How To Make A Website » Website Building 101 http://blog.websitetoad.com Free Website Tutorials Provided By WebsiteToad.com Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:17:18 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 How To Make A Website – Graphics And Blogs http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-website-graphics-and-blogs/ http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-website-graphics-and-blogs/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 06:15:47 +0000 David http://makeawebsitespot.com/makeawebsite/how-to-make-a-website-graphics-and-blogs/ So far I’ve covered some of the basic steps on how to make a website but I haven’t covered images & nor creating a blog. The images are a very important part of your website in regards to keeping visitors interested & for search engine optimization. A blog is going to keep content your website fresh and if you can write content that’s valuable, it’s going to keep people coming back to your website.

Tip 7: Images & Photos

How often to you revisit websites that don’t spice up their site with images or illustrations? For me, it’s rarely. I like to look at images & photos because it can answer questions without having to read through tons of content.

It’s important to place images on your website but don’t over do it. Many people still use dial-up for their internet connection so it’s important to use images that aren’t to large or exceed 72 pixels/inch. Most monitors don’t resolve more than 72 pixels/inch so you’re just making the images larger for no reason at all.

Another important part of images is the ‘alt’ tag, obviously search engines can’t figure out what an image relates to so it’s important to give your file a descriptive name and use the ‘alt’ tag. A good example of this would be something on the order of <img src=“chrome-wheels.jpg” alt=“Chrome Wheels” />.

To break this down you’re telling the search engine that your image is named ‘chrome-wheels.jpg and the alt tag is another way of describing to the search engines what the image is related to. It’s important to use the alt tag as often as possible because it’s a way of optimizing your web page for search engines.

There is a huge selection of image editing software on the market from free options like Gimp to higher priced editors such Adobe PhotoShop & Adobe FireWorks. I personally use both, I use PhotoShop for editing photos and I use FireWorks for creating and editing images such as banners & buttons. The later two offer advanced features so be sure to research them before making a decision.

Tip 8: Blogs

I’m running long so I’m going to make this short. Blog is short for Web log that consist of regularly updated entries displayed in reverse chronological order. Essentially an online diary or journal. The great thing about blogs is that search engines love blogs because of they are generally updated with new content and generally updated with unique content. You’ll find that almost every single web host offers a blog application with their hosting services.

There are a lot of different options in regards to blogs from hosted versions such as BlogSpot.com to versions that you host under your own domain such as WordPress. I personally use WordPress because I can host it on my own server and there are so many features that you can add to it. By the way, no matter which you choose, blog software generally is free.

You’ll find that we offer WordPress with all of our web hosting accounts as well. One final thing, I’ve covered just a very small area of blogs. In my opinion the best website regarding blogs and how to make money with blogs is at ProBlogger.net. I personally check with ProBlogger.net about 2 – 3 times per week so it’s a great idea to check them out.

In my next post I’m going to cover a couple of SEO, search engine optimization techniques.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

]]> http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-website-graphics-and-blogs/feed/ 0 Make A Website – CSS And Writing Content http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-website-styling-with-css-and-writing-content/ http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-website-styling-with-css-and-writing-content/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:51:37 +0000 David http://makeawebsitespot.com/makeawebsite/how-to-make-a-website-styling-with-css-and-writing-content/ Now that you’ve had a bit of time to research tips 1 – 4 it’s time to move onto the next batch of tips. In this post I’m going to cover styling your website with CSS and writing content. Both of these items will eventually get their own posts actually they’ll probably get quite a few posts. I just wanted to mention them now so that you’re familiar with them before you start building your website.

Tip 5: Styling Your Website With CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets which is used to describe how an HTML document should be formatted. CSS is great for styling a website within 1 CSS file which allows you to update your entire website by updating this 1 file rather than going into every page and making the updates. This is a real time saver that also cuts down on the HTML code within a web page.

Look at it this way, say your website is made up of 100 pages and the text for your content is black. One day you decide you’d like it blue instead. Rather than opening all 100 pages and updating the color, you can open you CSS page, update the color within the CSS, upload it to your server and you’re done. It’s that simple, update 100’s if not 1000’s of page by simply updating 1 page.

CSS can be used to define text, tables and more. There is a lot to learn about CSS and a great place to start is by visiting http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp.

One note, in a previous post I had mentioned purchasing website templates. Well most likely the styling on the website template pages are based on CSS so if you download a website template you’ll have a CSS template already setup which you can mess around with to learn a bit more about it. Just be sure that you have a backup of the CSS file before you start testing it out.

Tip 6: Writing Website Content

Writing website content seems like an easy thing right now as you’re full of ideas but as time goes on writing content is an area that becomes more and more difficult. The sentiment going around is that content is king when it comes to search engine optimization. Search engines such as Google want unique content on websites.

When you’re first starting a website it’s not too difficult to come up with new unique content but as your site grows it becomes tougher. The best thing to do is become familiar with the subject of your website and the content will come naturally.

One of the biggest things that you need to know is who your audience is. For me, I realize that I’m writing for people that are new to building websites so I need to start from scratch and write in a way that my visitors can understand. I don’t want to use a bunch of acronyms that seem simple to me. Rather than right that it’s great to use CSS, I need to explain what CSS is, as I did at the beginning of this post, and explain what the benefits are.

I plan on writing a detailed post on writing website content in the short future but I felt that this was important enough to at least briefly cover now.

In closing, you’ll find that both of these tips are important to building a website and if you take the time to write unique content that search engines will reward you for your hard work.

In my next post I’m going to cover graphics & images and creating a blog.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

]]> http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-website-styling-with-css-and-writing-content/feed/ 0 How To Make A Website – File Naming And FTP http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-website-file-naming-and-ftp-basics/ http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-website-file-naming-and-ftp-basics/#comments Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:15:42 +0000 David http://makeawebsitespot.com/makeawebsite/how-to-make-a-website-file-naming-and-ftp-basics/ In this post I’m going to cover naming files & FTP. I’ll cover naming your files a bit more in depth in a future post, probably in a search engine optimization post but again I at least want to touch on it right now. I figure that if I at least leave a quick blurb about naming files it will get you thinking.

Tip 3: Naming The Files That Make Up Your Website

This is actually a very important step when you build a website because it’s part of the SEO, search engine optimization process. One of the first things that I do after determining the subject of my website is to do a bit of keyword research. This is going to tell you what people are searching for related to your website. I personally use Wordtracker for all of my keyword research. They offer a paid & a very basic free tool for researching keywords related to your website.

The reason that I do keyword research is that I try to use keywords in all of the pages of my website. If the keyword is more than 1 word you’ll definitely want to seperate the words with a dash (-) rather than a space or an underscore (_). Quite a bit of research has been done and found that search engines such as Google prefer the dash.

You’ll see in my site at www.SteakBrandingIrons.com that I’ve done exactly that. For example, a branding iron that I offer is a Jeff Gordon branding iron and have named the page jeff-gordon-steak-branding-iron.php. This is a way of letting the search engines understand what your pages are about.

One other thing, it’s always good to structure your site by category. For example, say you sell car parts. You would create a folder in your web editor called wheels, tires, radiators, etc. Then within those folders you would save the files that relate to that product.

Here’s an example, say you own BillsCarParts.com and you review or sell tires, wheels & radiators. You are creating a page about chrome wheels and you save it as chrome-wheels.htm in the wheels folder. When you FTP, discussed next, the website to your hosting plan this page would be found at BillsCarParts.com/wheels/chrome-wheels.htm.

This is great for search engines plus it’s easy for you to organize your files. The bottom line is try to come up with a good blueprint of how you’d like to structure your website before just going in and creating a bunch of files and putting them in 1 folder.

Tip 4: FTP or File Transfer Protocol

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, which is the way that you move the files that make up your website from your computer to your web hosting plan. I personally use FileZilla it’s free to download.

Many website editors come with built in FTP capabilities but I find that they are slower plus FileZilla allows you to do some advanced features is changing files directly within your web hosting plan and change permissions of files which is common when you get into scripts such as CGI & PHP. I’ll explain them further in the future but I at least wanted to let you know why you may consider FileZilla over your built in FTP program.

That’s about it, in my next post I’ll cover tips 5 & 6. At this point I would take the time to get familiar with what I’ve reviewed above and check back tomorrow for a couple more tips.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
CEO/Founder – www.WebsiteToad.com

]]> http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-website-file-naming-and-ftp-basics/feed/ 1 I Want To Make A Website, Where Do I Start? http://blog.websitetoad.com/i-want-to-make-a-website-where-do-i-start/ http://blog.websitetoad.com/i-want-to-make-a-website-where-do-i-start/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:04:08 +0000 David http://makeawebsitespot.com/makeawebsite/i-want-to-make-a-website-where-do-i-start/ In previous posts I covered registering a domain name & selecting a web hosting plan so now it’s time so start looking into web design. When you’re new to website building, web design can be very intimidating. I’ve come up with a list of 10 tips to take into consideration when you’re ready to build your first website. I’m going to break them into 5 posts so avoid running long and I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information at once.

Tip 1: Choose Your Website Editor

There are a few different editors on the market which make building a website much more simple without having to be extremely knowledgeable in HTML. One term you’ll see is ‘WYSIWYG’ which stands for ‘What You See Is What You Get’. You’ll find that they are referred to as WYSIWYG Editors.

The two most popular website editors are Microsoft FrontPage & Adobe DreamWeaver. Just a note, FrontPage is being phased out but it’s what I will continue to use because it’s so similar to Microsoft Word. The issue is that they won’t be adding any new features but it still works great.

With that said, you may want to consider DreamWeaver because it does the basic functions of designing a page plus, as you grow, it has the capability of performing the advanced items such as CSS, PHP, among other functions. The great thing is that DreamWeaver is so popular that there are sites out there that cater to DreamWeaver templates, which is covered later.

The catch is that DreamWeaver & Frontpage are a bit pricey so if you’re on a budget you should take a look at CoffeeCup or an online website builder such as Website Tonight. They’ll give you the tools to build a basic website and as your skills grow you can always move into an editor such as DreamWeaver in the future. I would check with eBay for some better pricing on FrontPage & DreamWeaver.

CoffeeCup offers 100’s of templates and is priced a bit better than DreamWeaver & FrontPage. You’re going to lose a bit of functionality but again, you can always move to DreamWeaver in the future. You can actually get a FREE download of CoffeCup by clicking here.

Either way, just be sure to research the products and find out what will work best for the type of website that you’re wanting to build.

Tip 2: Search For Website Templates

The easiest way to achieve a professional looking website is by finding a website template. A website template will provide the layout, images, & formatting of a web page and all you will really need to do is fill in the blanks with your content and images.

The great thing is that there is such a huge demand for website templates that you can find a template for about any subject that you’re site may be related to. Please keep in mind that you’re going to need a WYSIWYG editor to make the changes that you need so you’ll need to get into DreamWeaver or even Frontpage.

A couple of great places to view some templates are Dream Templates, Dot Com Builder, & The Template Store. The great thing about Dot Com Builder is that it is a subscription service and you can download unlimited templates from their collection of 100+ templates.

That’s it, I’m running long so I’ll save tips 3 & 4 for my next post. This should give you enough to do until tomorrow when I post the next tips.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

]]> http://blog.websitetoad.com/i-want-to-make-a-website-where-do-i-start/feed/ 1 How To Make An Online Shopping Cart http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-an-online-shopping-cart/ http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-an-online-shopping-cart/#comments Thu, 06 May 2010 10:48:57 +0000 David http://makeawebsitespot.com/makeawebsite/how-to-make-an-online-shopping-cart/ Shopping cart software doesn’t have to be an intimidating factor in getting an online shopping cart online. You basically just need to know what your needs are and then go from there.

Majority of the shopping carts are integrated with PayPal so you can accept online payments easily. Eventually you’ll need a merchant account to accept credit cards but if you’re getting started, a PayPal account will do just fine. I’ll get into merchant accounts in my next post.

Now back to shopping cart software, Quick shopping cart is an easy to use application that allows you to add products to your catalog along with descriptions & images. There is absolutely no programming or HTML knowledge needed so you can realistically have your shopping cart online within an hour depending on the number of products that you offer.

For a basic shopping cart you’ll want certain features such as coupons, in depth reporting, and integration with certain shipping companies. One feature that Quick Shopping Cart offers is eBay integration so that you can list items on eBay without having to list items individually.

Other features that you will eventually want are cross selling which allows you to offer certain products when it relates to an item that a visitor is looking at. It’s a great way of upselling! Once your sales start rolling in you’ll need a way of reporting your sales & expenses so your shopping cart should be integrated with an accounting package such as QuickBooks.

These are the most important aspects of any shopping cart software. With that said, I invite you to learn more about what Quick Shopping Cart has to offer and how user friendly and feature rich the application is.

As I mentioned, in my next post I’ll get into merchant accounts and how to accept credit cards.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

]]> http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-an-online-shopping-cart/feed/ 0 How To Make A Free Website http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-free-website/ http://blog.websitetoad.com/how-to-make-a-free-website/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:30:19 +0000 David http://websitespotblog.com/?p=35 A question that I frequently get asked is how to make a free website. It’s an understandable question but one that’s difficult to answer. I realize that money can be tight but it’s difficult to truly build a free website especially if you want to create a professional website.

What I plan on doing is listing some tools on how to make a free website along with some affordable tools that allow you to present a professional image. Just keep in mind that if you don’t have a professional image it’s likely that you’ll lose out on sales.

Free Domain Names

I don’t know of any site that offers absolutely free domain names unless you purchase a pre-paid year of web hosting or some other sort of annual service.  A domain name is extremely affordable at $10.99 per year through www.SiteToad.com. Again, this is per year not per month so it’s extremely affordable.

Free Website Hosting

This is another service that it’s difficult to find for free and still portray a professional image. You can always use a service like BraveNet.com as they actually provide free domain hosting. The thing is that they amount of resources that they give you is limited to sort of force you to upgrade to one of their paid plans once you’ve outgrown the free space.

An affordable option is web hosting with www.SiteToad.com, we offer a Deluxe hosting plan for $7.95 per month but it gives you ample space to grow your site. Best of all, you an host unlimited domains on one hosting plan. This allows you to host multiple sites such as Domain1.com, Domain2.com etc all for only $7.95 per month. Plus you don’t have the adds that display on your site that you’ll find with many free domain hosting providers.

Free Website Builder

This is going to be very similar to free website hosting as you will have the providers ads displaying on your site and doesn’t look professional at all. www.SiteToad.com offers an ad-free website builder that allows you to update your website on any computer and offers 100’s of free templates to choose from to get that professional look that you should strive for.

How To Make A Free Website

As you can see it’s actually very affordable to build a website with www.SiteToad.com and still achieve that professional look that you’re looking for. If you haven’t had a chance to look at the site, we put together www.WebsiteToad.com which offers all the tips & tools that will help you learn how to make your own website.

I’ve built the site with a search box so that you don’t need to search all over to find what you’re looking for. I recommend that you check out www.WebsiteToad.com before committing to any given domain names or web hosting provider.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

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