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

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

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

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

1. Databases – Databases are a structured collection of records that can easily be recovered via queries. There are thousands of needs for a database such as forms that collect information, the products in your online shopping cart, blogs, etc. Basically any information that you need to store and retrieve via a programming language such as PHP or ASP. There are 3 main types of databases that you should be familiar with, MySQL, SQL and Coldfusion. In future posts I’ll cover these the difference in these databases. I personally find MySQL to be the easiest to manage & setup. This blog actually uses MySQL. I would say that 10 databases would be the minimum number that any web hosting plan should offer.

2. Free software – It’s difficult to actually find a web hosting company that doesn’t offer some of the basic free applications such as forums, blogs, forms & shopping carts such as osCommerce. These are applications that can easily be installed on your web hosting account via a few clicks and some information. You’ll find that a popular group of free applications is Fantastico, it will generally contain Wordpress for blogs and osCommerce for online shopping carts. You’ll also find that Fantastico will offer some great scripts for Live Support, FAQs & Website builders. You can find a list of the free Fantastico scripts at http://www.netenberg.com/fantastico_scripts.php. Many companies will offer the complete list while others will only offer a select group of scripts. Be sure to take the time to find out the free scripts & applications that your web host offers before spending money on a propriety application.

That’s it, normally I would give a couple more features to look for but I’ll save that for my next post so that I don’t run too long. I realize that I have left certain items out but I’m trying to cut my posts down so please leave any comments with any questions or anything that I may have left out.

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

A common misconception is that you need to setup your website on a Windows server because you’re website is built on a computer that runs Windows. This isn’t true and you would base your server on the type of programming language that you use. The only real reason that you’d need to have a Windows machine would be if your site was using ASP or you needed a SQL database. These are proprietary to Microsoft so you’d need to use a Windows machine but other than that I personally see no reason for using a Windows server.

I manage quite a few websites and I only have one of them on a Windows server and that’s because it’s an online shopping cart based on ASP & SQL. Every other website that I manage is on a Linux machine so you by no means need to choose a Windows hosting plan.

Both of these servers will support your basic HTML files that make up your website. Again, mySQL is generally found on Linux machines and SQL is found on Windows machines but you could actually run mySQL on a Windows machine as well. Both have their security vulnerabilities but many people will argue that Windows servers have more vulnerabilities than Linux servers

The bottom line is that the differences aren’t that big between Windows Web Hosting & Linux Web Hosting so just be sure that you know which programming language that you plan on use such as PHP, ASP, if any. If you’re just starting out and you plan on building a website based on basic HTML, it won’t make a difference at all which you choose. I would simply select a web hosting company that offers the options that you’re looking for and go from there.

That’s all I’m really going to get into in regards to web hosting for now, I’m sure that I’ll revisit web hosting in the future but I just wanted to give you the basics for now. Next I think I’ll get into some of the basics in regards to writing HTML code. Be sure to comment or contact me with any questions that you may have.

I welcome any comments on some other differences that I haven’t included.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

1. Phone Support – Any major web hosting company is going to offer phone support and I wouldn’t host without it. Imagine your website goes down on a day when you have a press release coming out or some other major event where you expect a surge in website traffic. Now imagine that your website goes down and all you can do is send and email to support. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience and phone support is a necessity. Don’t even consider a web host unless they have a posted phone number on their website.

2. Uptime Guarantee – Most hosting companies will offer something like “99.9% Uptime Guarantee”. This is something to look for as well, 99.9% is very good and really no one can guarantee 100% uptime. I’m sure some companies will claim 100% uptime but just be sure that they offer something very close to 99% uptime.

3. Monthly Commitments – I don’t really recommend paying for a year or so upfront. If you sign-up with a hosting company and find out that it doesn’t meet your needs you’re really not out anything. Granted, most offer a 30 day money back guarantee but why have to mess with billing or customer support when you can simply pay month to month. Once you’ve had a chance to host your website for a couple months you may consider committing for a year so that you don’t have the month to month billing plus you’ll find that you generally will save money by prepaying for a year but I don’t suggest signing up for a full year right off the bat.

4. Setup Fees – Unless your getting into a dedicated machine or something that requires custom configuration I would never recommend signing up with a web hosting that requires a setup fee. There are too many reputable web hosting companies that don’t charge a setup fee.

5. 30 Day Money Back Guarantee – What is it going to hurt to be able to try out a web host and know that you can get your money back if you’re not satisfied with their service or support. Again, there are too many reputable companies out there that offer 30 day money back guarantees out there to not choose one.

That’s it for this post, I’m going to leave one more post regarding web hosting and we’ll get into design & the rest of the basics.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

1. Disk Space – This is the amount of space that you’ve ‘rented’. The amount of space that you need really depends on how much content you plan on publishing. The more pages, graphics, images, flash etc that you plan on publishing will require additional space. A decent amount of space for most websites is about 5GB. You’ll find some companies that offer some huge number like 1,000GB of space. Unless you plan on publishing a huge corporate site there really won’t be a need for that amount of space. That’s like buying a 500 horsepower car, yeah it’s nice to say but you’ll never need it.

2. Bandwidth / Data Transfer – This is the amount of data you are allowed to deliver from your site in a given month. Whenever someone visits your website data is transferred from your web hosting account to the monitor of the person visiting your website. This includes text, graphics, images, etc. The size of the images, the number of graphics, etc will determine the amount of data transfer so it’s always a good idea to use images that are lower resolution & limit the number of large size graphics on your website.

3. Email Accounts – This is going to be the number of personal email accounts are allowed to have in your web hosting plan. I would say that 5 email accounts would be a minimum for a new or personal website but these days most companies give you at least 100 so this won’t be an issue.

Email accounts within a hosting plan allow you to setup personal email accounts. For example, say you own TonysToys.com, you could setup sales@tonystoys.com, info@tonystoys.com, tony@tonystoys.com, etc. One last thing on email accounts, often times you’ll find that your email accounts are taken into account when determining disk space. For example, say you have 25mb of space left after you publish your website and you receive an email with a 1mb attachment via your email account, you would then only have 24mb left. Not every hosting company works this way but majority of them do.

4. Domains / Add-On Domains – This is a great option that really made it big with web hosting companies in the last couple of years. Add-On domains allows you to host more than 1 website on a single web hosting plan. This is a great way to save money because you don’t need to purchase a web hosting account for each domain name that you plan on building a website for. Just knowing that majority of my web sites are generally under a few GBs let’s me know that I can setup a few websites on any web hosting account that I setup that offers the capability of hosting multiple domains on 1 account.

That’s it for this post, in my next post I’m going to explain some of the additional features that you can expect with most web hosting plans such as databases, pre-installed software among other features.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

I last left off after briefly explaining fees associated with merchant accounts and accepting credit cards on your website. I gave a brief explanation so please make sure that you ask as many questions as you can so that you don’t have any unexpected charges after locking into a contract with a credit card processor.

In this post I’m going to explain the most popular payment provider out there, Pay Pal, and the pros & cons of accepting credit cards via Pay Pal. For those who aren’t familiar with PayPal.com, PayPal lets you send or receive money from anyone with an email address. They are sort of the middleman to ensure secure transactions for both the buyer and the seller. PayPal makes their money by charging a minimal fee on completed transactions. The fee is generally paid by the seller.

I’m sure you’ve heard and probably used them but Pay Pal is probably the most trusted provider of merchant services on the internet. Most shopping carts out there are integrated with Pay Pal because of the popularity of the payment processor. They offer a few different options but if you don’t have any intention of setting up a true credit card processor right now they are without a doubt the way to go.

Be sure to sign up for their Business or Premier plan because this will allow you to accept credit cards without your customer having to have a Pay Pal account.

PROS:

• No Setup Fees – It’s free to send money, and PayPal is affordable for businesses of all sizes.
• No Monthly Fees – You pay only when you sell items.
• It’s Private – PayPal does not reveal your financial information to sellers.
• It’s Fast – Payments are made immediately and you generally can withdraw the funds immediately. Visit PayPal.com for withdrawal options.
• Trusted Name – Industry-leading fraud prevention keeps you safe and secure. (Assists with conversions)

CONS:

• Processing Fees – A Bit Higher Than A True Merchant Provider. (Visit PayPal.com For Exact Fees)
• Professional Image – Since all you really need is an email address to setup a PayPal account some people would prefer to go through a merchant that has had to be approved to accept credit cards via a true application process.
• Chargebacks – If someone disputes a charge with PayPal it’s very difficult to get them to side with you and will often times refund the customer plus a $10 processing fee on top of it. I know this first hand and I went well out of my way to prove that my customer received their order.
• Support – Although it’s gotten much better, it’s been difficult to receive a timely response. As I mentioned though, it’s gotten much better.

Here are some other basics related to Pay Pal. They offer some great ways to get your money fast, going so far as offering a Pay Pal debit card so that you can start using your funds the same day. You will need to go through some verification steps to be an ‘verified’ PayPal merchant which is a must because it proves to your customers that you’ve gone through the steps to prove you are who you say you are. This is going to help when it comes to conversions.

Also, if you plan on selling on eBay you’ll definitely want to accept Pay Pal because they won’t accept any other payment providers such as Google Checkout. Pretty much anyone that uses eBay will use Pay Pal as their payment method. This is obviously my opinion but it’s an opinion drawn from experience.

In closing, even if you accept credit cards through a true merchant provider you’ll want to also give the option of Pay Pal. Many people don’t have a credit card and this gives them a reason & the capability of still purchasing through your website.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

I just wanted to leave a couple more posts regarding domain names before I move into information on web design, web hosting & search engine optimization. There are quite a few things you can do with a domain name once you’ve found a domain that works for you. What you do really depends on what you plan to do with the domain name. I don’t want to make this a boring post so I’ll just list a few domain name basics with a brief explanation.

1. Web Hosting – If you plan on actually putting up a website you’ll need to purchase a web hosting plan. This is the space on a web server that you place the files that make up your website. There are a lot of options in regards to web hosting and I’ll be covering that in an upcoming post.

2. Domain Forwarding – If you have a current website you can just forward a domain name to your current website. This is something that’s very common with real estate agents. For example, a Remax agent gets a Remax provided website address such as http://ww1.remax.com/associates/243443433.asp.

Obviously this isn’t something to put on a business card so they register their full name, if available, as a domain name. They then simply forward TheirNewDomain.com to http://ww1.remax.com/associates/243443433.asp. This makes it much easier for them to give their website address & looks much more professional.

3. Email Accounts – Many times people will register a domain name simply to use for email purposes. Rather than using a free email service such as Yahoo or HotMail, many people would like to have a custom email address. For example, say your name is Bill Smith, rather than using a Yahoo email address such as bill_smith2008@yahoo.com you could search for a domain that represents your name, your interests or just about anything else that you want.

Then assume that you were able to register Smith.com, which you wouldn’t be able to do but for explanation reasons let’s assume it’s available. You would then be able to setup any email address you want such as Bill@Smith.com, Sales@Smith.com, Info@Smith.com, etc. There are a few email addresses that you can’t use such as www@YourDomain.com but other than a few your options are limitless.

4. Domain Parking – If you have a great idea for a website or think that you’ve found a domain name that may be valuable you can simply register the domain name and ‘park’ it. This is simply a page showing that the domain is registered and/or Coming Soon. A few things about park pages is that you can park a domain name with a company such as NameDrive.com which will display ads on your website and if someone were to type in your domain and click on one of those ads you would earn a percentage of the revenue earned on that click.

That’s about it for the domain name basics, there are a few more options but these are the 4 main reasons for registering a domain name. I’m sure that I’ll receive an email saying that I left something off the list but like I mentioned, these are the 4 main reasons for registering a domain name.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com