How To Make A Website Without Knowing HTML
By David | April 15, 2008
I’ve spent the last 5 posts explaining how to make a website, basically from scratch. Well I wanted to spend 1 post on how to build a website using an online website builder.
For those are unfamilar with an online website builder, it’s an online application that will allow you to build a website without needing to purchase software that needs to be loaded on your computer. You simply visit the login page and everything is there ready for you to make updates from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection.
This is ideal for those who just want to put up an informational site with some text, photos & images related to their business without having to learn all of the HTML involved with building a website we offer Website Tonight.
Online Website Builder Demo:
URL: login.websitespot.com
Username: wssdemo
Password: Wsspassword1
Popular Online Website Builder Features:
1. Step by step setup
2. No HTML needed
3. 100+ Templates
4. Video & Audio Uploads
5. Easily publish changes
6. Click Here For A Complete List Of Features
This will allow you to login and see exactly how easy it is to change templates add images & text as well as publish your website. Once you’ve made some changes & published them you can view your changes at www.WebsiteSpotDemo.com.
The great thing is that you can update the template that you choose at any time and we offer upwards of 100+ templates to choose from. It’s definitely an option for building a website without the struggles of developing a website from scratch.
Another great thing is the built in HTML modules that will allow you to customize your site with HTML if you happen to need to insert HTML code or you’d like to have more control over the look of your site. You won’t find this flexibility with a lot of online website builders so please be sure to take a look at this when you’re testing out our demo.
Please contact me with any questions because I think that once you’ve had a chance to try the demo that you’ll love the online website builder.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
Topics: Web Design | No Comments »
Make A Website - Reciprocal Links And Meta Tags
By David | April 14, 2008
As the final part of my 10 step guide on How To Make A Website I’m going to cover a couple of SEO techniques. I definitely need to point out that these 10 steps are by no means the only steps to building an effective website but it’s a nice start. Also, the two steps that I cover in regards to SEO are just a taste of what you’re going to learn.
Search engines are always changing and the competition is becoming more informed so it’s important to visit sites that are dedicated to the subject of search engine optimization. By far, my favorite site in regards to keeping up with the latest search engine trends & releases is definitely SEO Book.
Tip 9: Reciprocal Linking Campaigns
I’m going to write a couple of in-depth posts on linking in the near future but I wanted to at least give you a heads up to again at least let you know that it exists and to get you thinking about it. Reciprocal links are links to another website placed on your site in exchange for links back to your site from theirs. This is a very important method of building link popularity which is an instrumental part of getting high search engine rankings.
It’s actually very simply to do but there are certain things to think about. Basically you come up with an agreement with the webmaster of a website related to your topic and you place a link of your website to their website and in exchange the webmaster places a link back to you.
The most important aspect of reciprocal links is the ‘anchor text’ that’s used to link back to you. For example, you have a website name ChromeWheels.com, you would want the anchor text from the other website to use the anchor text of chrome wheels in the link back to your site. It would appear similar to this: Chrome Wheels. The code would appear something like this <a href=”http://www.chromewheels.com”>Chrome Wheels</a>. This is basically telling search engines that this page is related to chrome wheels.
As far as I know, it’s not important if the link is case sensitive such as ‘chrome wheels’ or ‘Chrome Wheels’. This definitely doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter so I would just request that it be formatted the same with all websites. Also, I request that all links contain the www such as www.chromewheels.com rather than just chromewheels.com.
It’s best to manually contact potential link exchange partners but I use Arelis to manage my link exchange campaigns as you can run a script to see if anyone has removed links to you plus a variety of other features that makes managing a link campaign easy. Again, I would never use it to automate link exchange request emails but it’s a great way to manage your current links.
Again, I’m going to do an couple of in depth posts on reciprocal links but I wanted to at least bring it up.
Tip 9: Meta Tags
In my opinion, as well as many other people, the most important meta tag is the Title tag. This is the tag that displays at the top of your screen and is a very important part of SEO.
A couple of other tags that are used are the Description & Keyword tags. As people have abused them by stuffing them with keywords, related & not related to their website, they have become less effective. With that said, you’d never find a page of mine without these two tags because it definitely won’t hurt, just keep them related to your web page without stuffing them with too much repetition of your keywords.
Here is how a basic meta tag would appear on a web page. I’ll again use the chrome wheels example.
<HTML>
<head>
<title>ChromeWheels.com - Chrome Wheels, Custom Rims and Tires</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”ChromeWheels.com offers the internet’s largest selection of chrome wheels. Shipping discounts available on all chrome wheel and tire packages.“>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”chrome wheels, chrome wheel, custom rims, tires, rims, discount chrome wheels“>
</head>
I’ll save some additional meta tags such as ‘revisit-after’, ‘robots’ & ‘distribution’ for another post but these are definitely the tags that you don’t want to miss when creating your pages.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
Topics: Website Building 101 | No Comments »
How To Make A Website - Graphics And Blogs
By David | April 10, 2008
So far I’ve covered some of the basic steps on how to make a website but I haven’t covered images & nor creating a blog. The images are a very important part of your website in regards to keeping visitors interested & for search engine optimization. A blog is going to keep content your website fresh and if you can write content that’s valuable, it’s going to keep people coming back to your website.
Tip 7: Images & Photos
How often to you revisit websites that don’t spice up their site with images or illustrations? For me, it’s rarely. I like to look at images & photos because it can answer questions without having to read through tons of content.
It’s important to place images on your website but don’t over do it. Many people still use dial-up for their internet connection so it’s important to use images that aren’t to large or exceed 72 pixels/inch. Most monitors don’t resolve more than 72 pixels/inch so you’re just making the images larger for no reason at all.
Another important part of images is the ‘alt’ tag, obviously search engines can’t figure out what an image relates to so it’s important to give your file a descriptive name and use the ‘alt’ tag. A good example of this would be something on the order of <img src=“chrome-wheels.jpg” alt=“Chrome Wheels” />.
To break this down you’re telling the search engine that your image is named ‘chrome-wheels.jpg and the alt tag is another way of describing to the search engines what the image is related to. It’s important to use the alt tag as often as possible because it’s a way of optimizing your web page for search engines.
There is a huge selection of image editing software on the market from free options like Gimp to higher priced editors such Adobe PhotoShop & Adobe FireWorks. I personally use both, I use PhotoShop for editing photos and I use FireWorks for creating and editing images such as banners & buttons. The later two offer advanced features so be sure to research them before making a decision.
Tip 8: Blogs
I’m running long so I’m going to make this short. Blog is short for Web log that consist of regularly updated entries displayed in reverse chronological order. Essentially an online diary or journal. The great thing about blogs is that search engines love blogs because of they are generally updated with new content and generally updated with unique content. You’ll find that almost every single web host offers a blog application with their hosting services.
There are a lot of different options in regards to blogs from hosted versions such as BlogSpot.com to versions that you host under your own domain such as WordPress. I personally use WordPress because I can host it on my own server and there are so many features that you can add to it. By the way, no matter which you choose, blog software generally is free.
You’ll find that we offer WordPress with all of our web hosting accounts as well. One final thing, I’ve covered just a very small area of blogs. In my opinion the best website regarding blogs and how to make money with blogs is at ProBlogger.net. I personally check with ProBlogger.net about 2 - 3 times per week so it’s a great idea to check them out.
In my next post I’m going to cover a couple of SEO, search engine optimization techniques.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
Topics: Website Building 101 | No Comments »
Make A Website - CSS And Writing Content
By David | April 9, 2008
Now 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
Topics: Website Building 101 | No Comments »
How To Make A Website - File Naming And FTP
By David | April 8, 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
Topics: Website Building 101 | 1 Comment »
