What is normalization?

Simply put, normalization is defined as the process of organizing data to minimize redundancy. The end goal is to decompose relations between tables with anomalies in order to produce smaller, better structured relations. This usually involves dividing larger tables into smaller and less redundant tables, then defining relationships between them. The objective of a normalized database structure is to isolate data so that adjustments to table data can be made in just one table and propagated through the rest of the database tables through defined dependencies.

There are 4 objectives to normalization, as defined by E.F. Codd in “Further Normalization of the Data Base Relational Model”:

• To free the collection of relations from undesirable insertion, update and deletion dependencies;
• To reduce the need for restructuring the collection of relations as new types of data are introduced, and thus increase the life span of application programs;
• To make the relational model more informative to users;
• To make the collection of relations neutral to the query statistics, where these statistics are liable to change as time goes by.

An Example

Confused yet? Let’s try to clarify things with an example. Imagine we have the database table below:

What happens when the name of the Biology major changes? We would have to update every single row with that major in it. As well, the data is redundant because the data for the studentMajor column is repeated over and over again within that table. A normalized solution to this problem would involve two tables instead of just one:

With our new database structure, changing the name of a major is as easy as changing one table row. As well, the data is no longer redundant since we are storing IDs instead of actual majors in the student table. If we create a dependency within these tables, modifying (for instance) a major in the major table will cascade the corresponding changes through the student table. Brilliant!

This works if every student has one and only one major. What would we need to do to normalize a database that allows for students to have multiple majors? The solution: you could add a studentID column to the Students table, remove the studentMajor column, and then create a new table called studentMajorXReference. StudentMajorXReference will contain rows of data that relate students to majors. See the example below:

Hopefully you now understand the basics of database normalization and the benefits that can be obtained by utilizing this principle. New database architects usually discover the fallacies of their design after application launch – when I first started database work, I created databases that I would be embarrassed to share with others now. The key is being able to deploy a scalable, robust design that minimizes data redundancy. Normalization isn’t a finite solution though, and there are plenty of reasons to denormalize a database structure. However, if you can keep normalization in mind during your database development you can save yourself a big headache down the road.

If you write JavaScript code and utilize JQuery (which you really should), you may be familiar with JQuery’s UI Library. JQuery UI is built on the JQuery Library and enables web developers to create cross-browser compatible and CSS3-compliant widgets used to build highly interactive web applications. UI works out of the box, but the true power is in customization – and that’s exactly what the Themeroller tool enables you to do. Themeroller is a free tool on JQuery UI’s website that allows users to choose a base theme and customize each UI widget to mesh perfectly with their web application’s color scheme and design. The tool provides real-time theme updating as colors and options are tweaked, allowing you to easily build and export a sexy UI theme. For more information on how to build and implement a JQuery UI theme, check out the earlier tutorial article I wrote.

Adobe BrowserLab

Adobe Labs come out with some fantastic tools – and the Browser Lab is one such tool that should be utilized prior to launch of any project. I tend to use this project throughout development. BrowserLab is an online service that helps ensure web content displays as intended and is useful for browser compatibility checks. Often times this can be a headache – downloading many different browsers is tedious and it is almost impossible to test on all available browsers. What’s more, BrowserLab lets you test operating systems as well. You can also use their diagnostic tools to optimize your website. This extremely valuable tool is free through April 12, 2012 – at which point it seems that Adobe may charge for the service. Indispensible tool.

Dropbox

Dropbox is my favorite file sharing tool. I can’t say enough about how awesome it is. The concept is very simple – once the software is installed, a Dropbox folder is shown on your computer’s desktop. Simply drag and drop files into the folder and they will be instantly shared and available to other team members in their Dropbox folder. All you need to do is share the folder with others. Dropbox not only works with PCs and Macs, it also works with smartphones and tablets. What’s even cooler about Dropbox is that you don’t necessarily need the software installed to access your folder. Dropbox files are accessible through Dropbox’s website from anywhere in the world. Drag, drop, share, and get things done.

AjaxLoad: Ajax Loading GIF Generator

This simple, sexy tool generates free animated gifs that can be displayed when you are fetching content from the server with an AJAX call. You are able to choose from 39 different icon types and fully customize the animated icon’s colors, including transparency. You can have an icon in about 10 seconds. This tool has saved me countless hours of unnecessary image editing work and is fully customizable. What I like most about it is the ease of use – just choose an icon type, grab some hex color values from your stylesheet, and generate your icon. The icons are very high quality and really add a creative spark to your web applications. Highly recommended.

W3C Markup Validation Service

This tool is a must-have for any developer. W3C’s Markup Validator is a free tool that you can use to validate your markup. By validating the syntax of your code, you are able to provide cross-compliant code and can limit the number of display and performance discrepancies. The W3C Markup Validator takes a web address as input, or optionally a file/some code, and displays any warnings you made need to know about. It is a very good idea to validate all of your code before going live. From W3C:  While contemporary Web browsers do an increasingly good job of parsing even the worst HTML “tag soup”, some errors are not always caught gracefully. Very often, different software on different platforms will not handle errors in a similar fashion, making it extremely difficult to apply style or layout consistently.

Kuler

Adobe Labs make me smile. There are a number of tools that Adobe Labs puts out that are extremely helpful for web developers. One such tool, Kuler, helps developers develop color schemes and determine their related hexadecimal values. You are able to dynamically select colors and color schemes, compare them against each other, and create the perfect color scheme for your project. Kuler also allows you to save swatches/schemes, browse other people’s schemes, and extract color palettes from pictures. Once you come up with your color scheme/swatch, you can easily export and download the scheme for use in Adobe products like Creative Suite. Great tool.

Pingdom Tools

Pingdom Tools is a cool web service that helps debug loading issues on a given website. Pingdom determines how long it takes each page to load and notes the respective loading times for each object on the page. Using this tool can help you determine which of your web elements are taking the longest time to load so you can take action and optimize page load times. The tool shows each object’s load times with both statistics and a visual bar, allowing you to sort elements and determine problem areas. The tool also shows other relevant stats, such as total load time and size of elements/pages.

Toggl

If you or your company bill clients by the hour, Toggl is an excellent tool for you. Toggl is a time tracking tool that helps you log your hours to bill clients. Since it is an online tool, it is available from any computer in the world – this makes working on the go especially easy. Within a few clicks, you are able to create a project and start logging your time. The tool also produces performance / time consumption reports and other reports that will be helpful for you and your team. The tool can be embedded in iGoogle, Gmail, and more so that it’s easy to share data with others. It’s free to use for up to 5 users, so for small teams this is a great tool to use.

Mockingbird

Mockingbird is an online tool that enables developers and designer to quickly create easy wireframe web project mockups. This is very useful when you receive a new project and wish to brainstorm ideas with your team or partner. The easy drag-and-drop interface couldn’t be simpler, and you can create as many pages as you like (even link them together). After you complete a Mockingbird site mockup, the tool provides a link for you to share with others. Great tool for collaboration and brainstorming in early development stage.

FavIcon Generator by Dynamic Drive

This handy tool by Dynamic Drive serves as a FavIcon generator. FavIcons are the little 16×16 pixel icons you sometimes see inside a browser’s location bar and bookmark menu. They help brand your website and increase visibility in users’ bookmark menus. This tool makes it easy: choose a file from your computer and generate your icon! You can even merge your icon with 32×32 or 48×48 pixel desktop icons as well. Best of all, the tool is completely free and Dynamic Drive also gives you the one-line piece of code you will need to include on your website for the FavIcon to work.

Sounds pricey, huh? It is. Granted, the web design and internet marketing sector is very competitive here in North Texas and converting a single client can easily cover your advertising costs and provide a profit. However, does it really matter to you how a potential client locates your website? To a certain extent it does matter – there are obviously some areas of the web that I don’t want my company associated with (like spammy sites, porn, and other inappropriate content). However, there are PPC options outside of Google Adwords that are reputable, can deliver results, and are much more affordable.

Microsoft Adcenter

Recently, Microsoft Adcenter merged with Yahoo’s advertising service. Microsoft claims that Adcenter reaches about 31.6% of the US search market (161 million unique searches every day) and 5.9% of Canada’s search market. This reach is possible because Adcenter serves search ads through Bing, MSN, and Yahoo! So, if you were to ignore Adcenter, you would essentially be missing out on a little less than a third of the total US search market.

Set up almost identically to Adwords (with a few less bells and whistles) , Adcenter provides a much cheaper alternative to Adwords. There is less competition because it is not as popular and well known as Adwords is, and this lack of competition translates into fantastic advertising opportunities. In order to test this theory, we recently launched our first Adcenter campaign. Although there were definitely some hiccups in the setup process – it took almost a week for our ads to start serving because Microsoft has to manually approve every ad and review each campaign – once our ads started serving we were shocked at the results. In the $500 Adcenter campaign of ours, we paid roughly $1.50 per click on average resulting in 333 clicks (our average ad position was 1.2). This was a 469% click increase for Adcenter as compared to Adwords for the same budget.

Why don’t more businesses use Adcenter? I think for one, there is a lack of awareness that Adcenter even exists. Google does such a good job marketing its services and is so well known that bit-part players like Adcenter are often overlooked. In order to gain an advantage and get a better return on investment, you should really consider implementing an Adcenter campaign.

Comparing Adwords & Adcenter in Our Two Campaigns

Final Thoughts

Although the Click Through Rates and Conversion Rates were higher with Adwords, Adcenter was able to get 469% more clicks for our budget than Adwords did. This resulted in more conversions for our budget (in our case, we consider a conversion to be when a potential client contacts us either through phone or through the contact form on our website). So, even though Google has better performance in a few categories, Adcenter seems to get a bigger bang for your buck. Due to the success of our Adcenter campaign, we are now advising our clients to begin utilizing Adcenter in their PPC campaigns and invite you to do the same.

JQuery UI provides abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications.

If you haven’t jumped on the JQuery bandwagon quite yet, you really should. These libraries are used by Google, Dell, Bank of America, Major League Baseball, NBC, CBS, Netflix, Digg, and thousand others. If you aren’t quite convinced yet, here are 5 reasons why you should utilize JQuery and JQuery UI:

• They are CSS3 compliant
• They are cross-browser compatible
• The libraries are lightweight and load quickly
• Powerful widgets and effects are robust and attractive
• There is great documentation and support available within the JQuery community

Those that aren’t familiar with JQuery yet may want to learn a little bit about the library before jumping into UI and theme design. For the purposes of this tutorial, I will assume that you understand the basics of JQuery.

Step 1

Go to JQuery’s ThemeRoller website. The menu on the left shows your settings – and the UI elements to the right of the screen show how your elements look like with the current settings. . You are able to view the style of common UI elements in real-time as you make changes to any parameter – customize font settings, state settings, and much more. Use the same color hex values that you use on your site where it makes sense so that the theme matches your website style. Play around with the settings until all of the elements shown are styled just how you want them to be.

Step 2

Hit the “Download Theme” button. At this point you can customize which components you want to download. Most of the time I don’t uncheck anything. Under advanced settings you can name your theme if you’d like – but leave the CSS Scope field blank unless you are going to utilize multiple themes on a single website (this is beyond the scope of this tutorial). Hit the Download button.

Step 3

Unzip the folder to your desired location. In the root folder there is an HTML file showing you most of the UI elements that are styled with your theme. Viewing the source of this file is extremely helpful – you can see first-hand how to implement UI elements and reference your required libraries and CSS. In the /css directory, locate the CSS file and images folder. Move these into your website or application’s directory (I put mine in the /css folder), then move the two JavaScript files as well (I put mine in the /js folder).

Step 4

Include the JavaScript and CSS files in the <head> section of your document.

<link type="text/css" href="css/jquery-ui-1.8.14.custom.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-ui-1.8.14.custom.min.js"></script>

Step 5

Done! You are ready to start using JQuery UI! Make sure to reference the JQuery UI documentation – it’s full of great support material including options, methods, and examples for each element. Remember to use the sample HTML file included in your JQuery UI download for samples on how to implement specific UI elements.

Google Adwords

The PPC advertising model is lead by Google Adwords, which dominates the industry because of its versatility, reach, and targeting potential. With Adwords, you create Ad Groups that are full of keywords or keyword phrases in which you would like your Ad to appear when someone enters that term into a Google search. Each Ad Group can have one or many ads. You then set a maximum bid price for each keyword. When someone enters one of the keywords that you have targeted into Google, Google determines the rank of your Ad based on your maximum bid and your quality score, and then displays it within the search results. If the user doesn’t click, you are charged nothing. If the user does click, you are charged a fee of up to your maximum bid amount (usually it is less).

With Adwords, you can define your target market by more than just keywords. Here are some of the other things that Adwords can do:

• You can specify a geographic location so your ads are only displayed to users within that geographic area. For example, our company targets users within 100 miles of Dallas, TX.
• You can specify which devices your ads will be displayed on – PCs, mobile phones, tablets, etc
• You can choose to have your ads displayed on the content network – which is a collection of websites that Google displays ads on (the CPC of these is cheaper than the search network)
• You can target specific time periods. You want your ad displayed on weekdays between 9 and 5, and weekends all the time? Easy!

For companies or individuals with a small advertising budget, it could be more beneficial to use as targeted keywords as possible in order to make sure that those viewing your ads are most likely to convert. If your budget is small compared to others, you should target keywords like “dallas small business web design” instead of “dallas web design”. As your budget and business grows, you will likely be able to compete for more competitive ad spaces.

There are other PPC advertising sites besides Google Adwords that are worth mentioning.

Facebook & Microsoft AdCenter

Facebook allows for unprecedented PPC targeting while at the same time offering much lower CPC rates. The drawback is that you don’t target search terms, but instead target demographics of your target market. Since Facebook users enter profile information like location, interests, age, children, etc. – you are able to target these demographics. If you own a vineyard and want to target Facebook users over 30, that are interested in wine, and that are located within 300 miles of you – you can do it.

Microsoft AdCenter is Microsoft’s response to Google Adwords. AdCenter ads run on the Microsoft Network and Yahoo! You will see a lot of overlap here with Google Adwords, but the benefits include a new medium in which to differentiate yourself (people still use Yahoo) and generally cheaper CPC rates for keywords.

Conclusion

There are many different advertising services that your business can take advantage of on the Internet. Most of them have moved to the PPC model, though it is possible to still use the CPM model with some services. If you understand your target market, PPC advertising allows unprecedented targeting methods and can really help your business convert new customers. Choosing an advertising venue depends on a number of factors, and sometimes choosing more than one is absolutely the best approach. Some of the most successful marketing campaigns we manage utilize multiple channels to deliver maximum results. Always remember to stop and think about your target market before advertising. Acting hastily without planning could cost you unnecessary amounts of money and dilute your return on investment.

WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes. WordPress is limited only by your imagination. (And tech chops.)

Wordpress has evolved into a robust content management system that can run entire websites rather than just blogs. Our website is 100% wordpress-driven. We are able to create new pages, post new articles to our blog, and manage nearly every aspect of our website quickly and easily. Once a site is successfully setup and integrated into WordPress, companies and individuals are able manage their entire website without having to call us for updates. Sure, sometimes our clients call us and ask us to clean up their updates – but this takes significantly less time and money than posting the content ourselves.

We are able to build and customize WordPress themes for your business or organization. These themes enable websites that are run by WordPress to be completely customized for your business. Many WordPress-driven websites are developed and customized so well that clients have no idea the website is WordPress-based.

One of the most powerful aspects of WordPress is the ability to easily manage a blog for your company or website. Blogs help you reach out to your client base and can help validate you as an expert in your field. By blogging regularly, you give people a reason to come back to your website and foster sharing of your articles – which can increase visits to your website and improve rankings on search engines.

Wordpress also has thousands of plugins that can be added-in to your website extremely easily. These plugins work perfectly with your website and can add advanced functionalities relatively easily. Some examples of plugins include:

• Google Analytics Plugin – adds Google Analytics to all pages on your website
• WPTouch – creates a customizable mobile version of your website
• NextGEN Gallery – adds a fully customizable WordPress photo gallery
• BuddyPress – adds social networking and sharing tools to your website
• Testimonials – add testimonials to your website and embed them with a simple widget

For more information on WordPress Development, contact Pinpoint Web Solutions today. We can help explain how your business would benefits from a custom WordPress-driven website. Or, if you want to give it a shot yourself, check out the WordPress Documentation.

AJAX enables a web developer to process input data without having to reload the page, reload specific sections of a page, and more.

To get started, you need to download the JQuery library and refer to it in the <head> section of your site. Another approach is to just refer to Google’s hosted JQuery library – they keep it up-to-date with the latest stable version.

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.1/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Once you have this code in place, you are ready to start using JQuery. Let’s create a super-simple address book consisting of only names and phone numbers. You’ll need two <div>s here, one that contains the form and the other that contains all of the names and phone numbers we have saved.

<div id=”formdiv”>
<form name=”addressBook” >
Name: <input type=”text” name=”name” id=”name” />
<br />
Phone: <input type=”text” name=”phone” id=”phone” />
<input type=”submit” name=”submitMe” id=”submitMe” />
</form>
</div>
<div id=”addressData”>
</div>

Ok, now that the structure is in place, it’s time to get into some JQuery. The first order of business is understanding the $(document).ready() function. All code placed inside the function will be loaded as soon as the DOM is loaded but before the contents of the page are loaded. Take a look at the commented code below and try to make sense of it.

$(document).ready(function() {
//load the information that’s already saved in the database
$('#addressData).load('phoneNumbers.php);
$('#submitMe’ ).click(function() {
//function to be executed when a user clicks the submit button
var enteredName = $('#name).val();
var enteredPhone = $('#phone).val();
$('#addressData).load('phoneNumbers.php?name=’+ enteredName +’&number='+ enteredPhone, function() {
//function to be executed after the load was successfully performed
alert('Load was performed.');
});
});
});

Within your phoneNumbers.php file, you would need to check if the GET variables are set. If they are set, make the INSERT  into your database then SELECT your data from the database and display it. If they are not set, simply SELECT your data from the database and display it.

The logic of this, in plain English:

• When the document is ready to be written to, load the saved numbers in the database from phoneNumbers.php and place its output into the addressData <div>
• When the user clicks the submit button, send the input field data to phoneNumbers.php. The PHP script will do the database insertion and return the new data after the insertion. This information is loaded into the addressData <div>
• After the load is performed, display an alert box letting the user know that the load was successful

What you have here is a very simple example of reloading only a single div when a form is submitted, rather than having to reload the entire page. There are shortcuts to some of this notation, but for the sake of learning I have done things longhand.

For more information, check out JQuery’s documentation.

If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you. If an SEO has FTP access to your server, they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.

A long time ago, SEO was basically full of black hat tactics – including stuffing keywords all over your web page, stuffing your keywords META tag, buying loads of unrelated links to your website, etc. As Google has grown, so has their algorithm for ranking pages. Google’s algorithm is much more intelligent now. Now, if Google determines you to be keyword stuffing or buying unrelated links, you are penalized. In the case of JC Penney a few months ago, you will find your pages are about a hundred pages back from where the used to be. So now that we’ve identified what not to do… it’s time to get into the nitty gritty.

Here are some good approaches to SEO that will help you achieve higher rankings:

• Create accurate and unique title tags for each of your pages with relevant keywords – make sure each title tag is 66 or less characters in length, because that’s the maximum size that will be read by Google
• Create a description meta tag for each page on your site. The description tag is usually used by Google and displayed under your title tag in search results. Words in the description field are bolded when found within the user’s search query.
• Take link structure into consideration when designing a website. Google can read keywords from your URL, so a page like this: http://www.domain.com/view/product.php?id=345345 is very hard to derive any useful information from. You should try something like this: http://www.domain.com/product/baseball-cards. Often times, especially when creating dynamic websites, it is difficult to create descriptive pages. There is a great solution though, and it’s called URL Rewriting. URL Rewriting is done with mod_rewrite in Linux servers. You are able to set rewrite rules so that you can link to a pretty URL with great keywords and have the content of a dynamic URL displayed. Our company uses URL Rewriting for almost every dynamic project.
• Make sure your website is easy to navigate. This helps search engine crawlers more easily index your web pages.
• Create an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a roadmap of all the pages on your website. You can add one to Google’s webmaster tools. Within the sitemap you can do things like specify which pages are more important and outline the structure of your website.
• Use breadcrumbs on every page except your home page. Breadcrumbs help users understand where they are within your site structure and help them navigate to previous sections. Breadcrumbs look something like this: Home > Products > Baseball Cards > Nolan Ryan. Do not make the current page they are viewing a link.
• Use relevant keywords within your anchor text and in the title attribute of your links. Keywords can be associated with the link destination in this way.
• Create a useful 404 page. 404 pages are shown when a user attempts to access a non-existent website. Creating a custom 404 page can greatly enhance the user experience. You can provide links on your 404 page to popular pages and add to the user experience.
• Create interesting, unique content on your website. Users understand good content when they see it and are more likely to share it with others within social media or their own blogs. Word of mouth buzz and personal referrals are paramount.
• Optimize images by using the ALT tag – which helps Google and other search engines understand what the image is about. ALT tags are also used by the visually disabled to better understand the contents of an image.
• Use heading tags to emphasize important text.
• Effectively use robots.txt. This file, stored on your server, enables you to tell Google which sites to index and which sites not to index. You obviously don’t want your admin panel or wordpress login page to be indexed, so tell Google this.
• Use rel=”nofollow” when you want to link to a third party site but don’t want Google’s crawler to follow it or to send any of your pagerank to that page.
• Make use of free webmaster tools, like Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

By utilizing the techniques mentioned above, you can really improve your search engine rankings. However, the single most important factor in determining your search rank for various keywords is how well connected you are on the internet – or in other words, how many people link to you. Always pursue listings in business directories or other relevant portals. Creating good content on your website and blog also encourages others to link to your site.

Good luck SEO-ing!

Here are a few common questions that you may want to ask the prior to beginning any web project:

• What operating systems do they primarily use?
• What browsers do they use?
• Which social media do they mostly communicate with?
• What is the average resolution of their computers?
• What mobile browsers do they use, if they use mobile internet at all?
• Which search engines do they primarily use?

This is by no means an all-inclusive list, but it’s a good starting point.

Now that you’ve determined the right questions to ask, it’s time to get the answers. A good starting point is W3Schools’ browser stats reference page. This website has generalized statistics, and since they are so vague they shouldn’t be heavily relied on. W3Schools acknowledges this:

“You cannot – as a web developer – rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old low spec computers.”

W3Schools is right – you shouldn’t see your research as facts. However, you can use them, together with your own discretion, to make educated decisions that you would otherwise have no basis for. There is a free resource hosted  by a company called StatCounter called StatCounter’s Global Stats that has a fantastic user interface and allows you to view more detailed web analytics. StatCounter calculates their statistics based on over 15 billion hits each and every month and allows the user to customize a visual display of their desired statistic and region.

Use this tool by StatCounter and the rest of your research to your advantage, but don’t see the statistics as finite truths.

Google Engage is a program designed to educate and support those businesses that specialize in helping other businesses succeed online.

A key feature of Google Engage is that after completing a number of webinars providing basic information and fundamentals of online marketing, qualified agencies are given a number of $100 vouchers that can be redeemed by the agency when opening new Adwords accounts on behalf of their clients. These $100 vouchers are then used as free advertising dollars for the agency’s clients, allowing businesses to try Google Adwords marketing at minimal risk.

Sure, agencies like ours charge a fee to maintain Adwords from month to month on behalf of our clients, but this fee is minimal. A free $100 can boost a business or organization’s starting budget and give them a good idea of what to expect from Google if they keep utilizing Google’s effective marketing channels.

Even more importantly, Google Agencies helps the people running your website or marketing campaigns stay up-to-date with the latest information so they can provide better services for your business.

Is your webmaster or web consultant a member of Google Agencies? Pinpoint Web Solutions is. This means that we are current with the latest happenings from Google, are trained in valid search engine optimization techniques, and understand the ins and outs of marketing with Google Adwords. Even better — when you open a new Adwords account through us, you will receive a free $100 of marketing from Google. Who doesn’t like free leads?