Web Wise!

When you or your web designer is in the process of building your site, constantly ask for feedback from family, friends, strangers....whoever. Seeing how others view, use, understand and navigate your website is the only way to fully realize what it's strengths, and more importantly, it's weaknesses, really are.

Case in point: I did some work for a company that distributed a certain piece of software. In order for me to better understand the company I got the software...and I was LOST! It turns out these people were basically having to train each new customer to use the software because it wasn't intuitive in the least! The company had been using the software for so long it was second nature to them, but to anyone else, even to people in their field, it was a big brick wall. Now that company is looking into new software. They will spend less time training their clients to use it, and more time making sells with something a customer can use on their own.

The same goes for your website. It's one thing if you have a highly specialized website...but if your site's intended use is for the public to find out more about you...make sure they can! Can they find their way around their site? Do they understand the purpose of the site (do you tell them the purpose of the site?)

Get others to examine your site...if they can't figure it out, how can anyone else?

Until next time...stay web wise!

This is going to be another short and sweet one. Flash is very pretty and can be a very eye catching and effective way to grab people...I'm ok with having some flash on a website. What I'm not a fan of are sites that are completely Flash.

I'm not a Flash designer by trade. Those guys are specialized and know their stuff. There are guys out there that make quite a nice living just by designing in Flash and nothing else. I'm not one of those guys! I do good to get by with some basic stuff in flash.

Here are a few reasons why I don't recommend flash:

1) Search Engines - Yes, before anyone says anything, I know that Google can now pull out text from a Flash file. I still think however that Google cannot process Flash text as nicely and neatly as it can straight HTML, XHTML, PHP, ASP.NET or anything else. I just don't think it's there yet. I also think that Google has a harder time tracing Flash links which helps in your rankings.

2) Portability - Not every web person out there works with Flash. I generally don't. I can but I don't like to. A lot of web people just don't have the software and knowledge to deal with it. Also with an HTML (or some variant) site, its easy to re-design an existing website. If your old web designer has suddenly gone MIA and you need some quick work done on your site, but don't have all the Flash source files...sorry...you are out of luck my friend.

3) Graceful Aging - Technology changes...but there are sites out there that are 10 - 15 years old that are HTML. Flash hasn't been around that long. Chances are in 10 years you can still write a page in HTML and most browsers (or hovercrafts or whatever) will be able to read them. This MIGHT be true with flash, but who knows?

So my suggestion, keep your flash, ALL OF YOUR FLASH, on your site to a minimum. Before adding Flash ask yourself its it's just cool/pretty/neat or if it is accenting the message you are trying to get across.

Until next time...stay web wise!

That title is your greek lesson for the day. Now on to my post.

This is going to be short and sweet with 2 points. When you have a web site built, by me or by anyone else make sure 2 things are in place.

1) Make sure you own all the designs/content of your website. Some designers retain ownership of graphics they create for your web site which, I don't believe, should be the case. If you are paying me to design YOUR web site, when I get finished it should be YOUR web site. If I create a logo for you it should become yours. Always check with your web guy to make sure this is the case.

2) Get ALL of your passwords, hosting information etc from your web guy if you don't set this stuff up yourself. Again, you are paying for web hosting and you should have the access information for your site. Over and over I get new clients who's last web guy has "dropped off the planet". I gladly agree to work with them but when I ask them for their hosting login information I am met with a "what's that?" or "I don't have that." response. This is often followed by "can't you just go in and make changes?" The short answer is NO. Companies put usernames and passwords in place for obvious reasons...so people CAN'T just waltz in and make changes to your web site or hosting.

I am going to expound on YOUR part in web site design in the future, but for now, make sure you own your website and even if you don't understand all of it, make sure you have all of the login and hosting information. Don't just trust your web guy to keep it for you.

(BTW...with IWD you own your stuff and I send you all of your password/login info, even if you don't know what to do with it.)

Until next time....stay web wise.

I'm going to try to make today's post short and sweet...

PUT YOUR WEBSITE ADDRESS ON EVERYTHING.

Any postal mail you send out should have your address on it. Your email should have your address on it (look for the signature file function). If you post to any forums or other websites (which we will talk about another day) put your website address on it.

In short, put your website address on everything.

Thanks and have a great day.
Chris Cummings
www.iwdonline.com

Things seem to move so fast on the Internet that everything seems instant. You can get up to the minute news coverage, instant stock quotes, chat with friends across the world and more. But not everything on the web happens in an instant...or even overnight.

There have been occasions where I've built web sites for customers and they come back a week later wondering why they can't find their listing on Google or why they don't seem to get a lot of traffic from search engines on their new and improved web site.

The answer is that these things take time. We do see a lot of things happen really fast online, but getting your web site address out there usually isn't one of them. There are things you can do such as Google Adwords and other advertising options (that we will discuss in the future) to get your name out there but a lot of it really takes time for things to start happening, especially on the search engines.

Unlike the movie "Field of Dreams" just because you build it, doesn't mean they will come. Of course with IWD or any really good designer, they are going to build your site that is friendly to search engines and visitors alike. But the second that site goes live, you probably aren't going to be over-run with web traffic. We can always hope...but don't hold your breath.

Once your new website is live, Google and other search engines will need to send their robots (also called spiders, crawlers, bots) to crawl across and index your site. You can go to Google and other search engines and submit your web site address for crawling. I always do this with my clients sites but it will usually happen even if you don't submit your address.

However....

The Internet is a BIG place. There are billions of websites out there and Google will try and crawl all of them. So it may be a week, a few weeks or even a month before they crawl your site. It's not going to happen the moment you go live. In fact it may not happen for a while!

As I said in the future we will talk about Google Adwords and other advertising options to promote your site. There's a big debate as to how much advertising on Google affects how quickly and how high you get listed in the search engine...but there is little debate that it DOES help. So if you can afford to drop a few bucks on an advertising campaign it will help.

That's it for now...more to come. Questions? Comments? New cars? You can comment on this blog or email me for info (or deliver the new car directly to my home address).