Archive for December 2011
There are both free services, and services that you pay for, that allow you to make your own website. While free services serve a purpose, if you are selling a product or using your website for professional purposes, here’s why you should use a paid service, or website editor, to build your site.
Advertisements
There are free services that display advertisements on your website each time someone visits. This is the way some free website design programs get paid for their services. Unfortunately, if you are selling a product or building a website for professional use, this creates an unprofessional and “cheap” look and may give your product or service a bad image.
Quality Customer Service
Most free services, in my experience, don’t have customer service. Or, if they do, it’s not very good. Companies that charge you to use their website design services are more likely to have the resources to help you when you have a problem.
Ongoing and Extensive Product Support
Because you are paying for the service, most paid companies have more reason to keep the product up-to-date, fix problems and bugs, and continue to improve their website design programs.
Valuable Integrated Services
Free website design services or software programs are less likely to have extras or bells and whistles for you to take advantage of. Some paid services allow you to integrate website store services (merchant account type services), advertising (including pay-per-click), the use of royalty free image databases (for use on your website), and much more.
If you are looking to build a simple, personal website, a free service may be just what you need. But, if you want to build a professional looking, reliable website that is expandable and offers bells and whistles, a paid service is going to be much more user-friendly, supported, and updated.
My favorite baseball websites are as follows (no particular order):
www.BaseballAmerica.com
Not taking the major leagues into account, baseball is played all over the United States. You can find minor league teams in towns and cities all across the country. Baseball America is a great source for finding out about your favorite major league team’s farm system. They provide comprehensive lists of players, sortable stats and commentary for all minor league teams. They also do a fine job covering college baseball, which is growing rapidly in popularity.
www.RotoWorld.com
Primarily a fantasy sports site, RotoWorld is not just for fantasy geeks. RotoWorld reports sports news in a very timely manner. Because of their superior coverage, they usually get their news items up faster than bigger sites like Yahoo or MSN. Plus, they report or comment on a much greater amount of players on a daily basis. You can look up a great number of professional sports players in their vast database, which gives you vitals as well as career statistics. You can also find quality articles in abundance there.
www.RotoJournal.com
A fantasy sports blog that currently covers baseball almost exclusively, Roto Journal provides quality articles and commentary on topics such as Division Inequality in Baseball and The Wisdom of Bill James.
www.TheBaseballCube.com
The Baseball Cube is a historical almanac providing major league, minor league and college statistics. The major league records go back over 100 years. I have often visited this site when I am trying to find information on minor league players, as they tend to have more info on the minors than any other site I’ve visited. You can also ‘sponsor’ your favorite player’s webpage on their site.
www.Sabr.org
The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) was established in 1971. Their desire is to promote the study of baseball, both current and historical. Of primary interest on the site are their studies on everything from The Deadball Era (1901-1919) to Women in Baseball. It’s a fine source for anyone wanting to examine the history of baseball, and how the game has changed through the years.
www.Baseball1.com
This site is a nice archive of various topics, ranging from Sabermetrics to the Negro leagues. It also has a fine database of downloadable stats from baseball’s early era.
www.Baseball-Reference.com
In my opinion, this is the premier website for baseball stat junkies. Here, you will find current standings and boxscores, and past stats going back to 1871.
You’ll also discover a comprehensive list of past players, managers, post-season results and awards.
www.BaseballThinkFactory.org
A general discussion site, with articles on all kinds of topics, including the minor league draft and current baseball events. At any given time, you might find up to 1000 people viewing the site.
With technological advancement, digitalization and integration of various platforms a number of websites is increasing day by day. Just having a website would not do, how many aficionados are there of your website? How many clicks do you get on your website per day? Does your website rank well and generate leads? Effective website design is most important to attract your visitors so that they stick to your website and also find solutions on your website. I believe for effective website design basic knowledge of web design and web development is essential.
In this tech savvy world, we require expertise and pragmatism in web design, graphics, search engine optimization and content as well. Mere web design knowledge would not work if the website is not search engine friendly.
You are thinking of creating world class website; do not worry! Just keep the following points into your mind for designing professional website.
Layout and design of a website is accountable for its effectiveness. Moreover, these are the key points on which a website’s popularity depends. Website effectiveness includes text type, text size, font size and font color, navigation system, color scheme. Web page with lots of graphics, images, flash banners may take time to load; visitors may get agitated and leave your website. Web design and development companies are advised to spend considerable time in finalizing final website design with clean layout and all web pages elements should be well organized. A professional web design and development company should consider these points. A professional web development company follows different development methodologies like agile development, extreme programming, rational unified process and model view controller before deriving any final conclusion.
Online business, media optimization, internet marketing and technology like web 2.0 have led to growth and increase in number of small, mid sized and large web design and development companies taking them to heights.
For internet presence of a website there are a number of prerequisites. Also, these companies are driven by rise of online business, social networks and communities, mashups and lot more.
For a company with a core competency other than IT, the best way to get it done is by outsourcing its web design and development requirements to any offshore company to ensure cost effectiveness. Moreover, there are a large number of startup offshore companies which offer professional web design and development services at cheap rates. The fact that they are cheap should not be mistaken for their web design quality. Rather these offshore companies by providing cheap web design and development services, want to build a strong list of client base and also attract a large number of customers and thus get established in the highly competitive market.
Web is the best place to find number of offshore web design and development companies. When a user enters a query string (keyword or keyphrase) for simple search then major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. will give a list of these web design and development companies. These search engines have a huge database of affordable, cheap, professional web design and development companies and a simple search will show you a list of such companies.