My first week of the new year was filled with adventures and new acquaintances. I spent a fair amount of time exploring cities in the Netherlands: going from café to café, from bookstore to bookstore and occasionally to a botanical garden or museum. I had a very good time and wanted to introduce a few good places I came to like very much.

Natural wonders, wildlife and historical sites – the world is a truly spectacular place to explore. If there is one place that no visitor to New Zealand should miss, it is Rotorua. Set in a tranquil lake studded basin among forested hills, the town is centre for a region where one surprise follows another. Geysers spout 50 ft or more into the air, bubbling cauldrons spit out mud and steam vents hiss to an all-pervading stench of sulphur.

The green rolling landscapes of the Waikato Region that lies to the south of Auckland form some of the most fertile land in New Zealand, yet this is one region in particular which holds more than just surface appeal… literally. For Waikato also boasts an extensive labyrinth of underground caverns that formed millions of years ago and are now a major tourist attraction.

Essentially forming a region of its own, the Central Plateau is New Zealand’s main volcanic area largely made up of national parks, which are perfect for exploration. Tongariro National Park is the focus, comprising moonscape craters, lush native forest, lava formations and crystal clear rivers and lakes as well as the imposing volcanoes of Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro. Ruapehu is the country’s most active volcano, spectacularly erupting in 1995, although several minor eruptions have occurred since.

Good website content works hand-in-hand with the interface design to create an easy-to-use website. To make your website a successful marketing tool, you need to strategically develop content that is smart and written in a voice with a tone that matches your brand. Editing existing content, drafting new content, crafting effective calls to action, ghost writing blogs and more… all website content should work together to address the needs of your audience.

Content doesn’t stop at the website, however. Inbound marketing campaigns, drip email campaigns, pay per click advertising and other digital marketing initiatives all rely heavily on content that is customized to your audience and your offerings. Content isn’t a secondary thought at TBH Creative. All of our projects emphasize sound content intertwined with creative design.

The crow tried to push his head into the jug. Sadly, he found that the neck of the jug was too narrow. Then he tried to push the jug to tilt for the water to flow out, but the jug was too heavy.

The crow thought hard for a while. Then, looking around it, he saw some pebbles. He suddenly had a good idea. He started picking up the pebbles one by one, dropping each into the jug. As more and more pebbles filled the jug, the water level kept rising. Soon it was high enough for the crow to drink. His plan had worked!

Combining a three-cylinder gas engine with an electric engine for a combined 362 horsepower, the car can reportedly travel 22 miles on electric power alone and 310 miles on the hybrid engine technology. The interior features LED lights, a passenger cell constructed of carbon fiber and, according to BMW, uses recycled material throughout the vehicle.

iPad has always been a powerful way to work, play, and learn. And iOS 11 brings it to life like never before. New features and capabilities let you get more done more quickly and easily, making your iPad experience even more powerful and personal. Do with it what you will. Because now you can.

The new Files app brings all your files together. You can easily browse, search, and organize all your files in one place. And there’s a dedicated place for your recent files. Those on your iPad as well as in apps, on your other iOS devices, in iCloud Drive, and across other services like Box and Dropbox.

The new Dock is a foundational change for iPad. It’s now available from any screen. So with just a swipe, you can open and switch apps instantly. And you can customize it with more of your favorites. Apps you’ve opened recently and apps that are currently open on your iPhone or Mac appear in the right side of the Dock.

iOS 11 makes it easier and more intuitive than ever to multitask. You can open a second app right from the Dock, and both apps remain active in Slide Over as well as Split View. You can drag the second app in Slide Over to the left. And you can get back to your favorite App Spaces in the redesigned App Switcher.

Drag and Drop comes to iPad, allowing you to move text, photos, and files from one app to another. And because it’s been designed for the large Multi-Touch display of iPad, moving them around is pure magic. You can touch and move just about anything — or things — anywhere on the screen.

Now you can mark up a PDF or screenshot faster and more easily. Step one, pick up your Apple Pencil. Step two, touch it to the screen. Step three, start writing. It’s called Instant Markup for a reason.

When you begin to draw or jot down something in Notes, the text around it can automatically move aside. And now handwritten words in Notes are searchable.1 It all happens on your device, so your private information stays that way. You can also add inline drawings in Mail.

With the new AirPlay 2, you can control your home audio system and the speakers throughout your house.7 You can play a song in the living room and your kitchen at the same time. Adjust the volume in any room. Or have your music start instantly on all your speakers — in sync with one another.

But there is just one problem…

What exactly are you going to write about? What products and services are you going to sell to site visitors? How are you going to stand out from the competition and make your mark?

Okay, so that’s a few different problems. But the point is, all of this boils down to what niche your WordPress website is going to be based in.

There are lots of ways to choose the perfect niche for your website. In fact, there are some concrete steps you can follow that will lead you down the right path and help you build a successful website.

And, it just so happens that today I am going to help you choose a niche so that you can start building your website right away.

Your Guide to Choosing a Website Niche

Step 1: Identify Your Interests and Expertise

Running a website is a lot of hard work. Do not pick a niche just because it is popular.

You will find yourself wanting to quit or just not knowledgeable to compete with those that have spent years fine-tuning their sites to cater to a specific audience. This will lead to business ruin if you are not careful, which is not the point of starting a website.

Instead, aim to find something that you are interested in, as well as something you know a little (or a lot) about. In fact, make a list of 5-10 topics that interest you and see what kind of ideas come to mind.

Being passionate about your niche is going to guide you through the rough patches, inspire you to develop your skillset, and ultimately make you money in the long run.

Your site visitors will know when you are not that interested in a particular topic. Do not make that mistake if you are looking to build a large following.

Step 2: Determine Your Niche Size

After deciding on a few solid niche ideas, you must do you due diligence and ensure that your ideas are viable for success. In fact, this is true whether you want to build an international eCommerce shop or simply share your best ideas with loyal readers. The point is to make sure your niche is going to be interesting and valuable enough for people to come to your website.

Take your cues from Goldilocks and find the perfect balance. If your niche is too large, it is likely there is way too much competition out there to make a mark quickly. If your niche is too small, you will not garner a big enough audience to make a difference either.

Aim to find something popular enough to bring your site traffic, but not too broad that site visitors will click on your website by accident and quickly bounce back to their search results.

For example, let’s say you want to start a food blog that focuses on desserts. When you niche related keywords into the Google Keyword Planner, you will see these types of results:

• “Desserts” – 1,220,000
• “Chocolate Desserts” – 33,100
• “Chocolate and Peanut Butter Desserts” – 720

Each number represents a specific keyword’s search popularity. This will give you a rough estimate on the kind of site traffic you might expect to receive monthly based on that particular keyword.

As you can see, the keyword “Desserts” is far too broad. On the other hand, “Chocolate and Peanut Butter Desserts” is far too narrow. The sweet spot here seems to be “Chocolate Desserts”.

Search Volume

Another great way to check your estimated monthly traffic based on keyword popularity is to use the free Search Volume tool found here. Simply enter one keyword per line and click Submit. You will then be given an estimated volume of searches performed each month for each keyword you entered.

For example, using the same dessert example as above:

Here, you can see that again “Chocolate and Peanut Butter Desserts” is not really a popular search term. And, “Desserts” is extremely popular, which will make it hard for you to get seen.

However, “Chocolate Desserts” is searched enough on a monthly basis to be considered a good niche without being too broad. In fact, a niche like this is likely to have just enough people searching for the kind of information you will be providing, and make you successful at the same time.

Step 3: Check for Profitability

If you are starting a website with the intentions of making money, you have to pick a niche that will do just that – make you money. And, while interests and passion are important, so is profitability.

Here are some things to consider when it comes to your niche and making money:

• Do you have enough resources to create a solid business or following?
• How easy will it be to attract advertisers wanting to market their products and services on your website?
• Are there affiliate programs available dealing with your niche?
• Are other people making money using the same niche?
• What is your competition like?

To find out if there are affiliate programs you can take advantage of, just Google “your keyword” + “affiliate programs” and see what comes up.

To see if people are making money by selling items related to your niche, check out ClickBank.com, under Affiliate Marketplace, and do a quick keyword search. This also doubles as a way to see what kind of affiliate programs are out there relating to your preferred niche.

Read complete article at Onextrapixel.

But why do they spin?

Well, there are a few theories:

Some think that the sound of the slap as the dolphin belly flops back into the water lets the rest of their pod, and even distant dolphins know where they are.

Others speculate that the splash helps a dolphin to accent an emotion, like we do with an exclamation point; communicating happiness to anger or fear.

And some observers feel that they spin above the surface to rid themselves of parasites.

And although no one is 100% sure why they do it, the spinner dolphin is surely one of the most incredible animals on earth!

But what if history had taken a different course? What if the asteroid had missed or arrived a few minutes earlier? That is the scenario suggested by researchers featured in The Day the Dinosaurs Died, a recent BBC documentary. These scientists – including geologist Sean Gulick of the University of Texas – argue that if the asteroid had arrived mere moments earlier or later, rather than hitting the shallow waters of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, it would have plunged into the deep sea of the Pacific or Atlantic oceans, absorbing some of the force and limiting the expulsion of sulphur-rich sediments that choked the atmosphere for the months or years ahead.

Giant pterosaurs with enormous wingspans could dominate the skies.

Had that been the case, there would still have been a catastrophe and extinctions, but some larger dinosaurs may have survived. Pondering the course of this alternative timeline is an intriguing thought experiment that dinosaur scientists are only too enthusiastic to speculate about. Would dinosaurs be here today? What new dinosaurs might have appeared? Would dinosaurs have developed human-like intelligence? Would mammals have remained in the shadows? Would humans have evolved and – as depicted in Disney’s 2015 film The Good Dinosaur – found a way to survive alongside them?

Some researchers argue that, even without the asteroid, the reign of the dinosaurs may already have been ending. “I take a slightly unorthodox view that dinosaurs were doomed anyway because of cooling climates,” says Mike Benton, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol in the UK. “They had just about held their own to the end of the Cretaceous, but we know that mammals were diversifying… [and] dinosaurs had already been declining for 40 million years.” Benton believes mammals would still have replaced the dinosaurs. He is an author of a 2016 paper suggesting dinosaurs were slower than mammals at replacing extinct species.

Just as our ancestors had to deal with sabretooth cats, early humans would have had to deal with the dromaeosaurs and abelisaurus

Other experts take a very different view. Carnivorous dinosaur researcher Tom Holtz at the University of Maryland in College Park, US, agrees there would have been some extinctions 66 million years ago anyway, due to eruptions and massive lava flows at the Deccan Traps in India – but he says “there’s nothing otherwise, once you’re into the Palaeocene and Eocene, that would have affected general dinosaur biology. It would be a world that Cretaceous dinosaurs would still be comfortable in.”

Stephen Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh adds that dinosaurs had survived well, doing a great diversity of things, through changing climates, for 160 million years. “Dinosaurs were still very adaptable at the end of the Cretaceous, that’s not the sign of a group that’s wasting away to extinction, just waiting for some asteroid to knock them off. It’s the sign of a group that still has a lot of evolutionary potential.”

Assuming dinosaurs had survived, what factors might have shaped their evolution? Climate change might have perhaps been the first big hurdle. An event known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago, saw average global temperatures reach 8C hotter than today, and rainforests spanning much of the planet.

In this hothouse world with abundant vegetation perhaps many long-necked sauropods might have grown more rapidly, breeding at a younger age and shrinking in size; several ‘dwarf’ sauropods (some little bigger than a cow) were already known from European islands in the late Cretaceous. The largest titanosaurs of mid-Cretaceous South America – 40m-long (131ft) creatures heavier than two jet aircraft – were already long gone.

Another trend in the later Cretaceous was the rise of flowering plants or angiosperms. During the Jurassic, most plants were ferns and gymnosperms (which include ginkgoes, cycads and conifers). These tend to be less nutritious than angiosperms, and the huge size of sauropods may have been driven by the processing time and gut size needed to digest them efficiently.

“If plant evolution continued as it has in our modern world, the herbivorous dinosaurs would almost certainly have had a diet primarily of flowering plants,” notes Matt Bonnan a palaeontologist at Stockton University in New Jersey. “Given that they are somewhat easier to digest, perhaps we would have seen an overall decrease in body size… the gigantic sizes of Mesozoic dinosaurs might have disappeared.”

Along with flowering plants came fruit, which co-evolved with mammals and birds to help plants disperse seeds. Might monkey-like dinosaurs have evolved to take advantage of this resource, just as primates did in our timeline? “Many birds eat fruit. So, there may also have been non-bird dinosaurs adapted to a frugivorous diet,” says Bonnan.
Brusatte agrees that some “small, feathered dinosaurs might have gone the route of primates,” as some were already scampering about in the branches. Others may have become nectar-drinkers, spreading pollen from flower to flower in the process.

1. How it is spelled – keep it short and simple, preferably the exact name of your business. Do not use hyphens or at least no more than one. These are difficult to remember and insert, especially along with dots and slashes so the easier to remember the better.

2. Keyword optimisation – if possible, include high-ranking keywords so that search engine spiders recognise and rank higher positions within listings. By accessing keyword analysis tools from Google and other search engine providers, you can identify the terms commonly used when people are looking for information on the internet. In fact, typing the first words into Google provides a list of the most recent and popular terms. This gives you a starting point.

3. Use a play on words – but do not be too clever. The easier to remember the better. A good example is phones4u where letters and numbers have been used. Again, remember to consider your business name and incorporate this, if possible, somewhere in the title. Make it too complicated and anyone attempting to type in your address may stumble across other websites and be distracted.

4. Research possibilities – use the facilities provided by domain registers to try various combinations and wording as some may be very expensive where others are only a couple of dollars per year. When deciding on your name, you normally pay up front for the first two years again, dependent on how much the name costs. You can help research your domain name here https://www.freeparking.co.nz/domain-names

5. The suffix or extension – or the .com or .co.uk. The dots are very important in a website address and it the.com ending is normally used in business. It is also more universal and worldwide whereas using .co.uk will link mainly to the United Kingdom. There are also lots of other file extensions available including .org, .au and so on. It is your website name so you choose. Bigger companies tend to buy all of the possible extensions along with their main name to prevent anyone using their reputation to gain monetary success.

6. Unique – it is true that most of the branded domain names can be taken however, your business name will no doubt be unique and you can build a reputation around it. By creating marketing and association with good quality information or products, your name will be remembered and easily recalled.

What Is An NDA?

An NDA is a type of contract in which one party, typically called the receiving party, agrees to keep confidential certain information it learns from the other party, typically called the disclosing party. NDAs can also be mutual, whereby each party agrees to keep certain types of shared information confidential. Frequently, an NDA will specify that the project, such as the development of a new app, should not be discussed except with those who have also signed the NDA.

An NDA is very useful for clarifying the expectations of the parties at the outset of the relationship. It also enables the disclosing party to feel comfortable sharing confidential information that is crucial for the project to proceed.

NDAs can also protect trade secrets. A trade secret could be anything from a business method to a customer list. It could even be a special formula that has economic value because it is kept secret from the general public and cannot easily be figured out by third parties based on publicly available information.

Theft of trade secrets is a major concern in both the United States and Europe. In the US, most states have already adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, which defines trade secrets as well as remedies under state law for the theft of such trade secrets. In 2016, the US went one step further with the Defend Trade Secrets Act, which also protects trade secrets under federal law. In Europe, a 2013 study found that more than 20% of companies in the European Union, including many technology companies, have suffered such theft. In 2016, the European Commission proposed new rules to improve fairness and consistency across the EU with regard to access for legal actions for trade secret theft. These rules were approved by the European Council in May 2016. Therefore, in both the US and Europe, there is currently a big push to protect trade secrets and to punish violators more forcefully.

Why Are You Being Asked To Sign An NDA?

If you are a developer, trade secrets such as algorithms, prototypes, designs, drawings and business intelligence might be of critical importance to your client’s business. Your client might even have an invention that it plans to patent.

Today, both the US and Europe use a first-to-file patent system, making it more important than ever to keep inventive information confidential until a patent application is safely on file with the US Patent and Trademark Office or the European Patent Office. Given the value of these types of intellectual property, your client will naturally want to protect them with an NDA.

Unfortunately, the histories of some of today’s most popular apps and websites are littered with examples of people who were damaged because they didn’t have a good NDA in place. Twitter cofounder Noah Glass came up with the name of the ubiquitous platform and did a lot of the early work on it, but he failed to secure NDAs at the outset of the company to protect his work and ideas. He was later forced out. Web app developer Theodore Schroeder claims that investor Ben Cohen stole his ideas about the concept of “boards” and infinite scrolling and shared them with Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann. However, Schroeder could not prove his case, and it was dismissed. In both of these cases, a well-drafted NDA could have helped to protect these developers.

How Do You Make Sure The NDA Is Fair?

When you are given an NDA, your responsibility is to read it over and make sure it is also fair to you. When reviewing the clauses, here are five important issues to keep in mind.

Read full article at Smashing Magazine.