Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

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Search Engine Advertising Choices

Sep
30
2005

Written by Jim Hedger for WebProNews

Search advertisers are offered two basic marketing models, paid-ads and free organic ads. While there are advantages and disadvantages to both models, one clearly stands out as a better advertising option than the other.

Why is it then that advertisers from small business to mega-corporation tend to show higher interest in the more expensive and least effective of the two?

Most SEOs speculate that advertisers understand paid-advertising better than organic placement. As much of search marketing is conducted in-house and optimization is a learned-skill, corporate marketing departments lean towards the very simple model of paid-search. Organic search engine placement continues to be perceived as a nebulous service that can take time to show results. On the other hand, paid-ad placements tend to show up minutes after they are established and bidding one’s way to top spot is relatively easy.

With search ad-spends sometimes topping five or six figures per month, many SEOs shake their heads at businesses that refuse to invest a much smaller (generally low to mid four figure) sum on organic optimization. Ranging from small to mega sized operations, the number of paid-ad advertisers that ignore organic optimization seems to be growing.

Over the past three years, independent research has consistently confirmed that search engine users tend to click on the center column organic (free) ads far more often than on paid ads. Earlier this year, search marketers benefited from a number of published studies that clearly demonstrate the higher value of organic placements. While the results of this research is easily available to all, traditional and tech media stories tend to focus on paid-search advertising.

Two studies that made an enormous impact on the search marketing field this year are the Eye Tracking research conducted by Enquiro CEO Gord Hotchkiss and a whitepaper published by Lisa Wehr, CEO of OneUpWeb titled, ” Target Google’s Top Ten to Sell Online.” Gord’s study shows the basic F (or triangular) shape search user’s eyes tend to follow when examining search results. Lisa’s study found that search users are up to 6X more likely to click on the first few organic results as they are to choose any of the paid results.

A third study, “Accurately Interpreting Clickthrough Data as Implicit Feedback,” released earlier this week by Cornell professor Thorsten Joachims looked at the links users found on search engine results pages and questioned why they choose which link. The results show again the importance of high organic search engine rankings. The researchers asked subjects to perform searches and looked at which results they viewed, which they clicked on, and what happens if those links are mixed up.

The Cornell study found that search users tended to view (look at) the first five organic results with a high percentage of them (approx. 2/3) viewing the top two listings with 42% of them selecting or clicking on that link. The number of search-viewers halves to approximately 1/3 of users viewing sites appearing in positions 3, 4 and 5. The numbers drop to about 1 in 10 users tending to view the 9 th and 10 th placed sites.

When a search user views search listings, it doesn’t necessarily mean they click on those listings. In this context, to view means to examine. Users tend to examine the text used to phrase the reference link as well as the descriptive paragraph appearing beneath the link before deciding to click on it.

This is especially true for the smaller number of searchers who view listings found in the 3 rd to 10 th positions as users who examined those listings tended to spend more time on the results page before choosing the link to click first. In other words, 1/3 to 1/10 of users are conducting preliminary research by seriously reading the text used to phrase the results before clicking.

This finding was backed up in another part of the Cornell study that showed when the same Top2 results were reversed, the text used in the link and description had a notable influence on which link the user clicks. The research found that when results were switched around, 34% of the users would still click on the site ranked in first place, even when they had seen the now #2 site there earlier.

In his Alertbox review of the Cornell study, Jakob Nielsen succinctly notes, ” If users always clicked the best link, then swapping the order of the two links should also swap the percentages, and this didn’t happen. The top hit still got the most clicks.

Read the Full Article

About the Author:
David is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Posted in Google, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation, Structure | Comments Off

How to Add a Search Engine to Your Site

Sep
27
2005

(Written by Herman Drost for SiteProNews)

When visitors arrive at your web site you want them to find the information quickly otherwise they will losë patience and move on. A great way achieve this is to add a search engine or search box to your web site. Since most visitors are already familiar with using search engines such as Google, they can easily use the search feature on your site.

In this article I will discuss:

A. The benefits of adding a search engine
B. Types of search service providers
C. Where to place a search box on your site
D. How does the search engine work

A. Benefits of Adding Search Engine and Types of Sites Where It Can Be Used

1. Ecommerce sites - your ecommerce site usually has many different types of products so the navigation menu is not focused enough to rapidly find the specific product your visitor is looking for. Adding a search engine to your ecommerce site will help the visitor to easily and quickly zoom in on the product by entering their keyword in the search box.

2. Dynamic sites – search engines have difficulty spidering dynamically generated web pages. These are pages often generated from a database, so the information on your pages will not appear in the search engine’s index. Add a search engine to each page of your site. If a visitor arrives on that page from one of the large search engines, they can then do a quick search from that page instead of searching elsewhere.

3. Small sites - web sites that contain 5-10 pages don’t need a search engine because visitors don’t have to search through many pages to find the information. Instead, make sure you create a simple navigation menu at the top or side and bottom of your web pages.

B. Types of Search Service Providers

1. Atomz – Atomz Express Search is a frëe service where you can integrate basic search capability on your personal web site or on one of your commercial sites. It can be used on sites with 750 total pages or less and allows customization of look and feel to match your site’s design. Some third-party text ads are shown above and below the search results. You can use it for as long as you like for there is no trial period.

2. Freefind – features include the ability to customize search and results pages. The frëe accounts are limited to 3,000 pages or 32MB of storage. Site search is hosted on FreeFind’s server. It generates a site map for you, tracks visitors searches and indexes password protected pages.

3. Google Frëe site search service – searches only the specific domain(s) that you list when you create your search box. You can customize your results display to include background, text and link colors you select. The search box itself will reside on your web site. The search results page will be served by Google with the customized look and feel you specify. Google may serve ads on the results page. You can do an unlïmited amount of searches. You must display the Google logo on the web pages that contain the search box.

C. Where to place the search engine on your site?

1. Place the search box in a prominent location on your web page…preferably top center or top right.

2. Place the search box on all pages of your web site. Visitors may enter your site from any page.

3. Make the search box large enough to accommodate all search terms the visitor would use to find the information.

4. The search box should be a type-in box, not a link so visitors don’t have to wait for another page to load.

5. Limit the search results to 50 per page. Visitors losë their patience if they have to scroll through long lists of results.

D. How Does the Search Engine Work?

It works similar to the major search engines that search the web, however instead of crawling the web the search engine spider will search your site. The results of the crawl are stored in a database that resides on the search company’s server.

The company provides the necessary code to add a simple förm to your web page. This usually consists of a search box for inserting your keywords and a send button. When you clïck the button it sends the query to the search company. They process the query to create a search results page. This shows those pages in your site that match the visitor’s query.

The quality of the search results the search engine spider collects depends on how much information is contained in your site. Therefore take time to correctly optimize your site i.e. provide lots of good content that includes your keywords. Optimize your meta tags, images and create an accessible navigation structure.

Optimizing your site will not only provide focused results from your internal search engine but also boost your rankings in the major search engines.

About The Author
Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of iSiteBuild.com. Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hostïng. Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original articles. subscribe@isitebuild.com. Read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles

Posted in Google, SEO, Techniques, Web Design | 1 Comment »

What’s the Most Effective SEO Tactic for 2006?

Sep
12
2005

Written by Brad Callen for SiteProNews

Today, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to go out on a limb hëre and make a blind assumption about you.
“You think that the Q-square formula (quality + quantity) of getting inbound links (reciprocal or one-way) is the best way to increase your search engine rankings.”

Just about right, eh? And unless you are a complete newbie to search engine optimization, this is exactly what SEO experts have been telling you time and time and time again. And if there was any doubt that search engines were being spammed, paid links put rest to those fears. The SEO experts make monëy, you get a boost in your rankings, everyone’s happy.

Or so they’d have you think.

Over the past year or so, search engines have started to take serious measures to combat sp@m against them. Search engine spamming usually occurs in one of three ways:

Multiple submissions of your web pages (you’d be surprised to learn that people still do this). Keyword spamming in low quality content. Link spamming (building tons of links to a new site REALLY quickly). On the other hand, you’ve probably heard about the need for quality content ever since you started learning about search engine optimization (hopefully). Either way, here’s a refresher:

Search engines are looking for unique and useful content – information that is accurate and important to the people interested in that field. Search engines also look for fresh content – regular additions to your website, etc (this is why blogging became / is such a huge craze). So let’s put that all together:

Search engines are working towards fighting SEO sp@m – bad, keyword stuffed content and link spamming – by:

Devaluing the “ranking boost” that these elements give. Penalizing the websites that are obviously spamming search engines. The end result?

Traditional link building is no longer your best bet to get high search engine rankings.

That’s not to say that you should dump your link campaigns all at once and scamper for the hills – links will continue to have value within search engines and until the search engine algorithms develop well enough to distinguish between “organic” linking and links generated through a link-building campaign (not easy to do at all, even with Google’s or Microsoft’s resources), getting inbound links will stay the easiest way to bump up your search engine rankings by several pages.

However, for SEO purposes, that brings us back to square one. We like things to be easy, but we also want things to work well. If link-building is a good tactic, but not the best tactic (especially when everyone and their mother is getting a few hundred links every month to their 30-page AdSense websites), then where does it leave the rest of us?

The answer lies with what the search engines have been saying all along – quality content, wrapped around quality, organic links.

Let me explain that.

Search engines have taken two specific measures to improve their results and reduce commercialized sp@m from their search engines:

Link pages are being “identified” as such and therefore are being considered as low-quality links (you’ll remember from Link Building 101 that the quality of the link is a big factor in how much it improves your website’s rankings). Some of the identifying criteria for a link page are: the number of links on that page, the ratio of text to links on that page, and relevance of the link, which I explain in the next point. Search engine algorithms are currently looking at the context that the links are placed in (i.e. surrounding text as well as the page’s keywords) to measure the relevance of the host site to YOUR website – in other words, checking the text of the page your inbound link is placed on to find out whether that site is relevant to your industry / niche. This leads us to the following conclusions:

The linking page must have as few links as possible. The links should be focused on as few sites as possible (to funnel the value of the link page). The links should be surrounded by “relevant” content. The linking page should contain “quality” content (written for human reading rather than written for search engines – there’s a sharp difference between keyword optimization and keyword stuffing). Now you must be wondering….”is there a point to all this?” And I respect that, because this is exactly what internet marketing and SEO gurus have been saying for a long time nöw. Just like I often ask myself:

So WHAT?

So…

What if I told you that you could use a blindingly simple marketing tactic that will not only bring you relevant, powerful and valuable inbound links, but that it will ALSO bring you regular visitors?

How many SEO techniques can promise visitors from other websites?

Nöw I’m not trying to sell you a product, so I’ll cut to the chase.

Take a single page. Take ONE core keyword describing your industry / main business, and a few more keywords for a couple of main category pages. Write 350-550 words of unique, quality content that gives the reader useful information. Each paragraph should be tightly focused around one keyword, and should contain one link (not more) to a related page (for your main keyword, link to your website, for your category keywords link to your category pages). Use keywords (but not sentences) as anchor text.

Once you’ve completed this page, contact link partners in YOUR niche – not direct competitors obviously, but complementary businesses (if you sell information books on candle-making, your ideal link partners would be informational websites on candle-making), and make them this pitch:

“Are you looking for a quick and easy way to boost your search engine rankings? Search engines demand relevance, they demand quality, they demand freshness. I’d like to offer you the chance to do a valuable exchange – I’ll provide you with an optimized article on a subject relevant to your business, and in return all I ask is that you allow me to place some links to my website on the page. In fact, you can even plug in your own links – affiliate, to your own website or any other website.”

Of course, you’ll probably have to write a more sophisticated approach letter than those 6 lines, but the intent is clear: write quality content, and then place it on websites relevant to your industry. Usually, the website hostïng the page will want some monthly payment in return (after all, you’re effectively buying a page on their website). If you’ve followed my advice and picked well-ranked websites with quality content, the monëy will be worth it. In addition, you’ll probably be paying less than an out-and-out link purchase as you’re also giving them something in return (quality content to boost their search engine rankings).

Got all that? Congratulations. You’ve just learned about what I like to call a “Hosted Marketing Page”. Don’t be fooled by its simplicity. What I’ve explained in 4 paragraphs (318 words) will probably be the subject of endless marketing campaigns and short $49 reports over the next year.

Nöw some of you might be saying: I know this – isn’t this just another version of marketing your website through articles (where you write articles, submit them to article directories and have webmasters pick them up to post on their websites)? What’s so great about this? We KNOW this.

The question isn’t that you know this, the question is: are you doing this? Article submissions are shots in the dark – article farms do give a better boost in search engine rankings than simple links, but most article directories are too general to help you rank well on the relevance factor. If your article gets picked up by a few webmasters, the extra links will be dampened by the fact that the content is “duplicated” – thus reducing its value.

Search engines are wising up to article submissions just as they started combating link sp@m a year and a half ago – at any rate, article submissions are marketing tools / branding tools, not pure SEO tools.

Experiment with a Hosted Marketing Page of your own. If you don’t have the time to contact link partners directly, talk to your link-building expert (or company) and explain what you are looking for (heck, you can forward this article to them).

The beauty of Hosted Marketing Pages is that they complement your regular SEO strategy. Link building, if done right, is still a quick and cheap way of getting higher search engine rankings. However, if you are looking to make a HUGE splash instead of just poking around, then I urge you to seriously consider the power of Hosted Marketing Pages.

If you would like help with your “Hosted Marketing Page” campaign, visit Textlinkbrokers.com. They are the leader in link popularity building programs and are the only company offering this particular service.

About The Author
Brad Callen – SEO Specialist and Internet Marketing Consultant for TextLinkBrokers.com SEOelite.com

Posted in Blogging, Google, Internet Marketing, Keywords, Linking, Organic Optimisation, Structure | 1 Comment »

Fast & Efficient Web Design

Aug
30
2005

By T. O’ Donnell for DevwebproUK

About two years ago, I had a go at commercial web site design. I put a medium-sized ad in a London classified ad paper. Nothing fancy: “Web designer seeks work …” etc. This was expensive, about £500 for a month’s run.

Got a few replies. Lesson number one: advertise where clients of the calibre you want will see it. The clients I got thought £300 was a lot for a web site. They didn’t want to pay web hosting. They wanted a lot of bang for their buck. ‘Mission creep’ was a term I grew to know and loathe.

This set me thinking: how could I give these people all they could ever want, but not spend a lot of time and money? Lately, I realised how.

So how can you get a full featured site up in a day? Easy (ish!).

1. Mambo Content Management System http://www.mamboserver.com

I wish I’d found this software a couple of years ago. It’s freeware. The default set-up allows people without web design skills to update the site. It has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) option. This adds HTMLArea code to text input form fields. Each HTML code input box becomes a mini HTML editor.

If you can use Microsoft Word, you can add formatted HTML code to the site.

To get it running you need to know how to install MySQL databases, or have PHPMyAdmin as part of your web-hosting package.

You can add articles, edit them, send emails to members, and be contacted by users.

The only criticisms I have of this software are:

1. The admin interface is confusing. It’s all there, just finding and using it is the problem!

2. You need to search around template sites to find ones suited to your site purpose. I wanted simple, clean, business ones. Most of those available seem to have a fat graphic which covers half the screen. There are more restrained ones out there.

These are minor gripes, compared to the relief of finding what is essentially a web site in a box. It can be insta!
lled in an hour, once you get familiar with it.

To add ecommerce to your site:

Oscommerce Shopping Cart http://www.oscommerce.com

Again, this is a full-featured, freeware software. You can add lots of freeware ‘plug-ins’ to it, to get a professional shopping cart.

Therein lies the danger. Some of these plug-ins require altering or overwriting the default cart files. When you try to upgrade the cart version later, you may ‘break’ it, by overwriting a plug-in, thus creating errors.

The trick here is to only install plug-ins that add files (rather than overwrite them) or that require minor alterations to existing files.

What I do is download all the versions of the plug-in type I need e.g. a WYSIWYG editor. I then choose the one which has the least files, or which creates a new directory for its files. If it requires that important files be overwritten, or is complex, I chuck it.

Mambo and Oscommerce. Don’t try to integrate them! Hyperlink from one to the other. I’ve tried integrations of other softwares, like PhpBB and PhpNuke. Fine, when it works, but when you upgrade one or the other, arrgh!

*Keep databases separate*. If one goes skew-whiff, then at least the other will still work. Same goes for adding chat rooms and the like. If they’re all running off the one database, and that database becomes corrupted …

It may offend your sense of tidiness for your visitors to have to sign up twice at your site, but you’ll thank me for this sage advice later. Remember KISS is the basic rule of computing (Keep It Simple, Stupid!).

About the Author:
T. O’ Donnell ( http://www.tigertom.com ) is an ecommerce consultant and curmudgeon living in London, UK. His latest project is an ebook on conservatories, available at http://www.ttconservatories.co.uk. T. O’ Donnell freeware may be downloaded at http://www.ttfreeware.co.uk.

Posted in Structure, Techniques, Tools, Web Design | Comments Off

10 Tips for Killer Website Design

Aug
24
2005

by Jan Peterson (c) 2005 from SiteProNews

Does website design make a difference in how long people will visit your website or if they’ll stay and shop? You bet. You’ve seen the websites that scream “bad idea” and you know those folks are losing potential customers to their ineffective website design. Whether you are an internet newbie or an experienced marketer, you should understand that good website design is part of the success equation.
So hëre are my 10 tips on how to create killer website design that will invite potential customers in instead of scare them away.

1. Easy Navigation- The Road To Success

When people come to your website they are usually searching for something in particular. It might be recipes for a healthy low fat diet that takes less than 30 minutes to prepare or what is the best business to start online. Whatever they want, you need to have the answer. So ask yourself, why do people come to my website? When you know that then you know you should make it easy for them to find it.

I have been on countless websites that make it difficult for me to do business with them. And you know what my first response is? “Next!”

I am onto the next website to see if they can answer my question. People don’t want to waste their time hunting for things that should be easy to find.

So, if people come to your website to find widgets, have a button easy to see and locate that says “Widgets”. People have been trained to look to the left of the website for the navigation bar.

2. Flashing Gizmos – The Exit Ramp To A Dead End Street

You’ve seen those sites where the elephants are dancing and the poker chips are running across the screen asking you to clïck on them; ­the only thing they have ever done for me is give me a headache and to reach the “let me get out of hëre as fast as I can” button on my computer.

If you are a running a professional site, please don’t use flashing graphics. Guaranteed you are encouraging people to leave your site. People have come to you for information. Not to clïck on an ad or have their brain scrambled.

Make your website a pleasant environment for the customer to be in. Just like a store. Think about when you go to the mall. You want to go in a store that is clean, well laid out, has good customer service and the products you are looking for. Your website should reflect this. If it is what you expect in your shopping experience, then isn’t it reasonable that your customers are looking for this in your website.

What about music? Well, it depends. On most business sites I would suggest not. But let’s say you have a realtor by the ocean who rents out homes for summer vacations. They have music that sounds like the ocean is lapping at the foot of your desk. I think music is appropriate in this venue, but I would definitely have it “off” as people log onto your site and give them an option to turn it on. Don’t forget many people are surfing in their office environment and don’t want the boss to find out. If your music is loud or on as people log onto your site and can’t find a quick way to turn it off, they will leave your site faster than a cat that just saw the jaws of a Doberman!

3. Color – Enhancing The Highway Scenery

Color is an individual preference, but studies show that colors have an affect on people’s emotions. Look at the top sites like Amazon; their layout is simple and so is their color scheme.

My recommendation would be to go with the flow. If you have a financial investmënt site, then conservative colors seem to follow. If you sell beach items, then lots of fun colors apply. If you have a bridal showër website, I would say soft pastels. Think about your audience and you will know the color scheme.

4. Page Links – I-95 To Your Destination

This is a no brainer but make sure all of your buttons are hyperlinked to a page and the right destination page. No one including Google likes broken link pages. It can be tedious but do it anyway. As you hover over the button and look down in the left-hand part of your screen, you will see the hyperlinked page. Just verify that yours are correct.

5. About Us – Is Your Map Reliable?

People usually want to know basic things before they do business with you. Who are you, how do I get a hold of you, what is your product or service guarantëe, will you resell my email address, what is your privacy policy, when will I get the product, etc. You need to answer these questïons to create trust between you and your potential customer.

6. Sitemap – How Do I Find My Way Around This Big City?

Let’s say you have a lot of products or pages and resources. A sitemap helps people to find what they are looking for quickly without have to rummage through your whole site like a lost soul. They are not hard to create but are useful for large sites. It also helps the search engines to know what you are about very quickly.

7. Fast Loading Pages – All Lanes Are Go!

There is nothing worse than slow loading pages. You can optimize your graphics for your website. People hate to wait. You can chëck your page load time and page rank on Alexa.com. Slow pages equal death to an online business.

8. Shopping Cart – Need To Buy Some Souvenirs

If you are selling items or services, you need a reliable and well organized shopping cart. I have seen some websites that have a zillion products listed and to email them for orders. What a nightmare! Yes, the shopping carts will charge you a fee, but it is worth it for them to handle the transaction. There are many good shopping carts available and I would research them based on your business’ needs.

9. Templates or Original Design- Chevrolet or Porsche

People often think that to have a website designed is going to cost thousands. So they opt for the templates and throw together sites. There is nothing wrong with this approach except I can tell the difference between what I call a “canned” site and one that was created from scratch. While I don’t think a website that uses templates will turn off a customer, I just think it may not be as appealing.

Have fun with your online business. You can go to any number of photography sites and download professional photos from cows to race cars. This will make your site look more customized.

Again, I recommend that you shop for a good web designer. I paid around $400 for a basic site to go up. I know others would have charged me $1000 or more. That’s why you need to shop and see examples of their work.

10. Customer Service – The Finish Line!

Okay so how is customer service a website design? Well, customer service should be written all over your site. From tips, to frëe reports, to guarantees, to fast and reliable shopping. People want to know you know what you are talking about and can deliver the goods they want. Give a little and I guarantëe you’ll get in back tenfold.

About The Author
Jan Peterson founder of GoldStarReview.com researches and reviews business opportunities including internet marketing, real estate investing, affïliate marketing, financial investing and more. Over 400 FR-E-E reports available.

Posted in Internet Marketing, Organic Optimisation, Structure, Techniques, Web Design | Comments Off

The 10 Best Resources for CSS

Aug
02
2005

If you have been paying attention, you certainly have noticed an increasing number of websites that are employing CSS and an increasing number of resources talking about how great CSS is. If you have not yet jumped on the CSS bandwagon, you may want to consider doing so immediately.

CSS has many different benefits for website owners. The most obvious is the pure, raw design capabilities CSS brings to websites. CSS can control everything from the size of your font to the very layout of your page. A site designed with proper HTML and CSS can avoid incorporating almost any design elements into the actual HTML. This means a website owner can change the entire look of their whole site without changing a single HTML page. For owners of sites with dynamic content or sites that have a lot of content (blogs, forums, stores, etc), this becomes a huge time saver.

CSS also allows a website owner to build their HTML in a nice, logical order. Often when using tables to layout a website, the HTML that powers the website is not laid out in a logical order (this is referred to as the ‘code flow’). This can hurt website owners in two ways. The first, and more important way, is to recognize that not everyone who uses the Internet is viewing your website through a visual browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. There are a whole group of people who are viewing websites using web readers and other tools which rely on well-organized code. Secondly, a well-organized website can actually help your search engine rankings. When a spider discovers a page that is well organized and not filled with a lot of extra HTML code, it can determine more accurately and quickly what that page is really about. Let’s face it, we all want to help the spiders, right?

It is in the spirit of CSS that this article is written. There are hundreds of websites offering CSS tutorials, CSS examples, competitions, and showcases. There may be some that we are not aware of which are not displayed hë²¥, and if so, we encourage you to let us know in the Site Reference Forums.

With that said, we must offer a word of warning before going to any of these websites. These sites can become very addicting if you enjoy web design in the slightest way. Some of these sites link to literally hundreds of other sites which will catch your interest.

Now that the warning has been issued, we present to you a list of our favorite CSS websites.

CSSZenGarden
If you have any doubts over how powerful CSS really is, then you need to visit CSS Zen Garden. CSS Zen Garden is a display of the power and beauty of CSS. The concept is simple: see how many ways designers can take the exact same HTML code and produce completely different looking pages. As you browse through the various designs, you will find that the only thing changing the way each page looks is the CSS file. The HTML is exactly the same.
CSS Zen Garden is a great showcase of creativity and technical expertise. It is also important to point out that CSS Zen Garden does not use any tables for their layout. Everything is done in pure, simple HTML and CSS.

The Web Developer’s Network
Any of the sites that make our favorites list are certainly listed on this extensive resource page. Be warned, this page has so many resources listed it is easy to get lost for hours exploring them. Some of the resources are just fun to explore while others offer some very practical advice on practical matters.

The page is not limited to CSS resources, but also delves into areas of good website design and creativity, along with anything else you could possibly want for your design needs. Our only criticism of this site is that it might be too extensive to find a specific tutorial or help guide.

Official Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Specification
This is the place where it all starts if you want to learn CSS. Hë²¥ you will find the official documentation on how to use CSS and what CSS is used for. Many novice website owners are scared away from this site because it is written in very technical language and they fear that they will not be able to understand it. If you feel this way, be careful not to sell yourself short. The specifications are actually much easier if you know how to read them.

When going over this document, keep in mind a few things. First, CSS was built for more than just the Internet. CSS can be used in print media and broadcast media as well. So when you are reading some of the instructions in the official manual you may find some aspects that do not apply to what you are doing. Secondly, do not worry if you do not understand a certain chapter or bit of information. The trick to learning CSS is to get a basic understanding of it first, then practice, then go back and re-read what you have already read (things will make a bit more sense this time around), then practice, then go back and re-read again, and so on. Every time you practice what you learned and go back to re-read some of the specifications, it will make more and more sense to you.

As a point of reference, if you want to just go over the most important chapters in the manual, be sure to read these chapters: Chapters 8-12, 14-18, and 4-6.

CSS from the Ground Up
Ok, so you have tried the official manual and it is just too difficult to understand. That is fine. There is a lot of information included in the manual, and they certainly do not work at entertaining you with the manual. If you want a bare bones tutorial on CSS, the people from Web Page Design for Designers have put together a pretty good basic tutorial which should get you started on your first CSS pages.

Listamatic
One thing you will learn as you begin to work with CSS powered layouts is that lists are extremely powerful tools. Lists are a vital part of building a website with good code flow. Getting lists to appear correctly in different browsers, or to appear in new, original ways, however, can be quite challenging.

Listamatic offers several examples of lists that use simple CSS. The examples cover nearly everything that you could possibly hope to achieve from an HTML list. Of course, if you are working with a nested list, they have examples of those as well.

CSSVault
This site offers a little bit of everything. They offer a great gallery for you to stop by and gawk at, as well as a number of resources on everything from lists to building layouts that do not use tables. Definitely a good overall resource on CSS.

CSS Layout Techniques
No CSS guide would be complete if we did not address the issue of building a layout that does not use tables. This is certainly the most challenging aspect of CSS, learning how to build a nice layout. The people over at Glish.com have put together examples of several different types of layouts. They may not offer every layout you could possibly use, but looking over their guides will certainly help you learn different techniques to learning how to layout your page.

Ruthsarian Layouts
There really cannot be enough resources on how to work with layouts using CSS. Ruthsarian Layouts offers several very good examples of popular layouts.

PositionIsEverything
And yet again, we offer another site dedicated to learning layouts and the little quirks that each browser brings into your CSS design. This site may just have the most information on position with CSS than any other site.

StyleGala
This is another site that goes a bit beyond CSS and into some other aspects of design, but still offers so much to learn from that it is highly worth putting in your favorites file. Included in this site is an impressive gallery, some forums, a collection of bullets that you can use on your site (where has this been for the past several years?), and a great collection of resources.

Using These Resources to Learn

Whether you are a code junkie or are a person who relies on FrontPage to do all of your design, moving in the direction of CSS and properly formatted HTML is the future of the Internet. For many, beginning the process of learning CSS may seem like a useless and overly-difficult venture. However, if you are responsible for the look and feel of your website you should begin to explore this technology which is being used more and more.

The best way to learn CSS is to start using it. Experiment with different parts of CSS. Try and accomplish different tricks that you have nev베done before. If you have nev베created a page without tables, try and do so today. If you have nev베worked with a list to format it in a completely different manner, experiment with that. Browse through some of the sites in the many different galler拾 offered to us and get inspired. Use these sites and these resources to imagine what your website could look like.

Your website is your salë³ pitch to your visitors. When they arrive at your website, it should be your goal to present to them the best looking page you can possibly provide. A well designed page will provide your users with the comfort that you are invested in your business, and you will be invested in them as a customer and visitor.

The Internet is a rapidly changing environment, with new technology and new tools being made available to enhance your site every day, and thus enhance your visitor’s experience. It is your responsibility to make sure that your website sells, and that requires using the modern and powerful technologies that are available to us.

About The Author
Mark Daoust is the owner of Site Reference and TowerSearch. You are fr률to use this article on your website as long as you make all the links active and include this resource box.

Posted in CSS | 2 Comments »

Exmouth Bed & Pine, oak and pine furtniture Devon, beds and mattresses

Jul
01
2005

WNW Design have just Search Engine Optimised Exmouth Bed & Pine’s website, for a new Silver Package. The Exmouth based store sells oak and pine furniture, beds, mattresses, headboards, divans, guest beds and more. With products in store for immediate purchase, Exmouth Bed & Pine can also order in virtually any model of bed, mattress or pine item you require. In order to get an idea of the range available customers can check out the manufacturer links on their website.

Exmouth Bed & Pine also deliver items free within a twenty mile radius, making them the best choice for beds, mattresses, pine and oak furniture in Devon. They offer experienced and friendly advice and are more than willing to lend you their expertise to help you find the right item for you. Thier shop can be found along the Exeter Road in Exmouth and customers can drop in any time during normal shop hours.

Customers can also contact the store via phone or email, through their website.

Posted in WNW Clients | 1 Comment »

Custom Web Site Design Strategies

Jun
28
2005

Custom Web Site Design Strategies by Nathan Drew Sire

Web site design has certainly, in the past decade, evolved tremendously. More clients now are demanding custom design, as opposed to the ‘cookie cutter’ sites of yesteryear.

Where once there existed a limit as to the types of fonts used, the types of coding languages used, and the styles themselves, there is now the possibility for more variety in Web site design than ever before. This has come about because of the advances in technology that did not exist even a few years ago, and it has opened up many creative avenues for Web site designers in the creation of custom designs.

Web development overall, has to be more competitive, and take into consideration the needs of clients now, when literally billions of Web sites compete for attention online on a daily basis. A Web site is the first impression the owner of an E-commerce business makes on their own potential clients, and the competition factor, has now led to the burgeoning of more creative designs and implementations to deal with this competition factor.
Web development now needs to speak to the needs not only of the clients that are building the Web site, but the needs of the visitors who are, overall “potential prospects’ of the Web site owners.

E-commerce needs have created some rather unique approaches to Web development, from the most beautiful to the most garish, unfortunately. In an attempt to have their own E-commerce sites ‘noticed’, some business owners have become too individualistic, and there does abound many sites that are not easily navigable, nor especially pleasing to the eye. A Web designer needs to use good judgment when making choices about how much is ‘too much’ individuality.

Web site designers can avoid the pitfalls of becoming overly creative, and yet do much now to make a client’s site, very appealing and eye-catching by keeping a few simple rules in mind:

A. Are the colors pleasing to most visitors, without being garish and hard to view?

B. Are the fonts easily read by most visitors, which means not too large (too much scrolling), or too small, (too much squinting)?

C. Is the navigation and usability of the site what it can be? Can visitors find features easily?

D. Is the site clean and uncluttered? It should never look like your grandmother’s attic, where thirty years of junk abounds in every corner!

At the same time, the E-commerce functionality can be maintained with advanced creativity, as navigability and usability can be implemented flawlessly also. The new advances in technology now have led to the following changes that increase the ability to improve creativity:

1. A staggering number of font sizes that can be flawlessly implemented to distinguish a site. Up until just a few years ago, Web masters were limited in the choice of fonts, and font sizes. Times New Roman and Arial were the two standard fonts used, as some browsers could not effectively display other fonts with any reliability, changing fonts that were not Times New Roman and Arial into the Sans Serif, which is not all that attractive. This was a big deterrent to the creative use of fonts. With new embedding technologies, this is no longer a real problem, and many designers are now using great new fonts that make a site ‘stand out’ effortlessly.

2. Original layouts can be more easily implemented due to the emergence of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) technology. Prior to CSS, it took much work (and therefore much money) to create designs with ‘punch’ as every design demanded hours upon hours of work with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the old standard for writing and creating custom designs. CSS has freed Web designers from these restrictions, and of course, saves clients a great deal of money spent on man hours, leading more clients to demand great looking custom designs.

3. Navigation and usability have also increased, once the restrictions were lifted from the creation and development of custom sites. Oddly enough, for some reason, many years ago, it was thought ‘common knowledge’ that all sites should contain a left-hand navigation bar, and nothing else. This was the old standard that designers had used for decades and no one thought to question this practice. This gave rise to sites that were for the most part ‘cookie cutter’ varieties, each having the same standard layout and left-hand navigation bar layout. Creative use of right-hand navigation bars and other techniques have created sites that are very much different in layout and navigation than the old standards, and this has not proven to be a detriment for most E-commerce businesses. In fact, uniqueness seems to be more memorable, and may indeed be a competitive edge in itself.

4. The emergence of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML technologies has opened up a whole new world of creative fonts, creative color schemes, and creative layouts. With WYSIWYG, designers can see exactly how a site will appear all through the process, eliminating much of the time consuming trial and error that preceded this. Even novice designers and those that seek to create their own site can benefit from WYSIWYG, as most Web site creation software and online sites used for Web site design incorporates this technology, which is easy to use for almost anyone and requires no coding language knowledge.

5. Better flash techniques have also been discovered and employed in the past several years, leading to greater effectiveness of flash sites, and faster upload speeds (a problem with flash prior to the technological advances was slow loading). Sites that employ flash now have a more professional look and feel to them, and flash is used often now in the construction of online videos and games that appear on sites and educates and entertains visitors.

The past decade in technology has indeed lent itself to the emergence of superior creativity in Web site design and Web development by Web masters. Gone are the old days of stagnantly designed sites, the ‘same old, same old’ fonts, dull colors, and slow-loading and ineffective flash. It seems now, that the sky is the limit with customization of sites, and this can only be called one of the best developments of this century. Beautiful sites, that will hopefully bring beautiful results to personal and E-commerce clients, are now standard, and the future looks brighter than ever for Web site designers and developers!

About the Author: Nathan Drew Sire, President of Captain Media, services the web design/development market. He’s been developing code since the age of eight. You can read more about his company at http://www.captainmedia.com or contact him at info@captainmedia.com

Posted in Techniques | 1 Comment »

Designing Your Web Site to Maximize Traffic

Jun
27
2005

Designing Your Web Site to Maximize Trafficby Brendon Turner

Designing your site to maximize traff from the search engines is not a difficult task but it does require you to think ahead and plan your SEO strategy carefully. If you have not yet built your web site and are still in the initial planning stages then you may have an easier time of it. If you already have an existing web site, then you may need to take the time to read up on these SEO strategies and make some changes to incorporate them into your web site.
I will discuss 13 ways in which you can improve on your existing web site or boost a brand new web site into the stratosphere of high rankings. These are NOT SEO tricks but rather tried, tested, ethical and true methods that we know to work effectively. We all know that in reality there are no real SEO tricks. True success is achieved through hard work, research and implementation of a thorough and complete SEO strategy.

Without further ado hë²¥ is a checklist of important items to consider and implement into your SEO strategy.

Using Javascrï°´ or Other Unspiderable Code

If you intend to use Javascrï°´ on your web page it is best to use it sparingly or not at all. Search engine spiders cannot read Javascrï°´ and it is possible that along with ignoring it when they come across it on your page, they may also get hung up on it if you are using a lot of it. If you really need to use Javascrï°´ you can safely use it by putting the code into a separate JS file and calling it with a single line of code which you place between your ‘head’ and ‘head’ tags within your web page.

Using Style Guidelines Effectively

If you are using CSS style commands, do not include them within your actual web page source code. You don’t want search engine spiders to have to wade through 100 lines of unreadable code before they reach your actual content. Instead, place your style guidelines into a separate CSS file and call them with a single line of code from within your and tags by using the following code:

Primary Keyword Layout

Examine your web site from a source code point of view and ensure that your primary keywords or phrases will be spidered first. When search engine spiders read your page they read the source code just like we would read a book from left to right – top to bottom. We know that search engines place higher relevancy on keywords and phrases which appear closer to the top of a page so it stands to reason that if you’ve got a large table full of graphics appearing at the top of your source code before your primary keywords, then you can achieve higher rankings by adjusting your layout and placing a well written search engine optimized paragraph above that table full of graphics.

Spiderable Text Present on Each Page

Many times I have seen some very pretty web sites, but their chances of ranking high for any relevant keywords have been dashed by the use of only graphics and very little or no text on the pages. It is very important to your SEO strategy that you make sure that you’ve taken the time to write some quality textual content for your pages. Don’t write nonsensical text filled with blatant sp@m. Instead, take a few extra minutes and write 4-5 quality paragraphs which clearly explain the theme of your site and the particular page you’re writing for.

Proper Use of Robots.txt File

On several occasions I have performed an analysis of a client’s web site only to discover that they had inadvertently blocked spider access to their web site by incorrectly formatting their robots.txt file. It is critical that you know what you’re doing when you use a robots.txt file. If you are unsure of the correct syntax when modifying or creating a robots.txt file, I recommend you not use a robots.txt file at all. This may sound counterproductive, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Accidentally blocking the spiders can result in a loss of all your rankings. It would almost be like starting over again to repair the damage. For help on correctly formatting your robots.txt file, visit robotstxt.org.

Dead Links and 404 Errors

If you are not checking for broken links on your web site, then you should start immediately and make this a part of your SEO strategy. You can nevë² be 100% sure of your link integrity, especially when your site has 100, or more, pages. Aside from losing potential customers into a vortex of 404 errors, you risk more than that from a search engine perspective. When a search engine spider visits your web site and finds broken links, the impression left is that your site is not regularly maintained and updated. Not much is known about how the engines view this, but your crawl status may be assigned a low priority by visiting search engine spiders. In other words, the spiders may not visit your site as frequently as they visit sites with 100% link integrity. So make sure you download some link checking software and begin a regular schedule of verifying your link structure.

Using Images For Primary Navigation Links

Many webmasters like to use fancy looking navigation links but, in doing so, they fail to establish a theme for their sites. For instance, using a graphical link back to your home page does not tell the search engine spiders what that link is about unless the spider actually visits that page. If you use optimized ALT text on that graphical home page link, then that would be a step in the right direction. But to maximize the effect and clearly define the theme of your web site, you need to use a text link that has your primary keyword or phrase within the link text. This is called Link Reputation.

Home, Site Map and Contact Page Links

The Home, Site Map and Contact pages are your site’s primary pages and should be your SEO strategy top priority. It is essential that these pages be spidered and exposed to your site visitors. To ensure that they are spidered, place links to them near the top of your source code on every page of your web site. Your home page is, of course, the main entrance to your web site so you want that to be the focal point in the search engines. Your site map page should (if properly optimized) have links to all of your sub pages and use primary keywords belonging to each sub page within the link text pointing to those sub pages. Your contact page is just as important because it’s used by visitors who have questﯮs or who wish to order products and services.

Redirected Pages

When a web page has outlived its usefulness, webmasters will, on occasion, redirect visitors hitting that page to another page. Search engine spiders, however, take a dim view of page redirects. If you change the content of your site and find that you have no further use for a page, do not place a redirect on that page. Instead, remove the outdated content and replace it with something relevant. Include a text link to your home page or to a new replacement page. When you remove a page or place a redirect on an outdated page, you’re cheating yourself out of better rankings and search engine traff Moreover, using page redirects can result in the removal of your site listing in search engine databases with a consequent loss of revenue.

Excessively Small Type Font Sizes

Text in a font smaller than font size 2 is normally reserved for copyright information and the l맡l jargon often seen at the bottom of web pages. Use font size 2, or greater, for the majority of text on your page. Font size is a major factor in SEO strategy because the font size used defines the relevancy a search engine spider assigns to the content it finds on your page. An example of this would be the text within heading tags (H1 through to H6). Text surrounded with H1 tags has a higher relevancy placed on it than text surrounded with H6 tags. Visit the W3.org website for a better understanding of how on-page text is viewed by search engine spiders with regard to importance and relevancy. Search engine spiders tend to follow the W3 HTML standard.

Hidden Text, Door Way Pages and Other Tricks

Nowadays search engines are pretty smart and trying to trick them is not a wise course of action. Take some time to stop and examine your approach before proceeding with your SEO strategy. The rule of thumb is that if it looks like sp@m or could be perceived as sp@m by the search engines, then it probably is sp@m. The last thing you need is for a competitor to report unethical SEO tactics to the search engines. Such tactics could result in a loss of existing site listings as well as a ban on future submissions. So, to ensure the longevity of your online business, stay away from any technique that looks unethical.

Using HTML Frames

In short, don’t. Frames are not very search engine friendly because search engines cannot read a framed source document that tells your browser to load more than one page in your browser window at the same time. Thus, achieving a high PageRank on your home page is difficult. Frames also make it hard for search engine spiders to find all of your sub pages.

Non-Spider-Friendly URL’s

If the URLs for your web site contain characters such as &, $, =, %, etc., that is they are dynamic in nature, then search engine spiders may not be able to read them. And, if they can’t be read, then the search engine spiders won’t be able to follow them to index your pages. However, there are solutions available to fix this problem. For example, webmasters who have sites hosted on servers with Unix operating systems can use Apache mod_rewrite to rewrite URLs that contain a session ID, or other nä³´y characters, into search engine spider friendly URL’s.

SEO, of course, is not just limited to the 13 areas covered in this article, but if you apply the SEO strategies outlined in these 13 areas to your web site, you will find that your site rankings and traffimprove dramatically.

About The Author
Brendon Turner is a certified search engine optimization specialist with 8 years experience as a Senior SEO Consultant. Brendon also maintains ProfitGazette.com, a progressive weekly edition of real-world online marketing business tactics that work!

Posted in Structure | 2 Comments »

Alloy Wheels News Section On Topgear’s Website

Jan
28
2005

If you were looking for Alloy wheels from Topgear.co.uk click the banner

Alloy Wheels News Section On Topgear's Website

A new news section has been recently launched on one of our client’s websites.

Topgear.co.uk, who specialise in a wide range of car parts and accessories including, alloy wheels, car tyres, performance exhaust systems and catalytic converters, have recently added a news section.

It will be used by Topgear to keep their large number of visitors up to date on such topics as new designs and ranges of alloy wheels, the latest information on car tyres and anything else they think would be of interest to their visitors.

So why not take a look at what they have to offer, simply click here to visit the Topgear Alloy Wheel News Section.

Posted in Blogging, WNW Clients | 2 Comments »

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