Good Web Design Practices
June 17, 2007 | 1 Comment
Your business resides on your web site — it’s like the headquarters of an off-line company. Therefore, it is important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.
Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.
Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load more slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize it using an image editing program so that it has a minimum file size.
Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too large. If a block of text that is too large, your visitors will skim over the content &mdasah; or worse, skip over your content.
Make sure your web site complies to HTML and CSS web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
Don’t use browser-level scripting languages, like Javascript, to handle or manipulate data or to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.
Don’t create your web site with Adobe Flash, or at least not entirely with Adobe Flash, if you want the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN to be able to index your pages. The search engines can not read Adobe Flash.
Use CSS to style your page content. You can save yourself a lot work by styling all elements on your website in one step.
Powweb Coupon Special $10 Off
June 1, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Powweb, who is my choice for web hosting - the web host that I use for all my sites — has been running a great special for a couple months. Their “Chili-pepper ad” that asks if $5.77 / month for 300GB Space and 3000GB throughput is “Hot enought?” as been quite effective for them:
Now, for a brief time, you can get the Powweb Coupon Special for
another $10 off your purchase of a year’s web hosting
Notice that this Coupon Special is only valid through that special page. You don’t get it just by going to Powweb’s site!
It makes me wish I needed to buy another account — but I don’t! — I can host unlimited number of domains in just one of these One Plan accounts. (One Plan = that’s all they offer).
I’ve been with Powweb for over three years and am happy with their services.
When you match that $5.77 / month pricing with an additional $10 off and get a 30-day money back guarantee, you’ve got a great deal.
Get the
Powweb Coupon Special for a great deal on web hosting.
Suggested Web Design Resources
February 22, 2007 | 4 Comments
I am often asked which resources (books, etc.) that I recommend for people who want to create web sites.
Many web hosts, such as Powweb, provide basic templates for easy creation of a web site. These can be your base for your very first web site, or can function as a quick way to set up your personal blog, a photo gallery or even a forum.
Once you have your first site created by some type of script or template, you will want to play around with it and change it. Whether you create a site using FrontPage, DreamWeaver, a web host’s templates, or code it by hand, you will probably find that you want to do things that can not be done by the standard package. That’s where coding and tweaking the site by hand come in.
HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide, Fifth Edition (Paperback)
– excellent structure, very readable and very understandable. Bite-size chunks of information and examples.
Open Source Web Development with LAMP Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP (the LAMP book will be hard to find).
My reviews of these two books.
If you’re using FrontPage, get FrontPage 2003 The Missing Manual.
Actually, all of the books at this link. I have but haven’t used the JavaScript one. The others are good. Start from the top, with Don’t Make Me Think
Get one or the other versions (paperback / hardack) of the HTML for the World Wide Web, even if you have another HTML book. www.terryscomputertips.com/computers/web-design-books.php The CSS and PHP anthologies are not learning tools, but more reference / script libraries. The “Build your own database-driven website” book is a good example for getting going with PHP.
The Adsense Secrets” ebook by Joel Comm. Joel is “Dr. Adsense” — one of the first people to make over $10,000 per month from Google’s Adsense pay-per-click ads on his web sites. I found this book a BIG help in understanding how to create and display Adsense “pay per click” ads on my sites.
Get Adsense Secrets
Visibone.com’s “The Browser Book” is a 16-page quick-reference booklet that I use almost every day. It covers HTML, CSS, colors, fonts, special characters, JavaScript, DOM and Regular Expresions.
www.visibone.com
The Super Affiliates Handbook about selling other people’s products. Rosalind Gardner, formerly an air traffic controller, made over $478,000 in one year as an affiliate selling other people’s products on the web.
Notepad++ color-coded syntax programmers editor (free). Mostly, I use the EditPad Pro ($40, www.jgsoft.com). I reviewed Notepad++ in my November 28th issue of Terry’s Computer Tips.
Adsense Gold (Adsense Tracker script + 2 web-based PPC price lists + ebook). I waited and waited, convincing myself I didn’t need it. I finally bought it recently. It brings a whole new level of understanding web site stats and information on which pages get visited and which adsense ad formats — and ads — get clicked, without having to mess with Google’s limited “channels.”
Get Adsense Gold
SEO Elite Finally, one software package that I’m still considering — probably like my unwise delay in buying Adsense Gold. This package is all about fine-tuning your web site(s) to get high rankings in Google, MSN, Yahoo and similar search engines — and establishing incoming links from other web sites — because higher rankings mean more traffic! And more traffic means more earnings, whether you are selling stuff or have content with advertising. SEO Elite helps you get targeted traffic — traffic interested in your site’s subject.
Why get links? The more inbound links you have — links from other sites to yours — the higher you should rank in the search engines. Search engines also look at blogs for their rankings because blogs have become a major factor in Internet communications in the last year
You can sign up for Free Web Advertising via the ability to post entries to a blog designed specifically for advertising by members. Free members can post a 700 character ad once per week. Paid members can post much more often, with larger ads and HTML (fonts and images) that free members can not.
Pay attention, though — there is a special one-time offer for a paid upgrade that is not repeated. Although you can purchase a lesser upgrade later, you can not post nearly as often and you don’t get all the bonuses available if you go for the “Elite” upgrade. I wish I had…
One of the new services that I have found is LinkMetro. With LinkMetro, which is available in both a free membership and Advanced Membership modes, is a great way to identify potential web sites that you might want to link to you.
Why get links? The more inbound links you have — links from other sites to yours — the higher you should rank in the search engines.
LinkMetro’s free service helps you identify potential link partners. The Advanced Membership makes the tedious task of modifying and maintaining your web site’s link files into a virtually automatic activity. Just initiate a link request, or accept a link request from someone else, and pick where you want the link in your links directory — LinkMetro’s software will handle the rest.
LinkMetro will also allow you to easily view the pages on which your link partners have your links and make sure the links are still there.
Sign up for a free or Advanced Membership at LinkMetro. I recommend the free membership, not the advanced.
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New Version of WordPress Blog Software
January 31, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Wordpress.org released version 2.1, codenamed Ella (for jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald) in mid-January.
So far, I like the changes and improvements. Upgrading from the previous version was easy, although it required locking the site and deleting almost all the previous WordPress files and replacing them with the new versions of the files. This step was necessary because some of the files were renamed (so old file names were obsolete).
Fortunately I didn’t have to rework any of my template customizations.
The only problem I had was that I accidentally uploaded my revised .htaccess file, the one with the password protection turned on, into my account’s root directory — and managed to password lock ALL of my web pages in all my domains. Arghhh! Resolving the problem was easy once I figured out what I did…
Windows Server 2003 Web Hosting
January 19, 2007 | Leave a Comment
My web sites are all hosted on at a web hosting company that uses BSD, Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL and provides install wizards for lot of other free open-source packages. I have FrontPage Extensions 2002, the latest and final version that Microsoft has said they will release, available, too.
I code my web sites at the PHP, HTML and CSS levels, and I usually tweak the open-source packages like WordPress so that I can get just the visual presentation that I want.
But, if I wanted to use the latest version of FrontPage (FrontPage 2003, which has web site interactive features that aren’t available in FrontPage Extensions 2002 ) I would need to use a web host that provided Windows Server 2003 web hosting.
Similarly, if I wanted to program using Microsoft’s ASP script or Microsoft SQL Server, I would have to find Windows Server 2003 web hosting.
I recently found an option for Windows Server 2003 Web Hosting - priced at only $7.96/month! . I haven’t tried them yet, since I’m not currently doing ASP or FrontPage 20003, but what I’ve seen so far looks good.
Getting Better Web Site Statistics
December 8, 2006 | Leave a Comment
One of the most important things to do, after you get your site initially up and going, is to watch your web statistics.
You want to know which web pages are getting visitors, which sites are referring others to you, which search engines are referring people to your site, what search terms they used to find you, and a lot more.
There are some good statistics packages that most web hosts offer, including Awstats and Webalizer. Powweb, the hosting company that I use, installs Awstats for free.
Those are pretty good for high-level statistics for everyday sites. But, they don’t let you dig deeply enough into the statistics, at least the way the web hosting companies usually set them up.
But, if you’re using Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network pay-per-click ads on your site, you will want a lot more.
How about an easy view of multiple domains’ activity, multiple web pages activity, all the search keywords that people used to get to your site, how many Google or YPN ads they saw, and how many they clicked on!
Yeah, Google’s and Yahoo’s tracking systems will tell you that — if you want to spend that much time setting up all the specific tracking (and if you don’t have too many different URLs or “channels” you want to track.
Adsense Gold is the tool that I use multiple times a day to monitor my site. It’s a lot easier than going to Google and YPN, plus a lot more information. It has real-time updating, since it’s storing data in a MySQL database on your site and served from your site.
It’s the best tool I’ve found to tell me which of my pages are getting the visits — and how visitors are responding to the Google and YPN ads on the page. That way, I know where I need to focus my redesign, rewriting, etc. efforts.
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