Text Is King!

Are you building your website? If so, STOP! Take a look at what you have done so far. How many images do you have? How much text do you have?

If your website has more images than text then you could be in trouble. Ask yourself these two questions

What are my visitors at my website for?

Chances are, your visitors cam to your website to find information on a topic or to answer a question. They probably didn’t come to look at pictures (unless you run a photo gallery). Give your visitors what they want and they will keep on coming back.

Why did I put all these images on my website?

Now, this is not always true, but what I have found is that people put a lot of images on their website to make up for poor quality content. They think if they have a pretty looking website, people won’t pay that much attention to the text. That is another wrong assumption that should never be made.

REMEMEMBER: People come to get quality content, and will leave if you don’t provide any

If your website has more text than images, good for you, keep up the good work and good things will come to you.

Website Checklist

10 Basic Things Your Website Should Have ...

1. all short sentences and paragraphs (more reader friendly)
2. lots of "white" space (more appealing)
3. graphics (makes site more interesting and entertaining)
4. links (widens reader interest)(boosts search engine ranking)
5. search engine listings (so people can find your site)
6. banner at top (makes home page look professional)
7. contact info (at least a valid email address)
8. About Me or About Us info (makes it more personal)
9. privacy policy (adds credibility; spam policy etc)
10. mission statement (defines ethics and purpose of your site).

With these 10 website basics your site can be both professional looking and appealing. And, as a result, you can expect to get a more positive response to your website and your website content.

How Do Absolute & Relative Links Rank?

The question for this article is whether or not you should use "absolute url's" or "relative url's"? Not only that, this article researches whether or not Google ranks these methods differently.

Absolute: You use the entire url pointing to the designated page.
ex. www.yoursite.com/page1/index.html

Relative: You use an automatic path to the file
ex. /page1/index.html

Relative gives a path that is "assumed". Your browser will automatically "assume" to put www.yoursite.com before the link.

When researching these two methods, I used 4 factors to consider:

1. 20 Different popular search terms
2. Top 20 listings
3. Top 10 "Inbound Links" for pages within the site
4. Relative/Absolute urls NOT images

So here's the results of this study:

1. The average results within the 20 search terms had a ratio of: Absolute 40% / Relative 60%
2. The average inbound links for each site I researched had a ratio of: Absolute %50 / Relative 50%

So it seems safe to say that Google doesn't necessarily rank "absolute/relative" paths differently.

Google may recognize the fact that neither method is wrong, it only reflects the designers preference.

There's only 1 type of Absolute and Relative paths that get a bad rank. Web sites that use "tracking url's" or data base urls get a significant reduction in page rank emmediately.

The easiest way to notice this in action is to go to www.pogo.com. You would think that pogo has a great rank but nope, in fact their main page rank is 0/10. This happens because every time google crawls through their url, the site is different.

So if you care about page rank, keep your url's the same as the day your site was born!

Useful Common Site Ideas

In my web surfing adventures, I've found a few site elements which make surfing easier and more enjoyable. There are no concrete, hard- and-fast rules to follow - these are just observations of some things which I virtually always look for in a site.

So without further ado, here is my list.

• I often look for a way to contact the webmaster. I may want to tell him something about his site (privately), propose a link exchange or just drop him a line. I feel an email link or a link to a form is something to expect to find on every single page. If you are running a commercial site this is essential - your customers want to be able to tell or ask you things and if you want their business you had better make it easy for them.

• I like guestbooks. When I run into a site that I find enjoyable, I want to tell the webmaster. Give him or her a compliment - I think it's a good exchange. The webmaster worked hard and provided something that was entertaining, informative or useful. It's nice to let him know in return. So please put a link to the guestbook on every page.

• A good navigational system is very important. A menu of some kind, with a link back to the home page, needs to be on every page of the site. Sometimes this may consist of a simple "previous" and "next", but please always add a "home" link in this case. If I've surfed a ways on your site, I want to be able to get back to the index quickly without using the "back" button.

• Nothing makes me leave a site faster than finding one of those silly little "right click" scripts which attempts to disable the right-click functions. Not only do these not work, but they are rude and violate some of the primary tenets of the internet - free, sharing, and community. Also, you are modifying my browser controls - which is not a nice thing to do. If you display something on your page I guarantee you that it can be taken, no matter how many scripts or functions you install.

• Speaking of browser control - don't modify my screen size, buttons, menus, cursors or anything else that my browser does. You want me to leave fast - resize my browser to fit the whole screen and remove the menu. I will be out of your site in a second!

• Whether your site is personal or professional, tell me a little about yourself, your wife, your kids, and your pets. I find it much easier to like someone and be receptive to their message if I know something about them. Just a quick page with a few paragraphs is fine. If you are going to ask me to fill out a form, please let me know how you are going to use the information. You want my address? Why? Phone number? What do you need that for? More importantly, how safe is this information?

• I know many people like to put banner exchanges on their sites, but please keep it to a minimum. First, banner exchanges don't work very well. Second, they make the pages load slowly. And third, if there is more than one or two banners on a page it's pretty tacky. If you are going to insist on putting background music on your site, please give me an obvious way to turn it off.

• Please don't expect me to go searching through your whole page for a little dot hyperlink. I've found sites which bury the link to the next page in the strangest places - in someone's eye, for example. Normally, I am just going to leave instead of trying to find out how to navigate.

Well, that's a start. I hope these ideas are of some value and help you make a better, more friendly site.

Superior to Dreamweaver?

I've heard a lot of good comments regarding Macromedia's Dreamweaver site building tool.

Does anyone use Site Build It!?, It's a website building tool that includes hosting and allows you to research profitable keywords, run a search engine optimization test, build beautiful graphics, automatically and periodically submit each page individually to the search engines, and it handles everything for you.

There is no required knowledge of HTML code, CGI script or javascript, all of this is handled automatically, all that is required is that you input the text information, (for example, paste in an article) and it is built right before your eyes.

I'm currently researching a few promising ideas using Site Build It's keyword research tool and plan to develop a few mini-sites in the near future, I don't have any experience using Dreamweaver but I have heard a lot about it which makes me wonder if it stacks up well to Site Build It!.

So if there are any Site Build It! users out there, let me know, and to Dreamweaver users, details on Site Build It! can be found at: http://www.smokesoft.net/build-it-tour.html . I'm interested to know if the two products are similar.

Website Design Basics

So, what's in a website design anyway? And, how do you get a design that is appealing to the broad and varied tastes of all those Internet surfers out there?

This is critical. Your website design is the first impression you make on your customers and visitors. There are a few sites in my favorites and bookmarks that I consider poorly designed. I still have them, because they have information I want. Lucky for the site owner that their content was that good! But one day I will find another site with the same information and a better design. Then guess who will be in my favorites and who will be left out? Maybe your content is great too, but don't take chances on a poor design. Think how much more repeat traffic and referred traffic you will get if you have both great content and great design.

Design Taste Varies - OK, design is a matter of taste and target audience to some degree. What looks good to one visitor may not be so great to another. Here we have the old adage of "one man's trash is another man's treasure". But there are solid basics that go into good site design. Creating a distinctive visual style and applying it consistently is the best way to bind a series of subjects and web pages together.

Layouts - The layout of your site is an important design element. A webpage is a document, plain and simple. It is like formatting a letter, an outline, a report, or an advertisement. Establish a layout grid and a style for handling your text and graphics, then stick with it to build a consistent rhythm and unity across all the pages of your site. Make it easy to follow, pleasing to the eye. Learn to use tables and nested tables, lists, and even well designed frames for controlling layouts.

Color - Color has a lot to do with target audience as well. What appeals to a teenager may not work with a target audience of baby-boomers, and so forth. But anybody can appreciate color coordination. Color coordination can be learned. Yes, it's a lot easier if you have a natural "knack" for these things, but you can learn basic color coordination techniques that make the difference between "tacky, yuk!!!" and "soothing to the eye".

Safe Colors - Everyone does NOT have 16 million colors on their computer. Learn to use the websafe 216 colors. Notice that's 216 colors, not 256 colors. This is a matter of video card capability and you are at the mercy of the viewer's personal computer system. Your best bet is to stick to 6 x 6 x 6 bit color resolution (216 colors) to cover the majority of Internet users. The 216 color palette gives you plenty for design options. Sure, not as many as 256 colors or 16 million, but still plenty to accomplish what you want or need to do with color.

Page Load Time - Now I'll be the first person to admit that I have made *personal* web pages which have large graphics or music .wav files and other things that take awhile to load. The point here is, they are my personal websites, *not* my professional or commercial websites. I may use these long loading pages for demo-ing several techniques, or chatting with friends and other developers, but never never never for professional site design (unless my client insists, in which case I do not use their site as a demo to other potential clients!). This doesn't mean you have to give up everything on professional sites. It just means take it easy, use only one high-load-time element or two, learn to compress your graphics properly, and if you've got that much "stuff" then break it up into more than one page.

Don't Overdo IT - A typical mistake among developers is to overdo it when putting together a website. Try to use extras in moderation. Some common things that get overused are:

• graphics
• background images
• bevels and other graphic tricks
• excessive frames
• text scrolling, animated .gif's, page fade-ins

Too much of something just comes off as being "cutsie", tacky, or unoriginal...but used properly it can add just the right touch. Learn to use things that compliment your site's content, and not to overdo it with extra techniques and tricks.

Readability - Make your pages as easy to read as possible. Black text on a white or off-white background is the easiest to read. There are plenty of hard-to-read pages that use backgrounds the same shade as the text (dark text on a dark background and light on light), or what I call the "neon" look with bright color on bright color.

Learn to use the <font style="font-family: FirstFontChoice,SecondFontChoice,sans-serif;"> tag and give your readers a font that's easy on the eye. I always think it's such a shame to see a site full of great content and then left in the default Times New Roman font. Use a sans-serif font - arial and verdana are good choices, then put "sans-serif" generic font in your last html tag attribute to cover anyone that may not have a specific font you listed as a first choice or second choice.

Browser and Monitor Compatibility -. Learn to make your web pages compatible with both Microsoft Internet Explorer(IE) and Netscape Navigator. After preparing a site, test it in both browsers and ondifferent screen sizes or resolutions. Typical figures are 80% of Internet users are on the IE browser, 80% using 800 x 600 resolution, and most on a 15" or 17" screen....but, can you really afford for your site to look poor to 20% of the market? The answer is NO. Make your site compatible with both browsers and take that silly "best viewed with..." graphic off the site! Furthermore, use alt tags in your graphics for people who surf with images turned off, or on smaller browsers which don't support them.

Designing Professional Web Pages

If your Web site doesn't project a professional and polished image to your visitors, your credibility and that of your products and services will suffer. Image is everything -- especially online where your competitor is only one mouse click away!

Before your first HTML code is written, you will need to consider your Web site's navigational structure, color scheme and page layout. Is your content developed? If not, who is going to write it?

Once you have done the necessary pre-planning, then the fun part begins -- coding your HTML pages.

Following are some steps to consider when laying out your Web pages:

1. I highly recommend that you try to get your home page to fit on one screen. Ideally, people shouldn't have to scroll down to see what your site has to offer. You may need to make your graphics smaller, but that's okay. Smaller graphics mean a quicker download time.

2. Be sure to check your pages at all the various screen resolutions. Although only a small percentage of users have their monitors set at 640x480, you will want to make sure your site looks good at that resolution. I design my Web pagesat 800x600, which is the average resolution. However, more and more users have their computer monitors set at higher resolutions, such as 1024x728. You will see that your pages will look radically different depending on the resolution. I personally have been horrified at how ugly my "beautiful" pages look on different computer screens.

3. Browsers are another very important consideration. Netscape and Internet Explorer both perform the same function -- display Web pages -- but the way they do so is strikingly different.

   Your code needs to be very clean and pretty much flawlessto display correctly on Netscape. If you miss even one table tag (e.g., you forget to close a tag), you will be mighty surprised when you get nothing but a blank page on Netscape.

   Internet Explorer is much more forgiving. It "assumes" what you meant to do. Netscape, on the other hand, is unassuming. If it doesn't understand your code, it simply will not display it.

   NOTE: An excellent site to check your HTML code for browser compatibility, as well as screen size, is Anybrowser.com at http://www.anybrowser.com/

4. You will no doubt want to employ JavaScript and DHTML on your site because it's both functional and cool. However, those technologies work better on Internet Explorer than they do on Netscape. Many of the scripts that you can grab for free at sites like Dynamic Drive DHTML (http://www.dynamicdrive.com/) and Website Abstraction (http://www.wsabstract.com/) are written exclusively for Internet Explorer, so you will need to be very careful when deciding what to use on your Web site.

   For example, on one of my sites I use a JavaScript to display the date and time. This script is supposed to work on both Internet Explorer and Netscape; however, a couple of days ago I noticed that the year on Netscape was 100 versus 2000. A 1,900 year variance is a pretty significant difference!

5. The titles on all of your Web pages need to be consistent -- not only in font style, size and color but also alignment. Make sure the spacing between the title and the first paragraph is consistent throughout your site. Make sure your spacing is uniform on all pages.

6. If your navigation is dependent on graphics (e.g., image maps, icons, buttons, Java, JavaScript), some of your visitors will have a problem getting around your site if their browser doesn't display graphics, or if they've chosen to turn graphics off on their browser settings for faster surfing. It is extremely important to provide text links in addition to graphic links. All of your users will see your text links, plus text loads faster than graphics.

7. It is an excellent idea to make your logo a clickable link back to your home page from all of the pages of your Web site. Many visitors expect to be able to use the logo to go back home. Don't forget to also include a text link to your home page.

These are only a few considerations in designing your Web pages, but they are very important. Don't let your beautiful pages look ugly on your visitor's computer screen.

Effectively Organizing Your Navigation

Not all links are created equal.
While all of your links may be important, prioritize to come up with an effective navigation scheme.you must sort and Here's what you should keep in mind:

1. Sort your links
Your links should be organized according to their relationship to each other. Any time you can find a way to divide your links into two or more categories, do so.

If you have more than 5 or 6 links, categorizing becomes very important. Try to find some natural groups. For example, suppose you sell widgets, and your site has this set of links:

Mini widgets
Multi-colored widgets
Discounted widgets
Contact us
About the company
News

Your major categories are:
- Products
- Company info

When you separate the two sets of links according to those major categories, it becomes much easier to sort the available information. The simple reason is that a choice between two items is less complex than a choice between 6 items. It's the principle of dividing and conquering.

Take a look at the following site:

www.adobe.com
Notice the four main categories--Products, Resources, Support and Purchase. These four categories help visitors narrow down at a glance which area they need to look in to find the info they want.

Imagine if all of those links were lumped into one long list. How much harder would it be to figure out where to go?

Often, you might not have clear-cut categories. For example, you may have three links that all go together in one category (such as "Products"), plus several more miscellaneous links. Even if the miscellaneous links don't fit conveniently under one category name, you can still group your links. Put the three product links together, then all the miscellaneous links in a separate place.

2. Prioritize your links
Hopefully, you have some idea of what you want visitors to do on your site. Your site should be designed to drive a specific action--in other words, get visitors to do a specific thing.

Once you've decided what your primary goal is, your navigation should reflect it. The links that pertain most closely to your main goals should be emphasized the most. You need to guide the visitor in the direction you want him or her to go.

Prioritize. Ask yourself the question, "What is most important?" What do you really want to accomplish? (I'll give you a hint: "About the company" should not be a top priority link.)

Here are several examples of sites that prioritize well:

www.fleet.com
On the home page, you'll see three main links. These links are geared at attracting the company's major types of customers. All other links on the page are much smaller.

www.atomz.com
On this page, it's clear that the company wants visitors to click on one of their three product links: Publish, Search or Promote. The site does a good job of getting attention and guiding the visitor in a specific direction.

By carefully prioritizing, these sites are able to narrow down the choices and make it more likely that visitors will head in the direction they want them to go.

Choosing the Right Website Designer

You've made up your mind. You want to have a website to represent your business. The next decision to be made . . . who should you hire to develop your site?

There are many people capable of building their own personal sites. They can put cute little comments and pictures of their pets or kids up for you to enjoy. But, when it comes to having a website that will be a form of marketing for your business, you want someone with experience. Someone who has an understanding of the Internet and what is the best way to boost the exposure of a website.

They must have a clear knowledge of a variety of contributing factors to your sites' success. Such factors include how best to market your site, the options and limitations of graphics, how to create a site that is effective within search engines, knowledge of the drawbacks of different browsers, and the understanding of the coding required for your site.

It is crucial that your designer understands you, your company and what you want to accomplish with your website. To determine this, you need to answer a few questions first.

What do you want on your website? What is the desired outcome of your site? Is your designer open to your ideas and provides input and suggestions for improvement? Have you checked out your competition or other websites to get ideas of what is the 'norm' for a successful site? The more information you have prior to starting a website, the more accurately you can communicate with your designer and get the desired outcome that produces the best results.

Creating a website can be an overwhelming experience. You need to ensure that your designer is easy to talk to and keeps you updated on your sites' progress. If you have questions . . . ask! After all this is your site and you have a right to know how it is coming along and in terms that you can understand.

You also need to check out websites that your designer has made in the past. Check to see that the graphics load quickly, that it is easy to navigate between the pages, and that overall you like their style.

Finally, the cost! This is a very important factor for small business owners when deciding on a website designer. Larger companies will charge more and can probably make your site very elaborate. If you need a site filled with all the bells and whistles, you will be paying for it. If you simply need a site that is a background of your company and the products or services that you provide, the cost will be considerably lower and you can use a smaller company or independent designer.

Your website is going to be a 24-hour advertisement for your company. Skimping on any of the above listed factors will have an effect on the final result of your website and the outcome that you want from it. Do your research and you can join other successful businesses who are using the Internet to boost their exposure and their revenue.