The popular web hosting company, Hostgator, currently have a special promotion code running to allow you to get a 20% discount on your order.

This website is hosted with Hostgator (check the whois to view nameservers) and we also have a review on our main site, the article is titled good web hosting and pretty much tells you the story from the title! For us they have been very reliable, good uptime, fast customer support responses, and excellent prices means great value for money.

To take advantage of this offer – it is only available until November 1st – simply enter the word ‘AUTUMN’ when you go to checkout on their website, it is very easy to do and means instant savings!

Although prices are in dollars don’t be put off if you are in another region as they are a global business, we are in the UK ourselves. They accept major payment methods such as credit cards, paypal, check and even cash so it is easy to pay.

When I first started webmastering I was a bit scared of getting feedback. The fear of someone telling me “your web design is absolutely rubbish” was the main reason, I would take the critiscm personally (looking back I have no idea why!). So I would just do my designs so that I think they looked ok and then that would be that.

In recent times I found the true value of getting feedback, as well as the different types of feedback you can get and also how to provoke the most feedback.

Types Of Feedback
Rather than just asking “what do you think of my site?”, it is good to be specific on areas you are most concerned about. So try asking simply about your color scheme of dark purple/light blue/silver, or whatever yours is. Other things to ask about are; navigation bar, logo, ad placements or font format.

Recently I did a post asking for people to test the load speed of my website. You can some software to test load speed but I always find when you ask actual people it varies a fair bit. So this is always a good one to ask.

How To Provoke Most Feedback
From looking at forums I’ve noticed the posts that get the least action are normally the “what do you think on my website?” questions. Other users think they are going to have to visit the site and comment on just about everything. Here are a few ways to provoke the most feedback.

• Ask a specific question about your web design EG “do you like my logo? how would you change it?”
• Be short in your post. No point rambling on about how you came to your current situation. Just politely ask the question and you’re done.
• Say you won’t need much time. In my post title I often put “What do you think about my Blah Blah – 30 seconds of your time please”. If a user knows your thread is only going to take him 30 seconds to read, look at your site & respond he will be more likely to view your thread.
• Put the nature of your website in your title EG “Please look at the color scheme on my health website”. I have found this leads other owners of health websites to be much more inclined to look at your site.
• Do follow up posts. Once you’ve started the thread don’t just leave it for others to post. When you have a few replies add your own reply saying thanks for the feedback, good points made etc, then ask for more. Keeps bumping the thread and makes it look more popular.
• Offer green rep in return for feedback. This may encourage posters who only care about reputation/post count but one way to encourage replies is to say you will give a green rep to those who reply.

Feedback is very important because it helps you improve your website and gives you an idea of what the majority of people think of your website, rather than just yourself. Best of all feedback can be received absolutely free and for minimal effort – win, win situation!

Image: Nirak

We are now approaching the end of 2008, the perfect time to reflect on how your last 12 months have gone for your online business. No matter what type of business you run it is vital to reflect back.

By looking back I don’t mean just thinking “hmmm, yeah that was good”, I mean getting yourself comfortable, no interuptions, going into deep thought and getting on a long train of thought.

Looking back can make you feel proud of achievements, understand why some things may have gone badly, realise why things have happened like they have, lay to rest bad things and also help you decide what you want to achieve next year.

So when you can take time out and have a good think, it will be more beneficial than you think.

Image credit: a_of_doom

A big part of webmastering is email; sending it, receiving it and keeping space in your inbox. If you miss important emails then it can be costly, very costly if the sender has a time limit on a reply from you!

You may think it sounds stupid that you might miss an email, but this is exactly what happened to me. I had put my email address on a website in plain text, soon all the nasty bots came along and saved my email address so they could spam the hell out of it. At the time I didn’t realise this sort of thing went on!

How To Stop It
To stop it the best option is to get some email spam protection, it only costs a few dollars per month and can save you a hell of a lot of time. I used to hate it when I would login to my website and be prepared for literally hundreds of messages, 95% of them being spam! With an email spam blocker you don’t have to worry about spam.

You may spend a few dollars a month protecting yourself from the spammers but the time you will save means you can spend longer working on important things – like increasing profits!

Perimetec Review
If you do want to get protected for only a few dollars per month you should check out Perimetec and their Barracuda spam security services. They provide a powerful hosted solution which stops email threats before they reach your network. Products offered include: Spam Firewall, Web Filter, IM Firewall, Load Balancer, Message Archiver and Web Application Controllers.

Perimetec are partnered with Barracuda networks and are trusted by over 50,000 companies. On their website they have a free trial, and after that you can protect your mailbox for as little as $2.50 per month! On their website they also have a ’spam cost calculator’, some interesting articles worth reading and some free anti-spam tips.

You can read more info on the Perimetec website which is super easy to use. Simply navigate to the information pages using the and left side and top navigation bars.

A fast website is important for users, so you obviously want your website to load as quickly as possible. For this a good web host is required. Having a web host with loads of diskspace and bandwidth can help your web design.

You should be comparing your website to your competition at all times, and not just in design terms. In google’s result pages you will notice they tell you the size of each webpage (just after the URL below the description in green text). If your size is bigger than all the others it may not matter, what matters is how quickly the webpage loads.

You can see using various tools (like meta tag analysers) how quickly a webpage loads so you can compare your own to others.

Often webmasters cut back on as much coding as possible to speed up their website, which is very good practice and something you should get in the habit of doing. However if there are a few features you really want to have that will slow your website down but actually improve the users experience then you should try and get the best web hosting possible to allow the host to provide the extra uummppphh you require!

For further reading you should check out this post about why cheap hosting can actually cost you money and learn how best to research about host providers.

Wordpress is brilliant, if you aren’t already using it you should seriously consider it for your next website. Even if you aren’t setting up a blog it works great as a CMS. Not only is it SEO friendly (with the help of plugins) and super easy to use and maintain, but it is also great for the design side!

Many designers create wordpress templates and give them away free, in return you just have to leave a link to their website at the bottom. Great you say, this happens for static websites as well! Very true, but in my experience the wordpress templates are of a much higher quality and there are thousands available.

Installing them is the easiest thing ever! All you do is upload the template to a folder called ‘wp-content’ in your hosting, then login to your members area and activate it – bing – your website instantly has a swish new design! If you want a bespoke design there are plenty of companies/individuals who specialise in wordpress templates. Or if you know CSS and HTML you can create your own masterpiece yourself!

So if you aren’t already using wordpress then download it now and install it on your next website. This blog uses a wordpress template given away for free, not bad hey!

Tinkering with CSS often gets on my nerves, often because I can’t achieve the effect I want to! Trying to sort one tiny little thing out for an hour isn’t fun, and you are left feeling like you haven’t actually achieved anything when you’ve finally sorted the problem out.

Aside from the little moments like this web design is no doubt one of the best bits about webmastering. It allows you to stand out, and make impressive changes to your website within just a few days, or even hours! You can get creative, test different colors, different fonts and different images. You can see what features other webmasters integrate into their design and draw inspiration from it.

The point of this post? Well, a lot of webmastering jobs are boring, repetitive, uninspiring and basically things you don’t want to do. So when your time comes to work on your design make sure you enjoy it! Take your time so you get it spot on as it is a vitally important part of a successful website!