Host Color, a global Quality Web Hosting provider introduced today it’s special WordPress Hosting service. The company launched WP hosting plan priced at $2.99 per month to provide more choice for the growing community of WordPress site owners.

Host Color says its new WordPress Hosting Plan is an exclusive WP service that can not be used for websites that run any other software applications. The limitation is set due to quality assurance, so company can guarantee that customers of WordPress Plan will not use the promotional price of $2.99/month to host other applications instead of WordPress.

"We provide quality service to people in various areas of web activity and
to enable site owners to use their favorite CMS and other software
applications in high-class web hosting environment. That’s why Host Color
maintains more than 30 different service plans only in Shared Class
Hosting", said Alexander Avramov, Managing Director of Host Color LLC.

"All customers of our have a choice and can use quality hosting plans in
range between $2.99 and $11.99 per month. WordPress Hosting plan is the most inexpensive one and we allow it to be used solely for managing a WP blog", add Mr. Avramov.

The WordPress Hosting plan allows WP blog owners to use 1,000 MG disc space and 5 GB data transfer per month. Host Color says that these quotas will be increased for anyone that needs more disc space and monthly transfer, but the company does not want to promote any numbers that aren’t realistic and could be considered as overselling.

Besides preinstalled WordPress blog, WP customers can use a number of
premium WordPress themes without additional cost, and to meter their
visitors with AwStats. Anyone who wants needs to register new domain name has to pay only $8.95 for web address under COM, NET, ORG, INFO, BIZ, US or WS extensions.

Host Color has recently been very active in promoting national and regional
domain extensions. It has launched campaigns to promote .ME, .US, . Asia and .BZ domains. The company has recently opened its new Affiliate Center and new Affiliate Program. The new program transfers 25% of the company’s revenue per sale to its affiliates and at the same time pays them for each unique visitor sent to Host Color’s website.

About Host Color
Host Color LLC is a quality U.S. web hosting company incorporated in
Delaware. It powers thousands of business and personal websites in data
centers in South Bend, Indiana, U.S. and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The
company also provides fully Managed dedicated hosting through HC Servers and European hosting services through HC Europe. It offers discounts to academics and non-governmental organizations. The Host Color’s corporate message is "Web hosting about people, not about gigabytes."

You can read my personal review about Host Color and its hosting services on this post.

If your web hosting plan uses H-Sphere control panel, and you run WordPress 2.5 from it, most likely you will get an "HTTP error" when you attempt to upload an image or anything to your WordPress 2.5 media gallery.

Here are the steps THC told me on how they solved the WordPress problem:

1. Right-click and save (download) this no-flash-uploader PHP file and upload it to your WordPress 2.5 plugin folder.
2. Activate the no-flash-uploader plugin in your WordPress control panel.
3. Be sure that your WordPress upload folder is writable (chmod to 777 to be sure).
4. Download this zip file, uncompress it to your local hard drive, and upload the folders to your WordPress installation directory. Make sure that the folders you upload follow the same directory structure of your WordPress installation.
5. Login to your WordPress control panel, and try uploading an image. WordPress 2.5 image upload should work during this step.

Just take note that the notorious WordPress image upload error is not exclusive to H-Sphere control panel. It also occurs to other control panels like CPanel and Plesk — and the solution approach is different.

If you find the solution above ineffective for your H-Sphere web hosting plan, please let me know and I would be fully happy to assist you.

Basically advertising involves costs as it does on television, radio and newspapers. Online advertising however, offers various ways to promote your products and services for free. Social media channels and online communities offer such opportunities in getting your products known beyond geographical borders.

Like other media channels, paid online advertising on high-traffic websites usually is a cost-efficient and timely marketing move. However, there are situations when such activities backfire especially when the advertisements are placed on irrelevant sites or placed in wrong advertising space.

This blog post sparks a series of discussions about online business promotion. Of course, this is aimed to help you bait real customers in the World Wide Web and making more money from them.

To have a head start, we will discuss the first and significant online business promotion channel: search engines.

Do Your SEO

Who else in the world doesn’t know about Google? Nobody except people who are still living inside caves, right?

As you might have known, Google currently owns the largest user base when it comes to web searches. This popular search engine is used by millions of people who are looking for something in the massive Web – people looking for information, entertainment, products, services, and so on. Oops, did I mention “products and services”? I guess I did.

Taking a serious analogy on that, it means that there are millions of potential customers you can have for your business. The problem is – how to catch them – since they browse through millions of websites which could be other businesses searching for their respective customers too. Meaning to say, you are not alone wanting these people – you have rivals like the typical business situation in the real world.

Now to arm yourself, you have to optimize your website to become friendly with search engines. This is first and most necessary business promotion activity you have to do before engaging on other methods.

Here’s what you need to do: try validating your each of your web pages to the following W3C validation services to know if your HTML markups and CSS adhere with the standards: the W3C Markup Validation Service and the W3C CSS Validation Service. If you find irregularities during validation, fix them if you can (else you can contact me for assistance). By doing such, you are making your site friendly to web crawlers and search engine spiders that contribute to your search engine ranking.

If your online business runs a blog that uses WordPress platform, make sure you read my previous post on how to optimize them.

I want to emphasize few things on what you must do for search engine optimization (SEO) since this topic is very broad and if we talk wholly, we would be making a whole separate SEO blog. You have to do some additional researches and make sure to do the following things to your website:

• Make sure you properly setup your meta description and keyword tags in each of your web pages.
• Name your web pages and image files properly and make them readable to human beings as they do to search engines. Make sure they present relevant keywords related to your site. Use hyphen as separator of more-than-two worded files.
• Put relevant ALT descriptions to all your images.
• Never use flash as a web page. Flash is known to be SEO suicide.
• Make sure your web page file size does not exceed 100 KB (images inclusive).
• In your contents, work on mentioning more the keywords related to your online business. However, do not overpopulate them with similar keywords.

In the next business promotion sequel, we will talk about how to generate press release buzzes and where to buzz them to make your business controversial and popular.

The upgrade process went very smooth and definitely transparent. As usual, WordPress guys made things easy – no “computerese,” no jargons whatsoever, just good steps. After I upgraded, I was redirected to the WordPress login and it is where my impression begins.

The login design has been changed for better. It looks very neat and fresh now, unlike the blue one that we used to see in the previous version which, in my opinion, was large.

The center of improvement came after I logged into my WordPress control panel. I was surprised – indeed, there are big changes. The first thing I noticed basically is the design. The new WordPress 2.5 default dashboard configuration displays recent comments, incoming links, WordPress development blog, popular plugins and the typical box news.

The default main menu now comes with only five items: Write, Manage, Design, Comments and Ratings. The Write menu item when clicked displays the Write Post page featuring the revamped (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) WYSIWYG WordPress blog editor. The Manage menu item lets you manage posts, pages, links, categories, tags, link categories, media library and like before, boasts WordPress Import and Export function. The Design menu, on the other hand, is equivalent to previous “Presentation” menu. The Settings, Plugins and User menu items are now displayed in small font to the upper right portion of the administration panel.

Another thing that is noticeable with the new WordPress is the speed. It is a whole lot faster than the previous one – one thing many bloggers will like (including me). The one-click plugin upgrade is superb. It asks for your domain’s FTP login information, and then it upgrades the outdated plugins for you.

My conclusion is that I very much prefer the previous blue-themed control panel. When I found that the color scheme can be changed to classic through the Settings, however, my little disappointment vanished. Now, WordPress 2.5 looks good and I love it like other bloggers do.

So what I did is that I unzipped the files to my local disk and uploaded them to this WordPress-based blog. I logged in to my blog’s control panel and see how the theme looks. The theme is called “THC Alpha,” a two-column WordPress theme that looks good. I was impressed of the decency of the design which carries an air of formality.

Download the THC Alpha theme for WordPress here.

Here are the screen captures of THC Alpha WordPress theme:

My review for THC’s Speedy hosting plan is still being written and no matter how many WordPress themes they will send me, it will never influence my judgement to their Speedy plan. Anyway, THC made it clear that what they gave was just a token of appreciation – so there is no bad motive behind unless you think otherwise.

Visit official Speedy hosting plan page at THC.

I just added another item in the menu called “Resources.” That page will be populated with useful media (themes, e-books, among others) that you would like to check and download. It is pretty barren as of the moment though, but you will love that page eventually.

What is JS-Kit?

I was intrigued when I found out that JS-Kit is not a set of WordPress or any blog platform plugin – and it’s not exclusive to blogs either – it works with any web page. JS-Kit is in fact, a package of web services that you can take advantage in many ways. It works similar to a widget. JS-Kit comprises of five different services that work amazingly with each other: Navigator, Ratings, Reviews, Comments and Polls.

The installation is flawless and very easy. You only need to insert the code snippet they provide for each service, and then load the page in the browser and poof – there you go. If you’ve ever tried using Google Analytics or StatCounter’s web analyzer codes then you’ll find the installation process similar.

One of JS-Kit’s weaknesses is that it will not run on websites that block JavaScript (since it is mainly powered by that scripting language). Therefore, there is no hope adding it on MySpace or Friendster which potentially could promote socialization.

JS-Kit Navigator

JS-Kit Navigator service provides a configurable widget that is implemented in a tab. When I run the page with the code for the first time, an admin console appeared and it let me configure how the service will look when the code is run. It displays basically three default tabs: Top, Hot and Best Picks – however, only one tab is required to be enabled for the service to work. I strongly suggest though that you enable all them for greater advantages. The caption of each tab is modifiable. However, for this review’s sake, I’ll use their default names.

In the Top tab, JS-Kit Navigator is able to show the most popular objects (or pages) using weighted average user ratings collected by the JS-Kit’s Ratings and Reviews services. It also able to gather the most active or “hot” objects measured by similar JS-Kit services in the Hot tab. On the Best Picks tab, site administrators can build custom views and put their own internal or external links for increased visibility to the website visitors. Finally, you can “viralize” your site contents with the “Grab It” feature – enabling your readers to embed the JS-Kit Navigator on any site on the Web.

The main advantage of this web service is that it can potentially increase traffic to the website. I could personally declare that with confidence because this so-called “widget” is very eye catchy (though some users would falsely identify it as one of Google advertisements). Its dynamic list generation is perfect for blogs and news websites.

Should you use JS-Kit Navigator? Well, JS-Kit’s Navigator brings no disadvantage so it is unreasonable if you don’t enjoy the blessings. If you have an extra ad space in your homepage, you can use the service, boost your page views and reduce your bounce rate. Just be sure to place it in a conspicuous place or anywhere above the fold.

To use JS-Kit Navigator web service, insert this code to any page you desire:

<div class="js-kit-top"style="width: 300px" title="Easy Site Navigator"></div>

<script src="http://js-kit.com/top.js"></script>

Learn more about JS-Kit Navigator here.

JS-Kit Ratings

It’s unfortunate for me that I learned about this web service too late. I’ve been using WP-PostRatings plugin for my WordPress blog for almost a month and I am still fairly satisfied with its performance. However, unlike WP-PostRatings plugin, which is rather specifically tailored for WordPress, JS-Kit Ratings web service goes beyond the boundaries. Aside from blog entries, it can also be used to let your visitors to rate merchandise items, services, pictures, and any other objects.

JS-Kit Ratings service presents benefits to visitors and web publishers. For visitors, it allows them to express their opinions through ratings to any associated object. For publishers, they can collect valuable stats about their audience’s preferences that may help push the efficiency of marketing plans. JS-Kit Ratings presentation is also customizable – however, only to a limited extent. It can show stars, and you can change its colors, but just stars. This limitation is the only drawback I found with JS-Kit Ratings web service.

Should you use JS-Kit Ratings? If you don’t have a ratings feature yet integrated in your blog or website, this web service is definitely a very good choice. The five star rating is very attractive and somehow entices the visitors to interact with your pages and rate your articles. If you ever plan to use this, I suggest that you use other JS-Kit services as well.

To use JS-Kit Ratings web service, insert this code to any page you desire:

<div class="js-kit-rating" title="" permalink=""></div>

<script src="http://js-kit.com/ratings.js"></script>

Just like that.

Learn more about JS-Kit Ratings here.

JS-Kit Reviews

If you feel that JS-Kit Ratings are not enough and you need to actually know what your visitors or customers have to say about a certain product or content, then it is where JS-Kit Reviews service enters center-stage. It is definitely the easiest code snippet I’ve seen in integrating reviews feature to any web page. I was amazed how the three lines of code could do such thing.

JS-Kit Reviews web service basically lets you interact to your visitors with its threaded comments. Like what I said, its deployment takes only a few minutes and then it will enhance your visitor’s site experience and potentially improve your page’s conversion rates. Its powerful moderation, spam protection and service statistics are thumbs up.

Should you use JS-Kit Reviews? Personally I don’t think I can take advantage much of this service on this blog. However, for merchants who sell products online, I highly recommend this service. It gives a chance to your visitors to leave reviews about the items you sell. The only missing part of this web service is that reviewers aren’t given a chance to leave their signature links. It could somehow boost the reliability of reviews. JS-Kit Comments web services, also shares similar shortcomings.

To use JS-Kit Reviews web service, insert this code to any page you desire:

<div class="js-kit-rating"></div>

<div class="js-kit-comments"></div>

<script src="http://js-kit.com/reviews.js"></script>

Learn more about JS-Kit Reviews here.

JS-Kit Comments

JS-Kit Comments amazes me in a way that it provides extended functionality with just two lines of codes. You will get a full-featured commenting engine to any page you want it to be applied on to. It lets visitors to leave comments without the annoying registrations or logins. Plus, JS-Kit Comments also lets commentators to upload their own avatar which is rather good.

A major drawback of the JS-Kit Comments web service is the lack of URL field for commentators. Though it surely fends off spammers, it would also discourage people (especially bloggers) to do some comments. I think that to grow a community we need to respect each other and at least have the courtesy to leave the link field optional.

Should you use JS-Kit Comments? Bloggers will be hesitant to try this web service as it easily gives the impression that it would not help or benefit their sites. For other website types that need a commenting engine, webmasters don’t need to find scripts anymore and take the hard road dealing with tricky database installations. JS-Kit Comments already provides you same functions with just – well – two lines of codes!

To use JS-Kit Comments web service, insert this code to any page you desire:

<div class="js-kit-comments" permalink=""></div>

<script src="http://js-kit.com/comments.js"></script>

Learn more about JS-Kit Comments here.

JS-Kit Polls

User polls are one of the efficient methods of getting opinions from users quickly. JS-Kit Polls service offers an attractive, simple-looking but highly customizable poll system. It lets web publishers modify existing polls on-the-fly without changing any HTML. After a website visitor casts a vote to the poll, JS-Kit Polls instantly shows a visual poll result which looks great – and I mean it.

I have decided to use this web service in my future blog posts. I believe bloggers can really exploit this in fetching their readers’ opinions about certain competing products or people. Perhaps I can do online election using this.

Should you use JS-Kit Polls? If you feel like you need this – why not? It invokes your readers mind to contribute some quick opinions. If you’re a blogger or writer, you could make new headlines with the final results of the poll.

To use JS-Kit Polls web service, insert this code to any page you desire:

<div class="js-kit-poll" style="width: 350px"></div>

<script src="http://js-kit.com/polls.js"></script>

Learn more about JS-Kit Polls here.

Are JS-Kit web services free?

As much I have dug the JS-Kit’s official website, I never found the word “free” there. However, I asked a friend who’s familiar with their services and I was told that their services are free. I personally hope that the people behind JS-Kit would clarify on their website whether their services are free or not.

TechCrunch, a popular tech blog, featured JS-Kit last year and described it as “Web 2.0 for the Lazy People.” Generally, I don’t have objection with that: with just two, three lines of code you’ll get extended features that will improve your website traffic, enrich your visitor’s experience and arouse their senses to interact with objects you put on your page. Truly, JS-Kit suite successfully delivers Web 2.0 “bling bling” services for everyone.

Recently, I found another free statistical tool that works similarly like Google Analytics. However, unlike Analytics, it does not work only as an invisible web tracker, but it can be configured to act as a hit counter too. It is also much faster and responsive, quickly loading than the Google counterpart. It accurately reports site statistics in real-time. The reportage includes popular pages, entry and exit pages, referring sites, keyword analysis, search engines, visitor information, paths and length, visitor map, among others.

It only takes four steps to get started with StatCounter. First, you need to register an account at StatCounter website. Then, you create a project for web tracking: it could be the whole website or just the major pages you want to comprehensively analyze. Finally, StatCounter gives you the snippet code that you just “copy and paste” to web page before the closing tag of the body. If you already experienced Google Analytics, you will observe that the application process is almost the same.

Bloggers who own sites powered by WordPress platform (like me) can also take advantage of StatCounter’s plugin. Like other WordPress plugins, this web tracker plugin is easy to install and use. Once it’s activated, it begins to track visitors from any page and reports more in detail the web traffic than any other WordPress statistics plugins.

Question: Can I put two web trackers on my web page? Yes. That is what I do with my websites. This website, for instance, is being tracked by Google Analytics and StatCounter. Each web tracker has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the weaknesses of one are complemented by the other. For Adwords users, Google Analytics may help you better in your web marketing; otherwise StatCounter offers more detailed web traffic report. The only minor rant I have with StatCounter free account is that its logs are limited to 500 entries only – but still enough for small to medium-sized websites or blogs. If you think your site is large, you can consider upgrading to larger log quota in various denominations. The cheapest upgrade is US$9 per month for 1500 log quota. But then again, I believe you’ll get the worth of your pay with StatCounter.

Click here to visit StatCounter website.

SEO is significant to site owners (regardless of the nature of the site) because it promotes greater chance of getting a higher position in SERP. Higher rank usually means greater probabilities of being searched by people, bringing traffic to their website and creating opportunities. If you just created a blog website powered by WordPress or you have an existing site that is not optimized, here are the most common effective methods you can do to improve your SERP rank.

Provide quality content at higher frequency

This is easier said than done. Providing fresh, quality content at higher frequency remains the most effective method of SEO. Quality content refers to the significance of information or services presented on your website. For instance, if you’ve published an article (or any content) that interests your users, chances are great that they might visit it again, promote it or create link to your website.

Search engines nowadays are getting smarter and more sophisticated that it can nearly bring visitors exactly to the page they really want. Search engines will look less on the syntactic composition of a web page, and focus more on the real, actual content. Since this is the trend, it’s wise to strive to provide quality content. The content, for me, remains the “king” when it comes to website marketing.

Make your pages searchable

Validate your pages and make sure they adhere to W3C coding standards. Having a good code in your pages basically will help spiders crawl and search relevant information on the page. Spiders are automated programs or scripts that search engine use to browse and discover the pages of Web. While validating your code does NOT improve your SERP ranking, it does contribute to an effective SEO by its nature. Use absolute links, and try to avoid making a Flash-dominated page because, as of this writing, it performs poorly in improving SEO. Dead links and HTML/JavaScript/CSS syntax errors should also be eradicated so that the page will properly be indexed.

Join the social community bandwagon

If you ever heard of social community and bookmarking sites (e.g. Facebook, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, Del.icio.us, among others), they are hot these days because they promote socialization beyond borders. Fortunately, webmasters can take advantage of them because they can be great tools to improve the exposure of a website. Most sites work by submitting to them your content through Web feed formats (like RSS), online bookmarking and personal submission, which they publicize. Squidoo, for instance, lets you create blurbs to promote or sell just anything. If interested online readers found them, they can potentially bring huge traffic to your blog or website. To participate, visit social community websites and create an account to them.

Install SEO-friendly WordPress themes and plugins

Personally, the Themes and Plugin feature are among the myriad things I love in WordPress blog platform. They are easy to install and you don’t need to be a geek to be able to add widgets and extended functionality (well, it helps when you know HTML, CSS and PHP – but don’t be scared if you don’t). If you own a WordPress-powered blog, visit their official website and browse for SEO-friendly plugins and themes. You may personalize them if you want.
This website, powered by WordPress, uses the following plugins:

• Adsense Deluxe
  Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Requires WordPress 1.5 or higher. For complete usage and configuration click on AdsenseDeluxe under the “Options” menu.
• All in One SEO Pack
  Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
• Digg This
  Adds Digg story link on detection on digg referrer.
• DoFollow
  Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
  Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
• Google Search Widget
  Adds a sidebar widget to let users search your site with Google.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.
• Social Bookmarks
  Adds a list of xHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.
• Text Link Ads
  Really Simple Web/RSS Advertising For Personal or Commercial Use
• WordPress Database Backup
  On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
• WP-Cache
  Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.
• WP-Print
  Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• WP 2.3 Related Posts
  Generate a related posts list via tags of WordPress 2.3
• WP YouTube
  WP YouTube makes it easier for you to post embed YouTube videos in WordPress. It also features YouTube options , for you to control all the YouTube videos at the same time.

I’d like to give credit to the creators of the above-mentioned plugins. It is up to you to discover how they work and what benefits they bring. Also, please note that there are other plugins that you may want to install for your WordPress site. My personal advice, however, is not to install too many plugins because they may consume too much CPU resource if you are on a basic hosting.

Spread your links to the world

In SEO, it is generally better if you strive to have more inbound links. Inbound links are links pointing to your website from other sites. If you are blog is new, it is wise to submit your website’s Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to free web directories. This can initially build inbound links that can be beneficial. Your next option is to exchange links with other bloggers or sites. Making friends online, blog commenting and link baiting usually help. If more of your inbound links come from sites with high PageRank and belongs to your blog’s niche, you might increase your blog’s PR as bonus. There are still quite a number of methods to spread your links to the Web, I leave it to you to discover. Enjoy!