Linux, Solaris, and Windows Servers can run an application called ColdFusion for accessing web pages. A request for web pages is made through an HTTP server in conjunction with a ColdFusion Web Application Server. When a request for a ColdFusion web page is made, the ColdFusion Server assembles the data and sends it back to your web browser.

ColdFusion can help you create and modify variables just like other languages, but it’s not a database language. Program flow controls like IF, Switch Case, Loop, plus many other complicated tasks are made easy with its built in functions. Using ColdFusion makes interacting with your database easier. By using SQL, you can easily retrieve, store, format and dynamically present information on you web page.

If you are comfortable with HTML you will love ColdFusion Markup Language. Many of ColdFusions powerful features like reading from and writing to the server’s hard drive are tag based. Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to write all the JavaScript for your pages? The CF tag CFFORM will automatically build all the JavaScript code to verify required fields before the form submits.

ColdFusion is designed to run on multi-processor machines and store your web sites on a cluster of servers. This helps with the biggest problems web designers have of complex, high volume web sites.

Basically, if you have plans to have a web site built that is more than just an advertisement for your business, ColdFusion enables you to perform many more functions. You can spend a large amount of time building a site and, over the years, adding more ideas and therefore more complexity and more functions.

Many new and powerful features are available for Mcromedia’s ColdFusion MX7. MX7 is the most significant release of ColdFusion within the last ten years. You can create dynamic web pages utilizing some of CodFusion MX7 (13 min.) new features. These features are faster and more cost- effective than many other solutions on the market. They can help you easily create, manage and deploy web applications. Using a single tab, web content can be transformed into portable documents in PDF and FlashPaper formats.

Coldfusion makes it possible to create rich Flash forms in minutes using just a few ColdFusion tags. You can re-skin forms easily across applications. Besides, you can easily interface to SMS text-messaging, instant messaging clients, and other Internet protocols to reach customers in new, exciting ways.

It’s time you explored ColdFusion MX7 and experienced the power that ColdFusion has to offer by browsing code snippets, examining sample applications, and seeing new features in action.

Many of our ColdFusion customers include organizations like Boeing, Goodyear, and Lockheed Martin along with many other organizations, education facilities and government offices. ColdFusion MX 7 is considered to be an incredible release with nearly everything desirable incorporated in the software. With ColdFusion MX 7, you can do more work in less time.

Fusionen Freddal is the editor of http://www.justcoldfusion.com which is a premier resource for Cold Fusion information. For questions or comments, go to: http://www.justcoldfusion.com.

Search engines list web pages in order of relevance to a search. How relevant to a search is the content of your web site?

One of several factors contributing to relevance to a search is the content of a web site. If you search the web for say toys, then it goes without saying that websites at the top of the search results will be all about toys, more toys and have many details about toys.

Times have changed:

If Website A displays its products, details of their uses, descriptions, related information and articles about them, and Website B just displays its products, obviously Website A has more relevant content than Website B. Website A will be more highly ranked than Website B. If there are a million listings for that product, then it’s unlikely that Website B will be found in the first few pages.

How to get relevant content:

Your customers can provide all the content for ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ pages and ‘Testimonials’ or ‘Feedback’ pages. If you can’t spend time writing articles, or can’t write articles, there are many article publishing websites happy to provide these to you. It all increases the content of your website.

Be relevant:

Ken McKay is an Australian web designer. More information on web design is available at platypus websites – www.platywebs.com.au

Every good Internet business understands the value of conversions versus hits received. Far too often, businesses become fixated on the hits they are receiving instead of monitoring their hit to sale conversion rate. This misguided focus is the road to ruin because it fails to take in the issue of abandonment.

Abandonment

“Abandonment” is one of those terms that has a unique meaning when applied to the Internet. The term refers to reasons why a user abandons a site before taking the action the site owner desires, typically purchasing a product or making an inquiry.

There are a number of beautiful sites on the Internet with unique innovations. Unfortunately, these sites rarely turn a profit or unnecessarily limit their profit potential. Site owners must focus on only one thing when building a site – converting visitors to customers. To avoid abandonment issues, you should focus on the following:

1. The site should always load as quickly as possible to accommodate visitors that are using 56k dialup modems.

2. The site should be designed for ease of use, not “what looks good.”

3. All advertisements must click through directly to the items that are being searched, not the home page of the site.

4. Site pages should be kept short to improve load times.

5. Information that is not germane to the product or service should be removed.

6. Flash, music and other “atmosphere elements” of the site should be removed or optional to speed up load times.

7. Signing up for the site newsletter must be incredibly easy.

8. Customers should be required to fill out the minimum of information to make a purchase.

9. Newsletters should be issued in HTML and text since some email systems do not accept HTML.

10. All images should be compressed for quick loading.

11. All links and emails must also include AOL friendly equivalents.

12. All emails must have automatic text wraps at 60 spaces so that the recipient does not receive a disjointed mess of code in their email box.

13. Email communications from the public must be responded to within 24 hours.

14. Communications made after business hours must be responded to first thing in the morning.

15. The site should offer accumulating bonus points for purchases that eventually lead to a “free gift”

16. When an order is shipped, an email should be sent to the customer telling them as much.

The list is fairly endless, but you should always view site designs and advertising from the perspective of the customer. The universal question for each project is, “How could we make this easier for customers?” By emphasizing this approach, you will bypass many of the problems you see on the net and avoid wasting your advertising dollars

About The Author

Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with http://www.marketingtitan.com – an Internet marketing firm in San Diego.

Forums are an excellent addition to a website to attract visitors to interact with the site and to return to the website freqeuently. While there are many other website additions that can retain visitors and have them coming back for more, forums are perhaps the most engaging for visitors to your website and offer the most benefits to both the website’s owner and the visitor.

Unfortunately, having a forum addition to a website does not guarantee its success and usefulness in gathering the hypothesized attention and attractiveness. A new forum with no content, no members or no active discussion is like an empty hall. Anyone who steps into such an empty room would most definitely get the creeps and run away as fast as they can. Similarly, your forum can quickly lose its purported usefulness if it is empty and bare.

Starting and building an active forum on your website is no mean feat. It requires a lot of time, patience, and hard-work. Why is that so? Well, there are several important factors that scares away visitors and you have to remove these factors in order to convince visitors to stay, read, and then post and join in the discussions. If there are no discussions in the first place, no one would be around to discuss! It is exactly a chicken and egg question that you have to answer. There are several methods to overcome these issues and to get content/discussions started on your forum.

Having good content draws visitors to read and if they have questions or concerns, they can always find a link to discuss it on your forum. Make sure you provide them a link and the outlet to voice out on your forums. The hard part is in writing quality content on your site.

Some forums offer active members special advertising opportunities such as banners or text links on the website and in the forums. Members are then encouraged to start threads and post and participate in order to obtain free advertising. Other than free advertising, you might want to consider giving away a free copy of your product to the top poster or hold a lucky draw for active posters. Nothing beats promotion than free products and competition. On my webmaster community (www.buildtolearn.com), I provide free cpanel web hosting for members who have accumulated 50 posts. This incentive has been in use for the past 2 years and our community now has close to 10,000 members!

There are many other new forums started on the net everyday and you could work together with other websites to generate content on your forums. It is a ‘I’ll post in yours and you post in mine’ exchange where both webmasters participate in each others forums in order to get the ball rolling in the forums. This exchange makes it more interesting for both parties.

If you have deep pockets or have a budget from your website, you can always get people to come to your forum and start discussions. Quality checks are in order to ensure that your ‘free-lance posters’ are not simply submitting 3 word posts or copying posts from other forums.

If all else fails, due to low budget or having nothing else to offer, you can create ‘virtual copies’ of yourself and start discussions with yourself. To new visitors to your forum, they see an active community and discussions, which helps them overcome the inertia. Once you have a handful of active members talking, you can stop talking to yourself and let your community grow itself!

The above are just some tips that I have gathered from participating in forums and from building forum communities on the net for the past 2 years. The tough part in setting up a forum is in the initial stage. Once you have overcome that hurdle, it gets easier for the forum to grow and mature.

Dax Christopher maintains a two year old webmaster community at http://www.Buildtolearn.com, a forum community that discusses web-hosting and webmaster related issues such as web-design, page coding, SEO and many others. Visit BuildtoLearn.com to learn more about developing and growing large communities.

Once a visitor gets to your web site, you want to make sure they can find what they are looking for quickly and easily, or they will just go elsewhere. If a web site is easy to use and understand, visitors will come back time and time again.

Using intuitive navigation techniques will greatly improve the usability of your web site, and therefore user satisfaction and return rates. By intuitive navigation, I mean some sort of menu, map or list that is instantly understandable to most visitors to your web site.

One of the first points to making a site easy to navigate is to have a consistent menu that is on every page. By having a menu that is on every page of your site, users can move from each section from any other section, with out having to go back to a home page or menu page.

Keeping the menu in the same location, and in the same style throughout your site ensures that visitors quickly recognize how to navigate your site. If you have a different style menu on every page, users may get confused and not as easily comprehend how to navigate your site.

Another useful tool a Webmaster can include for visitors is a site map. A site map is a page containing an organized list of all the pages or sections of the site. Instead of moving through the site’s menu system and down through categories by clicking on links on different pages, a visitor has the option of going to the site map and clicking directly to the page they are seeking.

Though there are many fancy buttons, graphics and rollovers that can be used for your navigation menu, sometimes simple text links are the best bet. For one, text link navigation menus are fast loading. Many web surfers are on slow connections and do not want to wait for a complex navigation system to download. Text navigation menus also can add relevant text to search engine results, whereas image navigation bars cannot. Text navigation also helps ensure your users understand what the links mean.

If you do opt to use graphic navigation menus, you may wish to consider adding a redundant text navigation menu at the bottom of the page to ensure viewability and search engine spidering.

Many new Webmasters are tempted to use frames to create a navigation menu that will appear on all the site’s pages. The benefit is that the navigation will stay in sight even when the rest of the page is scrolled. But because frames piece pages together from other pages a Webmaster cannot be sure that a web page using frames will be viewed correctly. If a visitor comes to a page through a search engine that was designed to have a navigation menu added with a frame, the user will see not see the menu. Because of this, it is important to add a link to your home page on every page, so viewers can see your site as it was intended.

Even if you are not using frames, it would be helpful to have a link to the home page of your website on every page, to ensure users can find the “beginning” of your site.

Keeping the navigation menu near the top of the web pages ensures that surfers will be able to see the menu as soon as the page loads. If a user has to scroll to navigate to other pages of your site, they will be less inclined to do so.

In closing, it is important to keep in mind that when it comes to site navigation, simplicity is key. If a user does not immediately see what they need, they will not spend much time trying to find it, but will rather move on to the next site.

Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with http://www.marketingtitan.com – an Internet marketing firm in San Diego offering automated web site systems through http://www.businesscreatorpro.com.