We have made a video to show how to print gridlines and borders in your Excel spreadsheet. Below the video, you will also find step by step instructions with images.

1. Open the spreadsheet or worksheet you want to print with gridlines or borders.

2. Go to “Print Preview”

3. This is how your worksheet would look like in print preview.

4. Click on “Preview” and then click on “Page Setup”. This will open the page setup dialogue box.

5. Go to the “Sheet” tab, check the “Gridlines” option and then click “Ok”.

6. Now your spreadsheet would look like this in the print preview.

You can now choose to print your spreadsheet or close the print preview.

In the default view, you will notice that your spreadsheet is as it is and no formatting has changed on it. But it will print with the gridlines when you send it to the printer.

Also note that if you want to print a sheet without gridlines you can always go to the Page Setup and uncheck the gridlines option.

How this is going to benefit you?

Right now implementing this will help Google display your profile picture on the content you have written. This will give credibility to your blog, increase the user trust, and will also help Google improve their search.

• Increases credibility of you as an expert in your niche.
• Increased trust level.
• Better page rankings.

As I mentioned earlier in my blog posts (here and here) that Google is now paying more attention to gauge a page’s importance using social matrices. The author tag enables search engines to find out more about an author and their credibility in a respective field. This tag will enable search engines to understand:

• Who you are.
• What are the topics you write about.
• Who likes your posts.
• How people interact with your content.
• People who interact with your content, what do they like.

How to add:

Step 1. Basically rel=author is just a hyperlink, which links to author’s Google profile. Like this:

<a href="https://plus.google.com/108579361730459688657" rel="author">Noumaan Yaqoob</a>

If you own a single author blog you can put this link anywhere on your pages.

Step 2. It was that easy to give yourself credit for a good blog post. There are people who might use this feature for writing poor content and give credit to other people. To avoid this, The Google profile page should also have a link back to your main domain.

There is more on how you can add this markup to your blogs with multiple authors. Check out this post on how to add it to a WordPress blog for multiple authors. Also check out this article on Webmaster Tools help pages.

Also watch this Webmaster’s Tools video in which Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson discuss authorship markup.

One way to do that is to manually enter data into your spreadsheet, which seems simple if you are only preparing a list of top 10 search results. What if you need to prepare a sheet showing top 50 results? Thankfully, it is not that difficult to do. You can download top results for any query to a CSV file and then import that file to Microsoft Office Excel or Open Office Spreadsheet.

Requirements:

1. Latest version of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome web browser.
2. SEOQuake addon which is available for both Firefox and Chrome.
3. MS Excel or Open Office

Install SEOQuake addon for your browser from SEOQuake website. Firefox users may need to restart browser to finish installation.

Go to Google, Yahoo, or Bing and search for the keywords you need to get results for.

Most search engines are now showing instant results and by default they show only 10 results per page. In order to quickly download top 30, 50 or even more results you need to change your search prefernces.

screenshot: Google Search Settings (click to enlarge)

Google: Go to Google.com and click on the settings button on the top right corner of the screen and select search settings. This will take you to your search preferences page and here you can turn off Google Instant. Just below the Google Instant you will see number of results to be shown, as soon as you turn off Google Instant this section will become editable. Select the number of results you want to be displayed for your queries.

Yahoo: Go to Yahoo Search, Click on More and Then Select Preferences. On Yahoo you don’t need to turn off Instant suggestions to get more than 10 results. Simply click on Edit in Display and layout section and select the number of results you want to be displayed.

Bing: Go to Bing.com and then click on Preferences (located at the top right corner of the page). Select the number of results you want to be displayed per page.

Now search using your keywords.

You will see your search results differently now. Here is a screenshot of what your search results page may look like.

Now click on the button Save to File. This will open a dialoge box asking you to save the file Farm Fresh Apples.csv to your computer. Save the file to a separate folder. Now download search results from all three search engines or just one. In this example we are just downloading Google Results.

CSV or .CSV means Comma Separated Values, this is usually a text file with each value separated by a comma. When you open this file with Microsoft Office Excel, it looks for a common delimiter. By default it assumes that your CSV file will have values separated by commas. However, the file you have downloaded with SEOQuake has values separated by a semicolon.

Before opening CSV file into Microsoft Office Excel, or Open Office Spreadhseet, we need to change semicolons into commas.

Open the CSV file in notepad.

Go to Edit > Replace

Screenshot: Search Results in Excel Sheet (Click to Enlarge)

Enter ; in the Find What field.

Enter , in Replace with field.

Now click Replace All.

This will replace all semicolons in your CSV file with commas. Press CTRL + S to save your csv file.

Open this CSV file in Microsoft office Excel or Open Office. Voila! you have your search results listed in a spread sheet. With lots of useful information about each link. If you don’t need that information you can delete those columns.

If you ask me they are all useless since WordPress has built in functionality to fetch, cache and display external rss feeds. The function to do that is Fetch_Feed. It uses SimplePie and FeedCache to do the job and it is very effecient. However, the WordPress Codex for this function shows only one usage example for this function which is fine if you are not a person who has good knowledge of PHP, WordPress tags and HTML. But there is a lot more you can do with this function. To learn what else you can do with it you need to read the SimplePie documentation. Using Simplepie and WordPress template tags you can display RSS feeds in many different ways.

I love WordPress, but each day it is becoming more and more complicated for me. For example if I need to choose a plugin to do some job and I search for it on Google, the results will show me many plugins that do the same thing. Now the problem is that how do I choose the best one? I want to use things that do not cause heavy server load. I prefer plugins with caching abilities, better code and effecient resource usage. But believe me not many plugins out there are that good. They are ok for small blogs but on busy websites with lots of visitors they create problems. So the solution to this problem is to first look at the WordPress it self and use it’s own functions to do the job.

Due to some troubles with a few of my WordPress blogs. I have recently learned a lot about security and protecting my WordPress blogs from hacking. There is no way to be 100% sure that your website couldn’t get hacked. However, using the best practices described below, you can make it very hard for someone to crack into your WordPress installation. Taking these steps does not take much time but it saves you from a lot of trouble, even if your website get’s attacked you can fight back quickly and restore your website easily. Without these security precautions you not only make your WordPress installtion vulnerable, but you also make it difficult for yourself to recover from horrible accidents. So lets begin securing of your blog:

Back up often

You have heard this many times. Here it is once again, back up your website and database at least once a week if you update your website daily, or atleast once a month if you don’t update that often. But please back up. Do not trust your webhost when they tell you that they have back ups of your website created on a daily basis. It is very smart to have backups on hand just in case something goes terribly wrong with you or your webhost. There are many WordPress plugins to back up your database. I use WordPress database manager plugin called wp-dbmanager. Using this plugin you can schedual weekly backups to be sent to you via email.

Stay Updated

Whenever there is a new version of WordPress, upgrade your installation as soon as possible. Since 2.7 WordPress has automated the upgrade process or you can manually update to latest version. It only takes about ten minutes but it saves you from a lot of trouble. Older, outdated and upsupported installations often get hacked. Once hacked it is a very lengthy process to clean your blog and upgrade. So protect yourself now upgrade your WordPress.

Also keep your plugins updated to newest versions. If you notice that a plugin author has not released an updated version since a long time go to plugin’s home page and check its status. If the author has abandoned the plugin then stop using it right away.

Strong Passwords

If no one has ever stolen your password then it does not mean that no one ever will. There are some really bad people out there who randomly pick their victims and crack their passwords to take control of their websites. WordPress has strong password indicator which you can use to generate a strong password. A strong password contains atleast 8 characters a combination of alphabates and numbers and special characters. Avoid using words that can be found in a dictionary.

You should have strong passwords not only for your blog’s admin interface, but also for your site’s SSH shell and FTP access. Doing so you make it very difficult for hackers to crack your site and access your files via ftp. Try to use SSH or SFTP instead of plain FTP.

But strong passwords are difficult to remember. Well you should then read this wonder post from the blog herald that tells you how to create strong but memorable passwords. You can also generate a strong password using Aautomatic password generator tool.

File Permissions

One drawback of using WordPress or some of its plugins is that sometimes you need to make a few files writeable on your server. For security it is important that you keep file permissions as strict as possible. It is ideal to have your directories file permission set to 755 and your files 644. See WordPress Codex Changing File Permissions.

Default Username

At the first installation WordPress automatically creates a user account with the username admin. Now using the default username means that half of cracking is done without any guessing. Unfortunately it is not possible to change this username from the WordPress admin interface. However you can change it by running a simple mysql query.
Update tableprefix_users set user_login='newusername' where user_login='admin';

Replace tableprefix with the table prefix in your wp-config file. If you didn’t add a table prefix then it would the default one which is wp_ . You can run this query or manually edit table in phpMyAdmin or you can also run this query using wp-dbmanager plugin.

Other tips:

Remember, no website is 100% secure. But taking these precautions reduces the chances of your blog or website getting compromised easily. The following web pages has more tips on securing your WordPress even more.

Hardening WordPress
WordPress Security Tips and Hacks
WordPress Security Whitepaper

There are several ways for a webmaster to notify the users about updates on their website. There are even free tools available that can publish an RSS feed for a static webpage (I haven’t used any of these and have no idea if they work with Google Sites or not). But since on this blog we rely heavily on the free tools provided by Google, so I will talk about using Google Groups as the solution.

Go to Google Groups and press the Create a group… button. On the Create a group page fill in the information about your site doing so your group and site will have same title and description. Under the option Choose an Access level, select Announcement-only and press the Create my group button. You will be then asked to verify by writing the letters shown in an image to prevent spam. Again press Create my group button. You will be then asked to add a few members to your new group. If you have the email addresses of people who would like to subscribe your group then paste them here or Skip this step.

Now you will be taken to your new group’s homepage. Copy the link from the address bar of your browser. Now go back to your Google Site. At the bottom of your sidebar you will see a link Edit sidebar, click it. On the next page click on Add a sidebar item. A popup will appear showing a few types of items you can add to your sidebar. Select Text and press ADD button. Now you will see a Text Box in your sidebar. Click on the edit link. In the popup window, Give it a title like “Newsletter” or “Subscribe” or “Mailing list”. Below provide the link to your newly created Google group with text informing visitors about your group.

The picture on your left shows how we have used the textbox on our sample website Bashir’s pet shop and notice how we have provided the link to the newsletter. Running a newsletter is no big deal, you can keep your subscribers updated about the recent changers you made to your web site, you can tell them about new products, share something useful with them and they will love you. See this page for some general email newsletter writing tips.

Content is the king on web. No one is going to spend more than a couple of seconds on a website if the content is not useful to them. According to a research, people don’t read pages they scan them when browsing the web and usually they make up their mind whether to stay or not with in few seconds. So you have just a few seconds to grab visitor’s attention and tell them that your page is useful for them. Placing the right content on right spots makes it easy for visitors to find the information quickly. So in this post we will discuss the content that most web surfers look for and where to place this content on your website.

• Introduce yourself. The importance of adding information about you and your business.
• Offer useful content. Detailed Information about your products and services.
• Stay in touch. Allow visitors to interact with you and the website easily.
• Keep it fresh. Content on the web is like vegetables in a grocery store. If its not fresh no one’s going to buy it.

Introduce Yourself

People are not stupid, they don’t just click on a link and order the product. People who buy things on the web are actually a lot smarter than people who visit your shop/store/or offices. They will look for who you are and how good you are. So why not you just tell them all this, and then a little more. Add an about us page to your website and tell your visitors who you are, what you do and how good you are at it. For example

“Bashir’s petshop is a small store located in thesmalltown, smallstate. We sell and supply pet food, accesories, clothing and jewelry. We can take care of your pets when you are on vacations or away for business. We are in the business since last 15 years and have a very good reputation among the residents of thesmalltown ask your neighbours if you don’t believe us. We have a very friendly staff and we love to meet new people. Come visit us at the store, join our mailing list or drop us an email.”

Offer Useful Content

In an earlier post for this series we made a plan to create our website where we tried to define goals for our website. For example our main goal was to sell our products/ services. So the products and the services go directly to your main page. Yes it is a good idea to create a section for product listings with separate page for each product. But since our main goal is to sell these products we are looking for visitors who come to our site looking for these products. And if they don’t find it quickly on main page they might move away without digging product catalogs. (Click on the image below to see a sample layout)

A sample site layout for a small business website

Now there should be a page for your products and services. Make sure it is easy to navigate. Prices are visible easily. Then each product should have its separate page. Provide as much detail as possible and don’t forget to add images of the product. If you already have a happily satisfied customer base ask them to write reviews for your products or services on your website. Also make sure that your potential customers can compare your product/services to your competitor’s.

All these things make your content useful for your site’s visitors. Tell them more and more about your offerings because thats what they came looking for. Keep your content focused on your goals, keep it information driven, keep it fresh and you have yourself a website with useful informative content.

Stay in Touch

This is a common mistake that most small businesses make. They do not provide enough ways for their site’s visitor to interact with the website, the business and the people behind it. If people don’t interact with the website then they are not good for your business. So please add a contact page. Your contact page should have a feedback form, email address, address of your locations, telephone and fax numbers.

You will also see that many popular websites which sell products or services have a comment form at the end of each product listing. Use it to allow your visitors to ask questions on the product page directly, to submit their user reviews and or offer some advise to other visitors. You can also get in touch with your site’s visitors by adding a company blog, a wiki, forum, mailinglist, etc.

Keep it Fresh

The difficult part is not to create the perfect website. The difficult part if to keep improving it. You can keep improving your website doing two things:

Update your site with new content as frequently as possible.

Many small businesses fail to do well on the web because they don’t realize the importance of the content. For example a small home appliances shop has a website with the images of an old television set that every one has already bought and after an year there is nothing attractive about it. The same shop could have done better if they kept updating their website with images of new items in their stocks. Like showing a picture of giant LCD screen for home theatre.So if you keep posting new items to your website it remains fresh and attractive to visitors. Post new offers, special discounts, or links to other webpages with interesting articles about your products.

Experiment with the layout of your website. Web design is a complex field. Sometimes a layout and design that works best for a pet store wouldn’t work for a music store. So you should continuously make changes to your site’s design and see what works best for you. Use different layouts, color schemes, fonts. Change the position of your content. Install a stat counter on your website and see what your visitors are looking for and then add the links to this information on your main page and link to your main page on your most visited pages. You will learn this skill on your way. It is actually fun and very addictive once you realize that the last change you made increased page visitors, you seek more ways to bring more visitors.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

Content Management System (CMS) is an application or a software used to create, edit, manage and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. We will be using one to manage our small business website. Those used to manage content on the web are called Web CMS. These are usually web applications. Which means that the software resides on your web server. It handles the appearance of your website, organizes your content and serves it in HTML when some one visits your website. Most open source and free CMS use PHP for scripting and MySQL database.

Why CMS?

You can create a web site by simply using a text editor to create your own HTML documents. Even for people with good HTML knowledge it is a lot of work to copy paste the same code on all pages to maintain consistency, check the website for broken links and manually update the navigational structure of the website. Why spend time on that? When you can spend the same time on creating the content.

• Using a CMS your site has the same look and feel and you manage site’s design with templates. So your pages have a consistent feel which is good for branding your website.
• Creating and publishing new content is easier as you will not have to worry about HTML and navigational structure of your website. Most CMS show your newest content on the main page and since they serve the pages dynamically so all your documents get updated with new content.
• You can add new users to work with you on the same site. You can set their roles and manage the content they add.
• Using a CMS allows you to give your site’s visitors a place to interact without breaking your site. Visitors can comment, join mailing list or take part in forums.

Which CMS is right for me?

There are many applications available and a great number of them are free open source CMS. You choose the one that meets your needs. What you should look when choosing the right CMS for your website:

• Does it have the features that help you publish your site the way you want. For example if you want to create an online store, wordpress which is a great CMS is porbably not the best choice in your case. But then if you want to create your main page with news and articles then wordpress is definitely a good choice.
• Does it have the ability to extend functionality using plugins or modules. Using plugins and modules you can add extra functionality and features to your website without breaking it.
• It has a template system that is easy for you to understand. Are there many free templates available on the web? This is important so that you can pick a well coded template that you can modify with your own branding.
• Support, does it have a well written manual available on the web? Is there a forum, mailing list, or a chatroom where you can go and ask questions.

There are many Free and Open Source CMS available on the web. They come with great community support, plugins, templates and themes. WordPress is probably the most popular example of an Open Source CMS. If you want a more e-commerce CMS then you can try Zen Cart or SilverStripe. You can also use more than one CMS on your site, for example you can use WordPress for your static pages and company blog, PHPbb for your web forum, and Zen Cart for your product gallery. Many web hosts offer one click installs for these popular open source CMS. You can also download and install them on your web server and play with them for a while before making your final decission.

Create Your Web Site

Now that you have decided to create your website with any CMS. Next step is to modify the default installation. First of all you need to change the logo, site’s name and title, design and layout to meet your needs. Most Open Source CMS has web forums, mailing lists, tutorials and Wikis on their websites with details about modifying your site. For example look at WordPress support pages, zen-cart tutorials, phpbb documentation and support, SilverStripe community support.

This is a great skill you are learning yourself and once you are familiar with the support system of open source community you will feel powerful and confident. Now lets say you want to change the header image of the default installation with your company’s logo, you go to your CMS website and look for tutorial to do that. If you don’t find a tutorial then simply ask in forums or mailing list. Some one will answer your question with in a couple of hours sometimes even in minutes.

Don’t rush to launch and announce your website until it is ready. Keep modifying your website, work on it, browse it, fill it with content, add plugins and try different layouts. Take your time, take a week atleast or a month if you are a perfectionist. Once you are satisfied with the look and functionality of your website launch it as “Beta” which means that product if polished but you are still testing it. After a while when you have enought users and you have resolved most issues with the website you can remove the Beta label.

In the next posts we will be discussing the content you should publish on your website and how you will be working to make your website popular.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

There are thousands of companies out there offering cheap and affordable web hosting but not all of them are good. It is important that you go with a company that offers reliable and affordable web hosting. Then again, they all claim to be reliable and affordable, how do you find out?

I go for word of mouth. I was working on a small website for an NGO and my agreement with them included web hosting and domain name registration. Normally I go for DreamHost which has proven itself very reliable to me. But a friend of mine had used Bluehost recently so he suggested that I should give them a try. I did and I have found another reliable and cheap webhosting solution. But you shouldn’t just go for what your friends say, make sure that you do check out reviews and packages before buying them.

First of all you should never go for the advertising jargon most web hosting companies use on their websites. Instead, you should carefully monitor their offerings. Compare packages and read their descriptions carefully. There might be some words that would confuse you but don’t worry lookup for them in web hosting glossary or search the web. While comparing packages you should pay attention to:

1. Bandwidth and Disk space. To make sure that it meets your needs. If you are going to upload lots of audio video files on your website than you need more bandwidth and disk space. But since hardware is becoming cheaper every day so all good web hosts offer quite enough disk space and bandwidth for a medium sized popular website to run swiftly.
2. Do they offer you to add additional domains and subdomains. This is important because at some point you might want to add additional domains and subdomains. like for example you might want to add an extra customer services website under your main site. If they do not offer you to do that freely than they are a bad web host. Dreamhost offers me to add as many domains and subdomains as i want to my existing hosting package.
3. How many email addresses they offer. You might need this if you start offering email accounts to your clients or staff.
4. Do they run latest PHP/MySQL. Since you will be using a CMS and most open source CMS use PHP and MySQL and most web hosts support PHP and MySQL. But some lazy web hosts use older versions which might cause you trouble while installing or upgrading your CMS.
5. What support options they offer. do they have help pages, do they offer email and phone support. You should make sure that help is available whenever you need it.

You can find answers to all these questions on their website but if its not there you should email them for the answers. I would say that you should email them any way because it tells you how quickly they respond to user queries. Ask them questions and make sure that they satisfy you with their answers. If they don’t then move on to the next web host.

After that you should check out forums such as Webmaster World and Ozzu Web Master forum. These forums have sections for web hosting related discussions where you can ask other web masters to advise you chosing the right host. Most probably someone has already used their services and you can hear from the users directly how they found the services. There are also many websites around that offer user submitted reviews of web hosts. Web Hosting Geeks is one such site.

Web Hosting and Domain Registration are two different things. There are many web hosts that offer free domain registration for your hosting period. But some times a Domain is not included in your web hosting package. I would say that you go for the web host that offers Domain Registration with hosting, but if your prefered web host does not offer this then you will have to register a domain name elsewhere and then redirect it to your web server. It is very simple and most of the time your web host will assist you with that.

Or if you want, I have connections with Dreamhost and I can talk them to offer you a special deal as an special Easy Life subscriber. Drop me an email if you want the details.

I have carefully handpicked a few webhosts some of them I have used personally and others are considered reliable in the market. But you are once again advised to review the offerings and package details to make sure that you are buying the right services.

• DreamHost: This website is hosted with Dreamhost. We have used them and found them very reliable. They have great customer support with wikipages and user forums, you can also email them, or telephone them. They offer unlimited diskspace, bandwidth, add your own domain names and subdomains, unlimited email accounts.
• Bluehost: They also offer unlimited diskspace and bandwidth and enough email accounts and mysql databases. They have good support options and I have used them for a client once and my clients are satisfied with their services.
• Yahoo! Web Hosting: Yahoo web hosting for small businesses is just as reliable as it gets. It is a little more expansive than the previous two hosts but they have great features to justify the price tag.
• AN Hosting: They are in the market since 2001, they offer you reliable installation and upgrades to many popular content management systems such as wordpress, joomla, drupal, b2evolution, etc. You add 20 additional domain names, 500 GB disk space, 5000 GB bandwidth and unlimited MySql databases.

 
All above mentioned hosting services also offer one free Domain Name registration with their hosting packages. Remember that you should do your homework before signing up with any webhost including those listed above. Let me know if you found some other reliable web host and we will add them to this list here.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

It is an old technique but still effective, get a pen or pencil and a peice of paper and write down your plan. Since we are talking about putting your ideas on the paper, have you ever heard about mind mapping? Though mind mapping is not the topic of discussion here but since I found out how useful it is, I can not stop myself from advising others to give it a try. Back to our discussion, so when you are writing down your plan for the website make sure that It has the following:

1. What you want to do.
2. Do you know how to do it.
3. Your budget.
4. Your long term goal.

You can think about other aspects and ask yourself other questions too. I am not asking you to answer these questions. You can answer them if you want to but just writing them down is also enough to help you understand your position and it will help you achieve your goals more effectively.

What I want to do with my website?

Lets say if you have a small pet shop. You would probably want to do the following with your website.

1. Advertise your shop to new customers.
2. Make an online customer base.
3. Sell your expertise.

You might have different ideas and products to sell. You should be clear about what you want to do with your website and there is no better way than to write down.

How I am Going to do this?

After that you should ask yourself how you are going to do this. By this we mean that do you have the expertise to do that, is your idea technically feasible, are there online resources available to help you achieve your goal which we described in last paragraph. Don’t worry if you don’t have the expertise yet, or if you think your idea is technically difficult to achieve. Web is a great place to learn, you will find free expert advise on almost every topic. But we are writing it down so that we know where we stand.

How much money I can spend on my website?

Now that you know what you want to do and have thought about how to do it. lets think about the costs. The cost of creating a website depends on how you are going to use it. If your plan requires you to host lots and lots of audio and video files then you will need to spend more money on web hosting and bandwidth. If you want to purchase things rather than using the free tools available then your costs would be even higher. A couple of hundered dollars are ok to get you started with a business website. This estimate includes web hosting charges and domain registration and you will be using free tools to achieve your goal.

What are my long term goals?

In the end write down how you want to see your website growing up. Where you want to see it after an year or so. Write down your long term goals in sales or daily visitors to your website. Write about how you want to become from just an ordinary pet shop owner to a web celeberity. Be creative and feel free to write about your idea of success. It is going to keep you motivated and will also help you stay focused during your journey.

Now make a copy of this paper and save the original one in somewhere hidden from your view. We will look into this document after an year and see how much you have achieved. The working copy would keep you motivated and on the track.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.