<img src="/images/athensguy_large.jpg">

Web Hosting

Featured Articles: Example Online Store
News about AthensGuy.com Web Design To promote our e-commerce web design, we have designed a fictious online store for you to browse and test. We can customize the look and feel to mirror your business image. Take a look around and order sometime. Select the "CASH ON DELIVERY" payment method, and you will get to experience the same process your future online customers will after AthensGuy.com designs a custom estore for you.

http://pastrystore.athensguy.com/


Posted by admin on Thursday, April 07 @ 18:19:56 EDT (760 reads)


Featured Articles: Animated Websites
News about AthensGuy.com Web Design AthensGuy.com enters the Animated Website development market. Bring your website to life with your own personal character. This is your chance to break out of the box and engage your web guests with interactive dialog. Give a face and voice to your website, and no one will forget you.

http://www.athensguy.com/animated_websites


Posted by admin on Tuesday, March 29 @ 20:02:20 EST (729 reads)


Featured Articles: New Look & Focus for AthensGuy.com
News about AthensGuy Web Hosting AthensGuy.com is now focused on Web Design. The facelift highlights the imphasis on Web Design as opposed to Web Hosting like the old AthensGuy.com portal did.

If you haven't watched the jazzy banner introduction, go to the top banner at of the Web Design pages and click on the speaker symbol above the 'N' of 'Web Design'.

The change in focus and design is possible since I, Patrick, have stepped out of my 10+ year IT career in Atlanta, Georgia and started working fulltime for AthensGuy.com. Our initial goal is to become the premier web design company for North East Georgia and then all of Georgia.

Posted by admin on Sunday, March 06 @ 21:02:41 EST (848 reads)


Featured Articles: Spam Filtering Available
News about AthensGuy Web Hosting Tired of bulk email and spam? Are you missing out on good email just because there is so much clutter in your mailbox to go through? AthensGuy.com now offers a unique Spam and Bulk email protection. We have implemented SpamAssassin with some AthensGuy.com proprietary features.

And best of all, the Spam & Bulk email filtering service is free! No additional charge will be made for customers to use it.

If you would like to try out AthensGuy.com's Spam Filter solution just email webteam@athensguy.com.

AthensGuy.com Support

Posted by admin on Sunday, March 06 @ 10:01:13 EST (764 reads)


Featured Articles: 2 Ways to Test How Easily Customers Navigate Throughout Your Website
Internet Article By Candice Pardue

For successful results from your website, I would have to say that the ease of navigation for your visitors when they first visit your website is the most important upfront web design factor to test.

Why? Because if your customers never make it beyond the first page of your site(your homepage), how will they ever get to the sales page -- which is the desired finish line, right?

Think back to a really great site you've visited recently and how easily you maneuvered around that website. Probably, the homepage had links down the right-hand or left-hand sidebar, an introduction to tell you a little about the site and/or the product or service offered, and no doubt the site had a purpose.

This key factor is exactly what's missing in many sites, and because it's missing, "visitors" seldom turn into paying "customers."

Below are two distinct methods you can use to test the navigation of your website:

1. Use your web host's website statistics. Your statistics will relay to you how many visitors are coming to your website, which pages they visit the most, the most popular entrance pages and exit pages, and how many pages were visited in your site versus how many visitors. The statistics you will want to concentrate on are the exit pages as well as the number of pages/number of visitors ratio.

By checking your exit pages, you can find out if a large number of visitors are exiting your website from the homepage. If the great majority are exiting from your homepage, you may want to make some changes on your homepage and test different layouts and content.

Your total number of pages visited versus the total number of visitors helps you to determine how many pages your visitors clicked to while visiting your site. For example, if your total number of pages is 1,400 and your total number of visitors is 700 for the same period of time - such as within one week or one day, then your total number of pages per visitor would be 2. The way I arrived at the figure 2 was by simply dividing your number of pages by the number of visitors. This tells you that many of your visitors are at least clicking beyond the first page entered. This could be good or bad, depending on what type of website you have, your product or service, and sales presentation.

2. The second method is to let your family members or friends visit your website for the first time with "you" watching from behind. You will observe their actions and reactions to your website. They may not tell you that anything's wrong, but you can test your navigation simply by watching their movement. The most important thing to watch for is a stopping point. If your friend/relative comes to a stopping point where he/she does not move forward(reading or clicking), this may be a place on your website for you to test a different method. The only exception, of course, would be if he/she "stops" to order your product. :-) In that case, don't change a thing! And, by the way, don't tell your friend that you're observing for anything in particular.

Remember, don't just design a website, design an effective website.
Now that you know how to test your website's navigation, go here to read a continuation article on the subject... "How to Make Your Homepage Flow" to learn some techniques that will help turn your visitors into paying customers....
http://www.webmastercourse.com/articles/make-your-homepage-flow/


Article written by Candice Pardue, webmaster of Online Success for Internet Business.


Posted by admin on Sunday, January 23 @ 09:23:28 EST (838 reads)


Featured Articles: WebMail for All Customer Domains
News about AthensGuy Web Hosting AthensGuy.com is proud to announce a fully functional WebMail usable by every email account on the AthensGuy.com server. The steps are simple:
  1. Goto the URL http://webmail.athensguy.com
  2. Login with your full email address and password

There are many features to the WebMail but here are a few highlights:
  • The Secure HTTPS connection guarantees no one is reading your email but you.
  • Check your email from anywhere.
  • From the Options panel anyone can setup their email address to forward to an external email account.
  • Users can change their own passwords from the Options panel.
  • Everyone can POP their external mail accounts from this web interface and have the mail stored here.
  • Built in Address Book that can import contacts from your Outlook address book.
  • Built in Calendar.
  • The Search feature allows you to search for messages in your inbox and your outbox.
  • View HTML formatted emails including attached images right in the browser.
And best of all, the WebMail service is free! No additional charge will be made for customers to use it.

AthensGuy.com Support

Posted by admin on Friday, November 19 @ 21:55:36 EST (965 reads)


Featured Articles: The Athens Guy
News about AthensGuy Web Hosting

The Athens Guy is an animated persona here to assist you in your visit to the AthensGuy.com website. Three events will prompt him to speak:

  1. Holding the mouse over some images and words. He waits about 2 to 3 seconds to make sure you are requesting feedback from him; then he will talk.
  2. Holding the mouse over The Athens Guy. On most pages, if you hold the mouse cursor over The Athens Guy for 2 to 3 seconds, he will give you a summary of the page you are looking at.
  3. Loading a new page. On occasion he will speek when a new page is loaded if he has anything special or new to say.

After you have given him a try, please fill out this simple survey and post any comments you would like to make.

Thank you,
AthensGuy.com

Posted by admin on Thursday, October 21 @ 22:19:24 EDT (1177 reads)



Featured Articles: WhyYouNeedThatPerfectName.com
Internet Article By Liji Thomas

Welcome to the dotcom bubble! Here, any successful e-tailer should tell you that there’s more to a name than just the name itself. This article serves precisely that purpose –against the backdrop of quality domain naming strategies and styles, auctions, speculators and court conflicts, to convince you why your online endeavor needs that perfect domain name.

There’s no point in coming up with that absolutely fabulous idea for online selling plus a perfect site to launch from, as long as you don’t have ‘the’ name you need. Choosing a name that will eventually contribute to your brand equity, profits, internet marketing and above all -your online credibility, shouldn’t be done haphazardly. Especially, since it’s so easily purchased (for a low startup capital), easily maintained and one that, if you choose, may be disposed off at a substantial amount. Intentionally or otherwise, your domain name becomes your de facto brand name, a location or an experience your visitors relate to in the long run. Even if you plan to sell it later on to prospective buyers, it is only an asset! Your challenge is to come up with that one name to funnel visitors through.

Brandmeisters today seem to understand the significance of site names, especially since the emergence of a number of me-too sites. Like a Washington Post reporter put it – “feature for feature, service for service, discount for discount, even annoyance for annoyance”, a number of sites may turn out to be a close match to yours. Quoting Rebecca Saunders, author of the Big Shot series, “Names have to sound fresh and new even if the site duplicates one already on the net. Names should stir the imagination or otherwise gain the surfer’s attention. Further site name should be as simple as possible, they should be believable, and they should be easy to pronounce, pleasing to the ear, easy to spell and therefore easy to look up on a search engine.” Here’s more on building your handle.

The ‘aha’ name

Domain name consultants will serve you innumerable dos and don’ts on internet domain naming – a feat that could leave you grumbling with limited choices. Personally, your domain naming methodology need not be absolutely conventional, as long as your imagination is not slave to impractical logic and common sense.

Begin with a paper, pencil and loads of patience. Consider seeking the advice of kith and kin, while you scramble ideas in your brain. Follow closely on what you ought to and ought not to consider. For example, consider characteristics, features, advantages and possibly anything that relates to your products and services. Now try to come up with a domain name that either addresses that one fundamental concept of the site, or that weds two or more key concepts in a single name. All the while, keep in mind, your site’s goals, the image you wish to portray and your target audience. Don’t compromise on your image-how you want your company to be perceived and it’s relation to your core business memorability. Jot down your list of ideas. Then narrow it down to those names you think are most reflective of your products/services. Most importantly, determine if the domain name you like is available and that it doesn’t violate any existing trademarks or copyrights. The last thing you’d want is your hard thought idea of that domain name accidentally offending a fellow netizen. Make sure that it doesn’t mean something entirely different in another language and that you don’t spare chance for the public to associate anything negative with it (easier said than done!). Care for the ins and outs of classic and non classic approaches in domain naming? Read on.

Unless you are a domain name squatter or a start-up capitalizing on domain names - save those tongue-twisters, masqueraded phrases and unpronounceable names.

Your creativity levels, thought and effort should be directed towards one that’s short and sweet. Though, a long name, embedded with your major keywords, can get your site a high search engine ranking, there is no reason you should take advantage of the 67 character limit provided for domain names. Besides, you are too late now. The record of the longest domain name has been set by a Welsh village, with its registration of llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com.

Concentrate on your visitors comfort levels. Leave them no scope for confusion and no loophole to err. Give them a name they can easily guess (without having to quip over the spelling and the location of hyphens) and hopefully, they’ll reciprocate with more clicks.

You could always rely on those prefixes (e, i, net, web, the, my) and suffixes (world, business, company, store). The power of vowels unleashed, you’d generate a potential brand name. E.g. ebay.com, ivillage.com, pcworld.com, smallbusiness.com

Lucky the business if it’s creator has that perfect proper noun to lend his site a name. Atkins.com named after Dr. Atkins and Dell.com after its founder and CEO Michael Dell. A traditional business moving online could capitalize on it’s established brand name. Even acronyms could yield quick domain names. Microsoft is an acronym for MICROcomputer SOFTware and so is Yahoo for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.

Targeting search engine rankings – e.g. Yahoo that follows alphabetic classification of websites – consider site names beginning with the digit 1 or the letter ‘a’. Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon.com, cites this as one of his reasons for the name’s choice.

But for those of you driven by the age old myth – that search engines have a liking for words that are separated by dashes- wake up! Today, when search engines focus on the site content, hyphenated names have no influence. Domain names with or without hyphens is in itself a topic for a forum. A good idea is to register both options if possible and redirect visitors to one site. Walmart.com never let go off it’s original registration (wal-mart.com), even after it changed name. Now both names take you to the same site.

Think of it on a broader angle. A few dollars spend to secure all possible variants of your name (with alternate extensions) will secure your visitors, otherwise likely to contribute to competitor site traffic. More - register possible names your visitors are likely to associate to your domain. The retailer Buy.com registered the domains: "10percentoffamazon.com," "10percentoffreel.com," and "10percentoffegghead.com”. Proctor & Gamble is an extreme case of this blanket approach. It registered hundreds of generic domain names relating to all aspects of personal hygiene and healthcare: pimples.com, badbreath.com, underarm.com, diarrhea.com etc. They advertise only one, but use the others to bring traffic, and point all the domain names to one site.

Though generic names can’t be trademarked, are sources of controversy and usually unavailable (if not, costly), your prospective domain name could sound of the genre of women.com, Hotels.com, Furniture.com, Art.com and shoes.com. Nonetheless, the loss of uniqueness in generic names is a serious reason for their unpopularity among namers. Now guess why Amazon was’nt named book.com and ebay not auction.com.

So, if the dictionary lets you down, do not fret to think of words that are arbitrary, previously unheard of and totally unrelated. Yahoo, Google and BlueTooth.com don’t owe their origins to the thesaurus. Sometimes it pays to be whimsy!

allthegoodnamesaretaken.com

In just around 2 years, the number of website names registered has grown from 200 to a voluminous 125,000 per month. And as yet, already over 1.6 million domains have been registered, including the subtitle above! Chances of you finding a 3 character .com domain name unregistered (not on sale!), are thin… very thin.

Here’s the good news. Everyday, around 20,000 domain names expire and get deleted. In addition to the generic domain extensions such as .com, .net, etc. there are approximately 250 different international domains each with their own two-letter country code extension. Speculations of new TLD (Top Level Domain) names include .firm, .store, .arts, .info, .nom, .biz, .pro, .aero, .coop, .museum and .name.

So, don't settle for the first domain name you think of! Although the supply of domain names is diminishing daily, it's better to expend more thought at the beginning and save money later. Don’t let the gold rush skate your decision (and later leave you to regret over an unmarketable name). Then again, don’t sit just hatching ideas. Even as you read this, someone halfway across the globe might be beating you to your choice!

Some are just registered by entrepreneurial opportunists hoping to make a fast buck by selling it on. If your choice is taken, the easiest, cheapest and most reliable solution would be to register another name. Did you know that the auction site eBay.com was the second choice of it’s creator after his initial pick EchoBay.com was taken? A good name is a legal name!

Nonetheless, if you own a successful site, that just can’t do without that colonized ideal name, you better ensure your pockets are deep because the owner at the other end knows that there’s nothing quite like the commercial value of a domain name. The highest publicly known sale of domain name was the sale of Business.com for $7,500,000 to eCompanies, a business incubator.

Domain names have been turned into a marketing bargain with its parking capability. A business can register or buy a name for later use. And there are sites that do nothing but park potential names mostly sold for fire-sale prices later on! A Belgian doctor, Dr. Lieven P. Van Neste owns well over 200,000 domain names. It’s a fine pursuit, if you care to keep your distance from brand infringement. In the past, speculators have faced legal charges on trademark violations from the bigwigs (including Microsoft) for having registered microsoftwindows.com, microsoftoffice.com, AirborneExpress.com, CitibankMasterCard.com, HewlettPackardss.com, and Wall-Mart.com. Domain name conflicts that grabbed headlines - Yahoo vs. "yahooka.com" (a marijuana site), Nissan Motors vs. Nissan Computer Corporation. One that caught my personal appeal - Archie Comics company’s trademark driven domain dispute with Veronica.org, a website set up by a loving dad in honor of his 2-year-old daughter Veronica!

From McDonalds to MTV, a lot of press on online brand infringement ( the hijack of popular brand names) has filled the air. Even as I write this, Google Inc. is being challenged the right to use the name "Froogle" for its online shopping service (a New York based carpenter owns Froogles.com - web shopping site).


Each year, about 250,000 cases are decided by the US federal courts. If you have no time to sort it out the good old fashion, you should consider devising a strategic approach for domain naming, reflected in sound corporate policy and executed with effective management. Toady it’s a topic of senior boardroom meetings where competent professionals are assigned to conduct name searches (a less costly venture compared to the possible consequences of dealing with a complaint of infringement.) Take lessons from corporate folklore on the long term effects of a carelessly chosen domain name. People who learnt things the hard way include Art-U-Frame.com that paid $450,000 to acquire the name art.com.

The crux

Your domain name is more than a ubiquity. You have no other billboard or bypass to your site. Statistics prove that direct navigation or guessed URLs account for majority of the traffic to a site (64.43%), much more than the search engines can bring (35.55%). Eat, drink and sleep on your idea before you move to register that killer name. Don’t hassle, thinking there are nodomainnamesleft.com (that’s taken too!). Your share of homework should save you a lot of misery down the road.

Besides, if you can’t trademark your design scheme, product idea and marketing strategy, here’s something you can. Your domain name is perhaps the only thing that you can own on the Internet. Remember, there’s always more to a name than just the name itself! Happy naming!


Reprinted from Zongoo.com Daily Press & Consumer Information"
Posted by admin on Saturday, August 21 @ 10:37:12 EDT (1140 reads)


Featured Articles: Active Offsite Backups for All Customer Web Sites
News about AthensGuy Web Hosting

Other providers may backup your website to tape or disk but the question remains, is your backup copy valid and recoverable? Will your website be successfully recovered during the restore process?

Every night AthensGuy.com archives your website and stores it at a secure and remote location in the event the primary web server for your website crashes or falls victum to a catastrophic event such as a fire or hurricane and is unrecoverable. Active Offsite Backup is AthensGuy.com's proprietary software that allows you, the webadmin, to view your web site at the remote location to ensure the backup is operational. With Active Offsite Backup, you can see for yourself that the backup is good.

If you are a current AthensGuy.com customer just reference your Active Offsite Backup by preceding your domain name with the hostname "backup". Here are a few examples:


Posted by admin on Saturday, August 21 @ 10:27:57 EDT (999 reads)


Featured Articles: Website Promotion - The stakes are rising – and so is the cost.
Internet Article By Tony Cooper

What we are seeing at the moment is a landshift change in promotion techniques. Only a year or so ago it was thought enough for a search engine optimisation company to optimise the pages (on page optimisation) and submit the website.

However now that the competition is becoming ever fiercer off page optimisation is becoming a necessary requirement of any respectable website promotion campaign.

Let’s examine these two terms and see what we mean my “on page optimisation” and “off page optimisation”.

On page optimisation is the process of tuning the page for a search engine or more usually trying to make it rank highly on a selection of search engines. It’s no wonder that many search engine optimisation engineers focus on google exclusively as it certainly produces the most traffic of all engines, but will that always be the case? Things can change quickly in internet land.

Page optimisation strategies generally consist of using your keyword or keyword phrases in all of the pages known “hotspots”. The page title, meta keyword, meta description, alt tags, first heading and the body text. Subsequent “tweaks” can include bolding the keyword phrase, using the keyword phrase in a hyperlink and more.

To a point there is only so much that you can do to search engineer a page before it starts to look spammy, repeating the keyword phrase over and over. Of course some “optimisers” still do this but it’s quickly becoming a frowned upon practice as it detracts sharply from a website wanting to produce a professional image, not to mention your chances of being banned from the search engine altogether.

This is where “off page optimisation” takes over.

Both Google and Yahoo use a system of “ranking” websites dependent on several factors - one of which is how relevant the content appears to be to the keyphrase searched for (on page optimisation).

The second important criteria that your pages are judged on is how “popular” those pages are in comparison with your competition. Broken down into it’s basest form it means that the more quality votes (links) that your page has then the more popular it must be and so is promoted higher up the search engine results.

In google parlance this feature is known as “pagerank” and pagerank is a vitally important part of your website promotion campaign. If you don’t have any then you are standing naked in front of everybody and that’s not a nice feeling!

Google pagerank is based on a scale of 1-10 where 10 has the most influence. The algorithm is configured on a sliding scale so that you only ever gain pagerank as a percentage of the full amount. As those with the highest pagerank are constantly adding more “votes” for their pages it makes sense that those at the bottom end of the scale are going to have to work ever harder to play “catch up” and that is where the extra cost is being factored in to website promotion campaigns.

However it becomes more complicated.

Not all links are equal.

Blindly rushing off and trying to get as many links as possible is not going to help you much. In fact it’s one of the reasons why people are spending so much time and effort in their link exchange campaigns and finding they are getting nowhere.

Savvy online marketers have established that links from pages with a low pagerank are not as valuable as links from those with a higher pagerank. But also in paradox to this it is possible to get more value from linking to a page with lower pagerank than the higher one!

Confused! No wonder “off page optimisation” is becoming such a sought after area of expertise.

The paradox occurs because built into the pagerank algorithm is a method of transferring the amount of pagerank “boost” a page gets by dividing up the total pagerank of a page by the number of links present. So a high pagerank page with 100 links on it is not going to give as much “voting power” as a low pagerank page with only one or two links on it.

Trying to make sense of this is at the heart of any “off page optimisation” campaign. Sifting through links, setting up reciprocal link campaigns (the site you link to links back to you) getting links from directories and so on is a time consuming task, even when using some of the more advanced tools that take a lot of the manual drudgery out of the job.

Link exchanges are springing up all over the place offering to bring together people willing to exchange links and the humble text link is becoming one of the most valuable pieces of internet property. Costs for placing text links on higher ranked sites are escalating and it’s becoming ever more important to network closely with other sites offering useful services to your visitors.

Throwing up a links page and asking all and sundry to link to it is not going to work – all that’s going to do is give you an administrative headache and make your visitors wonder if they are making the right choice. Choosing quality link partners is a time consuming and therefore expensive business.

What this all means is that the cost of website promotion is constantly going up. And those companies with well networked sites and strategically placed links are in a much better position to help their customers than those who rely solely on pay per click campaigns and other expensive forms of advertising.

A website promotion campaign is still the best value for money form of advertising that there is in my opinion, it’s just that the costs are rising and will continue to rise. But the rewards for those that get it right are greater in comparison.

To sum up, search engine optimisation is becoming a more and more labour intensive exercise. There are more pages to be made search engine friendly and to gain top spots each page has to be tuned for a particular search engine. Gone are the days of “one size fits all”.

In addition there is a large amount of work involved in linking strategies and building the “popularity” of a website so that it has a chance of making it into the top 10 results.

It’s this combination of work required that is forcing up the costs of a search engine optimisation campaign.

Tony Cooper is internet marketing manager for:

http://www.keywordmarketing.com

Building results driven websites.


Reprinted from Zongoo.com Daily Press & Consumer Information"
Posted by admin on Saturday, August 21 @ 10:24:19 EDT (954 reads)


Home    ::    About Us   ::    FAQs   ::    Newsroom   ::    Articles   ::    Contact Us

AthensGuy.com © 2003-2008 • Terms of UseAcceptable Use Policy
Athens, GA • (706) 549-0289