Phloosh Phloosh Phloosh

Once your website is up and running, it is important to review and update the web site from time to time. This will ensure that you keep the content fresh and relevant, and of course can also make changes to improve the content in the light of feedback and experience gleamed through running the site.

A professional review will run through various aspects of your site – here is a brief outline of the areas that should be examined during a web site review:

Usability
This is simply how easy the site is to use. A formal test may involve the preparation of a script containing simple and not so simple tasks for the uninitiated and experienced customer alike to perform. The results are an excellent measure of how usable your site is. If you find that all customers just cannot find an important area of your site for instance, then you can take measures to redress the balance.

Taxonomy
Related to usability, the hierarchy and structure of your site may change in light of feedback received, learnings and different internal or marketing priorities. The key is to remember to structure your site to fit external or customer perceptions and understanding of your company. A common mistake is to structure a site along internal divisions which is likely to confuse a customer who is not going to know the internal structure and politics of a company!

Accessibility
A key requirement: can anyone view your site no matter what web browser or monitor they use? If they are using a text-to-speech browser for instance, or have images and JavaScript switched off – can they still effectively move through and understand your site? Accessibility is key and there may also be legal obligations, depending which country you are in, for your site to conform to accessibility standards.

Search engine positioning
A review to examine the search engine ranking of a site for various common searches related to your business, and to provide recommendations as to what could be done to improve your search engine presence – and hence drive more traffic to your site.

Traffic review
It is very important to measure traffic to your site, where it comes from, and whether it is traffic from the sources you would most expect. You should inspect whether strategic linkings or partnerships are working for you, and what searches people are actually performing to reach your site. Crucially – what can be done to drive even more traffic to your site?

Content review
The content should be reviewed to ensure that it is clear, to the point and of course up-to-date. As promotions finish or expire and new ones come along you should ensure that the dead wood is cut out and replaced with fresh and relevant content.

Dan Moore is Director of Clarity Media Limited, a web design company and puzzle supplier of such smash hit puzzles as sudoku, kakuro, hanjie and codewords

No matter what type of carpet stain remover you are using, follow these instructions to prevent the unmentionable. First of all try scraping out the stain with a dull knife. Sometimes the stain only affects the surface of your carpet. By scraping it out you’re saving time and money. If the stain is too deep, then the risk of scraping might be too high. Next up, carefully read the instructions that came with the commercial remover. These substances are heavy duty stuff so it is highly recommended to follow their instructions to the letter. Be sure that there’s nothing inflammable near by.

Carpet stain removers must be handled with care. Since these products are chemical based you should protect your hands. A couple of dishwashing gloves are perfect for protection. Try to keep any pet away from the action zone. These creatures are curious and would eat about anything in sight. Inform everyone in the vicinity that a stain removal procedure is underway. This way you avoid any potential accidents. Many carpet stains won’t go off with the first pass. In that case keep repeating the process until satisfied.

No matter what type of carpet stain remover you are using, always finish with water. This benign liquid is a universal cleaner known for its unique properties. The trick is to stack up a series of towels and immerse them in water. Then take them and put them on top of the remaining stain. Apply some sort of weight to pressure downwards. Let it press for a few minutes. It should suck up the rest of the stain. If it doesn’t, then try to soak the towels in warm or hot water and repeat the process. An important thing to note: use white towels. Colored towels may discolor and make things worse.

Anne Willis has won numerous battles against all types of stains. Check out her latest exploits at stain removal tips and be sure to read her featured article: pet stain remover.

Have you experienced the frustration trying to grow plants that never grow? If you have, there may be some things to consider before you attempt to see growth happen again.

A first thing to considering as you try to plant seeds and see their growth is the location. Where will you grow the plants? What are the conditions of that area? If you attempt to grow plants outside, what is it like? If you are hoping to achieve plant growth inside, what kind of environment are you using for the growing? Be sure that you understand how wet, dry, sunny or cloudy your chosen areas are. Having a correct picture of these things will save you time and money as you begin to look for the right kinds of seeds and plants to experiment with.

It is important not only that you understand the environment in which you hope to see growth from your plants, but it is also important to choose the right kinds of seeds to plant. You must be careful to match a proper kind of seed with your environment. If you live somewhere that is dry and hot most of the time you should choose seeds that require a dry heat for maximum growth. Other varieties of plants will grow better in areas that are sunny but wet, and still others will have maximum growth in areas that are cool and wet. So learn your growth environment well and then choose plants wisely and accordingly. You will not see proper growth happen from even the best, most expensive varieties of plants if you have chosen a seed that does not match your growing environment.

Once you have determined the kinds of environments you have and you have selected the right kinds of seeds to plant you can begin the process of planting the seeds. Take some time to research this process. Are there particular kinds of soils that will bring growth quicker than others? Is there a plant food that will promote growth for your chosen varieties? These are important things to know. How much water does your plant require for healthy growth? Over or under watering a plant can quickly be the death of it.

Is this process sounding more complicated than you thought it would be? Take heart, you are almost on your way to seeing amazing growth from every seed you plant. The most important steps, if done properly, will almost ensure the results you are hoping for. Perhaps your best bet is to pick up a book on growth and planting from your library or from a friend. Learn as much as you can and then enjoy. Maybe you will want to start with some cheaper seeds first so that you can practice doing everything necessary for their growth before you spend too much money. Whatever you decide, just have fun. Determine the right environment for growth, pick the right seeds, then treat your seeds with the individual care they need. In no time you will be surrounded by a wealth of beautiful plants and flowers.

An avid gardener, Denton Krypps enjoys advising other people with tips and techiques for getting growth that makes the perfect landscape. Find out more at www.aboutgrowth.info

First, how not to go about it:

A cash loan is not the way to go.

Neither is signing as surety for a bank loan

A gift of the amount required? Again, not the best approach

But these are the three most common but wrong ways by which parents try to help
their children get started in business.

So what is the best way?

For US residents and citizens, Internal Revenue Code 1244 provides the answer.

If you give your daughter $50,000 say to start a new venture, and the business
goes belly up with the loss of the $50,000, there is no way that the IRS will
allow you to claim this loss as a deduction.

Or suppose you loan her business $50,000. Again, if things do not work out, the
business will keep paying you the interest until it runs out of cash, leaving
you with a worthless note.

Tax-wise, you have a capital loss, which is deductible at the pitiful rate of
only $3,000 per year against your ordinary income. Or you can use the loss to
offset capital gains.

The same sad tax fate, a capital loss, results if you sign as surety and must
pay Sue’s $50,000 loan from the bank.

Tax-wise, a gift to your daughter is even worse. The $50,000 is hers. As a
result, the tax loss is hers, not yours. Under the circumstances, chances are
that Sue has little or no income, and the loss is almost totally wasted.

Note too that a loan or a bank surety is often questioned by the IRS. Why? The
IRS contends that the $50,000 was a gift because you never intended to try to
collect in the first place. You had no reasonable expectation of being repaid is
the way the IRS puts it.

But now let’s look at IRS Section 1244 – the right way.

Section 1244 allows you to claim an immediate deduction for a loss on stock in a
small business corporation. Your loss is fully deductible against ordinary
income, rather than a limited capital loss.

And you can claim a maximum Section 1244 loss of $100,000 (joint return) in a
single year or $50,000 on a single return

The maximum amount you can claim as a Section 1244 loss in a single year is
$100,000 on a joint return or $50,000 on a single return.

So instead of a gift, a loan or a bank surety, you and your daughter set up a
corporation for her new business. You get $50,000 of stock in the corporation
that qualifies for Section 1244 treatment. Your daughter, who runs the business,
draws a salary

If the business succeeds, your daughter can gradually buy back your stock (or,
better yet, you can gift it to her) over time. Any profit you make on the
buyback will be a low-taxed capital gain.

If the business fails, your loss will be fully deductible under Section 1244 (up
to the $100,000/$50,000 limits).

Here’s another nice thing about Section 1244: The
tax benefits are
easy to get. The beneficial tax treatment is automatic and no written plan is
necessary.

A final point: Section 1244 is the way to go not only for your kids, but also
for your spouse who might want to start a new business. And the same strategy
applies if you want to venture into something new while keeping your present
business.

SEO Solutions and one-way link publicity services provided by Link Acquire.

David C Skul – CEOLinkAcquire.com and Relativity, Inc. can provide global market exposure and solutions.

We take it for granted everyday that not everyone can afford or can comfortably sleep on a tradition coil spring bed. It’s true. There’s an alternative to the traditional beds that not many people really know about, or automatically assume that it’s not for them.

No, I’m not talking about a couch.

Instead, I’m talking about the tried and true air mattress bed that so many people are now using full time in their own homes. Amazing but true, and there are many reasons why this phenomenon is happening today.

Cost: It’s simply cheaper to purchase an air mattress over purchasing a traditional box spring coil bed. Whereas a traditional bed will sometimes cost between $400-$800, a nice modern comfortable air mattress bed, like the ones manufactured by Aerobed cost anywheres from $99 to $300. That’s a big difference in cost!

Comfort: For a lot of people, back aches and bed pains are a common occurrence often attributed to a traditional coil spring bed. However, some doctors are now recommending patients to try sleeping on an air mattress (adjusted to their own liking) to help get a better nights rest. When you can adjust how hard or soft the mattress you are laying on to help compensate for back pains, the bed has already started paying back dividends on your own quality of life!

Convenience: Yes, very convenient. Built in portability, the ability for it to self-inflate using supplied tools, and the ease of use of lending it out to friends and family to give someone proper sleeping arrangements all help to lend the air mattress a rating of high convenience. Traditional box springs fall flat in all these categories. Although some people may like the traditional bed, more and more people are jumping on board and going to sleep on air.

What about you? Will you take the leap and sleep on air?

This article was prepared by theseArticle Authors
for this Air Mattresses Site

A phone answering service is definitely something you can operate
from home as a home-based business. There are some turn-key
business opportunities where companies actually recruit home-based phone answering service providers, generally to accept
inquiry calls for product information. Some of these involve
sales, some involve technical support, and some are as simple as
taking down a person’s address and phone number and scheduling
them for a follow-up call or visit, or taking a message.

Another option is to start your very own phone answering service
and to build your own client base. Sometimes this is a better
alternative than going with turn-key opportunities because, with
a turn-key operation, if the company you are working for goes
under, your business is shot. When you’ve built your own client-
base, it may hurt your business to lose a client, but you can
always get busy finding new clients to compensate for the loss of
business.

One woman I knew signed up to answer phones for a company that
sold tarot readings. She figured it was a scam, but there were no
start-up costs involved, so she decided to give it a try. The way
the phone answering service worked was, when she was ready to
answer phones, she dialed a number and signed into the system.
When she was signed in, inquiry calls were forwarded to her home
phone. She got paid a flat fee for every phone call she answered
through her phone answering service, and then got paid a bonus if
she scheduled an appointment with the tarot reader for the
caller. She received weekly checks for the calls that she took,
plus the bonuses.

The benefits of this type of arrangement are, you don’t have to
do much work to get started, and you can work when you want to.
The main disadvantage is, it is an opportunity that could be here
today and gone tomorrow. Stability is sometimes a concern if you
are depending on the income and the company shuts down, or even
decreases their marketing because your volume of calls depends
upon their efforts, not your own.

If you start your own phone answering service, you may have some
trouble getting clients. Only certain types of businesses
actually hire phone answering services and many of them are
declining due to the availability of cell phones. Even so, some
service conscious entrepreneurs and service providers who simply
do not want their customers to have to speak to voice mail, and
some don’t want their work interrupted by phone calls, so there
is still a demand for home-based phone answering services.

If you open your own home-based phone answering service, you can
define a broad target market and get clients that are not local;
however, in many cases, the best place to get clients is from
your community. Entrepreneurs who provide services at a
customer’s home or place of business are great targets for a
home-based phone answering service. Plumbers, electricians,
painters, contractors, roofers, carpet and tile layers,
landscapers, home remodelers, home decorators, and so forth are
good examples. For instance, if they are roofing a house, they
don’t want to stop what they are doing to answer the phone, and
having office staff to answer the phone is not usually
financially viable for small trade businesses such as these. Your
home-based phone answering service may be just what they need to
keep their business professional without the overhead costs of an
office.

Some home-based phone answering services provide services for
standard office tasks as well. Typing, entering data into a
bookkeeping system, preparing bills and other mail, or filling
orders are some services you can offer that are complementary to
a phone answering service. By offering additional services, you
will make the most of your time, rather than just sitting around
waiting for the phone to ring. With a little thought and
innovation, and a good sales pitch to pick up clients, you can
make money from a home-based phone answering service.

Copyright Christopher J. Enders. Are you at the end of your rope,
fed up and confused by all the scrambled internet marketing
advice you’re getting? Whether you are new to internet marketing,
or a website owner who wants to make more money from your
website, learn the proven strategies that will sky-rocket your
internet business at http://BiznessTips.com

‘Kenyanthropus platyops’: – Perhaps the 6,000,000 year old men found by a maverick who went behind the authorities back at the Olduvai Gorge will be proven to actually not be outside the australopithecine lineage. But the Leakey family has found a 3.5 million year old human that definitely is, and it was announced after I had written the things related hereto earlier in this effort. I love how these synchronicities occur and how much there is for us to know about ourselves.

“The ‘Gang’ Hits Again

Those famed Leakey fossil hunters add a new limb to our family tree – by Simon Robinson, Nairobi.

Like other members of the famous ‘hominid gang’, the sharp-eyed fossil hunters employed by paleontology’s Leakey family, Justus Erus spends three months a year scouring the dry, bone-rich riverbeds around Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya. It is a scrubby, desolate landscape, where the people are desparately poor and gun-toting young men are a menacing presence. But it is hallowed ground to scientists because of the clues it offers to early human history. Still, even after five years, Erus, a 30-year-old Turkana tribesman, had scored nary a hit-just bits of animal bones and teeth.

Then one scorching morning during the final week of the gang’s explorations in August 1999, at a site called Lomekwi, Erus noticed a white object, just a cm or two across, sticking out of a patch of brown mudstone. ‘I thought maybe it was (the bones of) a monkey,’ he says. Beckoning the expedition’s co-leader, Meave Leakey, wife and daughter-in-law, respectively, of Richard and Louis Leakey and renowned in her own right, he asked her opinion. By nightfall they realized that they had uncovered the partial remains of a humanlike skull.

The fossil turned out to be a totally new prehuman species and last week reignited one of paleontology’s greatest debates: Did we evolve in direct steps from a common apelike ancestor between 6 million and 4 million years ago? Or did the human family tree sprout branches, some of which petered out? {No integration of Mungo Man, the 6,000,000 year old find, the Black Skull or many other possibilities!}

In the past 20 years the Leakeys and others have dug up overwhelming evidence showing that between 2.5 million and 1 million years ago, the then lush woodlands and savannas of eastern Africa-where our family tree first took root-were the habitat of rival species, most of which were evolutionary dead ends. But what about before that? Paleontologists have generally agreed that there was just one hominid line, beginning with a small, upright-walking species known as ‘Australopithecus afarensis’, most famously represented by ‘Lucy’., a remarkably complete (about 40%) skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974.

Now {Ha!} that view is being challenged. The new skull, described by Leakey and six colleagues, including her and Richard’s daughter Louise, 29, in ‘Nature’ last week, pushes the presence of co-existing species back another million years, to between 3.5 million and 3.2 million years ago. That’s right in Lucy’s time. Yet it is so different from Lucy that they assign their fossil, which they call ‘Kenyanthropus platyops’, or ‘flat- faced man of Kenya’, to a new genus, or grouping of species. ‘This means we will have to rethink the early past of hominid evolution,’ says Meave Leakey, head of paleontology at the National Museum of Kenya. {Who didn’t want the Dalhousie professor digging up the 6,000,000 year old bones on the Yale site, that he says aren’t australopithecine, to upstage them.} ‘It’s clear the picture isn’t as simple as we thought.’ Even Lucy’s discoverer Donald Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, concurs. ‘This is a reminder that there are probably a lot more species out there,’ he says.

K. ‘platyops’ not only had a much flatter face than Lucy, she also had smaller teeth. From the teeth, the scientists conclude that it probably ate fruits, berries and small insects while A. ‘afarensis’ consumed tougher vegetation like roots and grasses. {The skull appears to have teeth as we do. This description of things bears little fruit of the nature of our ancestors or how they felt, thought and developed the things that really count. It would fit very nicely with the ‘cave man’ fiction and our ‘gradually evolved’ species though. Thus you can rest secure in the knowledge that YOU and especially the European (you) are the highest form of life ever found on the face of this planet.} ‘They were unlikely to compete,’ says team member Fred Spoor of University College London. ‘Two species don’t usually occupy the same ecological niche.’

Old flat-face could displace A. ‘afarensis’ as a direct link in the human lineage. Or it may be a part of a branch leading to ‘Homo rudolfensis’, a species with a strikingly similar face that lived in East Africa between 2.4 and 1.8 million years ago. ‘You find something beautiful and new, but the conclusion is you actually know less,’ says Spoor. ‘But we are getting there.’ – with reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York.” (1)

When all things are considered they are being disingenuous. Spoor or the others do know that the afarensis lineage is not related to us. As to the existence of super robustus australopithecines in the time, they don’t mention that because the probability of ‘occupying the same ecological niche’ increases the likelihood that humans and hominids banded together and formed protection groups against these larger foe with ability like their own. That is a possibility I think leads to social and cultural development that would push the meaningful aspects of human life back a great deal further. The spiritual and communicational possibilities of commerce and ritual as well as dance and herbalism, expand as people form larger units. It is likely that sexual relations between different hominids occurred and made mutational potentials to generate genetic streams of over a hundred different types in Africa. To focus on Africa forgets Siberia (Diring entry) and Mungo Man. It loses sight of Gondwana where the genetic material that became all these hominids formed before the split to South America, Australia etc. This leads to many different places on earth developing hominids. Yes, there is much to learn; but if we don’t consider all the facts we will keep our heads in a very dark place that doctors might have to use surgical tools like obsidian (as fine as any today) to remove. They have recently found an ape which the researchers think is a cross between a gorilla and a chimpanzee. It is still living in some numbers and I look forward to geneticists telling us what cannot be done while their colleagues say otherwise – some more. And those geneticists did so after I wrote much of this book. They found up to 1.8 million years ago that pubic lice which are only on humans diverged in North America.

Author of Diverse Druids
Columnist for The ES Press Magazine
World-Mysteries.com guest ‘expert’