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Lil' Kim and more stars given side-eye in recent years.

In an upcoming webinar on April 2, learn tips on site design, SEO, monetization, and mobile optimization.

Our next webinar will introduce you to the ABCs of eCommerce.

Starting a new website can be a bit overwhelming but we’re here to help! Beginning Monday, April 20th, WordPress.com will host free, 30-minute live webinars to cover those initial questions that come up as you start to build your website. Each day will cover a different topic, all designed to …

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Hey Everyone! I've been hard at work for the last month or so on doing a small update to the website. The most obvious thing you'll see is it's gotten a bit of a facelift which will hopefully make it a little easier to use. I've also tried to streamline things a bit so we don't have as much server strain when Hamlet puts out a new page.

Additionally, we've put in a new fanart section that features a whole bunch of awesome Starfighter fanart done by sexy Starfighter fans from around the world!

The games section is also improved, sporting games to some of our favorite awesomely talented artists.

If you don't watch HamletMachine on DeviantArt, check out the extras section too, where I've added a bunch of her recent Starfighter drawings.

Wow, ok that's it for now I swear! -Thisbe

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; it's an XML based content format for distributing things like news, headlines, content, etc. These are popular because instead of relying on them to bookmark your site and return later, their RSS reader keeps your site fresh by showing them your latest posts as a simple headline. So every time that you add content such as a blog post or article they get to see the update, plus a direct link to that post.

If you're brand new ot creating websites or blogs you may feel a little like a deer caught in the headlights of a truck when it comes to figuring out what things your site needs. There are thousands of things to choose from such as GIF files, videos, widgets, slide shows etc. But before you start getting carried away adding these things you need to add the basics, call them your core fundamentals if you will. Without these your site won't be as effective as what it could be, and won't attract the traffic that you want.

It seems there are literally thousands of sites that promise to promote your website or blog…..but for a price. The best known one is Google Adwords where you pay so many cents per click depending on the competition of the Keywords you want top rankings in. And while this will get your website to the top page in Google not everyone has the budget to fork out hundreds of dollars in advertising. But you can promote your site for free using some of these methods. Most of these are going to take time to build up before you start noticing huge amounts of traffic, but they will work if your willing to put the time in.

If you’re new to websites or blogs you might not have heard of “pinging your site”. Using ping is another free seo tool in your arsenal to help get your site indexed and more traffic. Basically it works like this, a ping is basically the equiviant of you shouting at the top of your lungs “Hey over here”. It sends a notice to the search engines and directories that you have content in need of indexing, or that content has been updated.

Using twitter is a great way to promote your website or blog and increase traffic. If your new to twitter and never used it before it works like this. You get 140 characters to write a short statement or advertisement depending on what you’re using the site for. Most people tweet simple things like there not feeling well or changes in their social life. All that’s fine but you want to use it to promote your website, so here are some simple things to optimize your tweets to get the maximum traffic return.

Traffic we all want it, so how do you get it? You’ve picked your topic, and you got your site up so how do you get visitors to your site. Getting website traffic can be frustrating at the very least, a major agonizing pain at the worst. Here are some tips on how to get website traffic.

When it comes to how to get website traffic, not all traffic types are equal and hold the same value. Many who are new to websites or blogs think that all traffic is one and the same. And while the number of visits might look good you have to actually look at the numbers to see the real story behind those numbers. This is one reason why using sites like Google Analytics or other traffic stat sites is important when it comes to unstanding what kind of traffic your getting. To understand if the traffic you’re getting is good or not you have to know what types of traffic are out there, they are 1. Social Traffic 2. Paid Traffic 3. Word Of Mouth 4. Search Traffic 5. Return Traffic

First off what is a favicon? If you look at the browser bar on this webpage just before the sites URL address is a small picture. When it comes to helping make your website or blog stand out there a huge benefit. They allow your readers to find your web pages easily if they have many browser windows and tabs open at once. If a visitor bookmarks your site in their favourites list the standard “e” icon is replaced by your picture helping your link stand out from the rest so they can return to visit. And they can also be used to help brand your site. Who would have thought a tiny 16x16 picture could help that much.

When it comes to ways you can increase traffic to your website there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to get more traffic. Depending on your website, the content or products you’re trying to get viewed, and the amount of time you can invest each day on your site, not all of those hundreds or ways are going to be as effective. You also want to avoid anything that could be considered “Black Hat SEO” as these types of tricks to increase your traffic may work in the short term, but get your website kicked out of search engine rankings.

When it comes to trying to get your site to rank well on search engines many focus on trying to rank for the most popular keywords, the ones with high volumes of traffic with the hope that hundreds or thousands of people every day visit their site. The reality is that chasing after the most popular keywords will be almost impossible to rank for. If your website or blog is brand new this will be a fight you can’t win, the large companies that rank number one for these types of keywords spend fortunes to dominate those positions.

Do people hate your website? This is a question you should ask yourself if your finding your site isn’t performing the way you would like it to. If your finding that people aren’t visiting your site for very long or aren’t coming back at all here are 10 things you should look at that could be killing your website traffic. This isn’t to bash your site or trash talk or brag about how much better my site is over yours (there are things I have to fix) this is just to point out some things that could be hurting how it performs.

How many times has this happened to you when searching online? You find several links to sites that look like they have the information you’re looking for. However when you go to those sites you find only a few ads and nothing but a couple lines of useless text. (If you’re lucky to even find that) So you go back and look around some more and find another link that takes you to another site like exactly like the first one,..............well maybe the color is different. After a bit more searching and running across several more websites like this, you either luck out or find the information you’re looking for, or get pissed off and give up. If this happened to you I don’t need to tell you how frustrating MFA websites are.

So you’ve decided you want to make a website, perhaps for a business or something more personal. If you’re new to building websites you might by scratching your head and wondering what’s the best option. for you. And while there are plenty of site builders to choose from such as Wix, or Weebly for example, one place you should check out is Webstarts website builder.........

So you’ve created your website, now all you have to is launch it and just sit back and let the hordes of traffic come to you………right? Wrong just because you slapped a few pages together doesn’t mean your website is ready for the world. There are some very important things to do before you launch your website to give it the best possible chance. Using a pre-launch checklist before you launch your website is your opportunity to fix any problems and add any last minute changes before that all important launch. In this post I’ll give you a list of what to do before you launch your website...........

Yesterday Webstarts.com suffered a major crash resulting in the entire system going down for over 24 hours. That’s why if you tried to visit this site yesterday you couldn’t go on. Fortunately everything appears to be up and running again. Webstarts found and CEO Adam Barger issued this apology on FaceBook..................

Traffic, if you have a website or a blog you want to get website traffic and as much of it as possible. It doesn’t matter if your site is to make money, to connect with others, for a business, or display your love for all things kittens, if you’re a site owner you want traffic. So how do you go about getting website traffic? Here is a list I put together of 100 different things you can do to get traffic to your website. These aren’t in any particular order of importance and not all of them will work for each site the same way. Some sites will have better results with some of these options then others..................

Regardless of your niche and what you use your website or blog for, SEO plays a huge role in getting your site noticed online. SEO though isn’t just optimizing your site by using some tricks and writing lots of content. There are also lots of free seo tools available online you can use to where your website stands, and what needs to be fixed or improved. Here is a list of 20 of what I think are some of the best free seo tools available.............

It’s no secret that having great content on your site is the corner stone to getting visitors and keeping them interested. But what happens when you can’t come up with any ideas? It can be frustrating trying to come up with something you hope your visitors will like on a regular schedule if your mind is blank. Fortunate there are lots of places to find content ideas for your website. Here is a list of 11 places to look for website content ideas..................

So your website loads slower then old people Fu%@ing. Nobody likes a slow website, not the search bots, and especially not people who will leave rather then wait for a page that takes forever to load, let’s be honest our attention span is getting shorter all the time. On top of that Google’s recent Panda update looks at a sites load time to determine where it’s going to site in search results, either way you look at it your website loading time is a big deal............ So how do you speed up your website loading time? Here’s a list of 10 tips for optimizing your website to load faster.........

Back in the day if you wanted your website or blog to get indexed fast by the search engines, you would submit it to website directories. Are they still worth submitting to today? For the most part yes. Submitting your site to website directories can still be an effective way at building back links that’ll help you rank higher in search results and should be part of your overall SEO strategy. This is especially true for new websites and blogs were getting back links from other webmasters can be difficult..........................

Remember all the details about the periodic table from high school chemistry?  Yeah, me neither.  Don’t worry – we will get through this together. Let’s…

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When Sam Goree and his colleagues came across articles and blog posts that claim or ask that websites today look very similar to each other, they were intrigued. Unfortunately, since these articles didn’t have an empirical study to back them up, they ran a test to determine whether this claim had any truth to it, and if so, the reason behind it.

We ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites.

And what did they find out? Websites, indeed, were becoming very similar.

More details about this study over at Fast Company.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: 200degrees/ Pixabay)

Show Notes for Episode 4: Subscribe to the Internet Musician Podcast with iTunes: As a musician, you need a good website.  You know that. But you really don’t need to spend years trying to understand the technology. You also don’t want to spend tons of time working on your site without knowing if you’re doing things […]

Do you want to know how to get more traffic to your blog? Well, I am going to reveal the advantages of press releases to boost traffic to a website. Once you know this your business will explode!

I was designing a website for a client. Over time, the client requested lots of little changes to the content. One weird result of this, though, is that any photos that included women were slowly removed.

Client: Could you remove that person in this photo?

Me: Okay, but that means there are now no more women on the website?

Client: That’s fine, we’re not marketing just for women. We’re not sexist!

Find out how you can make your website mobile-ready by simply modifying its Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Microsoft's free web editor is a sophisticated WYSIWYG web editor with many features usually only found in commercial offerings (and no wonder, since it was previously something you had to buy). This tutorial series takes you through the process of designing a fully functional multi-page website with Expression Web.

The entire BlueGriffon Tutorial has been updated for the version 3 series of BlueGriffon. Those thinking of using it to create a website can find the complete series online.

What if someone else owns the domain on which your website sits? For example, as it was in the case of one of my visitors, someone may have bought the domain for you, and retained ownership of it. Or perhaps your website is on a free web host, or a blog host, and you are using the web address given to you by them. This article deals with how you can solve that problem (or potential problem).

For the sake of completeness (and also because a visitor requested it), the Layout Wizard has been updated to support one column websites as well. As a result, it can now create one, two and three column websites (depending on which you prefer). The generated web page is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. There are no advertisements, and nothing you enter into the Wizard is recorded anywhere. And it's free.

A visitor asked me if there was a way to stop her web server from showing a directory listing of the folders on her site, without having to create a .htaccess file. This article gives 2 alternative solutions.

I was asked by a visitor how he could create rounded buttons. This article shows you how to add round corners to your buttons and, if that's what you really want, insert buttons that are completely circular.

I was asked by a visitor how he could move his website from Dreamweaver to the free BlueGriffon web editor. This article answers that question.

By default, anyone can place your website in a frame or iframe, for the purposes of clickjacking, altering your content, or putting advertisements on your page. This article shows you how to prevent this, using both the older backward-compatible method as well as the modern officially-recommended one.

Find out how you can insert a video into your web page with the free Microsoft Expression Web editor. The video, in this case, will be placed on your website itself (ie, self-hosted) and not on a video sharing site.

This article answers a question asked by a visitor on whether he can simply update all the URLs on his website to "https" without obtaining an SSL certificate, and, if not, why.

If you are thinking of designing a website, whether a business or hobby site, read How to Create a Website. The article has been updated with the latest developments on the Internet.