Here is a list of the 5 best webmaster forums that I continue to refer to when seeking information about websites, SEO, marketing, etc.; all of these forums are great communities! Be sure to bookmark them if you’re not doing so already!

The Top Webmaster Forums:

• DigitalPoint Forums
• SitePoint Forums
• V7 Network Webmaster Forums
• Webmaster-Talk Forums
• WebProWorld

If you have any other great ones you’d like to share, please do so below.

What webmaster resources do you use most?

Tags: Chats and Forums, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SitePoint, Web Design and Development, Webmaster

I’ve had several clients of mine over the years host their websites with a company called Lunarpages. For the most part, their experience has been a good one . . . cheap hosting, reasonable uptime . . . the basics.

Unfortunately, I’ve been informed that Lunarpages has dropped the ball, bigtime!

According to my client, Charles Feldman of TheFeldmanBlog:

I had this once before where the site was down, remember, and I left messages on their 24 hour line but they never got back to me…same this time. And last time, when I called during the week to complain, I , of course, got a voicemail for the manager who also never returned the call.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but that’s not the type of service I’m looking for in a host. Sadly, it seems, reality doesn’t match up with the company’s promises. The following comes directly from the front page of the Lunarpages website:

There are thousands of web hosting services so why choose Lunarpages? When comparing web hosts it is important not only to consider a price difference of a dollar or two. Although we offer more data transfer and storage resources then you will likely ever utilize, we prefer to focus on something much more important, reliable web hosting and great customer service. Above all we take care of you personally and attentively with 24-7 award winning customer support. It’s all about making sure your website and email remain online and you are happy. It’s not just technical support to us; it’s about caring for people since 1998. Phone us any time and become part of the rapidly growing Lunarpages web hosting family. We are rated #1 in the world. Call us now and find out why.

Notice the text in bold (we bolded it to highlight) . . . doesn’t really match what I’m hearing from my client. The 24 hour customer support seems to be nothing but a voicemail system . . . WOW that’s revolutionary 24 hour support! I’ve called several times over the past 24 hours – particularly late night and early morning, and have not gotten a person on the phone. Isn’t that what 24-7 customer service means to you?

Hopefully someone at the company reads this and works to rectify the situation . . . either way, I thought it was important to let you all know so you can make an informed decision when considering this host.

Photo Credit: Control Panel by Tim Dorr

Tags: hosting, lunarpages, webhost, website host

I’m always excited when a month comes to a close because it presents me with the opportunity to look back at what happened last month. This is especially important because I have the opportunity to see how I’m doing in attaining my goals for my sites. In particular, I’m most interested in traffic and financial trends.

Traffic Analysis
In looking at site traffic every month, I go immediately to my AWStats server software to learn how succcessful I’ve been. . .

• Did each of my sites see growth?
• What kind of growth was it?
• Did unique users increase or decrease?
• Did page views go up?
• Were there any major strains on my bandwidth (i.e. was anyone hotlinking to images on my sites)?
• What keywords were most successful in drawing traffic?
• Were there any keywords that fell in the rankings?
• How did the sites fare on the different search engines?
• Did I start to make progress on any one of them?
• Did I begin to lose ground on another?

I haven’t been especially active in tracking the number of sites linking in, the PR of my pages, or my Alexa rankings, because I don’t find them to be anything I can really control. Since I focus mainly on organic growth for my sites, I let the links come instead of undertaking a true link building program. With quality content, the links come in naturally. PR is really meaningless IMO, and Alexa rankings are extremely inaccurate. I have two different sites . . . one typically will rank on a daily basis similarly to another one, yet one of the sites gets between 10 and 20 times the traffic of the other. The one with less traffic that ranks well on Alexa is popular with webmasters and others online – people who likely have the Alexa toolbar or other tools installed on their browsers. It amazes me that this has become one of the standards for monitoring traffic because it is simply so innaccurate.

In terms of blogs, I’ll also look at numbers from places like Feedburner (# of subscribers to my feeds), Technorati (# of sites linking in), and MyBlogLog (number of people who have joined my community) in addition to the basic numbers.

May was a good month! I saw growth in all areas and by all metrics. I can’t really ask for anything else, especially considering I no longer run any keyword advertising programs. I’ll just say that I’m serving many millions of page views a month across the board!

Financial Analysis
The first of each month is also important because it allows me to reflect upon the financial status of my company over the past month. Between direct advertisers, ad networks, and affiliate programs, I draw income from various sources. In any typical month I spend a good amount of my time focused on how I can increase revenues from one or all of these sources. Because of this, I’ve been able to create a company that has seen steady growth financially since inception (with a few minor flat spots).

May was a good month and I’m looking forward to see what we can pull off in June! I guess we’ll find out next month!

I just wanted to remind everyone to periodically review all the links they keep on their site. Whether you are a blogger with a blogroll full of links or if you’re just another webmaster who shares resources with others like I do with BiggerPockets® Real Estate Investing Community, you should always do a periodic review of the links on your site.

I realize that this is just another obvious comment, but while the internet will go on “forever,” many websites don’t last even close to that long. I wish I had some cool stat on how often sites disappear, but it happens pretty often. A site you use daily this week may be gone next week.

Keeping dead links on your site does not bring confidence to your users. It shows them that you are not keeping up with your site. This is never a good sign for anyone. If your users believe that you do not care enough to maintain and keep to date your links, then they might just want to find another site that does.

Many times the obvious tip is one of the most important:

Get Rid of those Dead Links on Your Website Today!

One of the most frustrating thing back when I was a newbie at building websites was figuring out what that little icon was called next to a website’s URL. This little tidbit of information eluded me for the longest time, but I finally figured it out. Back in the day (wow I sound old!) there weren’t 1,000 tutorials to help with everything like that.

A Favicon is the Small Icon that Shows Up Next to Your Web Address in Your Browser

Favicons (a.k.a. favorites icons) help promote your brand and create an identity for your website. They help when you’ve got multiple tabs open on your browser and you can’t read the entire site title, and they are just great for adding a little something extra to your website’s identity.

How Do You Create a Favicon and What is Favicon.ico?

There are tons of online tools to help you create a favicon. My favorite is Dynamic Drive’s Free Favicon Generator. Here’s what you do to set up your website’s favicon:

1. Go to the Favicon Generator and upload a file from your computer that you want to become your favicon.
2. Press the “Create Icon” button and then the “Download Favicon” button.
3. The favicon will now be saved to your desktop with the filename favicon.ico
4. Using FTP or some other method of transferring files to your website, upload the favicon.ico file to the /public_html/ directory of your website’s server.
5. Check to be sure the file was properly uploaded by visiting in your browser http://www.your-site.com/favicon.ico (of course, your-site.com will be replaced with the name of your actual site name)
6. Finally, edit the main page of your site (the index.html file) and place in the head the following:
   

   <LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”favicon.ico”>

Your favicon will now be live. Sometimes it takes a little while to start seeing it, but don’t worry, it’s there!

Do Favicons Work in Subdomains?

They do! All you need to do is follow the steps above for the index.html file located in your subdomains and you’ll have a functional favicon for that subdomain.

I hope this helps some people figure out what to do. I know I would have been really happy to read this a decade ago!

Maybe it isn’t the first rule, but it is definitely important to remember:

Always Have a Contact Page or Some Other Method for Readers to Reach You!

Now, many of you are going to say how obvious this is, but it is clearly not too obvious. Imagine this – I’ve spent the past day or so trying to reach out to some real estate bloggers to get their feedback on a post I wrote on my real estate investing blog. What I discovered was actually pretty sad. Only somewhere around 1/3 of the blogs I visited on this list of 750 real estate blogs had some means of contacting the blogger. Of the ones who did, only a few had their information front and center, with an email link or phone number. I actually had to jump through hoops to find the contact info of some others.

This is particularly sad because the reason most of these people are blogging is to get business for themselves. How do they expect potential clients to reach them if they don’t have a contact page? You never know who is going to befriend you, and it just a good idea to make yourself available . . .

Without my contact page, I would not be in touch with several entrepreneurs who reached out to me.

Maybe it is not the first rule of blogging, but it an important one . . . if you haven’t done so already, get your contact page/info on your blog ASAP.

Note: This also applies for any other legitimate web-business. A phone number is okay, but an email address is imperative. If you don’t have contact info of some sort on your site, I’m not going to take you seriously, and I’m definitely not going to buy anything from your site.

Last week, I wrote an article about good customer service and used the example of how EzineArticles.com failed to live up to their promise to contact me about a situation. I am happy to report that I have finally been contacted by the company. The interesting thing is that the company broke another cardinal rule, research first and accuse later.

Don’t Assume You’ve got All The Facts Until You Do!

Here is the content of the email I received:

Hi Joshua,

Your account is suspended because your article “Hiring the Right
Property Manager for Your Rental/Income Property” has content that is
exactly the same as this piece:

http://www.wcrt.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1526

…and is not attributed to you. We require that all submitted
articles be either original articles written by you or articles to
which you have an exclusive right to. Please keep in mind that to
have an exclusive right to an article, only your name may be
associated with it. If you purchased this article as part of a pack
or received it from a distributor/affiliate site, so have others so
you do not have an exclusive right to it.

Can you please explain the above? What is the source of your article?

Abby

http://EzineArticles.com/

A few things . . . first, wouldn’t it make more sense if they had contacted me last year when I submitted the article with their inquiry? Instead, I was flatly banned WITH NO EXPLANATION. They assumed I was the one who was not the original author instead of doing 1 of 2 things: 1) contacting me asking me to prove I am the author or 2) doing 1 minute of research to see if I was the author. A google search of the first line of the article in question reveals the truth:

A little article I wrote back in October of 2005 called: Things to Consider when Interviewing Property Management Companies comes up immediately. It would be very clear to see that the duplicated article that they were talking about was written January 30, 2006, 3 months later.

In addition, the email assumes that I was the one committing the copyright infringement, when in fact it was someone from another site doing it. I was guilty until proven innovent! This is certainly not the way to run a service.

What Can Be Learned Here?

• Don’t assume that you have all the facts until you actually do.
• Choose your words wisely. In tone and content, it apears as though the people at EZineArticles are accusing me of stealing someone else’s articles. Accusing someone is not the way to make them happy customers/users.
• If you say you’re going to respond to someone in 24 hours, then do it.
• Don’t get on my bad side! (just kidding . . . kind of . . . )

Further Implications of The Situation
I am somewhat thankful for the whole controversy for one reason: I was able to discover that one of the users of my company, BiggerPockets’s forums was stealing our materials and posting them as his own. As a result, I emailed him asking him to immediately remove the article from his site, and warned him that I would contact his host if he failed to comply. We shall see what happens . . . back to my 7 Steps on How to Protect Your Website’s Copyright When Someone Steals Your Content.