I have to pat myself on my back because I discovered a new term yesterday, one that I would like share with you. Breadcrumbs. Yes this is can be viewed as mouse food, but it also is a website navigation term. It is something that anyone who has been on a few e-commerce sites has probably seen.

Think of this term as Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so they can find their way home after being abandoned in the woods. That is exactly what this term is referring to.

Large sites that have a ton of pages should use breadcrumbs to help their visitors navigate the site and found their way back to previously viewed pages or categories. Here is an example from A2 Hosting.

As with all of the other pages, the Shared Hosting page has breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs are located near the top of the page and look like this:

Home > Services > Shared Hosting

Notice that the phrase “Shared Hosting” is not hyperlinked. That is because that is the current page being viewed. To find your way back to the “Services” page, the user can merely click that hyperlink. Once on the Services page, it is easy to navigate back home by pressing the home link.

What’s the purpose of all of this? Sites that are easier to navigate convert better because of the comfort level of being able to find exactly what you’re looking for within that site.

So I wanted to write a Valentine’s Day blog post for today. I posted my Valentine’s Day forum posting on Tuesday, so I wasn’t left with much content for today. I am by no means a poet, but I figured I could fight through it and make an A2 Hosting limerick for the occasion. Whether you think that Valentine’s Day is the greatest holiday ever, is just another Hallmark holiday or are somewhere in between like myself…please enjoy this poem. I wrote the poem in past tense, but I can assure you that we are still alive and well.

There once was an amazing web host company named A2 Hosting

When supporting their customers, there was no such thing as coasting

They offered Apache, PHP, MySQL, VPS and much much more

This was certainly web hosting technology that nobody could ignore

Thanks sincerely for tuning into this Valentine’s Day blog posting

If you are looking to create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) database for your web site to help improve your customer service, look no farther than FAQMasterFlex hosting from A2 Hosting. FAQMasterFlex makes creation, management and maintenance of all of your pertinent FAQs straightforward and uncomplicated. Personally I think that “FAQMasterFlex” sounds more like a sweet rapper’s name instead of an amazing FAQ management program.

Like other open source programs, FAQMasterFlex is free and is a simple install with Fantastico.

Features of this PHP FAQ program are:

* Unlimited Categories

* Unlimited Questions/Answers

* Web-based Category and FAQ Administration with Add, Edit, Delete Capability

At A2 Hosting, we want you to love your hosting company all year, not just on Valentine’s Day. The only way we can make sure that you love your web host year round is if you are one of our customers. We would like you to use the following coupon code to take 20% off any of our hosting packages.

a2forum0308 (expires on 3/31/2008)

I would like to suggest our Small Biz Shared Hosting package. Take a look at all the goodies:

250 GB Disk Space

250 GB of Data Transfer

Host UNLIMITED Domains

PHP 5.2.5

MySQL 4.1.x or 5.0.x

PostgreSQL 8.2.x

Ruby on Rails 2.0

SSH/Shell

Subversion/CVS

cPanel

SSL, FTP, Stats

Free Auto-Install Blogs,

Forums, E-Commerce and more!

From $6.95/mo

If you are thinking about which programming language you should create your website in, I am hoping that this post will sway you toward PHP, supported by all A2 Hosting servers.

1.) PHP is cheaper. PHP programs run on Linux, which is free. To run an ASP program, Internet Information Server (IIS) needs to be installed on a Windows server which is not free.

2.) PHP is faster because it runs on its own memory space. ASP is built on a COM-based architecture meaning that whenever a program tries to connect to a database or file, it calls for a COM object. When that COM object tries to access the file system, it has to call on another COM object and so forth, causing things to slow down.

3.) PHP is more compatible because it can run on server platforms like Linux, Unix, Windows and Solaris. ASP is mainly run on Windows.

4.) There are no hidden costs involved with PHP because encryption, email management and file uploading are all built in. To get these features for ASP, you need to purchase additional capabilities.

5.) PHP is more flexible because it can connect to a number of different databases, whereas ASP generally uses only MS-SQL.

6.) It is easier to fix a bug in PHP because of the larger base of support available since it is open source.

7.) Don’t take my word for it because I’m not a programmer, but I have read and been told that it is easier to learn PHP because of the open source community. There are tons of tutorials and tools on the web to aid you along the way. Just check out this PHP Manual.

8.) PHP is more secure than ASP. PHP runs on an ever popular Apache environment whereas ASP has had a fair share of security issues in the past.

As you may or may not know, A2 Hosting is a Linux based web hosting company. That obviously differs from being a Windows based web hosting company…but how so?

1.) Linux hosting has been found to perform faster than Windows hosting.

2.) Linux is open source, meaning that it is less expensive because most of the application software needed is free to install and use.

3.) Linux offers telnet (way to communicate with another host) and SSH (command line interface used to securely access a remote computer).

4.) CGI (allows web servers to perform data functions and interact with users) and Perl (programming language frequently used for creating CGI programs on Web servers) are more commonly found on Linux servers.

5.) MySQL, a simple, yet powerful open source database is more commonly found on Linux servers.

6.) Linux hosting is more popular than Windows just by the sheer huge number of developers that create free, open source software that can be used by anyone. This leaves the door open for a ton of new web hosting innovation on the Linux side of hosting.

7.) Linux is fully compatible with PHP, which is rapidly becoming the most popular programming language.

8.) All the major services needed for a large venture website are available on Linux based systems for free. The combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP are being used in combinations to power some of the world’s most traffic rigorous websites.

9.) Historically, it has been said that Linux hosting is more reliable compared to Windows hosting.

10.) It is easier to find Linux support because of the huge, open source community.

So I’ve been a bit concerned about a few of my AdWord ads lately because I thought it would be very time consuming to change each and everyone whenever there was an update in software versions. Since A2 Hosting stays on the cutting edge of hosting technology, I figured I would be editing the software versions quite often within the ads. For example, when PHP6 comes out, I was going to have to go in and individually change each ad that contained PHP5.

This sounded very time consuming and tedious. I decided to play with the AdWords Editor to see if there was any way to make mass changes to ads instead of editing each and every single ad whenever a version changes. This miracle tool does the trick. Here’s how:

1.) Download the AdWord Editor tool if you haven’t done so

2.) Log in with your AdWord login information

3.) Select the “Text Ads” tab at the top of the page

4.) Select any of the ads and type the command “ctrl A” to select all of the ads

5.) Type command “ctrl F”

6.) Type the text you would like to change in the “Find text” field and type what you would like that text to be replaced with in the “Replace with” field

7.) Click “Find matches”

8.) Select “Replace All”

Pretty easy huh? My only suggestion would be for an alternative to “Replace All” so that individual cases could be reviewed. Regardless, this is a big time resource saver.

Trust me. It is.

I’m new to AdWords. I’ll admit it. I do know that you want to find niche terms that you can rank highly on while paying a minimal amount per click. That is not always the case. If you are familiar AdWords, you will know that some of the keywords will go inactive when Google deems you are not bidding enough. This is because Google wants to ensure that they keep a decent CPM when showing certain ads. If you do not have a high enough clickthrough rate at a low PPC rate, Google deems that you are getting too much exposure at too low of a price, regardless of the competition. What the exact equation is, I do not know.

The problem with this is that there really isn’t a good way within the AdWords administration area to see which words have gone inactive without spending a huge amount of time doing so. You can click on each ad group to see which ones are inactive, but this takes a crazy amount of time if you have a ton of ad groups. I tried running a few reports to pull this information, but it seemed like more than half of the inactive words were being omitted.

The trick is using the AdWords Editor. This is an awesome tool for many things, but in this instance it is perfect for increasing the bid amount so that your keywords are active. Here’s how:

1.) Download the tool if you haven’t already

2.) Log into your account

3.) Click the campaign that you want to manage

4.) Click the “Keywords” tab

5.) Click the “Status” tab to sort among active and inactive terms

6.) To bulk increase the inactive keywords, hold down the shift key and click the first inactive term and scroll down to the last inactive term and click on the keyword

7.) Beneath the keywords, increase the Maximum CPC bid to the desired amount

8.) Click “Post Changes” at the top

The AdWords Editor makes management of keyword bidding so much easier. I just don’t understand why these options and tools aren’t available online to make online bid management easier.

A2 Hosting knows that reliability is one of the most important factors when someone chooses their hosting company. When your business relies on your ecommerce web site, you expect that site to be up and running at all times. If it isn’t, you’re losing money. It is that simple. That’s why we take our 99.9% Uptime Guarantee so seriously. I think you will be impressed with the fact that we have had 0 hosting outages since October 2006. If you don’t want to take my word for it, check the third party stats for yourself.

If you’re ready to host your site with a company that takes their 99.9% Uptime Guarantee seriously, A2 Hosting is up to the task.

As an incentive to host with us, besides reliability of course, use the coupon code a2forum0308 to take an additional 15% off any package. This coupon codes expires on 3/31/2008.

Here is another happy customer who experienced the superb support from A2 Hosting’s staff.

“I just wanted to take a minute and tell you what a great job (staff’s name) did for me today. After a frustrating back and fourth with customer service over email and the support ticket system, (staff’s name) called me to make sure that we could resolve a fairly complex issue with my account. Not only was he extremely knowledgeable about what needed to be done, but he stayed on the phone with me while he got it working without even a minute of downtime.

Service people like that will make me an A2 customer for a long time.”

Maybe it is time for you to see the A2 Hosting difference.