This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of web design degrees (http://www.webdesignschoolsguide.com/). She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com. We've all come across it at some time or the other and accepted it at face value, that is, at least until the actual reality proves to be otherwise. Web hosts who claim an uptime of 99.99 percent are putting up those numbers on their advertisements because they know how important uptime is to a vast majority of sites that jostle for space and attention on the World Wide Web. No one goes so far as to explain how they came up with all those nines on the number, but they do know that if they end up keeping your site down for too long or one too many times, they'll end up losing an existing customer and many more potential ones. And that's because it's an age where uptime has taken on more meaning than ever before - with Web 2.0 and social networking sites, blogs and the like taking up oodles of storage space and lots of bandwidth, they cannot afford more than planned, or at the very worst, semi-planned downtime. While the first refers to times your host plans maintenance tasks, periods that are announced well in advance, the second denotes times that important security updates and patches have to be installed, with the time period being announced as soon as possible but not as...

This website offers absolutely stunning free Wordpress templates. This is the designer's own website, not a collection of submitted templates so it is a small collection, but man, they are extremely high quality. Check them out: Wordpress Themes (http://www.freethemelayouts.com/)

I have recently started to use Wordpress for quite a number of my own sites. Wordpress themes are actually quite fun to design - one almost feels that you can do what you like and not have to stick with strictly 'stiff-upper-lip-corporate' designs such as for Joomla, for example. So I designed a quick Wordpress template yesterday, making use of the free vector art available on http://www.bittbox.com/ (http://www.bittbox.com/) (check out the site - lots of free vector art available as well as utilities such as paintbrushes for Photoshop etc - great stuff). I am making the template available for free download here - click on the thumbnail screenshot below. (images/stories/wordpress-templates/grunge-flowers.zip)

There are many tools available to make the Internet Marketer's live easier. Some of these can be positively dangerous in the hands of the wrong person. And no, I am not even talking of black hat SEO, spamming or anything as overtly dangerous like that. There is something available on the market called 'content spinners'. These tools take an existing piece of text, preferrably a Private Label article that you want to change so that the article is more unique, and 'spin' it so that the end result does not resemble the original. Now, sometimes unscrupulous people take other people's content and also try to spin it. This is content that they really do not have any rights over. Luckily for the original author (me), the end result was, well..., less than what they expected it to be. Some kind soul traced this article back to the original one that I wrote, (have no idea how she managed to do that, the feat in itself is worthy of Sherlock Holmes...) and emailed the mangled piece of work back to me. My original article is posted in various article directories, you can read the original article on this link, for example: http://www.articletrader.com/internet/a-hosting-review-can-help-you-find-the-right-web-hosting-provider.html (http://www.articletrader.com/internet/a-hosting-review-can-help-you-find-the-right-web-hosting-provider.html) The same article that was spin doctored can be read below - enjoy!

Jaco van Niekerk is the owner of a website called Benchmarktimetable.com, a website that helps schools create timetables (http://www.benchmarktimetable.com/). We have helped him here and there with technical support on his site (which he built himself), and a couple of months ago he came round for some SEO and Internet Marketing advice. This morning he sent me a reference letter with some statistics of how his site has performed over the past couple months since our conversation. He implemented some of my suggestions and this was the result: Past Now Ranked 25 downwards Google : Position 2 Yahoo : Position 1 MSN : Position 1 Visits 379 4000+ and increasing every month Monthly Google ads Very high A fourth of what it used to be Overall Had to pay a lot to get visitors to my site. 10 times more traffic with more credible visitors. High ads with few visits VERY HAPPY. He wrote: Hi Christine. I thought you might like to know the success I have had after following your SEO advice. Again thanks for share your expertise. You saved me time and money. Jaco www.BenchMarkTimetable.com (http://www.benchmarktimetable.com/)

The most difficult thing in CSS to get right is the layout of your site. Here are a couple of tips dealing just with that. Tip 1 : Clear out the default padding and margin settings before you start working. Different browsers have different default margins so you want to start with a clean slate, so to speak. Use this command: * { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; } to clear all margins. Also note the border, which is set to 0. Please note that if you do this, you will also get rid of the pesky purple border round clickable images, although some people argue that the purple border is neccessary for accessibility and usability. But lots of people do not like the purple border round images, and this is one way that you can get rid of it in one fell swoop. Tip 2 : To center your layout, use a container div to contain all your content. Declare it as follows: #container { margin: 0 auto; width: xyzpx; } There are a couple of points here to take note of. DO NOT declare the width to be 100%. This defeats the whole object since you will just have to declare the sub elements within the container and then center THEM using margin : 0 auto. This is VERY BAD since it means that instead of declaring the central layout once, you will have to declare it in...

...and make it SEO friendly too What with all the fanfare made about generating links and adjusting title tags, it's often very easy to overlook other vital aspects of web marketing. Few of these are more important than good web content on ALL of your pages. This not only influences your search engine ranking as I will explain later, it also just makes your users experience better.

OK, everyone knows that Google recently opened offices in South Africa. Today I went to an event organised by Intoweb (probably the undisputed leaders in South Africa with regards to web design, training and Internet Marketing) where Google presented some of their ideas with regards to search marketing. I say 'some' since on 'some' questions they were remarkably silent...

The Wordpress Theme Viewer (http://themes.wordpress.net) is available again for theme downloads, however, today it was down for a couple of hours.... This drove me to look elsewhere for themes again and I came across the following three sites: Rock-Kitty - Free Wordpress Themes (http://themes.rock-kitty.net): This site is only three months old but already has over 300 themes. Nice thumbnail previews. Not all the themes have live demos but seeing that you can look at the thumbnail it gives you a pretty good indication of the theme already. Another Wordpress theme viewer (http://www.themes.solostream.com/) : No thumbnails, but live previews. Nice 'Web 2.0' style templates, most of them widget ready Another collection of Wordpress Themes (http://idratherbewriting.com/themes/) : Also no thumbnails, just a live demo function.

I will be running an Internet Marketing and SEO course on 29 November 2007 and again on 7 December 2007 in Johannesburg. The course will cover aspects of Internet Marketing from SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to Keyword research to link building and more. To read more about what the course is about and to book, you can click here Internet Marketing Course Details and Booking Form (seo-training-booking.html)