Dreamweaver Video Tutorial of the week #4

To start this week there is another dreamweaver video tutorial for you to enjoy. This one focuses more on the HTML side of dreamweaver, but users with basic skills (like me) will still be able to follow this one. It is important to remember that a well coded page should be the top priority when making a web site.

Choosing a web designer and developer

At the moment I am having my first commercial website designed and developed and many people have been asking me "how do you choose one out of the thousands of companies." These are my few tips for this daunting process

1. Firstly look at their own site:

• Does it look good?
• Is it easy to navigate?
• Do all the pages work?
• Does it work on all the popular browsers
  

2. Make sure they have a portfolio of pages they have designed. You can always email the webmasters of the sites in their portfolio and ask them if they were happy with the designer/developer.

3. If you are also getting them to do your search engine optimization then make sure they rank highly for their name and other popular keywords.

4. It is much easier to have one person to do all the work on the website, but remember that not all designers are good developers and vice versa so it might be worth using one of each.

5. Get a free quote on the website you want done. If they wont give a quote then move on to another company. Make sure they are friendly and will answer all your questions and emails quickly. Remember that cheap isn't always good - a professional web site that makes thousands a year can cost a mini fortune, but it is a once off cost! If the website is a hobby or simply fun then don't spend too much!

6. Give the designer and developer a really good idea of what you want. Some simple drawings of what you want your page to look like and where all the content goes is a really good idea.

I hope these few little tips help you! Good Luck!

Best Places to Register Your Domain Name

Registering a domain name can de a daunting task for many new webmasters with everyone trying to get your business offering all kinds of different incentives and prices. The best thing to do is find a site that reviews the top domain name registration companies and compares them with features as well as prices.
I have found such a site that might be useful for anyone trying to register their domain names:
Domain Name Registration Reviews
Good Luck!

Webmaster Tip - Dreamweaver video tutorial of the week #2

This is the second video tutorial in this series and well worth watching if you are trying to design your own website. Yes the guys voice is annoying and he explains things very slowly, but there is some really good advice and tips here to be worth the 17 minutes (hell I watched it and I don't even use dreamweaver).
This video focuses on creating hyperlinks and simple menu bars. Enjoy

Webmaster Tip - Dreamweaver video tutorial of the week

Without a doubt dreamweaver has helped spawn hundreds of websites many built with the WYSIWYG editor. The program is the best in its class and has helped thousands of computer code illiterates to build some very fine (and not so fine) pages. This video tutorial will help you start to gain a basic understanding of building a website with dreamweaver. It is filled with great tips and is a recommended watch for anyone learning dreamweaver or wanting to make their own website.

Please leave a comment if this was useful or if you would like to see more of these video tips. (commenting is open to everyone).

I am planning on starting a video tutorial of the week post so check back later for more video tutorials. You might also want to subscribe to this blog to get the fresh content first!

Webmaster Tip - SEO video tutorial

I found this great little tip while searching youtube today. It talks about a method of finding out how many websites have a certain word in their title. You can use this to judge how much competition you will have or to simply work out which keywords you will target. This video is very short, but it is certainly a handy thing for all webmasters to know.

Webmaster Tip - How to link so that people will click

Don't use "click here" as link text

We have all seen it before, a site tells us to click here, but is that the best way to get someone interested in clicking? Here are some following dos and don'ts of linking:

How to link

If you want someone to click on your links, use brief but meaningful link text that:

• provides some information
  
• explains what the link offers
• is not a verb phrase

Don't do this - An example

Avoid the following sentence on your page:

To visit my blog, click here.

or:

To sign up to blogger, go to the Blogger Website and fill in the necessary form.

This doesn't explain what blogger is or offers

Instead try this - An example

If you want to call your reader to action, use something like:

Visit Webmasters Central!

A longer link text might be:

Tell me more about Blogger: A free blog creator that lets you create you very own blog.

I hope this little tip has helped. Good luck writing quality links!

How important is Search Engine Optimization

There is no doubt that most webmasters and businesses on the web put search engine optimization (SEO) at the top of the importance list. Still this really is the ultimate question most people are asking.

Ask yourself - how many visitors do I want?
If the answer is a dozen a day then SEO shouldn't be a major concern. You should simply focus on writing great content and a few people will certainly come and visit. Good content is one of the keys to a decent google ranking and rumours abound that great content will become even more valuable to your listing in the future. That is why constantly updated blogs get into the top rankings of google - their content is always being updated! If you want hundreds of visitors daily then certainly put some of your focus into SEO, but still don't forget to write great content.

In the end true long term success with google comes from genuinely good content.

What should I be doing to optimize my page...?
Heaps of information can be found on this and I am not going to go into great detail, but these are the things you should be trying to do:

• Write good meta tags - you can view my blog post entitled how to write good meta tags here
• Get Inbound Links (including directories) - you can view my blog post about submitting to directories here
• Write great content (and lots of it) and optimise it for the search engine spiders

Is there anything I should be careful of...?
There are some things that google doesn't like and these can get you banned:
Keyword stuffing - filling the page with a ridiculously high percentage of keywords

• Duplicate Content - Duplicating content on different pages in and attempt to gain multiple search engine positions.
  
• Using "doorway" or "cloaked" pages which distort the true content of the website. This includes hidden text designed to be read by the search engine spider, but invisible to human visitors (often used by porn pages).
• Paying for links - Google keeps telling us this is bad yet people keep doing it - be careful