Make A Website - CSS And Writing Content
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008Now that you’ve had a bit of time to research tips 1 - 4 it’s time to move onto the next batch of tips. In this post I’m going to cover styling your website with CSS and writing content. Both of these items will eventually get their own posts actually they’ll probably get quite a few posts. I just wanted to mention them now so that you’re familiar with them before you start building your website.
Tip 5: Styling Your Website With CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets which is used to describe how an HTML document should be formatted. CSS is great for styling a website within 1 CSS file which allows you to update your entire website by updating this 1 file rather than going into every page and making the updates. This is a real time saver that also cuts down on the HTML code within a web page.
Look at it this way, say your website is made up of 100 pages and the text for your content is black. One day you decide you’d like it blue instead. Rather than opening all 100 pages and updating the color, you can open you CSS page, update the color within the CSS, upload it to your server and you’re done. It’s that simple, update 100’s if not 1000’s of page by simply updating 1 page.
CSS can be used to define text, tables and more. There is a lot to learn about CSS and a great place to start is by visiting http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp.
One note, in a previous post I had mentioned purchasing website templates. Well most likely the styling on the website template pages are based on CSS so if you download a website template you’ll have a CSS template already setup which you can mess around with to learn a bit more about it. Just be sure that you have a backup of the CSS file before you start testing it out.
Tip 6: Writing Website Content
Writing website content seems like an easy thing right now as you’re full of ideas but as time goes on writing content is an area that becomes more and more difficult. The sentiment going around is that content is king when it comes to search engine optimization. Search engines such as Google want unique content on websites.
When you’re first starting a website it’s not too difficult to come up with new unique content but as your site grows it becomes tougher. The best thing to do is become familiar with the subject of your website and the content will come naturally.
One of the biggest things that you need to know is who your audience is. For me, I realize that I’m writing for people that are new to building websites so I need to start from scratch and write in a way that my visitors can understand. I don’t want to use a bunch of acronyms that seem simple to me. Rather than right that it’s great to use CSS, I need to explain what CSS is, as I did at the beginning of this post, and explain what the benefits are.
I plan on writing a detailed post on writing website content in the short future but I felt that this was important enough to at least briefly cover now.
In closing, you’ll find that both of these tips are important to building a website and if you take the time to write unique content that search engines will reward you for your hard work.
In my next post I’m going to cover graphics & images and creating a blog.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
How To Make A Website - File Naming And FTP
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
In this post I’m going to cover naming files & FTP. I’ll cover naming your files a bit more in depth in a future post, probably in a search engine optimization post but again I at least want to touch on it right now. I figure that if I at least leave a quick blurb about naming files it will get you thinking.
Tip 3: Naming The Files That Make Up Your Website
This is actually a very important step when you build a website because it’s part of the SEO, search engine optimization process. One of the first things that I do after determining the subject of my website is to do a bit of keyword research. This is going to tell you what people are searching for related to your website. I personally use Wordtracker for all of my keyword research. They offer a paid & a very basic free tool for researching keywords related to your website.
The reason that I do keyword research is that I try to use keywords in all of the pages of my website. If the keyword is more than 1 word you’ll definitely want to seperate the words with a dash (-) rather than a space or an underscore (_). Quite a bit of research has been done and found that search engines such as Google prefer the dash.
You’ll see in my site at www.SteakBrandingIrons.com that I’ve done exactly that. For example, a branding iron that I offer is a Jeff Gordon branding iron and have named the page jeff-gordon-steak-branding-iron.php. This is a way of letting the search engines understand what your pages are about.
One other thing, it’s always good to structure your site by category. For example, say you sell car parts. You would create a folder in your web editor called wheels, tires, radiators, etc. Then within those folders you would save the files that relate to that product.
Here’s an example, say you own BillsCarParts.com and you review or sell tires, wheels & radiators. You are creating a page about chrome wheels and you save it as chrome-wheels.htm in the wheels folder. When you FTP, discussed next, the website to your hosting plan this page would be found at BillsCarParts.com/wheels/chrome-wheels.htm.
This is great for search engines plus it’s easy for you to organize your files. The bottom line is try to come up with a good blueprint of how you’d like to structure your website before just going in and creating a bunch of files and putting them in 1 folder.
Tip 4: FTP or File Transfer Protocol
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, which is the way that you move the files that make up your website from your computer to your web hosting plan. I personally use FileZilla it’s free to download.
Many website editors come with built in FTP capabilities but I find that they are slower plus FileZilla allows you to do some advanced features is changing files directly within your web hosting plan and change permissions of files which is common when you get into scripts such as CGI & PHP. I’ll explain them further in the future but I at least wanted to let you know why you may consider FileZilla over your built in FTP program.
That’s about it, in my next post I’ll cover tips 5 & 6. At this point I would take the time to get familiar with what I’ve reviewed above and check back tomorrow for a couple more tips.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
CEO/Founder - www.WebsiteSpot.com
I Want To Make A Website, Where Do I Start?
Monday, April 7th, 2008
In previous posts I covered registering a domain name & selecting a web hosting plan so now it’s time so start looking into web design. When you’re new to website building, web design can be very intimidating. I’ve come up with a list of 10 tips to take into consideration when you’re ready to build your first website. I’m going to break them into 5 posts so avoid running long and I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information at once.
Tip 1: Choose Your Website Editor
There are a few different editors on the market which make building a website much more simple without having to be extremely knowledgeable in HTML. One term you’ll see is ‘WYSIWYG’ which stands for ‘What You See Is What You Get’. You’ll find that they are referred to as WYSIWYG Editors.
The two most popular website editors are Microsoft FrontPage & Adobe DreamWeaver. Just a note, FrontPage is being phased out but it’s what I will continue to use because it’s so similar to Microsoft Word. The issue is that they won’t be adding any new features but it still works great.
With that said, you may want to consider DreamWeaver because it does the basic functions of designing a page plus, as you grow, it has the capability of performing the advanced items such as CSS, PHP, among other functions. The great thing is that DreamWeaver is so popular that there are sites out there that cater to DreamWeaver templates, which is covered later.
The catch is that DreamWeaver & Frontpage are a bit pricey so if you’re on a budget you should take a look at CoffeeCup or an online website builder such as Website Tonight. They’ll give you the tools to build a basic website and as your skills grow you can always move into an editor such as DreamWeaver in the future. I would check with eBay for some better pricing on FrontPage & DreamWeaver.
CoffeeCup offers 100’s of templates and is priced a bit better than DreamWeaver & FrontPage. You’re going to lose a bit of functionality but again, you can always move to DreamWeaver in the future. You can actually get a FREE download of CoffeCup by clicking here.
Either way, just be sure to research the products and find out what will work best for the type of website that you’re wanting to build.
Tip 2: Search For Website Templates
The easiest way to achieve a professional looking website is by finding a website template. A website template will provide the layout, images, & formatting of a web page and all you will really need to do is fill in the blanks with your content and images.
The great thing is that there is such a huge demand for website templates that you can find a template for about any subject that you’re site may be related to. Please keep in mind that you’re going to need a WYSIWYG editor to make the changes that you need so you’ll need to get into DreamWeaver or even Frontpage.
A couple of great places to view some templates are Dream Templates, Dot Com Builder, & The Template Store. The great thing about Dot Com Builder is that it is a subscription service and you can download unlimited templates from their collection of 100+ templates.
That’s it, I’m running long so I’ll save tips 3 & 4 for my next post. This should give you enough to do until tomorrow when I post the next tips.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
A Final Comment On Web Hosting Features
Friday, April 4th, 2008
I last left off explaining some of the basic features of a standard web hosting plan. In this post I’m going to explain a few of the extras. I’m noticing that my posts are running a bit long so I’m going to start shortening them and actually breaking my posts down a bit more and rambling on less, which is tough to do considering that there is so much information that you need to know. With that said, here are a few extras that you should expect to see with most hosting plans.
1. Databases - Databases are a structured collection of records that can easily be recovered via queries. There are thousands of needs for a database such as forms that collect information, the products in your online shopping cart, blogs, etc. Basically any information that you need to store and retrieve via a programming language such as PHP or ASP. There are 3 main types of databases that you should be familiar with, MySQL, SQL and Coldfusion. In future posts I’ll cover these the difference in these databases. I personally find MySQL to be the easiest to manage & setup. This blog actually uses MySQL. I would say that 10 databases would be the minimum number that any web hosting plan should offer.
2. Free software - It’s difficult to actually find a web hosting company that doesn’t offer some of the basic free applications such as forums, blogs, forms & shopping carts such as osCommerce. These are applications that can easily be installed on your web hosting account via a few clicks and some information. You’ll find that a popular group of free applications is Fantastico, it will generally contain Wordpress for blogs and osCommerce for online shopping carts. You’ll also find that Fantastico will offer some great scripts for Live Support, FAQs & Website builders. You can find a list of the free Fantastico scripts at http://www.netenberg.com/fantastico_scripts.php. Many companies will offer the complete list while others will only offer a select group of scripts. Be sure to take the time to find out the free scripts & applications that your web host offers before spending money on a propriety application.
That’s it, normally I would give a couple more features to look for but I’ll save that for my next post so that I don’t run too long. I realize that I have left certain items out but I’m trying to cut my posts down so please leave any comments with any questions or anything that I may have left out.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
CEO/Founder - www.WebsiteSpot.com
Linux Web Hosting vs. Windows Web Hosting
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008I have one final post regarding web hosting and it’s based on the platform that you choose for setting up your web hosting. There are two basic platforms for web hosting: Windows & Linux. There is another platform or two but these are the two that you will see offered on majority of the web hosting websites that you search.
A common misconception is that you need to setup your website on a Windows server because you’re website is built on a computer that runs Windows. This isn’t true and you would base your server on the type of programming language that you use. The only real reason that you’d need to have a Windows machine would be if your site was using ASP or you needed a SQL database. These are proprietary to Microsoft so you’d need to use a Windows machine but other than that I personally see no reason for using a Windows server.
I manage quite a few websites and I only have one of them on a Windows server and that’s because it’s an online shopping cart based on ASP & SQL. Every other website that I manage is on a Linux machine so you by no means need to choose a Windows hosting plan.
Both of these servers will support your basic HTML files that make up your website. Again, mySQL is generally found on Linux machines and SQL is found on Windows machines but you could actually run mySQL on a Windows machine as well. Both have their security vulnerabilities but many people will argue that Windows servers have more vulnerabilities than Linux servers
The bottom line is that the differences aren’t that big between Windows Web Hosting & Linux Web Hosting so just be sure that you know which programming language that you plan on use such as PHP, ASP, if any. If you’re just starting out and you plan on building a website based on basic HTML, it won’t make a difference at all which you choose. I would simply select a web hosting company that offers the options that you’re looking for and go from there.
That’s all I’m really going to get into in regards to web hosting for now, I’m sure that I’ll revisit web hosting in the future but I just wanted to give you the basics for now. Next I think I’ll get into some of the basics in regards to writing HTML code. Be sure to comment or contact me with any questions that you may have.
I welcome any comments on some other differences that I haven’t included.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
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