A while back I covered the subject of how to choose the right weblog CMS, but what I forgot to mention is that many people who start their first website do not even think about using a weblog or a content management system to begin with. They usually put together some sort of site using either a basic web site creator tool which usually relies on frames for navigation or use template that they found. The results usually are not very eye pleasing and barely functional. This is why for many first time web sites I recommend WordPress, because it does two things very well, the first being that it is feature loaded with almost everything a beginning site author needs to create content easily, and secondly because it adds structure to help make your site more pleasing to search engines and site visitors. For a long time I thought the Kurbick template which many blog systems use now, was boring, but then I realized that blogs do something which no Dreamweaver template does. It takes care of the layout and structure for you, so you can get on with writing your content. This has allowed the Personal Web Page to flourish with new content almost daily. The personal publishing revolution is in sense only possible because of tools like WordPress and Textpattern. So if you are considering your first web site, consider a blogging or content management system to drive your site.

How To Define Content

When it comes to new websites, less is really more. What that means is that you need to cater to your audience and you need to add content and less features. Many first time web site owners feel the urge to visit sites like HotScripts.com, and install every script and web application they can find for their site. The result is usually a site that has multiple areas, many of these areas go unused and are seldom updated. The gallery, the forum, the chat area, guestbooks which are so 1990-ish, are all examples of additional areas that you see on many personal sites. The more options you add to to your site, the more confusing your site will be to your visitors. The idea is to focus on two or three main areas of your site, typically your blog and one more area is enough. This is especially important if you will be the only person updating the site with content. Eventually you might find a forum to be very popular with visitors, that this area will eventually take care of itself, but this is not always the case. What matters most is content, not content areas. The number of pages, blog entries, forum posts are what matter most, and not how many different directions site visitors can take on your site. So if you are thinking of adding a forum, a gallery, a second blog, think about how often these additional areas can be maintained and if you really need them at all.

Color Schemes

Another topic which is hard to understand for first time webmasters is color scheme. Although a good CMS or blog script can give you layout, most of the time you will want to change the color scheme and this is where perhaps not taking art in school really does become a weakness. Color schemes are not exactly easy to come by for many people, and after so many hours of watching Trading Places, you can still not know much about picking the right ones. This when looking at other sites and asking for opinions help. What I mean by color scheme is your overall design colors, graphics, and of course your link colors. For me personally, computer operating systems tend to use shades of gray and blue on purpose, mostly because gray is neutral, and blue is the one color which is pleasing and not harsh on the eyes. Even Apple’s Mac OS X, which started out as white with pinstripes, has started to change back to a more subdued gray white and forget some of its original white and rainbow gel colors. Windows98 is an even better example of gray and blue design. Choosing something besides white or gray is really very hard to do, but some web design actually manages to pull it off, usually its a white and red or a green nowadays. However for me, blue and red are still the defaults for links and it is hard to choose anything else.

The Web Is Not Suppose To Be Boring

One of the more annoying things that I find nowadays with web sites is the growing number of garbage sites, many of which are nothing more than just random collections of RSS feeds or scrapper sites, which copy their content from other sites via scripts. It is not that I have strong feelings on republishing content, it is that these sites are in fact pretty boring and really not useful at all. If you can’t entertain or have a legitimate use, then yes, I would say your site is boring. The harsh reality is that many of these sites are being indexed more and more, and end up coming up on most search engines as being relevant, but in fact are not even close. If you really are going to do a web site, make it either useful (informative in some manner) or at least interesting by making it personal (adding your opinion or views). Scrapper sites really do suck and they really serve no purpose to real web surfers. Perhaps I am being harsh, but after doing so many searches on Google and ending up at so many scrapper sites, its bound to dawn on anyone that scrapper sites are boring.

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This week I added an SSL certificate to WebKeyDesign, so that our clients could have encryption for some of the services they use and to assure new clients using our web hosting form that there information was secure. Needless to say if you have taken a look at the SSL market, the prices do seem to be out of line with the web hosting and domain registration markets. For example a small personal site for hosting and domain registration could cost as little as $60 for the year, but a basic one domain only SSL certificate costs you anywhere from $49 to $150 for the year! This does not even include the fee that most web hosts have to charge you for installing the certificate, which could be another $50.

The main reasoning for SSL certificates is that for ecommerce, you really need to offer encryption for credit card transactions, but also SSL certificates are suppose to convey some sort of validity to your site visitors. The encryption is easy to do, you could generate what is called a free SSL certificate, but no browser would recognize your certificate as being properly authorized, hence free certificates convey no such trust to your site visitors, and so are inadequate for ecommerce sites. This leaves you with only a proper authorized certificate, which come in many forms and which offer different features. The idea being that the more features a Certificate Authority offers you, the more trusted your site will seem.

As a webmaster then, it would seem that if you just pick the most expensive SSL certificate, then this would equate into more transactions, but this is not always the case. The problem is that many internet users do not know the difference between an expensive SSL certificate and an inexpensive one, most site users end up just looking for the little padlock icon that shows up somewhere in the corner of their browser. No padlock, means no security in the mind of most site visitors. The case is only slightly different with more adapt internet users, but it still comes down to just secure or not secure. An avid internet user may just look for the url to start with https and view that as being secure. For the most part both of these conclusions are correct, that the padlock and https urls indicate secure encryption, or at the very least some sort of secured connection between the browser and the web site. However that is far as it goes, you cannot really know how any SSL certificate or feature will really be viewed by site vistors. Trust level is something that may be very hard if not impossible to properly quantify. Yet all the Certificate Authorities, try to sell their certificates on the idea that they do in fact make your site more trustworthy.

This is why the news that browser developers agreeing on new security features is big news for webmasters and the certificate authorities. It could mean that there will be more diversity in the SSL Certificate market, and that perhaps more webmasters will be able to afford recognized SSL certificates for their smaller web sites, while at the same time the market can expand and grow beyond the limited number of sites today. After all everything else in the internet market has come down in price, why not SSL certificates.

Mozilla’s Frank Hecker offers his own thoughts on where Mozilla’s Policy on CA Certificates is going, and then discusses the business of Certificate Authorities and why the market has been stagnant. It’s a rather interesting read as to why SSL certificates are still rather expensive and why security means different things to different people.

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You ever watch tv and catch one of those commercials where people are sitting around a board room and the topic of discussion is some business decision and the head guy asks for the stats? Those commercials are suppose to be funny because statistics are boring, but more importantly most people do not understand what they mean! When you run your own web site, you have the same problem, but since your site is the main concern, you might not see the humor in it. All web servers keep logs and so you have all the information you could ever want about your site, but interpretting any meaning from these logs is something which you need help with. I know I certainly find web stats a lot more interesting when a program like AWStats goes ahead and shows me some nice graphs instead of just lines and lines of boring text.

Better Stats with AWStats

In cPanel, you usually have AWStats which is a basic stats package that will show you the main things you want to know, like who visited your site, what pages on your site are the most popular, and so on. There is also a basic Error Log, this is pretty useful to at least look at to see if perhaps you have a missing image file that your site keeps referring to, or if one of your scripts is asking for something repeatedly and is not finding it. If the Error Log is clean, then yes, that is a good thing. If you have some errors then you might try to look into what is wrong or simply realize that this was a one time error and not worry about it. Most times you will be using AWStats to see how your site is doing daily. However, cPanel also lets you download your raw web server logs for your site. These are incredibly more useful if you purchase a third party program. For now let’s get back to AWStats and see just what to look for:

The Summary section at the top shows you: Unique visitors, Number of visits, Pages, Hits, and Bandwidth totals. The most important stat here is the Unique Visitors. This is how many different browsers are accessing the site. This is more of a true indication of how popular your site is than Number Of Visits or Hits.

Scrolling down the AWStats report, you can see how many hits and visits you have per month, per week, per day, per hour. This is helpful in determing your peak usage, when your site is actually the most visited.

Further down you will find Hosts and Robots/Spiders sections. This will tell you who is visiting your site the most. If you are your site’s number one host, perhaps your site is not as popular as you may think. The Robots/Spiders section is useful in seeing how much bandwidth these non-human vistors are taking up.

The Pages-URL section lists the most popular pages on the site and this should prove useful if you have ads on certain pages or if you want to know if a particular section of your site is popular or not.

The Connect-To-Site-From, Search Keyphrases, and Search Keywords sections are crucial if you are working on getting search engines to link your site. These sections are really about how some users are finding their way to your site. You can use this information to understand further how your internet audience is thinking when they try to locate sites similar to yours.

The last section, HTTP Error Codes, is more informative about what is not working on your site. Knowing which pages vistors are not finding is crucial, because you want to keep visitors on your site and the best way to do that is to make sure they do not wind up going to a dead-end, like a page that no longer exists on your site.

More Stats

Once you start to get interested in your stats, you might find AWStats limiting or perhaps you just developed an obsession with looking at stats in general, so you might want to purchase third party software and download your own web server logs. There are also other options like setting up a different program similar to AWStats or paying a stat service to keep tabs on your site. The following links should prove helpful for further reading.

The Dollars And Sense of Web Analytics is a good summary of web stats in general and what a typical business site owner might want to know about stats.

We also have covered web stats in our WebKeyDesign Forum. Feel free to post questions there and view the following posts:

• WebLog Expert Stats
• Peastat
• Web Site Statistics

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When you start your first web site, one of the most important areas of your site has to be the Links Page. Definitely any personal site or small business site (that does not have a lot of content), really requires it. The main reasoning being that a links page goes ahead and helps search engines rank you and also find your site more relevant.

There are a couple of ways of building a link page, the first one being a manual links page, where you add each and every link yourself into a static page or weblog menu. The automated way is to have a links program that helps you organize the links and may offer some added features like link validation and link submission forms. Large directory sites use commercial scripts to build their links pages, but as far as the search engine is concerned, a links page is a links page. A smaller static links page may in fact be more popular with a search engine than an automated page which has hundreds of links.

Who Should I Link To?

For a personal site, look at what sites you usually bookmark in your browser and pick the most interesting ones. Organize these into a few categories and then setup your links page. If at first you have just a few links, that’s fine. Over time your links page will grow.

Business sites, you probably do not want to link to your competitors, but at the same time you want to keep your links more closely related to your business. The great thing about the Internet is that there are many non-commercial sites that offer advice or information on a variety of topics. Linking to these type of informational sites is usually appreciated by your customers and will make your site more customer friendly. Another way of promoting your business is by promoting your friend’s business. For example Menards does not install the products it sells to home improvement customers, but they can refer you to a local contractor; you can apply this same strategy to your links page.

Once your site is up for a while, you might receive requests from other web site owners to link to their site. This is often referred to as link trading or having a link partner. The idea is for both sites to link to eachother and help promote eachother. The driving force behind this is Google’s Pagerank status. Linking to a highly ranked site usually does not mean anything, but if that highly ranked site links back to you and your pagerank status is lower, chances are your pagerank will improve in the coming months. Beginning sites should concentrate on their content first, and in time the linking requests will come.

Remember To Link To Us or Contact Us

On the bottom of your links page, you should have a note about how other sites can link to your site. Some webmasters are actually pretty friendly still, and if they find your site interesting, they will actually link to you regardless. And if your links page has no link submission form, a simple Contact Us link to your contact page or webmaster email will help those linking partner requests come in.

Eventually you may find that your Links Page may be one of the most visited pages on your site, and one which you hardly have to work at to really maintain.

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Today, online publishing can be divided into static html pages and dynamic pages. Most weblogs falls into what is referred to as Content Management Systems. In actuallity, most of these programs really fall short of what actual content management is suppose to be, but for individuals and personal publishing, weblogs are the standard. However deciding on which weblog CMS can be quite difficult, seeing as there are many choices available. To make the process easier, consider the following four points.

Cost:

Personal publishing usually involves some type of budget, especially if you are starting from scratch. Consider not only will the CMS be free (as in open source packages like WordPress and Textpattern), but how much domain registration, hosting, installation, and initial design are going to factor in. Even if you are doing most of the work yourself, there will be some costs initially. Once you have some type of budget in mind, review your options and grade them on the other three criteria.

Support:

Sometimes when choosing a free CMS, you tend to forget about the most important criteria for any software program, which is support. How many times do the programmers update the program? Are security patches released in a timely and efficient manner, are they easy to install? Is free support even adequate? Sometime user communities are not very friendly to non-technical users, so always take a look at what the user community is like and how responsive they are to others. Do not forget to look at documentation, a program may be very good, but if there is not a manual or adequate online documentation, you will have a hard time maintaining it. Usually installation documentation is the most essential, so most programs will at least have this down, but if there is not anything beyond a simple readme document, you should consider another CMS.

Expandibility:

A good CMS would have most essential features covered, but plugins and extensions allow room for customized users and also help make a plain CMS appear more personalized to the individual. After all we are talking about personal publishing, so there has to be some personality to it, and the best way to do this is in the form of mods, plugins, and extensions to the main CMS. Some commercial CMS packages might sell such addons, or might have better support for custom changes, so it is important to see just how much addons will cost and how useful they are going to be once your site is up and running. If the CMS programmers have made addons support a goal for their CMS, see just how much third party developers have taken advantage of this.

User Experience:

Lastly how easy is the user experience of your CMS? Is the website that it publishes easy for online vistitors to use, can they navigate, search, and comment easily? For the authoring side, how easy is it to publish new content? For content creation, think about how you can upload images, create drafts, integrate advertisements (if you need to), and how the final html code complies with web standards. But more importantly do you like using the CMS? If you do not like it, chances are you are not going to publish very much.

It’s Your Web Space, Test Drive It:

By now you probably figured that you need to try out a CMS before you can really decide on one, so hopefully, before you buy or make your final decision, make sure you try out any online demos you find. For most open source programs, you can try them out at OpenSourceCMS.com.

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