Bogdan Pop : Web development , Photography , Dj

Yesterday I wrote a post about online casinos websites, and I recently got a comment that there’s more. I didn’t spend time to look for online casinos yesterday, but people directed me to them.

Similar with my previews site I talked about is the next online casino reviews website. It is very similar, if not almost exactly like the one I mentioned in the start of this post. What is very intriguing, yet again, about this new one, is that the structure of the website is almost exactly like the one I mentioned yesterday. The resemblance is obvious. Moreover, both have the same title tag:

”

Online casino reviews, top guide for best online casino gambling news.

”

I have now checked the source code of both sites, and must say again that these 2 websites have a source that is 80% the same. I suppose either one has copied the other, or the sites are owned by the same company or person, which so far has done a great job in assuring that their services will be well seen and found whatever you search for on the internet. Of course, with respect to the main keywords of the site, which is “online casinos”.

What the best thing about it, is that the 2 sites, although they look like twins, have different databases and statistics as different people have visited them in time.

So, thanks Chris for you comment with regards to this website. If anyone knows any other similar sites, perhaps you should let everyone know about them, as they are very good, and useful websites if you’re into online gambling. If you’re new with this, the you should check out this FAQs for online casino.

Cheers!

Earlier today I stumbled upon a quite interesting online casino reviews website. Yes, a website with the sole purpose to review online casinos. I found this website quite intriguing, as you can find on this website that I am project founder of Web International Awards, a website that deals with reviewing websites and web development companies in general.

The home page contains a list of online casinos sorted by their rating, with links to full reviews of each one. All reviews are quite detailed, contain wast amount of information users can use, and by using their reference links, you can get huge bonuses when signing up to different online casinos.

If you are not very familiar with this, then you should check out their INFO section, positioned on the left of all site’s pages, as it contains FAQs, beginners guides, and much more useful information.

So if you are into gambling, you should really check them out.

Cheers!

Around a week ago, I have found and reviewed the website of Ashop Australia in this shopping carts post. It turns out that these people over there do not offer shopping carts hosted services just to Australians, or only thorough their Australian branch, as apparently they are a multinational company.

They offer their shopping cart software services through their international website too. By checking their contact page, I have come to realize that they have branches in Australia, New Zealand, UK, US and Canada.

They do not offer just shopping cart services, they also offer domain registration services, design services, so that you can get an unique e-commerce solution from one place, which is great!

As for their websites, I didn’t feel any difference between the 2 websites. I must yet again say that is bad they used table based layout, but the end result - the frontend users see - is great.

Cheers!

If you are one of those out there in the blog advertising network, the you are aware of Smorty. Personally, I think Smorty is one of the best blog advertising services there is. Unlike Sponsored Reviews, they do not allow you to search for campaigns, instead they keep a steady flow of campaigns available to you. Each campaign has a number of posts to be written by all the bloggers in the network, and almost always you must be very fast and pick them up before all those opportunities are taken away by others.

Payment ranges from just a few US dollars to hundreds, based on your blog smorty score. Yes, the value of your blog is based on pagerank, previous posts and many other facts.

Just a few days ago, Smorty has made their way into the big box of blog advertising services, as they launched their personal blog, and forum. Now, if in the past I was unsure of how big Smorty is, and how much you could earn, seeing the buzz around the blog and forum made me realize they got tons of opportunities waiting out there.

Also, what surprised me a little was the fact that a huge amount of people are from Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and other Asian countries. I mean, wow. This is very interesting, and points out how undeveloped this kind of advertising is in Europe.

Cheers!

I recently came upon bad credit loans website and I have found it’s idea quite interesting, and I decided to review their website, as I mostly do on Web International Awards of the V7N network.

First of all I want to speak about Bad Credit Offers slogan, which is “The user’s guide to bad credit”. When I first read that I thought what on Earth are they talking about? A guide, to bad credits? Wow. At first I thought they are some consulting company that makes the best to give you the worst credit possible.

But no. Their website is consisted of a list of credit opportunities, which are displayed on categories, in a comparison manner, so that you can choose what is best for you.

So, at first I really thought they were very stupid when they chose that slogan. In fact, their site’s name and slogan could become a gold mine. Why? With proper SEO tools and campaigns, they will rank 1st for keywords such as bad credit, worst credit ever and other alike. You do not see the good in it?

Well, here’s the good in it. Who searches for such keywords? Someone who wants to get his first loan? I don’t think so. It will be those people who have made a bad mistake in the past, and cannot handle their current rates and they are looking for solutions. And as far as I see it, the only one they will get it in the near future will be Bad Credit Offers website.

These guys over there have made a very interesting and original concept, which will definitely work. Their website is ok, on the front end. Information is displayed where it should be, it loads fast, doesn’t have unnecessary objects all over the place.

The part that is not that very good is the source. It is based on a table based layout as opposed to XHTML elements, which will mean poor SEO, the website title is the same across all their webpages, when it should reflect the keywords of each page alone. Their logo and slogan are not present in the page source, only as images, which are not seen by search engines, but at least they have an ALT tag for it.

The best thing is that they are free, and I really want to see if they will stay this way when they hit lots of traffic. You should check them whenever you think of going to the bank for a credit.

Cheers!

Is your house trendy? Do you feel the need to change the aspect of the walls, but not their color. Do you want your friends to go like: “hey, give me your decorator’s name and phone, please, I love what they did here with your living room”. But hey, you could spend less and find what you’re looking for online. Then, the reply will be, or at least it was for me: “I just got a modern sofa from modernlinefurniture.com”.

All right, all right, this was not my case as I am not in the US, but a close friend of mine sent me some screens with his new waiting room at the office, and he bought some sofas from the above mentioned website. He was delighted that they has some unique and exclusive models, that they shipped their products all over US, including his office and so on.

What I did was just to check it out for some ideas, and I decided I should review their website a bit (I am owner of the site review tool at Web International Awards afterall, aren’t I?). So what was the first thing I did when I decided on reviewing the site?

Oh well, refresh and Command key + U, which means view source on macs. And I was not satisfied on the outcome. They use HTML tables, not XHTML, so this means poor SEO, their CSS is right in the HTML, not a separate file and the list goes on.

Then the text sections of the site are not well organized, they have no space around paragraphs, therefor it could get hard to read their text information.

Yes, I must say that the website is poorly developed, and doesn’t have a concept. It could also get confusing as their website’s icon is the Yahoo logo. Is that legal, as I am not sure. They also have some ugly text banners next to the beautiful pieces of furniture, which is not very good. You would say that it should contrast, and make the furniture look even bette, but this is not the case.

They have the simple, well known and used navigation, left bar on the left. The items are displayed on the right as you would see web templates, but they do not have no fancy preview visualization options.

The only good thing is that they have tons of pieces, and this gets you carried away. And this actually sells. You do not even realize how many items you get to put in your basket until you check out.

So, bottom line, once again one of those websites that sells but looks awful.
I give it a 6/10 overall.

As I stated in a previous post the troubles I had with some foreign clients, one another issue that came upon me was the next one. I needed to register an Australian domain name for one of my clients. Of course, they could do it themselves, but they had no idea how to and so on.

They didn’t even know that you need to register a domain name in order to be able to host your website at a certain location. They thought that someone should “somehow configure the internet” to display your website for a specific domain name.

So, I turned to the domain registration services offered by PayLess. I checked their website a bit, their prices, tested their support and turned out they are great. Next thing I asked my client if they want me to register their domain for them, or if I should only guide them through the domain registration order process, which I did. Now, they are extremely satisfied with the outcome of the entire project.

They were also delighted of how PayLess treated them, so I guess this is a big plus for my company, as I referred my client towards PayLess. Referrals should come soon , shouldn’t they.

My company, Raptor Design, has done a few shopping cart templates in the past year for foreign customers. These customers were usually big companies, which had large dedicated or collocated servers, and unfortunately, they did not have control panels installed (like Plesk or CPanel), so they could not just click in fantastico and get their shopping cart up and running in no time.

So, we had to do all those jobs too, which ate a lot of our time, which was not good at all. Few days ago, I received again such a bid, and I really don’t have enough man power for the installation process of my client’s shopping cart which has to be delayed. This is why I started searching for shopping cart software solutions, and I came across Ashop.

My idea is to give them a try, and use their shopping cart services, as I did when I encountered a client as described above. It will save me time, man power, and money. So, until I find some new coding geeks this should work great, wouldn’t it?

So perhaps I should outsource a bit in order to get passed some small logistic issues I came across. You should give Ashop a try too.

Yes, all of us have lost few, or lots of data, important data, whether it is a photo of a friend, a contract, a project’s presentation that you must do in 15 minutes and so on. Few months back, a friend of mine wanted to start back in my old town, Bistrita, a back-up service (though for digital photos only). He suggested a dedicated server located on the metropolitan area of the city, and a small website, where you get to sign up, upload, download, and know that your stuff is safe and sound.

Of course, it would be a payed service. At that time, I said no to his offer, as I didn’t see anyone doing a back-up like this. I mean, you have external hard-disks, CDs and so many other ways to protect yourself. Plus, the city ain’t that big, and most of the internet users are kids.

Few days ago, I have changed my mind when I found an online backup service that actually works. They have free accounts, and payed accounts too. Amazingly, for just under 5 pounds a month you get 50 Gb of back-up space. That is huge! And it is cheap.

I am currently backed up by Time Machine (as I am a Leopard user, no comments), and my servers (as I own a web hosting company). However, I do not offer such back-up services, and as per contracts, I do not allow my clients to store data other than websites (they cannot use more than 70% of the space for multimedia hosting, and some don’t like this). So, I guess I will check to see if BT has some affiliation system for their backup services, and if they do, I will sign up, and then recommend to all my customers to back-up multimedia files over there, as opposed to hosting accounts, which are, for hosting.

Company website: BT Group

According to Computer World almost 10 percent of the worlds spam is sent from Russia, with a big 30% from Europe. According to Sophos’s Q4 2007 spam report, the country now deserves the moniker of ’spam superpower’ having seen its share of total volumes rise dramatically over the last year, to put it in firmly in second place behind arch-rival, the US.

The amount of spam sent from Russia has more than tripled since the beginning of 2007 until now, and they are on a very high ascending trend. Russia is already prominent for other types of internet criminality, such as malware and exploits, boosted by the near-mythical super-network, the Russian Business Network, which supposedly went out of business in November.

“We think that’s a pretty interesting increase and change in the chart over the years,” commented Graham Cluley of Sophos. “Of course, Russia has its fair share of spammers — and we see a good amount of Russian language spam advertising training courses and goods which are clearly of Russian origin.”

So, in the near future, Russia could take over US for the first place in spam amount.

Source:  Computer World