If you are a busy bride and need to send out a lot of correspondence related to your wedding, you can download free return address labels from our website. Each of the wedding address labels has wedding related clipart images like flowers, hearts, wedding bands, bells and wedding cake on them.

Here’s one sample:

These address labels are Microsoft Word templates so to use them you need to have a copy of the Microsoft Word program. After downloading the template from our website to your computer, open the Word template document up. Replace the sample address information included in the template and replace this information with your own return address information. Print the labels out using Avery Laser Printer labels #5260. That’s too easy!

View our wedding return address labels.

Enjoy!

Gina   

 Content © 2008 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

Have you ever been on a webmaster forum and someone was writing about MFA sites and wonder what that is? Well, MFA is the abbreviation for “Made for Adsense”. The MFA site owner has joined the Google Adsense or other affiliate program and earns revenue for their website when their website visitors clicks on their ads. The MFA site owner doesn’t care about the visitor experience or visitor loyalty-they don’t care if they visit the website again. They are more concerned with getting clicks so that they can earn the most money possible. The MFA site owner places numerous ads on a page that has no real content with only ads to click on. This is against the Google Adsense Terms Of Service but still some web site owners still do this. Eventually Google will ban the website owner for not following the rules. The little money you earn is not worth loosing your Adsense Account so I suggest you don’t follow this path.

If you plan to start your own website but don’t know where to begin, follow
these 5 simple steps that will have you well on your way to having your website
designed.

1.  Know the purpose of your website i.e. it will sell t-shirts, It will
advertise my business by providing information about my business, my business
hours, services offered, etc.

2.  Purchase a domain name for the website. This is important, as you want to
make sure your domain name is available. A second choice is ok but a first
choice is always better. You can also purchase web hosting at this point.

3.  Decide on what types of technology will be required for your website.

HTML Website - a static starter website with only text and image content
pages. An example would be an informational brochure type website. This type of
website might have pages for about us, products, services, and contact us.

Ecommerce Website - if your website sells products you’ll also need a way to
accept payments online. View our recommendations.

Database Driven Website Applications - if your website will require any type of programming or interactivity with your sites visitors it will most likely require PHP
programming. Examples of programmed websites include visitor login sites, dating
sites, download sites, etc.

4.  Draft out on paper what pages the website should contain. If your website
is Ecommerce (sell something) you’ll need to decide on your web stores
categories.

5.  Type up the text for each of the content pages. If your website is an
ecommerce website you’ll need to put together a listing of your products with
product titles, descriptions, prices and photos.

By following these simple steps you’ll be well on your way to starting your
own website.

Next you can decide whether you will hire a web designer, such as Hoover Web Design to design your website for you or if you will do it yourself. If you want to do it yourself but lack website design experience, use a website builder.

Enjoy!

Gina   

Content © 2008 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

This is a short article that covers rewriting articles  to create unique content that you have created manually or using article rewriting software to rewrite your articles automatically for you.

Submitting articles to article submission websites is a great way to promote your website. Examples of article submission websites are http://www.findarticles.com/, http://www.ezinearticles.com/, and http://www.articlesbase.com/. Everyone that downloads your free articles and displays these articles on their website will be linking back to you at your website.

As you know, more links you have to your website will increase your website’s popularity, page rank and potentially your websites traffic. This all sounds great in theory, but you should be worried about the Duplicate Content Filter. Not familiar with the Duplicate Content Filter? Well, most search engines, including Google, has a duplicate content filter which kicks out web pages that are duplicate or very similar from their search engine index.

How do you combat this? If you do submit articles to article submission websites make sure the copy of your article that is displayed on your website is unique from the articles that you are distributing through the article submission websites. To rewrite your articles manually, be sure to modify the words, change the paragraphs around and such but still get your point across. When rewriting the article you have to make sure it makes sense to it’s readers or it will be of no value.

If you want to use a reliable rewrite article tool or rewrite article software, be sure that the article rewriter tool that you use doesn’t make the words sound silly. Most article rewriting software that simply uses a thesaurus doesn’t work too well. Your choice of article rewriting software will need to analyze your article’s content and automatically rewrite your article understandably with a similar but different meaning. This isn’t an easy task so choose wisely your article rewriter software.

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2008 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

I’m sure you’ve heard all the horror stories. One of your friends hired a website designer to design a website for them and was not happy with the results to say the least. But more than that they have horrific tales to tell.  Long story short, the website designer took their money and delivered an unusable website if a website at all.

Being a web designer myself I’ve heard lots of stories from my clients who have been burned by their website designer…or so they say. Yes, there are unscrupulous website designers out there, but in many cases the problem between the website designer and the client is not due to unhonesty but due to a lack of communication between the client and the website designer.

Let me give you my take on this. Here’s an example of a website design horror story in the making. A client asks for a quote on a website. The professional website designer asks questions to see what the clients needs are and how they want the website to function.  The designer follows up with the client in writing on what the project will entail.

The client is on board with the cost and the project scope so they send in their deposit. The designer begins work on the clients website and then the client decides they want to add some additional programming features that they neglected to tell the designer about. Or maybe the client didn’t explain how a particular part of the website should function. The website designer has specifically let the client know that if they change the scope of the project they might incur additional fees and delays in completion time based on what the changes are.  That would seem to be only fair. Unfortunately, some clients don’t see it this way. Now the designer is on their way to becoming the Star in a website design horror story.

Being a website designer these situations are inevitable and we have to deal with them. Most web design clients aren’t versed in website design or they’d do the website themselves. They don’t know what’s involved in changes to their sites design or functioning. They think everything is easy. In website development it rarely is. The “simplest change” could result in added hours of programming or redoing the customers website over.

If you are a customer looking to get what you want out of a website, here are some simple tips that will help you avoid being on the other end of a website design horror story:
 
·  Tell your web designer exactly how you want your site to function. I.e. if you want 1,000 pictures to be on your website and each picture clickable to a larger image let the designer know. Provide an example if you can.
 
·  Be very detailed with your future website needs so that the web designer will know if any programming, flash programming, logo design, or graphics design work is required and can quote you an accurate price quote. Remember no detail is too small. This ensures you get what you want.
 
·  Don’t ask for a website mimicking a celebrity website for $200. Surprisingly, this happens a lot.  A potential client might ask for a celebrity website like Madonna, Carrie Underwood, Jay Z, etc. and claim their budget is $200. That’s not realistic and you know that’s not going to happen. None of those celebrities paid any where near $200 for their website and neither will you if you want one like them. If you have a small budget you have only two options: 1)  do it yourself or 2)  use a web template.

·  Don’t hide information from your web designer thinking you’ll leave it out and tell them later on to get a cheaper quote. Your designer will probably not like this and might not do the additional work. Any changes in design, function or layout most likely will incur additional fees.
 
·  Don’t ask for a website that you know is very complex and expect to get it for dirt-cheap. For example don’t ask for a website like Amazon.com for around $500 bucks. You might be able to pull it off with an offshore website design firm, but remember you get what you pay for. The price might be cheap but it will cost you more in the long run to fix the programming errors, missing functions, broken links and language errors. If you believe in your idea for a website you should pay the money on the front end to get it done right.  Don’t look for a bargain, look for the website designer you think will get the job done right on the front end for the least expensive price.
 
·  Communicate a lot with your web designer…be it phone or email to make sure you are both on the same page.
 
·  Check out the designer’s website. Always check the designer’s portfolio and review the websites that they have designed. They should have many links to external websites that they have designed. Check the website for spelling errors, check their Google Page rank (the higher the number the better) and Google their name to see what comes up. If you see excessive bad press, that’s a red flag to not use the design firm. true, you can’t really believe everything you read online, but many negative comments about a web design firm is not a good sign. Not worth the risk.
 
·  To protect yourself, follow up all phone conversations with emails detailing what was discussed so that there is written record of the conversation. Your designer should be doing this too.
 
·  If a disagreement arises, always have an open mind and be willing to compromise. It’s in your best interest to have the website finished or you may loose your time and money invested and have to start over from scratch with another website designer. Be calm and don’t shoot off angry emails or threaten the website designer…this could shut down the lines of communication and you’ll both loose.

Good luck with your website project and I hope you get what you want.

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2008 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

If you want to get a bunch of friends and family together and are throwing a retro 50’s Party you can find free 50’s party invitations templates on this website.

The 50’s party invitations have vector illustrations of 1950’s scenes like juke boxes, rock-n-roll, records, sock hops, white t-shirts with pants rolled up and more. The party invitation page also gives you tips on the clothing worn at the time period and dances that were popular. There will be six 50’s party invitations to choose from. I’ve added one now and the rest will be added shortly. Here’s a sneak peek of the party invitations:

To use these free 50’s party printable invitations are very easy to use. Simply open up the party invitation PDF file in your web browser, print them out with your home printer and fold them in half. Fold them once more to create a single 50’s party invitation. Now all that’s left to do is jot down with an ink pen who’s giving the party, the date, time, location and RSVP information for your 50’s party.

This should take you all of 5 minutes and you’ll have a professional do it yourself party invitation to give out to your friends and family.

If you are throwing a theme party from another decade we also have a nice selection of 20’s party invitations, 60’s party invitations, 70’s party invitations, 80’s party invitations, and 90’s party invitations.

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2008 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

I’ve noticed some odd fonts being displayed in my Adsense Ads lately. Here’s an example:

This font looks like Comic Sans MS. It doesn’t really look good on my website but for a personal website it might be ok.

I wonder if this means we will have the option to choose the fonts that are displayed in our Adsense Ads. Hopefully so. I definitely won’t use Comic Sans MS on my site.

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2008 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

If you are starting a new website you may wonder if you should choose a Flash website or a HTML website.  Whichever type of website you choose should depend on the type of website you are creating. Flash websites are really sleek looking and the animations are really cool to look at. If you’re going for a visually stimulating experience for your website’s users, choose a Flash website. HTML websites, while are not as flashy as Flash websites are easier to create, maintain, easier to navigate, more functional and easier to optimize for search engines.

If your website’s theme is of a personal nature like maybe a Model, Musician, Actress or Singer’s website, a Flash website is a good choice. On the other hand if your website has a Business theme you might want to think twice before creating your website in Flash.

Flash web sites may look fancy, but for functionality and practical use, I’ll never understand why anyone would bother. HTML websites are so much easier for the beginner to maintain. It’s not a good thing when a beginning website owner wants to have his website built in Flash expecting to maintain the website themselves. They know they don’t know how to use the Flash program but for whatever reason they think they can just pick it up and effectively maintain their website. Sadly, their bubble is burst right away.  Maintaining a HTML website is easier because you can use a HTML Editor to write the HTML code for you. Flash doesn’t have a editor to help you out. You have to know the Flash Actionscript Programming Language inside and out to maintain a Flash website. I would also like to add that HTML website’s are a lot easier to optimize for search engines because the web page is full of content rich keywords that search engines can spider and add to it’s search engine index.

The other day I visited a website which had an external link to it’s photo gallery. The gallery link did not open in a new window. I checked out the photo gallery and hit the back button to go back to the website. This made me have to see the website Flash intro all over again. Of course, the intro was long and there was no way to skip past it to get back to the site’s navigation inside of the Flash movie. That was annoying and made me want to leave the site. You don’t want your site visitors to be annoyed and leave your website. Flash websites can take longer to load, especially on dialup connections and on older computers. Some people really do hang on to old computers.

If you feel like you have to have a Flash website be smart about it. Better still it is better to make only parts of it Flash. For example add a sleek flash photo gallery inside of your HTML website or maybe a Flash header file. If you add a Flash Intro to your website, make sure there is a skip button.

If you choose to have a 100% Flash website, along with it you choose to not be as effective on search engines and you may annoy some of your website’s visitors. It’s the balance of choice vs. consequence.

Gina

Content © 2008 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

If you’ve submitted your website through Google’s Webmaster Tools you’ll see an option under the Tools Menu for “Set Crawl Rate”. The Crawl Rate determines how often Google’s robots (the Googlebot) will visit your website to spider your web pages and add them into it’s search engine index. The options are Slow, Normal and Fast. The higher the crawl rate the better because you want Google to find your new pages quickly and have them searchable by Internet surfers.

For most websites the Crawl Rate is automatically set at “Normal”. If the Normal Rate is a strain on your website’s servers you can change this to Slower to have your site crawled less.

Today when I looked at my Webmaster Tools, I had a yellow note that said I could select a Faster Crawl rate for my website if I wanted to.

Of course I wanted to. Who wouldn’t want Google to crawl their website faster? I’ve heard that with the Faster Crawl Rate pages are added nearly instantly to Google’s index. After I selected the Faster Crawl Rate option another note said my site would be on a Fast Crawl rate for the next 90 days. Cool!

So I guess we’ll see how it goes for the next 90 days.

My current crawl rate is about 1,800 max pages per day. Here’s the current graph. I can’t wait to see what that will change to.

As you can tell, I was very happy to see that I had this option available to me. It tells me that the Googlebot noticed that I’ve been working hard at providing unique content on my website and I’m being rewarded by having my pages crawled faster. I’m very excited about the possibility of my pages being indexed as soon as I upload them to the Internet. I’ve experienced this only one time before and that was with some Father’s Day Printable Greeting cards. Each time I added a new card to the page I saw that the googlebot picked up on it and indexed the new info immediately.

If you want to increase your websites crawl rate, you can add fresh and unique content to your website as often as possible. The Googlebot will notice it and reward you as well.

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2008 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

This article is from our guest blogger Malcolm Sheppard.

The web is bringing people together! It’s creating communities! That’s all true, but let’s flip that premise to boost our insight. The web also separates people. From search to target site, surfers can confine their browsing to very specific areas of interest. Unless you can get your foot in the door of a popular news aggregator you can’t rely on a broadcast marketing model to snag interest from an undifferentiated audience. You have to appeal to the niche. Here are five tips that work well for us at GILL Media.

Know Your Client’s Business: Do your research. Wring as much information out of your clients as possible. A niche audience knows their stuff, so if your copy looks less than authentic they’ll know right away. Generally speaking, our content development process starts with extensive research into the niche, followed by client approvals and adjustments. Sometimes a marketer’s “outsider” status is an asset because some clients are so engrossed in their fields they don’t realize how specialized they are, and don’t know how to properly define what they do. Use that to your advantage, but always get the facts right.

Design Niche Pages: You can read about that right in this blog. It’s a great article, so there’s not much to add except to note that a niche page is not necessarily the same as a landing page. Your target audience usually knows something about the business, so you’ve got to include novel, relevant content to bring in the leads. In all likelihood, these people have already seen the competition and are at the stage where they’re trying to weigh them against each other – and you.

Identify Vertical Entry Points: Marketing blogger Pete Caputa posits that verticalization is the only strategy left for marketers. That might be an overly strong statement, but it is true that search is getting more specialized and personal. While broad keyword searches will never die, services like Findlaw are pushing up in one direction, while Google’s Personalized Search will eventually serve as a custom funnels for browsers to “drop” through. The web will eventually hook personalized searches up with vertical portals so seamlessly that browsers may never have to look at anything they aren’t interested in again. Get your clients in the vertical browsing path. Genuine niche marketing portals (not link farms) do this in one direction, but for the other, getting in someone’s personal search path requires the same keyword research as before. Now, however, you have to take those long tail terms a bit more seriously.

Identify Communities: Use keyword searches and browsing to find the premiere communities for each niche. A warning, though: The more specialized the niche, the more likely your searches are going to be compromised by SEO “noise.” The most obvious sign of this is when a search with a small number of SERPS displays a lot of scraped and keyword stuffed pages. Look for active, spam-free web forums and hub blogs that feature many links from other sites and bloggers within the niche. You’ll find keyword inspirations and might be able to participate in these communities on behalf of the client, or point him or her there to get involved. Always adhere to community rules.

Get Prosumers on Board: Prosumers are powerful assets. They’re either respected community members or amateur producers within your client’s niche. In communities, their blog and form posts are frequent and filled with positive feedback. Encourage your clients to give them special access to products and services (early releases, freebies) and solicit their honest feedback. Prosumers generally want to like your client, but they don’t want to feel like marketing mouthpieces. Make sure you’ve written coherent copy they can mine for talking points, but don’t try to directly control their statements. Receptive prosumers can be powerful allies, especially since they post things that would be considered spam if you did it.

Don’t think of these five steps as pillars, but real “steps:” ways to drill down from refining a client’s web presence to managing the interactive elements of niche marketing. Done correctly, your plan should fill every level of the niche, from the first search steps to the most specific community discussions. Give it a shot.

About the Author: Malcolm Sheppard is a writer and researcher for GILL Media, an internet marketing firm with offices in Canada and the US. Check out the company’s blog at http://www.gill-media.com/InternetMarketingBlog.