You are getting ready to start a new business or expanding your current one to include an online presence, what is your first step? These days you might want to check what domain name is available for your potential business before you purchase your business cards. According to Domain Tools, there are 125,067,779 ACTIVE domain names, of which 91,264,685 are .com names.

Before you go to purchase your domain name, I recommend brainstorming a bit and start with 5-10 potential names. Once you have this list, you need to go to Bustaname.com and let their system help you come up with potential names based on the keywords you want to highlight. Once you think you have a domain name, you need to register it. You can purchase your domain through a company like Networksolutions.com or my personal choice GoDaddy.com. Network Solutions has long been the standard, trusted source for purchasing domains, but GoDaddy has proven itself as a leader in the industry and has the best prices for domains.

Dot com is still king and if you can get a .com name, you really should. You may need to be a bit creative with your domain name – using a phrase or dashes between words, but there are plenty of names left and Bustaname or GoDaddy will actually suggest alternatives if your first choice is taken. It might take a two or three word combination to get the domain you want and I recommend focusing on the keywords you are going after rather than the “cute” or “cool” factor in a name.

Deals on domains:

• Cyber Monday Offer! 50% off Hosting, Websites, Ecommerce & Local Search Visibility at Network Solutions, Use Code: affcyber50. Save Now!
• Special Domain Sale! $7.49.com at GoDaddy.com

Social media is hot and its here to stay! One of the biggest trends in web design right now is adding icons or buttons for all the various social media sites you use to your web site to make it one step easier for friends, customers and potential customers to connect with YOU. So where do the designers find all these cool icons? They are all over the web and many are free, but you have to go looking for them.

Fellow designer Randa Clay and I got tired of looking high and low for the best social media icons and decided to create a single hub where you can find the best, free social media icons, buttons and graphics to use at your site. We would like to introduce you to our new website, mysocialbuttons.com, a one-stop resource for all the coolest social networking buttons you can use to let the world know where and how to connect with you or your company online.

All of the buttons on the site at the moment are free. Yep, free. You can help yourself. We just ask that you save the buttons you want to your computer first before you add them to your site or your clients’ sites.

And, if you really want to show of your social prowess, check out some of the t-shirts, mugs, mousepads and other goodies we have created to go with the social movement. They make great gifts, awesome conference schwag, and they are perfect for use as doorprizes or ice breakers at corporate training sessions.

Anyhow, the site is still in beta, but we just can’t keep it to ourselves any longer! Please check it out, let us know what you think, bookmark it, share a link with your friends on Facebook, give it a Tweet, or love it anyway you see fit!!

While the site itself is a little ad-heavy, its easy enough to overlook them while checking out the fonts and quotes.

Using the web-based designer, you select a combination of colors, canvas texture, images, rotate them, scale them and test them. Then you can download the background tile to use how ever you see fit. There is also the social aspect of the site which allows you to share your creations using the major social bookmarking/sharing sites, save your backgrounds and vote on others’ creations.

Bgpatterns is definitely one of the coolest tools I have discovered recently and it is another staple in my designer toolbox – along with the 13 sites for great patterns and backgrounds and 13 sites for unique textures I shared in previous posts.

Most of these sites feature two things – cPanel and Fantastico – both of which are requirements for ease of use in my book. cPanel is easy to navigate and loaded with features allowing you to easily check stats, set up email, create database, password protect directories, and more. Fantastico offers the fastest and most straight forward installs for more than 20 of our favorite Open Source programs and scripts like WordPress, phpBB, ZenCart, Galleries, and other utilities. For the average website owner or blogger, these features cut down on a lot of tech support/webmaster support time.

In alphabetical order the web hosting companies I recommend are:

1 & 1 Web Hosting is a very well known web hosting option for many bloggers. A lot of associates use it and while they don’t have cPanel they have a reasonable substitute. For a limited time you can get the first 6 months of Business Hosting Package FREE!

Based out of Atlanta, GA, A Small Orange provides both shared hosting and virtual private servers. They advertise no limit hosting, cPanel, multiple stats packages, Fantastico and advanced email options.

GoDaddy is my personal choice for domain name purchasing/registration but I do have clients who love GoDaddy’s web hosting, too. They don’t have Fantastico, but do have their own version of it called Hosting Connection which gives site owners access to a variety of one click script installations. They provide shared hosting, virtual dedicated servers and dedicated server plans.

HostGator is my personal choice for web hosting. They have been doing a great job of hosting 30+ web sites for myself and my clients for the past two years. HostGator is very affordable, offers cPanel and Fantastico, and has had amazing uptime! HostGator has tech support that is second to none! Anytime I have had issues with my sites they have been able to help me identify the problem and resolve it immediately. You can read a review of them here.

HostMonster is another popular choice for affordable web hosting. They allow you to host unlimited domains on one account which is great for owners of multiple web sites. Fantastico and cPanel are included, and you can get $50 of PPC credit for both Yahoo and Google with your account.

HostRocket offers unlimited bandwidth, 1,000+ GB of RAID protected storage space, cPanel and Fantastico, 10 websites per account plus add a new site every month, and $50 Yahoo search credit.

I have been a customer of Jumpline since their first year in business – 1997 to be exact – and currently have about 15 client websites hosted with them (some of them have been hosted there since 1997). Jumpline’s uptime has been close to FLAWLESS, the tech support is knowledgeable and helpful, and they have been very stable. They do offer ValueApps – their own library of scripts – but it is not as intuitive as Fantastico.

Lunarpages.com offers enterprise level redundancy and security in their Tier 4 data centers with a dedicated staff of over 120 support professionals.

Do you have a high-traffic site that needs scalable, high end web hosting solutions? If so, MediaTemple is my first choice! Powerful grid service replaces shared hosting and the dedicated physical virtual servers in their Nitro program run on quad core processors.

Mosso is another service for sites that need instant scalability like a popular blog (that regularly gets Digg front page traffic), a large e-commerce site or 20 medium sites under one account. Mosso uses cloud technology which is basically instant, easy access to large scale computing.

NetworkSolutions.com is probably what I would consider to be the most credible and most likely to be around forever web hosting company there is. I registered my very first domain name with them in 1997 and have never once questioned the quality of their services. They have a more options and plans than most providers – in other words, you will be able to find a solution to fit your needs.

Site5, a great solution for eCommerce, Blogs or Ruby on Rails sites, is co-located with The Planet. Site5 uses extremely high-end servers and doesn’t crowd them. Additionally, they handle their own tech support and offer a 60-day money back guarantee.

I hope this is a helpful resource.   Finding a good web host is not easy, because many hosts offer sub-par support.  I’ve tried my best to list only the best web hosts there are. Or you may find you need to sign up for dedicated hosting services from a trusted provider.

I have looked high and low for a solution that would fit my needs (here are some I tested) and after talking with Leah from Working Solo, I have finally found my answer – Highrise and BackPack from 37 Signals.

The team at 37Signals has created a series of web-based products that help you and your organization stay, well, organized! Each of their products serves a slightly different purpose and a slightly different audience, allowing you to get only the functionality you need in a lightweight, web-based application.

I use Basecamp with some clients when managing a large project that requires input, file sharing and deadlines with more than one person. Basecamp is perfect because all the communication is done in one place, thus eliminating the lost emails, constant forwarding and CC-ing that frequently happen with larger projects. You don’t have to worry about missing anything – Basecamp emails you when someone adds anything to the project.

The product I am hooked on that really works for me as a freelance designer is Highrise. Highrise works as a contact management package with a kick. Not only can I keep track of my client contact information, but I can add notes for each one, create my to do list (and get email updates on what is due or past due), and use the dropbox as a back up feature too. When you pull up a client’s name, you get all of their information and notes all at once which is such a nice feature.

BackPack is a great way for your organization to stay on the same page or for you to keep all your notes and files organized. It is a beefed up calendar, file cabinet and white board all in one place. Use it for one person or the whole organization. Get your reminders sent to your phone or email – so you have no excuses.

Campfire is a great way for organizations to stay on the same page even when you are working from multiple locations. Think of it as your own private group IM. The look and feel is no nonsense, elegant and easy to use.

37 Signals has other products that make collaboration and organization work for you – it is just a matter of checking each of them out and seeing which one fits you best. For me, the answer is Highrise with a bit of BackPack on the side. Each of the 37 Signals products comes with a free trial and depending on the size of your organization and project needs, some of the solutions are free. You just have to give them a try.

Do you use any of these products? Which one(s) do you use the most?

Image details: 2008 CMT Music Awards – Red Carpet served by picapp.com

Guest Post by David Peralty

Something often overlooked by bloggers are images for their content, but with recent reports that most readers skim content equal to around one quarter of what is actually written, an image can sometimes be your only opportunity to hook a reader into really reading all that you have to say.

Just like with all other content, the images you can get for your posts can come from legal or illegal sources. Most people don’t pay attention to this fact, but with companies seeing decreasing revenue, protecting intellectual property is on the rise, so taking images you found from a Google Image search isn’t the best idea.

There are many free and legal sources for images, but you have to be willing to look around.

Currently, I work for PicApp, a company that provides access to high quality images from companies like Corbis and Getty. PicApp allows you to easily embed images in your posts.

Some others worth mentioning that I have used before include Flickr’s Creative Commons images that users have uploaded and given open access to, as well as stock.xchng.

The only issues with these sites are that they don’t always have the highest quality images, nor the latest editorial images.

Some other reasons you might want to make adding an image to your posts a regular endeavor is to break up the content, which can allow it to flow better, or helping convey thoughts, ideas, opinions, or even the overall mood of the text around it.

It allows you to differentiate from your competitors as many bloggers aren’t spending the time and energy finding images worth posting, and this opens up an opportunity for each and every one of you to make the most out of your content and how it is displayed.

One last thing I wanted to note that is special about PicApp, and incredibly useful for me as a blogger is the ability to subscribe to my searches via RSS. If you are a celebrity blogger talking about Miley Cyrus, it can be hard to keep up with everything that is happening with regards to her and her brand, but by subscribing to an RSS feed of your image search, PicApp will let you know when there are new photographs that you can use, and I have already been told that it has helped inspire posts, and I can see it helping some bloggers beat their competition in releasing an article.
About our Guest Blogger:  David Peralty has been a full time blogger for the last three years, and now works as Community Manager for PicApp while also building his own blogs like eXtra for Every Publisher.

• Search traffic
• Direct/Bookmark traffic
• Link traffic
• Social Media traffic (oooh, this is particularly cool)
• Email traffic

Of course, this is in addition to the other information on the dashboard such as how many visitors, actions, time spent, bounce rate, the inbound links, top searches, and top content page information.

pMetrics offers a free version of their product, but the paid version is very affordable and worth every penny.  For more reasons why I love pMetrics, check out:

• pMetrics – The Best Stats Package for Bloggers
• Making pMetrics Even Better 

I can receive email from all of my accounts and can still sort, filter, tag and prioritize, but I can’t send anything out. Nothing. I  didn’t change anything – it just stopped working one day. I have checked and double checked my settings – but nothing has fixed it. Does anyone have any ideas?  I really don’t want to reload the program and risk losing anything.

Meanwhile, I am able to send and receive from those accounts using Mail2Web, but that is just a temporary workaround. My G-mail account is working fine, but I don’t really want to start accessing all of my email through it either. As much as I like its spam filtering, its organizational features are lacking.

So, I am open for ideas!! What are you using for your email management? Any thoughts as to why I suddenly can’t send out from Thunderbird?  Thanks in advance!

There are plenty of applications available to help you move those big files – ranging from the free and easy to the expensive and decked out with extras. Here are the highlights on 13 services you can use to move big files:

Dropbox is my new favorite! Dropbox is an excellent option for moving your large files – whether you find yourself emailing yourself files regularly, relying on USB drives to move files from one machine to another or want to share photo albums. The free version allows up to 2GB of storage with a pro version that can handle 100GB. You can also sync your files online and across computers with Dropbox. Try their Pro Account for 14 days FREE.

YouSendIt – YouSendIt another one of my favorites – it has been around the longest, it’s easy to use and they have a solid free service. There is no software to download – everything is web-based. YouSendIt offers a variety of delivery options and packages for individuals, businesses and corporations. The totally free version has a limit of 100MB, requires no registration and offers some tracking options.

Send6 – Very similar to YouSendIt, Send6 allows you to transfer 10 files free per month, each with a limit of 100MB. They also offer online storage and tracking options. The free version does not require registration or software download. They do offer plans with more bells and whistles for individuals, businesses and corporations for a price.

TransferBigFiles – Send files up to 1GB via email with no registration required. TransferBigFiles uses Amazon’s S3 service to manage storage of files. Use their additional free services by registering and download the DropZone application for transfer management and storage options. Right now this is still a totally free service.

BigFileBox – Yet another UK-based service, BigFileBox is really geared toward the enterprise level solution. They offer secure Fileboxes that you can organize by project and issue security tokens to associates for project collaboration. No software to download. The Fileboxes have built in virus scanning and use the industry standard SSL technology.

PipeBytes – Still in beta, PipeBytes touts itself as the simple to use service. There is no limit to the file size you can send. The file is not shared on Internet – it is sent directly to your recipient. While the service appears to be free, there is something on the home page about a SpeedPass – but no real information to explain what it does for you.

DropSend – Not only can you use DropSend to email files up to 1GB each, you can also use it as your own file backup system (up to 250MB with the free plan). If you need more online storage, want SSL, or unlimited sends per month, then their business plan is the way to go.

MailBigFile – Simple and to the point, MailBigFile lets you send files up to 100MB for free with no software download or registration. The ProAccount offers faster upload speeds, address book capability, the ability to send the same 2GB file to 5 people at once, and other features. MailBigFile is a UK based service and the ProAccount can be paid for in dollars, Euros, or British pounds.

SendFile – While the file size threshold on the SendFile free service is rather low – only 5MB, the interface is nice, there is no registration and nothing to download. The upgraded service includes 1Gb file size, personalization of “File Send” system, file delivery notification and a user admin system to monitor file transfers and deliveries. You can purchase membership for a single day up to a year. Also a UK based service.

SendThisFile – You can use the SendThisFile service for free, but it does require registration first. They also host Fileboxes which are free inboxes so you can receive and track large files. Like the other solutions, SendThisFile has a variety of plans, with the higher priced plans offering customization, larger storage and transfer thresholds, and such.

Pando – Pando is more than just a way to move files, it is better suited for uploading and sharing media files such as video and audio. You can send files up to 1GB but you do need to download the Pando software. Pando allows users to subscribe to, share and download full screen Internet TV – it even powers the NBC TV downloads. If you are looking to share a variety of large media files on a regular basis, the $25 per year fee is well worth it.

HotShare – HotShare is an interesting service in that you can upload and share files with out registering, but you decide whether to share your file with the recipient only or with the world. The site is available in 21 languages and serves as a file directory as well. Search the HotShare site for video, audio, images, programs and more. When you upload a file it gives you code for inserting into a blog, forum, or email. It also allows you to email the file to a list of recipients, opt to share it with the world, tag it, and more. I am not sure how secure the site is, because the limitations as to what you can upload are pretty wide open. If you are downloading a file from HotShare, I would definitely be sure to scan it first.

Driveway - Driveway is another service to share your files via email or park them on the web for download by others. Send files under 500MB for free and no registration. The free account comes with 2 GB of storage space. While downloads are unlimited, individual file sizes still cannot exceed 500 MB. You can organize your files into folders, edit documents, and even import your address book for quick share capability. Driveway’s Plig-in (desktop app) and web widget make file sharing even easier.

Which of these services is the best? Unfortunately that is a loaded question and really comes down to your specific file movement needs and which interface you are most comfortable with. I am sure this list is just the tip of the iceberg! As consumers’ needs for file transfer and file sharing services become even greater the quality and availability of the free services is going to increase.

Needing to view audio and video over the internet? You can accomplish this and quite a bit more – transfer your video security camera images via the
internet when you utilize digital video
recording software. Capture photo’s of everything your cameras are observing for later review and study. Be sure to research online prior to purchasing your CCTV camera equipment.