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Appropriate Website Promotion Methods
Why would you want a site? Why indeed? The unceasing growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in an enormous number of sites, and new ones show up daily. Why would you want to create more? And what do you think about the widespread opinion that...
How To Build Some Stability In Your Monthly Online Income And Sleep Better At Night
You have just started an online business and sitting around hoping for the click-thoughs to happen. Then you start getting impatient as the cash inflow is not as strong as what you have hoped for. In fact, if there is an income, it can be pretty...
How To Maximize Your Profit Promoting Affiliate Programs
Promoting affiliate programs can provide you with a good extra income or even a full time income online. To help you maximize your profit promoting affiliate programs, I've provided the following tips to help you successfully market your affiliate...
Network Effectively Online
There are many ways to boost your business online - writing
articles, search engine optimization, acquiring incoming links -
the list goes on; but one of the best ways which is often
overlooked is to find forums relating to your line of...
Part 1 of 5 - How "Pipe Dreams" Can Become Realities!
Take a look at yourself - inside and out. Where do you live what job do you have, how do you relate to your friends and family? What interests do you pursue, what adventures do you have? What do you truly want from life? Do you want...
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Are you Ready for WAP & WML?
Acronyms make the computer world go round. Things like HTML, DHTML, XHTML; it's enough to make a grown man cry. Well, look out! There's a new player in alphabet-town: "WAP." So what is it and why should you care? WAP stands for "Wireless Application Protocol" and it allows people to access the Net using wireless devices like mobile phones and other gadgets.
It's estimated that by the year 2002 there will be over 800 million wireless users around the world. Eventually all wireless tools will come equipped with WAP as standard issue. That's a lot of possible viewers for your website. The problem is that wireless net-surfers will not be able to access your HTML-driven site. Their devices can only read sites built in (get ready for another acronym!) WML.
WML stands for "Wireless Markup Language." (Are you taking notes here?) So if you presently have a website built in HTML and you want mobile users to be able to view it, you'll need to make another version of it in WML. The good news is that WML is not hard to learn and can be picked up easily. Plus, there are plenty of sites online that will teach you everything you'll ever want to know about this new technology. Some of the better ones are:
http://www.wapdrive.net Learn what WAP is (and isn't), how to write WAP "cards" (not "pages"), and best of all, you'll find some free software you can download to make your own WAP site. Free.
http://www.wapuseek.com Contains Wap articles, links, tools and more. Make sure you stop in the developers area for all kinds of webmaster tools for creating your own WAP pages.
http://www.gelon.net/dev/ A ton of helpful information here: leaning WML, books, where you can host your new WAP sites and more.
http://www.anywhereyougo.com 100% wireless application development: archives, news, books, and more. Sign up for their helpful newsletter to keep abreast of what's going on in this new field.
As far as building your WAP site you can download free software or use an online editor available at some websites.
http://www.wapmine.com WAPPage 1.0 is an extensive and powerful design tool for WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) Sites.
http://mobphone.com WAP publishing tool for cellular mobile WAP phones.
Nokia has jumped into the arena by offering "The Nokia WML Studio". A free download that adds on to Dreamweaver to create WML content from within Dreamweaver's interface. Get it at http://dynamic.macromedia.com/bin/exchange/dreamweaver/main.jsp
For hosting your new wireless-enabled site, check out:
http://www.hoiley.com/ Offering a variety of free services
http://www.tagtag.com/ Build and host your site free
http://wappy.to The first online WAPsite builder complete with hosting.
Keep in mind that the viewing area on a mobile device is a whole lot smaller than that of a computer monitor. So you need to be short and concise. Plan on about 10 text lines per WAP "card" (instead of "page.") Due to slow transmission speeds typically 14.4 to 19.6 Kbps you need to keep text and graphics down to bare minimum.
Wireless phones use "microbrowsers" to surf the web so you need to make sure the web cards in WML look good on a wireless device. But what if you don't have that kind of luxury? No problem, hop over to http://www.wapdrive.net and you'll find something called "The Wapalizer" that will allow you to look at any WAP site using your regular browser. Just type in the URL and a new window opens up that imitates a mobile phones interface. You can browse through the entire site to make sure everything will be viewed correctly by your mobile guests.
So there you have it. WAP and WML, two good things that just naturally go together. If you presently have an HTML site you might want to consider making a version of it in WML as a sidekick, thus opening yourself up to a whole new audience; a mobile one.
After all, we're a society on the move... and you'd better keep up!
About the Author
Merle's Cyber Promotions http://www.mcpromotions.com/ "Creating Visibility Online for Small Businesses" Subscribe to MC Promotions Press by sending mailto:subscribe@mcpromotions.com New Service just added "Get Ready to Market Package" For details go to http://www.mcpromotions.com/getreadytomarket.htm To find out more about the products and services offered by MC Promotions send mailto:mcservices-ar@automagical.net
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