Well, if you are a returning visitor to my website, you probably have noticed a different template design. I was looking to brighten things up a bit, by bringing a clean new style to the website, and found this WordPress template that seemed to be quite versatile in what could be done with it.

BlogoLife 1.8 by wplook

BlogoLife is a simple and perfect HTML5 & CSS3 theme for personal blogging that supports post formats, and several customization options. The custom background, custom header, and multiple color schemes gives you the possibility to adapt your blog as you wish.
Options: Widgets | Menus | Wplook Panel | Background | Header

With the BlogoLife template, I customized it to the size width that I wanted. Though, I had to do some figuring out the widths in order to create some new graphics for the wider width that I was changing it to. I ended up increasing both the left column (main text area) slightly, and increased the width of the right column significantly to allow for the usage of wider graphics.

Prior to using the new template, I decided to upgrade WordPress to the latest and greatest. That was quite a story in itself and required troubleshooting an upgrade that went awry. If using WordPress for your website, I suggest reading about how to recover from a failed WordPress update here.

Once I was upgraded with WP and all the Plugins, I tackled the template area. As with any website, there are tons of things behind the scenes, which are not seen by most folks visiting a website. However, if you are a website developer, you know what I am talking about. Spacing, alignment, color, graphics, text size, and even the header and footer spacing is a puzzle with having to make sure all the pieces fit together properly. Everything is looked at with a critical eye (mine), and still there are always things that you want to improve. Then on top of all of that, making sure that Web functionality is still intact, navigation, analytics, and other smaller items of importance such as how the admin area for comments, access, and page and post edits work in conjunction with the template are all inner-linked and functioning well together.

So, I hope you like the new design to the website. In this template, you might see some different colors every once in awhile, along with different header images too. Let me know what you think.

Regards,

Jim

WordPress is a great platform for blogging, building websites, and content management systems; and like any software creators have from time to time, released new versions in the form of automatic updates that need to be (or should be) installed. However, not all hosting servers run the same way when it comes to updating the software. Herein lies the potential problem for an automatic software update on the server to go awry.

That is exactly what happened to me yesterday when I went to update the WordPress software to the latest version. I saw that I had plugins to update; which I completed with no problems. However, when I tried to do a automatic update to WordPress, it got the proverbial message, “Update Failed.” That wouldn’t be so bad, except for one thing, I couldn’t log back in to my admin area. The blog was still active, but when trying to login to the admin area, I had the white screen of death, a blank page.

So, as luck would have it, or should I say Murphy’s law would have it, I did not have a recent backup of the blog. So, on to Google Search to find a WordPress update solution. I went looking to WordPress for an answer. I read on the forums of various instances of failed WordPress updates and the things to try. Many of the processes involved recovering from the update using the backup files. No, that was not going to work. Then I thought, maybe the manual WordPress installation procedure would work. I found this link for updating WordPress and thought maybe I could find how to do the process there.

Before doing anything, I decided to make sure I did a complete backup of everything that I could at that moment. I felt that the WP database was still intact on the website server. So, logging in to the CPanel of the website, I downloaded the various backups, including the databases that I had on the server. I also downloaded the WP directory from the server onto my local hard drive. I like using the FireFTP addon for Firefox. It is quick, easy to use, and convenient to provide FTP access for any website that you maintain.

After doing those things, I wanted some additional confirmation on the manual WP update procedure. I found this article on How to Recover from Failed WordPress Upgrade. The procedure was inline with the WP instructions, however, there were a few more details that made it easier to understand. Below is the procedure from WP. I am also adding my comments to it.

The following instructions assumes that you have your WordPress files installed in a separate directory on your web hosting account. Example would be: www.jimwarholic.com/blog or you might have the directory named wordpress or other instead of blog.

Step 1: Replace WordPress files

1. Get the latest WordPress zip (or tar.gz) file. (I used the zip file and saved it on my computer hard drive).
2. Unpack (unzip) the zip file that you downloaded.
3. Delete the following two directories (inside your WP directory) on the web host using FTP or shell access (I used FireFTP):
1. wp-includes
2. wp-admin
4. Upload the new wp-includes and wp-admin directories (directories are “folders” from the computer hard drive) to your web host in the WP directory. Because the old directories have been deleted from the web server, the new ones will take their place.
5. Read this next step twice and follow it carefully. Upload the individual files from the new wp-content folder (located on your local computer hard drive) to your existing wp-content folder (on the web hosting server in the WP directory), overwriting existing files. Do NOT delete your existing wp-content folder. Do NOT delete any files or folders in your existing wp-content directory (except for the one being overwritten by new files). This will replace only the files that need to be replaced, but maintain the other files within the wp-content directory.
6. Upload all new loose files from the root directory of the new version (located on your local computer hard drive) to your existing wordpress root directory on the web host.

NOTE – you should replace all the old WordPress files with the new ones in the wp-includes and wp-admin directories and sub-directories, and in the root directory (such as index.php, wp-login.php and so on). Don’t worry – your wp-config.php will be safe.

Be careful when you come to copying the wp-content directory. You should make sure that you only copy the files from inside this directory, rather than replacing your entire wp-content directory. This is where your themes and plugins live, so you will want to keep them. If you have customized the default or classic themes without renaming them, make sure not to overwrite those files, otherwise you will lose your changes. (Though you might want to compare them for new features or fixes..)

Lastly you should take a look at the wp-config-sample.php file, to see if any new settings have been introduced that you might want to add to your own wp-config.php.
Step 1.5: Remove .maintenance file

If you’re upgrading manually after a failed auto-upgrade, delete the file .maintenance from your WordPress directory using FTP. This will remove the “failed update” nag message.
Step 2: Update your installation

Visit your main WordPress admin page at /wp-admin. You may be asked to login again. If a database upgrade is necessary at this point, WordPress will detect it and give you a link to a URL like http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow that link and follow the instructions. This will update your database to be compatible with the latest code. You should do this as soon as possible after step 1.

In my case, when I logged back in (and I was able to log back in now), I was indeed prompted to update the database before continuing. All I had to do was click the link button and follow simple instructions to update the database.

Low and behold, success. Everything was back to normal, and actually seemed to be functioning better. I did have some further updates to do for the pluggins, but those went smoothly using the automatic update links for the plugins themselves.

Question asked by a reader:

I receive allot of spam recently using the from: Linkedin Communication and to: info@a-company-name.com or some other junk in front of @ a-company-name.com

Do you think it comes from Linkedin link on home page or is it something else?

Answer:

The info @ a-company-name.com email addresses are spam magnets.

Even if you don’t post that email address, the spammers use it to send every url an email because they know there are a lot of people that have an info @ company email address. They also use a means of targeting a URL with a dictionary attack. So, if people leave a default (catch all) email address, and the spammers use any type of attack, they can find unlimited email address openings to send spam. This is why it is never a good idea to use a “catch all” email address. Not only will it be a bad experience for the user having to go searching through the tons of spam, but it will simply be an undo strain on the hosting server. This is why, many servers and hosting companies are limiting this type of setup. Additionally, if you choose to run this way, you run the risk of alienating yourself with the hosting company. In essence, they won’t like you very much and run the risk of having your website be transferred over to a much poorer server environment, one that has other less than desired operators and webmasters.

Once an email address is in the spammers database, it is impossible to get it cleaned, because other spammers get it from others online.

I strongly urge you to guard your email addresses carefully online. Use of Javascript, a picture image of the @ email address, or formmails are some of the things you can use to be proactive to protect your emails from the spam bots (email scavenging programs that automatically harvest email addresses online). However, even having guarded your email address, I strongly suggest using spam detection, or filtering it through Google Apps for email, or running it directly through Gmail (by adding an account in the Gmail settings), or other options like that for the long haul.

Do the right thing, and don’t use a catch all email address. If you have a number of email addresses that you want to use as throw away emails for signing up for things online, do a forward of those select throw away emails to your main email address instead. Then you can create email filters to place them in folders or assign labels. You can also add address aliases for your main email address. Read about on how to use an email address alias name.

For online marketing solutions for your business visit your B2B and B2C solution provider. Need a good webmaster? Contact us today.

This is a how to guide for importing and exporting your Blogger blog to other Blogger blogs. Carefully follow the import and export online documentation below. Procedure works for Blogger Classic (HTML), Blogger FTP Publishing, Blogger New (XML), and Blogger Custom Domain Names.

On my online post for Blogger Dashboard – Hide Show All Problems – Missing Blogs; as of 12/14/2008 I discovered a do-it-yourself fix for this peculiar dashboard problem. I made a discovery when doing some Google Searches for free blog editors for Blogger that started me thinking of a possible solution for my particular missing blog in the dashboard problem.

I found this one article that talked about the new features of Blogger Beta, with one of those features being that of importing blog postings from other blogs that a person owns and has the publishing rights to. Other blog platforms such as WordPress have for some time been able to import postings from other blogs, but until recently Blogger did not provide that feature. When I read the write up about this new Blogger feature, it was the old proverbial light bulb going off in my head. I thought, this might be a solution to the missing blog in the dashboard.

Some background information is required for understanding the Blogger technical problem to begin with. When I first created this blog, www.jimwarholic.com, and posted it the first time on the Internet, I believe I did it strictly under FTP publishing, and did not assign a Blogspot.com to the blog at first. I created the website, www.jimwarholic.com back in the year 2006, and started publishing directly with FTP publishing at my webhosting domain using my own domain name.

It was the later part of the third quarter of 2008 in which Blogger did an update to their system, and my blog disappeared completely from the dashboard area. It wasn’t in the hidden mode, or the cookies were not causing it to be hidden as some suggested, it was just gone. I could still gain access to it from the quick edit buttons when logged into my Blogger account, and navigate backwards into the back end of the template settings and publishing setups. I tried everything I could think of to get it to show up in the dashboard, though it was always displayed on my profile page. I assigned another email address for writing on the blog as an administrator. However, the blog would not even show up at the dashboard of the other profile account. I was scratching my head for months on trying to figure it out. I posted information at Blogger Help Groups. I searched online for solutions. I tried to leave a message for Blogger, but they no longer have a contact page online. But, I could not find a fix, that is until 12/13/2008 – 12/14/2008 rolled around.

Sometimes you have to take Internet matters into your own hands. Importing and exporting blogs to Blogger is now a mouse click away on the settings area of each blog control console. You now have three options available to you. Import a blog, export a blog, and delete a blog. To import posts and comments from a Blogger blog, you must first have exported the blog to your local computer desktop or folder on your PC.

I must warn you here. Take some precautions before you attempt to export and do an import of your complete postings and comments from another blog, especially the blogs that are missing from the Blogger Dashboard area. Note also, that if you export your content from one Blogger account, and then import your postings and comments to another Blogger account, with a different name on it, you will end up having all your posts republished with the new Blogger account name.

Additionally, I would recommend before doing the online procedure is having two windows open in your browser, or better yet, having two different browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, or Internet Explorer) open when exporting a blog from one Blogger account, and importing it to another Blogger account.

*Very important note here. It is highly recommended to have an Internet quick link from your desktop to the old Blogger missing dashboard blog, to that blog’s setup page. To do this, you can use Google Chrome, and create what is known as “create an application shortcut” to your desktop. Once you do that, then you can click on the Internet link in the future to gain access to your blog. Or you can use Firefox and drag the tab to the desktop to the specific page for the postings, settings, and template area of the old blog that has been navigated to with the quick edit links in the postings themselves. You could also do a bookmark or Internet Explorer favorite link too. However, I would not trust just one way only. If you do not do this link step, you will have no way of getting back to the old Blogger blog that remains hidden from the dashboard area. You will be lost forever. The reason for this is that once you publish using the new blogspot.com address, and then change it to your old FTP published address and click publish, your quick links will now be linked to the new blog instead of the old blog. Which means the old quick links used to navigate to the settings tab for the old blog will not work anymore.

Here is what I did for my particular FTP export and import blog solution.

This procedure is written for Blogger FTP publishing but most of these steps should work for other non FTP blogs such as blogspot.com address and custom domain names for Blogger too. The new XML Blogger template files can also be exported and imported too and you should export your HTML Blogger Classic template or XML template file too.

1. First read the Blogger information on, How do I import and export blogs on Blogger? Read it twice and make sure you comprehend all aspects of how to do it before proceeding.
2. Created favorites – bookmarks, and quick launch buttons using Firefox and Google Chrome on the desktop to the old blog setup page to be safe.
3. Saved old HTML template file on to my local computer from the old blog website. I used the following procedure for saving the old template file. Opened Template, Edit HTML, and copied entire html text to a notepad plain text file. Notepad is part of the default Microsoft Windows Operating System simple text editor programs available from the lower left of the screen. Go to Start, All Programs, Accessories, Notepad – and Don’t forget to do this and remember where you have saved the file!
4. Opened Firefox and Google Chrome Browsers next to each other. It’s nice to have a bigger screen, but not required.
5. Logged into one Blogger account in Firefox. Logged into the other Blogger account in Google Chrome. Though I used two different Blogger accounts, you can do the same thing with a single Blogger account and have two windows, tabs, or two web browsers open at the same time with the same Blogger account but with different blogs in each tab or window.
6. Navigated to the control area of the blog, using the quick edit links in the old blog postings, and followed the links to the settings tab for the old blog.
7. Exported the old blog to the desktop or folder on your computer’s hard drive which creates a (.xml) file.
8. Created new Blogsopt.com webblog. Went to the other browser, and created a new Blogspot address using the “Create a Blog” link from the Blogger Dashboard. I used http://internetjim.blogspot.com as the blogspot.com website. You can create your own name for your blogspot.com website. Note, it is going to change to your own domain name in the next steps.
9. Verified the new virgin site was live online. (I may have done one test posting to begin with, but am not sure on this point.)
10. Changed the new site title and description to reflect the name of the old blog. Note: I changed the title slightly to quickly visually verify on which website I was on at the time. Because, once you do the import of the posts, comments, and HTML template file, you will not be able to tell the difference from one blog to the other.
11. Switched to FTP publishing on the new blog by first switching back to classic templates mode.
12. Opened both the old and the new blog tab areas and copied the FTP publishing information from one settings are to the other. Went right down tabs: Basic, Publishing, Formatting, Comments, Archiving, Site Feed, Email, OpenID, and Permissions. It is important to get everything the way it is on the old blog to the new blog. Keep the publishing, archiving, and site feed absolutely the same, otherwise, you could end up with new urls, which won’t match up with the search engine results or result in broken links back to your website.
13. Copied from the HTML text in the Notepad template file previously saved in step number 3 and pasted the old HTML text into the new Edit HTML section of the new blog. (This makes the new blog look like your old blog, but not completely until you publish FTP publish it. Important! Don’t publish it yet. Wait till the next step. If you publish before the next step, you will write over all your postings at the hosting server for your blog for a period of time until you repost with the imported posts and comments.)
14. After double checking and comparing all of the settings with the old to the new, it was now time to do an import from the saved (.xml) file located on the computer desktop. Note, there are a couple of options on the import. You can either choose to import and automatically publish all posts immediately or import and save them as drafts to be published later. Your choice at this point. I automatically published at this point in the import process.
    
    

    Import posts and comments from a Blogger export file. Imported posts will be merged with any current posts, sorted by date.

15. Success! At this point in time, I verified all my posts were properly posted to the server. I navigated to each online to verify. The new blog was now showing up in the dashboard area.

Blogger Notes and Observations

I was still trying to figure out how my blog went missing in the first place. I still think it had to do with when I first created the blog without a blogspot.com address. I went straight to FTP publishing. Another possibility, is I may have created this blog at about the time Blogger still allowed you to use a different email address or Blogger account name other than a Gmail account. Blogs under the old Blogger accounts required a different login screen and are part of the legacy claim for claiming old blogs to be part of your new Google account name. I had however, claimed my blog under this legacy link a long time ago.

Somehow, when the most recent changes occurred with the Blogger Dashboard area, was when I first noticed my blog had disappeared. It seems as though a few other folks have experienced the same problem too. I haven’t heard of a fix from Google as of yet about this particular situation. It may be part of a database glitch for old FTP blogs that were created without a blogspot.com address to begin with that got overlooked when Google Engineers updated the Blogger system and dashboard areas.

Another important point to note when doing an import from one blog to the other, is that if you posted any of your old posts at the old blog account, and then changed the title of the blog postings and re-published the blog at the same spot, the URL would not have changed on this old posting, but when you import the blog postings into a new Blogger blog, the URL is updated to reflect this change. That change in the URL creates a small problem however.

Let’s take a look at a web page example. Let’s say I published a blog at the old account titled “This Is a Test Example” for the title of a new article. The URL at the old account would be the following: www.jimwarholic.com/2007/02/this-is-a-test-example.php. If however you changed the title at the old blog to “Internet Testing at My Online Sandbox Beach” or simply “Test” the new title in the Blogger Title Field would be updated on the old blog posting, but the URL would remain the same. This would not affect any links to that particular posting. But, when you import the name, “Internet Testing at My Online Sandbox Beach” or “Test” for the title of the posting to the new blog, the resulting URL would change to www.jimwarholic.com/2007/02/test.php, which is completely different than the original URL and will break hyper-links to that specific page, unless you create some permanent redirects (301 Status Code) in your (.htaccess) file. If your website hosting provider provides the easy-to-use cPanel website control panel for setting up redirects, or other website hosting control panels that provide for quickly configuring permanent (301) redirect solutions, then each URL can be quickly entered into an online input form. Otherwise, you must manually write a new .htaccess file by including the redirects for each particular file that needs to be redirected to the new URLs. Once the redirects are established online, after a period of a month or two, then you can remove them to make your website run more efficiently, and speed up the web page renderings. I suggest a search on Google for more information on .htaccess files to understand some of the finer points in configuring temporary (302) and permanent (301) redirects.

For the moment, I am a bit leery of deleting the old blog by using the “Delete Blog” from the settings page. However, I changed the FTP publishing user name and password, so it would not publish if I accidentally happened to click there for some reason. I also gave myself a note on the HTML template area to reflect what the status of that blog is. I might have missed a redirect, and if I saw an old page and thinking it needed to be edited, the old edit quick edit link will still be in affect for the old online posting. You would not want to republish from that old blog, otherwise you will change all your Internet postings back to what they were in the past.

I know this is a rather long Blog posting, but I feel it’s important for everyone out in Internet land to understand what is going on online with your web site, when a procedure like this is implemented on the Web.

Good luck everyone. If you happen to take the plunge into importing and exporting, take your time, and think about what you are doing. Print out these instructions if you wish. Feel free to post your comments or questions to either the comments section of this post or email me directly using the appropriate comment or email form below.

Best regards,

Jim

Brought to you by Professional Web Services. Gain new quality sales leads and attract new customers online with Internet marketing services for your business. Make your business alive today on the World Wide Web. Learn more, contact us today for more sales for you.

Get your business website found online with Internet marketing services from Professional Web Services. Learn how we can target the right customers for you.

Blogger Import Export Blog Update 12/18/08

After serious consideration about a few things related to possibly maintaining the old blog online, I decided it was in my best internet interest to delete the old blog completely from the Blogger system. There were a number of very good reasons not to save the old blog. For one, if I forgot to do a redirect of an old Blogger posted page, a commentator would still be able to post a new comment to the old blog. This would not be good, since all the old comments were exported and imported into the new online blog, and I really want people to comment on the new blog, not the old blog. Additionally, I found myself accidentally logging in to the old blog through quick edits, on web pages that I forgot about. By deleting the blog completely from the Blogger system, I will no longer have to worry about that. If I forgot a page or two on the permanent redirects, the Search Engine Spiders will eventually figure it out, and gather the proper pages to add to the online search directory database.

Warning about deleted Blogger Blogs!

I was however a little nervous when I went to delete the old blog from my Blogger account. I did not want to accidentally delete the wrong Blogger blog. It paid off and was good that I had two slightly different names for each of the blogs for identification purposes. There is no recovery if you accidentally delete the wrong blog in your Blogger account. Deleted Blogger Blogs are gone forever and Google will not be able to get them back for you.

Get your business website found online with Internet marketing services from Professional Web Services and improve your bottom-line.

Microsoft Windows Live Writer Multi Platform Blog Writer & Blog Editor Review
Five Star Recommendation

Table of contents posting was done with Microsoft Windows Live Writer to Jim’s Blogger account. See some of the cool features and read about Windows Live Writer blog editor software review below.

Jim’s Online Table of Contents For Internet Review

This is my year end table of contents for Internet Jim. Actually this TOC goes back a couple of years. I figured it was about time to have a quick review of some of the postings at this website. I created this template using Microsoft Windows Live Writer beta addition. Windows Live Writer is a cross platform, free desktop blog editor that allows you to quickly add tables to your blog postings. You can quickly and easily switch between multiple servers and blog platforms such as: Blogger, Windows Live, WordPress, SharePoint, LiveJournal, TypePad, Community Server accounts, and others. A number of features include quickly adding images, videos, maps, and tables.

The advanced tables feature was exactly the main feature I was searching for online, when I happen to stumble onto the Microsoft Live Writer software table solution. Tables, like a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet, are very useful when it comes to posting things in a logical order of columns and rows, with headings and descriptions included. Columns and rows can be quickly added and changed in size in a WYSISWYG, What You See Is What You Get, writing environment even if the cell, column, or row already has text or other information inside of it. Simply drag the columns or rows to increase their sizes and quickly set centering parameters for both the table and cells (horizontal and vertical parameters), and applying these horizontal and vertical parameters to entire columns and rows too.

Adding pictures into the middle of a blog posting is easy. Place your cursor where you want the image to be included in the posting, and click add image and have the text wrap too. There are some other cool features for images that makes if fun to just play around with the look and feel of what you intend to post online.

For example, you can quickly rotate an image and add watermarks to pictures that are on your computer to begin with, as the source picture, before uploading the image online. Add custom margins, borders, drop shadow borders, photo paper looks, reflections, rounded corners, and solid borders to images. Text wrap right (as the walking penny above), text wrap left (as the image is on the right), inline images, and image centering as the free form image below are just a click away. Linking to an image source or other url is easy without having to know any html coding. Images can also be added from an online source location such as Picasa Albums, Photobucket, ImageShack, Flickr, and other image hosting websites just by selecting the url of the image and adding it to the image prompt. You can also quickly size the image to any image size you need with customizable pre-assigned thumbnail sizes.

Additionally there are some really cool, fascinating, and advanced features for image editing. Contrast and brightness are easy to slide adjust, once again in a WYSISWYG view. A very powerful, yet intuitive cropping feature is also available for your image. As I said before, you can rotate the image, but also the image can be quickly tilted in the posting itself. See below.

Free Form Image With Tilt and Reflection Advanced Effects Features

This cool free-form picture certainly adds another image reflection and a completely new dimension to what you can do with a free-form picture image. Note the optical illusion along the left and right side of the image which makes it look like the posting is tilted.

Before the posting is ever published on the Internet, Windows Live Writer has the option to display the post in a preview form of the template you are using on the Web. This feature will show the full affect of how it will look when it is published online. You can also edit the source html code too. You can post to your blog in draft mode or publish live. Once the blog posting is published online, then you can use Microsoft Windows Live Writer to do future edits directly from your computer desktop and then re-publish your posting to view it online live.

Of course, Windows Live Writer features include a real time spell checker, save as draft mode, automatically save drafts at a fully customizable set period of time (every one, two, or three minutes, or more), plus it also includes word count, characters counter (with and without spaces counts), and paragraphs counts too. Links, font sizes, font styles, colors, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, headings, block quotes, bullets, numbered lists, left align, center align, right align, and justified text is easy with a quick click from the icons at the top of the editor. Right click on the mouse to display most used features such as link building, alignment, numbering, and bullets. Auto linking is another feature. Simply type in the url address like http://wow.jimwarholic.com or predefine keyword hyperlinks and the software program turns it into a hyperlink for you. Sidebar can be switched off or on which will display recently posted and open drafts, along with insert hyperlinks, pictures, tables, maps, video, and add plug-ins too. Download the Windows Writer Beta now with new features.

Wow! I have to say, I really am quite impressed on what Microsoft Windows Live Writer Blog Editor can do. There are more features to this blog editor software program then meets the eye. With over a hundred add-on plug-ins available to download online, with more being added, Windows Live Writer is likely to become a very powerful and useful online/desktop software blog editor tool. And, did I tell you the best of all, Windows Live Writer is available free of charge.

Are you looking for the answers of how to get your business website found online? Are you looking for more customers from the Web today. Then, you are just a short click away to learning more about how professional Internet marketing services business solution that can propel your business on the Internet. Contact Professional Web Services now to have an online salesman that never gets tired and works for you 24×7. So, for your business website, just like the lucky internet penny above, he will walk miles for you.

Internet Marketing

Left and Right Minded Internet Marketing

Adele Revella is the developer of the acclaimed Pragmatic Marketing® seminar, Effective Product Marketing, wrote an article titled, "Right-brained or left-brained marketing"

Laura Ramos, Forrester Research’s analyst for B2B Marketing wrote a research paper, entitled "Segmentation vs Personas, Where Should B2B Marketers Start?." Laura reports that B2B marketers are way behind their B2C peers in developing effective messaging and marketing strategies, and that the source of our problem is that we don’t use both sides of our brain.

Websites and Internet Marketing

The emphasis should be to use both right-minded and left-minded marketing approaches when targeting B2B Web buyers, B2C online consumers, and technology companies. This is even more significant given the speed at which buyers and consumers are searching the Internet for the products or services being sought after. Remember, the back button is only one click of the mouse away. I say that to place emphasis on the fact that you only have a small window of opportunity to convert a visitor into a potential customer. Websites must be able to target both sides of the brain in order to convert visitors into paying customers.

For both right and left minded approaches to Internet marketing, contact Professional Web Services. Ask for your free Internet marketing evaluation today. Professional Web Services provides all aspects of Internet marketing for both B2B and B2C businesses on the Web.

The Internet Marketing Ladder

Building Up Your Business Online
By: Jim Warholic

Marketing for the twenty-first century requires an understanding of the Internet both from the B2B and B2C perspective, as well as an understanding of the challenges facing businesses online today.

A business presence online today requires much more than just the website presence. It requires telling your marketing message in more ways than one, and in various marketing and advertising channels. The Web days of simply putting up a website and thinking you are going to get thousands of visitors are long gone. Yes, it is possible to attain world wide Internet recognition, but you will most likely have to climb a ladder with lots of hard work to get there.

Get your business found online with Internet marketing services from Professional Web Services today.

Good Domain Name News
Yay, We Got Our ProfessionalWebServices.net Domain Name

Learn the ins and outs of what a business can do to get a domain name that has expired. Read how we got our domain name. Consider the importance of acquiring your business name as a domain name, even if you are not currently using your business name as the branded website. With the cost of domain names relatively cheap from domain registrars such as Godaddy, (less than 10 dollars annually) it makes sense to register your business name. Register yours today.

Read the entire story about how we acquired our domain name.

The following is an excerpt from the story.

It is important to note, that if the domain had many suitors, it might have gone into an after market bidding area online. However, in the case of our name, since we are incorporated as Professional Web Services, Inc. and most of the other domain names are owned by us, we thought it would be unlikely that there would be any type of bidding on this name. Additionally, under domain name laws, U.S. federal law known as the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, a person or company that tries to capture an already established domain name for some corporation or entity that is not rightfully theirs could be considered to be Cybersquatting. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price. Read more

Are you struggling to get your business website found in the large search engines? Would you like to gain more customers from the Internet today? Then contact Professional Web Services for online marketing that works.

Special Website Projects Require Special CSS Programming

One would think it would be easy to center a single object like a picture or graphic image in the center of a web page using Cascading Style Sheets, CSS div tag and no tables. There are many ways of centering text or objects in a horizontal mode but not in both the vertical and horizontal modes at the same time, that works completely across most all brands of Web browsers.

I spent a couple of hours using the search engines for research on a special project that I thought would be easy. Finally after looking at maybe 50 websites and doing special searches I finally hit pay dirt.

For those of you that want to dig right in, here is the code I found from an old archive at www.WedDeveloper.com CSS – Vertical and Horizontal Centering.

I did a few modifications to the original html code in the header section

<style title="Default" media="screen" type="text/css">#center { width: 200px; height: 300px; position: absolute; top: 50%; left: 50%; margin: -150px auto auto -100px; border: 4px double black; background-color: white; text-align: center;}body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; background-image: url('your image');}#center p { margin-top: 2px; margin-bottom: 2px;}</style>

The div code in the body would look like this:

<div id="center">Professional Web Services</div>

Marketing Creativity Online

Meet Jim At Fridays

Internet Marketing Center

Here is a link to Jim Warholic, Centered Online Internet Marketing web page. Change the window size and notice the picture and text inside the predefined area, always remains centered in the middle of the browser window both horizontally and vertically.

Some of the CSS keys are: first define the box size in width and height measurements, then you position it absolute 50% from the top and 50% from the left, then you set your margins for the top, right, bottom, and left to be: top = -1/2 height, right = auto, bottom = auto, and left = -1/2 width.

Other CSS styles can be added for flavor.

Have fun.

Need help on the Web?

We will go out of our way to promote your company in creative marketing strategies and online advertising ways that will bring in new sales leads, generate website visitors, and turn those visitors into paying customers. Click here for the Top Secrets.

Our core Internet marketing services include:

• Internet marketing services
• SEO, ethical search engine optimization
• Online advertising strategies
• Search engine marketing
• Web branding solutions
• Blogging publishing services

Contact us today for services, strategies, and solutions for your B2B or B2C company.

Open Source Web Site Template Designs
When it comes to creating the perfect template for a website, quite a bit of professional work is involved. Getting a head start on the design process can be aided by many of the Open Source templates available online.

Website Designs

With millions of websites already in existence, it is not like something has not already been designed before in the way of a website template layout. There are layouts with one, two, or three columns, or even multi-columns. Menus have been created to be placed on the right, left, top, and/or bottom of web pages. But, no matter what type of website template design is decided upon, there will be extensive modifications that will likely be required for branding it to your business name, color preferences, and tastes.

Website Color Schemes

My personal feeling with colors is darker fonts on lighter background colors for the main body text seems to be the easiest on the eyes. Have you ever tried to read a long page of text in a website, with a black or dark colored background, with white or light text? After staring at the page of an extremely dark website for a minute or two, the eyes tend to have a burnt in image of the black background. This is very hard on the eyes. None of the big search engines have white text on dark backgrounds? None of the major websites from an e-commerce perspective have white on dark. Why do many of the graphic designers think that white text on a dark background is a good option? I guess it looks cool in some instances. I must admit, there have been instances (this website started off that way) where I have used the light text on dark background styles, but I did it as a means of measuring the likability of the style, and have not used it directly for a business website. I also have websites that are designed for personal use with a light text dark background style. See Jim’s Internet Shorts Backflag Tumblr for an example of a light on dark website. If you are going to do a dark background, then I suggest not making the font light as white as white. Make the font text a bit gray. This is easier on the eyes to read than a stark white on black contrasted background. Accentuation of the page can also be done with graphic images that provide a balance to the overall look but do not interfere with the text message to be read. This is not to say that portions of the web page design can not be accented with dark backgrounds with light text. Just do it in marketing moderation and it will set your website apart from the rest.

Certain businesses tend to have some great natural images that can easily portray what their business is about. As the old saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words can be true on the web, but it is wise to have body text to go along with the image for the search engines to pick up the information. Other businesses in the service sector require much more in the way of a creative image selection process in order to really tell their business story online.

Creative Marketing, Advertising, and Writing

Creative writing for the website and creative ad copy writing can be equally as challenging. For one thing, the keywords for your business must be used throughout the website in order to have it have the possibility of it showing up in the keyword search results of the search engines. Ignoring this one area alone can spell trouble for your Internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization – SEO efforts. From an Internet marketing standpoint, to place a website in front of your target audience requires using the keywords that your customers use. In fact, writing for the target audience is more important on the Internet than any single type of promotional material generated. Read about how online marketing means knowing your customers semantically. Brochures that are handed out or mailed can make an immediate impact without using many of the keywords within the printed items. That is because a sales person hands out or emails the information directly to a person that is probably already interested in what the business does. However, on the Internet, the website becomes the salesman for potential customers that may not know your business name but are looking for the equipment, products, or services provided, and therefore the Internet marketing messages must be more informative than any printed brochures.

For more information on creative marketing, Internet marketing, online advertising, search engine optimization, and web branding visit Professional Web Services today.

Do You Have The Time?
by: Jim Warholic
My Internet marketing timepiece message for the world wide web.

Yesterday, my favorite watch, the Casio DW-290-T, that I have had for ten or more years decided that it had had enough. It started out with, getting dimmer when the electro luminescent backlight was pressed. So I figured it was time to get a new battery. Driving over to the local Target store at 8:30 pm on a Saturday evening, it would simply be a matter of installing a new battery. As “Murphy’s Law” would have it, when dealing with time, this was not going to be the case.

My first clue that this was going to be an extended visit should have been when I approached the watch counter and asked for a battery for my Casio watch. The clerk behind the counter asked me, “do I know the battery model number?” “Well sure, just let me borrow your small phillips screwdriver and I can give you the battery model number,” I said. The sales clerk said, “we no longer have any tools to work on the watches.” “OK…, let me see if my trusty Leatherman multi-purpose tool had anything that would work,” I said.

Fortunately, the screws on the back of the watch were both slotted and phillips style. I had a small screwdriver on the Leatherman that worked just fine. After I got the back cover of the watch off, the clerk was able to see the battery number. She provided a new battery at the cost of four dollars and some change. I thought this would be great. I’ll be back in time… Foolish me.

While I was assembling the watch back together, the clerk asked if she could recycle the old battery for me. I said, “sure.” Big mistake. The new battery would not work in the watch. Or, should I say the watch would not work with the new battery. Making sure the battery was in properly, pushing buttons, taking it in and out again several times, had absolutely no success in getting that stupid watch to function again. Now my favorite trusted timepiece became a stupid timepiece.

The sales clerk during this time was helping out other customers and would occasionally come back to my counter area. She felt bad this had happened. I assured her it was not her fault. I stated to her, “Let me try my old battery, at least that one was functioning before I took it out.” “Well, um, let me see if I can find it,” she said. At that, she went over to the container of old batteries, which contained about a hundred or more of various types and sizes of batteries. She said, “I think it is this one. The one on top. But, I can’t get it out.” So, I start digging, and digging. Getting frustrated, I dump out the whole jar on to the counter. Separating the same style battery as mine into a pile. Only a dozen or so of that style batteries were present.

I start trying battery after battery with no luck. No display at all. Murphy’s Law finally took its toll on my time. Time to move on. Get a new watch. OH, how I hate shopping for watches. This one had too many buttons and was hard to figure out. Another had a display that could barely be seen, unless you had the eyes of a 18 year old. I just couldn’t seem to find the right timepiece.

“How late are you open,” I asked the clerk. “10:00 pm,” she responded. “OK, I might be back,” I said.

Trudging over to the local Longs Drug Store, where I had remembered that they also carried watches, I decided to give them a try. I finally found a watch that I could see with my own eyes, the buttons had just the right touch, and it did not take a rocket scientist to figure out how to operate it.

I am sure that many of you can relate to the time story. What is interesting is how this time story relates to matters on the Web. The Internet is a media outlet for B2B, B2C, and C2C. It is a marketing, advertising, and sales channel that really is difficult to encapsulate into one definition. Many B2B and B2C businesses want a website presence without doing much work. They want instantaneous gratification with an immediate website presence, that their website is showing up in the top search results for their marketing keywords, and the website becomes a powerful sales and marketing tool for their sales people to use. Time and time again, Presidents, CEOs, owners, and management of both large and small business fail to realize the amount of time it takes to develop an online web presence.

Developing a good web presence encompasses so many aspects of a business’s soul in order to have a successful online presence. Time is the one item that will definitely be at the forefront of setting up and maintaining a website, Internet marketing, advertising online, and web branding the company across a wide area of online distribution channels. If the company is involved in a vary narrow vertical market segment or technical engineering area of expertise, then writing, or at the very least supplying an outline of the topic, from company staff will be a prerequisite for developing a good website. Good Internet marketing companies can provide immense help in the area of writing and editing content for selected keywords, fine tuning from a search engine optimization – SEO and Web branding perspective, online advertising strategies, search engine marketing, customizing and/or designing search engine friendly website templates, and Web branding strategic marketing ideas. But, marketing online still comes back to the business of sharing knowledgeable information, in a customer centric way, through good writing styles and online communication skills.

Talk with Professional Web Services today for information about Internet marketing services, ethical search engine optimization, search engine marketing, online advertising strategies, and web branding solutions. Contact us for B2B and B2C marketing Internet marketing services, strategies, and solutions.

Well, I finally did it!
by: Jim Warholic

I finally decided to create a blog with my name in the URL, jimwarholic.com to dare I say, market myself online. There were a number of reasons to do this. Sharing information, giving out the URL to family and friends, personal branding, marketing and advertising, or in this case, the number one reason was to have a central location for all the links and information to various online sections of interest.

Staying on top of all the information from an Internet perspective is a challenge. Just trying to remember where I wrote an article online, or on what website is equally difficult. I find that I search on our Professional Web Services various blogs and websites for articles that I wrote in the past, so that a reference could be made in a current article. I had to create custom search areas online, in order to search out these previously published articles.

Maybe Google Had Me In Mind

Google just recently came out with a customizable search engine that anyone can build. This really has helped in cataloging and finding all those hundreds of articles written on the Internet. Check out the Internet Marketing Center search engine. If you want to reference it in the future simply add it to your personalized Google Search page by clicking on the Google Gadget button.

Add this search engine to your Google homepage:

Add this search engine to your blog or webpage »

Additionally, Google Custom Site Search provides a means of embedding the search results directly into the website itself. Check out the website search for this site using the Google Search bar found in this search link. Included are the results from this website along with some other Internet sites all searched from one central online location. Try the Google Custom Search now and check out how the results are embedded directly into “According to Jim” website. Try a test search and click the refine the results hyperlink at the top of the search results page, which is providing search results based on this website and other websites.

By the way, you can also visit me on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays too. Maybe in the future, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays websites will follow along also.

This is the first posting of this blog. The overall Internet theme is East, West, North, and South. That just about covers everything I think. Right?

By-the-way, did you know that you can get to the top at the north pole, the bottom — at the south pole, but you can never ever get to the end of the west, or ever get to the beginning of the east on the earth? In fact, the distance from north to south poles can be measured, but the distance from the east to the west is infinite. Or to say it another way; travel north and you will eventually head south, but travel east and you will never go west, or travel west and you will never go east. This gives new meaning to the words of the bible, “as far as the east is from the west.” Fascinating tidbit of information, don’t you think?

That’s all for now. Customization of the template to follow.

Visit Professional Web Services on The Web.

Above All, We Tell It Like It Is, And Do It With Style!

One more point for having a personal website in conjunction with having an online business presence is you will be building quality links back to your business; which is very important for SEO solutions. Take the time today to learn more about how Internet marketing can drive new customers to you online. Contact us today for help with your link building now. Improve your online web presence. Promote yourself in style.