by WebKeyDesign | Sep 28, 2005 | Web Site Basics
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.
by WebKeyDesign | Sep 22, 2005 | Web Site Basics
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.
by WebKeyDesign | Sep 20, 2005 | Opera
If you have not heard yet, Opera Web Browser is now free, and without any ads either. If you are looking for a fast browser or one more browser to use to check your XHMTL against, then you should look into installing Opera.
by WebKeyDesign | Sep 19, 2005 | WebKeyDesign
The WebKeyDesign Forum is now running Invision PowerBoard 2.1 and the Mac OS X inspired theme is done. It almost feels like an eternity that I have been waiting for Invision’s 2.1 release, but now it is finally here and with all the bugs and all, it still feels fast and a little slick. However, there are some things that bother but I’ll have to comment on those some other time. More importantly IPB 2.1 now has static css stylesheets which help increase download speeds and makes for a more modern closer to XHTML standards based forum.
For the Mac OS X theme, this is a theme I made for my original forum on Olaguez.net, which was ported over to work with 2.1. I will eventually start designing a WebKeyDesign theme, but for now the Mac OS X theme looks nice and is functional.
by WebKeyDesign | Sep 13, 2005 | Firefox
This Firefox extension is useful if you test out the nightly Firefox builds. The most useful feature I found is that it allows you to right click on an extension in the extension list and force enable it, so that even if the extension is not compatible with the nightly build, you can still try it out.
You can re-enable extensions manually too, see Deer Park As Firefox 1.6a, but Nightly Tester Tools is a lot easier.
Other than this feature, it also does the following:
- Adds a menu item to let you to copy the build identifier to the clipboard.
- Adds a menu item to let you insert the build identifier into the current text box.
- Adds a toolbar button to let you insert the build identifier into the current text box (Not supported in the Application Suite).
- Provides an easy way to launch talkback.
- Lets you customise the title bar to include the build identifier and other
information.
Download Nightly Tester Tools
