WebDev

What to Publish on Your Website: Content Development
 by: John Simms

Many businesses want a simple website where they tell people what their business is about, some information on the products they offer and a means of contacting them.

However, content is vital in the growth of your Internet presence. Information is your asset and all you need to produce it is the knowledge you attain over time.

For some, they simply don’t know where to start. Here are some things to consider that could lead you to providing great content and a value-adding website.

1. Write what you know

Knowledge is power. Post articles to your website that show that you are well informed in your industry. If you can position yourself as an expert in your industry you can boost perceived credibility of your business on the whole.

2. Entertain

Everyone likes to be entertained.

For example, if you are marketing African tours, you might publish photo galleries or post stories on the African people, travel tips, the climate, etc.

3. About Your Business

Are people interested in the current happenings in your business? Post news items on your website. Eg. “New branch in Gauteng”

If someone doesn’t know you personally, will they trust you enough to do business with you just by visiting your web site?

Most people view organizations - and web sites - they don’t know with great skepticism. Given all the identity theft and viruses running around, people are understandably cautious and somewhat skeptical when they go to a new web site.

What can you do?

Here are four tips on how to create a web site that builds trust:

1. Provide your contact information

You visitor wants to know that there is a real person somewhere behind your web site. Ideally, put a real person’s name, full postal address, e-mail, and telephone number. Some of your visitors will want to communicate with you. Make it easy for them to do so.

2. Post testimonials

You say: “Our web site is the greatest”.

Your customer says: "Yea, right."

How To Run A Successful Link Exchange Program
 by: Joe Balestrino

Link Exchanges are a very time consuming project. The time it takes to find the sites to exchange with, contact them and place a link on your page can seem like an eternity. The hardest part about link exchanges isn’t the research, it’s the waiting. This article will give you some tips to help speed response time to your requests.

“How long does it normally take?” you ask. The average wait can be 2 to 3 weeks, sometimes even longer. The reason for this is that many people operate their web site as a hobby or side business and may not be on top of their email. Keep these timeframes in mind before you judge the successfulness of a link campaign.

The first step is to find sites related to your web site that DO NOT have a large directory of links posted. You want to link to sites that have less than 100 links on their link page. Their Page Rank (PR) should be at least equal to yours. Higher is better, so always aim for the heavy hitters. Now, on to the business of saving you time.

Why time spent on your site is important

All websites regardless of type should measure this KPI, simply because all websites can use it as a gauge to see how compelling their offers are as well as check web site performance. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a content portal or an e-commerce sales operation, time spent on your pages is an important metric to measure. If you have for instance a commerce site you need to know how long your offers hold your audience.

Time spent on site is also another KPI that warns you when things aren’t going well.

Why you need warning signals

Life is full of warnings. Your body warns you with pain when there is something you shouldn’t be doing. If you don’t exercise enough and sit in front of a computer screen for too long you get muscle aches and pains, or a repetitive strain injury. That’s your body telling you to do more physical stuff or else!

Similarly if you twist or turn too quickly and strain a muscle, it’s your body giving you a not so gentle reminder that you should either stop overextending yourself or feel pain.

Create Huge Income From Your Web Site - 10 Easy Ways
 by: Dennis Becker

The cost of setting up a web site is dirt cheap nowadays. You can register a domain for less than $2.00 as I write this (for .info domains). Hosting is also very cheap, and getting cheaper all the time.

So why are so many web sites springing up? Obviously somebody’s making money besides the hosting companies, so here’s some idea starters for you:

1. Sell your own products or services. They should be related to your target audience. You want to be able to take credit cards (at least with PayPal if not otherwise) on your site and deliver your product to your customers as fast as possible.

2. Sell another company’s products. There is no shortage of companies willing to drop ship items for you, all you have to do is make the sale and place the order with your fulfillment company, they do all the work, and you profit on the difference between their price and yours. There are ways to avoid the hassles some attribute to drop shippers.

Your business website tells a lot about your company. A poorly designed website will have your visitors questioning the quality of your business. A well thought out elegantly designed site would instill confidence in your visitors that you are a credible business to deal with. There is a saying in advertising, "It is better to not advertise than to advertise poorly". The same holds true for web design.

There are so many Web Design companies now. How do you make an educated decision on which one to choose? Like every market that is saturated, you always see ads that read, "Hire us we are the best". Well how do you know that statement is true? Wouldn’t it be great if you had a resource available to you that pre-screened Web Design Companies to narrow down your choices? To answer that question, yes there is, use a Web Design directory. Web Design directories are usually run by companies in the Web Design Industry. Using their knowledge to pre-screen the Web Design companies that submit their contact information to the directory insures that only quality Web Design Companies are listed.

Using Robots.txt Files To Feed The Spiderbots
 by: Christian Whiting

It’s a Thursday evening. You are looking at your website logs to determine where your hits are coming from. You notice you are getting a ton of 404 errors records for a robots.txt file.

You might not even know what a robots.txt file is, let alone why it is missing from your website. Let take a look at this mysterious file that seems to be missing and why it’s important to have it.

Search engines like Google cruise the internet by sending out their spidering software. These are commonly known as spiderbots. The spiderbots visit websites all around the internet to include them in their index listings. The first thing they look for when they visit is a file called the robots.txt file. This file normally is found in the root directory of hosted website.

This file contains a set of rules that the spiders are programmed to obey based on standard protocol. These rules help the visiting spider determine what part of your website to include or to ignore all together.

Web design is a very competitive area and there is no longer any reason why people should pay large amounts for website design services.

This article describes and explains where to find very very cheap website design services.

The first place to try of course is the internet search engines themselves. The best place to try could be paid adverts on the right hand side of the search engine Google. These are called Google adwords and these companies are actively seeking business. The results on the left hand side are normally the more established companies who will probably try to charge a lot of money for their services.

I have heard a lot of people who have had great success on auction websites, like ebay. People or companies at times offer their services for a very cheap rate, normally to drum up some very much needed business.

Other areas to look are in places like the yellow pages, newspapers or by asking family or friends.

I myself know of many people offering expert website building skills who only charge between £50 and £100 per website. There are many great deals to be had out there for people who are willing to make lots of phone calls or send lots of e-mails and who are patient.

Ways Not To Look Like An Amateur
 by: Florie Lyn Masarate

Nothing can compare to the proud feeling you get when you see your own design, with your signature, on print. These would be for the trying-hard-to-be-good-designers point of view, anyway.

If you are one of these beginners, chances are you would be committing mistakes on the process of making your design. But do not fret! These are common mistakes that others like you have gone through also. As they say, it is part of the learning process. There are just some things that you need to know to make your design look like it is done by a professional even though it is not. What are some mistakes you need to avoid in making a design?

Putting all your fonts in one document. No matter how great they all look, putting all these into a single document could a jumbled and an inconsistent look on the document. Not only that, the readers would get confused on the changes with the constant change in the strokes of the letters.

1. The reliability of the service and their offers.

A brand new hosting provider which boasts features that are too good to be true usually won’t last for too long. Let’s take the example of one host (I won’t give names here) that went offline only a few weeks ago. They were offering 500MB of storage, 10GB of bandwidth per month, domain hosting, unlimited domain parking, CPanel with just about all possible features, absolutely no ads (not even a request to link back), and this only for 150 posts in their forum. Sounds too good to be true? Betcha! After they cashed in two fat checks from AdSense they simply went offline. No prior notice, no apology, nothing.

Things to watch out for:

- Design. If the site looks like it was bought from a man in a white van, or if it’s using a design from a free template site, it’s probably just a waste of time. If these guys couldn’t pay a web designer $100 for a decent layout, they don’t probably have the skills to run such a site.

- How long they’ve been around. I’m not saying that new sprung hosting services can’t make it, just be careful when choosing one that’s two months old.