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     Hugo Roberts


Author, Editor, and Webdesigner

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)



Website of award winning writer, editor, web designer, and former psychologist Hugo Roberts with his life story, literary awards, published prose and poems. This page contains the most Frequently Asked Questions by visitors of his sites and blogs. There are links to: writers' resources, to a page with the author's favorite books, to other writers' resources: useful sites for writers, news by or about him, a complete list of his prose, to his namesakes (other people named Hugo Roberts) where you can find out about your own namesakes, a page with new jokes every week, and to a contact page for messages, comments, questions, or other feedback. Click here to request the Contact/Feedback Form. You can also click here to go to Easy Comments or scroll down to it and quickly post remarks or questions. Please help the author find a lost copy of an article or request his services.

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Facts on Faqs

Are these all the Faqs (Frequently Asked Questions)?
No. Most questions are answered on the pages. For that reason and because the contents of the sites do not exactly overlap, you may want to search this site (click to go to orange box below) if you have a question. In case you didn’t succeed try: search the site www.hugoroberts.com in the green section on top of the page. Also, some pages have their own FAQ section. One example is the Home page and its Kwakoe Award. If you want to know more about the Kwakoe (or Kwaku) Festival and Award, please click: Kwakoe Festival/Events Explained in Dutch: http://www.kwakoe.nl/index.php?id=1320


A LINK TO FAQS ON YOUR SITE OR BLOG?
If you found useful information on this page, you can link to it on your web site or blog. This way your visitors can also benefit from it without leaving your site or blog. Simply copy the text from one of the boxes below and and paste it into the HTML code of your website (or blog).

Unchanged it will look like this:
Facts at your fingertips?
Please click here for useful questions and answers.


   
Unchanged it will look like this:
Facts at your fingertips?                This
Please click here for useful questions and answers.

By clicking post a comment you can tell me about the link and let me know if you want a link back.
This page has a Google page rank of 2, I can link to you from it, and/or from its homepage with a Google page rank of 2 and/or from page with a Google page rank of 3 with hundreds of backlinks. This will increase the popularity of your site (see pagerank, back links, and SEO terms explained) also SEO WORK PAYS OFF).
It depends on several things, such as: how many links you make, where you place the link(s) to us, etc.


Writing

How do I get my work published?
There are several ways to accomplish this. Read some of the many books on how to get published. I have to refer you to my bibliography. I recommend Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying out of the Rejection Pile and The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life, but many others are good. Navigate to Writers’ Resources or click: Bibliography by Hugo Roberts writer & editor. There are several groups for people ready to get published. Join WVU; for a small fee you can take courses and/or participate in groups, for example: on Marketing, Writing Query Letters and Synopses, etc. click: Writers’ Village University: http://writersvillage.com. They offer over 200 courses and groups.
If you’re beyond all this, you may want to consider small publishers; they have more time for you and your work and may publish your work in paper and as an eBook. Visit: ePress ebooks and epress-online Publisher Blog.


How do I win a writing contest?
If you want to win a writing contest such as the Kwakoe Literature Prize (see next question), the first thing you have to do is participate. They will not come knocking on your door. You can find writing contests listed for free by clicking: About.Com: http://fictionwriting.about.com/ under Fiction Writing you’ll see Short Story Contests by Month, etc. If you want to be emailed about contests that meet your own specific requirements, take an (inexpensive) subscription at: First Writer: http://firstwriter.com.
When you see a competition you like, download or request their regulations and read them carefully. Do exactly what they tell you to do. You may want to revise your entry to make it more appealing to them. Send it in before the deadline and do not go under or over the word count limits. For more details, read the eBook I wanna win by .Cheryl Wright that can be purchased and downloaded via Internet.
Consider engaging the services of an award winning writer/advisor (who does not charge as though you’re already making millions with your writing), please click: Do you need Hugo Roberts's help or services?


What is the Kwakoe Literature Prize?
Many writing competitions are coupled to a festival. The Kwakoe Literature Prize is awarded during the annual Kwakoe Festival in Amsterdam. If you want to know more about the Kwakoe (or Kwaku) Festival and Prize, please click: Kwakoe Festival/Events Explained in Dutch: http://www.kwakoe.nl/index.php?id=1320


Where can I learn how to improve my writing?
Please look at my bibliography on how to improve your writing skills. Seriously consider Mark Baechtel: Shaping the Story, Janet Burroway: Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, and Gotham Writers' Workshop Faculty: Writing Fiction. Navigate to Writers’ Resources or click: Bibliography by Hugo Roberts writer & editor.
For articles with instructions and tips on writing, make sure you visit GENERAL WRITING LINKS Then click: MY FAVORITE STORY WRITING LINKS to get "A list of my favotite places for information on story writing."
You can also improve your writing by taking courses, participating in groups etc. WVU has both; they offer over 200 low cost courses and groups. Click: Writers’ Village University: http://writersvillage.com.
Consider engaging the services of an award winning writer/editor (who does not charge as though you’re already making millions with your writing), please click: Do you need Hugo Roberts's help or services?




Web Sites

Where can I find information on web sites and Internet?
Below I offer quite a bit of information. If you want to know more about (registering) domain names, (free) hosting, or other things about the web and Internet, you can read more about these subjects by clicking: Webdesigner and Webmaster tools or by visiting: http://www.hugoroberts.com/news.html.

How do I get me my own web site?
There are a couple of steps to take before you have your web site up and running. Before you do anything else, ask yourself a couple of questions, like: what this site is for (is it for business or for pleasure)? About the budget and size (is it supposed to be inexpensive and small, or the opposite?). This makes it easier to answer the questions you will have to face sooner or later. In the following sentences they are often stated as "If..."
1. Think up a domain name. If you've decided that this will be a funny site to entertain your family and friend, then a funny name may be appropriate. Other than that, it can be your name or anything else, as long as it is available. To find out if a name is available to use for your site, click: http://www.urlpagerank.com and type in the name as directed (usually a string of only lower case letters (and numbers), preceded by www. (WWW stands for World Wide Web, the application used for most Internet traffic). That string is called a domain name, so one of mine is www.hugoroberts.com. The .com is called TLD (TLD stands for top-level domain); there are several, the most popular ones are .com, .net, .org, and .info. Everybody can use .com and it's the most used TLD. It is customary to precede the domain name by http:// (http specifies that a browser such as Internet Explorer should use the http protocol). The final result is a URL (a URL: Uniform Resource Locator) and includes the domain name. So my URL is: http://www.hugoroberts.com. Once you've picked a domain name/URL register it at once, or somebody else may and you'll have to pay more for another TLD or even dream up another name.

2. Then you have to find a place to host the site. This is a computer that makes the site accessible to anybody who wants to visit it. There are gratis hosts (often supported by ads), but usually you may have to pay a fee. Although free hosts offer a small monetary advantage, the disadvantages are: the ads, the limited possibilities and restrictions, and the danger of the host terminating the service for one reason or the other. No matter how small a hosting fee one pays a host, it constitutes business that the host may want to retain or sell. You can look up web hosting on Internet but don't click the sites that aren't approved by McAfee SiteAdvisor; even then, be careful. One of the tools you can use to find a host is:
Web Hosting Reviews
Thousands of web hosting USER reviews. Don't sign-up with any web host before checking out the web's biggest web hosting reviews site first, available at WebHostingReviews.com.

3. If your site is just for you, your family, and friends, all you have to do is to upload the pages of your site (the information you want to display on the web) the way the host tells you to, and you're set. Even if your site is meant to entertain your family and friends, it has to perform. In case of a business it has to perform well to stay in business. So design an attractive and effective site and keep it up-to-date.

4. If you want people to find you through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb, there are a number of things you have to do even when you use your own name. It is more difficult if you want to have people find you under, say: accountant or hairdresser, since there are millions of those on Internet. There's where the SEO work comes in (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization; you'll have to worry about PageRank, back links, etc; read: SEO terms explained). You can already do SEO work by doing some promoting on your own, for example by asking people to link to your site.

5. If your site is meant to be accessible by the general public, you have to have it verified (see Webdesigner and Webmaster Tools under: Site verification). Then it has to be submitted to search engines (the major ones first; it can't hurt if smaller ones also know about your site). On practically all search pages of the search engines you’ll find a link to Suggest or Submit a site. Read more on this by clicking: Webdesigner and Webmaster Tools under Submit your site.
After your site is the hands (claws?) of these web crawlers, you can sit back, relax, and watch how your counter is tallying the visitors.
You can do all this by yourself. There are a few free courses you can take to learn about the Internet and to learn HTML (the language of the Internet). For example, About.Com: http://webdesign.about.com/ and Writers’ Village University: http://writersvillage.com

If you don't want to go through all this, but still want to welcome visitors on your site, I'll be happy set up your site for under $100.00 (click Service for details). As a bonus I'll throw in some SEO work if you need to increase your PageRank and/or back links (otherwise, they'll be 0). I can also move, change, update, or maintain your site for a small fee. For a free price estimate or to request my services, please click here for Help or Services.


What does PageRank mean? What are back links? What does SEO stands for?
There are millions of web sites on Internet all competing for the search engines (such as Yahoo and Google) to locate them. These terms have all something to do with search engines and the way they find and rate sites.
PageRank: The most important sites are given a Google PageRank of 10 (PR10), while the least important sites are given a PageRank of 0 (PR0). For explanations and a link to find out and increase the PageRank of your own site; please click: http://www.urlpagerank.com
Back links: One of the ways to increase your PageRank is to have sites link to your site. The link popularity of your site increases as there are more links to your site. This you can check for the major search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb, find out your PageRank, and lots of other useful information by clicking http://www.diagnosticoweb.com/webcheck/ or : http://www.diagnosticoweb.com/
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): You can read about SEO and marketing in the article “Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Content Relevancy and Link Popularity Explained.” Click http://www.seo-news.com/ By now you must have become aware that there is a lot to this business. In fact, many companies do most or all of their business via Internet. To increase their sales, they may hire consultants like me to do their SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This way their company is found quickly and they are listed first or at least on the first couple of pages when potential customers search for certain products or services. For a free price estimate or to request services, click: Do you need Hugo Roberts's help or services?


I’m getting confused with the many names of your site, what is it?
It’s confusing indeed. The domain name is www.hugoroberts.com since 2004. When it was registered and hosted by planet.nl, they internally redirected the site to http://home.planet.nl/~rober160. When planet was taken over by KPN, they the changed the redirection into http://home.kpn.nl/rober160. From December 2008, the site is registered and hosted elsewhere and the name is and will remain: www.hugoroberts.com. We have several sites and blogs; here’s a list:
www.hugoroberts.com has the following features: links to writer’s resources (publishers, writing contests, courses, tips, etc.) and the possibility to play the national anthems of Suriname, The Netherlands, the United States, and Nepal. There's a list of the author's work, of his namesakes (you can find out about your own names and namesakes), and a link to news by or about him.
www.writerhugoroberts.com features: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), other writer’s resource--some of the author’s favorite books (most are on writing). Also, every week there is a page with lots of new jokes.
http://www.hugoroberts-writer-editor-webdesigner.com This site is home of the Webdesigner and Webmaster Tools in addition to Roberts's Travels with photos and other images from Asia and the speaking character/virtual employee.
http://www.webmasters4design.com/ To engage our Webmaster/Web designer's, and Writers’ Services.


Blogs:
http://writerhugoroberts.blogspot.com. Offers an easy way to post comments/questions or discuss issues and displays a new Inspirational Quote every time you visit. You could read the latest news about computers and internet or look for a gadget, widget, or other program.
http://hugoroberts.blogspot.com/ also offers an easy way to post comments/questions or discuss issues and daily displays a new Notable Shakespeare Quote. I also post some of my essays, columns, and articles here. You’ll also find Flight Status (airport arrival, departures, etc.) Personal Travel Agent (book your own low cost flights), and Travel coupon/promo codes. There is more for travelers on the page Hugo Roberts's Travels.
http://aboutnamesakes.blogspot.com/ is a blog where you will be entertained and informed about names and namesakes. You’ll find out the meaning, origin, and popularity of your name, Famous Namesakes, statistics, history, etc. The meaning of most names is given, not only of American and Anglo-saxon names, but also of African, Arabic, Chinese, French, Hindi, and Spanish names. You can post questions, comments, or articles or discuss everything about names and namesakes. Feel free to add a link to your site in all comments, essays, columns, and articles posted here or on any of my web sites or blogs. This will increase the popularity of your site (see pagerank, back links, and SEO terms explained) also SEO WORK PAYS OFF).


How do you know the countries your visitors are from?
Our sitemeter counters give various breakdowns of visitors to our sites and blogs. You can contact them by clicking on the counter of one of our pages or by clicking the link: http://www.sitemeter.com/.


What are the top 10 countries?
Are there any visitors from my country?
Below is the list of the This countries from where our visitors came. They are in alphabetical sequence; some countries are followed by their rank in our top ten list). The ranks 11-20 are shown between parentheses. Not included are countries unknown to the system and the European Union.

          Country name                         Rank in top ten (top 20)