The Art and Science Of CSS
November 27, 2008 by Stephen S Alison · Leave a Comment
Web site developers utilise a very powerful tool called Style Sheets which provide the ability to be completely consistent with the look and feel of your web pages, while giving you much more control over the layout and design than straight HTML ever did.
Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short, were introduced sometime in 1997 but it is only during the past few years that they have started to be widely used among browsers and web developers are learning to be more comfortable with them.
There are three parts or aspects to CSS:
- the styles which define how to display HTML elements;
- their placement; and
- the fact that they can cascade;
The Art & Science Of CSS beautifully presented in full color, will teach you how to apply innovative CSS based techniques to create visually stunning headings, forms, menus, navigation, backgrounds, and much more…
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Tags: CSS, The Art and Science Of CSS, web developers, web site, Website BuildingGoogle Webmaster Guidelines
November 25, 2008 by Stephen S Alison · Leave a Comment
Google Webmaster Guidelines – Today I want to talk a bit about Google and how they provide webmasters with lots of great resources when it comes to website creation. I am often amazed at how few people actually pay attention to what I like to call Google recommendations.
Presumably, one of your principal goals is to:
- Create a website that drives free traffic from search engine like Google, Yahoo and Msn.
Then you need to listen to what those very search engines have to say about how a website should be structured, the content, links, and the nuts and bolts. This makes sense to me.
Here is the link to the Google Webmaster Guidelines
These guidelines have been my SEO bible so to speak from ever since I can remember.
If your goal is to drive free online traffic to your website (s) – and it should be a priority if you truly want to make money online – then you should understand those Google Webmaster Guidelines inside out.
I personally like to think of these guidelines as the rulebook, and addressing these guidelines has been an integral part of my success online.
So I recommend that you follow the rules and you too can drive free traffic to your website and make money.
Tags: Google Webmaster Guidelines, search engines, SEO, traffic, webmasters, Website BuildingInternet Marketing
November 19, 2008 by Stephen S Alison · Leave a Comment
The principal objective of any Internet Marketing campaign is to attract traffic to your website. Regardless of what kind of business you ultimately want to build on the Net, targeted traffic is the key to greater income.
The achievement of a successful internet marketing campaign is not an easy task to accomplish, but with careful analysis and planning, you can save a lot of money and time and achieve very good results – by choosing the right options and channels.
Generally speaking there are a number of basic Steps of Internet Marketing which you should follow and these are itemised as follows: Read more
Tags: content, ezine, Internet Marketing, link popularity, linking strategies, pay per click, PPC, reciprocal links, search engine, targeted traffic, web site, Website BuildingGoogle Reveals More Linking Secrets
October 18, 2008 by Stephen S Alison · Leave a Comment
Website linking, linking, reciprocal linking or whatever you want to call it, is an important part of the search engine optimization process because Google and all major search engines place some emphasis on link popularity in their ranking algorithms by using link popularity algorithms (defined as the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy.
A recent article in Site Pro News by Titus Hoskins entitled Google Reveals More Linking Secrets To Webmasters, discusses this topic ad nauseam. Here is a direct quote…
One of the most problematic and confusing issues most webmasters have with Google concerns linking. How your links are ranked? How you should link out? How you should construct your internal links? How you should get more inbound links? How many links should you have on a page? And the líst of questions goes on…
Interested? You can read the full “Google Reveals More Linking Secrets To Webmasters” here…
Tags: Google Reveals More Linking Secrets, link popularity, linking, Website Building, websitesA Good Website is a Great Asset
October 17, 2008 by Stephen S Alison · Leave a Comment
A Good Website is a Great Asset – The importance of buying a domain name and building a website to promote your business, especially now that the general economy is tanking, was underlined in an article published by USA Today this morning. The story, “A Good Website is a Great Asset,” was written by Gladys Edmunds who has a weekly column in the national newspaper called Entrepreneurial Tightrope.
Here is a quote:
Every now and then I feel compelled to remind you of how important maintaining a website can be to your business. If you have a site that’s not giving a return on your investment then perhaps it’s time to rework it. If you have been procrastinating about having a website, now is the time to get one
Interesting? Then read the full A Good Website is a Great Asset article…
Tags: a good website is a great asset, domain name, Website BuildingDo You Have Duplicate Content
September 22, 2008 by Stephen S Alison · Leave a Comment
Do You Have Duplicate Content On Your Website? It may sound crazy but it is possible you might be creating duplicates of your own content without even knowing it. It’s important for you to understand how to avoid duplicating your own content so that you can stay in control of which of your Pages Rank in the Search Engines.
If the Search Engines see duplicates of your pages they automatically choose which page to rank and shove the rest in to their supplemental index (the black hole of Search Engine traffic).
The two main possible causes for this are:
- Duplicate Domain URL’s;
- Internal Duplicates;
Duplicate Domain URLs – The Search Engines view all the following URL’s as “separate” pages even though they all actually point to the same page…
- http://yourdomain.com;
- http://yourdomain.com/;
- http://yourdomain.com/index.html;
- http://www.yourdomain.com;
- http://www.yourdomain.com/;
- http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html;
If you (or others) are linking to your site using a variety of these different URL’s you’ll not only be diluting PR (Page Rank) on your site but you also stand the chance of having your content labelled as duplicate. At the time of writing Google is known to be aware of this issue and are working to solve it. However, I urge you to not leave it to fate. Take control of the situation as soon as you can.
Internal Duplicates – Are you 100% certain you do not have duplicates of your own content within your own sites?
If you are using one of the popular free content management systems (i.e. WordPress) your site might already be suffering from this.
For example, WordPress the popular Blog management system, automatically creates archive and category pages on your Blog. The default settings of WordPress result in these archive and category pages containing duplicates of the exact same posts appearing elsewhere in your Blog.
When Google finds all the multiple versions of your post their bot tries to determine which page to rank and places all the rest in to the supplemental index. This might not sound like a major problem because one way or another your content it still getting ranked but if it is left up to the Search Engine bots you may not get the page *you* want to rank.
If you are putting in all the effort required to make sure your content is unique you really don’t want to fall over at this last hurdle. Jason Katzenback from PortalFeeder has created a YouTube video tutorial showing the code you need and how to use it. Check Do You Have Duplicate Content here:
How To Build a Website
June 15, 2008 by Stephen S Alison · Leave a Comment
One of the principal keys to success on the Internet is learning and understanding how to build a website.
The appearance of your web site or your web design will to a very large extent, determine your success or failure as your product or service will be judged by the image conveyed by your website. Poor website design has already been identified as one of the leading causes of small business failure online.
So what really are the principal elements of good website design and are there any special “how to build a website” rules to follow?
In summary the following are the main good website design requirements:
- How to Build a Website Rule 1 – Your website should contain theme-based content;
- How to Build a Website Rule 2 – You should avoid using Banners;
- How to Build a Website Rule 3 – Your website should Not Sell. It must Presell;
- How to Build a Website Rule 4 – Pay close attention to your website’s Look and Feel;
- How to Build a Website Rule 5 – Pay close attention to your website Navigation;
- How to Build a Website Rule 6 – Pay close attention to your website’s Fonts;
- How to Build a Website Rule 7 – Pay close attention to your website’s Background and Text Colors;
- How to Build a Website Rule 8 – Your website should have Printer-friendly Web Pages;
How To Build a Website – Theme-based Content – So what exactly is a Theme-based Content website? It is a site based upon a theme. Each and every page of the site focuses on a single topic that is related to that theme.
For example lets say your theme is golf . Topical pages would include:
- The Masters;
- The British Open;
- Tiger Woods; and so on
We call each topical page a keyword focused content page. Your site could easily grow to over 150 pages, each of which focuses on a different golf-related topic. The net sum of all the information on all your pages forms the Content of your site – the first good website design element.
How To Build a Website – Avoid Banners – Retinal studies, conducted during usability testing, have shown that Web surfers actually avoid banners and banner ads. Yes, their eyes look away, so naturally your website traffic will be low.
How To Build a Website – Don’t Sell. PREsell – A common error made by many webmasters is …selling instead of PREselling. People resist sales efforts, so your click through actually goes down. A visitor arrives at a website that is no more than one, big sales site. Put yourself in that visitor’s shoes for a moment. You do not see interesting and inspiring content – you see a sales effort. But you were looking for content!
If your site is basically a “bunch of sales letters”, you are not building any credibility and likability with this visitor. Your visitor ends up feeling “pitched” by just another site doing the pitching. So, just like the banner ad, your visitor is not very likely to click through to your payment link.
How To Build a Website – Look & Feel – Select a style that matches your theme — choose the one that best matches the “Look & Feel” for your site’s theme. It’s a good idea to preview each style in a full screen (by clicking the Preview button in each style template) before making your decision. Start by choosing a Color Scheme for the style that you like best.
How To Build a Website – Navigation – When you begin designing your pages, please keep in mind that your visitors may enter your website from pages other than your home page (index page). So you need to make sure you include good navigational links on every page.
You should place your navigational links together at the top, bottom, left or right side of each page. Also you should use tables to align your links neatly and maintain a balanced, organized and uniform appearance throughout your website.
How To Build a Website – Fonts – One of the most important parts of a web page is text – both text font and text size. The way in which you display the text on your web page will have a great impact on your success as it can make your page look either professional or un-professional.
When placing text within your web page, always be consistent with your choice of fonts. In other words, don’t use different fonts throughout your pages. The standard fonts used on the Internet are Arial and Verdana. The standard text size is 2. Arial and Verdana are the standard simply because they are the easiest to read on a computer screen.
Headlines, which require a larger font size, are a bit different. A popular headline font used is Georgia, as it displays nicely in the slightly larger font size.
How To Build a Website – Background & Text Colors – Be selective of your background and text colors. Busy backgrounds make text difficult to read and may draw the attention away from the text. Also, always be consistent with your background theme on each page of your site.
Give some careful thought to your choice of colors, as colors affect your mood and will have an affect on your visitors as well.
How To Build a Website – Printer Friendly Web Pages – Reading from a computer screen is uncomfortable at the best of times, so users may often want to print the page they’re viewing. The problem is that web pages don’t usually lend themselves to print.
Unless your web page width is 600 pixels or less, the chances are that your page copy will not fit in the printed page, and important information will be cropped-out.
Additional Reading:
build a web site Build your own website with just a few clicks … – build a web site Build your own website with just a few clicks. Don’t lose a lot of time, don’t spend a lot of money. Try our website builder NOW and build your own website. Create a free website, get free web hosting and your domain …
Jeanine Strickland of Clayton ,NC discusses how to build a website … – Listen as Jeanine Strickland, a Independent Website Designer shares why your church, ministry, or business needs a website. Learn how to build your website as well.
Don't Build Your Web Site In Flash – As pretty as it may be in small doses, a Web site entirely in Flash still presents a poor user experience. No one wants to sit through that. I don’t care how indexable it is. There are still far better ways to present that content. …
Website Design Tips – Need help in setting up your up own web site? Information is available in free videos and articles from LinksParadise. This a free site with how-to and videos on such subjects as How to build a website, creating web site graphics and …
Do you have a website? Make it PROFITABLE – Marketing should be well planned before you start a new website. If you already have a website, don’t worry, it’s not too late to build free, targeted traffic to your site. There are three simple steps to follow to make your website …
Five Pointers On How To Build Links To Your Website & Improve Your … – By having your keywords and your website URL in your signature, you create many links to your website when participating and making posts in these forums. Some of these forums have high popularity rank, so by having links to these sites …
How to Build a Website If You Don’t Know HTML – Don’t let not knowing HTML stop you from building a website – there are a number of editors available that will help you design pages and install them on your web hosting server. These editors – often called WYSIWYG editors (for “what …
Make A Successful Web Site with This Four Key Steps – There are four main steps you must take in order to build a successful Web site: 1. Select your target market or audience 2. Create your site 3. Monetize your site 4. Promote your site Depending on… [[ This is a content summary only. …
How to Build a Website For Free in 9 Steps – This is the simplest of ways to get a real website up and running, but did you know that maintenance and updating can be labor intensive? And if you want to add different functionality such as a registered-users-only area, …
Tags: how to build a website, presell, theme-based, web design, Website BuildingWeb Site Building
May 11, 2008 by Stephen S Alison · Leave a Comment
Once upon a time, web site building was very expensive. Now, though, you can have a site up and running for the price of a used book, if you’re frugal and careful. Getting the cheapest website you can is a great first step on the ladder, to get started on the web and see if it’s for you.
Nowadays, web site building is easy using nothing but software you can get for free – most of the best scripting languages are free, and each one has had a lot of free software built for it by hobbyists. Check out sourceforge.net, which is a big repository of free software.
You might think that free software for web site building would be less functional than paid-for software, but you’d be wrong. If you want a forum, for example, there’s no clear advantage in paying massive license fees to vBulletin (the biggest seller of forum software) instead of just installing the free phpBB. The free software gives you more flexibility, and yet comes at no cost.
Free software has become an ideological movement, for people who want to be able to modify their own software, and much of the free software out there is quickly becoming widely-used and standard. Using free software web site building doesn’t make you look cheap, because users are used to seeing it everywhere – even better, the chances are that they already know how to use it.
Depending on what kind of web site building you are planning, you could use the design templates that come with your free software – they’re usually perfectly adequate. If you don’t want to do that, then a quick look around at a site like templatemonster.com is sure to turn up something suitable for your website building that only costs a few dollars.
Finally, one of the biggest costs associated with any web site building is marketing it – whether you’re planning to pay for banner ads or ads in search engines, website marketing is a big cost. You can save money on web site building though, by becoming involved in online communities that you think might be interested in your website. The biggest free marketing technique out there is SEO (search engine optimisation), which is when you organise your web site building in a way that makes it more attractive to search engines, getting you targeted visitors for free.
Once you’ve built your budget website, you may need to upgrade it later on when you start to get lots of visitors. You might wish to pay a professional designer to improve your design, but in most cases the path from a budget website to a big one isn’t all that costly either.
Additional Reading:
Website Building Mistakes You Should Avoid – If you happen to have a website (or plan to build one shortly) this is a must-read. A website should offer customers with useful information that can actually help find solutions to their problems. When I used to search for home … Custom Web Design – And that technique works fine, but it is not the hallmark of a custom website. If you want a custom website, you dont want to look as web designers as persons who take the job of building a website off your hands. … New Experiment: Building a Niche Website With Wordpress – Using Wordpress to build a niche site gives you an advantage. First off, it’s free. But more importantly, Wordpress’ plugin functionality gives you the ability to custom create a SEO monster — a website on steroids. … Notes for Newbies – Part Sixteen – Building Your Website – Building your website. To build a website you need some software called either a webpage builder or an HTML editor (these both mean the same thing). There are three types:. The simplest and hardest to use requires you to write … Website Builder: How Do I Benefit? – As a business owner, your initial steps towards building a website are usually ones of hesitation and doubt. You’ve heard the hype and every single business news and media outlet talk about this website and that website and all what a … How to make a website – Get a website-building program and do it yourself. While this might work for your dried bug page, if you are unsure of your design eye and ability, then it’s probably not the best choice if you’re trying to make a sharp, … Building New Website – On technically, it is very difficult to build online site if we don’t have basic knowledge and experience in programming and website design. Maybe hiring a professional is one of solution for this problem, but how many budgets that we … FREE building service for complete money making website! – Plus 30 days training. All that I need to do is promote my own website. With the help from this service, I cut the time to think about building a website. Now I can happily jump to the next phase which is to promote my website. … Make Money with eBay Affiliate Niche Website Builder Software – Aside from actually having a website, all you need to do is send traffic to eBay from your niche site. This can be done by more advanced marketers by building their own websites and inserting the RSS code from eBay’s fees from their … Bacllinks / Backlink checker/ Build backlinks – Backlinks (or back-links (UK)) are incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by … 7 Tips To Get Traffic To Blog or Website Without Breaking The Rules – Link building through submission to web directories, it’s an important part of the overall link building mix. Well, driving high traffic is not easy, we all know that, but it’s not impossible. No matter what blogging platform you use … Advice on Hiring a Website Designer – Find out the designer’s method in building your site. Check out the web designer’s portfolio (even if there is only a couple or a few, you can have an idea how appealing the sites are); Don’t be fooled by ‘pretty’ or ‘flashy’ sites … Does Your Web Site Have Trustability and Credibility? – Which site gained your trust? Which site would you revisit? The more user-friendly building tools you use on your site, the more trust will be developed with your viewers. With this in mind, here are expert tips for making your online …
Build A Web Site
May 6, 2008 by Stephen S Alison · Leave a Comment
If you don’t have a website, then you might not realise all the great things they can do for you. Maybe you think there wouldn’t be any point, because your business is too small – or maybe you don’t even have a business! Perhaps you think it’d be a lot of work for little reward. Or maybe you paid big bucks for a site back during the dot-com ‘boom’ days, only to get nothing but trouble out of it and shut it down a year later.
Whatever your situation is, though, you must build a web site, and I’m here to tell you why:
- Generate Revenue from Domain Development;
- People Will Look for You Online;
- Websites Cost Next to Nothing;
- Websites are Great Advertising;
- A Website is a Worldwide Presence;
- Your Website Can Save You Time ;
Generate Revenue from Domain Development – a major part of the domaining revenue model is developing a website as a business including web site creation and building, web site design, web hosting and website promotion.
There’s a lot of money on the web, and it’s not hard to get some – the longer you’re online for, the bigger your share can get. If you have something to sell, you can sell it worldwide. Doing business online eliminates almost every overhead there is: all you need to do is have the goods.
People Will Look for You Online – Sooner or later, someone’s going to type your name into a search engine. What do you want them to find? Nothing? These are people who want to find you, and if you don’t have a website then you’re letting them down – they expect you to be online. For many people, you might as well not exist if you can’t be found with a search engine. Not having a website is like not bothering to get listed in the phone book. Whether it’s customers or old school friends you’re hoping for, very few people are going to find you if you aren’t online.
Websites Cost Next to Nothing – Once, it cost a lot to run a website – but those days are long gone. There are ‘pay as you go’ services out there now charging as little as $1 per gigabyte of bandwidth. If you’re sensible about the size of your pages, that dollar could last you a whole month, or even longer! If you don’t want to pay for design, it’s never been simpler to do it yourself, or find free software to do it for you. Really, it’s never been cheaper to have a website than it is today.
Websites are Great Advertising – Whatever you’re advertising – your services, your products, or just yourself – a website is a great way to do it. Every other kind of advertising going costs a premium, especially if you want to target a specific kind of person, and there’s no guarantee that they’re paying attention. Websites are like brochures that are free to reproduce, interactive, and quickly distributed to people who are already looking for them. No advertising medium even comes close to the ease-of-use and effectiveness of a website.
A Website is a Worldwide Presence – On the web, it doesn’t matter whether someone is next door to you or on the other side of the world – they can see your website just the same as anyone else can, at no extra cost to you or to them. Phone and post both cost enormous amounts long-distance, but a website lets you send information anywhere without any extra effort or expense. You can make friends and contacts in places you’ve never been and will never go – suddenly, working globally is no more effort than working locally.
Your Website Can Save You Time – Giving out information takes time, whether it’s on the phone, or in brochures, or even if it’s just emailing your family. Websites are designed to save you time. All your family and friends can read your online diary (known as a weblog), but you only have to write it once. Customers can see your whole product catalogue without ever needing to talk to you or visit you. This is the power of the web: things on it are written only once, but can be downloaded endlessly – a good website runs itself, and keeps being useful to people for much longer than you’d expect.
Additional Reading:
Sometimes You Gotta Say…Build A Web site
How does my website compare to …
How to Create a Great Website
