The Internet has emerged as the new marketplace of the 21st century. It’s where everybody is flocking to, in the hope of starting his or her own business to make money. Indeed, the Internet today offers myriad opportunities of making money online. It has given rise to a new breed of moneymakers – the Internet marketers. They roam about in cyberspace (without really budging an inch from their seats), travel to the farthest nooks and corners of the online world at the click of the mouse and make money like magic! But it’s no magic, really! It’s just what business has evolved into!

If one takes a very broad look into this whole business of making money online, one can discern two very distinct groups of people. First, there are those who are selling some product or service (they usually have a website of their own to do so) all by themselves. It’s their product (or service) and they are running the entire show. It’s a one-point contact between the customer and the seller.

On the other hand, there are those who content with selling other people’s products. This is done by promoting these products on their websites and earning a commission on every sale. Affiliate program is the name of the game and believe me, when done properly and diligently, this can really rake in the moolah!

Talking of affiliate programs, one can be really spoilt for choices these days. We all want to have the best opportunity for ourselves. So it’s no wonder that very often we scour the Internet for the best affiliate program. But it can be a real slammer! Let me explain. Just try keying in “best affiliate program” in any Internet search engine of your choice, and you will be simply bowled over by the sheer number of matches to your simple query. The list will run into tens of thousands, even millions of affiliate programs, each claiming to be the best. Where do you go from there? Surely, all of them can’t be equally good! How do you know the best from the rest?

It’s time to think on you own and decide for yourself. Well, it’s not very difficult. Just use your common sense and some discretion, and you can easily zero in on some really good opportunities. To start with, there are 3 major hallmarks of a good affiliate program:

• A good product
• Attractive commission
• Trustworthiness

Having a good product is like winning half the battle. In fact a good, quality product will sell on its own merit. Of course you can rev thing up through your own marketing and promotional efforts, but rest assured, even if you do a half-hearted job at that, your product will still sell by its own virtue. Your customers will be happy to buy your product and they will spread the word around, and very soon, you can have an entire viral marketing campaign running for you (without any direct effort from you). A good product will also ensure that there are fewer refunds.

The commission that you get by selling these products, is the lifeline of the program. After all, it’s what really matters at the end of the day. The bigger it is, the better! In fact, most affiliate programs will pay you a handsome commission if the company is a reputed one and the product is good. Sometimes you will receive a commission just upon joining a program, even before you make your first sale. Such joining incentives can be very attractive at times (I’m not talking about a measly $2 or $5 scheme here, but real hefty sums!) But don’t choose your affiliate program just because the commission is good. Try finding out how you will get paid and how often. You’d probably like to get paid once or twice a month, and by some means convenient to you (like a check in mail or through third party services like Commission Junction).

This brings us to the question of trustworthiness. The Internet is as good (or as bad) as any other marketplace. You will find honest traders and then, you will also find some not-so-honest ones too. There are plenty of scams going around and you are advised to tread carefully. By the rule of thumb, it is better and safer to go by reputed names. If you get an opportunity, ask around a bit before joining a program. Talk to other affiliates of the same program and get their opinion on the program.

The best affiliate program takes care of its affiliates. Affiliate members are often provided with a wide range of tools to help in their efforts, such as banners, graphics, text links and other advertising aids. It will also provide top level support. Some programs offer a two-tier structure that allows you to appoint sub-affiliates under you. When one of these sub-affiliates makes a sale, you also get paid.

Choosing the best affiliate program is not difficult if you keep these simple pointers in mind. Carefully evaluate the program before deciding to join and you will not go wrong with your choice.

The Internet is getting larger and larger with the passing of every day. While the amount of data stored on the web is spiralling by the hour, the prospect of an information overload is becoming a major issue to web developers.
 
Far from settling down with web pages expiring and making way for fresh information, we're on the verge of a domain crisis. Some websites now host millions of pages, and the boom of user generated content has given way to a major discussion amongst the Internet community. How can we keep track of information?
 
A site map, technically speaking, is an index of all the content included on a particular website. As the Internet continues to grow and websites continue to add to their work, common users are finding it increasingly difficult to seek out the specific information that they're looking for.
 
Gone are the days when information architecture brought the challenge of modelling navigation for 5 or 6 pages of static content. But if the Internet is to continue to grow, more websites need to start providing site maps to help the every day user. Currently, less than 50% of all commercial websites actually have a site map.
 
Can you imagine opening a book and trying to find the paragraph of information that you're looking for without a content or index page? Consider the same prospect for a cautious Internet user on a site brimming with dynamic content.
 
If your website is starting to branch out in to various categories, you need to be prepared to sacrifice convenience for your clients. A site map is the least you can offer, a means to navigate your content. Research proves that users will rarely persist with a website if they don't find what they're looking for within those first vital clicks.
 
Yet even the inclusion of a site map is by no means a guarantee that it'll actually be any help. So what are the tell tale signs of a poorly designed map?
 
First, it's important to consider what's driving your visitor to the site map in the first place. They're obviously having problems navigating the content of the site and wish to be given a shove in the right direction. You wouldn't believe how many web developers let this small fact go to waste and design crazily inventive site maps; even using Macromedia Flash - to try and express themselves.
 
A lost user doesn't want to have to crawl through complicated map interfaces to find the right link. Categorizing HTML links is a nice start to making your site map more usable, but presentation is extremely important.
 
Many designers will add expand functions : the ability to minimize or maximise categories to save screen space. While screen space is certainly important, so is serving the purpose of a site map. Its purpose isn’t to make the user search out more links. All the major categories of your website should be present on that one screen. How many atlases do you see where the continent has to be clicked on to reveal the countries? Not many, and with good reason.
 
It's possible to use a variety of site map generating programs to create your guide, but the end result isn't always as pretty as you'd hope for. Software from Google and SiteXPert provide nice functionality, but you know your website better than a machine. It's important that you program the categories yourself since the people using it aren't going to be computer bots. Human logic certainly prevails when it comes to providing usability on a perfect site map.
 
Before you try to implement your site structure, make a note of the categories that you can divide it in to. Make these the basis of your map and divide slowly in to further sub-sections. But don't go crazy. Too many sub-sections will lead to too many choices. A key factor of good website usability rests upon narrowing choices for the user. The less they have to consider, the more likely they are to reach their destination.
 
Your navigation should be absolutely basic. Now isn't the time to provide rollover images, scroll bar menus or search functions. Nor is it the time to try out your new CSS themes. The priority should be to present the categories in a clear and simple manner. Visualisation of the site content is crucial.
 
One of the great deterrents to stop designers from implementing site maps is the idea of having to update it with every page that gets added. While it's possible to use a CMS (Content Management System) and draw up a tree of pages automatically, there really is little way of avoiding the process of manually updating your map. That is, of course, unless you have the opportunity to implement a database. Database-driven site maps are excellent in the sense that they can add links automatically to your index, through a couple of simple table fields in MS Access or mySQL.
 
As you can probably imagine, automation makes site mapping a whole lot easier in the long run. You can negotiate the issue on a dynamic website by providing an extra field for each page submission which specifies where the link should appear on the site map; if at all.
 
Content management is very much the future for web development. It can make site mapping an afterthought. You don't even have to worry about it.
 
There's one last thing to remember and it's the most important consideration of all. Can your users find the site map? Hundreds upon hundreds of websites will go through the painstaking bother of mapping their every last page, only to bury the link to the site map. What was the point?
 
User accessibility surveys have illustrated that users refer to the top right hand of the screen when they require help. This is where your link to a Help page, or in this case, a Site Map should go. Make sure it's clearly visible and coded in to EVERY page. Your users should never be more than one click away from the assistance that they require. Follow that simple principle and you may begin to notice a slight increase in the number of visits from previously bemused clients!

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Building web graphics can be one of the hardest or easiest tasks you face as a web designer, depending on the purpose of your website. While some websites will pride themselves with the fanciest graphical interfaces on the Internet, others will be happy with a few HTML tables and a simple header graphic.
 
There are plenty of programs catering for graphics design, and if you're serious about getting in on the act, you should have one of the following packages:
  
- Adobe Photoshop CS2
- Adobe ImageReady
- Macromedia Fireworks
- ULead PhotoImpact
- Jasc PaintShop Pro
- Xara Xtreme
 
While all of the above programs are relatively similar in terms of the available features, Adobe Photoshop remains by far the most popular choice of software. For the most comprehensive graphical development package, you'd be well advised to invest in Adobe's premium product.
 
Once you've opened your design suite, you'll usually find a wide variety of tools and effects that can be applied to your work. It's worth noting that you may need to have an image open for these options to appear.
 
Shape creation tools, paintbrush menus and various selection options are usually displayed on the primary toolbar.
 
The development of graphics is largely dependant on the usage of layers. We use layers to add different levels of content to our graphical designs. For example, if you've been developing a piece of traditional art, you might like the idea of applying a border around the edge. To add borders, it's a good idea to use a transparent layer and apply a 1-pixel stroke. This will add a neat border, without hard-printing it on to the original image. In the same way that we don't paint a border on to a portrait!
 
Once you have an open canvas to design your web graphic, there are many different techniques that can be used to get the job done. You'll find thousand of web graphic tutorials on the Internet, but to become a great designer, you should be keen to learn the art of your craft. Explore the various options and experiment thoroughly, even if it doesn't lead to something that can be used on the web.
 
There are also several in-built features which can be used to make graphic design easier. Patterns, textures and brushes are incredibly popular and you can create some intriguing graphics with them. Don't let that be an excuse to get lazy though. It's easy to apply an impressive little pattern and consider the job done; but you won't win any awards for originality.
 
A great graphic designer has an eye for the innovative. To create unique work, you don't need to know the obscenely complicated methods from tutorials on the Internet. You simply need to learn what each tool does, and how to implement it.
 
Blending effects are another commonly used technique to give a piece that extra finishing touch. Have you ever seen an outer glow around an image, or a box-like shadow to create emphasis? This is all done through the blending effects menu, it might be named something slightly different depending on your choice of software.
 
As the years pass, graphic editing utilities are becoming incredibly sophisticated and the blending effects are advancing. Popular features include:
  
- Inner glow : Creates a lightened effect inside the perimeter of the image.
- Outer glow : Creates a lightened effect outside the perimeter of the image.
- Beveling : Creates an engraved look, or adds a groove to an image. 
- Inner shadow : Creates a heavy shadow inside the perimeter of an image.
- Outer shadow : Creates a heavy shadow outside the perimeter of an image.
- Stroke : Creates a stroke of pixels, or a border - on the perimeter of the image. 
- Gradient : Applies a transition of colors over the top of the image.
 
These are the widely accepted features that you'll find in most graphical development suites. Photoshop, in particular, comes with many more filters and image manipulation tools that can also be applied. Be sure to explore your software and determine what features are available to you.
 
As tempting as it may be to revamp your website with fancy graphics all over, be sensible about how far you go with your designs. Are your web graphics utilizing lots of solid color? It's amazing how many designers will save blocks of images in GIF or JPEG format, when a simple HTML tag for the background of a table cell would do the trick.
 
Websites using lots of web graphics are typically much slower to load. This can be a problem depending on who you plan to serve your content to. A gaming audience, for example, is likely to have high spec computers and thus, make better candidates for your slower loading designs. Optimization is certainly important, and by limiting web graphics to the bare essential inclusions, you can do wonders for your loading times.
 
How does this affect your web graphic design specifically? Well, it puts important emphasis on how you save your files. GIF format is great for compression although you should be aware that it compresses via rows and not columns. This means that if you have a lot of vertical lines in your image, it won't compress as well. JPEG should be used for photographic work and pixel intensive designs.
 
You can also take the simple step of resizing images to improve web performance. By scaling the images down, you can reduce their physical size. Be aware that resizing an image with text can cause problems due to the way that the proportion is altered; it can look pretty horrific if you're not careful.
 
If you're going to scale an image down, you should make sure you restore the original ratio. Scaling images upwards is extremely inconvenient and shouldn't be practiced unless you're working with vectors.
 
The art of building web graphics doesn't develop on its own accord. It takes many hours of practice to come to terms with the many tools at a web designer's disposal. But the rewards are obvious. A great web designer is a great web designer for life, and the ability to produce good graphics will prove invaluable as you develop your site

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The process of change management process is the process of determining attainability, requesting, the work of planning and implementation, and the final evaluation in a company. This is important for a business because to grow and reach the next level the business frequently needs to change, and sometimes this change may be a major one. Understanding the change management process and deliverables will help here. It has become so important that change management has become a management theory and the company often refers to it when changes in an organization are imminent.

The two main goals it has are: supporting the processing of changes – and enabling traceability of changes, which we would be analyzing in this article.

What are Deliverables?

Deliverables are defined as the data that is put in use in every activity in a change-management.

Besides activities, deliverables form an integral part of any change management project. These concepts or deliverables have been described in a table below; here the concepts that are most important are: CHANGE LOG ENTRY and CHANGE REQUEST.

The concepts of data that comes under the head of Deliverables have been described in the table below. Furthermore, some other concepts (e.g. SYSTEM RELEASE, CHANGE REQUEST) lend themselves for the versioning approach.

Deliverable Concepts :	Name And Description
Concept	Description
REQUIREMENT	A required component’s functionality
PROBLEM REPORT	This is a document where the problem that the employee is unable to solve is mentioned. This document contains the contact information of the person who has reported the problem, the date, cause of the problem, its description and location, and also the action taken.
CHANGE REQUEST	This documents the change request and why such change is necessary. It can come from system enhancements, problem reports, and even the system and the senior management. These are documented as ‘Requirements’. Here it needs to be decided whether the change is going to be administered or not.
CHANGE LOG ENTRY*	This included the change technical feasibility, the Request for the change, the benefits and the costs involved, the impact of the change, how to plan for it and the verification too. However they become irrelevant if this change is not administered.
CHANGE TECHNICAL FEASIBILITY	The change may need software and hardware and other technical resource for the system that has been proposed. It has to be determined whether they can be developed or acquired in a timely manner.
CHANGE COSTS AND BENEFITS	What is the effort that has to be put in and whether the advantages are good enough in terms of increased revenue or reduced costs to put that in? This is also referred to as economic feasibility.
CHANGE IMPACT ANALYSIS	What is going to be the extent of such a change?
CHANGE PLANNING	Designing the objective and the method to reach the desired results.
ITEM	Referred to any subsystems, system, product, subassemblies, assemblies, sets, units, computer programs, accessories, parts or software.
CHANGED ITEM*	This is an item that existed before but has gone through change.
TEST REPORT	This is the report where the results of the test and its nature are documented for all future references.
DOCUMENTATION	Documentation is very important for the future. This works like a guide when any reference is made to the change that was initiated. Future employees come to know why the change was required and how it was administered.
CHANGE VERIFICATION	Yes the change was planned and it was done so to achieve some results – but was the results achieved? Was the change successful? This needs to be verified.

These then are the major concepts that fall under the category of deliverables in a “change” management project. However, before making use of any of the deliverables, one needs to have a clear idea about the difference between “change”, “deviation” and “waiver”.

In every organization, there are people who are opposed to the change simply because of the fact that they do not want to stick their neck out from their comfort zones. But when a change is required it has to be administered – there cannot be any second thoughts about this, as otherwise the business would suffer. And so, the change process and the deliverables need to impress upon them that the change is indeed good for the company and thus necessary.

When dealing with changes, the waivers and deviations also need to be distinguished. When there needs to be a shift from the requirements, the authorization of such a shift is the deviation. A waiver is much the same but once this shift has taken place. They are seen as a minimalistic management of change wherein, the problem was not really dealt with. Once these concepts are clear, the above-mentioned deliverables are ready to be put in use.

These days, everybody is scampering for a web presence. Earlier, every businessman wanted to have his business enlisted in some business directory or the other, especially in the Yellow Pages. Well, the times have changed. In the 21st century, the Internet has emerged as the new marketplace. It’s where all the action is at, and having a niche of one’s own in cyberspace has never been more critical. With the advancements and consequent proliferation of Internet technologies, more and more people are jumping on to the Internet bandwagon every day. The Net is throbbing with commercial activities of all sorts. Online business is the new mantra playing on everybody’s lips. So, are you chanting it too?

Web hosting services remain a crucial and core service on the Internet. Every business needs some sort of a presence in the Web, and web hosting services provide you with just that! But web hosting nowadays comes in all shapes and sizes. From the simplest of web hosting services to very large hosting solutions – there’s a hosting plan to fit every requirement. Just like the different shapes that they come in, web hosting services also carry a wide range of price tags. Some high-end services can be really expensive for the average customer. It’s important to understand one’s needs carefully and then decide on the right package. Why end up paying more for features that you’d never use? It makes plain sense to cut your coat according to your cloth.

The offer of the cheapest web hosting service can be a potentially dangerous one. I’m sure that if you try searching on the Internet with those words, you’d be surprised at the sheer number of matches that will be returned to you. It seems that everybody has the cheapest web hosting solution for you. But you should know better!

Let’s start by asking ourselves why anyone would want to look for the cheapest web hosting solution. Well, we all know that the cheapest may not necessarily be the best. The most obvious reason is economy. That’s understood. But would you really settle for just the icing without getting to bite into the cake? The cheapest web hosting package surely won’t provide all the features of the more expensive ones.

Well, yes and no. Sure enough, if you run a comparison check among all the hosting packages offered by a hosting service provider, you’d find that the cheapest one of the lot has the least to offer in terms of space, services and features. It’s the most stripped down package. But the beauty of it all is that it’s still complete in itself. A closer inspection will show that it has all the features you need to be able to host a website of a moderate size. If you are planning to start small (may be, you are just a budding Internet marketer, or are just testing the water before taking a full plunge), the cheapest web hosting plan may be just about perfect for you.

Let’s take a look at a typical scenario. Your first website is not a very ambitious affair. It will get you started in the game of making money on the Internet no doubt, but you are not planning to spend too much startup capital right now. You just need a small hosting space to find out how things move. Then, if everything goes well, you’d go bigger and meaner. Under such circumstances, it is only natural for you to look for the cheapest web hosting solution. All you may need are:

• A Linux platform
• probably 5 – 10 MB of hosting space (amply sufficient to host your simple HTML pages)
• a couple of free Email addresses (a standard feature with most hosting packages today)
• a modest bandwidth to keep you going (you are not expecting a huge traffic already, are you?)
• perhaps some other features (like MySQL support, Control Panel) that you may need eventually.

A hosting package such as this will not cost the earth, but will spare you plenty of costs that you may find worthwhile spending towards promoting your website.

All said and done, the question remains where you can find a reputed and dependable provider of such a cheap web hosting service. The Internet (like for so many other things in life) is the best place to search for such a provider. Every search on the Web ends up putting a lot more on your plate than you can really digest. So, limit your discretion to the reputed names in the industry. Compare costs and features of multiple packages and do check out at least half-a-dozen providers. Just do your own research and very soon, you’d be able to zero in on the right package. Also ensure that the service provider has a competent and satisfactory level of customer support.

Remember, finding the cheapest web hosting solution is not hard if you search around a bit. However, you are advised to check all the features carefully to find out if they suit your purpose.

Can you imagine a web without color? It makes for an interesting vision indeed. Where would we be with only plain black and white to make use of? You can forget those intricate layered interfaces, and the animation can join the scrap heap too. So much of our modern design work is centered on the use of various web colors to create an atmosphere. Depending on how a designer implements it, a well chosen color scheme can make a homepage stand out from your screen.
 
Unfortunately, a poorly chosen scheme can burn the eyes so horribly that we're tempted never to return.
 
But why is color such an essential component of a self-respecting web page? The truth is, if you design a website which uses every last color in the rainbow, you'll be making an even bigger mistake than somebody who chooses, say, pink for a male magazine.
 
Color sets the mood, tone and first impression for your site. Of course, it doesn't work alone. But it's one of the bare essentials of good design practice.
 
We use color for a variety of purposes, ranging from text to table cell backgrounds. The standard HTML configuration is to output text in black and backgrounds in white. We can change this easily by dipping in to the code and changing the FONT tag, or the BODY tag, as shown below.

• <font color=”…”>
• <body bgcolor=”…”>

Any paragraph classed under that particular style set would have white text. This is a rather basic example of how we use HTML and CSS together to provide global settings for color.
 
Why don't we simply use the FONT tag for everything? Well, if you can imagine going through how ever many pages your website has, and reassigning a color to each FONT tag, you'll be busy for a long time indeed. CSS is extremely efficient in comparison to hard coded HTML.
 
You may have noticed in the example above, the color is defined as "White". This is, technically speaking, very bad practice.
 
Whenever you assign a color to an HTML tag, or CSS for that matter, you can use either the name of the shade, or the equivalent hexadecimal value.
 
Hexadecimal is simply a way of providing an RGB triplet (CMY triplets are not available) to the browser, which renders the exact color on to the user's monitor. While stipulating "White" or "Red" can show the same results, what your browser associates as red, somebody else's might associate with a deep mauve. Hexadecimal takes the issue away from the browser's interpretation, creating a more consistent color scheme.
 
For example, changing a tag of "White" to "#FFFFFF" will make no difference whatsoever when you view the page in your browser. Both terms equate to white. But if you choose a color such as grey, various browsers have various different definitions of what constitutes as being grey.
 
When we break the Hex code down to its core essence, we're left with three hexadecimal numbers. These exist in pairs of two, as you can see below.
 
# FF (< First triplet - RED) 00 (Second triplet - GREEN) 00 (Third triplet - BLUE)
 
Speaking in hexadecimal jargon, this attribute will produce red color. The reason for that is because the red triplet is FF, which is the strongest hue you can have in hexadecimal. The two instances of "00" represent the lowest hue you can have on the scale, in the same way as a traditional zero effectively.
 
When the code is sent to the browser, and subsequently your monitor, the hex code will send a little message to display the entire red channel, and none of the blue or green channel. This gives us red output.
 
As you can imagine, the hexadecimal format offers much more leeway for manipulation than standard color name attributes. There are hundreds of possible hex combinations, but we can shorten them down to what's known as the 216 browser-safe color codes. These are colors that can be produced to the exact same effect on an old-fashioned 8-bit monitor.
 
When it comes to designing websites with maximum usability, you'll probably find that this becomes a factor in how you go about your work.
 
If you select a hex code, and it doesn't fall within the browser-safe color set, a process called dithering will take place. We don't like dithering. This is where the browser will evaluate the code and try to output the closest match that it can find. Subsequently, the dumber browsers on the market can make a complete mess of your carefully designed color theme.
 
How do you know whether your hex is a browser-safe color? The important thing to take note of is that valid hex codes contain a small number of possible options. These are 0, 3, 6, 9, C and F. If your code contains any figure which doesn't fall within those bounds, you run the risk of inconsistent design. For further information on valid codes, be sure to check out the w3 consortium website, which is the holy grail of all web usability resources.
 
Once you have the basics of applying color attributes, you can begin to enjoy experimenting and trying to find the right theme for your site. After all, colors can be used to provide some extra zest to those plain white tables, or the default black text. Feel free to experiment and play with your CSS Macromedia's Dreamweaver is a good tool for this.
 
But stop for a moment. How many of the biggest websites on the Net actually pack their templates with color? Think of Ebay. Think of Amazon. Think of MySpace. In all of these cases, you'll find that white is the most common color. There's good reason for this. White space is one of the most useful weapons in the web designer's armory.
 
White is the perfect tone for your standard web template, presuming that you don't have a pre-arranged theme to meet. It's clear, easy on the eyes, and acts as an excellent compliment to your text and images. If you scout around the Net, you'll generally find that most websites make good use of white.
 
Black, on the other hand, should be used as an absolute last resort!
 
Color themes should be employed across the entire website, not just parts of it. You will also have to make the decision between a two-color template, and a three-color template. What's wrong with four-color and five-color, you ask? It's not discriminating, it's just widely accepted that any more than three global colors and you won't have a theme at all.
 
A two-color theme can prove equally unattractive in the sense that contrast is important. Don't get in to the habit of using the same color for everything. You should use it sensibly to draw your visitor's eye where you want it.
 
Color is the one attribute which can give your website the fresh feel that you desire, so use it carefully and avoid those black backgrounds!

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The tremendous advancements made in digital technology in recent decades, along with the unprecedented affordability and wide availability of personal computers, have contributed to the dawning of a true digital era around the globe. Today, a computer adorns every important desk. We work using our computers, we store all kinds of data in them and simply refuse to let a single day go by without spending some time with them. The sheer amount of data that lies digitally stored in all the computers of the world is virtually unfathomable. From our office files to the photos of our friends to our music and videos – all have found their way into the myriad sectors of our hard disks.

And then one day, like a nightmare coming true, you may find it all gone. That’s right, one of the perils of the modern digital era is the probability of losing all your saved data due to a hard disk crash. Let’s look at a typical scenario. You wake up in the morning with another busy day ahead of you. The presentation you’ve been working on till late last night would really impress the boss in the meeting today. You chuckle to yourself as you think of that file sitting pretty on your computer desktop. You also plan to show your workmates all the lovely snaps you took at your holiday in the Bahamas. The pictures are all saved on your computer. You grab on to that mug of coffee and turn on the computer. And then the horror starts!! You are greeted by a blue screen and a warning message, a sinister beep and an error proclamation. Well, aren’t these the stuffs that digital nightmares are made of? You panic. Your computer won’t boot, no matter how hard you try. And before long, you know your worst fear has come true. Your computer has just crashed!

Well, dramatic as the account above may seem, the reality is not very different. The scenario can be really grim if you are one of those people who don’t take regular backups of their work. What we tend to forget is that computers are not infallible. They are machines after all, and like every other machine, they can malfunction or break down. Regular backups are a key to keeping our peace of mind (and sanity) during such possible hours of crisis. Just because you’ve never experienced a system crash before does not mean that you will not do so in the future. Why take chances? Our dependence on computers has grown substantially over the years, and if a machine bites the dust, we land in serious trouble. All your hard work could be gone in just one doomed moment. Get into the habit of taking regular backups if you are not doing it already.

In recent times, the prices of digital storage media such as portable hard disk drives, blank optical media (DVD-R, CD-R, BluRay Discs), USB Pen Drives, etc. have come down tremendously. They have become extremely affordable and have made the task of taking back-ups very easy. But still, taking regular backups is something that we often get lazy about. So when a system crash finally happens, we despair.

They say every cloud has a silver lining. Well, the silver lining in the case of a computer hard disk crash is that very often you can recover much of your lost data, sometimes even the whole of it! Computer data recovery software, as these nifty little lifesavers are called, appears as just another program installed on your computer. However, when the hour of crisis comes, it can quickly fetch all your apparently lost data from the ruins of the crashed drive and restore them (along with your sanity!) It can also retrieve data that has been accidentally deleted. We often ‘permanently’ delete files only to realize later that they were essential files. A data recovery software can magically retrieve the deleted file from the farthest depths of oblivion to save the day. Insist on having a computer data recovery software installed on your pc without delay. It’s one of the best ways of ensuring that even when your computer crashes, your business won’t.

Here’s a quick tip for those who want to try their hands at computer data recovery. If a hard drive in your computer has gone bad, start by taking it out of that computer. Refer to the manual that came with your computer if you need help. Don’t forget to disconnect the power cables before opening the computer case. You’d need a special cable called an IDE-to-USB adapter. This will allow you to connect the isolated drive with a functional computer. Once this is done, the old drive will show up on the new computer as a new drive (it will take up a new drive letter). The rest is easy. Navigate into that drive and copy all the files that you need onto the new computer or simply burn them on a CD or DVD.

Computer data recovery is possible with suitable data recovery software. However, taking regular backups is a good practice as it can restore data when such a recovery is not possible.

We all live in the digital age. The 21st century can be truly called the digital era. Computers have become an integral part of our daily lives and technology is our constant companion. The tremendous advancements made in digital technology in the recent decades, along with the unprecedented affordability and wide availability of personal computers, have contributed to the dawning of a true digital era around the globe. The paper is fast becoming obsolete and writing instruments like pen and pencils will become fewer and fewer. Our diaries have gone electronic (blogs), we prefer using word processors, notebooks don’t mean the same thing anymore and our correspondence is seriously electronic these days (emails). We work on our computers at work and can hardly think of a day devoid of the familiar caress of the mouse and the keyboard on our fingertips. From our office files to the photos of our friends to our music and videos – all have found their way into our computers.

Opinions vary on the impact of computers on human lives. Some cynics are of the opinion that computers, especially the Internet, have isolated us from each other. We’d rather spend our time browsing on the Internet or playing games on them or simply working than spending time in the company of others. Others hold a different opinion. Man is basically a social animal and feels a constant urge to communicate with others of his kind. This partly explains the popularity of all the social media websites. Millions reach out to each other through these websites, making new friends and discovering new faces every day. It’s no wonder that the list of contacts in our lives is expanding at an alarming rate.

The need for a contact management software has never been felt more strongly than now. The sheer number of contacts that an average teenager maintains today could easily fill up half-a-dozen notebooks. Even for the global businessman, maintaining the list of contacts can be a daunting task sometimes. It was a lot simpler earlier when people had just postal addresses, one for the residence and another for work. These days, people have website addresses, email addresses, IM (Instant Messenger) IDs, cell phone numbers, fax numbers and so much more. If you are required to remember so many things about one single person, just think what you would do with hundreds of them?

A contact management software easily takes care of such a problem. It neatly organizes all your contacts in such useful groups as Friends, Work, Acquaintances, Relatives and so on. Such a piece of software is usually capable of storing virtually limitless data and number of contacts. The best thing is that it indexes the names automatically so that finding a specific name from a long list of contacts is never a problem. You can search for names by their first names, last names, phone numbers, addresses and so on. Each contact is provided with a fresh new page where you can key in all the available details. If a piece of address gets changed or a new number is added, it’s a cinch to make the requisite changes in the entries.

There are some very smart contact management software available in the market today. All you have to do is choose one and install it on your computer. It can automatically import all your contacts from your email client (such as Outlook or Eudora), even your Internet mails (Yahoo! Mail or Gmail or Hotmail). Some would even let you store pictures, just to give a face to the name, as they say.

Talking of such popular email client software as Outlook, it is worth mentioning that they often come with an integrated contact management software. It monitors all the email addresses that you correspond with, whether it be receiving mails or sending them, and prompts you to save any new name that it encounters. There are also some very good contact management software services available on the Internet. The best thing about using an online service is that it doesn’t tie you down to just one computer. You can access your list of contacts from just about any computer anywhere, as long as it has an Internet connectivity.

Contact management software, other than simplifying the task of remembering the contact details of all the people we know, also offer a host of other advantages. When you have a mail to send to a number of people, just check their names in your contact management software, and it will send the mail to all the selected recipients.

In spite of all its glory, remember that a contact management software is after all a computer program, and like all other computer programs can crash, get corrupted or simply refuse to work like it should. Do keep a backup of all your contacts, especially a written backup. It will save you a lot of despair should the program crash and cause all the stored data to get lost.

A contact management software is more of a necessity than just a fancy accessory. As the list of contacts in our lives expands, its importance will also grow.

When you have a commercial website online, it's natural to want to expose it to as many potential clients as possible. And the same logic can be applied to any website, for any purpose. If we didn't want to receive exposure across the web, we wouldn't be using the Internet.
 
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO - is the method of maximizing potential search listings when a user enters a keyword in to a search engine. It's actually a sub-section of the more expansive Search Engine Marketing (SEM) definition. The concept is applied in several different ways, and depending on the business approach, the ultimate goal may differ considerably.
 
There's two important points to understand here. SEO can be used to maximize the quantity of SERP (Search Engine Result Page) links. Or it can be used to distinguish the relevance. Why does it matter? Surely the age old expression of any publicity being good publicity is true? Not necessarily.
 
Consider the analogy of a packed shopping mall, with every last shop front vying for your attention. As you walk through the mall, you don't have the eyes to see inside and view every last product in the shop. Nor would you have any idea what the store actually specializes in. The store front is used to draw your attention and demonstrate what the customer can expect if they decide to enter inside.
 
You could take one approach and fill your shop window with just about every attention grabber under the sun. You could pretend to sell DVDs, books, videos, clothes, sports gear and maybe even mortgages. Such a shop window would attract a lot of visitors; but how many of them will stick around when they enter your store and find that, well, actually you only trade children's toys?
 
On the other hand, you could fill your shop window with relevant information on the real content of your shop, providing more precise information including what to expect inside. While you might find a lot more visitors go passing by, the chances are that they weren't potential clients in the first place. This method is much more likely to generate sales, and is what's known as a conversion action.
 
The same concept applies to Meta keywords and Meta descriptions. These are the holy grail of SEO, and the reason why some websites will draw in potential customers, while poorly prepared sites will go unnoticed regardless of the standard of the service, or the actual content.
 
A Meta description is essentially a brief summary of the current page, and one which search bots and spiders will cache. You won't see it by browsing normally. To read the Meta description, you'll have to go to the actual source of the page. That's irrelevant in the long run however, since you don't want your users to be viewing Meta information.
 
Meta keywords are short phrases and terms which you can use to appeal to certain SERPs. For example, if you pack your content with relevant terms which a user would search for on Google, you have a higher chance of being picked out on SERPs.
 
There are two sub-sets of SEO, and opinion is divided on what constitutes belonging to a certain set. These are called White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.
 
White Hat SEO is the traditionally fair way of increasing the number and quality of search listings via natural means. Black Hat SEO, as you can probably imagine, is the opposite.
 
Black Hat applies to those who try to use methods of misleading search engines in to getting a better ranking than the content deserves. These methods include - but certainly aren't limited to spamdexing, cloaking and general abuse of the various search engine algorithms.
 
For the purpose of being fair, and not getting your website blacklisted, we're going to concentrate on ways that you can use SEO the lawful way to get a better ranking. Be warned that while Black Hat might bring you a short burst of activity, it will also get you banned from indexing altogether when the engine catches on.
 
First things first, what do we gain by using the White Hat method? The answer is desirable traffic and increased sales leads. These benefits weight far more heavily than a surge of useless clicks from users you'll never see again.
 
You can optimize your website right from the very top of the page. No, we're not talking about the header image or the first line of content. We're talking about the actual title which displays in the browser toolbar.
 
You should always use a unique and relevant title; especially on the pages which matter most to your website. God forbid using a bland title like "My Sales Page". Make your title meaningful and consider the impetus it would give a potential client to want to see what's on the rest of the page.
 
While a relevant title is crucial, it pales in significance to the importance of using specific terminology throughout your content. Don't throw vague definitions across your website. Match specific useful keywords and phrases which a potential client would enter in to a search engine. These are vital for drawing in the right kind of web traffic.
 
Many websites face problems when they decide to implement a log-in or member area to their site. Remember that the spider techniques employed by search engines only have the capability to access pages which don't require any input.
 
Requiring a user to register before viewing a certain page will rule out the opportunity of a search bot indexing the protected content. There's no real way to get around this, other than to make as much of your website accessible to bots as possible.
 
There are also several scripts which detect spider visitors and apply certain permission levels to access all of the content. You can find these on many varieties of forum software across the web, but it opens up an entirely different debate over security and unwanted access to files.
 
The inclusion of a robots.txt file in your main directory will be read by search engine spiders. This file is your opportunity to exclude certain directories from being indexed. As you can imagine, this is a tremendously valuable tool and a commonly implemented one in web development.
 
Above all else, remember that a search bot will only find a page if it finds a genuine HTML link. Flash and JavaScript links will NOT be followed by the spider programs and if that's the only route to the page, it won't be indexed. 
 
By following those simple golden rules, you should find that SEO can play a large role in generating more leads for your website. It might not happen overnight, and it might not happen at all, but search engine optimization is a key method of presenting your site to the correct audience. Master it and you'll be one step closer to conquering the SEM minefield.

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The amount of data in the possession of mankind today is simply unfathomable. As human knowledge increases its boundaries, the amount of data keeps accumulating with alarming rapidity. Even for a small office or company, the sheer amount of data being handled daily can be intimidating. And this data naturally grows with time.

Accumulation of data alone is not the end of the story anymore. What one needs is the proper management of received data so that it can be retrieved when necessary, used efficiently when the need arises and accessed readily. Data that cannot be used when the need arises is practically of no use. Proper categorization is critical and easy retrievability, too. Ideally, a system should be set up which allows a centralized access point for all the essential data, through a network system as is typical with many large organizations.

We live in times when the exchange of data has become faster and more abundant than ever before. Files and reports are transferred half way round the world in the blink of an eye. In recent times, the cost of various forms of storage media have also come down significantly and their easy availability and affordability have made the problem of storage space scarcity an issue of the past. In our eagerness, we are collecting data with renewed enthusiasm, without ever deleting the old ones. This is a potentially dangerous habit of humanity as it fills up our lives with enormous amounts of data, some useful but others mostly dispensable, but still there stored somewhere. Unless we introduce some system into them, it can spell sheer mayhem. We need to organize all this data in order to maintain our sanity and also to ensure that we can access and use them when they are needed.

This is exactly where data management can help. A proper data management solution becomes necessary for any large organization, and sometimes it is necessary even for a small business. As data after data continues to pile up, a systematic categorization and exposition of these data become indispensable. Today, the necessity of data management is undeniable in many different work arenas such as management, technical applications, research, technology, corporate activities and print media. Data management as a corporate discipline comprises of various processes such as data authentication, data substantiation, data coordination, rationale, integration and incorporation. It also includes having power over data rations.

In simpler words, the whole business of data management can be summed up as the development and implementation of various policies, applications and actions to aid an individual or an organization in dealing with the data. This naturally explains the need for professional data management solutions. Recent advancements in software technology have given us a wide range of software to make our lives simpler. And data management software is one such lifesaver. When it comes to making sense of the enormous amounts of raw data (and maintaining your sanity), data management software is a veritable godsend – no wonder they have become so popular. The advent of powerful processors to manage large volumes of data has revolutionized the whole process of data management. Various companies today offer data management software to its employees because it enhances accuracy in the management and interpretation of various levels of data, and also assists in maintaining productivity.

Data management software is basically a highly efficient and effective piece of software for data management and it provides immeasurable support to technical professionals. Raw data processing can amount to a task of Herculean proportions. Data management software can be of immense help here. Earlier, what was humanly impossible is now being accomplished by this sophisticated software at a fraction of the time and cost. All types of vigorous and complicated calculations, as well as interpretive charts, graphical representations, and interpretive images contribute to the clear interpretation of data.

Data management software holds a vital key to freeing up more time for your employees to focus on other aspects of work, rather than spend valuable man-hours crunching numbers or tabulating and arranging data. Data management software is very easy to apply and to employ. It is scalable in nature, which means it can grow with the growing needs of an organization. With the help of data management software, organizations can eliminate errors, quicken operations, become more effective in their economic activities and accelerate critical processes such as providing service to the customers. A proper data management solution is at the core of improved efficiency.

A data management software product is more of a necessity these days than just a fancy accessory. As data pile up, it will become more and more indispensable.

What makes a great web designer? Is it the ability to learn countless Photoshop tutorials, or the ability to store the largest bank of HTML knowledge?
 
The answer is neither. Every skill that you ever learn as a web designer is absolutely redundant if you're not capable of targeting a desired website audience.
 
The first step you have to take before you write the very first HTML tag is to ask yourself who you plan to reach with your new website. Is it designed to sell a product? Is it an archive of information? Maybe its purpose is simply to look pretty and act as a portfolio for your work.
 
Whatever the reason, optimizing content towards the correct audience is imperative. Consider the target market that you're looking to crack and imagine in your head what that audience would like to find in a website.
 
Relevant images are a great way to reach out to your desired web audience. An image can convey more than any page of words, if you choose the right one that is. There are several stock photo services offering royalty free images for use with your website, and these are extremely important for the purpose of getting the right message across.
 
Make sure you select images appropriate for your website theme. Is it designed for teenagers with a sporting interest? Abstract business imagery probably isn't the right choice then. It sounds like common sense, but you'd be amazed how many web designers select images based on how pretty they look rather than whether they're relevant to the content.
 
This brings us on to the much debated topic of flash content. How many times have you visited a website which requires some kind of browser plug-in to operate a fancy animation? So many designers choose to flood their websites with artsy multimedia videos which add absolutely nothing to the browsing experience of a user.
 
If you're working on a business template, or trying to sell a service, the last thing you should be thinking of doing is loading your page with flash animation. New web technologies are developing all the time, but the purpose of a business is to reach out to as many potential clients as possible.
 
How many clients are going to purchase your service if they receive a "Plug-in required" error on your homepage?
 
There are exceptions, of course. If you're designing a website for a gaming clan for example, it's highly likely that your web audience is in possession of the latest web technology and capable of supporting additional plug-ins.
 
Consider download times. Is your audience going to accept a long wait to access the content that they're looking for? It's extremely important to cater for the connection speeds of the people that you're pitching your website to. Make sure that your website has optimized loading times if you're aiming it at the type of users who aren't computer savvy with lightening fast connections.
 
Believe it or not, there are still a substantial number of users out there with connection speeds on 56k. If you want to sell a product to them, or provide a pleasurable browsing experience, make sure that your content and web graphics are optimized for maximum web performance.
 
One of the first jobs you'll have to tend to with a new web template is the CSS planning. CSS (or Cascading Style Sheet) allows for extremely important modifications to the style of a web page. Why is this important for reaching the right audience?
 
If you can imagine having a website with several content authors, consider a few people using Arial as a font, a few more using bright orange Times New Roman, and then one stray typist writing everything in italics. You can forget about appealing to the right audience. A website without a set style isn't going to appeal to ANY audience.
 
CSS lets you customize your website and apply global styles which must be adhered to by content authors. Many a fine template has been ruined by awful formatting, and CSS takes this danger out of the picture. If you want to format your content to fit in with a certain theme "business or casual" CSS is definitely the way to go. Alternatives include new techniques such as XSL (Extensible Style Sheet Language).
 
Once you have your web template in place, and a style sheet employed, it's time to create the actual content. Don't blow it now. Always remember the audience that you're aiming to please, and the kind of language that there sort of people would use to communicate.
 
Your website is the layer of web communication between yourself and your clients or visitors. Talk to them in a language that they're comfortable with. If you're producing a website for teenagers, don't bombard them with corporate talk. You'll lose your audience in seconds, and all that intricate design work will go to waste.
 
It's important to get the balance right between providing relevant content to your users and flooding the pages with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). While it's certainly not impossible to make your content search engine friendly and readable at the same time, you're probably going to need to make the decision at some point and choose where your priorities lie.
 
The same decision needs to be taken for your website navigation. Will you be using graphical buttons for your linking? If you do, consider that a search engine can't spider the content of an image.
 
Are you concerned about how your website ranks on Google and the number of visitors it attracts? Is being search engine friendly a big deal to you? Or are you devoted to keeping hold of the users who reach your site and losing out on possible SEO-driven traffic? The choice is up to you, but the answer should be reached BEFORE you begin to design your website!

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VoIP service is generally referred to as digital phone service. VoIP that stands for Voice over Internet Protocol is a type of routing of conversation (voice) over the Internet or by any other IP-based network. Digital phone providers offer plans which include unlimited local as well as long distance calls along with trendy calling features against a single low monthly charge. Such services are revolutionizing the way in which people and businesses are communicating and keeping in touch. And in most cases, digital phone services are cheaper too.

What exactly is the VoIP Service?

First of all one must get thoroughly acquainted with VoIP before proceeding further on the topic.

VoIP or ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’ is a technology which allows one to make phone calls by taking the help of Broadband Internet connections instead of the normal phone lines. And that’s precisely why it is often called Broadband phone, Internet phone service or just Digital Voice.

Though there are several service providers working on the same line, yet they all use the same basic technology. Incidentally, one need not get edgy, appraising so many unfamiliar jargons put together before an unsuspecting greenhorn since most of these are taken care of by the VoIP service provider. All one has to do is to pick up the regular phone, dial the desired number and get on talking. And it matters less whether the called parson has VoIP or not because that issue too forms a part of the service provider’s headache. The calling party should only have a very high speed Broadband connection and a PC. It can also be done obviously using the laptop.

But one may wonder at this juncture why there is so much fuss about VoIP? To be honest about it, there are reasons galore.

Firstly, Internet-based phone calls do not come under any taxation whatsoever or the Digital Service Providers would not have been happy with offering such a low cost tariff. Secondly, the Internet could not care less whether one is having a tête-à-tête with his newly found girl friend lounging in the next block or is having an argument with his irate wife looking after a sick child in a hospital in Australia. As a matter of fact, international and overseas calls are so cheap through VoIP that the service providers always encourage their customers to indulge in such calls most of the time. And imagine how the Broadband technology has almost revolutionized telephony all over the world – one low monthly fee covering calls made from one end of the universe to another. In fact, using this has become so popular that the traditional way of making long distance calls is on its way out as more and more people are using the digital phone service.

But let us get to know now about some of the intricacies or features that are available with broadband phone services. Technically speaking, the voice, which is an analog signal is converted into petite packets of digital data and transmitted over the Broadband Internet connection to the VoIP service provider. The service provider, on his part can do several things with it like…

• Store incoming calls to voice mail if the client is busy with something else.
• Send a voice mail to the client as an e-mail attachment so that he/she can attend to it through a computer
• Provide 3-way calling, i.e., allowing three persons in one conference call which may mean that the client can talk to the family at once.
• Provide caller ID and call waiting.

Despite such a vast array of features and facilities made available through VoIP, the only additional piece of equipment or gear that one may need for the set up is an Analog Telephone Adaptor or an ATA which is usually supplied by the VoIP service provider. When one makes a phone call, the ATA does the job of conversion of the analog voice to a digital signal which the Internet can follow. It then sends the signal to the Broadband Modem which simply passes it over the internet.

Some of the digital service providers go one step ahead, allowing their clients to see face-to-face with the called party even though the two are separated by seven seas. Known as Videophones, these amazing devices include 7” high-resolution video screen that self-adjusts to light in order to produce better pictures. What’s more, the images can be transformed to life-size when transferred to bigger screen. Fancy someone sitting smug in a New Jersey home and talking to a long-lost friend in South Africa who appears with his wife in full color over the videophone screen, gesticulating, joking and laughing like the old days. It is indeed true that digital phones can change our way of looking at the brave new world.

It's the question which has baffled some of the finest web designers you're ever likely to find. Unfortunately, there's no easy answer. But that doesn't stop people from wondering; how can I attract visitors to my website?
 
The reality is that competition on the Internet from rival websites all vying for the same consumers has reached such a fever pitch that it's incredibly difficult to gain an advantage. How can we market a website and gain attention, if many of the techniques are being employed by other developers across the Net? The answer is to steer clear of basing your business approach on marketing techniques alone.
 
The World Wide Web is saturated in terms of the effectiveness that early traffic generating schemes are likely to enjoy. That's not to say that we should avoid advanced concepts such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing), but we should expand on them.
 
Much depends on the nature of the website itself. A commercial website will gain clients through word of mouth and satisfied testimonials. A hobbyist website's best hope, in the modern day, is to create a "buzz factor" for its brand.
 
Websites such as MySpace and YouTube have grown at a frightening rate due to the buzz factor of user generated content, which has become arguably the most rewarding phase of online marketing.
 
Some websites are now making use of what's known as the folksonomy methodology. This is where a site relies on its users to generate content and data to attract further users. Obviously, you can't operate a folksonomy approach if you're running a commercial website where the image is ingrained, but the trends are switching.
 
User generated content is a great source of free publicity and you're likely to catch on like wildfire through the blogging scene, if your website fills the criteria.
 
For those of us faced with the prospect of building a website from the ground up, and attracting users with our own content, the task isn't quite as easy.
 
The focus on search engine ranking is hard to overcome for all of its importance. Websites like Google and Yahoo Search remain the number one source for referrals to popular websites. The simple reality is that if a web user wants to find something, they're more than likely going to use one of the major search engines. Directories and categorized listings used to be just as popular, but are quickly falling out of favor as the search algorithms increase their efficiency.
 
The use of keywords and metadata is a useful start for any budding webmaster. It may sound strange, but the Internet has evolved to the point where we now need to provide information about information. This is what metadata does. It serves information to the various search engines, and with some carefully planned SEO, it's possible to gain a higher search ranking.
 
While the Search Engine Marketing arena is widely regarded as a useful tool in generating web exposure, it remains a complimentary feature. In other words, it won't stand the test of time if your content isn't up to scratch.
 
Web users tend to be more skeptical of content these days, so if you don't deliver on your keywords, or dress a site for search engines only, forgetting the importance of human readability: you'll fall out of favor in a matter of weeks.
 
Of course, if you're that determined to launch your website with as many visitors as possible, there are paid solutions available. You can purchase advertising space and draw traffic from other websites, but ultimately, is this a long term solution to you? You'll tend to find that the most popular websites stay on top through branding alone, and rarely have to resort to paid advertising for their activity.
 
As an alternative to the paid method of advertising, you can sometimes strike up deals with other webmasters to provide content in exchange for an author's link. This is a simple way to channel traffic to your own website, and free if you're willing to work with other sites.
 
How often do you find that a visitor will drop by your site once, have a brief look, and never return? You'd be shocked at the facts and figures of how regular this occurs, but is it so hard to believe? Most poorly planned websites are designed with a lack of interactivity and flair. Once you have users on your site, do whatever it takes to keep them. Offer a newsletter system so that you can inform them of updates. Just don't let your site name slip to the back of their mind, since the chances are, they won't be returning anytime soon.
 
A registration system is great for getting a steady influx of regular visitors, but you have to have something to offer. Whether it's a discussion forum : VBulletin or Invision Power - or simple premium benefits, there has to be a motive to want to come back. You'll soon find that the problem isn't so much attracting users to a website; it's keeping them.

The good news for aspiring web designers is that absolutely anybody can design a website for the Internet. The bad news is that there's a significant difference between an ordinary web designer and a competent one.
 
So how do you set about the long and winding road towards web designing success? The most important thing to understand is that developing on the web, in any fashion, will require a great deal of patience.
 
Would you expect to learn a new language over night? You might manage a few words, in the same way that a web designer might manage to upload a few pages of limited code. But to design content for the web and implement it successfully, you need to have a grasp of a programming language. A computer doesn't have the capacity to translate your vision in to a website since it only has two states : on and off. Instead, we have to feed it instructions via a language that it can understand. For the most part, we do this with HTML (Hypertext Mark-Up Language). HTML is the translator between our human words and the computer's ability to output that image on to a page.
 
While HTML is widely accepted as the essential language behind web pages on the Internet, that doesn't mean to say that there aren't higher levels of development. Programming languages come in all shapes and sizes. Popular adaptations include, but are not limited to PHP, XML, ColdFusion, Java and ASP. These higher level languages serve a greater purpose and provide the scope for dynamic web design or database interaction. To reel off the whole list would be redundant at this stage. For the time being, you need only worry about HTML and learning its core syntax.
 
If you're human like the rest of us and appreciate the benefits of good old fashioned hard work, there's nothing stopping you from designing that inspirational website to end all. But don't underestimate the frustration and discarded tutorials that you're going to experience along the way.
 
The first step on the road of to web designing success is simple and it involves asking your good self a question. Do I want to design the graphics and organise how a website looks? Or do I want to provide the content and functionality? They are two fundamental and absolutely crucial differences - the ultimate separator between a creative whiz who gets paid as a web designer, and a professional who earns his living as a developer.
 
Web designers do not specifically develop the content of a website. A good web designer simply makes it his goal to provide an effective web template that can be handed over to a developer. The developer will then cut it in to fragments of computer-fed programming language- usually HTML with CSS - and mould it for the end user's good.
 
Do you want to be involved with the design stage, rather than the implementation? If you do, congratulations, you've just taken your first step towards becoming a great web designer.
 
Perhaps the greatest way to get an eye for various web techniques is hidden in this very sentence. What's that you say? The key is to use your eyes. Explore the web and look at other people's work. Nearly every website known to man has taken inspiration from somewhere else and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Tutorials will get you only so far before you have to take the step of analysing existing websites and using them to produce your own design work.
 
That isn't to say that you should rip off Amazon or EBay and plug them in to your own identical web template. Far from it. But a great web designer will have an intricate eye for the small details. Pay special attention to the way that professional looking sites utilise color and text.
 
Of course, there's only so much time you can spend gazing at other people's creations before you're straining at the leash and ready to be launched in to your first web designing project. If you're serious about learning web design, it's extremely recommended that you invest in a suitable commercial package capable of producing graphical interfaces.
 
If you want to become a great designer, you'll need a great designer's toolbox. Adobe Photoshop CS2 " the latest version at the time of writing " is an excellent product and perfect for any aspiring designer. Photoshop tutorials are scattered around the Internet with specific advice for customizations you can make to improve your templates. Don't start running before you've found your feet though.
 
At its very most basic, you can become a web designer by opening up Notepad, typing a few tags and uploading them to a web server. This might not be influential to the end user, and it might look like something you'd rather bin, but it's still a design.
 
While this hands-on method to web design is extremely valuable and allows the designer total control over his work, there are still other solutions on the market. Popular development tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver make use of what's known as a WYSIWYG editor to completely eliminate the problem of coding. They work by allowing the user to plot a page directly in to a graphical window. The HTML code is then automatically generated and created in an instant.
 
This form of automated coding is beneficial in the sense that it cuts development time dramatically. It is, however, a bad habit to fall in to. Dreamweaver, FrontPage and all the other development suites will generate the code with absolutely no consideration to the problems that a web designer may face in editing the file. They have a bad knack of generating scores of stray HTML code which could be handled much more efficiently by a laterally thinking web developer. It's up to you whether you choose to invest in one of these tools.
 
Remember that there are many stages to web design. The learning curve isn't so much substantial as it is never ending. Web technology is constantly evolving and a good professional designer will have to evolve with the times, refining his or her work along the way.
 
Although you should be aware that learning to design and learning to develop are two entirely different concepts, you shouldn't mistake the common ground that they share. A good designer must anticipate the problems that a developer will encounter when implementing the design. Likewise, a good developer should have an eye for basic web designing principles when the code is drawn up.
 
Ultimately, you will need access to a web server in order to present your designs to the world. This is an extremely complex talking point and every server is customised to fulfil a certain obligation. There are also considerable steps to be taken in order to choose the right web server for your personal requirements. Microsoft, for example, provides the IIS pack. Another extremely popular choice is Apache's HTTP server. Depending on what software and application your website will be required to support, it's important that you select the right server for the task. If you intend to implement a database of some kind, choosing the right server is absolutely vital.
 
You will also require some form of client to upload your pages to the web, presuming that your server is located on somebody else's machine. They don't get there on their own accord and the investment of a competent File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client is highly recommended. Programs such as SmartFTP or CuteFTP provide a great interface to get to grips with accessing your web server.
 
Learning to design a site isn't as simple as creating it and letting it rot in My Documents. You need to be able to understand the basics of how a server functions, or have the resources to hire a web developer to do all of the work after those initial designing stages. In general, you'll become a much better designer by learning to appreciate the developmental side of your work. Not to mention, you'll save yourself some invaluable resources in the process!
 
As a starting point, you've taken your first step. Take the time to consider what draws your attention to a well designed site. By picking up on the subtle flourishes, you will be leaving yourself in good stead to master the art of web design.

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A small search on Google will return thousands upon thousands of interface design tricks to impress web users. Most of these will consist of wild and wacky Adobe Photoshop techniques to create a visually appealing design. While this can certainly boost the appeal of a website on the surface, the art of impressing a web user extends far beyond a few snazzy graphics and a Macromedia Flash logo.
 
Truthfully, the idea of impressing with your interface design is a little misguided. The trademark of a great design is one that goes unnoticed. You don't want an audience to leave your website with the impression that the interface was the best you had to offer. A successful interface acts as a compliment to the rest of the website and highlights the ease at which a user can browse through your content.
 
We're going to look at some of the tricks you can use to transform your interface in to an efficient gateway to the rest of your content.
 
With every interface that you design, there should be one word resounding in your head; consistency. Web users love consistency.
 
As a developer, you should be looking to implement modelling standards as arranged by the w3 Consortium to tie in with accessibility and usability requirements. To do this, it may be necessary to draw up an interface flow diagram prior to coding.
 
Flow diagrams can be used to plot out how your website will operate, and they're ideal for arranging the information architecture in to an organized view. Your interface should allow navigation between every major area of your website within one click. This is an example of consistency to settle the user in to the mindset that they're not going to get lost. It sounds ridiculous, but how many times have you visited a website where one wrong click can spring up a completely different page layout? It's extremely common, but don't let that be an excuse for making the same mistake.
 
If you're a commercial website, you might have three separate sections; Products, Support and Research. A good interface design should allow users to access every parent category from any sub-page ANYWHERE on the website. This is a standard based on the idea that the most likely destinations should be readily available to your web audience, within one click.
 
Where are you placing the key information on your web page? Western users are prone to reading from left to right so the first place that they'll look is on the left of your interface. This suggests that your navigation panel belongs on that side, simply to fit in with the coordination of your western audience. As a mark of this, if you visit websites of an eastern origin, you'll find the navigation and key links on the right hand side.
 
You can place your navigation perfectly but it won't improve anything if you fall victim to the Mystery Meat Navigation disease. Ensure that all hyperlink labels are named accurately and not broad sweeping statements with a liability to be misinterpreted. Messages coded in to the interface should be concise and straight to the point.
 
A popular interface technique over the last few years has been to include layout icons as a means of linking to different sections of a site. Hyperlink icons are a terrible development practice at the best of times, but using them in your interface is unforgivable. Never rely on images to get your user from A to B. Not only does it waste your own time as a web designer, but it wastes the time of the user when they reach your page and have to decipher what a random image is supposed to mean. Text links should rarely be strayed from.
 
If you do happen to use an icon as a link, or as part of one, always use the HTML ALT tag to provide accessibility in compatibility with w3 standards.
 
While web icons are certainly risky ground to be covering in terms of your interface's efficiency, that's not to say they can't be a great compliment to user friendly buttons. You can create wonderfully complex designs in programs like Macromedia Flash, and these are good for giving the wow factor to a web page.
 
Sometimes, it can be out of our hands as developers to control all of the content that reaches a web page. This is usually the case when advertisements are placed on a page from an external source. We can, however, decide what forms of embedded advertisements make it to a page. If you wish to impress your web audience, the use of floating adverts is something that you should fight to the very bitter end.
 
It doesn't matter how great your original interface is, if you have advertisements appearing over the top of it, your audience is going to have immense trouble navigating from page to page. Consider the types of advertising that you allow on your website. And remember that these companies set out with the specific goal of making a user click on their advert. Are those rewarding banners really worth the effect that they're having on your own website?
 
Google AdSense is a great provider of non-intrusive advertisements. You can also customize them to fit in with the theme of your page, which is more than can be said for some of the third party companies that distribute code.
 
Finally, and arguably most importantly, always make sure that your interface complies with the web developing "contrast rule". This means that light text should always be displayed over dark background colors, and vice versa.
 
Interface design shouldn't be hard to master if you follow the basic guidelines of usability. It also represents one of the areas of web development which is most likely to take off with new technologies in the future. Individuals are constantly striving to produce innovative interfaces. We can expect the presentation of web applications to change dramatically over the next few years, so be prepared to spend plenty of time refining your work for the future!

With the ever-increasing popularity of Internet usage, most regular human activities have been conveniently switched over to the cyber field. These activities range from banking, air or rail bookings, to such common acts like buying or selling goods and services. The procedure of advertising and selling products (or services) via Internet to potential users/buyers is called Internet marketing.

Marketing products over the web has indeed proved to be an extremely profitable tool for most business owners and service providers. All that they need to do is develop their own websites, and then promote their products according to their marketing strategies. However, Internet marketing is not as easy to be performed effectively as it appears at first.

Developing a commercially viable product website and effective promotional activities is not something any CEO can do himself. This is a specialized activity, and it requires skilled and specially qualified Internet marketers to market products and services in a profitable manner. Indeed, if Internet marketing is not done properly, product websites may get distorted, and sales may actually go down!

The basic purpose of Internet marketing is to boost sales figures through promoting products on the web. For that to happen, business heads need to ensure that their websites attract plenty of “Internet traffic”. "Traffic" is the biggest buzz word in online promotional circles. When there is plenty of Internet traffic, sales will always result. So, the quest is to increase visitor numbers. If a website is designed well, it promotes products in an objective, user-friendly and informative manner, chances are that, the website will rank high (search engine optimization) in the various search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. ); consequently, the visitor count, i.e., the “traffic” to the website will be high.

Online marketing is generally a fast affair. Potential buyers log in, search for what they want to purchase, and, if they find their desired item, purchase almost instantly. Hence, the challenge for Internet marketers lies in attracting viewers and preventing them from navigating away from their sites. Indeed, researches find that average stickiness of a viewer on a web page is about eight seconds, so the website designers need to capture his traffics’ attention within that time period.

Internet marketing software could be the answer to marketing dilemmas of all magnitudes, helping to keep campaigns organized, on target, and generating sales. Some programs can even aid in bringing in the leads that develop into final sales. Such Internet marketing drives do not generate revenue per se, but are mostly informative in nature that ultimately leads to final sales, albeit at a later period.

Internet marketing require such product websites that are unique, informative, interactive and preferably, attention-capturing. An Internet marketing drive that boasts of a website that allows customers to interact with producer information almost certainly would have a headstart over its competitors. There are also programs that will allow site owners to interact with their customers online. These types of systems generally offer features such as shopping carts, blogging capabilities, or email sign ups, giving web site owners hands-on capabilities.

The various Internet marketing software programs

Various Internet marketing software products are available at the disposal of Internet businessmen, and the options seem endless. Programs can now help a team of professionals create slogans or jingles for companies, as well as developing ads with catchy headlines, department names, and company titles. Then there are those software programs that can find you good links for link exchanges and those that will submit your website to the search engines and directories. There are also a few Internet marketing software products that let you bring out reports on where exactly you stand at the search engines.

Technology is expanding human capabilities and never before has marketers had so much to work with. Hence, Email and Internet marketing software cannot be overlooked.

These programs focus on collecting email address from targeted audiences. They provide email hunters that can grab email address from sites if the URL is provided. They also manage mail lists and can create targeted listings from domain names. Promoting a product, campaign, or service can truly be exciting when utilizing the tools that are now available. When implemented effectively, these softwares can help online businesses to soar to extremely high levels indeed.

The web is simply loaded with different Internet marketing software programs to choose from. Browsing the different systems available will give those seeking promotional support an idea of what services will best benefit their companies. It is, however, highly advisable that online businessmen make thorough studies of the various tools available before zeroing in on any particular Internet marketing software. An analysis of the tools that are being used by other competitors is also recommended.

If starting your business on the web was easy, let me assure you that marketing it on the Internet is an entirely different ballgame. In recent years, Internet technology has advanced in leaps and bounds even beyond our wildest dreams. Improved connectivity, reduced cost of hardware, faster and more powerful servers, new and exciting online services – all have contributed to the growing popularity of the online medium. Indeed, the Internet is the new global marketplace of the 21st century. Millions are doing business on the Net today, with hundreds joining them every day from every corner of the globe. Over the years, starting an Internet business has only become simpler and easier. Today, virtually anyone can sign up for a business opportunity at the click of one’s mouse. The Net is buzzing with commercial activity of all kinds and it’s where all the action is at.

Ok, that all sounds so fine, but why are so many people complaining? Statistically, more than 90% of people doing business on the Web are far from happy. Their businesses are not doing well and the kind of response they had expected is nowhere to be seen. The flow of traffic to their sites is discouraging and the conversion rate is pathetic. So what’s wrong with all these ventures? Before one concludes that it’s all due to a bad product or just bad luck, look again. The problem with the majority of such businesses is a poor marketing campaign. There’s nothing wrong with the product. All it lacks is adequate promotion.

Looking for a single Internet marketing solution would not be a very wise decision. This is because, as most successful online moneymakers would tell you, a successful and effective Internet marketing campaign actually consists of a number of solutions. Some of the most popular (and effective) solutions are:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Email marketing
• Banner and link exchange
• Getting enlisted in business directories and Internet Yellow Pages
• Blog marketing

SEO remains a popular first choice for those contemplating a powerful marketing campaign for their business. Search engines are among the most powerful resources on the Net today and account for over 92% of traffic. Getting good ranks in the search engines for carefully chosen keywords is critical to receiving traffic from the search engines. Every business can generate a handful of keywords and these are the words and phrases with which somebody looking for a similar service would search for on the Net. SEO ensures that your website gets listed on the first page of the search results, and thus improves the visibility of your site manifold. If your online business is suffering from a serious dearth of traffic, consider SEO as an excellent corrective remedy.

Email marketing is another powerful tool for directly reaching out to potential customers. With the help of such nifty online marketing tools as opt-in lists and auto-responders, you can launch a really effective email campaigning scheme. You can directly address your customers through powerful emails and set the cash registers ringing like never before.

Banner and link exchange, even after all these years, continue to be extremely effective and powerful. Reciprocal link exchange with other sites is a much sought after practice due to its two-edged benefit. First, it improves visibility by showing a link to your site to visitors browsing a different site. Secondly, it has a beneficial effect on search engine rankings. More the sites you exchange link with, the better your rankings get.

A lot of traffic is generated by reputed online business directories. If you are serious about your Internet marketing efforts, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of getting listed in the various business directories such as Yahoo Directory, Dmoz (Open Directory), Alibaba and so on. Some of these directories would charge you a fee to be enlisted, while the rest are mostly free! Getting listed in a large number of directories will surely boost the flow of traffic to your site. Many people prefer using these directories to search engines, as they are believed to produce better results. The reason behind this belief is that most of the Internet directories are edited by human editors who actually visit your site, verify its contents and evaluate its worthiness to be included in their listings.

Social media sites are the latest rage everywhere. So are blogs. It is only natural that Internet marketers are also using these resources to their advantage, especially to market their businesses effectively at a very low cost. Through these resources, you can instantly reach out to thousands of netizens who are interested in your area of business. If you’ve always worried about getting quality, targeted traffic to your site, this is a great way of ensuring just that!

A single Internet marketing solution is perhaps ineffective. But combining several solutions into one super strategy can really help skyrocket your business to the next level.

Knowledge Management software or simply KM Software actually stems from the Enterprise Content Management software and which contains an array of software products that specializes in the way information is collected, stored, accessed, and such other activities. However, to fully appreciate its mammoth range of utilities, you need to go back a few years and check with the basic Enterprise Content Management or ECM which actually has given birth to the KM Software.

The ECM was intended to encompass the legacy problem domains that have traditionally been addressed by records management and document management. It also included most of the other problems involved while converting to and from digital content, to and from the traditional media of those problem domains like physical and computerized filing and retrieval systems, sometimes using paper and microforms. Eventually ECM itself became a new problem domain in its own right, employing the technologies and strategies of digital content management to address business process issues like records and auditing, knowledge sharing, personalization as well as standardization of content, etc.

Coming back to the original topic, the concept of knowledge management is based on an assortment of practices that are used by a business, an individual and often large corporations to create identify, represent and redistribute information for a wide range of purposes. In other words this means that when the company is trying to do certain activities that will document the knowledge base and make it available to all or the selected few in an organization, this act is referred to as ‘knowledge management’. Knowledge management is also often referred to as information management or information sciences.

The knowledge thus stored, documented and offered in the organization can be accessed at 3 stages and they are – during, before and after the knowledge management activity that is undertaken.
Here are some motivations for a company to opt for knowledge management…

• Enabling the people in the organization to access knowledge and gain from this.
• To reduce the product development cycle.
• Promoting and managing innovation within the company.
• Tapping the resource pool that is within the company.
• Making both the external and the internal come together,
• Allow employees to gain from the experience, knowledge and insights of senior pros.
• To manage intellectual assets and intellectual capital within the company.

How can a software product help in knowledge management?

A software product that enables an information practice or a group of practices at any stage of the process of information management can be deemed to be called information management software. But a subset of such a software solution that accentuates an approach to build knowledge out of the information that is managed or contained is called Knowledge Management Software.

Knowledge Management Software provides individuals, small groups or mid-sized businesses with ideas to innovate, build new set of knowledge in the group and/or improve upon customer experience. Thus you see how useful such a software solution can really be for the business.

Knowledge management tools (also software) include a vast range of around 1,500 or more approaches to collect and contain information to build knowledge that can be searched using specialized search tools along with concept building tools. And not only that, there are also visual search tools, which are useful because these tools provide information in a connected manner that was not originally conceptualized by those who collected or maintained the information database.

Knowledge management software products have evolved much over time. And today they cater to various industry needs that include content management. The one described below proves promising in providing this service.

Effective knowledge management, as we are aware of, requires quality content. While this is true in all cases, it is often overlooked by businesses in their eagerness in cost cutting procedures, resulting in poor-quality, knowledge-stale, irrelevant or worse still, incorrect content creation and management. This obviously gives rise to customer dissatisfaction and poor agent adoption.

Knowledge management software products based on a collaborative knowledge management framework that permits distributed content creation and editorial workflow enables cost-effective management of quality content. This allows any user, based on roles set by the business, to easily hint content into the application. Since this content is routed through an efficient workflow, its consistency and quality are both assured to be most appropriate and suitable. By utilizing self-organizing techniques, the knowledge management software can provide relevant response to customer requirements, based on dynamic relevance ranking and appropriate user feedback.

Knowledge management software may also be used to improve call set up and wrap up process that includes out-of-the box integration with leading call tracking applications. IVR data can be captured during call set up to pre-populate questions so that the agent can be provided with a running start on the issue-resolution process. After the call, the resolution transcript can be automatically saved in the call tracking system along with the service request, hurrying the wrap up while at the same time preserving quality data for reporting and feedback.

Before the Internet became popular, it was nothing like the mass network of information that it is today. Web design was non-existent and the Internet simply provided a way for users to transfer text files. It really was as simple as that.
 
It wasn't until the extended development of HTML and the introduction of the FONT tag that users were given the chance to define the way that text should be presented on a monitor to a web audience.
 
Back before you and I were browsing the Internet, every last page of text was constructed from Times New Roman. Users had no choice to define alternatives such as Verdana, Arial or Georgia. It's hard to believe how drastically the font designer's landscape has shifted since those days, but the new scope for type design is endless.
 
Typography - or font design is an extremely profitable business as far as web design is concerned. You've probably seen the various websites that offer commercial fonts for a premium fee, and you've probably been pretty surprised that a few characters of color could be worth such a price.
 
Why is that the case, you ask?
 
It's primarily because creating a typeface is painstakingly hard work.
 
Websites are in debt to the hard graft of digital font designers. The Internet has developed to a stage where it's possible to embed custom fonts in to a page, and completely overhaul the theme of a site. The text may seem like an afterthought in the queue of designer's priorities, behind images and interface design, but it's actually an integral factor. Choosing the right font can make a website feel futuristic, traditional, or maybe even gothic.
 
A typeface designer is responsible for the programming and aesthetical presentation of a font. Depending on whether you plan to implement your font on the operating system or as a custom image, you need to consider the implications of the various standards around the web.
 
There are several popular commercial products which can be purchased to develop a type design. Programs such as Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Fireworks are all used on a widespread basis and have sufficient tools to aid a budding designer.
 
Illustrator is particularly useful given its supplementary toolbox for careful custom drawing. Fireworks is also catching on, and Photoshop fulfils just about every designing purpose you could imagine.
 
Technically speaking, there are many different kinds of fonts and typefaces that you can expect to work with. The most popular of all is TrueType (TTF), developed by Apple and later modified by Microsoft for Windows. When you use a typical font on a Windows-based system, you're most probably using a TrueType font. If you're designing a TrueType face, you can rest assured that it will be widely compatible across the web.
 
Another option is OpenType, a combination of TrueType and the Linux based Type1. This is the second most popular type and another good option if you're thinking about designing from scratch.
 
One of the most common instances you'll come across is the inclusion of a bitmap font in a web graphic. Bitmap types are special in the sense that they don't make use of vectors. They're actually a matrix of pixels, and thus don't make good candidates for scaling. If you try to resize a bitmap font, the text will lose its clarity and produce rough edges.
 
The benefit of bitmap types, and it's a pretty huge benefit, is that you can simply open up Photoshop or your chosen program and draw on the text in pixel form. There's no vector and glyph coding to worry about.
 
When you're implementing a letter type on a website, you need to give due consideration to the style of the site itself. Is the theme traditional? Is it casual, or formal? Try to remember that too much of the same font can be a hindrance and dilute the impact in general.
 
Always remember to design with anti-aliasing in mind. You may have seen the term alias crop up in font engineering before, it simply describes the smoothness of the edges. Setting your font to anti-alias will provide a much smoother feel to the text and is highly recommended for all type design.
 
As we've already discussed, the use of vectors is another important issue to consider. A vector based type is one which relies upon lines, curves, and mathematical calculations to predict the look of a font. The advantage of this is the loading time and efficiency.
 
If you imagine that you have a 400x400 square that you wish to output to your screen, what do you suppose is the best way to approach this? Some designers may choose to go in and color the pixels, saving it as a bitmap. Others may opt for a vector format which essentially tells the browser the angles and dimensions, and cuts down on the erroneous memory required to save the information of every last pixel.
 
As far as your fonts are concerned, there are advantages in both methods. For an aspiring designer, however, it's best to start with what you can see. Bitmap based fonts (BDF) are more responsive in that sense.
 
Even if you have the best character set imaginable, it doesn't count for much if you don't have a good grasp of kerning and tracking. When we see a typeface on our screens, what is it that tells the output device how to space the individual characters? This is where kerning is influential. When we kern, we specify the distance and attributes linked to space. While some fonts may have a spacey feel, others may overlap. Take a look at certain fonts on web pages and notice how the letters overlap each other. The process behind this concept is kerning. And as a type face designer, kerning is your best friend.
 
So let's suppose that you're looking to set the theme of your website with fonts and typefaces. Where do you start? Times New Roman can look fairly ugly and it isn't the friendliest font on the eyes by any means.
 
The golden rule of font implementation on the web, and indeed everywhere - is to never use two similar fonts on the same site. You should only ever use a maximum of two fonts on your website in the first place, but similar types are a strict no-go. Any more and the user will consider the theme inconsistent and unpredictable.
 
It's quite possible to use a tidy modern font with a dirty graffiti typeface, or any other font which happens to look different. But if you start meshing the same styles together, you'll be losing a great deal of professionalism.
 
Embedding fonts in a webpage, although it's not technically true to the term : is growing in popularity and users are opting to use small GIFs rather than HTML text.
 
When you're using fonts on the web, with the use of the FONT tag or CSS scripting, it's important to remember that fonts will only translate to a user's browser if they have that particular typeface installed on their system. If they don't, they'll simply get the default : Times New Roman.
 
While this is an inconvenience, you've probably seen interface designs with some wild and wacky fonts that you've never seen before in your life. Designers get around this by presenting the fonts to the user as GIF or JPEG images. The user doesn't have to have the font installed on the operating system to be able to view it, because the image format automatically translates every last pixel to their screen.
 
So why aren't all typefaces saved in image format? As we've already seen, some are. But text loads MUCH faster in TTF form. Can you imagine having to load an entire page of images just to read a few paragraphs? The HTML standard converts text to a format which it can output in the browser, and this is why we only have a limited number of options when we choose to select a font in the FONT tag.
 
As a global rule, if you choose to take the path of displaying text in images, always remember to provide the ALT tag. This crucial tag ensures that images which fail to load are still outputted with the "alternative" text.
 
To master the art of typography, you have to truly appreciate the delicacy with which characters and fonts are built. It's certainly a rewarding process and can be the making of a website. But it isn't an easy skill to learn.

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Once you have your interface design drawn up with content that you'd like to transfer to the website, a careful consideration needs to be given to the way in which users are going to access your information.
 
Every good website should use a form of information architecture to lay down the manner in which users can move from page to page. Navigation is crucial to the browsing experience of your web audience and you don't want them pointed in the wrong directions, do you now?
 
It's possible to make use of a CMS (Content Management System) which automatically generates web structure for your content, and enables you to oversee the hierarchy of pages. This is helpful in the sense that it adds a lot of functionality to the administration of your site, but it's also a restraint if you don't have the money to purchase a sufficient CMS or the know-how to install a freeware version. Products like Serena Collage and other popular CMS tools can be extremely expensive.
 
There are two methods that you can use for the navigation of a website : taxonomy and folksonomy.
 
Taxonomy is the approach that most of us will be familiar with. It represents the idea of dividing content in to specific categories and grouping as such. Folksonomy, on the other hand, is a relatively new formula which several of the popular community websites put to good use. If you have what's known as user generated content being created by users "rather than uploaded by the developer" it becomes plausible to organize by the author rather than the category.
 
In either case, navigation plays a crucial role to whether the general public is going to find the data that they're looking for.
 
When you design your homepage, draw up a list of links which will cascade from the first page and make a note of them. Your links should be descriptive and to the point. Don't fall under the spell of Mystery Meat Navigation. Users stand no chance of finding the content they're looking for if you have hyperlinks which simply say "Section" or "Stuff".
 
Your goal should be to limit the destinations so that your web traffic is channeled to the right areas of the site. When a user arrives on the site, they should be presented with as few links as possible. Instead of listing every last product that you have for sale, include a simple link to a "Product" section.
 
Categorizing links is an absolute must if you have a vast number of files for navigation. Organize a hierarchy of priority. Where do you want the users to go upon arriving on the homepage?
 
Simple formatting such as bold links and drawing attention to them with white space - never underestimate the power of white space: can attract your visitor's eyes to where you want them to go on the site.
 
One thing to take great caution over is the use of navigation images. It can be very tempting to produce navigation buttons and provide a little more glitz to your interface, but is it really worth it?
 
Optimized web usability is an important factor in accessible content, and if you design your navigation to make use of relevant images rather than text, you may be missing the boat so to speak.
 
Search engines, or search bots as they're known by some, will fail to spider your website correctly if the links aren't effectively formatted. If you can't escape the idea of using images for navigation, always use the HTML ALT tag to assist users and search engines alike.
 
Consider the way that you name your files and subfolders. Did you know that a website loads much faster if your first level of files is restricted to simply the homepage? When a browser points to your server, it will automatically scan the entire top directory of files until it reaches an index.html (or relevant extension) file.
 
If your top-tier folder includes an index.html file, along with several other pages, you'll be missing out on optimized loading times. Not to mention, a website with clearly defined categories can assist users if they wish to manually point their browser to a sub-section of your site.
 
A good way to look at organizing navigation is to treat your homepage as a portal and the access point for the rest of your content. Don't include a "Home" link on your homepage. It's a common mistake made by many designers and one that can disorientate the less canny users that drop by your site. They don't want to see links to pages that they're already on. If you're not using a database driven system such as Access or mySQL, this can be a little tricky to address. The solution is simply to add a distinguished style of formatting to the currently active page. Take the A HREF tag away and apply a simple bold style, for example.
 
Another issue for web designers to address is the consistency of the navigation. There is absolutely no excuse for a site infrastructure where essential links only appear on certain pages. Your key categories should be available from every sub page. This is one of the most important stages in perfecting your navigation design. A user should not have to trace backwards to find a key link.
 
Look at your website from the perspective of a complete stranger. Would you feel capable of finding a certain area of the site? If not, you have poor information architecture and your navigation design is lacking.

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HTML is typically much more advanced than people give it credit for. While advanced programming languages reap the rewards for being complex in nature, or incorporating several built-in functions, HTML provides the basis for much of the interactivity on the web.
 
We're going to look at a few of the elements that you'll have the opportunity to work with as you grow accustomed to HTML coding. These include forms, sounds and the implementation of web surveys.
 
It goes without saying that you can build a successful website without these elements; although forms are extremely popular; but you'll soon find that they can add an extra dimension to your site.
 
Sound, for example, is a great way of bringing your page to life and providing a further level of multimedia which was simply out of the equation during the early days of the Internet.
 
It's now possible to embed music in to a page so that the user hears a certain song when they browse it. The trend has been accentuated largely by the role of user generated content sites such as MySpace and Bebo. Years ago, the most you could expect was a MIDI file to play over the background, which at the time, was nice, but ultimately no more than computerized bleeps. With increasing bandwidth, a sizeable number of web users are capable of streaming audio content and this is possible through basic HTML programming.
 
Looking past the usage of MP3 and WMA to stream modern music, you need to consider that not every computer is capable of supporting sound. Maybe the user doesn't have a sound card, or maybe their speakers are switched off. Either way, you shouldn't assume that a web user is going to be able to hear audio.
 

WAVE (Waveform Audio File Format), MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and Microsoft's AU format are the most common that you'll find for simple web sound. They're also the most highly supported and thus significantly more likely to play on a standard platform.
 
To include an audio file in your web page, you will need to use one of the following code examples:

   

- <EMBED src="yourfile.mid" WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=150 AUTOSTART="false">
 
In the instance above, the file will be embedded in to the page and the user will be able to click a small icon to play the music. This is the way that we transfer videos and audio files on user generated content communities. Embedding the multimedia file in to the page allows it to be played on any website. It's extremely recommended that you set the AUTOSTART attribute to FALSE. This prevents the file from playing automatically, and is widely considered the polite thing to do. Users should have the choice as to whether they want to have your audio files blasted through their speakers.
  
- <A href="mysong.wav">Click To Hear My Song</A>
 
This second example shows how you can provide a link to an audio file, without embedding unexpected music in to the actual page. When the user clicks the link, they'll be given the chance to listen to the audio file. The only problem with this method is that it raises copyright issues if the user should decide to actually save the file to their hard drive, which is harder to do with an embedded clip.
 
Unlike other forms of media such as images, the use of audio files has been somewhat slow in catching on. But it looks as if web users are finally accepting it and in certain circumstances "where you're not intruding on the user" a small HTML code snippet can add a whole new level of interactivity to your website. But it doesn't stop there.
 
As one of the most essential components on the web, forms can be used to provide direct interactivity with your website traffic. It cannot be understated how influential forms are in the global scheme of running a website. But what are they?
 
Without them, the web would be strictly read-only. By submitting forms to a web server, through a CGI interface, we can allow users to interact with the previously static content on our pages. How else would we retrieve information from the user?
 
Whenever you register on a website, login or submit any kind of change: you're using a form. Below is the basic syntax of a standard HTML form declaration.
  
- <FORM ACTION="action_page.extension" METHOD="get/post"> </FORM>
 
Bare in mind that this is no more than the basic syntax and we would typically go on to declare several text boxes or select fields to give the form a purpose. But let's look at the basics.
 
The ACTION attribute is what we use to define where the form should be sent when the user presses the submit button. Some forms will send data to the same page, others will redirect.
 
The METHOD attribute can be either GET or POST. The difference is subtle but important. When we use the GET attribute, form data is submitted through the URL string "that's the address bar" and visible to the trained eye. The POST method is different in the sense that it submits data as part of the actual body of the form. By doing this, we can count on additional security and the data will not be visible in the URL string. But we also lose the ability to bookmark or save a page URL.
 
Inside the opening and closing form tags, we can use a variety of different input tools to specify the type of data that will be submitted, and also the presentation. These include:
  
- Text fields
- Password fields
- Select boxes
- Radio buttons
- Upload options
- Text areas
- Generic buttons
- Checkboxes
 
By using forms, there's plenty of opportunity to retrieve feedback from web visitors, and we can implement a survey to do just this.
 
Web surveys are great for collecting information straight from the audience that you're pitching your website at. Not to mention, users like to feel that their opinion counts and it should!
 
Software is available to install a survey system and save yourself a lot of time, but if you have a firm grasp of forms, including knowledge of CGI, Perl or even ColdFusion , you can write your own code and have users' opinions collected almost straight away.
 
Every commercial website should have a "How can we improve?" dialogue form somewhere, just as long as it isn't the first thing the user notices when loading the page! A survey can be as minimal or as extensive as you want it to be, but there's no doubt that HTML is capable of initiating the task, even if a server-side scripting language is required to finish the job.
 
Designing a website doesn't have to be a chore of static content creation and minimal interactivity. Indeed, most of the top websites are finding creative new ways to relate to their audience, and by making use of these additional elements, you can too!

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You'll soon find that much of your time as a web designer is spent on graphics production. There's good reason for this. It's probably the most creative area of web design, and certainly one of the most noticeable aspects when we first visit a web page. Good graphics can be the difference between a site that remains lodged in the memory of a web user, and one which fades in the time spent navigating back to Google.
 
We're going to look at some of the techniques and background knowledge required to master the art of pixel perfect design. Obviously, to manage this, you're going to need a graphical editing suite. Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks (Now owned by Adobe) are both viable solutions and well worth your investment. It can't be overstated that you get what you pay for in the case of these two excellent programs.
 
Web graphics, as you probably realize, make up more than just simple photos on a website. Graphics can extend from text replacements to the actual nature of the web layout itself.
 
While they can add an extra level of professionalism to a website, they can also add download times which are quite unprofessional in their own right. So how can we get around the deterrent of lagging pages to create a website that looks as good as it acts?
 
Optimization is important. Yet many websites will throw the sheer thought out of the window in exchange for page stretching backgrounds that consume valuable bandwidth resources. You should avoid the temptation of designing a 1024x768 splash to cover the user's entire screen. Not only will this dramatically affect the loading times of your site, but you can look "quite frankly" just a little bit silly when a user accesses your website on a different screen resolution.
 
A better solution is to use tiled background images. By doing this, we can create simple patterns to be repeated across a user's screen and give the impression of an actual background being used. The key benefits are, firstly, the sharper loading speed. And secondly, the background will adjust to the screen resolution accordingly. That's more like the pixel perfect design that we're looking for.
 
Another good practice is to reuse graphics where possible. By making separate spacers, you can cut down on further download times by simply reusing your current graphics. The browser won't waste any extra time rendering them after the first instance has been displayed. Slicing images is also recommended. By slicing an image in to several smaller graphics, they will load continuously and the user won't be left to stare at a blank screen.
 
To get to the bottom of graphic optimization, however, we must evaluate the format that we're saving our graphics in. These will usually consist of GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group). The key to when to use each format is hidden in their names.
 
JPEGs are probably the most common format that you'll have heard about. They're an excellent choice,as their name would suggest, for saving photographic images. JPEG is not a lossless format, meaning the quality will suffer when you make changes. When we use a JPEG, the screen will recognize blocks of color and modify pixels appropriately. As a result, the JPEG is great for use with photographic imagery where rich levels of color are regularly used. Unfortunately, they don't hold up quite as well in flat-covered graphics. This is where we should switch to GIF format.
 
The GIF format has been around for an extremely long time, and is a great solution for saving text based images, vectors or flat-colored graphics. GIF is also a strong competitor in the compression market.
 
The format uses Run Length Encoding to compress horizontal lines, which means that if you use traditional scanlines, you'll be saving almost half of the original image file size.
 
Image compression is important for optimizing your web pages and improving the final download times, and this is where GIF holds a great advantage over its JPEG rival. GIF is a lossless format, meaning that it doesn't alter the individual pixels in a graphic. As such, it's an excellent choice for vector based graphics, or areas of blocky color.
 
Another advantage that comes with using GIFs lies in the ability to make one color completely transparent. You've probably seen instances of this before where the background is missing from an image. Transparency can be a valuable technique. Just remember that if you're going to specify the removal of a particular color, make its one that isn't included in the graphic that you're trying to retain!
 
Finally, it's important to address a couple of the more popular Photoshop techniques that seem to be grossly overused on the web; the drop shadow and beveling effects.
 
Quite why these particular effects have taken off is a bit of a mystery. General consensus would suggest that it has something to do with the 3D illusion that they provide, with all the ease of a single button click. But don't let that be an incentive to overuse them. Beveling, in particular, leaves a horribly unprofessional depth which will turn away the trained eye.
 
There really is no way of establishing pixel perfect design without getting your hands dirty and experimenting in a graphical development suite. It's not something that you'll discover overnight, but once you've mastered it, you'll be one step closer to the kind of web design that'll instantly impress a web user when they arrive on your page.

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Website design is one area where all the three factors that is technology, creativity and business come together, and in fact, unless these three can come together effectively, the website design would not be a success. By website design the first thing that comes to our mind is designing the website – and here there are 2 aspects, which are the programming part and the images.

The programming behind professional website design: Much like that of a coin, there are two sides of a web page – the front end that the viewer sees and the back end that actually creates the page. The programmer writes scripts that make this backend and in this, there can be many alternatives such as HTML, XHTML, ASP, Java Script, PERL and others. In professional website design, programmers go for one of these two kinds of pages and they are static pages and dynamic pages. In static pages, the content of the page does not change whereas in dynamic pages, the content changes based on the input that the user gives such as filling out a form.

Then there are some websites that use CSS file wherein the codes are kept in one central place such as the Font and others. This is convenient because then the same codes need not be repeated in all the pages of the website. All pages in such cases refer to the centralized CSS file.

Then there are those web pages that also contain audio and video. In recent years, web pages have started to be more dynamic than before where the user’s data such as his/her location and other demographics are being analyzed to offer the visitor a customized web page. In case of online stores, such data can also capture the links the visitor had clicked on an earlier visit through cookies that are in the browser to offer these links above all else to the visitor on a repeat visit.

Professional website design also needs to consider browser compliance when the pages are being created. The fact is that, the same page may appear different in different browsers such as IE, Mozilla and Safari. This has to be kept in mind because an increasing number of people are now trying out other browser options as well.

The creativity behind professional website design: A professional has to do a good job when doing the design work for the web page. Yes, the images need to be attractive to grab the attention of the viewer because otherwise the person may want to leave the web page. But on the other hand if the images are too heavy then the web page will take too long a time to load and this may put off many visitors. On the Internet people have so little patience and there are so many options (so many websites), that it is necessary to capture the attention of the visitor with the images and the content and the page needs to load quickly, because otherwise the person may simply click the Back button or exit the page. And one visitor gone may be a customer lost. The designer also has to decide whether the images will be static or whether the page will have flash. Flash movies also take a longer time to load.

It also needs to be kept in mind that not all people have flash plug-ins loaded in their browsers, and these people would not be able to view the flash part in the page. So many professional website designers opt for two versions of the website – a flash version and a HTML version.

The business behind professional website design: This is of great importance because it centers around the root cause of the existence of the website. Creativity often needs to be controlled because the website exists to do business after all (be it an ecommerce or a lead generation website or one that just builds a brand) and creativity can often come in the way, but not always.

It starts with the navigation structure of the website. The navigation has to be user friendly because the visitors must have an easy time of finding all the relevant sections of the website and should be able to go from one page to another easily. There are some websites that do not carry a link to the Home page from the inside pages – this is simply unacceptable.

There are many other usability issues that need to be considered by the designer. Such as for ecommerce websites, it has to be decided where the products would be displayed – on the Home page or in the products page and how the “Buy” links would appear – as a text link or as an image. The positioning of such links also needs to be decided. The professional website designer also needs to consider whether there should be any cross selling or not from the shopping cart page.

Looking for a software company poses a unique problem due to their abundance. Paradoxical as the statement above may seem, it’s true. Earlier, we had fewer choices and selecting from among them was a relatively easy task. Today, the sheer number of choices available to us can cause a good deal of confusion. We are misled by false claims, get dazzled by the fanfare and end up making a wrong choice.

If you are looking for the services of a software company, one of the easiest ways to get started would be to make a search for it in your favorite search engine. And that’s where the problem starts! You key in “software company” in the search field and hit the Enter key. The very next instant, you are returned with tens of thousands of matches! How do you sift through them and make your selection? You try checking out a few from the list, but they all seem good. They are all making their usual tall claims, flaunting an impressive portfolio and are eagerly waiting for you to contact them. You have to choose just one from among the millions of them. How on earth are you supposed to do that?

Don’t despair. This article will provide a ray of hope if you are feeling completely at a loss. These days, a lot of work is being outsourced to various offshore companies. These companies are located in India, China, Korea and many other similar countries of the East. The main reason behind this is the significant cost advantage that can be realized. The relatively lower cost of IT services in these countries are helping companies in the West make significant savings in the software arena while maintaining a very high quality that can truly be called global. In a country like India, there is an abundance of very skilled software personnel who can get the job done at a fraction of the cost.

However, before you appoint one to do your job, there are a few things to check first. Outsourcing is an attractive option, but remember, you’d be dealing with a company that is located thousands of miles from you. That means, it would probably not be possible for you to actually pay a visit and meet the people who would be working on your project. Trust plays an important role here. But more than just going by your gut feelings, check out their portfolio. If you can, get to talk with their previous clients and ask for their opinion about the company. If you find a company with a largely dissatisfied clientele, it’s probably better to steer clear of it.

A good software company will not just work for you, but with you. In other words, it will be in constant communication with you and make an earnest effort to fully understand your specific needs. If you find a software company that is too eager to sell one of their set packages to you instead of understanding your specific requirements, don’t waste time with it. A good software company would first listen to you and try to understand how best it can help you. Then, it would come up with a solution tailored to address your specific requirements. Anything less than that is not good.

Do run a check on the infrastructure of the company that you’d be dealing with. If you have an extensive project, it would probably require a small team of dedicated professionals. Make sure that your chosen company has the necessary infrastructure and manpower to provide you with that support. Keep a close watch on how well your chosen software company is adhering to the various project milestones and deadlines. Punctuality is of the utmost essence and you surely wouldn’t want to get caught with a software company that keeps missing deadlines or is inordinately slow in its operations. A reputed software company would also refrain from using pirated software or developmental tools. Using licensed software expedites the process and cause fewer hiccups in the way. After all, you wouldn’t want to have your software developed using pirated software.

Any software development process follows certain norms. Make sure that your designated software company follows them. They should be appreciative of the fact that your project is critical to your business, and consequently, have the honest eagerness and sincerity to execute it well. A software, in its final release, should be free of bugs and be fully operational. Regular intermediate releases of the different versions will help you monitor the progress of your project and keep a track of how your project is progressing. The final release is not the end of the story. Should problems arise in the future, the company should be by your side to troubleshoot it. If any serious flaw is noticed in the developed software after its formal release, it should quickly address the problem.

Choose a software company with care and run a check on their actual capability before awarding them your project. With a little caution and forethought, you would not go wrong.

We live in an age marked by a tremendous influence of technology in virtually every aspect of our life. IT (Information Technology) is reigning supreme and computers have become inseparably intertwined with our daily lives. Software companies are keeping themselves busy with the development of myriad pieces of software that control, or are related to, various aspects of our work and life in general. Software development is big business nowadays. From small pieces of software to large-scale applications – software comes in all shapes and sizes. So where does software configuration management figure in the scheme of things? Well, it’s the solution that ensures that the software is developed smoothly and without unnecessary delays.

Having said that, let me add that we have just about scratched the surface of the entire concept of software configuration management. It is a rather technical concept that may be difficult to comprehend for those who are not from a technical background, or even for newbies who have just started out to understand it. It is not self-explanatory and usually requires a formal introduction to the subject. For the uninitiated, finding oneself facing a computer with a Open Source Code Data configuration software open in front, can be quite an intimidating experience indeed!

To start understanding software configuration management, one is required to have some degree of familiarity with C++ or Java, as well as a basic working knowledge of Linux or Unix. Configuration management, in the broadest of terms, can be defined as managing changes. When there are multiple people working on the same piece of software, it becomes essential to have a software configuration management system in place to allow for harmonious work on a simultaneous basis. Configuration management makes it easier for computer systems to evolve with the incessant changes in software and computer technology. Constant upgrades to newer computer systems and networks have become unavoidable. Such upgrades however, often results in error and damages to the system. Configuration management technology prevents the occurrence of such problem by recording the details of changes that are done to the components and devices of a computer system.

The essence of software configuration management can be better understood if we look at a typical scenario that involves two people trying to work on the same file simultaneously from two different terminals. Let us suppose that in a local network system, you are working on a Word document. As you continue working on the document, it is accessed by another user from a different terminal. However, he’d be able to open a Read-Only version of the same file. In other words, he would not be able to make any changes to the document. In order to do so, you need to stop working on the document and close the file on your terminal. Most networks devoid of a software configuration management system would not allow multiple sets of changes to be made to the same file due to security reasons. Even if it did, there is always the possibility of two users accessing the same document, make two sets of changes and causing the last set of changes to overwrite all the previous ones.

Software configuration management systems work in such a way that there is always a central database of files which users can access to check them, make alterations, save them – all in a non-destructive mode. Every generation of changes made to a particular file is kept in the system’s archives to enable easy retrieval of an old version as and when the need arises. Some of the attributes of any software configuration management system are concurrency management, versioning and synchronization. These collectively allow for multiple versions of the same to exist side-by-side. All changes and alterations made to a specific file are closely monitored by the system and maintained in its memory. So, no change ever gets lost and if a point comes in the developmental cycle when an earlier stage needs to be reverted to, a software configuration management system easily lets you do that.

Concurrent management is a key feature. It basically allows multiple users to work on the same file simultaneously, and merges the changes by checking the updated files against the root files residing in the database. This is done by running a series of complex algorithms. Versioning is another very useful feature. It works by archiving copies of each file in the database. This lets users to recall any previous version of a file. Each file version is stored in the system along with such details as who checked the files, when it was done, what the changes were and so on. Last but not the least, synchronization is the process of a user submitting his file to the database so that the software configuration management system can update the master file for subsequent use.

Software configuration management makes effective teamwork possible. As software systems get more complex, the need for such a system will only continue to grow.

Surveillance methods have undergone a sea change since the Mata Hari days. James Bond had outwitted her in more than one ways with his Octopussy film. But Bond too, has to take the rear seat now since contemporary surveillance agents are today using such sophisticated equipments that make 007 gadgetry as archaic as manual typewriters. As an instance, take the case of guiltless MP3 players (such as Walkmans). Insert recording devices, cameras and communication devices within it and pretend listening to music while roaming round or sitting near the target/targets. The ultra-sensitive recording device catches all the conversation while the hidden camera takes uninterrupted images of suspected subjects.

Even bugs now come in all shapes and sizes. Miniaturization of electronics has gone to such an extent that TV pictures can even be broadcast via bugs that incorporate miniature video cameras. If, however, surveillance is the main issue, you can do so by sending radio frequencies through the main wiring of a building and then pick them up outside. And the cost of these ultra-sensitive devices is falling dramatically.

At base level, computers are great surveillance targets since large amount of personal data are often stored on their hard disc. There is a generation of hackers who have made it their profession to infiltrate the computers and put in their surveillance equipment with the sole purpose of capturing the browsing habits of people – and sometimes their intentions are worse. When a computer bug is electronically inserted within a PC, it no longer remains one’s Personal Computer in that sense. As a matter of fact, an outsider sitting thousands of miles away can easily drain out all the information stored in the PC and can also sell it to any interested party at a profit. Steve Gibson, the self-styled computer security Guru who ‘invented’ spy ware have described in detail how surveillance tools can be installed against the user’s will or choice. High-speed Internet connections have made the job easier too.

But surveillance equipment can be used for other purposes too – such as to monitor the activities of partners who are suspecting of extra marital affairs. Often such gadgets that are very small are installed to catch an unsuspecting partner. These gadgets are so small and they are so cleverly hidden that it becomes very difficult, almost impossible really for an untrained eye to find them out and dismantle them.

CCTV or closed-circuit television is yet another modern surveillance tool. Here a miniature TV camera installed at a strategic point in a hall or a mall goes on taking images within the location and transmitting them to a monitor set in a secure site for viewing and taking appropriate action when needed. Created initially for use in high security areas, banks, etc, CCTV today is widely used in airports, shopping malls or even in housing blocks to prevent access by unauthorized persons.

Although photographs are no more accepted as evidence in courts of law since they can be easily doctored, photos nevertheless can be taken as first hand proof of a crime committed before the lens of a camera. Alfred Kodak would have shifted in his grave if he ever had a chance to see how his box cameras have now taken the shape of pencil cameras that are capable of taking accurate pictures of events when focused at them. Why, even the cell phone cameras crated quite a stir when they had hit the market a few years back. Many European glossy social tabloids probably survived because of those trendy mobile camera phones.

Contrary to earlier days, surveillance can now be done in a passive way. A person in his day-to-day activity leaves many trails behind from which his/her lifestyle could somehow be gathered. These may be termed as paper trails. Like when a person makes payment through checks, such payments are recorded in the bank’s ledger that forms a part of the person’s paper trail. But today, most of these records are electronic, forming an ‘electronic trail’ that can be easily reconstructed through automated means. Every time a person uses a bank teller, pays by credit card, uses a phone card, tops up cell phones or otherwise completes a recorded transaction, an electronic record is generated. Aggregated and analyzed, this electronic trail will give away person’s behavior pattern or lifestyle to anyone merely for the asking. This kind of electronic surveillance can be a profession for someone who can earn his livelihood by selling the electronic trail. As for buyers, they are aplenty! Banks or companies selling credit cards, professionals engaged in credit rating, loan sanctioning agencies and mortgagers are the biggest buyers of such personal electronic trails of persons who are in need of such facilities.

The web design represents an arranged collaboration of web pages, which in turn make up a website or application. There are millions of web designers scattered around the world, and all of them have their own design preferences, but the end goal is always the same.
 
Web design, although associated with graphics design in some quarters, is primarily concerned with three objectives:
 
Information value : The quality of information stored across the website.

These three factors make up the essential components of a web page, and a good web designer will score highly in each area.
 
Web design caters for several technologies in order to aid the production of web based material. Most pages are made up of HTML (or XHTML), CSS, images and further multimedia content. HTML is the underlying foundation for most of these pages, but web technology is constantly improving and just as we usher in XHTML as the new design standard, several other technologies are expanding their horizons and further dividing the web community.
 
You can compare a web design to a book in many ways. A successful book usually stands out from the others, whether it's through a snappy effective title, or an appealing front cover. An author will spend a great deal of time targeting their title and display information to gain the attention of potential readers. This works in the same way that a web designer may use SEO and keywords. A book has to stand out in a library, in the same fashion that a website has to stand out in a network of other sites.
 
Then you have the actual value of the content. A fancy front cover or an attractive title isn't usually enough to guarantee the user's satisfaction. The book has to have valuable content, or a good story. A website has to have relevant information stored on its sub pages.
 
Finally, a book needs to be easy to read and presented in a user friendly manner, with images where appropriate to aid the reading experience. The same can be said for a website, which can be improved dramatically by the inclusion of multimedia content or relevant images. Just as a book has readability specifications, a website has usability and accessibility guidelines. These are designated by the w3 Consortium.
 
As we mention the w3 Consortium, it's important to understand the influence that the w3 community has over the web. Every web technology needs to have a fixed set of standards drawn up and approved, due to the nature of most open source web languages. The w3 Consortium handles this task and sets out strict web regulations which we're all obliged to follow if we wish to comply with the accepted industry standards. For commercial websites, this is essential.
 
Before your web design can be accessed by other users, you need to make sure that you have several items available. These are listed below.

• Editing software
• A web server
• An upload client

Looking at the first requirement, editing software can be as simple or as advanced as you'd like it to be. For example, an HTML page can be coded in Notepad and saved with the .HTML extension. But if you're working with complex languages, you can also purchase a copy of Adobe Dreamweaver (Formerly owned by Macromedia) or Microsoft FrontPage. These development suites allow for a much more automated coding experience, with the use of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. Indeed, it's possible to create HTML pages without the knowledge of a single tag!
 
A web server is required to host your content on the World Wide Web. Servers are usually maintained by professional businesses, so it's quite possible to sign up for hosting on a number of websites and use their own resources. This is usually the case when you find a website offering to store your content. There are free hosting services on the Internet, but they'll usually come with advertisements included in the package.
 
Finally, you need an FTP upload client, or a web based upload environment, so that you can send your content to be published on the web. SmartFTP and Cute FTP are both great tools for this purpose.
 
If you have all three of the items above, you're ready to get involved with the production of a web design.
 
Every web design is initiated when a user accesses the INDEX page of your website. This will be named with a further extension, determined by the language that you've used for the page. If you're using PHP, it might be INDEX.PHP. If you're using ColdFusion, it might be INDEX.CFM.
 
Your index page should be the portal to the rest of your website. A good design starts on the very first page, and it's important to make this particular page the most informative on your site.
 
Web design doesn't have to be restricted to the basics of HTML and CSS. We can use what's known as server-side scripting and client-side scripting to make a site dynamic and more interactive.
 
Server-side production usually consists of one of the following programming languages:

• ASP
• JSP
• PHP
• ColdFusion
• Python

Client-side scripting is mainly restricted to the use of JavaScript. You will shortly discover the benefits of these advanced languages, but rest assured that web design was once as simple as plain HTML and it still can be!
 
With good planning foundations and a solid grasp of HTML, we can produce some excellent websites and web applications. The learning curve is ongoing, and you'll find that your web design can always be improved. Don't be put off by the idea. Even the greatest websites were once imaginary tags in a designer's imagination!

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Unfortunately for us all, web design is a business with considerable scope for problems. You'd be alarmed to hear of the sheer number of things that can go wrong; even after you've completed your website to the highest of standards. Here we will take a look at some of those problems and how you can address the possibility of facing them in the future.
 
At the top of the agenda, we're confronted with the issue of website security. How can we make our web pages secure?
 
The first thing to ask ourselves is how can a webpage become insecure in the first place? Depending on the nature of a website, the issue of data protection may rank as one of the most important considerations throughout your business plan.
 
If you're supplying a service where consumers trust you with their private details, it's absolutely vital that you do everything in your power to respect the confidentiality of their transactions. This isn't an optional requirement, you should be aware that failing to appreciate the data protections requirements can lead to severe fines and a damaged reputation that won't be healing anytime soon.
 
Of course, you might be designing your website with total honesty and no intention whatsoever of exploiting user privacy. But that's not to say that third party hackers would be so courteous. To provide a service to a web audience, you need to take personal responsibility to ensure that your website is as secure as possible.
 
Make sure that your web database, if you're using one, is protected and sufficient user privileges are employed. You should change your master password regularly for any FTP client or administration login which allows access to the back-end of your site.
 
Security considerations should be pondered right the way back to the coding phase of your website. Make sure that you use sufficient user authentication and that your entire website has undergone a thorough examination before you release it for retail use.
 
Your carefully constructed HTML pages are liable to become corrupted, especially if you use dynamic web design. With the increased concern of hacking and malicious users, always keep regular backups of your core files and databases. A mySQL or Access database can be somewhat large to download, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
 
One of the most common hindrances to web design is often out of your hands completely. Most designers have experienced the painstaking frustration of a lousy server that spends more time down than it does hosting a site. When you seek out a host for your website, be sure to research in to the potential companies.
 
You don't want server downtime to force your web users elsewhere. Free hosting is available on a widespread basis, but the benefits of paid servers are obvious. There are some great providers of cheap web hosting if you keep your eyes peeled. GoDaddy offers an incredible amount of space and a free domain with most of their orders, which is obviously a plus.
 
You should also be aware of revolving technology standards when you design your site. Don't use beta-phase technologies until a full public release is available. The last thing you want to do is code your website in a brand new programming language, only to discover later that the release contains bugs and your website isn't quite as accessible as you'd originally hoped.
 
Stick to stable programming languages and consult the w3 Consortium website for the latest upgrades to code specifications. It may seem like a hassle at first, but the rewards of using supported technology far outweigh the extra hours of converting your site across.
 
If you have a website which relies on lots of external links to provide a service to the users, make sure that you check them on a regular basis!
 
External links can become defunct, or be moved at any given time. If you're going to link to external content, have the courtesy of ensuring that the links are directing to the right places. This means testing your website every couple of weeks and correcting expired links where necessary.
 
Finally, we move on to one of the hardest problems that you'll face as a web developer. How can we prevent user activity from drying up over time?
 
The lifetime of a website, in most cases, is extremely short. Rapidly improving technology, along with static content, make it incredibly hard to sustain a website over a significant amount of time. This problem is accentuated if you have no interactive features to lure a user back. Community forums from vBulletin or Invision Power can be put to great use to retain user activity; but they're not always appropriate for the theme of a website.
 
If you're stuck with static content, try to stay up to date with your website theme. Don't be under the assumption that a web design is a design for life. Most successful websites are constantly being tweaked with fresh touches added to the interface.
 
If you find that your user activity is drying up, be prepared to act and overhaul your website. Whether it's with several pages of added content, or a complete redesign, you'll need to do something to give your site a fresh appeal.
 
It would be foolish to believe that a web design today will be good enough for tomorrow. As web developers, we must appreciate the constantly evolving technology. Appreciate that you'll have to stay in touch with the art of web design, if you want your site to remain in touch with its audience.

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One of the most important processes to be undergone before a website can be publicly unveiled is the usability testing phase. If you're running a commercial website, this is a crucial technique to master and one which unfortunately, isn't particularly enjoyable.
 
What is usability testing? And perhaps, as you might be wondering, why isn't the testing carried out by the actual users?
 
Usability testing is simply the method by which we determine areas where a website may not be functioning correctly.
 
The World Wide Web is a giant network of information being exchanged across many different platforms. Not every one of those platforms is the same, and as such, a website may operate to differing standards on different computers.
 
One of the most obvious aspects of usability that a developer must learn to consider is the nature of web browsers. While one user might be using Microsoft Internet Explorer, another might be browsing via Mozilla Firefox.
 
There are many browsers on the market but the most popular choices include; Microsoft IE, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, Crazy Browser and Apple Safari.
 
Each web browser is developed to a different optimum of performance. While the general standard for HTML compatibilities and XHTML interpretation remains present on all of them, certain functionality might not. The w3 Consortium regularly reviews its policy for web standards, but you should be aware of the basic differences.
 
When you test the usability of your website, don't take the high route of expecting the rest of the world to employ the same browser as the one you happen to have installed. Usability testing is profession of its own, and to do a good job at it, you should have all of the major browsers installed.
 
If your website operates to the same standard on each platform, congratulations, you're in the successful minority. If it doesn't, what kind of errors are you getting? Certain browsers will render HTML components differently, while others will reject unstable code altogether. Be sure to stay up to date with the revolving web standards at w3, since every browser has to be designed with the consortium's approval before it reaches the mainstream.
 
You'll have to spend a good slice of time evaluating the usability of your website on each browser, and analyzing the core functions. But the fun doesn't stop there. You'll also need to employ usability testing for the absence of scripting technology.
 
Every user has the ability to turn JavaScript off in their browser settings. This is a remarkably scary proposition for a commercial website without both client validation and server-side validation.
 
It's not enough to provide JavaScript alone as the mechanical engine behind ANY aspect of your website. JavaScript is a complimentary technology, and one which not all users will support.
 
If you're going to implement scripting of any kind using variable technology, make sure that you offer an alternative for if the user has JavaScript turned off. There's a simple way to test whether your website is matching the usability requirements. Go to your Internet Tools (the exact location will vary depending on your browser) and disable scripting.
 
If your website still operates, give yourself an even bigger pat on the back, since you're now in an even smaller minority of successful web developers.
 
Another variable to consider is the usage of cookies. You've probably heard of the term, but you might not know what it is exactly. A cookie is a harmless slice of information stored at the user's end, and it can be beneficial for tracking activity across a website.
 
Some websites rely on cookies for instances such as shopping carts and member areas. These are scenarios where information has to be transferred from page to page. If your website is designed like this, you will definitely need to test the usability to determine whether the problems are insurmountable with cookies disabled.
 
If you find that errors are returned with cookies disabled, you need to take action. A surprisingly large number of users deny cookies storage space and thus, you will need to provide either a display message on the homepage issuing a warning to the user that cookies are required to continue; or an alternative method of information parsing. Sessions can be used depending on the capabilities of the browser, and parsing through the URL string is another option.
 
Many commercial websites use what's known as a staging server to run thorough tests on their web applications. These are especially useful if you're committing changes to a database such as mySQL or Access. You don't want to write to the actual database if you're running usability tests, and a staging server acts as a virtual development site to ensure functionality before public release.
 
Error debugging is perhaps the ultimate goal of usability testing and you'll be glad to hear that you're not alone in the field. Many programs come with debugging features. Macromedia Dreamweaver is fantastic for ironing out glitches in the code, and you can even throw your pages through a development processor which will return any stray line that isn't compatible with a certain browser. EditPlus is also a great development suite, and has the added advantage of being free.
 
Usability testing can be immensely frustrating for a developer. Indeed, when you seem to be so close to having that perfect design in place, it can be a real heartbreaker to find that part of your audience are using incompatible web browsers.
 
But despite the inconvenience, usability testing is here for the benefit of all of us. If you want to be reaching the optimum number of potential clients on the web, it's a process that has to be taken seriously
 

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Web graphic design has the ability to frustrate and reward in equal measures. It is the art of communicating to an Internet audience through the style of image and text. It can be as easy or as complicated as you want it to be : so why do so many people get it wrong?
 
Ever since the trend of complex web templates took off, developers have been striving to master the art of graphical interaction on websites. For every proud designer that ever made it, hundreds have failed to make the cut. At least, they would do, if there were an Internet law restricting the use of obscenely poor graphic design.
 
Immensely powerful graphical programs are available on the market. Applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks have revolutionized the way we look at design, and understandably so. The computer world has come a long way since the days of DOS based operating systems and 16 bit GUI.
 
So how does an aspiring web designer mould the perfect formula for his craft? Perhaps the first duty of call should be to address how to utilize BAD graphic design. Avoiding bad habits will save you a lot of time in the long run.
 
You need to have good graphics developing software to equip yourself for the strains of web design. It's thoroughly recommended that you invest in one or more of the popular brands; Adobe Photoshop CS2, Macromedia Fireworks or Jasc's PaintShop Pro.
 
Does it matter which one you choose? Yes and no. Photoshop is, and has been for a while, the leading software for any kind of graphics development. It's an incredibly powerful design tool and better yet, it comes complete with Adobe ImageReady which serves as a useful sister application. Indeed, the Adobe series has produced several notable applications for web designers. Illustrator and InDesign are both worth the investment as well.
 
Fireworks is catching up fast, but one suspects that the recent merging between Macromedia and Adobe will put a dent in Fireworks' chances of taking over as the lead provider.
 
PaintShop Pro serves up its own advantages, but unlike its rivals, it specifically focuses on vector and bitmap editing rather than the general field of web design.
 
Whichever program you end up with, be aware of the fact that good web graphics designers spend a painstaking amount of time honing their craft and exploring the advantages of their design tools.
 
Make sure you spend plenty of time experimenting with the various tools before you even consider plunging in to the murky depths of designing a web template or slicing a layout for coding.
 
It would be impossible to retrace every last designing technique practiced by professionals, but it's important that we touch on the issues that are faced. What are the challenges of designing for the web?
 
To set off on the right track, you absolutely must design with a mind for the browser capabilities and accessibility of your users. When you design images, or use Clip Art for a website, you have to consider the optimized loading times.
 
There's a general rule in graphic design that if an image is relatively photographic, with extremely detailed pixel patterns, it should be saved as a JPEG. This will increase the quality of your image, and preserve it well for the web.
 
However, if you're dealing with vector graphics, shapes and solid objects, you should be saving them in GIF format.
 
What difference does it make, you ask? An image is an image, right?
 
Traditionally, a GIF image is highly compressed and much smaller than a JPEG. This is exactly what a good graphic designer should be looking to implement wherever possible. Optimized download times are extremely important.
 
Clip Art and stock photo websites are widely available on the web and you should stock up on freebies as much as possible. Hey, it's there, so you might as well take advantage of it.
  
As technology progresses, web designers are becoming more and more ambitious with their interfaces and animation is cropping up all over the web. Macromedia Flash is a fantastically diverse tool for creating mini animated videos, and loading them directly on to a page. Of course, remember that not every user has the latest plug-in. For that reason, videos embedded in web pages are still somewhat of a rarity in the global sense.
 
While programs such as Flash, and to a lesser extent ImageReady, are certainly serving their purpose, they have several restrictions. Until all browsers are capable of handling the technology, they can only prosper as a solution to a niche market.
 
Designers have been getting around this stumbling block through other means however, with the client side handling of JavaScript proving a popular choice. Using JavaScript, a developer can produce rollover images and provide a dynamic design with CSS and basic HTML. It certainly isn't as hands-on as Flash or Animator, but most browsers support JavaScript these days and it's therefore a suitable alternative.
 
Aside from choosing a preferred technique and designing your template, you also have to consider the implications of different resolutions and screen sizes. It's a horrible fact of a web designer's life that not every user on the Internet has the same output on a screen. Some ancient browsers are still hovering on 640 x 400 resolutions, while others are taking up the entire office wall with incredible 1600 x 1200 outputs.
 
What does this mean for you and your design? It means that you have to choose a size for your web templates that isn't going to alienate a large percentage of your potential visitors.
 
The most popular resolution is 1024 x 780, and thus, you should be gearing your website towards those specifications. It's possible to design a website compatible to every resolution by using table widths and stretching graphics accordingly. Unfortunately, and more often than not, somebody has to miss out. And usually it's those 640 x 400 stragglers.
 
Over time, you'll discover that the greatest pain of a web designer isn't in finding the right fonts or getting the perfect color scheme. It's actually the bother of fitting it all together.
 
Creating web graphics and creating web templates are two entirely different crafts and you'll need a knowledgeable background of HTML and basic developing standards before you master the art. Don't let that stop you.
 
At the bottom of every great designer's rich portfolio of creations, you'll always find a scrappy heap of MS Paint bound garbage. Don't be put off by the idea of your first graphics designs being unusable. Graphical work is perhaps the finest example in the scope of web design where practice really does make perfect.
 
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Long before the first advanced Graphical User Interface (GUI) was created, the Internet was a network of minimal functionality and basic display. Text was displayed on its own, and the scope for interactive, or indeed, graphical design, was extremely limited.
 
Fortunately, times have moved on and we're now at a stage where web users will not only expect a good interface design, but they'll demand one. It goes without saying that an efficient user interface design is paramount to a successful website.
 
The Internet is not a pretty environment if you strip away the bare bones and examine the protocol mechanics. To cover the technicalities, we use graphical interfaces to navigate websites, and get from A to B. These are simply instances where text, images and specific actions are made available to the end user, allowing them to interact with the web. Site interactivity is a crucial factor for any would-be designer, and you need to understand that without a working interface, every last visitor that your website receives is going to waste.
 
A user interface can be created through a variety of tools. If you're feeling brave, you can design an entirely table-driven interface in Notepad (or any basic HTML editor). You don't have to include graphics in an interface design, but it's very commonplace. For example, users are finding it increasingly possible to design an interface through Macromedia Flash. While this throws up a whole set of accessibility issues, it can look extremely initiative, if you have the plug-ins required to host it.
 
Information architecture plays an important role in your interface system. What good is a website that hosts information that the user doesn't want? You should have a solid understanding of the audience that you're targeting with your website, and cater the interface to their needs. Navigation plotting is a priority and you should have a clear outline of links to assist the users in navigating the site.
 
There's nothing worse than an interface that lacks navigation consistency. A user shouldn't face the problem of visiting one page and subsequently finding that the entire list of links has changed and they're in a completely different realm. Information architecture relates closely to navigation in the sense that your users should always know where they are, and how they can access any part of the site.
 
A good way to counter poor interface design is by ensuring that a hyperlink to every essential area of your website is displayed on every page. Don't make your audience search for the needle in a haystack of misleading links. This raises the issue of overcrowded navigation systems. There's no greater sin than presenting your user with a sea of options and expecting them to figure where their next destination should be.
 
A good navigation system needs to incorporate categories, and possibly graphic themes to differentiate separate areas of the site. Don't flood your site with bold imagery if its only purpose is to look beautiful. Simple and initiative interfaces are the direction you should be heading in.
 
You will need to carry out a great deal of usability testing to ensure that your interface is multi-platform compatible across different browsers. You have to be careful since Microsoft Internet Explore doesn't necessarily render HTML tables in the same fashion as Mozilla Firefox.
 
Each browser has a slightly different specification for displaying functions such as borders, spacers and table alignment. You need to go through and test your interface with each browser to ensure that you're not alienating a large portion of your audience.
 
Did you know that websites which "discriminate" against those with disabilities by not providing full accessibility are breaking the law? Consider the implications of using JavaScript and Flash without consideration to those who use alternative methods of browsing the Internet. While it would be ridiculous to design an interface with your target audience being the blind, or the partially sighted, that's not to say that you should forget about them completely.
 
There have been several cases of commercial websites being taken down due to a failure to comply with w3 Consortium accessibility standards.
 
When you put your interface together, make sure that you use a minimal number of external links. In some cases, this can be unavoidable with advertisers paying for space on your page. But external links are out of your hands and they can be somewhat distracting to the user who probably doesn't want to be taken on a detour of the Internet to reach a second destination.
 
Don't make the fatal mistake of opening external links in the same window. Any link for an outside party should be targeted to _BLANK. Targeting retains your audience, and separates your interface from somebody else's disasterpiece.
 
Above all else, strive to ensure that your interface is consistent with a clear header, a clear reference to the user's current location (a tiny site map with arrows in tree view does the trick), and a set of core links that remain present throughout the site.
 
Keep your background tables easy on the eye by using light colors with a dark text. Black interfaces should be avoided unless essential to the theme of the site. Your main content pane should be distinguished and obvious when the page loads. And on the subject of loading, you MUST remember to optimize your interface images. Don't leave your users waiting seconds on end for some fancy design to appear. Simplicity is the key.
 
If every web interface design was the same, our jobs as designers would be mundane and pointless. It's the scope for creativity that can make interface design one of the most rewarding aspects of web developing. But be aware that as in all aspects of developing, your personal pride should not get in the way of the end user's browsing ease. A good user interface is one which users can actually use. Don't forget it.

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The systematic way of saving data in e-mails so that they can be easily accessed later is known as e-mail archiving. Earlier companies had to rely on the end-users maintaining their own individual e-mail archives. But today's compliance legislation and legal discovery rules has made it necessary for IT departments of companies to maintain e-mail archives in such a way that a particular mail can be found within minutes.

Email archiving can be said to be an IT application wherein the email server manages the email messages of the company. The server records all email messages whether outgoing or incoming in a central database and this is what enables them to be accessed when the need may arise later on. There may be a need to search for certain historical emails because of some legally required internal investigation, and in such a situation, thousands of emails can be easily searched. It is done by the search tools that are embedded in the archiving system of the email. And of course finding past emails may also help in running the business from time to time.

Why archive emails?

Employees in e-commerce must access emails to manage and close sales. These employees, along with many others, often have to store their emails for a very long time, but in some organizations it is mandatory that all emails that are more than 90 days old must be deleted. Getting rid of them is not ideal because e-mails might win the company a law case. And an email that was sent from the company outside might still be there even when the company itself has deleted it.

An email archiving solution can enhance the performance of the email server and also the efficiency of the storage – this is done by getting rid of the attachments and the emails themselves from a messaging server that is based on the policies that have been decided upon by the administrator. There is no need to worry because the email and also the attachment remains archived and can be accessed by the email client existing applications.

IT departments use policy based e-mail archiving software applications that help them to maintain large e-mail archives and also to free up server space. These applications deal with indexing, accessing logos and search capabilities .A life cycle management component is also included; it acts as a sort of traffic inspector in regard to the mails that are coming to company and acts on the basis of rules set up by the administrator. The rules classify the e-mails that need to be archived; it also sends the emails to the most economical and efficient storage media, and it also automatically deletes e-mails which are no longer required.

Many people wrongly believe that email archiving only needs the intervention of the IT department, which has to either purchase or develop an in-house email archiving system. But in reality for an e-mail archiving system to be successful it needs the Legal, the HR and IT department to work in unison.

The legal department needs to set down the parameters on which the archiving system will be based, namely what needs to be recorded and for how long, the terms and conditions that the stored data would be subjected to, who will have access to this data, etc.

The HR department involves the hiring of the people who would have the responsibility of the archiving system. This department also decides how often and when the archiving system needs to be run.

The IT department's task is to set up the infrastructure (including hardware and software support), systems and procedures as well as recruiting and training personnel to oversee the system. The department is involved with the infrastructure, whether developing the system in-house or purchasing the suitable one and then setting it up. Training the people who would be in charge of the system is also a responsibility of this department.

And lastly there is the system itself, the hardware, the software application, backup systems, disaster management etc.

Email archiving solutions archives email content in 1 of 2 ways. One method captures emails straight from the application itself. The others method captures the email while it is moving through the agent that is installed at the network gateway.

The many reasons why companies need to archive emails:

• Archiving emails lets users have almost an unlimited capacity in their inboxes and thus they can easily receive hundreds of emails. Plus they can also easily retrieve any email.
• This helps in offloading data from a production server and this leads to enhanced storage and performance efficiency, and it also preserves access to the end users.
• This allows the company to retain data for regulatory, litigation and business needs. Legal professionals can easily search the emails that have been archived.

But at a higher level there are mainly two main factors that make email archiving necessary:

• For being a part of storage activities and messaging infrastructure
• As a legal business request and for an essential compliance

Finding the appropriate vendor is important to get your archiving solution and implementing it. There are a few such vendors that offer such an archiving stand alone solution or which comes with other offerings.