In the last few years, Americans’ use of the Internet and computers has grown substantially. The rate of growth of Internet use in the United States is currently two million new Internet users per month. There is no question that the Internet is now a mainstream medium. In 2009, the US Internet population will grow to nearly 200 million users, or 65% of the total population.

More than half of the nation is now online. Americans are going online to conduct an expanding range of activities.

The Internet has become a tool that is accessible to and adopted by Americans in communities across the nation. Approximately two million more people become Internet users every month, and over half of the population is now online. Those who have been the least traditional users -people of lower income levels, lower education levels, or the elderly – are among the fastest adopters of this new technology. As a result, we are more and more becoming a nation online: a nation that can take advantage of the information resources provided by the Internet, as well as a nation developing the technical skills to compete in our global economy.

Stay in touch with faraway family and friends by sharing photos and news, and having a message board for easy communication. A website is very cost effective. Compare the return-on-investment (ROI) of radio commercials or printed flyers over a year, to the ROI of a well designed and operated website.

Web pages are easily changeable and updated with new information

Show off your hobby, sport, or crafts It can reduce communication time and the cost of information delivery. The questions you answer most frequently can be found by your customers without interrupting your other tasks. You can also offer customers the ability to view animated presentations, download how-to-do-it videos, brochures and catalogs that can be costly to print and/or deliver. It is likely that your competitors are already on the internet. That means your products and services will not even be considered by visitors to these websites. A website offers constant advertising 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Worldwide exposure Your contact information (even how and when you prefer to be contacted) is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Increased customer base Customers perceive that you are a state of the art company. When they see your URL on business cards, letterhead, press releases, brochures, commercials, newspaper ads, printed flyers, yellow pages ads, product packaging, and any other promotional materials that you offer.

Respond immediately to requests for information You would like to expand into foreign marketplaces. How much do you have to spend on travel to other countries to create relationships with foreign customers or go-betweens. Don’t speak French, Spanish, Italian, etc. Automatic translations are available and some are free! Your products or services are highly customizable. Online order forms can handle errors and even explain the options you wish to offer.

How many times have you clicked on a link that looked interesting, only to have to wait and wait for the page you had hoped to see to appear? Did you continue to wait? Most people won’t.

Or maybe you have a high-speed connection and rarely (if ever) have to wait for a web page to load. Many people don’t.

In spite of the widespread popularity of high-speed internet access, most people are still on dial-up, and a great many internet users with a dial-up connection have slow connections.

What this means to you, in plain terms, is that you can have the most beautifully designed and informative site, but if it doesn’t load within a reasonable amount of time (and internet surfers are notoriously impatient), which is right around 8-10 seconds, your beautiful, informative web site will not be seen by the majority of internet users who click on a link that will take them there. They won’t wait.

Keeping the above in mind, I’ll keep your file size reasonable with various methods; Images are fully optimized to maintain high quality while minimizing file sizes, allowing fast download. Overall file sizes of individual pages are kept to a minimum by employing external files whenever possible and optimized images always, so your pages will load quickly and your visitors will stay long enough to see what your website is all about.

What’s the difference between a lonely, ignored website and a popular, well visited website? A website that can be found.

Search engines are constantly updating their databases in order to keep on top of the game with search results that are up-to-date and relevant. There are a great many websites that are added each day, hundreds of thousands, as well as dropped.

With all this activity, how do the search engines possible keep up? It’s easy-they use “spiders”, which is a common term for the mathematical algorithms search engines use to calculate and rank your website. In order to be indexed by the search engines, their spiders have to

– Know your website exists
– Find your website “tasty”

I know how to make this happen for you. Through trial and error over the years, I’ve discovered what type of “food” the spiders like, and how to lead them to it.

This is not something that I’m going to charge you extra for, but an integral part of the methods employed in creating each page of your website. There are many web design companies who will charge you extra for this, but why? You’re being ripped off by being charged extra. But that’s just my humble opinion and in any event, not the way I work. You can rest assured, your website will be indexed quickly. I can’t guarantee you a top ten placement, (although it’s happened) but then, neither can the huge SEO firms, regardless of what they may promise you.

(This information is from and more can be found at the Spambot Beware site)

Spam is another term for unsolicited commercial email (UCE). Most people with an account on the Internet are familiar with spam – it usually is advertising “spamware” (software for spammers), pornography, shady MLM (multi-level marketing) deals, and other scams. Spam was originally used to describe unwanted, off-topic, excessive posting on usenet, but has come to include email as well. For the purposes of this site, spam is email that is sent to other people without being requested. Note that this does not have to be a commercial message – the content of the spam is irrelevant. Here are some other sites that explain the spam problem in much more detail:

What is a spammer?

A spammer, simply, is a person who sends spam. Usually, these are people who think that they are going to get rich on the Internet by flooding it with messages and hoping for a response. They often do get a response. However, the response is from outraged people who receive the spam and complain to the ISP of the spammer, which usually gets the spammers dial-in accounts, email addresses, and/or web pages cancelled.

How do spammers get email addresses?

Spammers generally gather email addresses in the following ways:
Using spambots to scour web pages
This is the main focus of this page. Spambots basically follow links and grab email addresses from “mailto” links, storing them as they go along. See the section on spambots below.

Using spambots that scour usenet

If you’ve been on usenet (aka newsgroups) you know the deal: you have to hide your email address or you will be swamped with spam. Not only do you have to disguise it in the body of your post, but in your newsreader client settings as well. Spambots love to grab those email messages. Some of the techniques described here can be used, or adapted to, usenet posting.

Specialized spambots

Some spambots are more specifically designed to scour certain places, such as a local bulletin boards, chatrooms on AOL, etc. These will not really be discussed as they are really too specialized to worry about. Usually it is up to the company running a service to discourage or prevent use, not the users.

Buying lists from other spammers or companies

You may have seen the spam – “Over 1 million email addresses on a CD!” Not just CDs but on ftp sites, web pages, etc. Once your email is harvested, it may get copied around for years. The only good news is that they want to charge other people for their hard work, so it does usually cost them some money to buy the addresses. This site will help prevent your email from ever getting on a CD in the first place.

From a mailing list

This is a particularly despicable way. Spammers join a mailing list, then gather the email addresses of the members, either from a list of the members provided by the mailing list software, or from people as they post. It’s hard to avoid this, short of not joining the list. On some mailing lists, you can “lurk”, that is, hide your existence so that nobody knows that you are on the list. Until you decide to post, that is.

By people themselves

Commonly seen as part of a spam message: “To stop any future mailings, just reply to this message with a subject of REMOVE”.
Yeah, right. If you reply to the spammer, you accomplish three things:
– You verify an email address for the spammer as valid.
– You verify to the spammer that you actually read the mail, and took the time to reply to it.
– You demonstrate your lack of anti-spam knowledge to the spammer, by falling for this trick.

All of this means that you are more likely to receive more spam by replying. This scheme is also known as a opt-out mailing list and is a terrible alternative to opt-in.

Other ways

There are probably some other ways, but this list covers most of the common ones. Web pages and usenet are the main ways.

What is a spambot?

A Spambot is a piece of software, a program that someone has written. Which language it was written in does not matter, but most are probably written in C for speed and portability reasons. A spambot should not be confused with regular robots, also known as spiders or web-crawlers.
A spambot starts out on a web page. It scans the page for two things: hyperlinks and email addresses. It stores the email addresses to use as targets for spam, and follows each hyperlink to a new page, starting the process all over. Spambots also usually do not follow the guidelines in the robots.txt file, like civilized robots are supposed to. Most spambots are a part of a larger program, allowing them to send out the spam to email addresses as it find them. Others merely store the email addresses for later use.

Spambots vary in their intelligence and sophistication, but even the smartest can be fairly easily fooled by the tricks on this site. The simplest spambot would simply find mailto links, and follow each hyperlink as it comes up, until it reaches a dead end. The smartest ones can recognize email addresses in many forms, recognize dead links, avoid certain types of email addresses (such as *.edu and *.gov) and track many pages at once.

Registering Your Domain Name A domain name is a name which you select that people will use to find you on the internet, such as “uppervalley.biz”. You can search for the availability of the domain name you have in mind, and if it is not available, you will be offered available alternatives, or you can try another domain name.

Cost to Register a Domain Name

Domain names can be registered for under $10.00 per year and more. For example, you can usually register your domain name with us for $9.95 per year. There is really no need to pay $35.00 per year for a domain name registration. And here’s something really cool…if you also need web hosting (or you just want BETTER web hosting), you can get your domain name free! Already have a domain name? Well, that’s ok, because if you sign up with Seacoast Media Partners for hosting, just tell us that you’d like us to transfer your domain name – we’ll update it for you for free as long as your website is hosted with us!

Technically Speaking

The Domain Name System (DNS) associates various sorts of information with so-called domain names; most importantly, it serves as the “phone book” for the Internet: it translates human-readable computer hostnames, e.g. angelsaffordablewebdesign.com, into the IP addresses that networking equipment needs for delivering information. It also stores other information such as the list of mail exchange servers that accept e-mail for a given domain. In providing a worldwide keyword-based redirection service, DNS is an essential component of contemporary Internet use.

The most basic use of DNS is to translate hostnames to IP addresses. It is in very simple terms like a phone book. For example, if you want to know the internet address of angelsaffordablewebdesign.com, DNS can be used to tell you it’s 66.225.201.223. DNS also has other important uses.

Pre-eminently, the DNS makes it possible to assign Internet destinations to the human organization or concern they represent, independently of the physical routing hierarchy represented by the numerical IP address. Because of this, hyperlinks and Internet contact information can remain the same, whatever the current IP routing arrangements may be, and can take a human-readable form (such as “angelsaffordablewebdesign.com”) which is rather easier to remember than an IP address (such as 66.225.201.223). People take advantage of this when they recite meaningful URLs and e-mail addresses without caring how the machine will actually locate them.

I’ve  listed on this page some tools that will be useful to you when planning your web site, and other tools that are useful for various other tasks. They are free to use online, you don’t have to download anything. Please check back from time to time, as I’m sure to be adding more periodically.

• Search Term Suggestion Shows keywords and frequency searched on Overture (Yahoo/MSN) last month.
• Keyword Suggestion Keyword searches from Overture and Wordtracker (Wordtracker displays singular/plural & correct order).
• Browsershots Get free screenshots of your website, as viewed on various browsers.
• Character Counter This is a helpful tool if you need to limit your text to a specific character count, such as when you’re submitting your resource for consideration on another website! It’s fast, free and easy!
• Wondering what your screen resolution is? Go to What Is My Screen Resolution and find out right away!
• Likewise, you can go to the following website and it will display your system information…in case you wanted to know: What’s My Browser

If you are looking for Joomla! Web Design in Portsmouth NH, Dover NH, White River Junction VT area then Seacoast Media Partners is the web design solution for you!

Want to be prompted before accepting cookies or completely disable accepting cookies? Here’s how:

Explorer 4.x

• Select “View | Internet Options…” from the main menu.
• Change to the “Security” tab.
• Select “Custom” and click “Settings…”
• Scroll down to the “Security” section.
• To enable: Select “Always accept cookies”
  To disable: Select “Disable all cookie use”
  To get a prompt: Select “Prompt before accepting cookies”
• Click “OK”

Explorer 5.x

• Select “Tools | Internet Options…” from the main menu.
• Change to the “Security” tab
• Click “Custom Level…”
• Scroll down to the “Cookies” section.
• To enable: Set “Allow cookie that are stored on your computer” to “Enable” Set “Allow per-session cookies” to “Enable”
  To disable: Set “Allow cookie that are stored on your computer” to “Disable” Set “Allow per-session cookies” to “Disable”
  To get a prompt: Set “Allow cookie that are stored on your computer” to “Prompt” Set “Allow per-session cookies” to “Prompt”
• Click “OK”

Navigator 3.x

• Select “Options | Network Preferences…” from the main menu.
• Change to the “Protocols” tab.
• Navigator 3.x does not have an option to completely disable accepting cookies.
  To get a prompt: Check “Accepting a Cookie” under “Show an Alert Before”
• Click “OK”

Communicator 4.x

• Select “Edit | Preferences…” from the main menu.
• Select “Advanced”
• To enable: Select “Accept all cookies” or “Accept only cookies that get sent back to the originating server”
  To disable: Select “Disable cookie”
  To get a prompt: Check “Warn me before accepting a cookie” and select “Accept all cookies” or “Accept only cookies that get sent back to the originating server”
• Click “OK”

If you are looking for Web Design or Computer Help in Portsmouth NH, Dover NH, White River Junction VT area then Seacoast Media Partners is the web design solution for you!