Sure, it is very true that you can indeed have a website of your own live within minutes but those kind of services are far from professional, client’s may not always realise that and the fact they will assume that is how websites are built can be a little annoying to say the least.

From Freewebs to the entire social networking community such as MySpace and Bebo etc, a lot of the popular websites you visit today now let you alter the way your page looks such as layout and colours or in the case of Freewebs you can completely create a site without a single line of code in sight and without paying a penny.

The difference that really matters when it comes to having a site designed professionally is that you get a lot more than just a better looking and better coded website.

Some of the advantages of having a website coded well as opposed to using any kind of visual site builder.

Accessibility – When a site is created, accessibility is often neglected and you are instantly ignoring a certain percentage of your visitors and quite possibly losing yourself potential leads and sales not to mention that it is actually a legal requirement to make sure your website is accessible to all including blind, deaf partially sighted and any other common disabilities.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This would be one of your major sources of traffic should you have a well made site, search engines crawl websites with bots than scan the code of your pages to look for keywords and tons of other information to rank you in search result pages, a poorly coded web page just makes the life of those little bots that little bit harder, the term is known as “Code to Content” and you want to keep your code as clean as possible.

Cross Browser Compatibility – Ok, so most of you probably stick to using one browser and any bugs you find you may get fixed and make sure it looks good but only in the browser your using, coding a site so they validate with W3C can help you achieve cross browser compatibility much better than ignoring validation. There are still some minor differences between browsers and how they render your code but for the most part coding well will make sure the majority of possible issues never occur.

Page Load Times – I can’t think of anything more tedious than a page that takes a while to fully load, a lot of load time can be reduced simply by creating pages correctly by which I mean validating and and not having useless code dotted around the place. Many visitors to your website may even hit their back button due to slow page load times so it is something to consider.

Those are a few of the most important aspects of having a professionally made website to consider.

So to sum up this article, you can indeed have yourself a website setup after just a few clicks of your mouse but is that going to give you a website that really works for you? How much do you really care about your visitors experience during their time on your website?

Most importantly, how serious do you want your visitors to take you?

So remember, when you pay good money for web design there is a reason behind it and it is not done in the “Drag Drop” environment that is often assumed.

1. Markus Frind – PlentyOfFish.com – $300,000 per month

If you haven’t heard of this guy yet you should check out the website plentyoffish.com. He is the person who created this free online dating website from his appartment all by himself. His website soon become one of the largest dating websites online. I have actually tried out his website myself and can see how it can be interesting and attract a lot of visitors. The graphics and layout of the website is nothing fancy at all but the functionality is all there and its fast to use.

There have been many of doubts that he wasn’t making that much money so he made those people silent by posting a picture of his paycheck on his blog. According to his blog check represented two months worth of Adsense earnings.

2. Kevin Rose – Digg.com – $250,000 per month

Kevin Rose started Digg.com in December 2004. It is a social marketing site that is mostly news, video, and pictures that are submitted by users for other users to read about and view. Basically what happens is you can signup for an account and you can submit a “news story” and other people can view it and if they like it they can “Digg it” and this boosts the rating of the post. If it gets enough Diggs it will appear on the Frontpage of the site and will get tons of traffic. Digg has both Google Adsense ads and Federated Media ads. It is estimated that he earns roughly $250k a month from Adsense alone.

3. Jeremy Schoemaker – $140,000 per month

ShoeMoney is considered to be one of the greatest Internet Marketers out there. He is very good with search engines and knows how to setup his sites to get optimal traffic to them. In one of his best months with Google Adsense ShoeMoney earned $132,994.97. You can imagine it was probably pretty difficult for him to cash a check of that size!

Unlike most of the other Google advertisers ShoeMoney makes his money from hundreds of sites and thousands of domains.

4. Jason Calacanis – Weblogs, Inc. – $120,000 per month

Jason Calacanis is the creator of Weblogs. Weblogs is a network of blogs and it was apparently making roughly $4,000 a day from Google Adsense! He eventually sold the company to AOL for a reported $25 million. He also announced his retirement from blogging earlier this year (July 2008). He is now focusing on his email campaigns instead.

5. David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard – FreeWebLayouts.net- $100,000 per month

According to a Washington Post article these 20 year old’s claim to be making $100,000 a month from their site FreeWebLayouts.net which offers free Myspace templates. That is pretty impressive for a couple of young guys that are offering free Myspace templates!

6. Tim Carter – AskTheBuilder.com – $30,000 per month

Tim Carter is a licensed master plumber and carpenter with his own radio show. He started his website up in 1995 with his primary focus to cater to an avid following of fellow builders on the site. In April 2004, Carter learned about Adsense for content sites and he put it on his site. With minimal effort and time he optimized his website and his Adsense earnings grew from $1,500 to $7,500.

There was a Google case study done on Tim Carters earnings with Google Adsense. You should definately read it by clicking HERE. Read the results section because it gives a bunch of helpful tips on how he increased his revenue with Google Adsense.

7. Joel Comm – e-book – $24,000 per month

Joel Comm is a get rich quick guru. He wrote an e-book, What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense. With his e-book and his website he earned $23,458.46 between Nov 2005 and Dec 2005. Check out his Google account stats here.

8. Shawn Hogan – DigitalPoint.com – $10,000 per month

Shawn Hogan is the creator of the forum DigitalPoint. This forum is a very usual forum with lots of information about: Search Engines, Marketing, Business, Design & Development, and Products & Tools. In a New York Times article it stated that he was making roughly $10k a month with Google Adsense.

The members of his forum speculate he is now making around double of what he was making in 2005 when this report was published in the New York Times.

So there you have it, the Top 8 Google Adsense earners. This list might be slighty out of date and there could be some new people in this list but this is the list I was able to pull from collecting information on the net. So check out these sites and see if you can strive to earn as much as these people do with your website or blog.

Hey, I was just having a look for something new to try game wise and came across Combat Arms, it really looks nice and as it is open beta it means you can all get your hands on it without it costing you anything.

I am downloading the open beta right now so if you are reading this why not come and join me in this sweet looking online FPS.

vBulletin 3.7.0 is available immediately from the Members’ Area to all customers with active vBulletin licenses, and will be offered as the primary choice to those making new purchases.

This release supercedes the 3.6.x branch as our primary product. vBulletin 3.6.x will continue to be maintained for a limited time, as outlined in the end-of-life announcement posted today. We recommend that all customers with active licenses upgrade to vBulletin 3.7.0.

There are many new features and improvements to existing functionality in vBulletin 3.7.0 over vBulletin 3.6.x, most of which have already been described in the release announcements for the various pre-release versions, and in the First Look thread that was posted at the beginning of the beta process, but here is a brief list of just a few of the highlights.

PHP and MySQL Requirements

vBulletin 3.7.0 requires at least PHP 4.3.3 and MySQL 4.0.16 (These are the same requirements as vBulletin 3.6), but we strongly recommend that all customers run PHP 5.2.5 with APC and MySQL 5.0.51 or later. Major performance benefits can be had by taking the recommended route rather than simply satisfying the required versions.

What is a ‘Gold’ Version?

When talking about software, the term ‘gold’ is not related to the color of the application. Rather, it refers to the practise of burning the final version of a software product to a CD-R so that it can be sent to a large scale CD press for large-scale distribution. It is used to indicate that the code is ready for deployment to customers. The official name of this new version is vBulletin 3.7.0.

Installing or Upgrading vBulletin

Anyone who has installed or upgraded any version of vBulletin 3 before will be familiar with the process, but for those who are new to the system, the vBulletin manual has all the details for installing and upgrading.

Template Changes

A large number of templates have been changed when compared with vBulletin 3.6.x. It will be necessary to revert affected customized templates or otherwise carefully integrate the changes into your custom versions or new features and existing functionality will be adversely affected. A complete list of the templates you have customized whose original version has been changed by the 3.7.0 upgrade is available within your Admin Control Panel after the upgrade is complete.

Bug Reports

As with any software, bugs will appear. If you find a problem that you believe to be a bug, please don’t post about it on the forums where the development team may never find your message, but instead use the dedicated bug tracker to make a report that can be tracked through to completion.

Before reporting a bug, please ensure you are able to reproduce the problem on a board using a default, uncustomized style with all plugins disabled.

A few days ago, Google launched a new tool called Google Ad Manager to help website publishers manage their direct ads selling more effective.

If you run a content based website or blog, probably your main source of online revenue will depend on selling ads directly to advertisers . Selling ads directly to advertisers does involve management work and sale process and when your ad space were fully sold out, some advertisers may request to reserve an ad space for them if there is an ad space becomes available in future. If you do all the things manually, it will be time consuming and can easily make a mistake. The Google Ad Manager is seem to be created specifically for helping you solve these problems.

It will help manage your direct ads selling more easier and effective; and most importantly provide fast service to your advertisers. The tool is right for you if you want to consistently make money online by selling ads.

Google Ad Manager

And the good news is, Google Ad Manager isn’t just restricted to Google Adsense network only. You can choose to use any ad network you like.

I know that that it depends on how good you are at something and not just what you do so with taking that in to consideration, what are the better jobs when it comes to opportunities with the web.

I am going to do some research to see what pays well but if you are able to post some f your own knowledge that would be great.

I will post an update when I have some more information regarding my question.

Today I finally went for fully dedicated hosting, I have been waiting before making the upgrade for a while now but it is complete now.

If you have any comments to make regarding dedicated servers please feel free to leave a comment.

I thought it was a good time to upgrade for a couple of reasons, one reason is because I am working on building my client base up now for my web hosting and design and the second reason is that my course will be covering server management and such soon so it will be a great help for that I am sure.

It is only a very basic website guide designed for complete beginners of the whole proxy scene.

If you are interested in checking out the proxy guide I have made then please click the link below.

Proxy Guide

I hope I did a much better job on this one than in my first attempt, please feel free to drop me a comment and let me know what you think of it.

All comments more than welcome!

P.S Thanks to those who helped me out with this one.

Hey all, I have just made my very first glossy image in Photoshop.

As it is my first attempt I would really appreciate any constructive criticism, I did not actually use any tutorials online or anything, I just made what I saw from all the sweet web 2.0 glossy images we see pretty much everywhere.

I love the glossy look but I need to be careful how I use it as because most of you reading this will know, it is easy to over use a new technique you have learned, I remember when I first started using gradients and oh my I went crazy and it was only when it was pointed out to me that I realised how bad things looked.

Anyway, your comments are really welcome on my glossy button.