The Monday after Thanksgiving is known as CyberMonday. This is the online version of Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. People head to Internet stores to get good deals on the things that they’re buying for Christmas. If you have an ecommerce store then you had better make sure that it can handle any traffic that you might get during this busy shopping time.

You may be thinking that this isn’t going to be a problem this year since it’s expected that holiday shopping rates will be low again because of the recession. While it’s true that there will be fewer shoppers this year than a few years back it’s not true that you don’t have to worry about your website. There was a well-publicized example of this last year when a local store that sells diabetic socks was featured on a news program and got so much traffic that the site crashed.

The worst thing that can happen to your site is to crash during a time when a lot of people want to make purchases from you. That immediately means profits down the drain. If you aren’t sure whether or not your website can handle holiday shopping traffic then call your host and ask about the issue.

Before you can start building a company website, you first have to choose a web hosting provider.  Though it may be tempting to just sign up with the first one you run across, that plan can backfire.  Here are a few tips to help you find good unix hosting.

• Do they have a package that will fit your needs?  This requires that you know a little bit about what you need.  If you just want a small website and don’t anticipate having much traffic come to it, a small website with shared hosting will probably be just fine.  If you have big plans for an ecommerce giant, and you have reason to believe you truly can do it, looking into dedicated hosting options.
• Will there be room for growth?  Again, this does require that you know a little bit about what you expect from your website — initially as well as what growth you anticipate.  Be sure there is a plan to upgrade to should your bandwidth and storage requirements exceed the plan you will be starting out with.
• Do they have good customer service?  Good customer service response time, not to mention ability and willingness to help customers, are a necessity with any web hosting provider.
• How do their prices measure up?  While this is too important of a decision to make solely based on price, the cost of your web hosting does matter.  Do a quick comparison check to see how the company’s prices measure up to their competitors before signing up with them.

These are just a few of the things to look for when choosing a hosting provider.  I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting, so if you notice something I didn’t mention, please feel free to make suggestions in the comments!

Are you looking for better ways to get your web development done? If you’d like to spend less time coding pages and more time trying to get creative with your projects, you might want to consider switching your application development environment to Dreamweaver, by Adobe, and then purchasing add on dreamweaver extensions.

photo credit: schoschie

Why would you want to do this? For one, using Dreamweaver will greatly reduce your development time in its own right. With color coded language sets you reduce eye strain and increase speed. You’ll also have fewer errors that need trouble shooting.

After you purchase one or more dreamweaver extensions, you will find that creating various aspects of your web applications goes much smoother. You might find yourself coding a ton of CSS style sheets. If you had a CSS menu writer extension, most of the work would be done for you in a click or two.

Perhaps you create a lot of web charts and would love to move into the dynamic creation of them. There’s an extension for that as well.

Creating Google maps to embed in pages or generating code that inserts cookie functionality into your web site? All of this and more can be delivered when you start using dreamweaver extensions.

There are a lot of work from home schemes that you can find online. They all seem pretty inviting too, but many of them just seem a little bit too good to be true. And you know what they say about things that seem too good to be true: There usually are.

The big one you see all of the time is filling out surveys. Supposedly you can get cash just for filling out surveys online. But then when you sign up to do this you find out that the surveys don’t pay cash. Instead you earn reward points. And you have to earn a lot of these points before you can trade them in for stuff. That’s not money, that’s stuff!

But there is one out there that I don’t think is a scheme. You can do medical transcriptions or medical billing from the comfort of your own home. All you need is some training which can be done online. Once you are trained you may have to buy some specialized software like medical billing software, but then you are good to go. I’m kind of excited about the prospect of earning some money by working at home, so I’m going to follow up and see if this is for real.