A simple guide of how to create an Amazon store front without knowing how to code around the Amazon Developers Kit. Everything referred to in this HowTo is completely free to download and setu

In no uncertain terms, your domain name is your brand name. In fact it says all about your business. It is no less than a road sign that directs traffic to your site. One of the most crucial steps to go online is to choose a domain name or a website address that stands for your business. So be watchful while arriving at the name as it cannot be replaced once you have booked for it. Your domain name should be at least two characters long and should not comprise symbols like @, #, $, %, &. No doubt, the number of .com names is limited, but once you follow certain strategies you’ll be able to come up with a unique website name.

Short and easy to remember

No doubt, a creative domain name is indeed appealing, but is it easy to remember at the same time? What if your prospect finds it difficult to recall? An ideal domain name should be short which also speaks about your business at the same time. Furthermore, it should be kept simple, so that user could easily memorize it.

Geographical Component

If you add geographical component with the domain name, it gives an additional push when it comes to local searches. For e.g. If you are running a dry fruits company with a name Ahmedabad Dry Fruits then form a domain name as Ahmedabaddryfruits.com, or AhmedabadDryfruits.com .

Don’t make up words

Certainly, both Yahoo and Google have become successful, though these sites have conjured up the site names. However, according to experts you need to have good strategy in place, subsequently followed by sizeable marketing budget to make the site climb up in popularity rankings. So it is strongly recommended to opt for a combination of words that already stand for something.

Opt for “.com” if possible

In case of most businesses, ‘.com’ names have already been used. Nonetheless, one could explore options like ‘.net’ or ‘.biz’, however ‘.com’ is still the most sought and prominent addition. Try and find such a domain name.

Buy Pre-registered Domains

One can also opt for pre-registered domain names that are offered for resale. Nonetheless, their price may be tad higher than the available domains. If you really wish to have a domain name that speaks about your business then opt for pre-registered, premium domains as well.

A domain name, one that customers can easily relate to, will undoubtedly increase traffic on your site. So whenever you wish to run a successful online business, the domain name is first step, which will help you climb up in Google rankings.

In no uncertain terms, your domain name is your brand name. In fact it says all about your business. It is no less than a road sign that directs traffic to your site. One of the most crucial steps to go online is to choose a domain name or a website address that stands for your business. So be watchful while arriving at the name as it cannot be replaced once you have booked for it. Your domain name should be at least two characters long and should not comprise symbols like @, #, $, %, &. No doubt, the number of .com names is limited, but once you follow certain strategies you’ll be able to come up with a unique website name.

Short and easy to remember

No doubt, a creative domain name is indeed appealing, but is it easy to remember at the same time? What if your prospect finds it difficult to recall? An ideal domain name should be short which also speaks about your business at the same time. Furthermore, it should be kept simple, so that user could easily memorize it.

Geographical Component

If you add geographical component with the domain name, it gives an additional push when it comes to local searches. For e.g. If you are running a dry fruits company with a name Ahmedabad Dry Fruits then form a domain name as Ahmedabaddryfruits.com, or AhmedabadDryfruits.com .

Don’t make up words

Certainly, both Yahoo and Google have become successful, though these sites have conjured up the site names. However, according to experts you need to have good strategy in place, subsequently followed by sizeable marketing budget to make the site climb up in popularity rankings. So it is strongly recommended to opt for a combination of words that already stand for something.

Opt for “.com” if possible

In case of most businesses, ‘.com’ names have already been used. Nonetheless, one could explore options like ‘.net’ or ‘.biz’, however ‘.com’ is still the most sought and prominent addition. Try and find such a domain name.

Buy Pre-registered Domains

One can also opt for pre-registered domain names that are offered for resale. Nonetheless, their price may be tad higher than the available domains. If you really wish to have a domain name that speaks about your business then opt for pre-registered, premium domains as well.

A domain name, one that customers can easily relate to, will undoubtedly increase traffic on your site. So whenever you wish to run a successful online business, the domain name is first step, which will help you climb up in Google rankings.

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You may have a spectacular website, but there are a few essential requirements that your website needs to be successful.

Meta Tags: Title Tag, Meta Keyword and Meta Description tags should be included in your HTML code at the top of every page. Search engines will crawl them and store them to display in their search results. Again, each page should be optimized separately and have a unique title, keywords, and description tags.

Navigation: Normally I will suggest Top, Left and Bottom Navigation, also if possible breadcrumb navigation too. Make sure it stays the same across the board on all pages of your site. Your job is to guide your visitors through your website, making sure they always know where they are and how to get to where they need to go.

Search Engine Optimized: Trust me it is very important, everybody wants their pages to rank well in the search engines. All the pages of your website should be optimized with 2, or 3 keywords/phrases. Use your keywords into your title tag, Meta keyword and description and in the body of each page, also use them in your images alt tag, even in the names you give your pages.

Google Analytics/Tracking System: Once your site is up and running you’ll want to keep your eye on traffic. Who’s visiting your website, what pages are the most popular, where is the traffic coming from. All of these questions and more can be answered by using a good analytics program. You can use Google Analytics for this, once registered you will be given some Java Script code to copy and paste in all your web pages.

Contact Us Information: Many websites fail because the visitors cannot find a way to contact the owner of the website. If you can’t include a phone number, at least have an email address or a “Contact Us” form. By this you can make your visitors feel comfortable and they can reach you.

Privacy Policy/Disclaimer: Privacy Policy document should be standard issue for every website you have. Visitors need to know how you are going to use their personal information.

You also need to include a disclaimer/terms of use page. This protects you and spells out to your visitors what they’re agreeing to by using your website.

Copyright Notice: All web pages should include a copyright notice. If you don’t want to have to update it manually every year, find a simple Javascript that will automatically do it for you.

Search Box/Site Map: If your website is rather large, you will also want to include a way to search, or have a “Site Map”. There are many ways to add a search function to your site, the easiest being to use Google’s free service at- http://www.google.com/sitesearch/

A site map is just one web page that contains links to every page of your site, usually broken down by category.

Newsletter Sign Up/RSS Feed: By offering a newsletter you will be building a list of possible prospects, which is invaluable to any site owner. Remember no body will buy from you if they don’t know you.

You can also offer an RSS feed for your newsletter, or updates to your blogs or website. This makes it easy for others to keep up with your most recent posts.

Social Media Share Button: With the popularity of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, you would be foolish not to include an easy way for your content to be shared with others. Visitors can instantly share them with their friends. The best example I can give is ‘AddThis’ http://www.addthis.com/

Trust Seals/Testimonials: They both instil trust and confidence in your visitors. Remember, when someone comes to your website, they don’t know who you are and if you are selling something, they may not feel comfortable giving out their credit card information. To help them include trust seals.

Example: If you are dealing with online buying and selling, use ‘VeriSign’ Seal – http://www.verisign.com/

Also, if you have testimonials from happy customers, or ezine subscribers, weave them into your site copy. People always love to hear that others have had a happy experience with your products/services. Make sure you take permission first from the testimonial writers before placing them on your website.

These are the basic things your website should have, to build trust in your visitors. It is not very difficult to create a website, but to stands out in crowed, you need to include these important elements.

- Joydeep Deb

IIT Bombay unveils ‘AGNI‘ Formula Student car Bangalore: ‘AGNI’, a Formula Student car developed by the IIT Bombay students was unveiled for the Formula Student competition to be held in July at Silverstone Racing Circuit, England. The competition is organized annually by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) at eight different venues, reports Zigwheels. The car -equipped with a Honda CBR 600 F4i motorcycle engine, and weighing just 275 kg including the driver – was unveiled by Indian Formula 1 racer Narayan Kathikeyan. 95 teams from universities from around the world take part in this competition. The students face the challenges of designing, building and race a one man, open-wheeled race car. This has to be done assuming that they have been engaged by a manufacturing firm to produce a prototype car for evaluation as a potential production item. IIT Bombay’s first race car was the ‘VAYU’, developed by 35 students & faculty. The car competed with 120 other entries from different universities around the globe. Massive efforts were put in to make the car lighter and quicker, as the team has managed to shed a lot of weight of the car. The chassis is shorter than ‘VAYU’, boosting dynamics even further.

Microsoft’s Ballmer on H1-B Visas, Immigration

The Detroit Free Press recently interviewed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer who asked him why Microsoft in 2007 built a research and development facility in Canada–over the border in Vancouver–not that far from Microsoft’s quarters in Redmond, Wash.

Why not build it in the United States? Ballmer’s response:

While the Canadian R&D credit may have been a factor, it wasn’t the deciding one, Ballmer said. That would be immigration policy…

“We opened the lab in Vancouver,” Ballmer said, “because we were having trouble getting visas for the best and the brightest to come to Seattle. The Canadian government said, ‘We’re happy to have those people.’ “

“It’s a bit goofy,” he said, “because for every person we hire to be an engineer, there’s probably another four or five people who we employ at Microsoft. There’s another set of people employed in the community in construction and housing and retail, a bunch of different industries.”

In 2008, Microsoft employed more than 78,000 individuals. According to Fortune, Microsoft employs 47,645 in the United States and 30,920 in other countries. Microsoft has said publicly that less than 15 percent of its U.S. work force are H1-B visa holders–which would put the total number of visa holders in the 6,000 to 7,000 range.

The United States has a cap on visa holders at less than 15 percent, so Microsoft is maximizing its use of visas, but consistently lobbies the government for more. The claim? It just can’t find enough talent in this country. Ballmer appears to be beating on that visa drum again in this DFP story. Again, from the article:

“”I don’t care whether they’re American-born or Indian-born or Russian-born. I want to pay them to work in the U.S. That’s why I’m trying to get ‘em a visa…. I’m not trying to ship the job to India.”

But Microsoft will locate the job in India, or Canada or wherever it can get the best talent.

Canada is well known for its generous R&D tax credit poilicies and the U.S. wavers on it frequently. From a Scitax Advisory Partners report entitled “North American Politicians Recognize R&D Tax Credits as a Useful Economic Fix”:

The low priority afforded this issue is witnessed by the fact that Washington has let its Research & Experimentation (“R&E”) tax credit expire no less than 13 times since it was originally enacted into law in 1981. In Canada – and most other countries with similar credits – R&D tax credits are fixed in legislation. But in the US, congress must vote on renewing the R&E tax credit every year. And frequently they vote against renewing it, which means technology companies can’t really count on it.

Canada’s R&D tax credits may be more significant than Ballmer wants the public and U.S. government to believe.

XML Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about pages on their site that may be crawled by their robots.

A typical XML Sitemap file lists each URL, together with information about when it was last updated, how often it normally changes, and how important it is, relative to other pages in the site). This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site.

Generate your website sitemap by finding link here http://fashiong.com/linkexchange/185/Site-map-maker.html

The official site for the joint venture is at sitemaps.org and contains a lot of info about the new standard and it’s syntax. What the site singularly fails to do is explain correctly how to submit your sitemap to the big three! The format suggested on the site of:

does not currently work at any of the three sites! Until it does, this short article provides instructions for how to (a) create your sitemap and (b) how to submit to each of the three main search engines…

Creating your Sitemap

Some hosting providers (for example 1and1) provide utilities via their web control panel, to create your sitemap, so you should always check with your provider first. If this service is not available, then make a visit to xml-sitemaps.com and enter your site URL into the generator box. Copy-and-paste the resulting sitemap into notepad, then save-and-upload to your site with the file name: sitemap.xml

If you want to validate the XML prior to uploading to the search engines (useful if you have made any manual amendments), look at the XML validator (at the same site) where you can put in the URL of your sitemap and check it against the standard.

Submit sitemap to MSN

MSN have yet to implement a formal interface for Sitemap submission (as at July 2007). To monitor the situation, please visit (from time to time) the MSN Official Livesearch Blog (where where future announcements are likely to be found).

Whilst MSN have yet to implement a front door, there is a recognised back door for submitting your sitemap to the MSN Search index; namely moreover.com! You should use the following syntax directly in your browser URL box:

Since February 2005, moreover.com have been the official provider of RSS feeds to the myMSN portal (see press release) and reliable evidence suggests that submission to Moreover will result in MSN spidering your pages within 2-3 weeks.

Note that, whilst MSN still do not support direct submission, they do suggest on their blog that you add a reference to your Sitemap into your robots.txt file (something now supported by sitemaps.org). For example:

This would tell MSN (and all other engines) to crawl your sitemap file but not to crawl your cgi-bin directory. For more info on how to implement a robots.txt file (in the root of your site webserver) please visit: http://www.robotstxt.org

Submit sitemap to Google

Google originally developed the XML schema for sitemaps and have developed a dedicated portal for webmasters, from where you can submit your sitemap:

First, you need to tell Google all the sites you own, then verfiy that you indeed own them. The verifiaction is achieved by adding a metatag between the head tags on your site homepage. The syntax for the tag is as follows:

There are full instructions on how to do this on the Google site.

Submit sitemap to Yahoo

Yahoo follows a similar approach to Google. Again, there is a dedicated sevice for webmasters (Yahoo! Site Explorer) and a procedure for verifying your ownsership of the site. First go to:

Add a site, then click on the verification button. You can then download a verfication key html file – which you will need to upload to the root directory of your webserver. Then you can return to Site Explorer and tell Yahoo to start authentication. This will take up to 24 hours. At the same time you can also add your sitemap by clicking on the manage button and then adding the sitemap as a feed.

Submit sitemap to Ask

Ask follows a simpler approach to the other three. To submit you sitemap, you simply enter a ping URL, followed by the full URL of where your sitemap is located:

After clicking return, you will get a reassuring message from Ask that they have received your submission. Very neat!

About the author:

David Viney, the author of Get to the Top on Google, is a leading website promotion expert – and provides search engine optimisation services to companies large and small. Further articles tackling the tricky SEO challenges faced by David’s customers may be found on the SEO Expert Services site.

HYDERABAD: I am really sorry I had to take this decision since I could not die daily, so once for all I want to put an end to this.”

“Please burn my personal belongings which I have packed and kept in the cupboard along with my pyre. Good bye, selfish world. Your’s ever loving, Pradeep.”

26-year-old software engineer Pradeep Kumar Gondkar of IBM, Bangalore, just did that.

He came to Hyderabad by a Kingfisher flight on Wednesday morning, and allegedly committed suicide by consuming poison at Shri Shyam Mandir, opposite Kachiguda police station. At 10, temple staff informed the police about a youth who suddenly collapsed on the premises. Pradeep died by the time police reached the temple, sub inspector A Sai Reddy said.

Police then contacted some of the numbers in Pradeep’s cellphone and came in touch with his sister in Bangalore and informed her of the death. She in turn informed her husband, Santosh, a software engineer with ITC, Secunderabad, who rushed to the police station .

Then the cops came to know that Pradeep had emailed a suicide note to Santosh and the Karnataka police at 9.35 am. “Santosh went to office around 9 am. He was shocked when he found the email from Pradeep with ‘Suicide note’ written as the subject,” police said.

What is baffling is the suicide note Pradeep left behind with a ‘Good bye selfish world’ sign off.

“No one is responsible for my death, I took this decision and no one influenced me. I am fed up with my life and am just eager to see what lies behind the curtain of death. I am not a coward. It is my decision to end my life in the way I have decided. Father, mother, I am sorry! I did not meet your expectations. Please, forgive me and I was not able to finish all my responsibilities. I am leaving them half way, hope Santosh will fulfill them and take care of you people. Take care, with all my love.

Kanpur: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur has come in to agreement with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to launch a nano satellite. It will be the country’s lightest and the institute’s first satellite to be launched in the orbit from Sriharikota.

IIT Kanpur had presented the second design review to ISRO which nodded to launch the satellite.

“Though the memorandum of understanding between ISRO and IIT-K for the project was signed in February, regular review sessions are being carried out by ISRO to check the progress of the project,” said Sanjay Govind Dhande, Director, IIT Kanpur.

“On Tuesday, our technical team working on the project apprised ISRO authorities of the release and antenna mechanism,” he said.In April, the first review of Jugnu was carried out by ISRO.

Since last December, a team of 40 students and around 12 professors, led by Professor and Mechanical Engineering Department Head, Nalinaksh S Vyas have been working on the project.

“A similar project in any European country would have cost over Rs 10 crore but we expect the entire project to complete within a budget of Rs 2-3 crore, without compromising on quality. This is a welcome signal for indigenous remote sensing technologies,” said Vyas.

A technical team led by D Madhav Murthy in the ISRO for Small Satellite, has said that the procedures for informing the ISRO officials for launch by a mother satellite has been provided, along with the details of the positioning of the satellite antenna set up in the institute premises.

Jugnu weighs around 3.5 kgs and would be 34 cm long and 10 cm wide. Equipped with the micro imaging and micro electronic system, it will transfer the images to the IIT Kanpur campus. The high resolution pictures obtained will be used for different applications like drought monitoring, wasteland management, urban planning and flood risk management.

“Although the stipulated life time of the satellite is six months, we are optimistic that it will complete at least 12 months in the orbit,” said Dhandhe.

Rajeev Motwani, the Indian-American computer science professor at Stanford University who mentored Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were graduate students, has died in a swimming pool accident at his Atherton, California home. He drowned Friday morning in a backyard swimming pool at the home, said the San Jose Mercury News. Though paramedics were called when his body was found, and he was pronounced dead at the scene at 12.28 p.m.

Born March 26, 1962, in Jammu, Motwani grew up in New Delhi, earned a computer science degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur in 1983, and his doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley in 1988. As a Stanford professor, he also served as the director of graduate studies for the computer science department and founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS).

Motwani was well known for his research in theoretical computer science and was a winner of the Godel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation. His work had a major impact on the field of algorithms, and he used his knowledge of that field to develop methods for searching almost infinite archives of data by randomly selecting subsets of the data. It was in the field of data mining that he made some of his seminal contributions. The field is the basis of much of modern Internet commerce and the operation of search engines such as Google.

Motwani co-authored two widely-used theoretical computer science textbooks, Randomized Algorithms with Prabhakar Raghavan (Cambridge University Press 1995, ISBN 978-0521474658) and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman (2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2000).

Motwani helped many Valley startups gain a foothold, but none so famous as Google, whose cofounder Sergey Brin mourned him Saturday. “I want him to really be remembered well. It’s a rare combination to have somebody who is so smart and also such a nice guy,” Brin told Mercury News on the phone.

Motwani, he added, “had a lot of interest in computer science theory. He’s primarily a theoretician, and it’s incredible the amount of impact he has had directly on products and companies.”

The news of Motwani’s death struck like a thunderclap in Silicon Valley. Blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter communications were filled with testimonials to a brilliant, kind man who was never too busy to help a budding entrepreneur or struggling graduate student.

Motwani is survived by his wife Asha Jadeja and daughters Naitri and Anya. The family will hold a private funeral, according to the university’s news agency, but a memorial service will be held at a later date.