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 »
I Want To Make A Website, Where Do I Start?
By David | April 7, 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
Topics: Website Building 101 | No Comments »
A Final Comment On Web Hosting Features
By David | April 4, 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
Topics: Web Hosting | No Comments »
