Keep Your Site Up-to-Date and Lookin' Good
December 2004
Websites have soo much power for a company if they are maintained and working.
The first step is to visit your site often. Make it the home of your browser. If you need instructions to set that up, I can help you with that. It does depend on the browser you are using.
It is not only important to make sure your events are current but adding more information to your site does more than make you the expert. The search engines love it. Why? Because as it has been since its conception, the World Wide Web is about information and the more you have on your site the more keywords to for the search engines to spider. This is not advocating clutter. The beauty of the web is a well organized - well informed site.
How's that website working for you?
October 2004
If you are in business, any business, a website is a must. It can be more effective than a yellow page ad. Unfortunately, many websites are launched and then go dormant. That means the website isn't working Or how about those shopping carts that don't let you buy? Let's take a look at how to have a website work without breaking the bank account. Susan Allen Morgan, MFA (SAM) owner of transNETMedia.com shares her expertise. After 9 years' experience designing over 100 websites, SAM can troubleshoot websites to make them effective business tools.
Working on Priority
July 2004
Priority status means search engines ranking to a WWWebsite designer. It is important for your designer to keep up with the rules. Search engines set rules. Each search engine has its own. If you have a budget, you can pay search engines to give your site priority. If not, it is a matter of keeping up with the rules they set. Since Google.com is the most popular search engine, it helps to align your site with their rules and the magic will work. For instance, if you go to google.com and key into the search field "az website design" and then click on the search, your first listing is transNETMedia.com. It is important to note that website is set as one word. The website, transNETMedia.com, has the keywords on the site aligned with the word website, as one word. If you key the same phrase in with web site as two words you get different results. What this means is you can choose the keyword phrase that best suits your site, then align it with the rules and you get the control you need for priority status in the search engines. This contributes to the success of your site.
Is Buying on the Internet Safe?
May 2004
I set up shopping carts for clients as well as the ability to take money on their web sites when they don't require a shopping cart. Our scottsdaleexpress.org web site takes money through Paypal but doesn't require a shopping cart. Using a shopping cart means that you can pick and choose; the site adds up your total and adds any necessary taxes and shipping.
Many users are afraid to use the WWW because of identity theft. You have to be a pretty good hacker to steal credit card numbers if it is at a secure spot. Secure, meaning it has "https" instead of just "http" before the address. My web site allows my clients to charge their bill to me. It is wonderful. I never see my clients' charge card numbers.
Authorizenet stores somewhere. I am given an email with the client's name, address and amount. Within a few days, the amount due is passed into my bank account. It is very safe. The biggest problem on buying on the Internet is getting the merchandise. If the merchants don't know how to get their orders or don't check, you could be safely dropping your money into an account and never seeing the item you purchased. Try to find a way to call the merchant to get some satisfaction if is a reliable site.
Is White Right or Go Bright?
March 2004
The word on the web is white is the best color to use as a background for your website. How do I know this? Clients go to seminars and report to me that they read about it or a great web guru shared this great discovery. Yes, white is successful as a background. I don't deny it. Any color looks good on white. Classic paintings from our great artist of the past always started with a white canvas. Or did they? No, Rembrant for one, use green and black as a base color to get his noted light effects.
Designing websites for nine years, I have seen many white websites, good and bad. I have seen the use of color, good and bad. Color on websites is a very challenging variable for designers. Some colors just don't look the same from monitor to monitor. It may appear that the light green link you put over a dark blue background looks great on your monitor but can't be read on another.
The beauty of websites and color is that there is no extra charge for using all the color you want. In print you pay for color.
As a website designer there isn't anything I appreciate more than a well-designed website that uses a full spectrum of color in good taste.
Google and Your Website
December 2003
I want to share an article about Google's success. I design my websites with them in mind.
When you conduct a search in Google, you'll see sites along the right in green and the top in yellow and green. These are pay-per-click sites. They come up when users type in certain keywords. If a user clicks on a link and goes to the site, the merchant pays for that hit.
The rest of the listings in white along the left are fighting for priority. According to this article, the more information you have in HTML text, the higher you are rated. We've demonstrated this with sites, as we create pages to describe products in html and link them to the home page. They get a lot of hits and sales. Go to http://www.nypost.com/business/11930.htm
and, if hits are your thing, Alan Webb has some info that backs our designs with the Simple philosophy. Go to http://www.isedb.com/news/index.php?t=reviews&id=565
Our Philosophy:
- Simple Code - Communicates to the search engines
- Simple Message - Makes it easy to understand
- Simple Graphics - Makes it load better (and communicate to the search engines).
The World Wide Web Designer
November 2003
As I've shared with you before, "Keep it Simple, Stupid" is a favorite of advertising people. It is especially true when it comes to the code behind the Web site. Web sites are strategic business tools and the first thing we expect of them is to communicate to the search engines with our keywords so we can get the right kind of hits. And, thanks to search engines like, google.com, the most popular search engine, this is still free. We can list our Web site with google.com and it becomes part of the open directory, which is then shared by many other search engines.
I have two tips today:
If you are thinking about getting a Web site up, get it going because it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months for it to be recognized in the open directory.
Your code behind the site should be simple. Look at your code, how? In your browser, such as Internet Explorer and Netscape. Go to the menu and find View and then down to Source. This shows you the code that is behind the site. First, you should see meta tags with keywords and a description of your site. If they aren't there put them in. Although google.com does not look at the keyword meta tag other search engines do.
Now, scroll down and see how long it takes to get to the text on your site, that is, if you have any. Sites that are created in Flash animations lose the ability to communicate. The text embedded in a Flash animation is not communicating to the search engines. When you start to see the text that shows on your home page, that is how far a search engine has to go to get to more of your keywords. The more keywords available, the more priority the site is given by the search engines. But most search engines will not scroll down very far to search for your keywords in the text. They consider the keywords close to the top and how often they are used on the page.
transNET MediaĆ LLC creates code that is simple and clean. We do not use the programs that are created without getting into the code. Programs like Frontpage, GoLive and Dreamweaver are great programs but tend to create too much code and this stops the search engines from working for you. We write the code.
Also, some developers embed their scripts into the head of the page. This is an area for special effects on the page. This is O.K. as long as the script isn't too long. These scripts can be put on other pages and a smaller script can send the code to the other page.
