In any type of sales if you're not tracking your leads, your sales, your conversion rates, etc. then you are missing out on an opportunity to expand and grow your business; in the Internet Marketing world this is especially true.

There are plenty of free tools on the Internet nowadays that allow you to see how many visitors you are getting, what geographic location they are in and 'how' they got to your website. The 'how' they got to your site is the most important question of all.

You may be getting 500 visitors a month of which 300 may be coming from advertising source 'A' with another hundred coming from advertising source 'B' and yet another 50 visitors coming from advertising source 'C' with the rest coming in small increments of 1-5 from different ads that you've placed on the Internet.

One good reason to track your website visitors is it lets you know whats working in contrast to that which is barely working if working at all; this way you can save time and energy focusing on what works and tossing aside what doesn't.

Another excellent reason is, as stated before, to save time. You want an online business to enjoy the increase in time available to spend with your family, on hobbies or on whatever you want to do. If you're laboring at a computer all day wasting time on what doesn't work then you are also wasting precious time that would better be spent elsewhere.

There are all kinds of free trackers on the Internet but one of the best I've ever seen is Google Analytics. You can see everything from the number of visitors your site had from day to day, but you can also see their geographical location as well as how they were referred to your site. This is very important as you want to know what is working and what isn't. Another benefit of Google analytics is that it doesn't leave a little box at the bottom of your page which allows both you and all your visitors to see your site statistics. With Google Analytics you place a small piece of code at the bottom of your page which is invisible so only you have access to your stats.

Not long ago, a friend of mine sent me an email asking for my opinion on whether a site he was developing should be done using Wordpress, LAMP, or ASP.NET. I've used all of those, but have always been so focused on the details and learning them that I never really thought about the great question of "What technology should be used for a given site?". That is such a good question that I decided to put my thoughts on paper and help provide some education to others.

Some people don't have the skills and ability to actually be able to choose the most appropriate technology. They know one thing and that is going to have to be made to work in all cases. That's not necessarily bad, but it's nice to be able to switch between technologies based on the type of site. The important thing to realize in web site development is that one technology does not fit all.

Wordpress

I have several web sites currently running Wordpress. I originally thought of Wordpress as just a blogging platform. While that is certainly its main use and what it is optimized for, you can definitely use it to create a more "traditional" looking web site. It is very configurable and there are tons of custom plug-ins available that can allow you to add RSS feeds, SEO tags, voting, etc. Since Wordpress is developed using PHP and MySQL, it is also possible to create your own plugins and customize your site template. Oh, and that's the other incredibly awesome thing about Wordpress -- the templates! There are literally thousands of free Wordpress templates available for download. If you can't find one that fits the theme of your site than you aren't looking hard enough.

Another nice thing about Wordpress is that you can easily find web hosting providers that support Wordpress. In most cases, you can click an install link and have Wordpress properly installed on your site in a few seconds. Then you go to the Wordpress admin console and configure your site. It is all very easy. You can upload multiple templates and easily switch between them. It is also easy to make minor changes to the templates (like changing tag lines, colors, etc.).

The other benefit of Wordpress is that it is a blogging platform and the search engines love blogs. You can configure your Wordpress install to automatically ping one or more blogging services whenever you add a new post or page. That way they know your site has changed and they should come index your site again. If you want your site to be found then using Wordpress as the underlying engine is a good option.

LAMP

In case you don't know, LAMP stands for Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, which is a very common and powerful set of technology components used for building web sites (and did I mention completely Open Source and free!). If you want complete control over your web site, then LAMP is a good option. There are plenty of examples, free scripts, etc. available on the web site to help you get started. There are also plenty of free editors and tools to help you along. The downside of LAMP is that it is hard for you to create your own development "environment". Since most of us run some flavor of Windows as our desktop operating system, we would need to use something like VMWare or Virtual PC to create a virtual machine running Linux. The next challenge is getting all of the components properly installed. While the installers for the LAMP components have definitely improved, they still don't compare to the ease of installing a Windows-based application. The next challenge with LAMP is debugging. It would be nice if we all wrote perfect code, but the reality is you need the ability to debug. There are PHP debuggers available. A good one is going to cost you some money though.

One of the best things about LAMP is that there are TONS of web hosting providers out there for you to pick from. The reason is quite simple -- LAMP is completely open source, so it there is very little cost for the hosting company to bear. That means more margin for them!

ASP.NET

Microsoft's contribution to web site development is ASP.NET. You can use any .NET language (C#, VB.NET, Python.NET, etc.) to develop an ASP.NET based site. In my opinion, the best thing about ASP.NET is the fact you can use Microsoft Visual Studio for you development tool. Visual Studio is the best tool out there. Yes, it costs money, but you definitely get what you pay for. The other nice thing about ASP.NET is that you can easily develop on your Windows-based desktop or laptop.

It is harder to find a good ASP.NET hosting provider. Believe me, I've looked! And I've used several different ones. The ASP.NET providers lag behind the LAMP providers in terms of what they offer. You also need to be careful and really understand what the provider means by things like "host unlimited # of domains". In many cases they just mean you can have an unlimited # of domains point to your single web site. That probably isn't what you want.

I mentioned the use of Visual Studio before. That tool is awesome and makes development SOOOO much easier. I did quite a bit of development using LAMP and got some sites up and running. I used Eclipse with a PHP plug-in and it worked pretty good. I didn't have Apache running or Linux, so couldn't really debug but I still managed. When it came time to create a more advanced web site, however, I quickly decided to switch over to ASP.NET and use Visual Studio. Debugging was a snap and the coding was made much easier thanks to Intellisense and Visual Studio's ability to "import" web services and make them easier for me to call from my code.

Making the Right Choice

Each of the technology options has pros and cons. If you want to get a site up quickly and it will be displaying basic information (text, images, video) then Wordpress is a great option. If you want a more advanced web site but don't want to spend much money on development tools, then LAMP is the best choice. Finally, if you already have Visual Studio or know .NET programming, then ASP.NET is a good option. If you're really lucky and can know all three then you can use the right tool for the job no matter what.

Did you know that your css code could be slowing down your website? Did you also know that there is a free solution out there that can help you optimize or reformat your css code for speed and readability? This article is going to explain the benefits of optimizing your css code and the reasons why all web designers should be doing it. First we need to take into account the 2 reasons why you would want to reformat your css: readability and optimization.

Readability

Having nicely formatted css that easily readable is very helpful when you are developing a site. Most of us (me included) can get pretty sloppy when in a hurry to develop code, and a formatter can really help out to make it more readable.

On development teams where both Macs and PCs are used, sometimes line breaks are not read correctly across platforms and your css can end up all on one line. A formatter can help get your code looking pretty again.

Optimization

The opposite of readability is optimization. One problem with CSS is that it can get pretty file-size heavy when designing with it - especially on complex layouts. Optimizing your CSS will strip out all unnecessary characters and leave your CSS lean and mean.

Optimizing css is great to do once you've finished your site and don't plan to work on the design very much anymore.

The css formatter is a great tool because it can do both! You can format for readability while you are designing, optimize when you go live, and reformat it for readability if you ever need to work on it again. It's really a 'win win' thing to do.