SiteProNews

I am writing this for all those who have or influence a website, especially those who will never set up a custom search for themselves.  I first read about CSE in SitePro News and have been setting some up.  An article on the usefulness of CSE for the Webmaster, Blogger or Website owners in general is about due.

Let us clarify “Google Custom Search”. The word “custom” means individuals or groups are able to tweak the search process, according to their own specific interest.  Custom Search Engines can be simply customized by selecting suitable sites or quite advanced specific searches.  What unites them all is Google’s technology. The tweaks to the system are those Google has made available.  It works. Google did well.  

As of yet, nobody has coined terms for Google’s Custom Search Engine feature. Here are some basic handles;

1. CSE means a Google Custom Search Engine, *GOOGLE is a trademark of Google Inc.

2.  “Gateman” will mean the person(s) who have customized a search engine.  As much of the customization selects this is, ‘in’ or ‘out’.  If you are into electronics you know ‘logic gates’ control this. 

So basically; the technology is Google’s, the customization is the Gateman’s and the results are the work of the Webmaster’s of the sites found by the CSE search.

A CSE  uses the URL “Site List” collected together by the person building the CSE.  This is both the strong and weak point of a CSE.  The CSE site list is collected to match a specific interest of the CSE, unlike the [full] Google search which gives you the world.  Obviously the person or small group building the CSE can and will miss out, or not include some websites. When a CSE has the websites in its site list, each URL becomes a bigger fish in this smaller pond.   

First for your own interest or research, there is no need to ‘ re-invent the wheel’ if somebody has set up a CSE in your area of interest.  As might be expected computer subjects are well supported by CSEs.  

For the purpose of this articles I set up a CSE on CSEs, a rather introverted custom search.

-try this:  This is the Homepage of CSE on Custom Search Engines  

You are offered; 

•Use the search box to test the CSE for suitability for your interest.
A CSE has a cleaner performance because it is not searching the whole web. It is using Google indexes built by the Googlebot but only on the selected websites.  Other than the customization, CSEs feel much like searching Google.  You will find less of the; “same words - but I didn’t mean that” problem.  When Google advertisments appear, they follow your input search words.

Just type a word; “CSS”, “plants”, “steam engine” etc.  The high-lighter function on your browser will help here. 

•Search engine details,
Written by the person creating the CSE, I have put an Email & a Website address.

•Number of sites searched with last ones added to site list.

•Add this search engine to your Google homepage:
This allows you to have a CSE on your personalized Google Homepage, you can fit pages with several unique CSE search boxes.  Best to have signed in to your homepage before clicking the ‘ Add to Google’. 

•Add this search engine to your blog or webpage.
Check the terms and conditions. If you like the CSE and the terms are ok, change the search box size and margin colours to your requirements.  I found it an easy copy and paste operation.  It is Google that gives you the code without charge.

The potential of this is great, a website could put a CSE in as, a reference for a current topic, project, related interests, educational research, etc…  You could change a CSE every week if you wished. Use CSEs as content on fledgling sites.  A small complementary cluster of CSEs on a ‘ latest news page’ of a Website could be a little like magazines in a waiting room if chosen carefully to the interests of your visitors. (ed note: just be certain to update them more frequently than your GP does. - jh)

Create your own Custom Search Engine? Google does not charge you but it does take quite a bit of your time.  Its not the Google technology that is difficult, it is the time it takes to make your own decisions!  You choose of what goes in and which does not.  Though the Google claims you can, “set up a website in minutes”, you might find yourself spending two hours getting a colour or phrase just right. Budget enough time to make working with CSE worth it because by the end of the budgeted time, you’ll likely find working with a CSE is worth it.

Author:  Visit Brian Nash’s website http://www.custom-search-engines.brian-e-nash.me.uk/  which has been set-up to work with this article.

1. Making Use of SEO

Every good webmaster should use search engine optimization techniques for their website. At first glance, this can seem to be an intimidating area to get into, and when you don’t have a very large budget, you may think that it is impossible to use SEO to your advantage. However, there are several free, and/or low-cost, tools on the Internet that will help you out. In addition, websites such as PromotionWorld and SEO-News offer a wealth of content on the subject of SEO. And even Google offers up some candid advice on giving your site an advantage in its results pages. Yes, SEO work takes a large investment in the way of time, but the results of continuous hard work will pay off - there are many companies today that do not use any form of paid advertising because all of their website traffic comes exclusively from non-paid search engine links. I suggest that you give search engine optimization a try for awhile, and see what happens.

2. Exchanging Links with Related Websites

Much has been said lately about the benefits of links, both outgoing and incoming, on the overall marketing success of a website, especially since Google’s Jagger update. The common perception has always been that you need as many incoming links to your website as possible, and that you should spend all of your time exchanging links with everyone you can think of. While I could write a whole article on the myths of links and link exchanging (and I probably will at some point), I’ll try to stay basic here. The main thing to know is that if the site that links to you - or the site you are linking to - has nothing to do with your website, it will do you no good, and may even penalize you in search results. Exchanging links can not only bring you actual traffic, but a link to your website can also act as a “vote” for you in the search engines’ eyes. So choose your link exchange partners wisely. Do not use link farms. Do not blanket the Internet with links to your website. Instead, choose quality, non-competing, content-related websites that are willing to link to your site, either for a fee, or in exchange for a link from your website back to theirs. A strategic link-sharing campaign will be of much greater value to you in the long run than a poorly-planned “blitzkrieg”.

3. Examining (and Conforming to) Customer Needs

Of course, you do know what your customers want, don’t you? So often, entrepreneurs jump into business without even asking potential customers what they really want. This mistake can be deadly, and certainly won’t earn you any friends. And just because you are currently successful does not mean that this will always be the case. Constantly ask your customers what they think about your products and services. Get their suggestions. And if a customer complains to you, or offers up a suggestion on their own, take it to heart - they have gone out of their way to communicate with you, meaning they want some sort of resolution for the situation; this is a golden opportunity to keep them as a customer for life.

4. Keeping Things Simple!

My own company, GlobalWebBrands, made the near-deadly mistake of “over-expanding” in two-thousand-and-five. I will always remember last year as the year that we tried too hard. Things have since settled down, but I will never make that same mistake again.

Please allow me to offer any startups or struggling businesses a very important piece of advice: when you start in a certain line of business, stay in that line of business! Until you have actually been there, you cannot imagine just how much trouble you will get into by rapidly expanding the number and type of products and services you offer, or the number of payment methods you offer, or the number of brands you have, or in the cases of some - the number of physical locations you have.

Diversify - ah yes, the golden word of the past fifteen years. Everybody has been chanting it: business ‘gurus’, personal investment ‘gurus’. Folks, these people are not really gurus at all; rather, they’re goons looking to make a little bit of money!

Customers today want simplicity. They want stability. They do not want everything from one person. Wal-Mart is failing, and they are proving that you just cannot be everything to everybody. Become the expert in your field, and not the Wal-Mart. Be one thing to everybody, and you will be successful beyond your wildest dreams.

In other words: Keep it simple, stupid!

Author:  Daniel J. Briere is the CEO of Netpreneur Host, a Web hosting and domain registration company for Webmasters and Internet entrepreneurs.

Article marketing has been an effective method of website promotion that has literally been used since the inception of the public Internet. I have been online since November of 1995, and even in those early days, I would read people’s articles and click the link in their resource box to learn more about their website.

The Early Days of Article Marketing

In those early days, there were a few players who recognized the value of article marketing. The two writers who were most influential to my use of article marketing, as a promotion method, were:

• Dr. Nunley (http://www.DrNunley.com) has been online since 1996, and this website was registered in Oct. of 1997. Dr. Nunley was influential in that he taught me the power of syndicated article content.
• Wild Bill Montgomery (http://www.MakingProfit.com) started his website in Nov. of 1998. Wild Bill offered one of the very first article distribution websites. I received his daily mailings for nearly a year, until he shut his article system down. I subscribed to Wild Bill’s mailings, so that I could locate articles for my own publication and website, and later to distribute my own articles.

It was in the aftermath of the demise of Montgomery’s article distribution system that I wrote my first script to enable me to make better use of this promotional method for my own articles. That original script was adapted later to became the foundation for my article distribution service a couple years later.

How Article Marketing Came To Be Regarded As A Powerful Tool

For several years, article marketing remained a promotion technique utilized only by a few hundred people who fancied themselves as decent to good writers. These individuals were able to generate quite a buzz for their own websites. The buzz in turn created streams of traffic to their websites, and more importantly, sales.

Their articles were picked up regularly by ezines, which need good content to retain the attention of their readers. Publication of the articles in ezines resulted in thousands of website visitors in just a few days. My biggest ezine publication event resulted in 16,000 visitors in the first 96 hours after publication. I regularly see thousands of visitors in three-to-four days, due to publication in individual ezines.

Articles that I had written in 1999 still reside on websites where they were originally published those many years ago. And, I still see regular traffic from the placement of those articles. Yes, and I still retain link popularity and good search engine rankings, as the result of the placement of those articles on third-party websites.

Many writers were seeing the same results as I had seen, and they told others about their great success. People began to pay attention and take advantage of the technique for their own promotion.

A New Breed Of Article Marketers

In late 2004, the market changed when people decided that the only goal of article marketing was for the purpose of link building for link popularity purposes.

A few new distribution systems popped up only targeting placement of articles on third-party websites. With these new systems, the article writers had to put their own articles into the distribution services database, and they had to select a general category for the placement of their articles.

Suddenly, with these new fully automated systems, computers were left to answer the most important question of category placement. These new systems left this important question to the computers to solve.

People were being removed from the article placement process, because people cost more money to employ, leaving a lot of results to chance. But, the new breed of article marketers did not care. They liked the lower cost of human-free article placement.

The Four Primary Players in of a Successful Article Marketing Campaign

There are four primary players in the article marketing game. First of course is the writer. Then there is the distribution person or service. Third is the website owner or ezine publisher. And the final element is the person who will read the article and act upon what they read in the article.

Sometimes the writer is the same person as the distribution person. That is fine. The website owner or ezine publisher is actually the most important person in the link building process, because he or she wants to be sure that the fourth person, the reader, will be happy with what they are publishing.

Believe it or not, the website owners and the ezine publishers are frequently very selective about what articles they are willing to accept from a writer or distribution service. After all, if the readers are not happy with what is published on the website or ezine, then the reader will not feel a need to return to either one. Webmasters and ezine publishers, who are committed to success, will be even more selective in their article choices.

To see what website owners really think of many of the automated article distribution systems, read this: http://www.articledashboard.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4679

Any writer or article marketer, who does not pay attention or consider the needs or desires of webmasters or publishers in the process, is condemning their article marketing campaigns to failure.

Twisted Logic

When this new breed of article marketer began showing up at my article distribution service, I found myself in many strangely naïve conversations.

People would enquire about the value of our service. Naturally, I would mention publication in ezines as a method of driving thousands of targeted visitors to their website. Then I would mention the value of links on third-party websites, which results in the double benefit of targeted traffic from the third-party website and link popularity for search engine rankings.

Frequently, people would tell me that they literally “do not care about placement of their articles in ezines.” They continued to explain that they were only interested in placement on third-party websites for the purpose of influencing their search engine rankings.

Wow! Every time I heard someone make this claim, I would think to myself about the shortsightedness of this approach. In my experience, link popularity and search rankings were a long-term benefit, and the publication of an article in an ezine is what was generating the most immediate and largest amount of click-through traffic to my websites.

But, who am I? I am just some guy who had been using this marketing technique for five years at that time, and I was a person who had been providing distribution services to other writers for several years. Why would anyone want to hear my thoughts on the subject?

The Proclaimed Death of Article Marketing as an Effective Promotion Tool

I have been hearing rumors for years of the death of article marketing as an effective marketing tool. Here are a couple samples:

• Dmitri Davydov proclaimed in June of 2007 that “’article marketing’ has been long dead.” (http://www.nichegeek.com/article_marketing_is_it_dead_yet)
• In May of 2007, a few people in this forum thread declared that article marketing does not work, one of them just a little more vehemently than the rest (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=338394).

What I find somewhat funny and disconcerting at the same time is that most of the people making this proclamation actually admit that they have only tried article marketing with “one or two articles”. In their wisdom, you should ignore people like me who have seen success with this promotion method, and you should follow their advice to abandon all hope for article marketing as a method for website promotion.

I have asked a few people to better define the status of article marketing:

1. Does article marketing not work? Or,
2. Did article marketing just not work for them?

The Nail in the Paid Links Coffin

On April 14^th, 2007, the Google Guy (Matt Cutts) spoke out against paid links. A firestorm of complaints from webmasters followed Cutts’ initial comments.

On June 12^th, 2007, Cutts’ original comments became official Google policy as shown here (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-ways-for-you-to-give-us-input.html)

Vanessa Fox (formerly) of Google summed up the issue very succinctly, “Links that are purchased are great for advertising and traffic purposes, but aren’t useful for PageRank calculations. Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates (Google’s) guidelines.”

Confusion Ensues Over Paid Links

With Google officially stomping on “paid links,” a lot of confusion entered into the marketplace. The confusion really hinges on one simple question: What kinds of links does Google consider to be paid links?

Many people have extrapolated Google’s campaign against “paid links” to suggest that anytime someone pays money for a link building activity, then the links created during that activity will be construed by Google as a paid link, and that link will be discounted or ignored by Google. But, that simply is not the case.

Some have even chosen to lump “article marketing” as a “paid link”, thereby decreeing that article marketing is truly and finally dead.

But all one has to do to gain a different point of view is to listen to Matt Cutts’ comments from the SMX Search Marketing Expo in Seattle on June 4^th, 2007 (http://videos.webpronews.com/2007/06/04/smx-seattle-matt-cutts-on-duplicate-and-paid-search/).

Within this video, Matt Cutts said, “If you are going to syndicate your content, try to make sure people know that you are the master or source of it. You can do it with a link from the article or link from the video, or stuff like that…”

The End of Article Marketing As We Knew It…

I don’t know about you, but I read Cutts’ last comment above as an indication that Google still considers article marketing to be a valid and Google-approved method of building links to one’s website.

But, no matter how we cut it, we have in fact passed “the end of article marketing as we once knew it.” Here is why:

• Some people will never have the chance to read this article and make their own mind about whether what I say has merit, or not.
• Some people will simply trust the fear mongers who have been trying to declare article marketing dead for years.
• And, some people will decide that they are not willing to take the chance that I might be right.

Going forward, we will see a fewer people using article marketing as a promotion technique.

The fact is that many people have quit using article marketing as a promotion technique. This outcome will only strengthen the hand of those of us who continue to utilize article marketing to promote our websites. After all, with fewer people using articles to market their websites, we will have fewer writers to compete with, in order to get attention for our own articles.

Author:  Bill Platt has offered article marketingservices at The Phantom Writers, since 2001. If you are interested in guaranteed link building services, utilizing articles as the foundation for the links, then Bill’s team can help you with that as well. If you have questions that only Bill can answer, give him a call at (405) 780-7745, between 9am-6pm CST, Monday through Friday.

I must be the luckiest person alive. In the past three days I found out I won 1.5 Million Euros in the UK lottery, One Million Euros in the Winx International Lottery, 1.5 Million Euros in the 2007 E-Mail Lottery, and 500,000 Pounds in an e-mail lottery held by the Coca Cola Company. Wow! What did I do to receive all these riches?

The sad truth is there are actually people who fall for these schemes. For the promise of a quick buck (or million Euros as the case may be) people will turn over their bank account numbers, wire money in the hopes of getting more back, or give other information that could lead to identity theft.

These lottery and sweepstakes schemes have gone on long before the internet, with one of the oldest being the phony sweepstakes which required an entrance fee to claim your prize, which amounted to more than the “prize” was worth. Another variation of that scheme was requiring the potential “winner” to call a certain number to find out if he or she was a winner. The phone call cost the potential “winner” a certain amount per minute with an unusually-long wait time on hold. The real winner was the scamming company which made money off the phone calls.

Today’s thieves have a wide choice of scam-delivery mechanisms, including in person, the mail, phone and internet. However, the same holds true no matter how the scam is delivered: if it sounds too good to be true, it is.

How Can You Recognize the Lottery or Sweepstakes Scam?

There are certainly legitimate lotteries and sweepstakes offers. Who hasn’t bought a state or multi-state lottery ticket from their local lottery retailer? Or, who hasn’t seen one of those sweepstakes offered by a recognized company advertising in the coupon section of the Sunday newspaper? You fill out the entry form or reasonable facsimile (usually a 3″x5″ card) with your name and address and send it off.

Therein is your biggest clue as to whether you’re the victim of a scam. In a legitimate lottery or sweepstakes you have bought the ticket or entered your name and address. In a scam lottery or sweepstakes you are notified you’ve won when you haven’t even entered or bought a ticket.

In addition, it’s illegal to use the mail or telephone to play lotteries across borders, whether national or state lines. Any lottery offer involving the purchase of lottery tickets for other state or country lotteries could end up with you being charged with illegal activities.

One ploy used by foreign scammers involving lotteries or sweepstakes is offering you an “advance” on your winnings. The scam artist will send you a check for part of your “winnings.” All you have to do is wire them payment for “taxes” or other official purposes. By the time you find out their check has bounced the money you wired is in their hands. And, because it was wired it’s harder to trace.

Lottery scammers don’t always use e-mail or the phone. Sometimes they do their dirty work in person. A typical scam would go something like this: You are approached in person by someone who claims he or she just won the lottery but isn’t eligible to claim it. They offer to split the money with you if you claim the prize. Sounds good, right? Except that before you claim the prize from the lottery retailer you are required to withdraw some money from your account and give it to the ticket holder as a good-faith gesture. By the time you find out you’re holding a non-winning lottery ticket, the thief is long-gone with your good-faith money.

In order to protect yourself from these scams, it’s important to remember the following:

Lotteries

* It’s illegal to use the mail or telephone to play lotteries across borders.

* If you ever receive a phone call, letter or e-mail announcing you just won a lottery, it’s a scam.

Sweepstakes

* It’s illegal for a company to require you to pay to win or claim a sweepstakes prize.

* It’s illegal for a company to suggest that buying something will improve your chances of winning.

* Companies cannot ask for money from you for taxes they say you owe on a sweepstakes winning.

* Be cautious when entering sweepstakes from displays you see in malls - often times these are people just wanting your name and address for a future sweepstakes scam.

* Only enter sweepstakes from recognizable companies, and never pay a fee to enter.

Avoiding being the victim of a scam takes a healthy dose of skepticism. If you are ever unsure about the legitimacy of an offer made to you, you can call the National Fraud Information Center’s Hotline at 1-800-876-7060

Author:  Shari Hearn is a writer and creator of Safety Tips 411, where you’ll learn how to guard against identity theft.

This article will point out 3 simple and highly effective web design techniques that use cascading style sheets to improve your web design and make your website perform better in the major search engines.

First of all, what is CSS? CSS stands for cascading style sheets and CSS is a way of separating presentation code from your actual content in web design. Usually you build up a set of CSS style rules that are stored in a separate file that has a .css file extension. You then link to the CSS file from your web pages using an HTML link tag.

There are many, many web design advantages to separating your presentation code off into separate CSS files and this article will tell you 3 excellent ways that you can use CSS to make your web design more search engine friendly.

Web Design Technique 1 - Us CSS to Structure Your Document

Let’s consider the facts that we know about search engines. They send their search engine robots to your site to read the content that you have there and the easier it is to find for them the better because they don’t waste much time looking. So having said this, what is the point of bogging down your pages with lots of un-necessary presentation markup that could quite easily be stored off in a separate CSS file. Most often this means removed any extraneous table tags and replacing them with a smaller number of HTML div tags which can be formatted using CSS rules. This removes the vast majority of presentational markup and leaves you with nicely formatted content that the search engines can easily find and index.

Web Design Technique 2 - Us CSS to Style Your Header Tags

We also know that search engines place a huge amount of importance on the header tags - h1,h2,h3 e.t.c. that they find in your pages. The thing that puts most inexperienced web designers off using header tags is that by default modern browsers render them in massive black text that looks really ugly. This is where CSS comes in. CSS can be used to easily make your header tags appear in nicely formatted, attractive text that both scores well with search engines and is pleasing to the eye of the user - perfect!

Web Design Technique 3 - Us CSS to Create Rollover Images

Traditionally rollover images are created using 2 graphics for the on and off states that are toggled on and off using some complex JavaScript code. This JavaScript code can bloat your web pages and since it is not content and just appears as gibberish to search engines it can adversely affect your rankings to have lots of embedded JavaScript in your web pages. A much better way to accomplish the same web design effect is to use CSS. Your still need your 2 graphics but you actually create a normal text link in your (that can also have keyword targeted anchor text) and use CSS to format its appearance. This is as simple as making the link a block level element in your HTML, setting it a height and width and then defining it 2 different background images, 1 for when the link is in its ‘off state’ and when for when the user is hovering over the link.

Conclusion:

Cascading style sheets are a very powerful way of separating presentation code from your actual content and the search engine optimisation benefits the CSS will bring to your web design are undeniable. Why not put these CSS web design techniques to work on your website today?

Author:  Stuart Mortimer is a freelance website designer in Doncaster UK who specialises in search engine friendly web design for companies of all types.

Introduction

In this final part of ‘Website Design that Works’ we will be discussing how to structure your website and learn all about CSS, web standards and usability. If you need a refresher of the discussions on the previous article please visit part one for a recap. Most of these lessons are used with Dreamweaver, so the basics of Dreamweaver are required. You can go ahead and purchase Dreamweaver here insert code. Now lets get started.

Test, test and test again.

Now that you are armed with a png file of your homepage its time to do some usability testing with it. What is usability? Well usability is testing your website to see how easy it is for people to use This doesn’t require a large budget or lots of people to do usability testing, just use your friends and family to begin with. You should test your site at every stage. Try to use a cross section of people of various age groups and backgrounds as these people will search and use your website differently.

Insert your png file into a html page within Dreamweaver and upload the page to your server. Then get some people to look at it and see what they make of it. Try not to tell them, if you can help it, what the website is going to be about. This will allow you to get better feedback as they figure it out from themselves. Any website should be instantly recognisable as to what its aims are. If the usability testers don’t get that instantly then you should make some modifications until they do. Ask them about the colour scheme you have chosen and just generally get their thoughts on the project. Don’t get too upset if some people say it sucks, as this is all good feedback that you can use to improve your site.

Creating your first page.

Once you have defined a new site and opened a new page in Dreamweaver its time to start creating your index.html page. Straight off the bat you should write your page title and description, for more information on this see the section on ‘what are keywords?’ in part one. Once you have written your keyword rich title and description add some Meta data.

Keywords Meta data

Inserting keywords into your code so search engine spiders can see them is really not that important to search engines these days. I would however still include them as you never know what the future holds and they may start holding more weight in the future. Don’t just fill your keywords description tag with words you think are relevant to your site only use words or phrases that are actually in the content of your webpage. This is why you should wait until you have all your content written before inserting your keywords. Make sure you separate your keywords with a coma.

Div tags verses tables.

Should you use div tags or tables? Well in my option you should use both by definition tables are used to hold tabular data, but sometimes tables are just the easiest way to go, for structuring forms etc. Just remember to add captions and comment tags to the table to help with accessibility.
Div tags should be used for the most part partnering with CSS (more on CSS in a moment). Dreamweaver has some created CSS templates you can use to get started in structuring your website.

CSS the basics.

CSS, which stands for cascading style sheets, are used to add style to the elements on your page. You can create a separate style sheet and link it to your html file or embed it straight into your html document. You can assign classes to an element which can be attached to tags.

You can also assign ID’S or pseudo-class selectors which can only apply to one specific element. There are great advantages of using CSS rules as one change of the rule will take effect site wide, for example, if you wanted to change the font colour for the H1 tag you would only need to change the rule once and it will ripple through your site on every page that is linked to that external CSS file.

One thing to remember about CSS rules is your .css file can get a bit messy if you don’t keep things structured. You should always give your rules generic names so you can remember what it actually does and try to bunch rules together with a similar theme or that are assigned to specific pages. This avoids the process of locating them again becoming laborious.

It’s a good idea to put comments into your CSS file for example  /* home page table elements */ to give you a better idea of what’s going on and anyone else who might be making changes to your CSS file will have a better idea of what applies to what.

Dreamweaver CS3 has a new feature which allows you to move your rules up and down your file, which is a welcome addition. For further reading on the subject of css I would recommend you read the following books.
The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks
Eric Meyer on CSS (Voices (New Riders)) 

Adding images.

Now that we have the structure sorted you can start by adding images in gif, jpg or png. In my option images are like flash should be used sparingly. Over the years I find myself using less and less images as “content is king” and people are for the most part visiting your website to read your great content not marvel at your pretty graphics. However there are times that images are needed to convey things that text alone just can not,  e-commerce websites for example.
Always remember to add alt tags to your images. These should be no longer than a couple of lines, you should also include some keywords in your alt tags as again this will help with SEO. Another thing to note is if you can’t convey your image in a couple of lines of text you should enter the long description tag which will link to a file where a longer description can be found. This can be very beneficial the blind or people with vision impairments.

Content is King

“Content is king” is an old cliché in the website design world and like most clichés it rings true. I can’t stress enough about the importance of your content as this is the most important aspect by far when designing your website. Writing good engaging web content is so vital in your website project and will keep visitors returning back for more. At the end of the day that’s what you want, and if your are writing web copy to sell a product you should try to reach people on an emotional level and include lots of emotional words in your copy. This should be followed by a clear call to action. There is a great tool I discovered for inserting emotional words into your copy. Visit Paul Galloway’s site and use his tool to Replace Rational Words With Emotional Words.

For more information on this subject I would recommend you read this excellent book by Maria Veloso Web Copy That Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy Every Time 

Navigate don’t Alienate.

Now its time to add your navigation. In my option all navigation should be an unordered list (please don’t use graphics for this as search engines are blind and will have difficulty indexing your site, also not good from a SEO standpoint). Placed mainly vertically near the top of page and horizontally down the left of the page navigation should be clear and generic and make it clear where you are sending people. Your navigation should be separated into two kinds: utility links and main navigation. Your utility links are links like sitemap, contact us, about us and your main navigation should be links to the main parts of your site i.e. Service pages.

If you want to add images to your links you should style your unordered lists with css to add background images and always remember to style your link a:link, a:visited, a:hover and a:active in that order. A good way I remember this is

LOVE HATE.

Your links should also have a title tag describing what the links are. No need to add it to them all just the ones of most importance. Also for accessibility purposes they should all have a tab index to help people with mobility problems, who may not be able to use a mouse tab index code: tabindex=”5″.

A good tip for inserting tab indexes is don’t start your tab indexes with 1,2,3,4,5 etc. as this will cause you problems when you add links to your navigation as you will need to renumber them all. If you tab index them in increments of 10 for example 10,20,30,40,50 this will leave you room to add tab indexes without having to renumber. Another good idea here is to add access keys code: accesskey=”k” for people using text browsers.

Whilst pressing the control key then your selected access key visitors can go straight to the page the link specifies. This is kind of like shortcut keys but remember to list these somewhere so visitors know what your access keys are. Don’t forget to test them as most browsers and applications use shortcut keys for different things and you don’t want to override them.
Another good accessibility tip is to add a skip to content link nearest to the top of the page as you can insert a named anchor to your content and link to it.

This is also good for text browsers so visitors using them don’t have to tab all the way through your links to get to the content. It is also good for screen readers. Your website should at the very least validate to priority one of accessibility standards.
For more information and further reading on accessibly I would recommend this book by Joe Clark Building Accessible Websites

Dreamweaver templates

Now you have got your all your page elements in place, a great feature Dreamweaver has is Dreamweaver templates. You can save a page as a Dreamweaver template and then create pages based on this template. This is a huge time saver as all you need to do when you make a change is modify the template and all pages will be modified instantly.

More testing

Now you have got your template created you need to check if your html and css validates, also check the accessibility of the page. This should be done early, as mistakes will be made and better to correct them now before things get out of hand.

To check your html and xhtml confirms to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards visit their html validater and run your page through it to see if it validates, if it doesn’t make the desired change that it specifies. Sometimes it can be unclear what the problem is so another good tool to use for this is total validator.  It can give you more incite to the problem. While you are at it you can go ahead and use W3C’s css validator tool to validate your css file.

Next thing is to check how accessible your website is. You can use the total validator tool to do this but another excellent tool for this is watchfire’s   WebXACT service.
I’m afraid your testing isn’t over yet; you now need to test your page in all major browsers including Firefox, Internet explorer, Netscape and Opera to name the most popular ones. Also in even older versions if you can.

Text browsers are also needed as a lot of handicapped surfers will use text browser and your website should be structured to work easily with them. Opera has a great feature for you to simulate a text browser but you should go ahead and download lynx and test it in there as this is the most popular text browser.

Screen readers should be your next test but it can be difficult to test as these can be very expensive but you can try to get one on trial to get the idea. Generally if your website works good in a text browser the likelihood is that it will work ok with a screen reader, and don’t forget to check your pages on different screen resolutions as well.

Creating the rest of the website

When you are happy with all your testing you can now start creating all your other pages based on your Dreamweaver template. Just create a new page based on the saved template you have and repeat for all pages. Some essential pages to include are sitemap, contact us and about us. When creating about us and contact us try and not call them this if you can help it. For example call it ‘contact Hamish paints’ as there are millions of pages in Google’s index called about us (including some of mine). As for a sitemap you should include all the pages of importance in your sitemap.html page and give them a little description which will help your visitors and search engines alike.

Creating a file structure

Try to include as many of your pages as you can in the root folder and give them keyword rich names. Don’t include spaces between words use _ to separate words because if you use a space this will show up as % in the code. Keeping your pages in the root folder will help your website get indexed by the search engines quicker.

Author:  Website design specialist Kevin J. Gallagher works with Umbrella Website Design in the UK. Umbrella Website design offers website design, hosting and web builder software.