In the past two years the popularity of social videos has exploded. Many amateur actors and video producers have earned a measure of Internet fame after creating popular “viral” videos that were viewed by millions around the world. Taking their cue from these lucky individuals many musicians, aspiring actors, and even business owners have started creating and distributing their own social videos with the help of social video networking software.

This software makes it easy for anyone with a bit of dedication and computer knowledge to create and edit videos. One no longer has to hire a professional to create their own videos. Even though many businesses have been made aware of the ease of creating these social videos quite a few do not realize the promotional potential these videos have.

There are many websites live today that exist solely to showcase social networking videos. These videos let visitors view and share their favorite videos absolutely free of charge. Social videos can be embedded on websites, in blogs, and even emailed to others. Businesses can make their own short videos promoting services, special products, and even more. Some companies even hold contests asking customers to create their own videos for the chance to win prizes.

Social video networking software can be used to edit these short videos. Effects can be added to fade into certain scenes or fade out other scenes. Graphics can be added and audio can even be inserted. Once the videos are prepared and ready to be viewed by the public social video networking software can also be used to widely distribute these videos to as many social video networking sites as possible. Some video networking websites have even started to include their own web based editing software free of charge.

With the rise of video social networking more companies are developing advanced video editing services that are both easy and affordable for users. Pretty soon all business owners will be able to easily create, edit, and massively distribute their own promotional videos with no previous video creation knowledge. By investing in social video networking software now your web based business will be able to get the jump on competitors while reaching out to an entirely new audience.

With gas prices rising out of control, many people are looking for information on how to build an HHO cell. These popular gas saving devices utilize inexpensive parts that can be found at any local hardware store, along with plain tap water to improve fuel economy and clean up emissions.

An important thing to remember when looking at how to build an HHO cell, is not to get caught up thinking there are several different designs as some would lead you to believe. Although there are some neat deviations from the original design, such as the 6-pack for big trucks, all of them still operate on the same basic principle.

HHO cells are also known as HHO generators or hydrogen gas savers, and operate by actually generating HHO gas directly from water. HHO gas itself is a hydrogen/oxygen gas mixture which is created through the process of electrolysis. Electrolysis is nothing but a fancy term for passing an electrical current through water. The electrical current will be provided by your vehicles battery/alternator.

In order to supplement gasoline usage, HHO gas is directed from the cell to the engine air intake via a vacuum tube. After entering the intake, it travels with the air into the engine where it will supplement the gasoline for combustion.

That being said, the basic design consists of a water reservoir, electrolysis parts, tubing, and some hardware to mount the reservoir underneath the hood. Beyond that, there is not much when it comes to how to build an HHO cell. There is some simple wiring involved as well. You will generally wire the electrolysis equipment so that it is on anytime the engine is running, but you can also wire it up with an on/off switch ran to your cars cabin for easy operation.

Having an alarm system in your home is not a bad idea. Crime rates are rising in virtually everywhere, including in so-called “good” or “nice” neighborhoods. Many families are becoming increasingly aware of their need for added security, and a good option for many is a wireless home security system. Especially if you have children home alone after school or own a lot of expensive household items will you want to consider installing such a system.

Why do we say this; what advantages does a wireless home security system have over a hardwired system? Here are some things to consider:

Most alarm systems work in virtually the same way. There are sensors that are attached to the area you want to secure, such as a door or window, and usually to the wall next to it. Those two sensors usually have a signal running through them in a continuous loop; when that loop is broken from someone opening the door or window, the sensor sends a signal to the mechanism that sounds the alarm.

In a wireless home security system, that signal is sent through the air. If you opt for a hardwired system, you need to run a wire or cable from every sensor you hook up to the keypad. Obviously this would be cumbersome, more difficult to install for a do-it-your self, and rather unsightly. A wireless home security system is typically much more subtle and can usually blend in with any décor or home design. And because there are no lines or cables, you don’t need to make holes in the walls, tear up any carpeting, or fuss with trying to get the wires to run flush along a wall or door frame. They’re also a great consideration for home with young children, as you don’t want them to ever get their hands on the wires or cables of the alarm system.

A wireless home security system is usually much easier to install than a hardwired system. You typically just plug in the keypad, mount the security sensors where you want them to be, and program it rather quickly. There usually isn’t much more involved than that.

If you want to install your own wireless home security system, there are some things to consider. You can usually get one with a sensor that is connected to a key fob so that you don’t even need to remember and enter a pass code to deactivate the alarm. A hardwired system runs on electricity to operate whereas wireless systems run on a lithium battery. Many times the wireless home security system needs to be tested to be sure the battery is running at optimal levels.

Many wireless home security systems can also be monitored alarms, meaning that an outside company can be monitoring your alarm system at their office. If the alarm is tripped, the company will alert police and rescue personnel immediately. This can be a great asset for children who are home alone or those who may get easily flustered in an emergency situation.

Importance of Graphics

A picture is worth thousand words. This is a famous proverb of all time, which is exactly true in current business scenario. People need graphics at several point of time in their life. Be it a normal logo design for your business or unit name, or corporate, graphic designs are very much important in developing corporate identity of an organisation. Special Graphics are being created these days for large events like sports championships like Olympics, Asian, or Commonwealth games. Four rings of Olympic is a symbol in itself. In brief, we can say, “Graphics are required in our every day’s life.” All over the world, graphics are being designed by the millions of graphic designers to attract people and increase the sales of a business activity, or to increase the brand or product awareness among people.

Graphic Design Process

Graphic designing is a difficult process. While preparing for a design, a graphic designer looks into several factors including audience status, aim of the message, and medium (such as print, online, book or poster). Once a designer clears all his basic requirements to design a graphic, he needs to organize text and graphics on selected formats and layouts. Fonts, colour, size and arrangement of text and graphics are re-looked at and sent for proofreading. Graphic designs also need to take care of the things including its balance, colour, contrast, emphasis, movement, pattern, proportion, proximity, repetition, rhythm, texture, unity, and white space.

To make a graphic really attractive and adorable, proper arrangement of graphics needs to be done. A graphic becomes meaningful when it defines the text given below properly and images to produce a coherent and interesting piece of work, according to the end goal. The purpose of graphic designing is not limited to that only but it plays a special role in improving sales of a company.

Web Graphic Designs

Graphic designs help in improving the look and feel of a website, attract the viewers, convey the message of the company and stimulate their senses effectively. Currently, web graphic designing is a multi billion (US$) business. Companies are spending lots of money to design a perfect and customize website for them. Graphic designs have become an essential part of any website designing. So, if you want to design a customized website that states your needs and requirements, make sure you keep the graphics as per the demands so that it will benefit your business needs.

Scope of Graphic Designing

In this growing world, the scope of graphic designing has changed a lot. Latest technologies have created new means in this area and new developments are easily visible. Now, with the usage of new software and printing technologies, graphic designing has become more flexible and practical.

Outside of buying a home, the investment in education is one of life’s biggest expenses. Too many students don’t understand what they are buying or what their options really are. Art school is not like other areas of education. A doctor or lawyer needs an education in order to practice their profession. However, an artist does not. Many well-known artists have no formal training at all.

As in any profession, attending a top-ranked school may provide better career opportunities for artists, but it is best to think of art school as a time and place to acquire the skills that you want to grow as an artist. There are ways to enhance your arts education; for fields such as animation, graphic design and web design, practical hands-on experience could be acquired through certifications, internships and freelance projects. If you are focusing on Fine Art, try to participate in as many exhibits and shows as possible. These types of activities will boost your resume and online portfolio.

1. The Top Schools

Every school says that they are the best but in truth only a select few are rated at the top of independent studies. If you want a chance to get into a school like Cal Arts, Chicago Art Institute, RISD, Pratt or School of Visual Design, you will need to prepare while you are in high school. The top art schools require a portfolio, not just the knowledge that you want to be an artist. These schools include some academic courses and the student earns a BFA or MFA.

2. Major Universities

Studying art within the walls of a university has several advantages. Art is a study of life and the world around us. A fine artist may find history, sociology, anthropology, even physics interesting and helpful. Graphic designers can benefit from computer science classes. The mixture of academic and artistic courses is a style of learning that many aspiring artists enjoy. The best part is that many schools have excellent programs. Yale is widely considered one of the very best art schools and some of the large state schools such as Indiana University, UC Berkeley and University of Michigan offer a great arts education at a reduced price for in-state students.

3. Arts Trade Schools

Trade schools do not require the academic rigor of universities or the commitment and portfolio development expected of top tier art schools. They do provide real world training and the technical skills that can be matched to great talent. These schools are located in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle – cities with large established art scenes that can benefit students that are looking to refine art skills.

Gaining good positioning with the search engines is one channel for increasing your online business—but it’s not an end in itself. Your ultimate goal isn’t to increase traffic, but to increase sales, and thereby, profit margins. Will Reynolds of SEO consulting firm http://ThinkSeer.com, sheds some light on common misconceptions regarding search engine optimization:

Myth Number One: I have to submit my site to the engines to get ranked.

Truth: The search engines have advanced to the point that they’ll find you on their own. You’re wasting money by paying a service to submit your name to the engines.

Myth Number Two: I need to optimize for ALL the engines.

Truth: There are only three search engines that matter: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN—in that order. Google is by far the most important in terms of driving traffic. Nearly every other search engine feeds off one of these three, so if you do well in any of them, you’ll show up in the other engines as well.

Myth Number Three: If I use pay-per-click ads, I don’t have to worry about natural rankings.

Truth: Up to 75% of users don’t even consider clicking on the paid ads, so if you rely solely on pay-per-click for your business, you’re losing out on a huge section of the market.

Myth Number Four: My goal should be to rank well for all related keywords.

Truth: Certain words and phrases produce better results than others. You need to look at your ROI and your conversion rates, as well as your rankings. Says Reynolds, “I’ve seen sites rank highly for terms that result in no conversions. That ranking might be getting you some exposure, but it’s not getting you sales.” Analyze your keyword campaigns so you can see what your expenditures are doing for your bottom line.

Myth Number Five: My web design doesn’t affect my positioning.

Truth: Your web architecture has a tremendous impact on the search engines’ ability to read your site’s content and, therefore, on your rankings. For instance, Google assigns the most importance to your homepage. If you have a flash intro, the search engines can’t read it—they see a blank page. If there’s no Skip Intro button that allows the search engines to get past that, the rest of your site’s content may not even get indexed. Bringing in a consultant to work with your web developer may help you avoid navigation and structural pitfalls that make your website difficult for the engines to read.

Myth Number Six: Increasing my traffic will automatically increase my conversions.

Truth: Your website must be user friendly as well as search engine friendly. Advises Reynolds, “Don’t butcher your site for the search engines, in terms of the size of the text and the verbiage… it won’t read well or connect with your customers. You’re not going to look credible, and people aren’t going to feel comfortable purchasing on your site or giving you their information online.” You may rise in the rankings, but it will cost you in conversions.

Increasing your website’s visitors through search engine optimization is important for your eBiz—and it’s equally important to make sure your site’s structure, design, and navigation are conducive to converting those visitors when they land.

Story Board - A storyboard is a series of diagrams that shows how a project will look when completed.A small sketch that represents every page in a website. Like a flowchart, a storyboard shows the relationship of each page to the other pages in the site. Storyboards can be helpful when planning a Web site because they allow you to visualize how each page in the site is linked to the others pages.

A web design storyboard is the process of making a rough outline of what your web site will include before it is actually created. It can be used to organize thoughts and content. Essentially, storyboards are meant to tell the story of each web pages and are meant to visualize the goal that the web designers and website owner are expected to achieve.
Story Boards are the blueprints of your interactive courseware design and development process. The more detailed they are, the better they are at fulfilling their communication and documentation roles. Making sure that your storyboards are complete and accurate can minimize questions that cause delays, assumptions that cause confusion, and errors that cause rework.
Components of a good storyboard are as under -
Story Boards - It is the main page of your website which represents the entire website.it should be designed beautifully and should be user friendly as far as fonts, colors, contents, links are concerned.
Story Boards - About us page tells about the company for which the website has been developed. It should be designed in such a way that it effectively presents the true picture of the website.
Story Boards - This page is meant to tell the user about the services (in tangible) offered by the company(website owner).
Story Boards - This page is meant to tell the user about the products (tangible) offered by the company(website owner).
Story Boards - This web page is meant to clarify the most common doubts of the website users. It contains frequently asked questions along with their answers.
Story Boards - This webpage tells about the contact address, phone numbers, email address and other information which helps the user to contact the organization.
Story Boards - This webpage is like a flow chart which shows how different web pages are linked to each other i.e. how an user can navigate from one page to another. When an user wants to search a particular page then he can directly go to the site map webpage and from there he can search the webpage of his choice.
Following questions should be kept in mind before designing the website’s story board -
· What do my visitors want to know?
· What do my visitors want to do?
· How do my visitors to want feel?
· What benefits are my visitors looking for?
Story Boards must tell the developer everything he is supposed program or build right down to the module title font, hyperlinks, and navigation of all buttons or other clickable objects. For graphic designers, they convey the story of what graphics are needed on a screen or as part of an animation. In fact, I like to create a separate list of what graphics are needed on what screen for production purposes. It’s faster for the graphics person to refer to this list than to flip through the many storyboards that would make up a course.

Anyone who is managing a business would have a wish list similar to this: a demand for a product or service that he or she provides, a streamlined base of operations in making and providing the product or service, besting the competition with a plan of action, having loyal customers, having even loyal employees and getting timely information relevant to the business. The Herculean undertaking of putting all of these together is another predicament to be sorted out. No matter how you look at it, actually completing and implementing this list is in no way easy. So what does a good entrepreneur do? He delegates the tasks to people so he can deal with the more important portion of running his or her business. The delegation of work to other people, of course, is only good if you have people to delegate to as in the case of large enterprises. If you don’t have people or enough people to pass the work to, you can always ask for outside help, which in most cases works out better and much more economical.

Websites are essential in today’s businesses. It serves as an inexpensive conduit from the manufacturer to the customers and vice versa. The efficient and cost-effective manner by which customers are able to interact with the company via a website is invaluable. The site already contains all the vital information that a prospective or existing client might need. From the manufacturers point of view, having a website enables them to manage the information their customers should know about their product or service by putting up tailor made links to exact client needs. Every little detail that they see fit from product specifications to ordering information can be seen in a nice layout and the client can analyze a fully searchable database of appropriate information about the product or service. For the customers, what they get is a 24/7 information reservoir about the product or service that they need. Queries can be answered via a public forum post or a private message and even through email.

Being the busy entrepreneur that you are, I am pretty certain that you don’t have time to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL etc. to make your website communicate with your customers, receive orders and generally create a homey look and feel for it. That’s where purchasing (this would be the outside help I was referring to earlier) very affordable prepared scripts or short programs come in handy. These ready-made codes will permit your ordinary website to receive orders from your customers. It will even allow you to receive comments, suggestions, and complaints for Customer Service functions. Best of all, you don’t need to know a single programming language to use scripts, that’s because you won’t even be writing a single line of code. One more thing you don’t need to worry is software incompatibility. Since scripts are interpreted codes, it does not matter if you or your customers are running different versions of OSX, Windows, Linux or any other operating system because scripts are fully portable. Utilizing scripts will smoothen your website operations leaving you with more time for other much more important endeavors, time with your family or friends.

One of the biggest reasons people visit websites is to get information. If you can regularly provide fresh, quality content on your website you can expect to be rewarded by visitors and return visitors. What’s more, you will be rewarded by the search engines. I recommended that you add new and original content to your site as often as possible, ideally once a day.

Regularly adding fresh and original content:

- Keeps your site visitors coming back
- Continually adds value to your website
- Makes people more comfortable buying from your site
- Establishes yourself as an authority in your industry
- Greatly helps your site rank higher in search engines

All of the above factors translate into revenue.

We all know how hard adding original and fresh content is, especially if you’re the business owner. You have to be original, creative, organized, thoughtful and motivated, and above all, able to write. So what’s a website owner or business owner supposed to do? RSS may be the answer.

What Is RSS?

Here’s the Wikipedia definition of RSS:
RSS is a family of web feed formats specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats) and used for Web syndication. RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an “RSS feed”, “webfeed”, “RSS stream”, or “RSS channel”. These RSS feeds provide a way for users to passively receive newly released content (such as text, web pages, sound files, or other media); this might be the full content itself or just a link to it, possibly with a summary or other metadata (data describing the content).

RSS feeds are operated by many news web sites, weblogs, schools, and podcasters.

“RSS” can stand for any of the following phrases:

Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

Want to see an example of RSS in action? Go to the Oak Web Works, LLC homepage (http://www.oakwebworks.com ), and look at the bottom of the right-hand column under the title ‘Latest Tech News’. This is actually two RSS feeds from other websites.

Our company homepage was very static. It didn’t change very much since the services we offer stay basically the same. Why should any visitors come back if every time they come to our site, the content is exactly the same? They don’t have much of a reason.

Interestingly, that’s the way search engine spiders were programmed to “think” as well. Spiders are programs written for search engines to regularly surf the Web and record what’s there. That recording goes into the search engine’s databases ready to be accessed by the next searcher. This process is called indexing.

For example, Google will send out a spider to your site and index a lot of it, but not always all of it. It determines how often to revisit and index your site by how often you update it. If you update it every day, then it will visit much more often than if you rarely update it. Engines also consider the homepage to be the most important page, so it’s good to update it even more often than the rest of your site.

Again, if you struggle with adding fresh content, then RSS may be the answer. We didn’t write the headlines under ‘Latest Tech News’ on our homepage. Instead, the RSS feed automatically grabbed it from another site that had created them. Once we set the feed up, we don’t have to do anything more, and our homepage has regularly updated content. Every time those headlines change, it updates its feed, which is then updated on any other websites displaying that feed, as well as ours.

RSS feeds can be more than news headlines. They can be lists of any kind. They can be press releases, articles, blog entries, product releases, or almost any other grouping of changing or growing data.

How Do I Set An RSS Feed Up?

There are a number of ways in which you can display an RSS feed on your website. You can use JavaScript or various other scripting languages. Unfortunately, RSS that uses JavaScript is not seen at all by search engines when they come and index your site, so don’t use JavaScript.

Instead, use a script that can be handled by your Web server besides JavaScript. Ask your hosting company or IT people what platform your Web server uses and what software or modules are loaded onto the machine. This will determine what scripting language you can use for your RSS.

Check if your Web server has PHP capabilities. If so, then there are hundreds of scripts written in PHP that you can use for free that properly displays RSS feeds that are recognized by search engines. There are RSS scripts written in ASP.NET, Perl and numerous other languages, so you have a wide variety to choose from.

For the Oak Web Works, LLC homepage we used an ASP script called RSStoHTML.

Which one would you choose? After you’ve determined which languages your Web server supports, conduct a search such as ‘PHP script for displaying RSS feeds in html’ or ‘ASP and RSS’, for example. Try a few and see which ones run on your server. If one runs on your server properly, and you check this by simply seeing if it displays RSS feeds on your Web page, then use that one.

When you download the script, look at the code and find where to add an RSS feed URL. There should be a dummy one in there already, so just replace that one with the RSS feed you want to use. Here’s what a typical RSS feed URL looks like: http://nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/userland/Technology.xml
The URL’s often end in ‘.rss’ as well.

After we inserted the RSS feed URL into the script, we wanted to display the feed in HTML on our homepage. To do this we added the following bit of code into the spot on our homepage html code where we wanted it to display:

Keep in mind that this is for a Windows Web server. The way in which you include it on a website powered by a UNIX Web server will be a little different. If you’re not sure, ask your hosting company.

Where can I find feeds that are relevant to my website’s content?

First you can try these:

- Syndic8 – http://www.syndic8.com/
- Feedster – http://www.feedster.com/

You can also do a search for your topic and RSS feeds. For example, search for “RSS feeds and pets’, or ‘football and RSS feeds’, or ’small business news feeds’. Finally, you can go to specific websites that are related to your industry and look for a small, orange, rectangular icon that say ‘RSS’ or ‘XML’. Click on that and you’ll get a feed URL to enter into your RSS feed script.

Remember, always be sure to include feeds that are relevant to your website’s content. Once you get the hang of the concept, RSS can be a lot of fun, and it definitely keeps your website fresh and updated, just what search engines like, and more importantly, what website visitors like.

If there is one tool to create astonishing websites, that’s Macromedia Flash. However, it is not that easy to learn and is difficult to use. But the results are incredible: web pages that mesmerize us with special effects, including image and sound, animations that make us feel like we are in a theatre, interactive applications and so much more.

Inexperienced online entrepreneurs ask web design companies to create Flash websites. Many of these firms are indeed able to design an amazing website, but how many are able to optimize its pages for the search engines? What about the other obvious difficulties: long loading time, firewalls that block Flash, lack of usability – and the statistics that show more than 80 percents of online users prefer non-flash sites? Considering that search engines cannot read Flash, what are the chances for such a website to be indexed anyway? Ergo what’s the point in having an amazing website if it’s difficult to use and no one can find it?

A well designed Flash website is beautiful, not so difficult to browse but very difficult to optimize for the search engines because it lacks scannable content. Fortunately, difficult is not synonymous with impossible.

To get higher rankings for a Flash website you should start with META tags and linking strategies.

Write proper META tags for the opening page: title, description, keywords. Use the most important keywords in the title tag and the description. That’s all the on-page SEO you can do for a Flash site. It doesn’t sound much, does it? It is not. Because many search engines disregard these tags and look for content. While visitors can read the content of a Flash site, for the search engine spiders it’s a blank space. So the second thing to do to boost SERP for a Flash website is to build link popularity. To boost link popularity you need to link with websites that have a Page Rank 4 or higher. In time, this may bring the desired results. The importance of text links is, in this case, obvious. A text link is generally keyword rich, so search engines will know, by reading the link, what topic is treated on a website. Submit the website to directories and try to get one-way links by submitting articles and press releases.

Another method to boost SERP placements is the page re-direct. As META tag redirects are blacklisted, you might wonder what else is left. Well, Google allows redirects and using a 301-status code means that a site has been permanently moved. You could easily create a plain html page, respecting all the ethic SEO standards, and then redirect it to the Flash site. Avoid creating layers of text that should be delivered to the spiders instead of Flash. Although you do provide unique content, search engines might mistake the method for cloaking and ban your website.

That’s all the SEO you can do for an entirely Flash website when you don’t want to develop an HTML version.