by WebKeyDesign | Oct 20, 2005 | Web Site Basics
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:
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 | Aug 18, 2005 | Web Site Basics
This is perhaps the most asked question I hear from potential clients. How do you build a web site (when you do not know how)? Essentially there are three components to every site. First you must register a domain name, second you must have a web server to serve your web site, and lastly are the web pages themselves.
In Choosing Your Domain Name, I kind of covered some basic ideas on how to come up with a domain name for your site, so I will not cover that subject, but instead talk about what registering your domain name really means.
Domain names are not really owned as much as they are leased on a yearly basis, or for whatever amount of years you pay to register the domain name. Once you register your domain, your personal information is kept on file for that domain and is available to any one who does a WhoIs search on your domain. Some people find this disturbing and the industry has come up with privacy protection, where individuals who register domains can purchase privacy protection for an extra yearly fee. This privacy protection is still not officially recognized, so the registrars are doing this on their own to help customers have a service they want.
Besides letting know everyone, that you own the domain for a certain amount of time, your registrar also provides options to change your DNS record, the most important part of this being the official nameservers for your domain. Nameservers are the servers that tell the rest of the internet, where your actual website pages are located, on what actual machine. Your DNS record points any requests for your web site to these nameservers, who in turn point the request to the appropiate server, once it gets there, the web server knows which directory your web pages are and then serves them to who ever requested them. When you first purchase a domain name the nameservers will be defaulted to the registrar that you registered the domain with. You must change them if the registrar is not providing you with a hosting account from which to host your pages on.
This brings us to step 2, the web server. This is the physical server that will actually serve or deliver your web pages to any computer or device that requests them. This is what is meant by a web host or web hosting account.
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by WebKeyDesign | Jul 22, 2005 | Web Site Basics
The idea behind the World Wide Web was to use the Internet to publish information and have it openly accessible to everyone. In the early 90’s the Internet was essentially Mosaic running on a computer, but now it is quite possible to browse web sites without a computer. You could use a PDA, a cell phone, even some kitchen appliances now connect to the Internet and download data automatically. The introduction of RSS feeds also offer new and innovative ways for information to become quickly accessible on more than just the traditional computer screen. Then there are the programs that search all this information and try to index it. All this accessibility is only possible if your site accommodates it, and so if you are just starting to build your web site you should keep in mind the following points, because accessibility is what the Internet is all about these days.
No Frames Please
If your site uses frames think about how confusing this is to Google and Yahoo. Most of the time, sites use frames for navigation, with a top frame or a side frame having all the links to the areas of the site. These are unnecessary, as the same effect can be easily recreated without frames. This is one case where someone invented a neat new way of doing something, and then realized the old way was in fact better. Other reasons not to use frames range from the fact that not all browsers support them, to increased page download times, to making it harder to bookmark specific pages on your site.
Under Construction Sites
Today when I see a graphic or message that states that the site is under construction, I immediately think amateur. If your site is truly under construction, then it should not be accessible period! Most site visitors will understand if a site is down for maintenance, updating, or if you are just moving in to a new server. If you really have a new site and it is not finished, think about having a message similar to a movie trailer. Putting up a nice graphic that depicts your site’s subject matter with the words “Coming Soon…” is a lot better than some yellow construction graphic. Your site’s theme should always come first.
Click Here To Navigate
If you actually put the words “Click here” to see other pages, then your site is stuck in the year 1991. An entire generation has already grown up on the web, and the term url is as common to them as cassette tapes were to my generation. You should never have to bring attention to your site’s navigation, because if you do, then you either do not understand how web pages work or your site’s navigation is so confusing that you yourself thinks it is bad! The exception would be if you have some special links which are different in some way, like when a weblog has article links to publications on a different site, or when the web site owner wants donations, like “Click here to give me money”, but these exceptions are quite specific.
Fonts, Fonts, No Really Fonts!
One of the best things you can do with a site is use CSS to make your fonts stand out. Perhaps CSS positioning is a little too hard to understand right off, but CSS styles are easily to learn and they can do a lot for making a site look ten times more professional than relying on the old html font tag. But whatever you do, do not make paragraph text blue. The color blue is most often reserved for links and making whole paragraphs of text blue confuses many site visitors. In fact if you need to bring attention to what you are saying on your web page, you might consider editing your message so it is more clear. Color is not what should get people’s attention. You want people to focus on your message, not the rainbow of colors you are using to convey that message.
Graphics You Love, But Which Everyone Else Hates
Probably the easiest mistake to make when designing a site is to want to include some graphics which you think are eye catching or interesting, because you absolutely like them. Sometimes it is very hard to admit to ourselves that we do not always have good taste or simply that something we like will not work. Film directors wrestle with this all the time, because they often shoot a scene that they totally love, but which they know will not work in the final edited film, so they end up cutting some of the scenes that they personally love in order to produced the best film they can. The same thing applies to web design, you can often make a really interesting graphic, but somehow it will not fit into your site’s theme and so you make it fit and the end result is a bad web design which everyone else except you will hate.
Your site should have a theme from the beginning, and understanding that theme is what should guide your site design. If a graphic is too large in size, the wrong color, or simply does not fit into the them, you should not use it. The web site has an audience, and that audience is what will drive the success of you site.
Additional Resources:
For further reading, look over some of the criticisms atWebPagesThatSuck, which has tons of examples of when web design goes bad. You can read over Alertbox: The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines, which is revelant if you are designing a corporate web site.
by WebKeyDesign | Jul 7, 2005 | Web Site Basics
Having a Personal Web Page is how everyone starts. You have that one idea, for whatever reason, to publish one web page out there for your own personal reasons. I know my first web page was back in the 1990’s and it was certainly exciting to have a web page out there with some links to other sites I liked. However in today’s Internet, the personal web page has now evolved beyond the simple index page into multiple page volume sites that could easily expand to thousands of pages of content and still be referred to as a personal site. This has largely happened because of the weblog revolution which allowed many people for the first time to publish easily and without the necessity to worry about the technology and code behind it all. In a sense, the pen and paper letter was replaced by the wordprocessor and email, and now the blog. The blog is instantly a personal site, or a publishing column, or even just a modern business card which is digital and constantly changing.
As a web designer, one has to see the blog not just as a trend but as the new standard for personal web sites.
Presentation:
If we install WordPress 1.5 and use the defaults, we can already see what the standard Kubrick template does so well for the personal web site. Namely we get a title for our site, a description for our site, a sidebar for easy navigation, and a layout that has a very presentable use of white space. There are also features for the site that are available immediately, like Search, RSS feeds, and even user commenting. If you were to create a web site from scratch you would have to include each of these features and you would have to implement that as well as WordPress or better.
This poses quite a challenge since even if you coded your site with these exact specifications, WordPress and other blogging software is usually expandable by way of plugins, which makes it harder to keep up with such a successful site design as WordPress. At this point we are only really discussing the front end of WordPress, what the site looks like and does, not even the backend which makes a WP site very easy to update with new content!
Dreamweaver v/s CMS:
The traditional way for novice designers was to use Dreamweaver (or Nvu) to design simple web pages and then learn html by editing the code that Dreamweaver would create. Eventually after designing enough pages and looking at the code, you eventually switch to a text editor for making most html changes and even designing. This is still a good way of learning html, but learning CSS really requires you to look at stylesheets and WYSIWYG editors are not really meant for CSS design. In Dreamweaver’s graphical view, the idea is to drag and drop elements, to create space similarly to a wordprocessor or drawing program. CSS positioning is hard to visualize in this mode. To see how CSS works, you really have to work in a text editor and render the web page in your browser to see the immediate effects.
This is where a CMS (Content Management System) takes over what Dreamweaver does well, namely adding new content to an already designed layout. The backend of a CMS takes care of adding new content, and it is faster and more efficient than Dreamweaver or a text editor, since it immediately adds your content to your site and even links it throughout your site. Blogging programs like Textpattern, WordPress, and Blogger don’t really offer full CMS features, but concentrate on fundamentals which work well for personal publishing.
The New Personal Web Page:
Essentially today’s personal web site is really about dynamic publishing presented inside a CSS based template. You can write the dynamic publishing system but why reinvent the wheel if you do not have to. Most people would be satisfied with just modifying the default CSS template and tinkering with some of the default publishing features. What I suggest is a hybrid of both static pages and dynamic publishing. The most popular personal publishing system is undeniably WordPress, and there is good reason for this, mostly because it is mature now and easily expandable for most experienced web site designers. But even if you just started coding your own pages in Dreamweaver you should start looking at WordPress and other blogging systems to see what they offer.
Once you have decided what the blogging system can do best and what it can not do very well, it is time to either add plugins to the blogging system or to use an outside static page or different program altogether to complete the web site functionality. However as you add external features or pages, make sure that you retain the same presentation throughout as much as possible. This does not mean that adding a forum to your site has to completely integrate with your dynamic publishing, but it all has to navigate well and be accessible from your main page. Without a doubt, trying to maintain the presentation of your site, is the most time consuming and hardest part of having a personal web site.
Blogs And Static Sites:
Personal sites are rarely static, but perhaps you do want to create a static site for some reason, then a personal publishing system may be overkill for your needs. In these cases, you do not have to abandon the whole blogging personal publishing concept, you may in fact need to choose a different blogging program, perhaps a simpler program would suffice. The whole idea with using a blog presentation may still apply, you may still want easy navigation, a template that provides a nice layout, etc, but comments and other features may need to be disabled. After learning to rely on a blogging program you may find that even if you do not use a blog for all your web sites, you may still find yourself imitating the layout and navigation features that you have now grown to appreciate.
