Author Archives: Anwar Baksh

Getting More Feedback on Marketplace Websites

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 09/24/2018 Comments Off

How much feedback should I expect?

The amount of feedback you get from your buyers will vary and that is also based on a few factors. According to discussions on the Ebay community site, the percentage of feedback from sales can range from

How to Be a Blogger and Attract a Boatload of Customers

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 05/15/2017 Comments Off

Why do you want to be a Blogger? Do you want to be a Blogger for the fame? Do you want to be a Blogger to earn a living or even a side income?

It takes a lot of guts and creative energy to run a Blog.

It takes hard work, discipline, charisma, and pure determination, to run a high income earning Blog.

Are you crazy? If you’re not crazy, maybe you’re a genius, ready to birth the next great Blog.

In any case, why are you

Attractive, Modern, and Customizable Restaurant Templates

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 06/18/2015 Comments Off

Would you eat at a restaurant that looked horrible on the outside?

The website of a restaurant is a direct insight into its quality and its experience. Just like the front area of the restaurant itself.

If it looks bad, nobody will want to come in and give the great food a try.

A website that looks good can dramatically improve the initial perception of a restaurant to prospective patrons – again just like the actual front.

To achieve this on a small budget, a restaurant owner should choose from the best restaurant themes made for WordPress.

Other platforms will not subsist because they are not Open Source, or have millions of freelance developers working with it.

And most of all they cannot be extended with tens of thousands of plugins like WordPress.

A modern, attractive, easy to customize template made for WordPress can provide

How to Use Established Standards to Create a Great Website

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 03/23/2015 Comments Off

Ignoring standards in Web Development is like raising a child in the jungle. That child will not perform well in normal society when mature.

When you build anything, it must be adapted to the fundamental features of similar products. At least to some degree.

When I started building websites over 15 years ago, it was mostly by trial and error.

Like many Professional Web Developers who are self-taught, I didn’t know much about conversion optimization, typography, vertical spacing, and the countless other ingredients that make a great website.

These are some of the standards that are critical to the success of a modern site or application.

Design and programming best practices were developed mostly through testing, experimentation, and analytic reviews. This is what gives it strength.

Industry tested approaches and techniques that are proven to work should be fairly reliable, right?

Most big companies didn’t know much about this as well, and many still don’t. Back then there were no major college level programs focusing on website development.

Don’t get me wrong, there

Save your Data and Sanity with an External Drive

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 03/17/2014 Comments Off

One day just like any, you open your favorite browser and the screen goes blank. You press a bunch of buttons hoping it’s just a glitch, but nothing happens.

After several minutes of waiting, you decide to restart the computer. On startup, you get a blue screen displaying an error message. In short, your computer has crashed, taking thousands of family photos, videos, prized music, and even movie collections.

Even worse, your tax, other important documents, business-related data, shortcuts, favorites, bookmarks, applications, and software are all gone.

You can try a data recovery service, but there is no guarantee the files can be retrieved.

You can get

5 Best Downloadable Logo Creation Software

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 03/03/2014 Comments Off

Have you ever tried to make a logo, but failed in frustration? It’s surprisingly hard to design a logo, isn’t it?

I’ve spent hours and even days trying to create something I can be happy with. It’s just not an ideal way to get something this critical done.

If you’re just like me – not a graphic designer, you should seriously consider looking through some of the best logo creation software currently selling to help you with the process.

What kind of logo can you

How to Increase Your Website Traffic by 2000%

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 01/23/2014 Comments Off

179,000 plus impressions in Google Search and barely 500 clicks! That’s the worst I’ve seen.

It’s like tending a Gold Mine and coming up empty every day. This is the slow strangulation happening to a site I recently did some work on. I’m so unhappy about this, I decided to write this post to help other site owners avoid this problem.

Low CRT Serp Listings

At site launch, these basics must be addressed

Do you know how to access your Webmaster Tools Account (WMT)? Do you even have an account?

A standard inclusion on any new website that I develop is WMT setup, XML sitemap creation, sitemap submission to WMT and ongoing site monitoring through the platform.

These simple set of tasks can

A Basic yet Essential Tutorial on Web Hosting

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 12/30/2013 1 comment

Web Hosting is a term for the service of storing and serving up the files of a website. The service provider is referred to as a Web Host. Godaddy, Blue Host, and Hostgator are examples of website hosting service providers.

So how exactly does web hosting work?

Well it’s very simple. A website is a collection of files. These files need to be stored on a computer’s hard drive.

Not only does it store the files, it must process and present the files after a request for those files has been made. In other words, they’re

Features of the Best Web Hosting Companies Reviewed

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 12/12/2012 Comments Off

Would you build a house on land that was unstable? I’m guessing the answer is no.

This same principle applies when reviewing services and looking for the best web hosting company for your website business.

Think for a moment if a server has a hiccup and the entire website is wiped out. Will the host be able to help?

A few years ago websites went down constantly whenever they were promoted on Digg. This happened because of the sudden spike in traffic that came from this site.

How will the host handle a similar problem if it was your website?

These are just two common problems. But don’t underestimate them. Having an established site crash while money is being made and customers are using the site is the worst case scenario. And this alone can drive a person crazy.

So it’s critical that you choose the right host from the start. Because

10 Best Quality Webcams for Live Streaming

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 06/19/2012 Comments Off

Buying a webcam is like buying yourself a used car. It can end up being a lemon or your “old reliable”.

Even if you bought a used cam, my list of the best webcams will not include any lemons.

In the last decade, video chatting, and video publishing has skyrocketed in popularity.

There is the problem where most videos are progressively downloaded. Nevertheless live streaming videos are also very popular.

I needed the best cam for streaming and decided to research some of the top cams on the market today.

My interested was not in Camcorders or professional video cameras. I was looking specifically for cameras made for live broadcasting.

So here they are, and in no particular order:

The cost of ignoring On-page SEO

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 06/20/2011 1 comment

There are only so many things we can control. Algorithmic updates is not one of them. But what about ON PAGE SEO?

There are people who work very hard to solidify standards that even the Search Engines must adhere to.

Of course standards may only be enforced if there is true habituation by the masses.

So what’s costing you thousands of dollars every year?

Missing Sitemap

Your Website might have many pages with plenty of text content. If you’re still not receiving significant traffic, then perhaps your site is not properly indexed by Search Engines.

This could be caused by bad site navigation structure, lack of a

5 legitimate home based business ideas

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 06/21/2010 1 comment

We all know there are countless work at home scams shamelessly being pedaled online and even offline. A legitimate home based business can seem like a pipe dream to someone who has never ran one before. Often seeding these ideas require a lot of connections, capital and ground work. But I can propose some options that don’t require a big network, large amounts of money or years of ground work.

I”ll share with you three jobs I’ve tried my self. And two others I firmly stand behind. They require little to no money to start. But please take note, they do require a little bit of skills and training. So if you decide to try any of these, expect to put in at least one month of training. Also, try to have

10 Website Growth Boosting Tips

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 06/16/2010 1 comment

Your website might be suffering with issues that need immediate attention. Let me shed some light on several areas often neglected by Webmasters. After these upgrades, you can expect a significant boost in readership, performance and overall growth of the site. Here they are;

1. Reduce the number of objects loaded

The objects on a website include images, JavaScript files, CSS files, video and audio files. Even Flash files are objects. Count them. You don’t need any special software for this. To check the number of JS and CSS files, just press CTRL+U and the source will give you the details.

Then trash or combine some of them. Try to bring it to under 20 objects. The key is to improve latency and increase speed.

2. Improve the quality of headlines

The title for a website page is the first thing a potential visitor sees and they are often very weak. Use

How to Create a WordPress Template in 5 Minutes

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 06/14/2010 Comments Off

To create a WordPress template (theme) in 5 minuets you will not start from scratch. There is no need for that when you want to quickly develop themes. The purpose of this article is to outline the fast track to theme creation (Not theme design, that is a different thing).

The benefit is a new theme ready for styling within minuets. It’s a jump start for designers and folks with low tech skills or interests. In other words, if you don’t want to deal with complex code. And you just want to spend time designing or making minor changes.

In many cases you are the developer for someone else, and a client wants something original. Or you want to sell templates to make some cash. This should be

How to use Gimp to Create Logos

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 06/10/2010 Comments Off

logo example

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what do you think a good logo is worth?

And if it’s worth anything, you can bet it will cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to create a logo.

This is a relatively small investment for something that may help catapult your business to success. But you don’t have to spend anything to make a good looking logo for your website.

Gimp is the freeway to a professional looking logo. You can do it yourself and it will cost nothing but your time.

If you’re interested in creating logos using Gimp, let me first introduce you to this program, then I will walk you through the basic steps.

Gimp is a free image editing software that runs on almost any computer and operating system.

This software can be used to retouch photos. It can be used to crop, re-size, or optimize images for use on the web.

Best of all it can be used to create custom text or graphic art.

I’ve used it for a number of edits on my own, and client projects.

It’s very effective in providing the features now considered standard for Graphic Software. If you don’t want to pay an outside person or company to do your logo, you will find this software very useful for creating professional looking artwork.

What kind of logo can you create?

In this guide I will show you how to create simple text logos using Gimp. You’ll learn how to

HTML5 Audio Tag Tutorial

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 06/06/2010 2 comments

HTML5 is here and so is the long awaited Audio Tag. They said it would take a decade or more, but it’s quickly being adopted by popular browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Although it’s not a W3C recommendation yet (at the time of this writing), there is enough support to start experimenting and developing websites and applications with the new elements. I’ll cover the HTML5 Audio Tag specifically in this article.

The plain Audio Tag looks like this:

How to Track Views on Craigs List Ads

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 06/05/2010 2 comments

UPDATE: This article is no longer useful. Craigslist has disallowed embedded images in their posts and this tracking method is obsolete.

I’ve made thousands of dollars from leads generated by CraigsList Ads. At first I didn’t care how much views my ads received. I only cared about who called me or clicked on my website’s link because I can easily monitor that.

With a bad economy, it became harder to generate the same amount of leads.

This is the point where conversion optimization becomes important. I knew the leads were still coming from classified ads. But I needed a way to

My Freelance Experience in the Big City

Posted by Anwar Baksh on 06/04/2010 2 comments

My big city is New York City. I’ve lived and worked here for the past 17 years. One thing I must throw out about city life is it’s very gritty.

There is on the other hand a method to the city life madness. Outsiders might find it overwhelming. But once you’ve established a footing, it seems we’re able to soar to new heights never before realized when living in a small town.

The pace is fast for sure. But the City also provides inspiration simply from observing it’s people. Some are the uber successful, while others are top of their field talents.

It makes me want to

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