Markspixel News for September
Things have been going smoothly here at Markspixel and we have not seen much of an affect from the slow down in the economy. We keep growing steadily and any decrease in work available has given us more time to focus on bettering our infrastructure and our own website. For example we have now enabled better fraud protection on all of our orders, preventing abuse and providing a more secure environment for our clients and also decreasing costs. We are also in the process of releasing some new products and services this month. Some of these changes will make it easier and cheaper for clients to own their own website with a unique design from Markspixel. New pricing structures will also become available. Please sit tight for the next two weeks and we should have something ready to present by that time. Stay safe and have a good labor day weekend!
How to configure and setup WHMCS Licensing addon
To follow this tutorial you will need a whmcs license and the whmcs licensing addon which can be found at the WHMCS website. I have tried to include as little code as possible in this tutorial, thus I will be referencing lines of code in the files you received when you downloaded the addon initially.
I will assume that anyone reading this post was able to upload the files included in the addon to the correct folders in your whmcs directory and that the addon shows up in your admin area. This tutorial is for those who are not very good with php and need some help adding this licensing script to the template, design, script or whatever you have made or just want to add a license to. I just got everything to work for me in a little less than an hour and I would say the whmcs instructions are not very clear on the procedure.
Lets get the basics out of the way, first step is to copy all the code in the check_sample_code.php file into the file you want protected by the licensing script. I was testing this out on a wordpress script so I used the admin login page to experiment, a good place to put the code would also be the index page of your project.
Once that is done we simply need to follow the instructions in the file, just edit line 17 to your whmcs root url, line 18 to anything you want, i put markspixel84209 to represent my website. No need to edit any other variables for now.
After that I went ahead and created a configuration.php file which the user can edit with his or her unique license key. This is what my configuration file looked like
/** Please replace the word key with the license key provided to you during the order process at Markspixel.com. */
$license_key=”key”;
This seemed more secure for me and easier for the client so that he or she doesn’t have to scroll through tons of code to activate their license.
I then went back to my code, the code we pasted into our index file, and scrolled to line 133 and simply replaced the sample key with my variable I just created in the configuration file “$license_key”. Now we should have the script working, if you go to the index page it should give you some kind of feedback of whether the license is working or not. Try issuing yourself a license in your whmcs script and put it into your configuration file and test to make sure everything works. You should see a fairly large output confirming your script is active, also check your whmcs to make sure it pops up as a valid license there as well. If not please go back and make sure you did all the steps correctly.
Next, now we need to get rid of the ugly textarea we see at the top and make the actual licensing stuff work the way we want it to. So I went to line 149 and put a # right infront of the “echo” this will comment the line and prevent the box from appearing. Delete line 152 to 156, line 152 to 156 should now be blank. If your project is php you can skip this step, however if you have html please add a
echo=”
on line 152 and then at the bottom of all of your html add a
“;
This will display all your html code if the license is active. If you use PHP you don’t need the echo tags in this step since the php should show up automatically. Now to make it work Cut lines 157 to 165 and paste them at the very bottom of the script.
Now your script should work, the page will be blank if the license is invalid, suspended or expired.
To tell whoever is using the script why they are getting a blank page simply edit the following comments
# Show Invalid Message
# Show Invalid Message
# Show Suspended Message
Please remember to use echo tags if you want to display text or html. Below is what I used to replace the comments.
echo “License Invalid, please enter your license key in the configuration.php file or contact Markspixel.com for support”;
echo “License Expired, please contact Markspixel.com”;
echo “License Suspended, please contact Markspixel.com”;
I hope that helps, If you have any questions or need any help feel free to contact me. If you have any helpful additions to this tutorial please make a comment or contact me.
Markspixel recommends Traffic 6 for SEO for your website!
We constantly have clients who ask us to do SEO work on their website and we are capable, but only to an extent. We are unable to deliver the full package and get clients sites listed at the top of search results on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. We have carefully looked through and tested various SEO companies on our own websites to see the results and we have found Traffic 6 to be the best and most reliable for the price you pay. Services range from $49.95 and up and you can even make your own custom packages, just contact Traffic 6 today!
For clients with larger budgets we recommend that, in addition to Traffic 6, Reach Local may be a popular and viable solution for your business. Although we can not vouch for their services ourselves we find that a lot of our clients are currently using them for their websites.
Markspixel is now listed in the BBB Directory!
You will now find us listed under the following categories
Web Design – http://www.bbb.org/houston/directory/greater-houston-accredited-business-directory/1/web-design/2889/
Web Hosting Services – http://www.bbb.org/houston/directory/greater-houston-accredited-business-directory/1/internet-web-hosting/4013/
MarksPixel now has a new phone number!
Please not that we have changed our phone number to 1-888-409-7884 so that customers may call us toll free.
New 125x125px banner from Markspixel.com
We have just created a new banner which you can use on your website.
If you would like to use this on your site just copy the code below
<object width=”125″ height=”125″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://markspixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/markspixel_125.swf”>
<embed src=”http://markspixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/markspixel_125.swf
” width=”125″ height=”125″>
</embed>
</object>
Markspixel is now on the iphone and Ipod touch
We have now made a special page just for the Iphone and Ipod touch, so when you visit our site it will be optimized and easy to use for all Iphone and Ipod touch users. This has been done by Markspixel to make our site more user friendly for users using their phones or ipods to use our site. We have yet to learn if this will affect the Ipad. This is a great step in our effort to make our site better and easier to use for our users.
2 New Banners For Markspixel.com
We just added two more banners for Markspixel.com
<object width=”498″ height=”60″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://markspixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/marukoy96_468.swf”>
<embed src=”http://markspixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/marukoy96_468.swf” width=”498″ height=”60″>
</embed>
</object>
<object width=”160″ height=”600″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://markspixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/marukoy96_160.swf”>
<embed src=”http://markspixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/marukoy96_160.swf” width=”160″ height=”600″>
</embed>
</object>
What is a sitemap? Where do you get a Sitemap? And why do you need one for your website?
A sitemap is a XML document used to help Google and other search engines find pages it needs to look at and index which they may not find otherwise. It is a list of all the pages, or atleast the pages you want search engines to find, on your website. A sitemap will help search engines find all the pages on your website and will definitely help your website if you are trying to rank higher in search engines.
How do you get a sitemap for your website? Just find any sitemap generator, there are lots of free ones out there, I would recommend http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Just fill in the information about your website, like your URL, http://Markspixel.com. Then just hit the start button. After the sitemap has been generated you will need to upload it to the root directory of your webserver, this is the same folder where your index file would be, a common directory is public_html/ or www/. After you have done this you will need to submit your sitemap to Google and other search engines, Google has a guide on how to submit your sitemap to them here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184.
A sitemap will not hurt your website in any way so there is no reason why you should not create one. This is a great way to promote your site and get it recognized by search engines. If your site and individual pages show up in more search engine results it will create more traffic. If you happen to be using wordpress you can use the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin to easily generate, update, and submit your sitemap whenever its changed.
Please feel free to leave a comment or ask any questions.
Using banner exchanges to generate traffic
We have experimented a bit with ways to advertise the site and recently we had the idea of using a banner exchange network to generate some traffic. After finding a site (1800banners.com) and doing some research we decided to give it a try. We don’t expect to see any great results in sales, since banner exchanges do not tend to be very effective. We do want to analyze what happens. We start out by putting a few ads on some of our other sites to generate some credits that we can use for free to advertise any other site we would like to. So we decided to use all our credits to promote MarksPixel.com. We have only running this for about 10 hours and you can already see the changes from our AWStats and Google Analytics.
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AWStats |
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Google Analytics |
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As you can see our traffic has spiked since we begun advertising. Traffic is great, but it means nothing unless its targeted, we selected that we wanted to advertise on sites related to computers, however we have no way of confirming that this is what is actually taking place. So how useful is this traffic that is coming to our site? There is really now way of knowing if the traffic is good or bad until we keep the banners running for a few weeks or longer. Currently we have had no increase in sales thanks to the banner exchange.
Here is a sample banner that would be displayed from the banner exchange. You are free to choose any size.
