Fixing Your Web Server's MIME Types

If, after putting the above code on your site and uploading your music file, your music does not automatically play in IE, Netscape or Opera, it is possible that your web server is not sending the browser the correct MIME type. In order for the browser to know how to handle the file, your web server needs to be configured to send the correct information about the file. For example, for MIDI files, the web server should send the browser a "Content-Type" header of "audio/midi".
You can find out if your server has been correctly configured by starting up Netscape, invoking the "View" menu and selecting the "Page Info" item on that menu. (I'm referring to version 4.7x of Netscape - the item may be labelled differently on other versions of Netscape.) The MIME type of your music file will be displayed (among other things).
If the MIME type is incorrect, contact your web host to have them fix it. If your website runs on an Apache web server, and your host has configured it to allow you to override its settings using a .htaccess file, you can set up the MIME type yourself. For example, if you have MIDI files with a file extension of ".midi", you might add the following line to your .htaccess file:

AddType audio/midi .midi

If you don't have any existing .htaccess file, you can simply create one using an ASCII text editor and upload it to the top directory of your website. Remember, Microsoft Word and Wordpad are *not* ASCII text editors. Also note that this method only works for Apache servers configured to allow .htaccess overrides. If this is not the case for you (for example, if your site runs on a Windows machine running IIS), you will probably have to get your web host to fix the problem.

Browser Plug-in Problems

Sometimes you may encounter a situation where the embedded code works for you but not for others using the same version of the same browser.
This situation may occur when the person has installed some other software that has replaced the default browser plug-in to handle the music file type. For example, various multimedia players (like QuickTime) replace the browser's default plugins when they are installed. The replacement plugins may not function in quite the same way as the default plugin for the browser, leading to your code not working as expected.
There's probably little you can do to prevent this from happening, short of posting notices everywhere on your site telling people not to install such-and-such a software, which is of course ludicrous. If you insist on putting auto-playing sound files on your web page, my recommendation is that you ensure that your page makes sense whether or not those sounds are played on your visitor's machine. That is, don't auto-play a sound file that provides vital information that the visitor needs to understand your web page - unless of course you also provide a clickable link on the page that allows him to hear the information should his browser not auto play the sound file.
Like many other aspects of coding for the web, putting music on the web requires a certain amount of defensive coding. Even then, there will probably be a percentage of visitors who will not be able to view/hear your site the way you intended.

How to Embed Background Music on Your Web Site

Update: This article was written at a time when Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4 were the browsers used by the majority of people. ("What is Netscape?" you say. My point precisely.) As such, the rest of this page is obsolete. It even talks about a type of music file (midi) that you rarely see on the Internet any more. If your site uses HTML5, you should use the <audio> tag instead. You can find more information about the use of this tag in the audio section of the official web standards site.

The problem with embedding background music is that the different browsers out there have their own methods of implementing embedded music files.
For all versions of Netscape, as well as Internet Explorer ("IE") 3.0 and above, you can use the following code:

<embed src="yourmusicfile.mid" autostart="true" loop="true"
width="2" height="0">
</embed>

The width and height attribute given above causes the player to be invisible. If you do not want it to be invisible, you can specify your own dimensions to suit your site decor.
For Opera and all IE versions, the following code works:

<bgsound src="yourmusicfile.mid" loop="infinite">

As you probably have noticed, IE 3.0 and above support both methods, so you cannot simply put both those tags into your web document in the hope of supporting all browsers. It will work on Netscape and early versions of IE, but the newer versions of IE will recognize both tags, leading to problems when IE tries to load the music file twice.
The workaround that I've seen on some sites, that seems to work for me, is to enclose the BGSOUND tag inside NOEMBED tags, thus preventing IE from interpreting the second tag.

<embed src="yourmusicfile.mid" autostart="true" loop="true"
width="2" height="0">
</embed>
<noembed>
<bgsound src="yourmusicfile.mid" loop="infinite">
</noembed>

This code appears to be compatible with all versions of IE, Netscape and Opera.

Mandatory Items on the Site Navigation Bar

For a commercial site, certain links should be accessible from every page of your website. The easiest way to do this is to place them on your navigation bar. If you don't know what a navigation bar is, take a look at thesitewizard.com. On the top left of every page is a series of buttons which give you access to the main pages of the site. Your navigation bar need not be on the left side as mine is. You can put it at the top, the right or the bottom as well. However, the following items should always be present:

• Products: this is a link to a page listing all your products. If you have too many products to fit into one page, you may want to create category pages that are accessible through the main product page.
• Order Form: this should point to your order form.
• Price List: as mentioned earlier, a price list improves the usability of your site, and ultimately your bottom line.
• Support: you should place a link to a page which provides ways that your customer can contact you.
• About Us: since you are selling things, you should have an "About Us" page that tells your customer about you or your company.

Conclusion

On the Internet, customer service starts with a usable website. How you design your site will determine whether your visitor becomes a paying customer or your competitor's customer.

Allow Your Customers to Browse Your Site in Any Way They Choose

Have you ever encountered a "live" salesperson who drones on and on about a product, giving you little chance to jump in and tell him/her that you have already decided to buy the product? "I'll buy already!" you want to shout, but the guy insists on finishing his tome on the product.

Such a person, in real life, is probably seldom found. However, I have visited many websites that practise this very sales tactic. One characteristic of such websites is that the site has very poor navigational facilities. You cannot easily access other pages on the site except through a sequence of choreographed steps that the author has planned. First you have to read his introduction about the product. Then after a very long exposition on the first page, you are graced with a link at the bottom that takes you to a second page. Again, you have to endure the sermon on the second page before you can find the link to move on. Even if you have already decided to buy the product, you're forced to go through the whole sequence of steps before you can buy the product.

Such websites are reminiscent of the high-pressure sales tactics employed by some salesmen, and give visitors a bad taste. The usability of such sites is low, and the design of the site discourages impulse purchases.

One of the basic rules in selling something on the web is that you should not force your customers to click through many pages before they reach the "Buy" or "Download" button. It is never productive, leaves a bitter taste in some visitors' mouth, and drives off others. Sure, you may convince some people to buy the product after they read it all, but you are also convincing others that you're the sort of person they don't want to do business with. A website is different from a "live" salesman. People can leave any time during your sales pitch. And they do. Most people visiting a site to buy something are not there to read a long exposition. They are there to get a product. Delaying that purchase can only hurt your business. When I say that you need to give a product page with a detailed description about your product, I don't mean that you have to force everyone to read that detailed description before they can buy. Always provide a shortcut to the order form for your visitors

Provide Descriptions and Pictures for Your Products

  realize that the new web designer is beset with contradictory advice about how best to design their site. One set of such conflicting advice is the requirement to be brief and to-the-point so that you can catch that Internet visitor who will only give your web page a few seconds glance before deciding whether to stay or go elsewhere. Contradicting that is the requirement that you describe your products in depth and place pictures of your product, or screenshots if yours is a software product.

The best way to resolve this, I think, is to take a leaf from Amazon.com's book. For every item they list on their search results for a query (they have too many products to have a straightforward "Products" page), they usually have a brief description, a thumbnail picture, the price and a link to buy the item. If this brief description interests you, you can click the link and get a longer description and more information about the product.

A product page for each product, with a long description and pictures of the product, is indispensable. This is particularly so if your product is expensive, or has plenty of competition. Your long description and pictures of what you're selling is what cinches the sale. Potential customers will use the information on that page to decide whether or not to buy the item. They look at the page and compare it with the what is said about your competitor's product. It is thus in your interest to mention all the salient points about your product or service on that page. Think of it as the web equivalent of a salesman promoting a product to a walk-in customer.

An informative and detailed product page is not all you need. You also need to place your "Buy" or "Order" buttons both at the top and the bottom of the product page. If your product page is especially long, spanning many screenfuls, you may also want to consider placing additional buttons somewhere in the middle of the page. Do not force your customers to scroll to the bottom of the page before they can buy the item. You may have suffered countless hours drafting the description of the page. Do not pass the suffering to your customers by requiring them to read it all before they can order your product. Some customers are easily convinced, or they come to your page having already decided to buy. Make it easy for them to get to where they want to go within your site.

Tips For Creating And Uploading Web Pages

1. Creating Your Web Pages

Important Elements On A Web Page

Page Title (<title>) - Page titles are the titles that will appear on top of your pages. They are also important because search engines use them to provide title page information to your visitors on the search results page.

Headings (H1, H2 ... H6) - There are six levels of heading and heading sizes. The most important heading is H1, the second is H2 and so on.

Meta Elements - The two most important meta information is the keyword and description meta tag. Meta elements (or tags as they are sometimes referred to) are used by web designers to embed your web pages with information such as your keywords, author information, and description about your site. These elements are than used by some search engines to identify and catalog your web pages.

Contents

Page Size
The recommended file size for a web page is 30KB to 50KB - keep it smaller if you can. Remember that 80% of web surfers uses 56K modem or less, so keeping your pages small means that these users will not have to wait too long to download their pages.

The suggested content per page is between 200-500 words per page. Most web surfers don't actually read, they scan for useful information. Try not write technical or difficult to read articles. Use lots of bold heading, italics, paragraphs, short sentences, dashes and text breaks - anything to make your articles easier to read. If people see that your pages is loaded with technical information or essay type articles, they'll quickly hit the back button before trying to decipher what it is you are writing.

Graphics
Here are some recommendations for using images on your pages.

• Use thumbnail for images that are larger pictures.

• Reuse the same pictures, navigation icons or banner on your pages whenever possible instead of putting up new images. Images that are reused are downloaded once and stored in the computers temporary memory. Using a large number of different images will slow the download time of your webpages.

• If you want to use background image, make sure that you use Alt tags and title tags to describe you what they are. The alt tag is what gets displayed when a picture is broken or it does not load up at all. The title tag tells the visitor what the image is whenever they move the mouse over a image.

2. Uploading Your Contents

After creating your web pages you're ready to publish them. This process is known as uploading. The most common way to upload your contents is via FTP, the other way is to follow a step-by-step web form which will vary depending on the web hosting service. Once you sign up with a web hosting service and you know where you're going to upload your files to, you will need the following information to successfully upload your files:

• Your username

• Your password

• Your host name that you will need to connect and upload your files to

• Your URL or website address

Make It Easy for Visitor to Check Your Price List

Some websites try to hide the price list for their products. Some of these sites only display the price of the item after you hit the "Buy" or "Order" button, or worse, only after you have created an account on their site. Others have a price list, but bury the link to the price list somewhere deep in their site in a place not easily accessible from the main page or the products page.

I'm not exactly sure what the reason behind this is. Possibly, they think that if the customer does not see the price until they click the "Buy" or "Order" button, they will be more likely to buy the item. This reasoning is fallacious.

There are many types of visitors arriving at your site. Let's take the case of the window shopper. If they see something noteworthy on your site, they may make a note of the price so that they can return later if they want the item at some point in the future. If the price of the item cannot be easily found on your site, do you seriously think that they will thoroughly search the site just to find that elusive price tag? Or do you suppose that such a visitor will click the "Buy" button, just so that they can find the price tag at the end of the process somewhere? Or will they go through the bother of creating an account, revealing their personal particulars, just to find the price of an item?

Like the serious shopper, if they cannot find the price, they will simply go to another site. Remember: this is not a brick and mortar store we're talking about, where you need to take time and put in effort to travel to another store. On the Internet, your competitor is only a click away. And the search engines are more than happy to yield thousands of other sites selling the same type of goods or services as you. I realise that there are some brick and mortar stores (usually small concerns) who think that if they don't put a price tag, the customer has to find out the price from a sales person, who will then have the opportunity to persuade him/her to buy that item. Whether or not that is a good idea for a brick and mortar store (and I can think offhand of some types of customers that you will lose even there), it is a bad idea for a web store.

No matter how you look at it, every customer and potential customer will need to know the price of a product. Even the corporate customer buying for his/her company works to a budget. Making it difficult for your visitor to find the price list is a quick way to drive a potential customer away. As has been observed by many usability experts - the average Internet user has the attention span of a flea. If they can't find what they want within the first few seconds of glancing at your page, they will leave. And your competitors will be more than happy to attend to them in your place.

How to Add Background Music to Your Web Page

If you code your web pages using a text editor (as opposed to using a visual web editor like Dreamweaver), you may be wondering how you might go about adding background music to your web pages. While this is not a question I encounter often at the sitewizard.com , I do get the occasional music aficionado sending me this query, hence this article.

Issues Surrounding Background Music

Before you start, you should be aware that background music that automatically starts playing when a web page is loaded may not be appreciated by a large number of your visitors. Some of them, when greeted with the sudden blaring of music from their speakers, may immediately hit the BACK button of their browsers. This may occur even if you're playing a piece of music that you think is well loved by everyone: remember, there are people who surf the Internet in public libraries, at work, or in the dead of the night when others are asleep. Others may already have their favorite ("favorite" in US English) piece of music playing on their computer speakers, and your auto-playing music file will only cause them to be annoyed.

Even if you are satisfied that your website has the type of target audience that will enjoy your background music, there are alternatives to automatically playing music that you might want to consider. For example, giving visitors a link which they can click to play music would allow you to showcase your music while remaining sensitive to your visitors' preferences. Instructions on how to accomplish this, as well as how to implement autoplaying music, are given below.

Playing Music Only When a Link is Clicked

If you have a music file (such as an MP3 file) that you want played when a visitor clicks a link, put HTML code like the following on your page:

<a href="yourmusicfile.mp3">Play music</a>

Replace the "yourmusicfile.mp3" with the appropriate filename. Note that the above HTML code works for ".wav" and ".mid" files as well (or anything else for that matter).

Seven Easy Ways to Annoy Visitors to Your Website: A Satire

1. Place some (or all of) your content in a small frame and force your visitors to read the content through that window. Don't worry about what constitutes "small" here, since most of the time, even if you create a big frame, it'll be considered too small by most visitors. This trick has a high annoyance value since your visitors have to view the information through that small little box and scroll continuously to see the text while the rest of the browser window is filled with information they don't really want to read at the moment. With this strategy, visitors cannot resize or maximize the window to make their reading more efficient or pleasurable. This method will allow you to frustrate those hapless souls and, as a bonus, make them leave your site.
2. Disable the right click menu of the browser. Nevermind that people need the right click menu for many purposes, and that they can access the same functions through the main menu bar even after you've disabled it. After all, if your aim is to annoy, you might as well make their visit to your site as unpleasant as possible.

• Play background music when they arrive at your page. If that's not enough of an annoyance, make sure you loop the music so that your visitors are plagued by it continuously while they are on your page. If you're feeling particularly sadistic, place automatically-playing music on many (or even all) pages of your site. You don't have to worry about choosing a horrible tune — choose your favourite piece if you like. Since one man's meat is another man's poison, any sort of music tends to annoy most visitors.

1. Make every link on your site open in a new window when your visitor clicks on it. That is, put a target="_blank" to every link. This will annoy visitors since every time they click on a link in your site, a new window or tab will open. Imagine the number of windows those poor sods will find open on their computer if they try to read every page of your 100-page site. Delicious, isn't it? Another benefit of this technique is that it makes your site look amateurish.
2. Force your visitors to navigate your website using Flash. That is, place all your content in a Flash file — text, pictures, links, etc — even if Flash is not ideal for such content (a straight HTML page is best for those types of content). Make sure that visitors who don't have the Flash plugin enabled or installed cannot see anything or do much on your website. This effectively drives away all mobile users, a group of users that is growing in size, as well as cripple your visitors who have come to expect certain facilities to always be available in their browsers (such as the BACK key, the ability to bookmark specific pages, the ability to open certain links in a new tab, etc) when they visit websites. Now they will be forced to work through the more limited Flash plugin of their browser with whatever subset of features you deign to provide. In fact, exclusively using Flash for your site content might even help you to drop to the bottom of search engine listings too, thereby reducing the number of visitors to your site. After all, if you don't have visitors, you don't have to think of new ways to annoy them.
3. Load your site with pop-up windows that open when your visitor reaches your page as well as when they leave the page. In fact, if you want to annoy them even further, open a pop-up window when they click on links on your site.
4. Reduce the navigational usability of your website. Don't put site maps or navigation bars with shortcut links to pages that your visitors will usually want to go such as the "Download" page if you're a software author. If you can annoy your visitors by forcing them to read whole pages of your text before they can find a link to move on to do what they really want to do, so much the better.

There you have it. Seven quick ways that you can use to annoy, frustrate and irritate your visitors. They may even be effective in driving them away permanently. There are undoubtedly many other ways, but the methods listed above are easily doable by new webmasters.

Web service

Despite our best attempts to make this as clear as possible from the home page of this web-page itself, there is no doubt that some of you still will not totally understand what we mean by "web services". To be completely honest, there are so many technical needs customers can have these days, that we struggled for quite a few days to name this 9999articles, and we're still not completely sure we got it a hundred per cent right.

Well, our definition of web services in this web-site is anything that you can do online for real-world customers. This could be a simple email solution, a basic web-site, or even a portal with a payment gateway so that your customer can sell goods online and accept orders online.

Basically, we've seen a market rise in the need for small businesses to get online, and it doesn't matter what that business is, because these days it's honesty more of a necessity than a gimmick. Although the idea of making money from business by helping them tap into the world of the internet can scarcely be considered novel, it's only in the past few years that the demand has risen to a point where it is a serious business opportunity.