Articles

Some things really are difficult to imagine living without. How did we search before Google? Share images before Flickr? Connect with long lost friends before Facebook? In a distant past, barely memorable now that the internet is so ubiquitous, people actually installed software on their computers for everything they did rather than using the internet for everything.

Here are the RealmSurfer picks of the top 10 free software applications that no business should be without.

Any good business owner will tell you that if you want to be more than just an employee in your own business then you need to grow it to the point that you have resources working for you, leaving you to step out of the day-to-day activities and focus on strategy and further growth. Arguably, the most valuable resource your business has is its employees. However, probably your next most valuable resource is, without a doubt, your business website.

Internet marketing is perhaps the most important aspect of business website management. So what is internet marketing, and how do you get started?

You have a new online e-commerceⁱ store. Your web developer has set up your store to process e-commerce transactions in a secure environment for you. Now all you need is some tips on how to get your online store running well and making some money. Here are a few e-commerce marketing and promotion tips to get you started.

Have you recently launched a new business website, and want to get the necessary search engine traffic to make it a profitable investment? If you're new to online business, odds are that you're almost certainly new to setting up your website so that it can perform well in the rankings of the major search engines.

Thinking of starting a new business, primarily internet based? Are you starting a business and not sure the role your new business' website should play? Most find it somewhat daunting starting a new business from scratch, let alone trying to figure out a whole new specialised field, that of internet business management and marketing.

Chances are that whether or not you are not a technology guru, you keep hearing talk of internet technologies in terms of a never ending stream of acronyms. XHTMLⁱ, CSSⁱ, J2EE, PHPⁱ, ASP.NET, JSP, SQLⁱ, HTTP, SSL, VOIP, P2P, XML, RSS... Sound familiar -- or a bit like Klingon?

One of the major barriers to understanding potential customers on the internet is the fact that many of the interactions our site visitors have with us are nameless, faceless and one-sided.

Many businesses these days are creating powerful websites to market their products and services, and the really successful ones have excellent, high quality information for their customers. The tool they're using to publish this information is the business blogⁱ.

A question often heard in the internet industry is how quotations for web design and development services can vary so drastically from one web design consultancy to the next. People, quite understandably, get very confused when one quote comes back as $800, another for $8 000, and many big-brand sites can easily cost millions of dollars to create and maintain. Why the vast disparities? How can you assess if your $800 quote is a bargain or if you're paying for the glorified equivalent of a cardboard cutout?