I regularly get enquiries from my clients who have received a “Domain Name Expiration Notice” email or even a letter in the post from some official sounding business (such as “Domain Renewal Group” or plenty of others).  However, I suspect that many of them just receive n invoice, assume it is legitimate and go ahead an pay it. This initiates a transfer of the domain to a new registrar, and means that future renewals will continue to be at the inflated price (unless of course they get another domain renewal scam letter in the interim)

Unfortunately, it is usually the small business owners who normally get burnt by these schemes.  They know that they have a domain name, and that it needs to be renewed every now and again, but get confused by the technical details, assume it is OK, and go ahead an pay.

One of the problems is that these renewal scams are in many cases not illegal, but they are certainly unethical. They prey on the naivety of website owners who assume that the notifications and invoices they receive are legitimate.

How do Domain Renewal Scams work?

Domain name renewal scams are setup to work in a number of ways.

• You might be sent an invoice for a domain name that is very similar to your current domain name – the scammer hopes that you don’t notice the difference and just pay the invoice.
• You might receive notification that someone is trying to register your domain with a different top level domain or country domain and they are trying to help you “protect your intellectual property” by offering you first option.
• Alternatively, you could be sent a letter that looks like a renewal notice for your actual domain name, but is from a different company to the one which your domain is actually registered.

Check your Domain

The job for domain renewal scammers is pretty easy, because in most cases information about who owns domains (including contact details) is publicly available, although, there is often an option for you to make this information private as a part of the registration process – for an additional fee.

You (and anyone else, including domain scammers) can check the details of your own domain by using a WHOIS service such as www.domaintools.com.   Simply enter your domain name, and click submit to see what information is publicly available.  Different types of information are available depending on the type of domain name you have, but the main things that you should be aware of is :

• who your registrar is (this is the organisation that your domain is registered with) and
• when is the domain due to expire.

How to avoid Domain Scams?

To ensure that you don’t get ripped of by scammers – either by paying too much for the renewal of your own domain, or tricked into buying a new domain that you may not need, you should:

• Be aware of Domain Prices – make sure that you have at least some idea of what you should expect to be paying for your domain name.  Take a look at WebConsulting’s domain name prices for an idea of costs for registering most common domains names
• Be suspicious of ANY unsolicited bills – be sceptical of any emails, letters  or invoices you receive that you weren’t expecting or that are from organisations that you don;t recognise
• Know your domain details – follow the “Check your Domain” instructions above and make sure you know who your domain is registered with, and when it is due for renewal
• Is your domain renewal due soon? – scam domain notification renewals will often be sent out several months before the renewal id actually due, whereas legitimate ones tend to be sent out with month or less notice.
• Carefully read the Invoice – make  sure to check that the domain name listed in the invoice is the same as your actual domain name. If it is the same, also check to make sure that the invoice is from the company that you have previously used to register your domain name.

Domain renewals and transfers

Whenever you receive a renewal notification – whether it is legitimate or otherwise, take a little time to check out current domain registration costs.  These prices tend to have reduced over the years and can vary significantly even for legitimate domain registration providers.  For example MelbourneIT (One of Australias original and for a long time largest, domain registration services) currently charges $75.60 for a single years .com registration and $140 for renewing a .com.au domain name for 2 years, whereas Webconsulting’s domain registration service currently charges just $12 a year for a .com and $28 for two years for .com.,au domains – a MUCH cheaper option for exactly the same service.

Transferring a domain name to another registrar is a pretty straightforward process, but do not leave it to the last minute, as in my experience there can sometimes be problems if a transfer is initiated within 1 week of it’s renewal date.  If you think you are paying too much for your domains, and are looking at a making some significant savings on your domain registration costs, check out WebConsulting’s domain name prices , and why not transfer your domain today.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of XX bytes exhausted (tried to allocate XX bytes) in /directory/filename.php on line XX

This error may occur for various elements on the dashboard, or when trying to upgrade WordPress.

The error indicates that there is a restriction on the amount of memory the system can allocate to perform a particular task, and there is not currently enough memory available.  The problem sometimes starts to show up after a new plugin has been installed.

To resolve this issue you need to try and either reduce the memory requirements of your WP implementation, or increase the available memory.

Decrease WordPress memory requirements

If the error only shows up when trying to upgrade WP, you may be able to temporarily deactivate all plugins, undertake the upgrade, and then reactivate them.  However, if the error is impacting on the functionality of your installation, then try and deactivate any unnecessary plugins.

If this works, and the error is resolved, be aware, that the problems may very well recur if you install more plugins.

Increase System Memory

Depending on your hosting environment, you may be able to allocate additional memory via the following steps.  However, there will be a limit on how much memory is available to you, so there is a chance that these “fixes” will have no impact.  If this is the case, you should contact your host provider and see if they are able to allocate more memory for you (this may involve upgrading your hosting, and / or paying extra)

To try and increase memory allocation, use the following following processes :

(note their are various methods to do this – depending on what version of WordPress you are running, so some of these suggested methods may not apply to you)

1.  php.ini

Create or edit a local php.ini file in the wp-admin directory (and also, possibly the directory where the error is occuring and insert the following:

;; set memory limit for cache.php
memory_limit = 64M

2. Cache.php

open the file wp-includes/cache.php and place the following code immediately after the opening <?php  tag:

ini_set(‘memory_limit’,’64M’); // set memory to prevent fatal errors

3. .htaccess

Create a .htaccess file in the wp-includes directory and insert the following directive:

# set memory limit for cache.php
php_value memory_limit 64M

4.  wp-settings.php

open the file wp-settings.php (in the root  directory) and increase the  :

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);

entry. Save the file and refresh.

5.  default-constants.php

open the file wp-includes/default-constants.php and increase the  :

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);

entry  (note there may be different setting for Multisite configurations)

Save the file and refresh.

6.  wp-config.php

In your WP installation root folder, find the file named: wp-config.php

Open the file to be edited in your favorite editor

after the lines :

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);

/** The Database Collate type. Don’t change this if in doubt. */
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Add this code to your wp-config.php file

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);

Save the file and refresh your wordpress page and it should not give the error again.

And that’s it. Save, upload, test and check for additional errors. If necessary, you may wish to try alternate values for the memory limit (e.g. 32, 64, 128, 256) – although be aware that there will be a physical limit imposed by your hosting environment, so any values greater than that will have no benefit.

What if Nothing works !!!

Your host may not allow the Memory Limit  increase, or they may have a setting which overwrites (or limits) the changes you made. If nothing seems to work, contact your host provider and find out if they allow you to increase that limit and which method ought to be used.

Useful Content

Make sure the information you are using is interesting, useful, practical and most of all relevant. When building your site be sure to consider your objectives and goals and then implement them into your site. Be sure to include links, articles, newsletters and promotions within your site as well. There is nothing quite as sad and annoying than a web site that has been neglected, be sure to go back frequently and update you site often. This will makes sure that your visitors will come back because they know you are offering up-to-date information.

Simple to Navigate

Make your site easy to navigate. If you really want your site to be easy to navigate then you should group all of your site links together in one place. The directs the attention of your visitors to one area of the page from which they have easy access to the rest of the site. You can place other links such as: media, career opportunities, contact us and about us at the top or the bottom of the page. These links are important in their own right but they are definitely not what your visitors came to see. When you have created the links and all the new pages for your site, be sure to include a home link on each of the new pages. These links will help you to guide your visitors back to the main page whilst removing the need for them to clink back several times to get there. Navigation is crucial so you should spend some time checking and rechecking all of your page and homes links.

Fast Load Time

Don’t let your visitors get bogged down in loading times. You should try to avoid large graphics that will increase the amount of time it will take your site to load. You should try and keep in mind the idea that not all of your viewers will be packing the best technology available. Try to keep your site as open as possible to as many people as possible so that everyone has access to it no matter what kind of equipment they are using.

Targeted

You should always know who are the people you are aiming the site toward. These people are your target audience, they are the people you want to visit your site. You need to identify what the age group, gender, class and spending habits of your target audience are. This will help you to create a likeable atmosphere on the your site. You want to create a space for the few not the many.

Ask for Feedback

Aim to have your visitors tell you what they think and what they want. If you are looking for consumer to business contact then on your contact us page you should put your phone, email, fax and postal information here as well as a text box of instant feedback. This gives you the opportunity to hear from your visitors in way that benefits both you and customer. Make sure you never leave your customers hanging and always answer their comments, concerns and questions. If you are looking for ways to keep in contact with your customers then you might want to think about a simple newsletter or email marketing to keep your customers informed about what is going on even if they don’t visit all that often.

Use the information contained in this article not only to improve your own but to evaluate other websites. These tips will not only help you to make your web site strong and professional it will also help you to identify those web sites that aren’t.

Build an affiliate website with our affiliate website builder that allows anyone to create their own website quickly and easily.

Logos are consider one of the forms of brand recognition, and they’re more than just something used by the country’s huge corporations. Brand recognition is key and many small companies should try and establish their brand in their local area when they begin operation. The brand can be included on everything from business cards, to coupons, to a website, an ad in the telephone book, or even on a sign on your truck.

Although utilizing a logo is easy, creating a good one is not so simple. Information on creating a good logo can be found on the Internet, as well as information on what to avoid when creating a logo. The most common one centers on employing clip art to create a logo yourself. Many people can recognize many clip-art pictures and designs when placed in front of us. For instance, a business was employing what is known as a ‘string bean man’ from a widely recognized clip-art resource. I instantly thought they could put some effort into creating a better logo than that and sadly, I wasn’t impressed.

Using a text based logo isn’t a very good idea either. Since the entire point of having a logo is the visual appeal, just simple text or monograms doesn’t have much visual appeal, which means people won’t remember it. Even as some businesses have effectively utilized logos with just text, it is an incredibly hard thing to accomplish. Read this site if you want logo contest website information.

On the other hand, extremely complicated logos are another bad error. Fancy, photographic special effects can make an image look muddy and unappealing when in print. Your logo should be recognizable in black and white as well as color. Many people use the yellow pages and newspapers where it is less expensive than using color and thereby saves an advertiser money. Whether you want it or not, colorful logos will be copies and faxed. A beautiful color image can translate into a large, black blob when sent through a fax machine.

Seeking out a professional to help you with your logo design is of paramount importance. A sweepstakes game that was born in 2000 was lucky enough to have a talented graphic designer on the team who created their logo. This logo, which still meets all of the recommended curriculum, is easy, enjoyable and easy to remember. Your logo should be equally attractive no matter what color it is printed in.

That graphic designer was quite an asset to have on the team. You should consider yourself as wise if a close acquaintance is a graphic designer. If not, shop around and find a graphic designer to help design a logo. Designers are not difficult to track down. Type logo into Google and you’ll see just what I mean.

However, based on search engine optimization, it is not recommended that you simply go with the company that pops up at the top of the list. Research four or five companies, finding out their expertise and price range. Once you’ve chosen your favorites, start comparing aspects like their customer service, refund policy, technical support, number of revisions allowed, and what file formats will be provided.

Check out the graphic designers and marketing consultants in your own area. No matter who you decide to hire for designing your logo, remember that this is an investment you will make. A bad investment might have prospective clients thinking that you might have selected a better design, which looks bad for your enterprise. When done well, a logo will be long remembered and the company that is identified by it will be remembered, too.

Quick Guide to Writing a Business Website Homepage

Target audience:

Your business website´s home page must be all things to all the people who type your URL in their navigation bar, whether it´s their six-hundredth visit or whether they just happened to catch your web address painted on the back of your car.

Content:

For the benefit of new visitors, a home page must provide a snapshot of who you are and what visitors can do on your website. Your first one to three paragraphs should give a quick overview of what visitors can do on your site. For example, you could include a short paragraph each on “buy widgets”, “learn more about widgets”, and “meet other widget enthusiasts”, with links to your shopping cart, informational articles, and message board, respectively.

For returning visitors, the home page must serve as a touchstone for navigating the site, announcing new developments and pointing out especially popular or useful pages. For these visitors you don´t have to write anything new especially for your homepage. Anyone who’s coming back to your site is already interested and is going to want to jump right into the deeper pages of your site, rather than linger on the homepage wondering whether it’s worth their time.

Your home page should include teasers for the inside pages of your site. For instance, you could have a tip of the week, linked to a web page on your site with an article explaining it. Good navigation (list of links to the four to eight most essential web pages on your site) is also a must.

For both new and returning visitors, always give a prominent place to a featured product or service (or two or three) with a picture, one or two-sentence description, and a link to its own web page or its place in your “products and services page,” catalogue or shopping cart.

You should also probably feature a satisfied customer preferably with a photo. But  always include a testimonial quotation, and a link to a case study or customer story on its own web page, which you should definitely find time to write or have written for you by a website content provider.

Title:

Don´t title your home page “Welcome to [name of your site]“. Don´t include that message anywhere on your homepage, in fact. It”s a waste of space. This was normal in the 1990s but it”s pretty outdated now. Everyone already knows they”re on your site. What you need to tell them is what they can do there. Try something like “Buy, Study, and Discuss Widgets”.

Also make sure your title incorporates any keywords you think people might use to search for your product or service on the internet. Search engines decide how to categorise pages largely based on the homepage title and first heading text.

Length:

Ideally, the first few paragraphs of the homepage (the ones aimed at new visitors) should not be more than 100-350 words total. The teasers for inside pages targeted to returning visitors should not be more than about 100 words each.

Making Sure Your Website Has the Best Homepage Possible:

Before your homepage goes live, test it out on a few people. Don’t just ask your volunteers how they like your homepage. Courtesy may prevent you from getting an honest response. Instead, ask them to find how to buy your latest product or if they understand what?s the most important development in your company recently. If they can navigate to the correct page within about eight seconds (the average human attention span on the web), you’ve done well.

You may just want to hire a website copywriter, online copywriting firm, or website content provider to create your homepage for you. After all, you wouldn’t build your own office building, would you? Of course, that´s not an entirely fair comparison; more people will see your business website homepage than will ever see your office building.

What a Business Website Homepage is Not:

• A homepage is not the place to dump a long description of your business. That´s for the “about us” or “company information” page. On the homepage, this information will just bore most people.
• A homepage is not the place where you list and sell all your products (unless you only have one or two). You should have a special products and services page for that, and preferably a shopping cart or catalog. Trying to make people buy right on your homepage is a little pushy. The homepage will also get over-crowded as your offerings expand. Instead, just include a list of product categories with links to inside pages, along with direct links to your biggest sellers.
• A homepage is not the place to include the full text of your announcements and press releases. Just include a teaser paragraph of each article on the homepage, with a link to the web page with the full text. If people want to read the full text, they can. If they don´t, you haven´t bored them to tears.
• A homepage is not your company president´s or owner´s personal blog. It´s OK to rant, rave, or preach the need for world peace. Just don´t do it on wesellwidgets.com

As you´ve probably noticed, a good website has multiple pages. You should have special web pages for special topics: an “about us” page for company information, a products and services catalog, the president´s blog, etc. When you advertise or send out links to your site, you should link directly to the most appropriate page, rather than just the homepage.
Of course, that doesn´t mean you don´t need a homepage, just that you don´t need it to do every single thing you want your website to accomplish.

• when it was last updated
• how often it usually changes
• how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site

That information helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site. The Sitemaps protocol is a standard that makes it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all search engines.

How can the Sitemaps protocol help your website?

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

The sitemap allows you to inform search engines about the pages on your website. Depending on how your website is structured, it can be easier for search engines to find all of your web pages if you use a sitemap.

How do search engines find my Sitemaps file? What’s new?

The big four search engines Google, Yahoo, Live/MSN and Ask will now automatically index your Sitemaps file if you add a link to your Sitemaps file in your robots.txt file.

All the major search engines regularly check the robots.txt of a website. Just add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http:/www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Of course, you can also actively inform Google and Yahoo about your Sitemap file. This is not possible with Live/MSN and Ask.

Does a Sitemaps file improve your search engine rankings?

Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that your web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

A sitemap helps search engines to find your web pages but it does not help you to get higher search engine rankings.

When search engines index your web pages, they must find optimised web page content and good inbound links. Search engines will only give your web pages high rankings if they have both.

The Sitemaps protocol can help you to inform search engines about your web pages. Further information about the new sitemaps standard can be found on the official sitemaps web site.

It was found that 28% of online sellers were using customer ratings and reviews. More than half said they were considering it.

Asked about the effects of customer ratings on their Web sites, over half of online retailers in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe said their overall conversion rates had gone up in the past year, compared with only 9% who said they fell.

Nearly eight in 10 online sellers thought a major benefit of such reviews was to increase conversions, while 73% thought improved customer retention and loyalty were major benefits. Nearly six in 10 thought the fact that customer reviews improved search engine optimisation was a significant benefit.

“Tapping into social commerce can be a great way of gaining a competitive advantage, for example through ratings and reviews,” Linus Gregoriadis, E-consultancy’s head of research, said in a statement. “But apart from the early adopters, this is something a large proportion of online retailers are only just starting to think seriously about.”

Objectives

Know your site’s objectives – The success of your company’s website should, at the end of the day, hinge on how well it achieves your objectives. To help with identifying your website’s objectives, here’s a starter list of the most common ones:

• Generate more qualified traffic
• Produce more leads
• Sell more products
• Educate buyers
• Generate passive income
• Increase employee productivity.

Once you identify all the objectives for your site, see if you can’t prioritise what the top three objectives are. Keeping these top three objectives for your website in the forefront, you’ll do a far better job of designing a website that achieves your objectives.

Identity

Make your online identity synch up with your offline one – Most small businesses have spent many hours and dollars developing an offline company identity. This identity, found in existing signage, PowerPoint presentations or brochures, may have already established an image in the minds of visitors who land on your site. That’s why you should work hard to incorporate logos, icons, colours and typestyles from your offline identity into your online one.

Key Actions

Identify the three  key actions you would like your site visitors to do on your site – A short time ago, I was hired to audit a client’s website. When I met with the owner, I asked him to name the top three things he wanted visitors to do after arriving at his website. He said he wanted them to :

1) place an order for his spa covers;
2) understand why his spa covers were superior to the competitors’ and
3) order accessory items.

But when I visited his site for the first time, I couldn’t see how to do any of these three tasks. For your small business website to succeed, first identity your Three most important outcomes and then make each one glaringly obvious. Use whatever design ideas you and your website designer can come up with (i.e. box them in, shade them a different color, use bursts), but just make sure they’re as obvious as the nose on your face.

Entice

Draw visitors in with your first two paragraphs of copy. You’ve got between 15 and 30 seconds to convince a visitor to stay on your site, so your first 100 words of copy have got to be compelling. I once heard a webmaster refer to these first 100 words as your “opening statement”. And much like the lawyer arguing in court, if your opening statement doesn’t convince your visitor, you’ll fail to win your case.

Search

Consider including a search box – According to website marketing guru Jakob Nielsen, 50 percent of all website visitors are search-dominant; meaning they arrive at a website fully expecting to search its content using a search box. So, if your site contains many pages (over 100), articles, white papers, or back issues of newsletters, provide a search box that’s easy to find and use.

Tagline

Use a tagline – Good sites often use a tagline to communicate what their site is all about, and place it inside the front page header for maximum exposure. Some of the world’s most popular websites use this approach including:

• Facebook – “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”
• YouTube – “Broadcast Yourself.”

Consistency

Keep the web page layout consistent throughout your site – I disagree with those who say the home page template should differ from the site’s interior pages. In my mind, all pages, images, elements, typefaces, headings, and footers should stay consistent throughout your site.

Succint

Keep text short – Recent statistics show that people read from computer screens 25% slower than from paper. To address this, break up your small business’ website copy into small blocks, use shorter paragraphs, lead off text sections with subheads, and occasionally use bullet pointed lists.

FAQs

Provide a FAQ section – For recurring questions, a FAQ section can be a godsend. A FAQ will also help first time visitors get acquainted with your company and its philosophy. But more importantly, a FAQ section will build trust and credibility in the mind of a visitor by helping them answer their own questions.

Sales Tools

Make your sales tools available on your site – One of my larger clients hangs its latest PowerPoint sales presentations off its website. That way, one of its sales reps can give a product demo to a prospect in a different state without either of them leaving their offices. If your small business is national in scope, think of the travel savings if you adopt this approach.

Contact

Provide contact information on every page – Many times buyers print off web pages for further review. Then, they end up contacting your company from that piece of paper. That’s why it’s so important to include your company’s address, phone numbers and email at the bottom of each web page. As a marketer, your job is to make it as easy to do business with your company as possible. This is one way.

Media

Increase media access to your company with a press room – If one objective of your site is to generate media coverage, consider adding a self-serve “Press Room” to the site. The more accessible your website is to the media, the more your company will be written about.

Follow these twelve tips and you’ll be well on your way to a standout website design.

1. The Internet is probably the first place a person will go to get information on your company. Most people are online daily for tasks such as banking, shopping, emailing and so on. Many people prefer to read websites at work – it looks like they’re working when in fact they may be researching a product and/or service that they require. This is the face of your business and the first impression your company conveys. If a user doesn’t like what they see, they’re onto the next site.

2. Your competitors are online (and making money). You don’t want to get lost in the shuffle. In order to obtain new customers, generate new sales leads, and promote marketing campaigns there is no more effective tool than a company’s website. People in China aren’t going to know anything about you except for what your website has to say. It is essential to distinguish your company from your competitors.

3. A well designed website will give you added visibility and credibility. The new site will bring new interest in and establish creditability for your company over time. It can serve as a central building block for your branding, marketing and accordant sales support strategy for years to come.

4. Do you find you answer the same question over and over again? If so that should maybe be on the homepage of your website. A website should tell people what you do and how good you are. If your customers know what you do before they call, the conversation will be shorter and more productive.