Posted June 11th, 2010 by sharkdancer
Each website has an optimal design that fits perfectly to its thematic, requirements and visitors’ type. For example, a web site offering e-cards will certainly need to catch the visitors’ eyes, using images, animations and interactivity, while a site dedicated to science, teaching or investigation may not need any of those to show up their information and contents.
The amount of animation or interactivity will certainly affect the accessibility of the web page given that the technologies used to provide this type of content are usually not supported by user agents or many times not designed for people with disabilities. To consider how many people you could be letting behind I will base my study on the statistics of this site (HTMLQuick.com) which is completely accessible and provides a lot of textual information.
To look at some round numbers I will say that if the content of the site would be completely based on Flash or JavaScript we would be loosing from 1.77% to 4.55% of the visits due only to the lack of technologies, which could be a very large number of visitors if the site is successful. But lets take some considerations based on the most popular and problematic technologies available.
Flash
Flash is a great way to build animations and interactivity but could also be a big accessibility problem. Creating a website completely in Flash could let out a 2.78% of the visitors and make the site completely empty for search engines, which may be your primary inconvenience.
Many sites will look at Flash as a primary necessity while others may only use it for animation or won’t use it at all.
- If your site doesn’t need it, then try to use it only for animation or providing rich alternative texts.
- Avoid building menus in Flash, as user agents not supporting it will not be able to follow their links.
- Export the swf files using the lowest version possible. Only a 69.2% of the visitors use the latest version. The rest 29.03% will have to download before playing the movie.
- Try to make the movie size as little as possible so people don’t get bored waiting for the page to load. There are still an 11.83% of visitors using dial-up connections.
JavaScript
JavaScript has similar issues to Flash. Many user agents won’t support it, including search engines robots. A 1.77% of the visitors won’t be able to see the information written in JavaScript nor follow the links.
- If possible use it only for not necessary interactivity and functionality.
- Otherwise, provide alternative static content in the “noscript” tag.
- Don’t make it necessary to follow a link. Use the “location.href” command as the “onclick” event in a static link (“a” tag).
Frames
Frames are nice, but should be definitively avoided. While most of the user agents support frames, search engines, as well as blind people, could be seriously confused when trying to relate the information contained in the different pages of a frameset.
Images
Images, even when not accessible, are a more benevolent alternative to Flash animations.
- Always prefer the use of images instead of Flash animations.
- Keep them small in size to reduce the page load time.
- Always provide the most appropriate alternative texts that better describes the purpose of the image.
Some ways to generally avoid the use of conflictive technologies is to opt for more common or more supported types of information. One of the best alternatives to set the look of a website is CSS. CSS is specially designed to set presentational attributes. Use it instead of tables to set layouts.
Anyway, some sites will necessary use some or all of these technologies to display their primary content. For example, an e-cards site may need Flash to display the animated and/or interactive cards (primary content). But when the use of these technologies is not a necessity, avoiding their use to provide primary content will be good for your visitors as it will be for you.
Posted June 3rd, 2010 by sharkdancer
The Forex market was off limits to the public until 1998. Once it opened up so that anyone could trade, there has been a huge interest in Forex trading, and the potential it holds for making substantial profits.
Forex software was originally designed to assist professionals at banks and other financial institutions in making profitable trades.
The First Forex Robots were designed to analyze the markets and produce signals that the professional trader could use to determine if a trade should be made.
In recent years there have been a large number of Forex Robots that have been created for the individual trader. They only need a computer and a connection to the Internet to begin trading for you.
A good Forex Robot will definitely help you trade profitably, but don’t ever let anybody tell you that you’ll get rich in a few short years when trading with automated software.
When you do implement the strategies of a Forex robot, you need to remember that you will incur short term losses from time to time; it’s the nature of the Forex Market whether you’re trading manually or automatically.
The truth is, if you are trading with a Forex Robot that has been rigorously tested and proved itself in live trading, you will see some short term losses, but you can be pretty sure of profitable gains in the long run.
Remember that all Forex Robots are not created equal. Do your research before you invest your hard earned money into an automated system.
When you begin your search for the most effective Forex Robot, make sure you find out how rigorously it has been backtested and more importantly find out how well it has been proven to do in live trading.
A Forex Robot worth its salt should be producing anywhere from 85 to 100 % wins on a consistant basis.
Posted June 2nd, 2010 by sharkdancer
Forex robot software is very popular and it’s the choice of most new traders but they quickly learn, it’s not the road to financial freedom which the marketing copy claims and they lose. The reason why Forex robots don’t win is obvious and the subject of this article…
Some Forex trading systems work and we will look at them in a moment but none of the heavily advertised robots do.
Forex robots look to good to be true and they are. If you could really make huge gains with no effort and only had to spend a hundred dollars or so for this automatic income, the whole world would be trading and not working.
These Forex robots never have any independently audited figures of performance to back up there claims, just simulations or figures they produce and that hardly inspires confidence!
I have seen most of these systems and the so called sophisticated algorithms are not sophisticated at all and furthermore, money management is poor or no existent. The reason there so cheap is they don’t work.
There are mechanical trading systems that work but they don’t tend to call themselves Forex Robots or Forex Expert Advisors or make ridiculous claims.
They call themselves Forex trading systems and they have realistic track records which are verified.
If you look around you will find them and there is also an excellent free Forex trading system called the 4 Week Rule, it works and will always work, so look it up in our other articles.
Don’t be taken in by hyped advertsing copy of the Forex Robots, always look for real gains which can be verified on any system you buy.
Posted May 30th, 2010 by sharkdancer
A Forex trading robot is a computer application that can fully automate your Forex activities. It can be used as your 24/7 personal trader so you can focus more on strategies and money management.
When the automated Forex software was first invented, many traders were doubtful if it could become a useful tool for currency trading. Using advanced computer technology in trading was totally unheard of when the robot was developed.
However, there are traders who tried the Forex robot. After testing the application, traders were convinced that such Forex robot can really provide great help in automating and simplifying trading activities.
That is why a Forex trading robot has become so popular nowadays. So here are the great benefits you can get from a robot. By understanding these benefits, you can decide later if you will need a robot for your trading activities.
A Forex Robot is Fully Functional 24/7
The market operates on all international time zones. That is why the market is always open 24 hours a day. As a human trader, you do not have the physical capability or the time to keep track of the market anytime of the day.
By using a Forex trading robot, you will be able to transact at the market for 24 hours. Your Forex robot will be fully operational unless you stop it. So even if you are sleeping, your robot trader will generate income for you. It can also protect your trades from disasters during times that you cannot monitor market trends and transactions.
Opening New Opportunities for You
A Forex robot is designed to analyze the market and seek trends that will be favorable for you. By providing the right inputs and pre-sets, your robot will be able to spot big opportunities in the market that you can take advantage.
Market monitoring is a very tedious and time-consuming task. It can distract you from your principal goal of developing the proper strategy for a profitable trading. But with the help of your automated software, market monitoring can be fully automated. The software will give trend reports and suggest new opportunities whenever you log in to your account.
All you have to do is to find out if the reports are accurate and if you can afford the new investment opportunities suggested by your software.
A Forex Robot Will Execute No-nonsense Trades
Your Forex robot is programmed to execute unemotional financial decisions. It will not display greed or human weakness. The robot decides based on mathematical computations and data gathered on the Forex market.
Essentially, your software will be a ruthless financial trader that can make no-nonsense transactions. Its decisions could be very accurate because they are based on concrete data and not on emotions.
So if you want to make your life easier, the automated trading robot would be best for you. The software can also become your reliable assistant to maximize your profit at the market.
Posted May 30th, 2010 by sharkdancer
Robots.txt is a text file you put on your site to tell search robots which pages you would like them not to visit. Robots.txt implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which allows you as a web manager, to define what parts of your site are off-limits to search engine crawlers. For example, Web managers can disallow access to .cgi, private, temporary directories and other areas with pages they do not want accessed or indexed.
The robots.txt file is made up of two parts, the User-agent and the Disallow. The User-agent specifies which robots to allow or disallow and the Disallow specifies which directories robots can or cannot crawl. The robots.txt is a gentleman’s agreement and some crawlers, such as Google, may ignore the robots.txt file that disallows all crawling.
The structure of a robots.txt is pretty simple. This example allows all robots to visit all files:
User-agent: *Disallow:
Example of a recommended robots.txt files blocking crawling of the scripts and images directories:
User-agent: * Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /images/
If you have a particular robot in mind, such as the Google image search robot, which collects images on your site for the Google Image search engine, you may include lines like the following:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
This means that the Google image search robot, should not try to access any file in the root directory and all its subdirectories.
You can create the robots.txt file manually, using any text editor. It should be an ASCII-encoded text file, not an HTML file and the filename should be lowercase. Include the robots.txt file in your server’s root directory. This is standard web management practice. It must be in the main directory because otherwise user agents (search engines) will not be able to find it – they do not search the whole site for a file named robots.txt. Instead, they look first in the main directory and if they don’t find it there, they simply assume that this site does not have a robots.txt file and therefore they index everything they find along the way.
All search engines, or at least all the important ones, now look for a robots.txt file as soon their spiders your web site. So, even if you currently do not need to exclude the spiders from any part of your site, having a robots.txt file is still a good idea, it can act as a sort of invitation into your site.