The Web Hosting Blog » Web Design

How can a blog help your main website? Setting up a blog to increase web traffic.

admin — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:28:03 +0000

Ok, I know what you all are thinking: ‘oh no not another – why a web blog is great article’. In this article I am not trying to convince you to start a blog, rather to share my experience with my web hosting blog that I started 6 months ago.

When I first thought about adding a blog to my website, I was really skeptical. I noticed that everyone and his mother had a blog. How could a journal style website possibly help my business increase its sales? What’s so special about a blog that I can’t do with my website?

There is one myth that I want to clear up before we get into this: a blog is given no special advantage over a static website as far as search engines and search engine rankings are concerned.

Blogs tend to rank better for the following reasons:

Blogs are updated more frequently than your main website – search engine bots love continuously updated content and websites. My new blog posts get indexed within 30 minutes.
Blogs are typically programmed a lot better from a SEO perspective.
They often can simulate a community within the blog itself through user comments and author response.

One thing that I am certain about is that blogs are a lot easier to build up traffic to than your standard corporate style website. In 6 months, I am generating the same amount of traffic to my blog as my main sales website that has been online for 6 years.

I am able to write about broader topics on my blog compared to my sales pages where I can only write content that is to sell my product. This leads to more search engine traffic because I am able to write content with different keywords than my main site.
I am also able to add content onto my blog that an average user will find helpful. For instance, I could write an article on how to setup a website a web hosting account. To someone new to building websites, this will be more helpful compared to a sales page that provides no usable or helpful information.

Blog posts are great for long tail search engine traffic

Long Tail Lizard

By adding a lot of related keywords to your blog posts, you can build up some really nice long tail keyword traffic. Also, whenever your readers comment they leave behind some more related keywords that you might have missed during your initial post. I often see search terms that look like this – ‘how to setup a a wordpress blog and monetize it’ while on my main sales site I will only get short tail terms like ‘wordpress blog hosting‘

Now for the two favorite things about my blog:

Blogs are really easy to update. Static websites are often a pain to update because you have to go through and change every page to make the changes global. For my blog, all I need to do is add a post and BAM everything is nicely linked together and tied into the rest of the website with no additional work.
Your blog can syndicate its content to other websites. Within your blog admin panel, there is a section where you can input a list of RSS syndication networks to ping. The next time you update your blog, your new post is syndicated out to thousands of different websites. This can bring in some nice traffic to your site because every post that is syndicated links back to the original source blog.

So how can my blog help my main sales pages?

With proper linking, it is really easy to filter the traffic within your blog to your desired sales/landing pages. Basically what I am trying to do is build my blog up so that it gets a large amounts of traffic, then filter this traffic to my main business website. It is often more expensive to get traffic to my sale pages than to get it to my blog. Blog traffic is much more…organic, if you will. One thing that you can do with your blog is show off your knowledge on a certain topic. This gives your readers/future clients the impression that you are knowledgeable on your topic and that you are the go to guy/gal for that product/service.

While a blog does take a little bit of time and a lot of writing, I truly believe it is a great way to increase web traffic to your sales pages. It can also be a great source of extra income for your main business if you advertise on your blog properly.

An easy way to build a website. Using a WordPress installation and pre designed templates for a quick and good looking website.

admin — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:42:52 +0000

Building a GOOD website from scratch takes many years of design experience as well as dozens of hours of time on the website design itself. You could take this route, but if you have no prior experience this is going to seem like a daunting and impossible task. Rest easy because there is more than one way to start a website. In this article, I am going to cover what I think is the easiest and quickest method to getting your new website idea online. With this method, you should be able to get a good looking website online within 15 minutes.

There are many free web applications available that are basically a website in a box. All you do is install the script and find a good pre designed theme for your software. I will use the WordPress blog software in this example but there are plenty of other free web apps available for download.

What is WordPress anyway?

WordPress is a free blogging script written in PHP and programmed to run off a MySQL database. Even though WP is considered a blogging software, it can be converted to act as your standard idea of a website.

Part 1: Installation/Setup and Configuration

I am assuming that you already have two things:

A Web hosting account that supports PHP and MySQL
A domain name

To begin the installation, download the latest stable version of WordPress from www.wordpress.org. Unzip the file into a folder labeled blog.

Login to your FTP server or file manager and navigate to your web document root. If you are on a cpanel server it would be /public_html

By uploaded the folder blog to /public_html you can access your blog install at http://yourdomain.com/blog/

If you want to install the blog so that it is viewable by going to www.yourdomain.com than upload the contents under the directory ‘blog’ and not the directory ‘blog’ itself. Basically you are uploaded the contents in blog while leaving the main directory ‘blog’ on your computer.

After you have uploaded the files, it is now time to setup your database. You can do this within your web hosting control panel like cpanel, plesk, directadmin, etc.

Once you have created the database and added a user to it, you must setup the config file within wordpress. This is located at /public_html/blog/wp-config-sample.php

Edit the file in notepad and change the database information so that it reflects the database you just setup. Save the file as wp-config.php. Upload this file to /public_html/blog/. If you have done this right, it will NOT ask you to overwrite any files.

Your setup is now completed. All you have to do is go to your blog installation through www.yourdomain.com and it will quick WP Setup. All you have to do is fill in a few text boxes…it’s easy don’t worry.

So now you have a default website setup installed to be viewable at www.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com/blog. If you want to, you could start your website right now…however it will be the default look/configuration.

Now it is time to change the look of your website:

Simply download the theme you want at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

Unzip and upload the theme directory to your wordpress installations theme repository located at: /public_html/blog/wp-content/theme/. You will see 1 or 2 of the default themes already in there.

To enable the them, login to your wp admin panel located at http://youdomain.com/blog/wp-admin or http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ (depending on where you uplaoded it). Click the themes tab, click the thumbnail of the theme you just uploaded and click activate.

Thats it! Now you have a brand new website that will look really good which is also easy to use and update.

That is great, but its not exactly what I wanted!

I highly recommend you play with WordPress before you come to this conclusion. I guarantee that WP can do 99% of the things you want it to do. You just need to play around with it. If you really want your website to be 100% the way you want it, than forget about using pre installed software and go pick up a few web design books – html, css, and working with photoshop. Then spend the next year designing as many websites as you can. Your first web design is going to look like crap, your 2nd web design is going to be just as worse, and your third design might be slightly better than the 1st and 2nd. Web design is all a matter of experience and NOT knowledge.

Building a website from scratch vs. Building a website from a pre-made template

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 21:52:56 +0000

Over the years a lot of personal friends and acquaintances have asked me how to start a website. This is obviously a very general question to be asked and it’s hard to give them the answer they are looking for. Unfortunately there is no one stop way to start a website. Starting a website involves way more than just making a web page design and slapping some HTML and text on it. However, everyone has to start somewhere so why not start with your web page design.

When building your website you have 3 options: Build it from yourself from scratch, build it from a pre-made template, or pay someone to build it.

Building it from scratch is a really long process as far as learning and experience is concerned. I wish it were as easy as picking up a book on HTML and BAM you have your awesome website made in just a couple days. If only life was that easy! In my day I’ve probably made around 15 websites from scratch and to be truthfully honest, I’m still no where near as good as most of the nicely designed web sites out there. See the thing is, designing a web site requires more than just time and effort – you need to have talent. Building a website is definitely an art form. While experience does help a lot, being artistic can go a long way.

So if you want to make a decent looking website be prepared to spend a lot of time. I can guarantee you that your first web design will be junk. I can guarantee you your 2nd web design will be junk. It took me about 5-10 complete web designs before I considered them worthy of being on a business website.

If you insist on building it from scratch, here is a good list of what you will need to start:

Average skill level in HTML – a 200 page book on HTML will get you there.
HTML editor – I suggest Adobe Dreamweaver. This will make it a lot easier for you to write the HTML for your site. In fact, Dreamweaver will typically do 90% of the code for you, you just have to figure out how to manage it.
Image editing software – You will need this to make the actual design elements of your site such as your theme, your design layout, custom images, etc. Adobe Photoshop is great for this.
A web hosting provider to upload your website creation to

All I can say is you better be prepared because you have no idea what you are getting into. I’m talking 50 solid hours at the bare minimum if you are new to building website.

With that being said, I highly recommend going with a pre-made template if you are new to building websites. 5 years ago I wouldn’t be saying this because a) Most websites were running pre-built templates and b) there wasn’t as much variety as there is today. I would have definitely told you to start from scratch if you asked me back then. However, nowadays there are thousands and thousands…and thousands….and thousands of pre-made web designs out there.

You might be thinking that a pre-made website won’t be exactly what you want and I totally agree with this. However, would you rather have a website that is 80% the way you like it or a website that is 100% the way you want it that will require 50+ hours of your time to get to.

For the most part, any template you find will automatically be 10X better than you could ever do on your first few creations. Some templates will be better than anything you could ever do period.

To get the best of both worlds, what you could do is download or buy your template of choice (one that is 80% what you want out of the website) and use your HTML and Image editing skills to customize your template to get that last 20%. The end result is a great looking website that does everything that you want it do while only requiring a small amount of your time.

Don’t get me wrong, making a website from a template still requires some skill to customize. But by all means no where near as much as building it from scratch. Using a customize template requires only basic knowledge in HTML and image editing skills.

Hopefully this will help you make your decision:

Building a website from scratch Advantages:

More customizable to the way you want it.
Personal gratification when you look at your finished website and say to yourself that you built it on your own.
Increased overall website building ability with each web design you make.

Building a website from a pre-made web design template Advantages:

A quick, professional looking, website that requires hardly any skill to work with.

Website Accessibility

admin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:04:15 +0000

One of the things to keep in mind when developing a website is the level of accessibility your target audience will have when using your site. While it’s often easy to make nice-looking designs that appeal to your average teenager, it’s rarely easy to make a site that can appeal to those both young and old. Some things to keep in mind include the font size, color usage, HTML labels, and cross-browser compatibility.

Font Size

The size of font on your website is critical if your target audience is 40+. While small fonts may be easy to read and often times look better overall, your website is of no use if the user cannot read what you’re writing. Font size is also important in making titles and headers stand out. Having the same font size for all parts of your page may make the text hard to navigate.

Color Usage

Color usage is important for the obvious reasons of appearance and the mood the site conveys to the reader. But remember that some of your users may be color blind. Certain colors that blend well may not be ideal for text/background colors.

HTML Labels

Few people know of the tag for HTML. Specifics can be found here, but the general idea is that these tags can aid in helping sight-impaired users navigate specific content on your site should they be using speech-enabled browsers. Labels also have other benefits of distinguishing specific form content and their respective identifiers.

Cross-Browser Compatibility

Depending on your audience, it may be beneficial to test your website on a variety of browsers including Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. While later versions of these browsers have begun to comply with internet standards, you may be surprised at how these browsers render your website differently. Adding onto the idea of font size and colors, also keep in mind the zooming capabilities of these browsers. For example, Firefox 3 has a zoom functionality that lets you zoom the entire page, including images. Thus if text on images is small, zooming the page can make the content easier to read. However, most browsers do not support this, so small text in images may be impossible to read when projected on a larger screen or viewed on a small, mobile device. Also keep in mind that if your font is small, using the browser to increase the font size may distort your page. Again, each brower will handle this differently, so be sure to test to make sure the primary browsers all scale your site appropriately.

Website Optimizations

admin — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:17:24 +0000

When designing a website it’s important to keep in mind more than just the content and aesthetic appearance. A critical factor in website design is its performance. If a user is on a slower internet connection, pages with a lot of content and images may loading painfully slow, and this can detract from your users’ experience on the site. Here are two tips for optimizing your website:

1. Save Style Sheets in CSS Files

Sometimes it’s convenient for the developer to store page styles directly within the HTML page. While this may make it easier to modify the CSS when working on the site, it has one huge disadvantage: The user must download the CSS every time a new page loads. The solution is to store all of your CSS in a separate file, usually ending in “.css”. This allows the web browser to cache the CSS files, saving the user a little time if their connection is slow. To import a style sheet that you’ve saved elsewhere, simply add this HTML in the header of your webpage:

Make sure to replace “file.css” with the name of the file.

2. CSS Sprites

Another trick to cut down on the time needed to load your page is by storing your images in sprites. A sprite is simply a collection of images stored in one larger image. This decreases your website loading time several ways. First, if you were to have 25 images on your page, the browser would be required to make 25 HTTP calls to the web server to retrieve the images. Not only is that a lot of calls for the user, but the browser usually makes only a handful of calls at a time, so you have to wait for the images to load. It can also be daunting to the server. By combining the images into one file the browser only needs to make one request. Also, depending on compression, the size of the larger image may be substantially less than the sum of all of the small images.

For an easy method of generating a sprite image with the necessary CSS code, please visit this page.

600 Free Icons for web designers and websites – full size .png 3D and 2D

admin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:01:47 +0000

Are you finding that your website is becoming more and more boring each time you look at it? Try adding some of these icons into your design to spice up your pages a little.

Here is a sample of the 600 icons for your websites. These are all 3d and 2d style icons and are provided in full size so that you can use them for whatever you want to.

As you can tell they aren’t just some everyday icons you can find for free. I found these very useful if you run a web based business because of how clean some of these icons are. If you would like to use any of these, simply go to the gallery, click the image, then right click and save to your hard disk. You might want to convert these to .jpg or .gif because they have a pretty big file size.

<< VIEW THE 600 FREE ICONS GALLERY. >>

Do you have a website but still need a good web hosting provider?

30 Free web designs and web templates – .PSD and HTML included

admin — Fri, 30 May 2008 23:56:00 +0000

We have a nice little free download for everyone out there. We are providing for FREE, to anyone who wishes to use them, 30 pre-made web templates and web designs. These are all professional looking templates that we were planning to use in the site builder we were working on however we no longer have any use for them. Another company came up with a site builder software that was much better suited (and a heck of a lot cheaper) than ours. Each one of these designs cost me anywhere from $40-$150 so enjoy these templates on me. Each template download includes the full HTML for the design, all the images and .PSDs so that you can edit them. The only thing we ask is that you don’t hotlink anyone to the direct template download. Link them to the page below that has all the templates displayed. If you would like to provide a link directly back to www.readysetconnect.com, please feel free to do so

You may view a complete list and screen shots of the templates here:

http://www.readysetconnect.com/free-templates.html

Enjoy,

ReadySetConnect Web Hosting