites are up to standards in as far as mark-up is concerned.  The huge list of plugins ensure that the geekiest of administrators or users are able to incorporate just about any feature desired.  The list includes events, localization and much more.  As LifeType is built upon the Smarty template engine, creating new templates for the software is a breeze.

Conclusion

Put it all together and LifeType is one great bit of programming.  It includes all the features your basic user, administrator or hard-core geek would enjoy.  Toss in the multi-blog and multi-user capabilities and this is one piece of software worth checking out.