Love them or hate them, the blogsphere is a massive part of the web and is of increasing importance. Initially conceived as a way for individuals to easily maintain an online personal diary, blogs have become a powerful business instrument.

Ensuring that websites are compatible with all of the major browsers is an important part of any web designer/developers job. But it can be a frustrating and time consuming process. Thankfully, there is a fairly painless technique that you can employee to make the task a lot easier.

Forums are an invaluable resource for any web developer, marketer, publisher or entrepreneur. They are the source of endless amount of information and lessons learnt from seasoned pros. A great forum has a real sense of community and a place where people are there to help each other out.

Google offers the ability for webmasters to submit guideline information to assist its robots in indexing websites. You can even instruct the Google robot to prioritise certain pages. This is called the Google Sitemap and I highly recommend taking advantage of this facility to ensure that Google is indexing all of your web pages.

A common debate with any budding e-entrepreneur is the domain name. You probably want it to sound cool and memorable. But at the same time, you probably want as much traffic from the major search engines as possible. Most people choose the coolest sounding name available. But the wise person may elect to choose a keyword focused name instead.

Learning PHP and MySQL can be a daunting task, especially if you do not have any programming experience. You are probably confused about all these arrays, functions, objects and classes.

Luckily the internet is full of some great tutorials and reference guides to help you along the way.

Most people glaze over when web developers talk about content management systems. The words "management" and "systems" in the same phrase is enough to send anyone running for the hills. However, using a good robust content management system is vital to any online venture. So lets demystify content management.

People who have never designed a website before normally have no idea what the process is. Even people who do design and develop sites for a hobby or living, do not know the best practices. I have been guilty of this myself. I get an idea in my head and jump straight into coding the site. There is no surprise that the site does not look or function correctly.

A lot of people seem to pay more than they need to for domain names. So I thought I'd let you know two of the cheapest places to buy them.

I have never been a fan of flash sites. A bit of flash is fine to jazz up a site, but I find full flash sites annoying, slow to load and just plain pointless. Combine this with the fact that you are essentially counting yourself out of any decent search engine traffic and you have got an internet disaster on your hands.