Website Design and Promotion

Matching Email Address and Domain Name

Filling in for Juliet today with a brief post...

I always recommend to my clients to, whenever possible, get an email address to match their website's domain name. (i.e., if your website is www.yourbusiness.com, have an email address info@yourbusiness.com and/or yourname@yourbusiness.com.) It reconfirms your URL in people's minds, makes it easier for people to remember both the URL and your email address, and looks neater on business cards.

If you've already got several email addresses and don't want to be bothered worrying about another one, just have this one forward to one of your existing ones.

Do Not 'Enter'

Two reasons why I don't recommend using an 'entry' page to your site - i.e., one that says, "Click here to enter":

1. Time speeds up on the Net. You have very little time to grab your visitors attention. They may be too impatient to have to click that one extra time to get into your site and decide to move on to another site (your competition?).
2. Your home page is generally the most important page as far as search engines are concerned. That's where most of your incoming links will likely go to and that's where you want to have copy that's optimized for Google and co. If your home page is basically graphics and has no (or little) text, search engines don't have much to base rankings on.

The only types of 'enter' pages that I think are somewhat useful are when your site is split into two - e.g., English and French. Still, in that case, I'd make sure to have at least a couple of paragraphs of good copy in addition to the two entry choices.

More on How To Promote your Website with Article Marketing

Although marketing your website via articles has been around for some time, it seems to be exploding lately with the importance Google seems to be placing on quality, relevent backlinks.  As a result,  more people are starting to use article marketing as a way to promote their websites.

There is increasingly a lot more information available on marketing via articles as well. For example, Priya Shah at the Marketing Slave blog has posted a useful article called, 6 Article Marketing Smarts: How To Get More Reprints And Exposure.

To summarize her 6 points:

1.Pick a topic that is hot or always fresh.
2.Target a large audience.
3.Craft a catchy relevant title.
4.Offer publishers a monetary incentive (i.e. affiliate program).
5.Write an article series.
6. Distribute your article widely.

Focus!

I find that many people have unrealistic expectations when it comes to their site's search engine rankings. They'll throw up a site about organic cotton clothing, for example, and wonder why it doesn't rank high for clothes, shirts, shorts, pants, socks, etc.

First off, those words are far too general. You need to be much more specific in what you can expect high rankings for. In our example, terms such as "organic cotton t-shirts" might draw your site highly, if it's done right.

Secondly, you're much better off if you create separate pages for each keyword/phrase (plus, maybe one or two others). So, have one page that describes your organic cotton t-shirts; one for organic cotton hiking shorts, one for organic cotton baby clothing, etc. Then, each of those pages can be optimized for those specific terms. You'll have many more "ins" to your site that way — one (or a few) for each page. It doesn't really matter how someone enters your site, as long as there's an easy way for them to find their way around and what's there gets them to stay.

Writing Articles to Promote Your Website

Getting relevant, quality back links (links from other sites) is key to your website's success on the Internet as search engines place a great deal of emphasis on them in their ranking of sites.

The problem is how do you get quality, relevant back links?

You certainly don't want to be using link farms as you could be seriously penalized by the search engines. And contacting other sites and offering to exchange links can be a tedious and time consuming process.

One way to get links that works quite well is to submit articles to article directories. There are hundreds of them on the Internet that you can submit to and most have a fairly straightforward submission process. One of my favorite directories is Ezinearticles.com

Increasingly I have been submitting my own articles to some of these directories and am amazed at not only how quickly they get picked up by other websites, but also how much more visible I am for the main key words that I use in search engines. Not only that, but I am also slowing increasing my Google Page Rank.

If you haven't considered submitting articles as a way to increase your exposure as well as your ranking in the search engines, you might want to consider this great way to promote your website.

 

"Sound" Advice

It's funny how topics for articles come to you (well, to me, anyway). I was in yoga class the other day, trying to relax in shavasana (for non-yogis, it's basically the final pose of the practice, where you lie still on the floor for a few minutes), but kept hearing a banging on the door next door. It was, needless to say, very distracting. But, it did give me the idea for a blog post: sound in web sites. As you might guess, I'm generally opposed to it.

One thing that really annoys me is when I go to a site and all of the sudden I hear a blast of music, an ad for a movie, or someone saying, "Hello, welcome to my web site." To me, it's like my radio coming on automatically — it jilts me. And, having worked in outside offices before (as opposed to at home, where I usually work), I know how potentially embarrassing it can be when your boss walks by the instant that blast comes on!

Sure, I could keep my speakers off, but I like to hear that little ding when I get new mail (makes me feel important) or the beep when I try to do something without closing a dialog box first. And, I do like to hear some music or movie clips, but at my choosing.

The only time I really expect to hear sound, without OK'ing it, is when I go to a musician's site. In fact, I recently checked out Gavin DeGraw's site (www.gavindegraw.com) and was pleasantly surprised to hear the acoustic version of Chariot (sent shivers down my spine!). But, that's it. Otherwise I don't like to be bombarded with noise and have to fumble for the volume control or the Back button.

So, I implore all web developers out there — please only place audio on your site if there is some sort of "click here to listen" button. And, if it is on a music site, definitely have an easily located "off" button. Some of us are supposed to be "working" (nudge nudge wink wink).

Green Web Hosting

Increasingly I have been hearing about "green" web hosting companies. One example is being offered by sustainablemarketing.com which uses open source (free) software and purchases "wind power certificates" to offset 100% of their energy usage. The money goes towards the construction of wind turbines. More information on how these certificates work, is available here.

Prices, starting at $10/month are also very reasonable. Extras added on to their packages include:
access to their library of sustainable and green marketing articles, inclusion in their membership directory, abiity to update your own web content, and blog and website template installations.

I haven't switched my own hosting over yet, but will be checking into this and other companies more...

Web Page Dimensions

Ever wonder why some web pages fill your whole screen while others don’t? Many people have the same question: What’s with all the white (or other plain color or background pattern) around the main part of the page?

There are 3 basic design styles when it comes to dimensions relative to the screen:

1. Fixed width and height – usually 700-740 pixels wide by 400-500 pixels high (a pixel is a tiny dot on the screen). These sites look like a rectangle, usually centered in the screen, with some form of “white space” around it.
2. Fixed width only – fills the screen vertically, but is usually 700-740 pixels wide, with white space on both sides (if the page is centered) or filling up the right side (if the page is left-aligned).
3. Variable height and width – these fill up the whole screen (usually both widthwise and heightwise).

Types 1 and 2 have the advantage of allowing for greater control of design elements – i.e., you can pretty accurately decide where all images will sit in relation to the text. If you can control the font size/type using CSS style sheets, the page should look pretty much the same on every monitor. The reason for limiting the dimensions to around 700x400 has to do with two things:

1. What we call the "lowest common denominator" - i.e., what the visitor using the smallest screen resolution is using. This used to be 640x480, but now is accepted to be 800x600. See Display Resolution statistics at www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp. There's even a warning there that says, "Web developers be aware: Many users still have only 800x600 display screens." Meaning they can't see all that those of us using 1024x768 or higher can!
2. Usable space left after considering for possible toolbars (such as the Address bar, Google Toolbar, etc.) at the top, bottom, or side of the browser window.

So, after we take these into consideration we're left with around 700x400 pixels to play with.

Most sites these days go with the approx. 700 pixel width and let the height fill the screen vertically. A great solution, in my opinion, as it gives you control over image placement, but also allows for a large amount of copy.

Type 3 has the "advantage" of no white space, but the cost is little control of the spacing of images relative to the text. And, you often get a lot of white space within the page if you don't have much content. I usually only recommend this type if the page is copy-heavy and exact placing of images within the content is not essential.