Just take a look at these Google Q4 statistics taken from TechCrunch: 250 million Android activation; 11 billion downloads in the Android Marketplace. And we’re just talking about Android. Now take a look at Apple’s figures for the same quarter: 15 million iPads sold, 37 million iPhones and $46 billion in revenues. And to add to the excitement, comScore have released their data last December showing that 38% of smart phone owners made a purchase online. Digital goods (such as ebooks, music, movies), clothing/accessories, tickets and daily deals made up most of these purchases. What these figures are showing is that there is clearly a shift of consumer behavior towards the use of smart phones.

As a website owner, one of your primary goals is to ensure that your traffic keeps going up. Because the more traffic you have, there’s that potential of increasing your CTR (click-thru rate) and also increasing your conversions whether that would mean increasing your sales, adding your leads, growing your lists, etc. And this means studying your target audience’s behaviour and finding out ways to get their attention. This is why you’ll be needing a smart phone strategy. Experts project that the statistics mentioned above will continue to increase and that there would be more people surfing online using their smart phones. So how does one take advantage of this? It’s all about creating a smart phone app that will complement your website and making sure that your website is easy to navigate when visitors use their smart phones. Here are a couple of suggestions:

1 – Use less columns on your website. Unlike a desktop computer, the real estate of the smart phone screen is absolutely limited. Having more columns on your website makes it more harder for the user to navigate your site. Our suggestion would be to have a maximum of two columns where the main content would be on the left column. Off course, just having one column would be the best answer.

2 – Use less graphics. Again, this is something to do with the real estate of the website. So less is more. An alternative to this would be to create web pages that is made specifically for smart phone devices. This means that your website needs to detect what device your website is being accessed from and then serve the pages that is relevant for that device. This definitely would cost more but at least you improve your users’ experience.

3 – Create a smart phone app for your RSS feed. This is great if you have a blog. This means that the user can download your mobile app and with just a double click, access the newest blog post you have. Without an app, it will probably take 3 or more clicks to access your site – assuming that your site has already been bookmarked. And in todays fast paced world, the less click the better.

4 – Get your site mentioned in someone else’s mobile apps. The more mobile apps, the better. This is especially useful if you have an e-commerce site. If you are giving discounts or have an item on sale, look for an app that gives away coupon deals and join their merchant program. This gives more visibility to your product / service and your website.

5 – Advertise. Again, this is about doing research on your target audience. If you know what sites and mobile apps they use, then look for a way to advertise you website either through paid advertisements, link exchange or content exchange.

6 – Join an affiliate program. Affiliate marketers are usually at the forefront of commerce when it comes to new technology and that’s why joining an affiliate program as a merchant increases your website’s exposure to your target audience.

7 – Do not neglect the desktop and the tablets. People will still surf the web with their desktops because of the screen real estate. Some would shift to tablets. So ensure that your website’s user experience is exceptional as these two device are usually a starting point for smart phone users.

Having a smart phone strategy is indeed the new DNA for successful websites. And only a few have done it so far. But that is where the puck is going. As the late Steve Jobs quoted “I skate to where the puck is going be not where it has been”.

And thus, at htmlpress.net, we are introducing new products that will help you achieve this strategy. We start with our HTML5 tutorial and later on will be introducing new stuff in keeping with the times.

The recent website hackings belonging to top companies such as Sony, DreamHost, and others is a continual reminder that even though you have a great website but no backups, then your website is only as good as the last hacking spree. It’s a good thing for WordPress website owners, you have choices as to what backup strategy to implement.

MyEasyBackup is a WordPress plugin that you can install and activate in order to ensure that you have a fallback in the vent your website goes down, get hacked and gets corrupted. Ugo Grandolini, developer of the myEasyBackup plugin, provides us some insight on the history and importance of this WordPress plugin.

htmlpress. What motivated you to develop your plugin?

Ugo. I was looking for a plugin able to save both the MySQL database and the installation files (not to loose the uploaded media) and was not able to find a satisfactory one.

htmlpress. Describe your plugin and explain to our readers how it will benefit their website?

Ugo. The plugin let’s you backup both the MySQL database and the full installation folder. By running periodical backups the user can be sure not to loose all the media files uploaded since the previous backup.

htmlpress. What differentiates your plugin from others in the same category?

Ugo. It was created to be really easy and nice to use it: many users reported I reached the goal already – despite the big number of settings it has. When my main (paid) job allows, I keep improving the plugin features and make it better and better. Whenever someone reports a possible exploit or security issue I promptly take the time to fix it – even if its still a free plugin.

htmlpress. What are your future plans with this plugin?

Ugo. I already have a beta of the PRO version that I am planning to release later that includes scheduled backups as users requested. Actually my main job does not leave me too much time to properly test the beta so I keep delaying the release.

htmlpress. How do you monetize this plugin?

Ugo. I got few donations since the initial release but all in all the development costs are not recovered. Hopefully I will release the PRO version and get some cash in.

htmlpress. What are the different advertising / marketing methods for your plugin?

Ugo. There is a banner in the dashboard showing the user the latest news and the myeasywp.com site itself. Its not a proper campaign, I know, but everything you want to do – if you like to make it almost perfect – requires time…

htmlpress. What advice would you give our readers if they want to develop their own plugin?

Ugo. Do not do it if you plan to recover costs from donations. Do it if you like to code and are willing to learn how to interact with WordPress. Be sure to have a good number of hours if you like to keep your plugin alive.

Developer: Ugo Grandolini Website: http://myeasywp.com/ The myEasyBackup plugin has now been downloaded more than 40,000 times and enjoys a four star rating in wordpress.org.

WordPress plugins, with no doubt, can help a website’s overall success. The winner of an international SEO (Search Engine Optimization) competition used WordPress plugins to win the match. Plugins save time so that you do not have to create the engine that can propel your website to new heights. And that’s what the Ultimate TinyMCE plugin is all about. It’s a feature rich WordPress plugin where you can stretch and extend WordPress to improve your website’s usability and also to give it the WoW factor that it deserves. Josh Lobe, the developer of the plugin, tells you more about this plugin in this interview.

htmlpress: What motivated you to develop your plugin?

Josh: When I first installed WordPress, the first flaw I found was with the editor when creating content. I thought, “How in the world can I create my content with only these few options”? I have a fairly strong background with HTML and CSS, so I just bailed on the visual editor and switched to using only the HTML editor.

Then, it occurred to me many people who use WordPress are probably not code savvy. WordPress is used by individuals and business across the globe, and not everyone has the coding experience to fully utilize wordpress in the HTML editor.

htmlpress: Describe your plugin and explain to our readers how it will benefit their website?

Josh: Ultimate Tinymce will add two additional rows of buttons used for visually created advanced posts and pages. Going above basic formatting controls such as bold and italics, Ultimate Tinymce gives the user graphical interfaces for managing features like custom css styles, image mapping, image mouseover and mouseout effects, javascript popup windows, advanced linking options, (just to name a few). All of these without writing a single line of code!

htmlpress: What differentiates your plugin from others in the same category?

Josh: Honestly, I have no idea. I am a grad school business student, and the first rule they teach you is to know your competition. However, I am still in very active development with my plugin and I don’t want to be “jaded” by what everyone else is doing. Instead, I want my plugin to be fresh and unique.

While maintaining my support forum, I have heard of the similar plugins. But I have honestly not installed a single one (at this point).

htmlpress: What are your future plans with this plugin?

Josh: I plan to continue development and try to make it as stable and cross-browser compatible as possible. The default tinymce editor in WordPress is already “buggy” as it is. This plugin certainly has it’s bugs as well.

htmlpress: How do you monetize this plugin?

Josh: I simply rely on the few donations I receive from users who are pleased with the plugin and continue using it on their sites. I have thought about writing “add-on” packs for the plugin and selling those, but I’ve opted against it at this point.

htmlpress: What are the different advertising / marketing methods for your plugin?

Josh: I have added a blogging incentive on my plugin settings page. If a user blogs about the plugin, I will add their name, website, and link to the plugin admin page. So, every user of the plugin will see those blogging links.

I have also made many acquaintances through my support forum along the way. Some of them have allowed me to place banners on their site as a form of “Thanks”.

htmlpress: What advice would you give our readers if they want to develop their own plugin?

Josh: Developing a plugin is certainly a fun endeavor. The WordPress Codex offers a vast collection of resources for developing a plugin (although tough to follow at times). Developing a plugin takes time and patience. It’s certainly not an overnight creation. I spent a month researching and trying code before I released the first version of Ultimate Tinymce.

If you are looking to monetize your plugin, try to find something everyone can use. Unless you have the specific knowledge of writing a plugin which converts the mass of Earth from pounds to grams, you’d probably want to avoid it. Not many people are going to have use for this feature. Rather, find something everyone can relate to (such as images, text, menus, navigation, etc.).

Lastly, plan to be responsive to those who need assistance. Let’s face it; we all don’t like it when someone doesn’t return our calls. The same applies for software support. Plan to have a support forum, or at least a page on your website, where users of your plugin can collaborate and share ideas, and most importantly, you can have a voice in it as well.

Developer: Joshe Lobe Website: http://www.joshlobe.com/2011/10/ultimate-tinymce/ The Ultimate TinyMCE and has now been downloaded more than 65,000 times and enjoys a five star rating in wordpress.org.

Who would have thought that building a website that sells customize European license plates can bring in $100K of revenue (which is about $70K-$80K in profits)? But that’s how Sean Percival did it by building customeuropeanplates.com – a website where you can own a customized European licence plate. Later on he sold it for $100K during the Global Financial Crisis.

The website came about after realizing that there is a sub-culture of people in the USA who would like to have a European feel on their car. This stems out from their desire to give their BMW or Volvo a more authentic look. Although the laws varies in different states, most of them would accommodate having such a license plate on the front of a car.

Early Growth

OS Commerce for WordPress is the tool used for building the website. And to grow the website, Sean had to rely on AdWords and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). For AdWords, the Sean and his wife started with just $5-$10 per day as their budget and had their first sale on the first day of their campaign.

Growing the Revenue

The plates are sold roughly for $40 and the business owners’ profit margin would be around $20. So in order to come up with $100K revenue per year, the business owners need to sell about 2500 annually – which is a realistic figure considering that America’s population is over 350 million and that there approximately 10-12 million cars sold every year.

In order to reach this goal, Sean realize that SEO would be the least expensive option. And having experience in SEO, this method turned out to bring in the most traffic to the website. The business owners targetted obvious keywords such as “European plates” or “European license plates” or “German plates”. He also concentrated on building a good landing page where the first five second would really draw the user in to the website. And this involves putting a bit of a Flash program where users can type in the words they like to see on their license plates and how the license plates would look like given the different background and font color the user specified. Sean also limits the use of Flash as it is not really good for SEO when it comes to ranking their website. And as opposed to building a stunning website, Sean concentrated on making it as simple as possible.

Another SEO strategy Sean employed is to look who ranks well for the keywords that he has targetted. He then reached out to them and exchange links. He also wrote articles for them that generates a back link to his site. Because these are websites that rank well for the keywords that he targetted, the search engines looked favorably at his links as being relevant and of high quality. Not all of those he approached agreed as they were direct competitors.

Other marketing strategy that the business owners did was to host other websites of other businesses for free. And from there he then places a link to their website.

Exit Strategy

It was during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) that brought the business owners to exit the business. When Sean went to one of those auction sites, he saw a similar business that’s for sale for about $18,000. This thought, plus the effects of the GFC, prompted him to look for a buyer. And he resorted to Twitter and found a buyer willing to buy the website for $100K. It was sold within a week.

With a lot of free tutorials on the website, it is a wonder if a similar website can earn $1.7M in revenues annually. And that’s the story of teamtreehouse.com. The website is a place where one can learn how to design and develop websites and develop in iOS to anyone online. In just a few years, Ryan Carson and his wife was able to grow their website into a million dollar business – with the help of some angels. In this analysis, we’ll see how such a website actually come to such tremendous growth in such a challenging niche.

Conceptual Stage

The advantages that the founders of Team TreeHouse have is that they already have an events business going for them and a blog called ThinkVitaminMembership.com since 2005-2006. The latter is a blog for web developers and web designers which is now being redirected to the Team Treehouse website. Ryan’s events business was about running tech conferences such as Chirp (Twitter conference) and the Future of Web Apps to which he sold it. He also a approximately 30,000 Twitter followers. So these factors alone were useful tools to prosper Team Treehouse to where it is now.

Ryan also had a business called DropSend which it enables its users to send large files. Later on he wold this for half a million dollars. Having this experiences has benefited him to prepare for his next business. The new business came about when he realized that it takes a lot of money to run conferences and wondered if there is a least expensive way to teach courses that are found in these conferences. The first thought that came into mind is by utilizing video as a tool to teach these courses and that the medium for delivery would be the internet.

Building the prototype

Ryan then went to Go Mockingbird to build a simple video page and tweeted as to whether anyone would be interested. There were about 10-20 people who responded and so the next question tweeted was how much they would pay for it. The figure of $25 per month came up and that was the go signal that there could be a business doing online education by using video as a medium.

The idea, at first, is to build a website where people can go for online conferences to learn about certain topics. It also includes videos of the early events he has organized. It was only later on, when the business pivoted, that their website became to be what it is now.

The Risks Involved

To get started Ryan needs a web application that will handle the membership, billing and the video engine that will run the system. And do this he had to hire a web developer and a web site designer that cost him $55,000 alone. This was the one time payment just to get the website working.

To get the website going he had to pay two full time teacher which commands a fee of $6K+ each per month and a web hosting plan that cost $3,000 per month. So the monthly maintenance would be around $15,000 per month and this excludes the salary of the founders (their events business was paying their salary). With monthly membership costing $25 per month, the business needs about 600 subscribers to break even.

One smart move that Ryan made was to get a free video hosting in exchange for free sponsorship when he would run an event. This then free the business from paying video hosting and brought down their expenses to just $13K+ / month for the two instructors.

The total cost to get the business going though was about $150,000 as it will be needing some video equipment which does not come cheap. But because of his events business, he was able to fund the expenses for this website.

Early Growth

Inititally, in launching the video training website Ryan used his existing blog – ThinkVitaminMembership. This website was already getting about 3-4 million unique visitors per year. Ryan used his existing resources in order to get the membership that he needed such as the tweeter account with 30,000 followers. The website was a combination of online conferences and videos from their events at first. And it was able to get subscriber to partially pay the monthly bills. And there were a lot of things to learn that were on offer. Although they their subscribers to the hundreds, the business did not break even yet.

The business piggy-backed on Ryan’s existing blog – ThinkVitaminMembership. By offering a 50% discount on the first month and broadcasting this through the blog’s newletter he was able to get a lot of sign ups. He also advertised on the blog itself and placed a lot of free videos on succeeding posts. This means that there’s a teaser video on learning PHP, Ruby, etc.

However, the business model wasn’t working. There were set backs such as it was getting very hard to get in the online conferences. The churn rate, which is the rate users are cancelling their subscriptions per month, is about 12% which is quite high for this industry. So they had to change the business model.

The Pivot

The founders have decided top replace the video conferences with a more in depth-video about web design and web development plus development in iOS. The courses where streamlined to these three topics. He calls it the Master Class. Part of the pivot is to change the domain name of the website to TeamTreeHouse.com as the existing domain name is quite off. Also included in the pivot is the inclusion of badges when a user has finished a master class i.e HTML.

Growing the Revenue

The badges were introduced in order to decrease the churn rate which worked wonders for the business. TeamTreeHouse.com was launched as the new domain name for the website and the old domain name is now being redirected to this. Having more free videos continued to work really well in order to get more customers.

What propelled the website even further is that they have Kevin Rose, with 1.7M followers on Twitter, as an ambassador for TeamTreeHouse. Although his tweet was a one time bump, the growth was describe as amazing.

Scaling

Having established a good relationship with TechCrunch in the past, Ryan was able to get some good publicity from this tech blog which even spread the website’s fame even further – and among the start up community. Paid members increased by 47% in week’s time and revenues increased 38% in the same time span as well. This publicity stunt also brought in big time investors.

TeamTreehouse now has some big name investors such as Reid Hoffman, David [Zee] , Kevin Rose, and Mark Schuster. With such influential investors in the tech industry, it is no wonder that TeamTreehouse is now pulling revenue in the millions.

Nowadays the business is reaching new heights. They just partnered with WordPress, BankSimple, and Living Social. These partnerships means that organizations will start hiring out of TeamTreeHouse. They will be hiring users who have unlocked badges.

The really big event that TeamTreehouse has in its cards is that Wiley Publishing wants to launch its education materials in print. It won’t be surprising to see the revenues of TeamTreeHouse increase in the millions in the coming future.

AllFacebook.com is a blog that was sold for roughly a million dollars to WebMediaBrands two years after it was founded. How could a website that blogs about Facebook reach this potential? The domain name itself is quite a controversy because of using the Facebook trademark. However, AllFacebook is now one of the endearing brands that rides on the popularity of Facebook and has brought in millions to its founders.

Early Growth.

AllFacebook.com was founder by Nick O’Neil and Jesse Thomas who was the main designer for the site. Prior to this Nick has a blog called Webpreneur which covers internet entrpreneurs. The blog is quite similar to TechCrunch and aims to duplicate its success.

Business Pivot.

The realization to differentiate itself from TechCrunch came in 2007 when Facebook was launching its platform. Nick realized that blogging about Facebook is a blog in itself. The next day after this realization, AllFacebook was born. Such is the nature of pivots. When the road for an online business is to steep uphill, shifting directions can bring a website to a much less steep road.

Risk Involve.

The domain name is the obvious risk in this website. The founder was betting that since the blog is obsessively covering Facebook updates and development, that Facebook would not mind his blog using their trademark as this gives them added publicity.

Building Followers.

Being a blog, the founders of AllFacebook wrote contents that involve people who were players in the Facebook website. Nick knew that he had to invest in names because people would like to read about themselves online. In particular, these were the application developers and people with major influence for the Facebook platform. He wrote about them and their applications by interviewing them. And by writing article based on this interview, he touched on keywords that people will be searching for when it comes to Facebook and its applications. This strategy help give his website authority in any matter pertaining to Facebook which is noticed by the search engines.

From this point on, Nick also wrote article to expand the website’s target audience. In particular, these article are lists and guides which increase the number of visitors to his site. Learning how to copywrite also became an important factor in getting early follower to AllFacebook.

Growing The Revenue

Being an application developer, Nick used his blog to get leads for some development stint. This also involves using adwords in order to get those leads for Facebook applications. Then there was a business that put up their ads on his site in order to get their own leads for FB applications. The owners get a commission for every lead it generated. Nick found out that media companies were early adopters for FB applications.

Scaling

Eventually, Nick found out that blogging would be his best interest rather than developing applications. So he decided to scale his business by looking for other businesses who would take on the development and Nick will take a commission for the leads. But the most effective part of scaling his business is when he got into ebooks. His first being: 30 Days To 3,000 Fans. The method for selling is through giving away for free a portion of the ebook and when users would want more of it, then they can buy the whole ebook for about $20 and when the volume goes down it got sold for $9.95. Some ebooks were sold at around $2 such the ebook about Facebook privacy.

AllFacebook.com had about 500 visitors per day for quite a while and the traffic just exploded afterwards. And during this time, it was a good time to sell the website in the millions. If the founders still continued to blog and post article similar to TechCrunch, then their chances of success may not be as good as when they focused on one platform where one tenth of the world’s population is using.

Happy New Year!

Well, it’s 2012 and the last year has brought some really interesting challenges online. Google’s Panda update has certainly been one of the most notable highlights of 2011. But the news about WordPress’ continued growth has also been newsworthy. Other online-related news were Android, iPhone and smart phone apps. There also the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. So there’s no question that the internet is growing. And it is growing at an astonishing rate. This only means that ranking your website will be increasingly difficult. And here’s why:

1 – New domain extensions will usher in more websites. ICANN is in the process of accepting applications for new domain name extensions. The most recent – .XXX – has already been approved and is now accepting registrations. The possibilities of new domain name extensions are endless such as .sport, .paris, .cars, etc. These domain extensions will disrupt the domain name industry – and online websites.

2 – New smart phone apps will need a home. And that means building their own websites. The present issue right now is how to organize these apps that are being published. Some are expecting a Google for apps. But apps are apps whether it is made for mobile or the desktop. And one of the best way to market apps is to create a website and get organic search engine growth.

3 – New devices will come in more cheaply. This means that owner possession will increase. As it gets less expensive to communicate online, then more and more people will get new devices like tablets and smart phones. Just right now there are 700,000 Android devices being activated per month. And this gives more opportunities for entrepreneurs to start up companies that will solve new problems that these innovation brings. And the best way for these entrepreneurs to market their products or services will be websites and traffic coming from search engines.

That’s why at htmlpress.net, we have set up a new category called Domain Analytics – or DNA. With new domain name extensions and new websites, there is a need to give users on how these new domain name extensions will perform when it comes to website development. So stay tuned.

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is making a comeback this 2012. For a moment you would think that HTML would be dead because of the emergence of technologies like Flash and Silverlight. With these new technologies, it is possible to create graphic and animated powered websites that makes HTML look like a Jurassic technology. But with the introduction of new feature and/or elements, HTML is making a comeback with its newest version HTML 5. In fact, Flash and similar technologies like it are facing a long steady decline because HTML is on a path that will be providing elements that rivals the features and functionalities of Flash. What compounded this competition is Apple’s decision to exclude Flash files from being downloaded in the iPhones. This in turn, after three years, prompted Adobe to decide not to pursue Flash for mobile. The reason why Apple excluded Flash files is that its performance in the iPhone (and other mobile devices) is less than acceptable. Meaning it sucked. And Apple was also banking that HTML 5 will be the Flash substitute for mobile devices. Here are a list of features why Apple think HTML will fly in 2012 for mobile devices.

1 – It’s easy to create layouts. HTML 5 has added new elements to layout your web page. There are now tags specific for each parts of a web page. The nav tag is used for menus and specialized navigation like Next Page and Previous Page; section tag for the main articles; article tag for the body of your web page’s content; aside tag for the side bar; and the footer tag for the bottom of the HTML page. Prior to HTML 5, developers rely on either the table of the div tag to create the page layout. But with HTML 5, such introduction of new elements makes the web page more readable programmatically.

2 – It’s optimize for videos and audios. HTML 5 now has a video element which makes it a breeze to include videos in your HTML page. This used to be the domain of Flash but now HTML 5 is slowly making in-roads with multi-media.

3 – It comes with new form controls. The basic controls it had were input boxes and text boxes. But with HTML 5 there are new form controls introduced such as email, url, search, calendar, date and time. Prior to HTML 5, developers were relying on scripting language such as Java script and VB Script in order to provide such form controls. This makes it easier to create the comment section of your web page for example. It’s easier because all the client side validation is done for your such as when users are entering their email details.

Styling with CSS 3. HTML 5 works well with CSS 3. This means that you can do the following:

• background image can expand and contract when container is adjusted
• application of rounded corners on elements
• second background image is supported
• create multiple columns
• create drop shadows on images
• highlighting second element in a series; also called zebra-stripping

All these new features were designed to meet the overall goals for HTML 5 which includes: dependent on HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript; Better error handling; device independent which is great for mobile and tablet devices; reduce the need for external plugins; more markup and less scripting; and visibility of html structure.

HTML 2012 will definitely conquer website development together with WordPress. Websites in 2012 will be made up of these two technologies where they would be complementing each other.

The internet landscape is changing incredibly fast. A decade ago, having a website would mean that you have a business card online. A website also means that your business – whatever it is – is high tech and thus was a form of status quo when place on your business card. But the internet has moved on. New technologies have been developed. Broadband and wireless internet has become faster than ever. The world is changing. Websites are changing as well. Here are the technologies and trends that will affect websites this 2012.

Go Mobile. Websites that fail to incorporate mobile technology will be playing second fiddle in their own niches. More and more users are using their smart phones or mobile phones to surf online. The Christmas of 2011 saw 3.7 million Android activations alone! If you consider iPhone’s iOS that’s 6.8 million devices activated! That’s quite a record for one day considering that there are 700,000 Android activations per day. These figures are absolutely fascinating to the internet marketer. And if you are marketing your website properly, you would do it a favor if you customize your website to suit mobile devices.

And then there are the mobile apps. There were 242 million apps downloaded that same day were 6.8 million phone devices were activated. That’s an incredible statistic to ignore. But some would ask, could this be the end of websites? Although a valid question, the answer is a resounding no. Mobile phones are the new PCs. When PCs were new to the market, applications were king. Now it’s having an online connection so that users can surf the web which is primarily made up of interconnected websites. The year 2012 will bring more apps – especially apps that will be geared towards businesses. And these apps will need a home in the form of websites for support and sales. Some apps will be using the backend of existing websites too. So this means that apps is positioned to be a tool that will either supplement or complement a business’ existing website.

Social media network. Social media is the website evolution that is taking the online community by storm. Starting with MySpace then Facebook and now Google+, social media is the current trend in website development. And this will continue on in the year 2012. Existing business websites will have to incorporate existing social media to their own website and some will create their own social media network. As more and more users go online and spend their time online, having some form of social interaction will be the trend for some websites. Gone are the days were a static, boring, non-intereactive website is the norm. Now it’s mobile and social media. Most social media network allows the creation of a web page for a business’ product or services but this does not necessarily mean that they will replace websites. Business’ will have to exercise due diligence that social media networks come and go. Just take a look at MySpace and Friendster.

WordPress 2012 will conquer websites. It’s a no brainer. With the current trend, WordPress will be growing even much faster in 2012 especially when ICANN starts the process of approving more gTLDs. This means that anyone can develop their own domain name extension i.e. .paris, .car, .sport, etc. And when ICANN starts approving this, more websites will be going online.

Online advertising will see an explosion of growth in 2012. Google’s main source of income is advertising so it is no surprising that as WordPress becomes the tool of choice when it comes to website development, it rolled out its own advertising platform. This means that if you have a blog at WordPress.com, you can put out ads on your blog similar to Google’s AdSense.

TV and the internet. This has been on the table for quite a time. But a decade ago, the speed of the internet cannot keep up with the pace of software development. So although there were software that can broadcast video way back then, the speed became the limiting factor that turned off users. And that is changing now. Internet speeds have increased as communications structure has changed with the use of fibre optic cable and wireless broadband. New algorithms to transmit data over the internet have also been developed. It’s possible that we may see some TV shows being syndicated this 2012 – or a protoype of it. YouTube will be a great platform for this prototype as it already has the structure to do so.

The year 2012 is definitely great for websites and website development. It will also be a good year for WordPress. And that’s why htmlpress.net will continue to respond to these trends to help you build better websites this 2012.

It’s the one of the top trending phrases in Twitter: you the boss. Whether it’s a radio program a tv program or music, the title in itself is appealing if taken literally. Who wouldn’t like to be the boss of their own business? Why work for someone when you can be the boss and earn more than the people working in the business?

The internet has created such wonderful opportunities where you can be the boss. And many entrepreneur stay at home moms and dads have done it. And all it took them is passion for a niche that they love and they created their own website. But they did not stop there. They built connections and improved on their site. Some of these enterprising entrepreneurs are bloggers and some of them just loved cats to make people’s morning much more happier. That’s their passion and you can learn from their success.

Some would use the excuse that they are not technical enough to create their own website. The truth is you do not need to have that much technical knowledge on how a website is built especially if you are using WordPress which is the top CMS (Content Management System) available online. And this tool gets better year after year with new innovative features being built in to make it more user friendly. Just take a look at WordPress 2012.

If you have gone this far in the article then that means you have some motivation in you to be the boss of your business. So now that you know that WordPress is a good tool for developing websites, all you need to do now is look for a website tutorial to help you in your journey. Website tutorials are helpful to speed up the process for you to get online. Some provide a structure approach on how to build one from scratch while others blog about certain features you can use or implement. The latter is for the more technical savvy who do not need an introduction to WordPress. This tutorial website is actually made for the beginner and the expert in mind.

So if you have gone this far and the motivation is still in you to be the boss, then take that first step on creating your own empire until you become the boss.