When writing your website content, it is important to understand there is a difference in writing for the written page and writing for a web page.
For a start, space on the website is technically unlimited.
Reading a monitor is generally harder work than reading a magazine page, so things should be spaced to make it easier to read, and in a font that is easy to read.
As for the content itself, it needs to be written in a way that engages your user.
If someone has purchased a magazine, they are more likely to read all of the content as they want to get value for money. The same is not true of websites.
It is important to understand that websites are free and you can navigate away from any page at the touch of a button. People have money invested in magazines and will continue to read even if it’s not wholly appropriate, as they have paid for it.
Web pages carrying news content or a just a lot of content in general, need to be laid out in bite sized chunks with images to illustrate points.
Many people will skim read a webpage and if it is perceived that there is too much content or waffle, users can be put off and navigate away from the page – possibly even the website.
Reduce that content into managable chunks and people are more likely to invest their time reading your content.
The nofollow tag seems to create a bit of confusion among developers, so I thought I would clarify my understanding of the tag and would welcome a discussion.
I have a very easy way of deciding these things for the company I work for – anything that comes through the advertising department should get nofollowed, and anything through the editorial department should be followed. I should point out that I am currently working for a magazine publisher.
The rule of thumb I work to is that if a link has been paid for, the nofollow tag should be applied. Any naturally occuring link within the website content should be left alone.
When the link metric was first introduced as a ranking factor it was seen that a link was a in essence a ‘vote’ for the recipient website. This was easy to manipulate by buying links.
Google combated this by penalising sites that were obviously selling links and followed that through to penalise the websites listed on them.
A natural website linking pattern would should links that are both followed and nofollowed.
There was a thinking that nofollowed links were useless as no ‘link juice’ was passed to the recipient website, but I have always subscribed to the theory that a good link is worth having regardless of the nofollow tag, and it seems I may finally have the proof!
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-signals-hiding-beneath-the-surface
Randfish, a well known and respected blogger in the SEO field has stated that he believes that nofollowed links from trusted sources will have an impact on your linking profile.
The bottom line is that as long as you are targetting good links, it doesn’t matter if they are nofollowed – a nofollowed link from a trusted website is a good thing to have!
We’ve all encountered that page…the annoying standard “The page you are looking for cannot be found…”, but you don’t want your visitors to find those pages on your site do you?
As hard as you might try, if you have a big website or have changed the url structure, or even removed content, can you be sure your visitors are not seeing that annoying, and frankly useless, page?
Why not create a custom 404 page? Style it in the same manner as your website, and quite often having a funny tagline on the page amuses users, but most importantly, they have remained on your website despite not finding the content they wanted.
Now is your chance to re-engage those users by offering them the content you think they may have been looking for.
There is a second reason to customise your 404 pages – and that is for the friendly spiders that visit your website!
If a spider follow an internal link on your website and comes to a standard 404 page, it will end it’s crawl as there is nowhere for it to continue onto. Having a 404 page that has your site menu and/or links to different content will give the spider somewhere else to go!
Of course, you need to ensure that the page returns a 404 and not 200 status, and you should remember to noindex the page, or block it with your robots.txt file!
I read SEOmoz on a regular basis, and today read a post about getting links to your websites.
One resource they recommended really stood out as being useful for both the website looking for links, but also for writers looking to validate their content.
At Zemanta you can submit your RSS or Atom feed, then as bloggers write their own posts that have access to a list of media items and related articles they can reference in their own blog.
Obviously, there is a plugin for WordPress, but there are plugins and extensions for a variety of blogging platforms, included hosted wordpress blogs and blogger, as well as an API for blogs that don’t have their own plugin yet.
I can see it as a great resource for verifying your information and finding new resources for good information!
I really like the concept and am trying it out in this post. Let me know what you think!
- 4 Valuable Link Building Services (Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, EightfoldLogic & Whitespark) (seomoz.org) – this was the blog post I originally saw and have been able to add this link at the click of a button!
If you are not going to have a bespoke website built for you, or you are doing it yourself, there is a vast array of Content Management Systems out there, and a lot are free.
Popular ones you may have heard of are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
But as with everything, there are good and bad points about every CMS so it’s important to know what you need the software to do, and whether it allows for expansion later down the line.
It’s also tricky to migrate between CMS’ at a later date, so it’s better to put the work in now!
I am going through this process at the moment.
Normally I build my own bespoke systems, but as I know the functionality of the new site I’m building is fairly simple, I want to try an open source CMS solution.
If anyone has any recommendations, I’d be glad to hear about them!
PHP is a very versatile web language and you can easily make various different useful applications.
This is a very simple random number generator that will not duplicate any of the previous numbers, which is perfect as a UK lottery number generator.
Get new numbers
This was a very quick piece of code to write and is completely random.
Give it go although we take no responsibilty for losses you may incur when playing the UK lottery with these numbers! We would however appreciate a small donation of our generator makes you a millionaire!!
We all have to update our websites at one time or another, whether it is a full on server move, or a simple text change, but when is the best time to make those changes?
The bottom line is that no matter what your website offers, you make your changes at a time when it is least likely to cost you money.
If you run a B2B website, then the weekend is probably the best time to make large changes, while a B2C website would probably be in the small hours of the morning.
Before you make these kinds of decisions, you should consult your analytics program and guage when the best time is for your own website.
Small changes can be made any time, but if you value your site and your business cannot afford for any website downtime, you need to ensure your changes are handled effectively.
For example, for large and complex websites, I run a development site alongside the live website and all programming changes are tested on the development site before being transferred to the live site. This means bugs are fixed before going live and the downtime experienced on the real site is minimised. It then becomes easier to guage how long changes will take, and thus gives you an idea of when you can feasibly fit the updates into your work schedule.
If you cannot run a duplicate site as a development website, you need to factor in the possibility that the changes you make to your live website may break the site and will result in significantly more downtime than you envisaged.
So, in summary, small changes to the content of your site can really be done at anytime, but structural changes and feature additions should only be implemented when you can minimise the impact of your website’s downtime.
There is an ongoing debate about the use of Captcha images on website and whether they should be used.
The argument from those people against using Captcha images is that spam is not the fault of the genuine website user, so why should they be faced with what are often very hard to read images, just to be able to send an email via a website.
Obviously, the argument in favour of them is that they dramatically reduce spam.
So who’s responsibility should it be?
Personally, I have no problem with the use of Captcha images, but as a Webmaster I understand how much spam you can receive without implementing it.
But if I want people to use my website, shouldn’t it be down to me to ensure that measures put in place to combat things that don’t affect my customers don’t have any impact on my customers? For example, a Captcha code exists to make a webmaster’s life easier – it does not offer any advantage to my website user to complete a Captcha code.
I have tried to use a number of measures to combat spam, none of which have yet worked. But I do believe that us web developers should look beyond the Captcha code to try and find an effective spam deterrent that does not impact the users of our websites.
I would like to hear other’s opinions on this subject. Do you get frustrated with the Captcha codes and do they bother you?
I agree that Flash websites can look amazing – but you need to understand what creating a website in flash means for you.
Maintenance
If you have paid a designer to create your whole site in Flash, you are going to need them to make any change, however minor that may be. Not only can this end up being expensive, the changes may not be particularly quick.
You should keep in mind that Flash is a complicated technology. You should consider if it is the right technology for your website. An (X)HTML website incorporating Flash is far more acceptable to search engine spiders, and I agree that Flash has it’s place. For example, you could use Flash for an online presentation that is more of an extra to the website.
Search Engine Spiders can’t find it!
There has been a lot of talk over the last few years about how search engine spiders have improved their ability to read Flash files. However, while this is true, Flash still presents indexing problems, and so a website built entirely in Flash, will be likely to experience SEO problems.
As the purpose of your website is to attract visitors, the lack of spidering will restrict your search engine optimisation efforts. The current mantra of SEO’s is that “content is king”. If the spiders cannot access your content because it is locked inside a Flash file, you are not realising the true potential of your website.
Do you really need Flash?
I have many bugbears with websites created entirely from Flash – even with just landing pages that have the ‘skip intro’ button as part of the flash. There are still a lot of people who don’t have flash installed, and the lack of non-flash navigation can be particularly frustrating.
I tend to find that Flash sites have been created by brilliant designers who lack the understanding of how poor implementation of the technology can create a frustrating website for it’s users.
My own opinion of Flash is that it should be used sparingly and mainly for things that are not important to show up in the search engines. I love a lot of Flash websites, but I look at them from the point of view of the user and the search engines, and I advise my clients accordingly.
Ultimately, the decision of whether to use Flash, and how much, is up to you. If you’re site is essentially a sales or lead generation site, I would advise staying away from Flash as it can slow a user’s progress through your website, and as such, may end up costing you clients.
If you have a website that is about you and your abilities, for example, a graphic designer, then Flash has it’s place.
As a web developer, I often get people asking me to build a website and their explanation of what they want – “I want a copy of www.domain.com please”. I tend to stay away from these kind of clients, as if my client doesn’t know what they want, then I have no hope of developing a site that they will be happy with.
I have tried this once before and got my fingers severely burnt.
When I start a database driven site, I look at the full spec of the site and the database structure is decided from what the requirements of the specifications are. Telling your developer three months down the line that actually you want to be able to import data in a set structure, or providing a feed to another site that was never previously mentioned, will only serve to frustrate your developer and is likely to push the cost up, as fixes will have to be found to provide the new functionality. It will strain your client/developer relationship.
On a personal level, I also think it is good for a website owner to think about what they want their own website to do – creating a clone of someone else’s website may not provide everything you want – and a lot of what you don’t want. Besides, surfers don’t want to see replicas of the same website all over the internet – be different!
Asking a web developer to create a site that does what you want it to do requires a specification list to be drawn up. Without it you may as well ask an insurance company for a quote without providing the details of the driver and the car. A properly drawn up spec list means a developer is more likely to be able to provide a realistic quote for the work, so you are less likely to incur extra costs.
So in summary, providing your developer with a spec list means that you know what you want the finished project to be able to do, and will help to build a relationship with your developer that is built on respect.
