Is your web site behind the times?

If you are new to internet business, you might find all of the website jargon and phrases quite confusing. you can start a business on the internet and market until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t know what that marketing is doing for you, you might as well be doing nothing at all. once you have the website statistics broken down for you, you can take all of the information and apply it to your marketing strategy so that you continue to draw in repeat customers as well as bring in some new ones, as well.

there are four big terms in website traffic statistics: hits, visits, unique visitors, and page views. these four terms may seem like they are interchangable when you hear them, but when it comes to your website traffic statistics they are all different, and if you want to succeed in internet business it’s important that you learn what all these phrases mean and what they can do for you and your business.

the first term is hits. most people that analyze website traffic statistics will tell you that this stat is fairly worthless. hits refer to the number of times that a page, image, or file on your site is viewed or downloaded by someone. because hits record every page view on your website it is not an accurate way to determine how many people are viewing your website and making use of the content or services offered there.

the next common term is visits. the term visit is defined most commonly as each new incoming visitor to the web page that was not on your website during the last 60 to 90 minutes. visits do not require anyone to buy anything or click on anything, they simply have to come and view the page.

unique visitors is the term that refers to the number of client hosts that come to visit the site and visit at least one page. the unique visitors statistic typically is able to provide the number of different people that have visited the site, not just how many times the pages have been viewed as the statistics are reached through looking at the number of ip addresses come to the site. this can be very valuable information because you can discern how many people your marketing efforts are reaching.

page views is a statistic that will provide you with the number of times an actual page on the site is viewed. this statistic is typically provided as a sum for all the the visitors. this is much like the “hits” statistic, except that it only counts pages and does not count files, images, and other downloads.

as you can see, each of these terms refers to something entirely different. none of this information can be used alone, instead one should use it all together to determine what they may need to change, what is working, and how well their current marketing plan is working.

Is your web site behind the times?

Today’s world, new technologies are being developed at a very rapid pace and are being adapted by the public very quickly. a year ago, did you use an ipod or any other mp3 player? do you use one now? have you heard about blogs, podcasts, and networking sites such as myspace.com? have you used them? many consumers have already changed the way in which they get and use information from the web, which means you may want to take a closer look at your company’s web site.

although your company may not need to implement blogs and podcasts, you should at least be aware of the new technologies that are available today, and what kind of impact they are having on your customers and potential customers.

for instance, some of the newer technologies might not have existed when you first launched your web site. but today’s users are often already comfortable with them, and ignoring technologies like rss feeds or interactivity on your web site can give customers a negative impression. new companies and web sites entering your market today are taking advantage of what’s popular with consumers, and are developing web sites with new tools and products that may not have been available when you built your web site.

if your competitors have new technology features on their web sites, you should consider what impact this has on your business. web sites that provide rss feeds, blogs, podcasts, or other interactivity are often perceived as having more value than sites that do not. if your competition has a more up-to-date, feature-rich web site, will you still be able to attract new customers? or even keep the interest of your current customers?

try to evaluate these new technologies to see if your web site could benefit from implementing any of them. not a blog user? go find a blog you’re interested in and check it out! (a good place to start is www.blog-search.com.) consider adding news headlines from a rss feed in your industry. think about adding interactive features such as a dynamic calendar of events, maps, articles, how-to-guides, or even a site-search feature to your web site. show your customers that your company is progressive by keeping your web site in step with technology, and the impression you make will be a good one.

lauren hobson is the editor of biz talk newsletter, a free monthly publication designed to provide small businesses and non-profits with tips and techniques to help them make the most of their web sites and marketing efforts without spending a lot of money. biz talk is published by five sparrows, llc, and you can subscribe from the five sparrows web site.

CSS Rounded Corners Using Div for Firefox

Here you go for Rounded corner for FireFox Browser.

If you want to round corners without using images, that is unfortunately not possible with either CSS1, CSS2 or CSS2.1.

The CSS3 Border module offers a way out, though, through the border-radius properties. The syntax is as follows:

border-radius: <length> <length>

The two lengths are, for left-to-right and right-to-left scripts, respectively horizontal radius, and vertical radius.

For top-to-bottom scripts, and bottom-to-top scripts, the values are respectively vertical radius, then horizontal radius.

If the second length is omitted, it should be interpreted as being equal to the first property, thus making the corner a quarter circle.

If the second length is set to zero, the resulting corner will be square.

Individual corners

The border-radius may be specified individually for each corner, through the use of:

• border-top-right-radius
• border-bottom-right-radius
• border-bottom-left-radius
• border-top-left-radius

Browser compatibility

At the time of writing, the border-radius properties are not supported in any browser, since the CSS3 border module is still in “Working Draft” status.

However, browsers based on the Gecko rendering engine (Firefox, Mozilla) has experimental support for the border-radius property, and use the vendor-specific -moz- prefix for the properties, making it -moz-border-radius

Practical use of border-radius

If you absolutely want to make use of the border-radius properties now, and want to maintain forward compatibility, Yous should use both the Gecko specific property, and the CSS3 property. Further, you must restrict yourself to only creating perfectly circular corners, using only one length value:

blockquote {   -moz-border-radius: 2em;   border-radius: 2em; }

This is because the Mozilla implementation of border-radius is severely out of line with the CSS3 working draft. Mozilla accepts up to four length values for the border-radius property, and interprets them as -moz-border-top-left-radius, -moz-border-top-right-radius, -moz-border-bottom-right-radius and -moz-border-bottom-left-radius with one value for each.

 For More Information Mozilla CSS Extensions