Wednesday, March 28, 2007

How to Design a Web Page That Pays by Cliff Posey

It is relatively easy to design a web page. It is much more difficult to design a web page that works, and more importantly a web page that pays off for either you or the web visitor. But if you want to create web sites or have a home based business that you can promote online, building a web page that pays is an absolute necessity. So, how do you design a web page that pays? First off, you need to determine who will be getting the pay-off. It could be you or the web visitor, or better yet, it could be both of you. For example, an informational web page will be valuable to a reader looking for information and valuable to you if you have affiliates, links to products, or other sites you want to promote.
When building a web page or looking for a home based business, affiliate programs are worth considering because they add value to the site for the reader and can provide enough revenue for you to keep the site going. The best affiliates offer products that are in some way related to your site. In other words, if you have an informational web site relating to pet health, it wouldn't be a good idea to have affiliate links for tax software. You will be much better served with affiliates that sell pet vitamins, pet toys, or other pet related products.
If you want to create web sites or design a web page so that you can make money from affiliate programs, it is a good idea to research affiliates and the topic before you proceed. Making sure that affiliate programs exist in conjunction with the information you want to provide or the home based business you want to promote will prove to be very valuable later on as you try to get the site off the ground.
You will also want to make sure that you will be able to provide credible information to the site's visitors. For example, you will have a hard time building a web page devoted to coaching soccer if you know little about the subject. And without credibility, you stand little chance of getting site visitors to stop by once, let alone, again and again.
Credibility will also prove to be important when you look for affiliates. Often times, your site will need to be reviewed before you are allowed to participate in the affiliate program. If you design a web page that is not up to par, you will have little chance of being approved.
In short, take your time and do your homework. That is the only way to create web sites that truly pay off for you and your visitors.

About the Author
About the author: Cliff Posey, owner of CRP Marketing, owns and operates http://webbusinesstoolsonline.com/ Cliff Posey has also operated several other successful web businesses including Love Song Cards and Radio Career Consultants. The content in this article was developed from his experience in these businesses and his continual research into further business improvements.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

The Art and Science of Webpage Building by Cliff Posey

Webpage building is partly an art and partly a science. Art comes into play when you want to create websites that are visually pleasing. Science is also important because you need to understand the method that goes into building pages that are optimized properly for search engines.
If you want to make your own website that stands out among the many competing sites on the web already established, you will need to keep the art and science of webpage building in mind at all times. In other words, you need to create websites that are search engine friendly and user friendly all at the same time. Here are a few specific tips that will help you through the process:
Make the Site Easy to Navigate Today's web visitors are impatient and more than a little finicky. If they come across a website that is hard to navigate, they'll log off and go elsewhere. This is extremely important to keep in mind during the webpage building process. The site should be easy to navigate and should be set up so that the user does not get trapped in one section. If they hit the back button, it should take them back to where they were. When you make your own website, you will also want to put a link to the home page on every other page you create.
Watch Out for Broken Links Nothing is more frustrating to a user than clicking on a link that doesn't work. When you create websites, you should periodically review all of your outgoing links to make sure that they actually go somewhere. While this won't be something you need to do every day, it should be something you take care of once a month and during the initial phases of the webpage building process. Keep Content Fresh If you want to make your own website, but don't want to keep updating it with new content, you might want to rethink the idea altogether. The only way to create websites that stay fresh and keep visitors coming back for more is to consistently update the site with fresh content. If you have the same old stuff on your site from month to month, visitors will notice and so will the search engines. Webpage building is an ongoing process. Anyone who tells you differently is lying.

Designs Your Web Site For Search Engines

When you design a website, it's easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see your website everyday. What do you have to realise, though, is that you're going to have another kind of visitor with a completely different agenda: they're not going to be looking at your pretty logo and they're not going to be passing judgement on your background colour. What they're looking for is the content and structure of your page.
They're the search engine spiders, and they are in control of probably the largest section of your traffic. You need to please these spiders if you want your site to be successful. Here's how. Make Your Structure Clear.
Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways: you want it to be very clear to the search engine where the navigation is, where the content is, and where the headings are. As a rule, put navigation first in your page. Always use the heading tags (h1, h2 and more size.) for headings and sub-headings.
Avoid using generic span and div tags and only making things clear to the user through CSS font sizes: instead, use every 'semantic' HTML tag that applies to your content. If you're quoting someone, use the blockquote tag; if you're posting program code, use the code tag. Search engines love this.
Keep Keywords Consistent
It's not usually worth deliberately saturating your content with keywords in hope of a higher search ranking - the engines have pretty much wised up to this tactic - but do make sure that your keywords appear consistently when they occur naturally.
For example, for these articles, I have stuck with 'website' throughout, as suddenly writing 'web site' instead would bring down my rankings.
HTML and Javascript
It's worth noting that search engines read HTML, but they don't, in general, read Javascript. That means that using Javascript to insert text into your page is a bad idea if you want search engines to see the text. On the other hand, you might want to have just the text in HTML and insert all the other parts of the page with Javascript: this will tend to make your page appear more focused, although you should be careful not to insert navigation links this way if you want the search engines to follow them.
Use Meta Tags
Yes, meta tags are out of fashion, and search engines pay no attention to them any more when it comes to ranking your site, but they're still important in one way: the meta description tag is still often used to decide what text search engines' users see when they find your site in their results! This can be just as important as the ranking itself - write something here that will look useful to the searcher, and you're more likely to get them to click-through. Don't forget that, while search engines are just machines and algorithms, the end result of it all does involve a human decision: to click, or not to click?
Avoid Splash Pages
You might think it's a great idea to have a 'splash' page displaying a full-page version of your logo (or an ad) to every user who arrives at your site, but search engines really hate that. Using this trick will get you ranked far lower than you would usually be, so you should avoid it - it's annoying to visitors anyway.
Include Alt Tags
Any time you use a graphic, include alt text for it - especially if there is text in the graphic. Remember that, as far as search engines are concerned, all your graphics might as well just be big black boxes. Test by removing all your graphics and seeing if your content remains relatively intact. If it doesn't, then you'll be turning search engines away.
Finished, Write Great Content
The key with modern search engines and at the same time, the thing you have least control over is how many people decide to link to your page from their page. How can you make more people link to you?
Make your content interesting for visitors. Make it something they'll want to quote on their blogs. Content is more King than it's ever been, and the best way to design for search engines is to make your content really stand out.

Learn How To Build a Web Site by Website Builder

You need to learn how to build a website - fast! Maybe your school, church or community group is in desperate need of a web site to promote their work and communicate with members. Or, you may be trying to launch a new product or service and need to use the power of the Internet to reach out to new customers.
Whatever your reason, you need to learn how to build a website now and you probably don't have the time to stumble around learning how to make boring little 'practice web sites' as you learn technical details that don't solve your problem. What you really need is a streamlined approach to show you what you need to know to get the results you need - and nothing else.
So, what are your options for learning how to build websites?
Going Back to School
You don't literally have to go back to school, there are plenty of excellent free educational resources online. Learning to build websites by 'going back to school' means committing time to go through a course of study that will teach you all of the programming information that you need to know to create a web site. This involve learning the structure of HTML documents, learning how to work with tags, style sheets, scripts, and more.
You will start at the beginning and work your way through to the end creating little tutorial projects along the way. When you are done, you will know everything required to begin building web sites.
Going back to school is a long process, but you will be a very skilled person when you are done. If you have the time to pursue this approach, the http://www.w3schools.com/ website offers some excellent tutorials for all of the important skills needed to become a web developer. Bookmark this site, because you will use it often as a reference.
Building a Free Web Site
Blogger.com, WordPress.com, and other commercial web site companies will allow you to quickly and easily build a website for free - no special skills required.
This is a great solution when you just need to get some information online fast. But, there are several big limitations.
When you create a web site at Blogger.com, or another similar company, they own your web site address. They are also in complete control of the server and decide which features and templates you can use on your site. These free tools also tend to be focused on people who create blogs. So, unless you need a blog, you may not be able to create the kind of site you need.
Building a Web Site with Web Development Software
The fastest way to build highly customized web sites is to use a web development software tool. These tools provide a simplified user friendly interface the allows you to design your web site in a very natural and intuitive way. Then, behind the scenes, the software creates all of the code required to make a valid web site.
The features you need are presented in a simple, straight forward way and, as your skill and experience grows, you can still switch to view and edit the HTML and CSS code directly, then quickly switch back to the visual interface to see the effects of your changes.
These software tools are also an excellent way to learn about the technical side of web sites. You can use the visual tools to create new features and then switch to the 'code view' to see how it looks in HTML. You can also type in the code and then switch to the visual interface and see what the code will look like in a finished web page. You will be able to learn very quickly through this technique.
There are dozens of choices when it comes to finding the software you need when learning how to build a web site. Many of the software packages produce very bad code that doesn't meet web standards. (Microsoft's Frontpage has an awful reputation among web designers and produces some pretty ugly sites.)
The big dog in the web site building software category is Dreamweaver by Adobe. This software is stuffed with every feature known to man and will cost you hundreds of dollars. But, it is the industry standard for web development. You may spend as much time learning how to use this software as you would 'going back to school."
There are modestly priced software solutions available. Look for software that has been updated recently (web standards are always undergoing change and actively developed software will keep up.) And, look for software that creates 'standards compliant' results. This will ensure that your web site's code doesn't get in the way of your search engine rankings.
Do you need to learn how to build a website fast? Easy Website Builder will have you building sites in no time. Don't believe it? Watch the video demonstration or download the free lite version of the software and try it for yourself. Visit: http://ezwebsite.gotoguyenterprises.com

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