Low Price Web Design – Advertising and Marketing

By visiting a number of sites, you’ll probably be quick to notice that many of their web designs include “What’s New” pages or sections within other pages of the website design such as the home page. These sections are becoming increasingly popular among web designers as they’re an easy way to keep the content of your website’s design fresh and informative. These sections are frequently complimented by “What’s New on This Site” sections or pages, which also allow for fresh content, and keep visitors interested in returning to the site to find out what’s happening.

It has been proven through the number of visitors and other traffic statistics that any pages that highlight their newest additions to the site will experience increased traffic – likely due to a great deal of returning traffic. Even if there are links to the different parts of the site where the changes will have occurred, having those changes stand out on the home page or with their own pages increases their visibility, creating greater interest through the larger number of people who notice that something new is available.

Remember that just because the amount of traffic increases on your site, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the number of unique visitors to your site has increased. It could mean that you are generating a large number of return visitors. This is great if you want to ensure that your buying customers don’t forget about you. It helps to make certain that when your clients think about the type of product or service that you sell, you’ll be the first business that comes to mind. This is among the best kind of marketing that you can achieve.

So how do you know if a “what’s new” section is for you? Consider the following “qualifications” that would make your site design a good candidate for a “what’s new” section or page.

Your content is always being updated, changed, or altered in some way

Your site contains a very large number of different pages

If your page consists only of a main page as well as reciprocal links or perhaps a guestbook or feedback form, and perhaps a few small sub-pages, then a “what’s new” page is likely more work than it’s worth, because it won’t offer much real benefit to your visitors.

However, with many pages, or pages that are constantly growing or changes, this section will be a wonderful way to flag what’s new so that the visitors can head directly to the fresh stuff that they’re looking for, without having to search through the site – or simply give up before finding what they’re looking for.

However, remember that even if your site doesn’t change too much, as long as it’s large enough, you can still use a “what’s new”-type section to highlight the sub-pages that are most popular on your site. If anything, this will provide a much easier navigation through your site. Simply change the name of “what’s new” to something more practical, such as “Popular Pages” or “Featured Pages”.

Remember that the main point of a “what’s new” section is just to make the lives of your visitors easier as they navigate your site. A web user simply won’t search a full website to see if anything just happens to be new. Nor will they look for very long to find what they want if they haven’t found it in the first couple of clicks. Therefore, use this as a tool to keep your visitors satisfied with the ease of navigation of your site.

Within the “what’s new” section, you can write whatever you want, but the important thing is to make sure that whatever you say displays the latest changes, additions, features, or information offered by your site. Remember that your visitors aren’t going to use the “what’s new” section to its full potential, but will simply use it for what attracts their attention the most. It’s just a quick way to “get there”.

A what’s new section is great for those people who have found your site, and those who intend to return. It makes the site much easier to use, and is very pleasant to see upon landing on the home page. Just make sure that your site is large enough to make it worth the effort.

Copyright 2006 Mark Nenadic

Mark Nenadic
Mark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North http://www.15dn.com, where you will find articles and resources to help with SEO, marketing and Web design.

If you’d like to do business on the Internet, launching a quality web site is an absolute must. Learning how to design your own web site can be a little intimidating. However, there is a wealth of free information available on the Internet to assist you.

The best way to learn is by doing. Take the first step and begin researching. Once you understand the basics of web design, you can begin experimenting with some more advanced coding techniques.

A great place to start is HTML Goodies:
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/primer_1.html

Over the years, I have received many questions in regard to web design. Below, are some of the most frequently asked questions I receive on a regular basis:

Question: I am in the process of designing my first web page and am confused about making it compatible with all the different web browsers. Can you help?

Answer: Although there really isn’t a “set in stone” solution to developing a web page that will display properly in all browsers, there are some basic guidelines that will assist you.

The best advice I can offer is to develop your site to be compatible with Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, as these are the two most widely used browsers.

Although the latest versions of the two browsers are fairly comparable, you must take into consideration that many of your visitors won’t have the latest versions.

Some of the main differences between earlier versions of the two browsers are as follows:

(1) In order to center a “table” within earlier versions of Netscape, you must enclose your “table” code with the CENTER and /CENTER tags instead of using P ALIGN=CENTER. The CENTER tag is compatible with both browsers.

(2) When creating form fields, if you use the maxlength code within your code, Netscape will display the input box the length of the maxlength code value.

(3) If you would like to display your web page full-screen or adjust the margins, you’ll need to use the following codes within your BODY tag:

< BODY topmargin=0 bottommargin=0 leftmargin=0 rightmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 >

This margin code is compatible with both browsers.

Internet Explorer supports:

topmargin=0

bottommargin=0

leftmargin=0

rightmargin=0

Netscape Navigator supports:

marginheight=0

marginwidth=0

(4) Avoid using special design techniques that require a special browser extension or plug-in, as many of your visitors will need to download and install the plug-in before they can use your site — most won’t.

If you follow these few guidelines, you shouldn’t have any problems with browser compatibility.

A great way to ensure your site displays properly is to download and install both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. This will enable you to view your site through both browsers.

Internet Explorer

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.asp

Netscape Navigator

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/download.jsp

You can find a nice “Browser Compatibility” chart at the following web address:

http://www.webreview.com/browsers/browsers.shtml

You can test your site’s compatibility at the following web addresses:

http://www.anybrowser.com

http://www.netmechanic.com

Question: I can’t get my image to display on my web page. I placed the image code in my page, but all I see is a “red X” where the image should display. Can you tell me what the problem may be?

Answer: In order for an image to display on a web page, it must first be uploaded to your server in “binary” mode. If you’ve verified that your image has been uploaded properly, your next step will be to double check your image HTML code. Make sure that the image address leads to your image and is spelled exactly the same. Keep in mind, the name of your image is CaSE SeNsiTIve. In other words, if your image name is “Image.gif” on your server, it must look exactly the same within your code.

Question: I would like to display my text, side by side, like a newspaper, but I can’t figure out the code.

Answer: In order to display your text like a newspaper, you must place it within a table.

< TABLE >
< TR >
< TD >text< /TD >
< TD >text< /TD >
< /TR >
< /TABLE >

Question: When I placed my text within my page, it’s right up against the left border. Is there any way I can correct this?

Answer: Yes, you can place your text within a table. You can specify the width of your table to determine the distance between your text and the left and right border of your web page.

< CENTER >
< TABLE WIDTH="80%" >
< TR >
< TD >text< /TD >
< /TR >
< /TABLE >
< /CENTER >

This table code will display your text across 80% of your web page with a border of 10% on the left and right side.

If you’d rather not use a table, you can also set your page borders within your BODY tag:

< BODY topmargin=0 bottommargin=0 leftmargin=0 rightmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 >

Question: I have specified a font face at the beginning of my web page, but the font face isn’t displaying within my tables. Can you tell me what the problem may be?

Answer: In order to display a specific font face within your tables, you must use a separate font tag within each table cell.

< TABLE >
< TR >
< TD font face="Arial" >text< /font >< /TD >
< TD font face="Arial" >text< /font >< /TD >
< /TR >
< /TABLE >

If you’d rather not use a font tag within each of your table cells, there is an easier way. Place the following code between the HEAD and /HEAD tags. This code will specify the font style for all of your table cells.

< STYLE TYPE="text/css" >
< !--
TD{font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt;}
–>
< /STYLE >

Question: I’ve placed a form code within my web page, but my form isn’t working. Can you help?

Answer: In order for a form to function, in addition to placing the form HTML within your web page, you must also use a CGI form processing script. This script will reside on your server within your CGI-bin and will be called from your form code within your HTML. Your code might look something like this:

< form method=post action="/cgi-bin/example.cgi" >

The “cgi-bin/example.cgi” text should be changed to the address of your form processing script.

You can find free form processing scripts at the CGI Resource Index.
http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/

Learning how to design a great web site isn’t easy. However, if you take the time to educate yourself and start with the basics, you’ll be well on your way to designing a great site.

Copyright © Shelley Lowery

About the Author:

Shelley Lowery is the author of the acclaimed web design course, “Web Design Mastery” (www.webdesignmastery.com) and “eBook Starter – Give Your eBooks the look and feel of a REAL book” (www.ebookstarter.com)

Visit www.Web-Source.net to sign up for a complimentary subscription to eTips and receive a copy of Shelley’s acclaimed ebook, “Killer Internet Marketing Strategies.”

You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, in your ebook, or on your web site, free of charge, as long as the author bylines are included.

Many articles and books have been written on Search Engine Optimization by experts and non-experts alike. And there are many debates on the various techniques of how to optimize web sites so that traffic is increased. But my purpose here is to explain what I believe are the important basics that you should know.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It is defined as the process of increasing traffic (the amount of visitors) to a web site. The higher a web site ranks the greater the chances that it will be visited by someone. You know yourself that when you go to Google and search for something that you generally view the first page that comes up and possibly the second page before you find something. So where a web site is ranked is essential for directing more traffic. SEO helps to ensure that a site is easily available to a search engine.

But, what is a “search engine”? A search engine is a software program that searches web documents (pages) for specified keywords and key phrases and returns a list of web pages where the keywords and key phrases were found. Google would be a prime example.

Typically, how a search engine works is by sending out a “spider” to retrieve as many web pages as possible. Then an “indexer” reads these web pages and creates a catalog based on the words contained within each web page. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm so that specific results are shown.

A “spider” or “webcrawler” , as it’s sometimes called, is a program that automatically retrieves web pages and are used to send these pages to search engines. It’s called a spider because it crawls over the web. Because most web pages contain links to other web pages, a spider can start just about anywhere. As soon as it “sees” a link to another page, it goes off and captures it.

You’re probably asking yourself: How do I get my web site included in search engine queries?

A search engine finds information by accepting listings sent in by authors (web site owners) wanting exposure, or by getting the information from “web crawlers,” “spiders,” or “robots,” programs that wander the Internet and store information about each page they visit.

They normally start with a catalogued list of links, which are usually the most popular or best web sites, and then they follow those links to find more links and are added to the database. Unfortunately this makes most search engines biased toward the more popular web sites. The web crawler might send back just the title and URL or it could send the entire page. If you’re worried about these spiders and crawlers taking over your web site, check out Webcrawler for some interesting reading.

About Keywords And Key Phrases In SEO
It’s very important to have your keywords and key phrases geared to the basic subject matter of your web site. Keywords are important, but key phrases can be vitally important.

Here’s why: Suppose you have a web site all about classical music for children. Go to Google and type “music” (without the quotes) into the search area. You probably got about 1,080,000,000 results (as of this writing) with the top web sites being located within the first page or two. What do you think your chances are to being among them?

So to have “music” as one of your keywords would not be a good choice. It’s too broad. But, what if you were to make a key phrase more specific to your web site by entering “music for children”? This time you got about 188,000,000 listings. And then even more specific, “classical music for children”, where you’ll get about 45,700,000 listings. And finally, “mozart for children” which gave you about 3,110,000 listings. So you see how this works? The more specific your keywords and key phrases, the more specific the results will be and your chances of receiving targeted visitors to your website will increase. This is especially important if you’re paying for these clicks such as in PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.

About The Title Tag In SEO
The single most important area of your web page is the title. The title is the headline or label of the web page. This is what you see in the top header of your web browser, such as Internet Explorer, when a web page comes up. Simple enough? You would think so but it’s really not that simple.

How many web pages make up your web site? Each one should have it’s own title. What should you put in a title? Well, for starters, check out what keywords and key phrases are most appropriate for what’s on the particular web page. For instance, going back to the classical music for children web site, we see that “mozart for children” was used as a key phrase, but wait, you also have information about Beethoven, Bach, Chopin and Debussy.

Your first page, or index (Home) page will be where people are directed first. This is where you will be introducing yourself and your web site. This is where you will be generalizing about the music offerings by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin and Debussy. So it would be logical to put “Classical Music For Children” as your title tag and then if you have each page thereafter more specific, such as “mozart for children”, you would make that the title for that specific web page. So if you’re one of those people that think “Welcome to my website” is a good title, think again!

About Domain Names In SEO
Equally important is your domain name. A domain name should also include a keyword of what your website is about. For instance, you want to have a web site about classical music for children. You’ve gathered all the information and written content for each page dividing them by composers. You now have a conglomerate of information about classical music for children. You could choose “classicalmusicforchildren.com” as your domain name, or “kidsclassicalmusic.com”, or just “classicalmusic4kids.com”. Get the idea?

About Meta Tags In SEO
Meta Tags provide information about the document to search engines for inclusion of your website into their indexes. Although Google ignores the meta tags except perhaps for the description meta tag but the other search engines use them.

The two meta tags that search engines look for are the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag. We’ve already touched on the keywords, and the description tag is basically a key phrase description of your website. It should only be 10-20 words describing with keyword rich content but should read intelligible to the user. Each search engine is different in how it looks at each website, however, the keyword meta tag has been highly abused by some webmasters because they’ll use unrelated words in order to attract more traffic. This is taking a quite a chance because some search engines will ban a website for “spamming” them with tons of highly unrelated keywords. But if used smartly and in conjunction with other things on your web pages, specifically content, then chances are the search engines will be crawling all over your site.

About Content In SEO
Content is king. We can’t stress this enough. What you say within your website and how you say it is very important to search engines. Keep it rich with keywords and key phrases while making it easy-to-read and understand. Remember it only takes about 6-10 seconds to lose a visitor, so also keep it brief and to the point.

What Not To Do In SEO
Google offers suggestions and has some information on Search Engine Optimization Worst Practices if you’re interested.

The time it takes to get included into the search engine’s database is typically about 6-8 weeks. No one has control over how long this process takes. But what most people don’t realize is that once a web site gets listed into a catalogued database, it won’t be there for long unless there are regular updates to that web site. Search engines are very smart. They’ll be checking their databases to see if web sites still exist and to see if they’ve been recently updated.

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Diane Dickler is the owner of http://www.dironwebdesign.com/ where she specializes in creating, maintaining and hosting websites for her clients. Diane believes that knowledge is the key to power and continuously applies new concepts. Previously, she was the Managing Editor for a large company’s intranet and has taken the next step in the creative process.