As part of activities marking the official visit of the high powered delegation of the National Youth Service Corps of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, led by Brigadier General Yusuf Bomoi, the National Youth Service Scheme officially launched its website recently. Delivering his launch statement at an event held at the Joint Officers Mess, Kotu, NYSC Director General, Brig-General Bomoi, expressed satisfaction with the progress made by the NYSS in the recent past. He noted that the occasion was yet another mile stone in the annals of the NYSS and that it speaks volumes of the efforts of the scheme geared towards empowering the youth.

Brig-Gen Yusuf Bomoi, who spoke at length about the relevance of NYSS, also seized the opportunity to talk about the importance of the website to the scheme, noting that it will help to strengthen the ideals of the scheme. While commending staff of NYSS for what he called an indelible achievement, he promised to support NYSS in all its endeavours.

For his part, Marchel Mendy, NYSS Public Relations Officer said the website that can be browsed on www.nyssgam.org and contains some vital information about the programmes and activities which the scheme and its corps members are involved in.

Further still, he noted that the launch of the website is in line with NYSS’ ardent desire to change the mindset of the people about the scheme and also make known some critical issues of the scheme. “There is no denying that the importance of NYSS is immeasurable. However, a rather small percentage of the Gambian populace know about the existence and its programmes. This among other things prompted the launch of a website for the scheme”, he noted.

While urging people to visit the website, he expressed confidence that all browsers of the website will be adequately informed about what happens within the NYSS by the time they finish browsing.

The embassy of the United States of America in The Gambia recently launched a new website geared towards standardizing US embassies around the world.

The new site, http.banjul.usembassy.gov, is designed to increase customer services and standardize the United States embassy websites around the world.

Having been created to give a detailed and up-to-date information to the general public and    

to the US citizens on wide ranging issues, the new format is more user-friendly, has shorter load-times for those with slow internet connections, and contains information about American citizen services and visa application procedures and US policy.

Importantly, the site is also, among other things, expected to highlight the latest headlines from Washington, embassy news including offices and departments, American citizen services and general information about visas to the United States.

Also to be highlighted in the website is the issue of Non-Immigrant visas for students wishing to attend a university or other academic institution in the United States.

Briefing journalists about the new website on Wednesday, Ms Wendy A. Kennedy, Consular Officer at the US embassy, said the change was considered an important step in improving customer service and standardising US embassy websites around the world.

She added that the old website will be discontinued. She demonstrated the filing of the visa application form to journalists gatherted. "The US Embassy website is most visited by people seeking information about visa applications".

She revealed that the embassy has a special section called the "Visa to the US" that contains all the relavant informations needed to apply for a visa. "More importantly, this  section contains links to the necessary application forms.

For his part, Papa Njie US Embassy Public Diplomacy and Cultural Affairs Assistance,  believed that the informations posted at the site would better the communication between the embassy and the general public. He is of the view that the site would also be useful to journalists.

In the previous article, we discussed how blogs can help you generate traffic for your main website. But what if you don’t have another site? Or what if you want your blog to be your main website, the exclusive carrier of your money making ventures?

This can be achieved, of course. Such is the versatility of web logs.

Standalone blogs are best utilized for online businessmen or women who have decided to pursue what many people call as nicheing. Yes, the word is ungrammatical, but it is a term that many Internet marketers have come to embrace with fondness. Nicheing involves the creation of many sites that cater to particular niches. Niches, of course, are very specialized markets, most of which are so obscure that they do not garner the attention of businesses, hence creating high demands with low supplies. The purpose of nicheing is to find these markets and provide for their needs. These enterprising businessmen would earn through the following ways:

* Creating and eventually selling products that aim to serve the said niches.

* Selling existing products that the said niches need.

* Providing for information that the members of the said niches can access for free, and enrolling the site that contains the information in a Pay Per Click (PPC) program like Google AdSense.

Regardless of what path the online entrepreneur decides to take, he should first create a site that serves as the repository of his commercial methods. Niches can be very rewarding. Since there is but a few competitions in the field, your search engine placement is sure to be higher than usual. Traffic should also be at a sustainable level since the members of a niche have nothing else to visit. This will mean a greater possibility for more sales, if you’re selling a product, or a higher Click Through Rate (CTR) if you’re enrolled in a PPC program.

Now, making a site can be quite cumbersome. You have to deal with the aspects of web design, graphic creation, and content writing among other concerns. What more when you have to create numerous sites for numerous niches?

Thankfully, blogs will make things a whole lot easier for you. Every online marketer who has attained success with niche marketing can attribute this to their proper exploitation of blogs. Whereas it would take you a couple of weeks to come up with 10 websites, it would only take you a couple of hours to come up with 10 blog sites. The sheer convenience and ease of web logs have made nicheing a very potent business model.

Blogs can very much substitute for a regular website. As we have previously discussed, high quality content is, ultimately, what will drive traffic to your site, and this kind of content can easily be carried through a blog. Also, you don’t have to change the entire page whenever you want to update your content, as you would with a regular website. With blogs, all you have to do is to write your update in a designated box and press the publish button. Of course, different blogging software have various features, but none comes more loaded than Wordpress (www.wordpress.com).

Blogging is the way to go if you want to create, and maintain, several niche sites. And Wordpress is the weapon of choice for most Internet marketers. To fully realize the potentials of the medium, therefore, you should be able to exploit all the features that Wordpress does offer. Again, David Pankhurst’s excellent report on powerful Wordpress secrets (http://www.malkeenan.com/top10tricks) will help you excel in this area.

Look out for the next article, where we’re going to discuss how you could efficiently integrate the Google AdSense program into your blog, and make it a passive income generating machine.

For More Free Resources visit www.freeearningtips.com

In this article, I am going to discuss the issue related to Google sitelinks. So the article is going to be little technical.

Before three years, webmasters noted that Google has started showing "sub topic" or "sub category" links within the results. Now Google has finally implemented the change and the name given to that service is "SiteLinks".

Sitelinks are the additional links that appear below search results in Google. They basically serve as a shortcut for internal pages of the website. It allows users to easily navigate through your website.

Google sitelinks are the ultimate endorsement of a website. While there are many clear compensation but knowing how to place site links is always like searching something in a dark art. More guess work and then hard work. But there is always a way out.

Last month in Feb, 2008, I planned to get Google sitelinks for one of my website. It was a very good experience to gain sitelinks as I also learned alot about Google sitemaps. As usual, Google is not entirely helpful in explaining the sitelink system. I worked on alot of options and found a way to get my sitelinks. I am going to share my experience so that you can also get sitelinks for your website by using these following steps:

1. Create Google sitemap of your site (e.g. sitemap.xml)

2. Upload this sitemap to your domain (e.g. www.domain.com/sitemap.xml)

3. Submit this URL in Google webmaster tool.

After submitting the sitemap, the next step is to verify your site on Google. Google offers two methods for verification. You can either upload an html file with the name which Google will specify on verification screen or you can add a Meta tag to your index file.

After verification, Select links from the left menu of webmaster tools and then navigate to sitelinks. From there you can see the pages which Google is going to use as sitelinks. You can easily manage your sitelinks from there and also block any page you don’t want to show as a sitelink.

I hope that the above information will help you in getting your sitelinks placed on Google.

Junaid Ashraf is the SEO Specialist in eNet Technologies. Website Design and Search Engine Optimization Company.

These days, it is a cut-throat competition. Unless you take advantage of the resources and the latest technologies right now, you may never be able to make it and eventually compete with other business people in your field. Hence, you have to make sure that you can build your own website. However, it should not just be any other site composed of multiple pages. You should also ensure that you have implemented an effective website design.

How Your Business Can Gain Something from Good Website Design

Why do you have to focus on your website design? Here are the numerous reasons why. Keep in mind that this list is not exhaustive. Nevertheless, there are the best purposes:

1. A good website design can drive traffic into your site. Whether you like it or not, Internet users will always go for websites that appear neat, easy to navigate, and professional looking. And these are usually the basic benefits that you can derive from having a good website design. The more people going into your website, the higher will be the possibility that you will be able to obtain the kind of sales conversion rate that you have always wanted for your online business.

2. You can generate sales leads from a good design for your website. An efficient web design allows you to build your number of potential customers. This is because you can include a mailing list where they can place their full names and e-mail address, making it real convenient for you to promote your products and services as well as send out news and other updates.

3. You can gain your own spot in search engines. This is also another huge advantage of an effective website design. As a business owner, it should not be sufficient that you can see your website in the Internet. Most of all, you must appear in at least the first pages of search engine results. A professional web designer can implement search engine optimization techniques that can make your web pages extremely friendly search engines such as Google, allowing spiders to index your web pages. You should bank on your maximum visibility.

4. An effective design for your website can help you increase your credibility. In business, it is very essential that you can build a good reputation or credibility not only for yourself but, most of all, for your small business. Otherwise, if people do not trust you, you will not be able to improve your sales, and you cannot even maintain your customer base.

Your web design, however, can increase your credibility. With excellent content to balance the aesthetic value of your web pages, you can provide information to your target market, allowing them to make careful and wise decisions. Your Products and Services page will also help you let your customers know that you can offer everything they need. Most of all, you can steer clear from penalties of search engines. After all, if you are doing web designing right, then you shouldn’t have implemented any online marketing techniques.

John Mahoney is a freelance author who writes about various technology related subjects including Website Design . For more information about John visit his website: www.techstore.ie

Visualize this: You’re driving to a friend’s place which has no road signs or distinct land markers. Your chances of finding this friend’s place without someone or GPS to direct you are probably none. Furthermore, should you be expected to find this same place in darkness, giving up to head home might not seem like a bad idea, right?

A Web site works similarly: if there are no clear directions on how to navigate through the site or it has poor visual cues on how to convey the content, then it will be given a low ranking and no accessibility. If this is the case for people with the gift of sight, imagine the plight of millions of visually challenged visitors who would want to access and locate content on your site.

An accessible Web site provides assistance in communicating effectively with the widest audience by flattening roadblocks in interaction. All it requires of the Web site owners is to follow Best Practices in site and content design principals to make the Web site easily reachable for all. The most common categories that hinder accessibility are:
• Blindness and Low Vision. A whole range of computer technology can provide assistance ranging from screen readers, refreshable Braille displays and screen magnifiers. Assistance in keyboard/ Web site navigation, scalable display font sizes, fuzzy searches, alt tags for all images and high contrast between the background and the text go a long way.
• Cognitive and Learning Disabilities. Simple and intuitive navigation, consistency in content presentation through out the Web site, clear labels and ALT tags, relevant and meaningful content, lengthy documents carrying executive summaries at the top and language understood by a wider audience.
• Impairment of hearing. Websites needs to be accessible with content captioning synchronized with multimedia and other manners of rendering content as well as interactive volume controls.
• Mobility and Speech Impairment. Technology providing assistance usually requires computer hardware at user site and assistive Web site architecture. This includes one-handed keyboards, head/mouth sticks and full eye tracking on user’s computer. Web site navigation using voice recognition provides an easy way to navigate through a Web site.

Access Ramp to your Websites?

Designing navigable sites for people with disabilities is not only federally mandated in some cases it is also socially desirable and makes good business sense too. The organization pursuing it comes across as one that has a strong sense of social responsibility, and sensitive to the needs of the otherwise challenged. It is also desirable because legislation like Section 508 (of the Rehabilitation act) mandate that US federal agencies have their Websites accessible for the blind and visually impaired with the help of screen readers.

Section 508, for those not conversant with the Act, requires "federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities…Under Section 508 (29 U.S.C. ‘794d), agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others."

While this is not mandatory for private organizations, many have voluntarily made their Websites Section 508-compliant as such requirements may be enforced in the future. Census data points out that in 2002, out of 222 million Americans (15 years and above), there were 46 million with some form of disability (30 million severe). This number is expected to swell up to 54 million in 2007. It is only a matter of time before private organizations realize the importance of presenting their Web site in a manner that is fully accessible to visually challenged people. With such a huge base, smart private organizations cannot afford to overlook people with disabilities. Even with the annual mean earning of this segment was $23,034 against an average of $31,840 in 2002, it is estimated that they control over $175 billion in discretionary income.

Despite this not inconsiderable opportunity, most businesses have not actively taken steps to make their Web site Section 508 compliant. As with any other technology adoption, cost is undoubtedly one of the major factors that influences decision making. Developing, maintaining and repurposing content to conform to Section 508 guidelines is an expensive and resource intensive job. When guidelines change, the content or framework of the whole site needs to change too. When you consider that these changes have to be made to thousands of pages on a Web site, the effort is tedious and time consuming.

Requirements for accessible Websites

For a Web site to be easily navigable by visually challenged, screen readers are needed. Organizing content, appropriate titling and linking are critical sign posts that enable screen readers to access and read out content in the same way as a person with normal sight would interpret it. Designing such a Web site is no less challenging, as the screen reader needs to intelligently convey to the person on the site how to browse, communicate relationships between content elements, and the type of content. These requirements will be slightly different for a person who can see but has poor vision. Those falling into this category will need their content in large fonts, and visually bright colors and large image sizes.

When you consider that Web site content management itself is a challenge, Section 508 compliance requirements take this challenge to a whole new level. In addition to requirements of content, usability, design and information architecture – you will need to separate form from content, and do it to make it accessible for people with all categories of disability. This is not a task for faint hearted unless you have a comprehensive Web CMS system to handle content requirements.

Web site CMS can help Build the right Ramp

A Web site content management system is the right tool in taking over the task of creation, maintenance and management of a Web site. Most notably, it allows organizations to maintain consistency across all pages of their Web site – which is absolutely critical when it comes to a Web site which is going to be accessed by a visually challenged person.

A Web site CMS like CrownPeak can for instance, enforce design and navigation schemes, and the presentation of content through standardized presentation templates. These templates can ensure that the content presentation, titling and linking are arranged in such a way that it would enable visually challenged people to easily navigate the site using voice commands. As templates control how data is displayed throughout the Web site, subject matter experts can create content without having to worry about Section 508 compliance.

The company’s versioning and content monitoring tools can also enable government organizations to become instantly compliant with data archive regulations, as they are established.

Features like complete system auditing and reporting provide government organizations the ability to manage and track the history of all work easing adherence to compliance regulations. Files can be given a full document lifecycle, including check-in, check-out, versioning, rollback, approvals, and scheduling.

A Web site content management system also has intelligent workflow automation, ensuring that content passes through appropriate quality gates before being published. Additionally, completely configurable workflows enable organizations to assign tasks to any person, and scale up when defined thresholds are crossed. For example, e-mail alerts can be sent to content owners of specific sections on a Web site when these sections don’t get updated after a specific time period. This is difficult to do in a manual system.

To summarize, a Web content management system can provide the following benefits:

• Improving efficiency and maintaining consistency with respect to regulations
• Reducing non-compliant code violations
• Reduced maintenance cost.

Why should you consider SaaS Model?

While Web site content management systems help users manage content more effectively, government organizations will realize that most content management systems are expensive to procure, complex to implement and configure, and require more resources to maintain.

To address these issues, organizations can consider using Web site content management systems that are delivered through Software-as-a-Service model. By accessing ‘software’ as a service, organizations are spared the high initial cost of purchasing the license. Moreover, as the software is hosted, there is no hardware to buy and no software to purchase and install. The subscribing organization only pays fixed monthly or quarterly fees and leaves the task of managing, maintaining and upgrading the software to the vendor. This is extremely important for government organizations that have tight budgets and growing Web site related responsibilities.

Currently, CrownPeak manages Web content for the office of the US Trade Representative, helping America’s chief trade negotiator and trade policy advisor manage a continuous shuffling of Web site content, maintain indexing and categorization of various content types, and sustain accessibility and records management compliance.

CrownPeak also helps the Commonwealth of Virginia manage the Web site that serves as the gateway site to every Virginia government related resource, with information ranging from government elections data to travel and tourism. The vendor also provides a dedicated account manager, with an escalation path for support. By using a SaaS model, government organizations can also cut down on their risk, and choose different functionalities as the requirements grow. Further, as billing is on a monthly or quarterly basis, costs are spread across the lifetime of a product’s usage. This is an extremely attractive value proposition when compared to the traditional CMS model, where costs are paid upfront and the risk of product implementation and adoption rests totally on the organization.

That is not all. CrownPeak Lifelong Active Support ensures that content management Best Practices are available at all times. It has been estimated that 91% of all support requirements are unrelated to software and organizations deploying enterprise CMS have to make additional investments to cover this need. CrownPeak Lifelong Active Support covers these requirements automatically giving the true complete coverage of all support needs.

Accessible to All

The Internet is a powerful and influential medium. By enabling visually challenged people to access Websites, government and private organizations can take the lead in creating a future that allows every citizen to explore a vast world of information in an unhindered manner. While it is a mandatory requirement for government organizations, it is a highly desirable social responsibility for others as well; and CrownPeak Web content management system ensures that you do not have to make a large dent in your budget to achieve this goal.
This article is contributed by Rob Rose - Vice President of Crownpeak. An accessible Web site provides assistance in communicating effectively with the widest audience by flattening roadblocks in interaction. All it requires of the Web site owners is to follow Best Practices in site and content design principals to make the Web site easily reachable for all. Crownpeak offers an efficient Content Management System (CMS) for your website.

Forget Facebook, MySpace or You Tube: here comes connect2earth, a new online community where young people can upload videos, pictures and comments about the environment.

On www.connect2earth.org, users and visitors will be able to write, speak, illustrate and video present their concerns on subjects important to them, and share environmental ideas and solutions.

Each month, users will vote for a winner who will receive a Nokia mobile phone.

“Connect2earth is a truly global space for young people to connect, share, express their concerns and hopes about the environment online – and win some prizes in the process”, said James Leape, Director General of WWF International.

“This new community allows them to tell the world why they care about the environment and why it should be protected.”

Julia Marton-Lefèvre, Director General of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) said: “We live on an amazing planet – we need to protect it. We want to encourage young people to be involved in environmental issues and take action.”

A panel of prominent conservationists will elect an overall winner who will get the chance to participate in the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona next October.

She or he will have the opportunity to present some ideas directly to leaders from around the world.

“Young people feel increasingly strongly about protecting the environment because, for them, it represents their future”, said Kirsi Sormunen, Vice President of Environmental Affairs at Nokia.

And how do you connect to earth through connect2earth? The site, not surprisingly, is particularly suited to uploading short films, photos and comments from mobile phones.