After reading a blog entry on JenSense, about how "One poorly converting site can "smart price" an entire Adsense account", I got the opinion that many webmasters like yourself did not like the idea of smart pricing.

Here is the basis of how smart pricing works:

And this often used example explains how this works more precisely.

Advantages of smart pricing

A while back, I went through a phase of looking for an alternative to Adsense. Some of the alternatives were good, but so many of them require you to explicitly state which sites you are going to place their advertisements on. This is alright for people who own one site, but it can be a big hassle for people who own more than one site.

As Adsense does not require each website to be explicitly stated, it has opened the doors to alternative models, like revenue sharing forums. It is just one thing that makes Adsense a lot simpler than the alternatives.

The problem with not explicitly stating the websites that Adsense will be on, is that it is hard to tell where one site stops and another site starts. From Google's point of view, every domain and sub domain is a new site, but there are sites out there that cross sub domains and even domains. So as a result, Adsense smart prices the entire account.

What separates your site from the others?

Your site is unique for one reason and one reason only; it has been created by you. You have put your foot print on the site and your views and opinions have made the site unique. Even across all my sites, there are similarities:

• If I have a professional template created for one site, there is more chance that I will have professional templates for all my sites.
• If one of my site is written in British English, there is little chance of my others are in US English.
• If I have found an Adsense placement that works well, I will use it on most of my sites.

All these little differences affect Adsense and which advertisements work best on your site.

Facts about smart pricing

Keep sites with low click through ratios

The percentage of clicks that convert for an advertiser is the most important factor in an advertiser's ROI, so it's not only possible, but common, to have a low CTR and a high advertiser conversion rate. It's also possible to have a high CTR and a low conversion rate. Don't remove the Adsense code from your site just because it has a lower CTR - it may be one of your best converting sites.

Content is king

The best way to ensure you benefit from Adsense is to create compelling content for interested users. This also means driving targeted traffic to your site -- advertisers don't gain as much ROI when paying for generic clicks as they do for quality clicks that come from interest in your content. Good content usually equals a good experience for user plus advertiser, which can be much more valuable than CTR.

Google doesn't make money from 'smart pricing'

In fact, they make less money, since the cost to advertisers is reduced in order to provide a strong ROI. Ultimately, this leads to higher payouts for publishers by drawing a larger pool of advertisers and rewarding publishers who create high quality sites.

Many factors determine the price of an ad

More than conversion rate goes into determining the price of an ad: the advertiser's bid, the quality of the ad, the other ads competing for the space, the start or end of an ad campaign, and other advertiser fluctuations.

Color Symbolism describes the use of color as a symbol throughout cultures and religions. Listed below are some common cultural (symbolic) connotations attached to colors in Western cultures, particularly in the United States. These are not necessarily consistent with color psychology:

Gray

Elegance, humility, respect, reverence, stability, subtlety, wisdom, anachronism, boredom, decay, decrepitude, dullness, dust, pollution, urban sprawl, water

White

Reverence, purity, snow, peace, innocence, cleanliness, simplicity, security, humility, marriage, sterility, winter, coldness, sterility, clinicism, surrender, cowardice, fearfulness, unimaginative, death, air, fire

Black

Modernity, power, sophistication, formality, elegance, wealth, mystery, style, evil, death, fear, anonymity, anger, sadness, remorse, mourning, unhappiness

Red

Passion, strength, energy, fire, love, sex, excitement, speed, heat, leadership, masculinity, power, danger, gaudiness, blood, war, anger, revolution, radicalism, socialism, communism, aggression, stop

Blue

Seas, skies, peace, unity, harmony, tranquility, calmness, coolness, confidence, conservatism, water, ice, loyalty, dependability, cleanliness, technology, winter, depression, coldness, idealism, obscenity, tackiness

Green

Nature, spring, fertility, youth, environment, wealth, money (US), good luck, vigor, generosity, go, grass, aggression, inexperience, envy, misfortune, coldness, jealousy, illness, greed, life, air, earth

Yellow

Sunlight, joy, happiness, earth, optimism, idealism, wealth (gold), summer, hope, air, liberalism, cowardice, illness (quarantine), hazards, dishonesty, avarice, weakness, greed, femininity

Purple

Sensuality, spirituality, creativity, wealth, royalty, nobility, ceremony, mystery, wisdom, enlightenment, arrogance, flamboyance, gaudiness, mourning, profanity, exaggeration, confusion

Orange

Buddhism, energy, balance, heat, fire, enthusiasm, flamboyance, playfulness, aggression, arrogance, gaudiness, overemotion, warning, danger

Brown

Calm, depth, natural organisms, nature, richness, rusticism, stability, tradition, anachronism, boorishness, dirt, dullness, filth, heaviness, poverty, roughness, earth

Various cultures see color differently. In India, blue is associated with Krishna (a very positive association), green with Islam, red with purity (used as a wedding color) and white with mourning. In most Asian cultures, yellow is the imperial color with many of the same cultural associations as purple in the west. In China, red is symbolic of celebration, luck and prosperity; white is symbolic of mourning and death, while "having a green hat" metaphorically means a man’s wife is cheating on him. In Europe colors are more strongly associated with political parties than they are in the U.S. In many countries black is synonymous with conservatism, red with socialism, while brown is still immediately associated with the Nazis. Many believe that blue is universally the best color as it has the most positive and fewest negative cultural associations across various cultures. The symbolism of colour can also be seen in localised religious divisions, in the UK and Northern Ireland for example, cities such as Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast where Catholic and Protestant have a history of conflict, the use green (Catholicism) or Orange (Protestantism) are seen as almost taboo by opposing socioreligious groups.

Studies have shown most colors have more positive than negative associations, and even when a color has negative association, it is normally only when used in a particular context.

People in many cultures have an automatic negative perception of the color black, according to some researchers. Thomas Gilovich and Mark Frank found that sports teams with primarily black uniforms were significantly more likely to receive penalties in historical data. Students were more likely to infer negative traits from a picture of a player wearing a black uniform. They also taped staged football matches, with one team wearing black and another wearing white. Experienced referees were more likely to penalize black-wearing players for nearly identical plays. Finally, groups of students tended to prefer more aggressive sports if wearing black shirts themselves.

Criticism

Most evidence suggests the lack of a single, universal psychological reaction to a particular color. For example, death is symbolized by black in most Western cultures and by white in many Eastern cultures. Even members of the same culture from different age groups can act differently. Referencing colors with emotions is developed by every individual when they feel an emotion and then see a color repeated during this time. After the connection is ingrained, the referencing can go both ways.

Reasons for Color Association

Black is often seen as the color of death in Western culture. This is likely because when things die the rotting flesh will turn black. Black is also the color of wood after fire has completely consumed it. Likewise the association of white with death in Eastern cultures could come from the stark whiteness of bones and skeletons. Red is often a color representing violence, war, aggression, or passion; this is probably because red is the color of human blood.

The Wordpress Hidden Link Injection exploit has been the cause of concern for many users who use Wordpress on a daily basis. For those unfamiliar with the issue, the attack inserts links into the files of your active Wordpress theme mostly pointing to adult material elsewhere on the web. The lainks are completely hidden from view so you may never know about them and nor will your visitors. But the search engine spiders will certainly pick them up - and penalize you for it.

Detection
Seeing if your Wordpress install has been compromised is easy. Simply view the source of your homepage and look for any code that does not belong. Check near the top and near the bottom of the file as this is the place I've found the hidden links to mostly exist. They're also usually wrapped in HTML comments.



Some website 1
Some website 2
...
Some website n



If you see code like that, chances are, you are a victim of the Wordpress Hidden Link Injection exploit.

How are "they" doing this?
Apparently, there was a security hole in Wordpress versions 2.8.x that allowed outside users to hijack the /wp-admin/upload.php file and insert files on your server that could be used for all sorts of malicious purposes. One of those purposes is the hidden link injection. Wordpress 2.9 fixed this hole, however, simply upgrading is not enough. Outside users will no longer be able to hijack upload.php but the files that they have already inserted will still orchestrate the attack.

That's why simply removing the links from header.php or footer.php (the two places I've seen the links) is not enough. You'll notice that the links will simply reappear. We've got to treat the disease now, not just the symptom.

Fixing the problem
First and foremost, always keep your Wordpress install up-to-date! Updating could not be any easier. Simply click on the alert that appears at the top of your Dashboard and follow the instructions. It takes literally 10 seconds.

Next, change the admin Wordpress user's password. Also change your MySQL user's password.

Lastly, find the files that have been inserted by the exploit via upload.php. I have found two separate instances of these files, both located in the wp-includes folder. Check the permissions of each of the files in wp-includes and investigate any file that has 777 permission (that's your first clue that something is wrong). class-rss.php and feed-atom2.php are two files that I have seen cause issues. Cleverly named files. These two files are not native to the Wordpress codebase and can be safely removed. If you were to open either of these files and know a bit of PHP, you'll see that these files are certainly the culprit.

Going through these steps should safeguard your Wordpress installation against the hidden link injection exploit.

Stay vigilant
Just because we've fixed this does not guarantee that you'll be immune forever. Hackers are constantly looking for newer and better ways to tear stuff up. Wordpress has been exceptionally good at patching security issues, but someone somewhere has to be the guinea pig to get hit with an attack - and then report it to Wordpress.

One great plugin I've begun to use is Wordpress File Monitor. This plugin scans your Wordpress installation and reports if any files have been added, deleted, or changed. The plugin is customizable to run on a schedule that you set. You can also exclude directories from the plugin's reporting so that you're not alerted every time you upload a picture to insert into a post. I, however, recommend that you do not exclude directories as that directory may be the next location of the next exploit.

Brian Onorio is the President and CEO of O3 Strategies, a Raleigh web design and development group. O3 provides strategies that help small businesses nationwide successfully launch and maintain web presences and online brands.

Think of any store you visited in the last month and consider how that store owner would feel if more than 75% of customers took a shopping cart, pushed it around the store, placing some goods in it and then, when they approach the till to pay for their purchases they suddenly decide that in fact, they are only pushing some goods around and are not going to pay for them.

They leave the cart in the aisle and walk out of the store.

3 out of 4 customers!

This is the very same situation which the majority of ecommerce website owners face – more than three-quarters of their customers abandon the shopping cart before or during the payment process.

Minimizing shopping cart abandonment can dramatically improve your revenues and ecommerce performance, so before we look at what needs to be done, let's look at why people abandon shopping carts in the first place.

Main Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment

The principal reasons for shopping cart abandonment are:

-slow payment processing systems;

-no preferred payment option is available;

-“hidden” costs and fees appear in the final order, especially high shipping costs;

-the prevalence of “comparison” shoppers;

-Lack of online customer support.

Action to Take

Addressing shopping cart abandonment is important, no matter how well the system is perceived to work.

The key areas to address are:

Transparency in Pricing and Fees

Always be upfront with costs, especially shipping costs – it pays to display the shipping price with the price of the goods where possible (use a smaller font size to display the cost below the main price tag). Watch out for high shipping charges because these can break the deal with the potential customer, especially those who have come in from a price comparison website which may not provide an all-inclusive price.

You also need to bear in mind what your major competition is doing – Amazon for instance, offer free shipping, so remember you need to compete on total cost and avoid “shocking” your potential buyer.

Ensure the Payment Process is Simple & Fast

Only ask for that information which is relevant to processing the transaction – do not let your marketing desire creep in here with for instance, an offer to take a customer survey before the customer hits the authorize button.

Make sure the payment process is fast – if the customer is waiting for minutes for authorization and confirmation, your site is too slow. It is simple for the customer to hit the back button or worse, navigate to another website to make the purchase.

Offer a Wide Variety of Payment Options

Promote a wide variety of payment mechanisms on your website and be sure to include credit cards, debit cards, e-transfers (eg Paypal) and where these are not available for the customer, offer a mailing service where they can pay by check .

It is extremely frustrating for a customer to get to the payment form only to find you won't accept the credit card they have in their hand now. They are more likely to move off your site to another retailer than go find their wallet to use another card!

Allow Price Comparison on Your Website

Where possible, provide customers with the ability to compare prices from your major competitors on your own website – this will prevent them from navigating away from your site to do the comparison themselves. This will also allow you to control the presentation of pricing information, so you can introduce reasons aside from cost, why the customer should be purchasing from you.

Quality wordpress ecommerce plugin and wordpress plugin tips can be found at PhPurchase.com

If you are planning to have a website and want to make your web designer understand the proper scope of the project then wireframe is the most suitable technique you should apply.

Wireframes are nothing but hand drawn blocks of the site giving an idea of various placeholders for the website.

These placeholder can in turn be then explained by the client in order to make a web designer understand how the website will function overall.

There are a few things that should be remembered when you create a wireframe:
1. Boxes should be clean and very basic (not very fancy to confuse)
2. Simple layouts to be used even though the actual design may be complex.
3. Various call to actions for the website to be noted.
4. Various levels or pages to be explained in separate wireframes.
5. After each wireframe explain in points the working of various blocks.

In engineering as a block diagram explains the working of a circuit similarly in web designing a wireframe explains the flow and working of a website in a very basic way.

What do you need to create your first wireframe?
1. A nice pen or pencil (i prefer pencil since you can erase as well)
2. A white paper (not the old ones which look yellow)
3. A eraser
4. A nice coffee for company (this one i use normally)

Now all you need to do is draw by hand or use some fancy things like VISIO and draw your first site wireframe.

I bet these wireframes will make the scope of the project much clearer to any website designer.

Web Design Company

/cgi-bin/nph-job.cgi?url=

This one appears to be an attempt at finding a url that a spam url can be injected into. The resulting web page will usually display the spam url or redirect the user to the spam url.