Smart Internet marketers know that buying master resale rights is a shortcut to getting products on the market. But did you know that Bill Gates and the Microsoft empire were built from purchasing master resale rights?

That's right - the richest man in the world bought the rights to DOS, the operating system that began the Microsoft empire.

There are 5 important lessons Bill Gates could teach you about master resale rights.

1. Find a hungry market with a burning need and fill it.

Bill Gates read about the Altair 8800 computer in Popular Science in 1975. Realizing Altair needed a simple programming language to make the computer popular, Gates sold a version of BASIC to Altair before it was even written. Then Gates worked night and day with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff to develop it. Microsoft was born.

In 1980, IBM created the desktop PC - but they didn't have an operating system. Gates saw a burning need waiting to... [more]

Like most web developers, I've heard a lot about the importance of valid html recently. I've read about how it makes it easier for people with disabilities to access your site, how it's more stable for browsers, and how it will make your site easier to be indexed by the search engines.

So when I set out to design my most recent site, I made sure that I validated each and every page of the site. But then I got to thinking -- while it may make my site easier to index, does that mean that it will improve my search engine rankings? How many of the top sites have valid html?

To get a feel for how much value the search engines place on being html validated, I decided to do a little experiment. I started by downloading the handy Firefox HTML Validator Extension (http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/) that shows in the corner of the browser whether or not the current page you are on is valid html. It shows a green check when the page is valid, an exclamation point w... [more]

In an interview with Jonathan Hedvat, President of FashionJobsCentral.com, Hedvat stressed the importance of a well designed payment page.

The payment page is where your customers pay. It is just as important as your homepage or any landing pages you might have. I see the same mistakes on different payment pages all the time. When designing the page, I think most people tend to forget that the goal of the page is for the user to pay.

K.I.S.S. Keep it Simple Stupid. You have already sold an item to all the people on this page, now let them pay! There's no need for fancy graphics or animations, leave those on the selling page. You don't want to sell your customer again, because that would be giving them more reasons to not pay. Any change in color themes, fonts, text size, or logos can also change how the customers see your product. Make sure you keep everything consistent.

PHONE NUMBER Depending on your customers, pretty often you will get ... [more]