I’ve been hearing a lot about viruses spreading on Facebook and seeing it personally from friends who have been infected on the social media site. Recent infections on Facebook are growing “virally”, pardon the pun. Review these tips and advice to avoid potential problems on the social media website.

You normally get one of these viruses from a friend who was unknowingly infected. They could come from a simple message, or a “video of you”. These viruses can take your personal information to log into your account and cause you to spread them to your circle of friends as well.

The most recurring one, called the “Koobface”, gives you a link to a video with “you” in it, and when you attempt to play it, you get an error message saying you need to download a file to update your Adobe Flash software. Now this “flash_player.exe” file contains the malicious Koobface code.

Another bit of advice involves keeping an eye on and adjusting your privacy settings in Facebook. There is a new privacy setting on Facebook called “Instant Personalization” that shares data with non-Facebook websites and it is automatically set to “Allow.” Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Instant Personalization > Edit Settings, and uncheck “Allow”. If your Facebook friends don’t do this, they will be sharing information about you.

Just a heads up to keep alert and watch what you click on. Some of the applications on social media websites can spread infections as well. Personally I’ve always stayed away from game applications such as Mob Wars and Farmville, but proceed at your own discretion. There’s always going to be a threat of some kind somewhere, but the point is to be educated about it to avoid headaches in the future.

How would you like to add your likeness on a building or a movie theater screen? Perhaps put your image on a billboard or in the clouds. Now you can with LoonaPix Photo Editor. Try this photo graphics website to have some fun and turn your photos into works of art.

Once you finish with one photo effect, the links to change the effect or upload another photo are close by, so navigation on this website is simple. When you are done editing one photo, you can either add a different effect or just upload another one. Rather than using a photoshop program, LoonaPix Photo Editor could prove to be a good option for a photo editing website.

I also found that Photomontage Generator from WriteOnIt had a variety of excellent photograph effects as well, with the main difference being that you choose the photo effect first, then upload a photo.

There’s No Place Like www.home.com, your business website’s home page. With this familiarity, the website should encompass a professional theme. The home page should make visitors feel just as comfortable, but sometimes it’s hard to have an objective opinion of your own site.

The journey of a thousands sites begins with a single click, so maintain a positive first impression. With a positive home page reaction, your website visitors soon become interested in products or services offered. Sharp graphics and layout should use appropriate colors and fonts to match your business cards and printed material. The website visitors should be able to recognize your market branding on a website that is easy to navigate. Give your potential customers the ability to gather information quickly and easily.

The home page is the first thing your website visitors see and should attract website traffic. Bringing repeat customers is the advantage of a small business website, and with enough visual appeal, visitors will be encouraged to bookmark the website and tell a friend as well.

What happens when you put a Porsche engine into a Pinto? The Pinto can’t handle it, and to make it fit, you’d have to change so much about the car that’s it’s not even a Pinto anymore. After the parts and labor, you probably would’ve saved money just buying the Porsche.

Much like a website, without the engine to drive it, it can’t go anywhere. Using some “cheap company” is great to just have a website online, but the website is not yours. Now you have some company with their claws into you, probably having to pay a monthly fee for the rest of your life. Chances are they would never give up the control of registrar to let another website designer give it SEO.

By knowing about quality and “you get what you pay for”, we see that going with some do-it-yourself company could have you paying a monthly fee for nothing. You may find that you can’t even find your website in search engines even by typing the name of your company, location and type of business.

Sure, it’s great to have a website to send people to, so they can read more about your business, but the idea of having a website online is for search engines to index you and generate traffic for your business. Your website is about promotion. The more traffic you generate to your business could bring more potential customers.

Cell phones have evolved from huge, heavy, bulky, awkward mobile devices into the slim, light, handheld touchscreen smartphones we see today. They are thought of as handheld computers integrated within a mobile phone that are capable of using literally thousands of online applications. Such applications allow the user to watch movies, check email, Skype, connect on Twitter and Facebook, enable GPS, check weather conditions, access music, and so much more.

These handheld devices come in many varieties, shapes and sizes. Some of the most popular handheld devices include the iPhone, Blackberry PDA and Motorola Droid, and often come equipped with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, spanning varieties such as handheld PC’s, palmtops and PDA’s. Some of the most popular brands include Nokia, Motorola, Sony, Dell, Sharp, Verizon, LG, the Apple iPhone, and T-Mobile Sidekick. From the smaller palmtops and handheld PC’s, these electronic devices bridge the gap between notebooks, netbooks and tablets.

Many people get Android and Droid confused. Droid is a phone created by Motorola sold by Verizon and Android is a cell phone operating system created by Google. The Droid has Android 2.0 installed on it.

One of the newest versatile Android tablets is the Dell Streak. This versatile Android tablet comes in a 5, 7 and 10 inch. This handheld device sits between smartphones and larger notebooks and tablets commonly used today.

To justify it’s existence, the Streak needed to excel over other smartphones and provide a rich multi-media experience. Staying a step ahead of cutting edge technology is the only way for a mobile device to survive. Keeping current and informed about how high tech devices can simplify your life may be advantageous to you.

Next month Microsoft will launch the beta version of Internet Explorer 9 with accelerated HTML5. The intent of this software giant’s next-generation web browser is to allow “a more beautiful web that feels native on Windows,” says Microsoft.

IE9 will be available in a public beta release for the first time on September 15th, 2010 at Microsoft’s event in San Francisco. Microsoft formally releases the new version at its “Beauty of the Web” event in hopes to wow people and fend off any competition from such rivals as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

IE9′s integration of HTML5 with full hardware acceleration is clearly a first step and it is good for Microsoft to be behind HTML5 – Al Hilwa, Director of Applications Software Development at the International Data Corporation

IE9′s features are based upon using the power of the whole PC to achieve the greatest websurfing experience. Internet Explorer 9 began from the premise of the internet delivering HTML5 experiences which feel more like a native application than a website. If you are still using Windows XP and would like to use Internet Explorer 9, you’ll need to upgrade to Windows Vista or Windows 7 in order to run this browser.

In order to find out what version of Internet Explorer you are running, simply go to the ‘Help’ tab on your web browser toolbar and choose the option ‘About Internet Explorer’. To find out what version of Windows you are currently running, click on “Start” on your taskbar, type “run” in the searchbox, and in the run dialog box type “winver” and click OK. A window will display the exact version of Windows you are running and any service packs installed.

Search engine upgrades are becoming more prevalent in just these recent weeks. Yahoo’s gone to Yahoo Pulse, MSN has upgraded to MSN Beta, and Google even allows you to customize your homepage now.

It seems that these search engines are becoming more like social media websites since social media is the growing trend for the last few years, including MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Search engines are constantly making it easier to connect with friends and relatives online.

Yahoo! Pulse allows users to add photos, share links with contacts, and connect to social media websites and other sites across the web. There are even applications such as “The Video of the Day”, or you could create a blog to write on for your contacts to see.

MSN has recently upgraded to MSN Beta, allowing it’s users to share photos, add favorites and groups, and customize pages with animated display pictures signature sounds and custom scenes. MSN Hotmail allows you to scroll photos sent to you through email as an album. MSN even has a media player built right into its Hotmail now, making watching and sending videos through email so much easier.

Consider these computer management shortcut tips when working with documents, photos or videos. Using shorcuts is very helpful and saves time when working on anything. With quick ways of accomplishing complicated tasks, your projects will tend to run smoothly.

Some useful tips include the use of shortcut keys such as with the shift or control button. Copying text or a section of a photo can be easily done with ‘control + x’ to cut, ‘control + c’ to copy, ‘control + v’ to paste and ‘control + a’ to select all. To undo anything on a text document or a graphic, just click ‘ctrl + z’.

Here’s a great tip for moving or uploading multiple files at once, and an alternative to selecting them all by dragging the mouse and boxing them in. Highlight the first file in a group to begin. Then go to the last file you want to highlight in the group and while holding the shift key, double click on it. This should highlight the entire group in between and allow you to move, copy or upload that entire group quickly and easily. If you want to copy a file instead of moving it to another folder, drag it with the right click of your mouse.

F5 is used to refresh a website page if you want to reload it, whether for seeing new changes made or to just refresh a stale webpage. In the same way, to do a “hard refresh” simply hold control while clicking F5. ‘Alt + F4′ closes the current window you are on.

Changing photos from one format to another is simple. If you want to change a file from gif or bmp to jpeg, or vice versa, an easy way is to right click on it, choose ‘open with’, choose paint, then on the top right of paint, under ‘file’ choose ‘save as’, and choose the format you’d like to save it as. Paint is kept in your accessories folder and can be useful to resize and edit photos as well, using the options across the top.

When changing video files from wmv to mp4 or between any other formats, DVD Videosoft could be a useful option. Adding graphics to photos can be easily done with Befunky.com. Add special photo effects such as starbursts, ink, text, shapes and speech bubbles.

Keep checking my blog and website for tips, tools and advice for making your online experience more productive. I offer custom CMS website design and SEO services for small businesses worldwide.

When writing, the importance of targeting your audience remains a valid strategy. So many business owners have a website and a blog, but rarely do any writing on them. Review these tips and advice on involving your readers in your business and reading your articles.

Your posts should be about your readers’ interests and related to your own business. Keep your readers involved with popular topics that are the buzz on social media websites and the news. Think about who is going to be reading and tailor what you write to your audience’s needs.

Make sure you stay focused on what topics your readers expect you to write about and revolve your writing around them. Keep up with what’s interesting in the news by doing searches, watching what others post about, and using Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a great way to choose what topics you want to be informed on to organize them for review and research.

With these tips in mind, write about your business and current events whether on your blog, website or in articles. Target your audience and let them know you’re thinking about them by writing in a fashion that is beneficial. When you involve your readers with your writing you can expect to provoke an interest in what your business is about as well.

Coderepair went from a 16 to a 95 grade score in under a year according to Website Grader. How did I do it, you might ask. Natural methods of search engine optimization helped my website to gain popularity online.

Writing articles gave me backlinks, or inbound links to my website. A website’s grade is partially based on how many inbound links point to it. Also by subscribing to websites that offer inbound links, I also raised my grade.

Another measure that is used to calculate a website’s score is the number of pages that a site has. By adding a blog post twice a week and adding pages to my resources section, I managed to get my site from 10 pages to over 400 in this last year.

Having an aged domain certainly didn’t count against me. Being this website started in April 2003 gives it a bit of authority according to search engines. So when faced with the decision of whether to build your website on an aged domain or to come up with a new one, I would build on the aged domain.

Build an online presence with a good reputation to promote your business. Use natural methods of SEO, write articles and blog posts often to get some inbound links to your website, and an aged domain never hurts.