Archive for April, 2008

The thing I like about blogs is their ability to inform popular sites that you have added new content without you having to do anything manually. For those of you who don’t know this is done by sending a Ping.
This has the potential to bring you instant traffic as people browsing sites like Technorati can see what is fresh content on your blog.

I’ve done a bit of research and have come up with what I think is a fairly comprehensive list of the most important services to ping. Add this to your blog admin area in ‘Settings - Writing Settings‘ and then ‘Update Services‘ at the bottom. Paste the list in there. (That’s the path for Wordpress blogs. Not sure of other blogs).

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

Please add a comment if you know of others to add.

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The key to an effective web site or blog is not the style or design, but is in the planning of it before you even start fiddling with code or design.

A while ago I wrote a document that I would give out to all new and prospective customers that enquired about web design. I have reproduced it here for you to mull over.

Planning Your Web Site – guidelines

In many ways the planning stage is the most important stage of the lifecycle of any web site. With careful planning of the content and overall look and feel of your site you increase the chances of getting it right first time. You may already have a clear idea of what you want for your web site and a plan of action of what to include on it. The idea of this document is to help stimulate thought and discussion to help you clarify the requirements for your site.

PLANNING:
Step 1: Draw out a plan –
The best place to start designing a web site is actually not a computer, but with a pencil and paper. You don’t have to be a good artist, as the goal of this stage is not artistic creativity, but to create a working idea to guide the design stage. Invite others to comment on your ideas.

Key questions to ask yourself:

1) What is the purpose of your site?

Roughly, web sites can be categorised as either:

• Informational – promoting awareness of your organisation or business, or of your events?
• Educational – raising awareness, providing teaching resources?
• Entertainment
• Commercial – specifically to sell a particular product(s)?

Of course, any web site can be a combination of any of the above.

List products and services that you offer and divide the information into relevant pages.

2) What are the components of your site?

These are suggestions for what you may want to include on your site. There may be others that you can add too.

• Your organisation’s mission and goals
• About your organisation – history, and key people
• Contact details – email,fax, directions, phone numbers
• Services offered
• Products
• Customer Account – are they able to check previous orders, etc.?
• Portfolio – examples of work done.
• Price list – if applicable
• Events
• Search facilities – to allow for visitors to search for specific information or products.
• Latest News
• Links to other sites you would recommend or are partners.

3) What is your ‘Target Audience’?

There can be many target audiences. In many ways this is determined by the nature of your organisation. For example, a youth group will probably be aiming at informing other young people of what is offered at their group. But that group may also want to raise awareness of lack of resources for young people in their area and so a target audience may also be funding organisations and people with influence.

4) What will the visual appearance of the site be?

Related to your target audience, the look and feel of your site should represent the style that would appeal to your intended audience.

• What colours will be used? – will it be bright and artistic or cool and laidback? (hint: if you already have a particular colour scheme in your organisation, such as one a letterhead or promotional material this should be adopted as the main colour scheme of the site.) The EasyJet web site is predominantly orange and features their logo. You instantly know that it is their web site when you go on to it. This helps your customers/members know that the site they are browsing is connected with your organisation?
• Will the site be static or have elements of animation?
• Layout: what type of font do you want to use? Small or large text?
• Do you have photos or particular images you would like to use that would help people to associate your site with your organisation?

5) Why should people visit your site?

Ask yourself this question: Why should someone give up his or her precious time just to spend it on your site instead of doing something else?

Added to this is why should they look at your site rather than your competitors’ sites? What do you have to offer that separates you from your competitors?

6) How will you promote the existence of your web site?

A great looking web site that absolutely no one know about is not an effective web site. Success on the Internet is all about visibility and the amount of traffic your site gets. It is important that your web site marketing is seen in the context of your overall company/organization’s marketing strategy, which could be
summarized as comprising:

1. Offline Marketing – (Print, Radio, Direct Mailing, Sponsorship etc.)
2. Online Marketing – (Search Engine Marketing – Banner Advertising Affiliate Programs etc.)

This is by no means an exhaustive document but is designed to help you think about what your site may look like. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to ask me.

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For a limited time Featured Links at Global Search Directory are now half price too. They were £5.00 one off lifetime, but now only £2.50.

Get ‘em while they’re hot at www.globalsearchdirectory.com.

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For a limited time only I have dropped the price of Regular Links at the Global Search Directory site. They were £3.00 but are now HALF PRICE at £1.50 per link. This is a one-off lifetime price. You’ll never have to pay for this link to be included ever again!

Come on over to www.globalsearchdirectory.com and get some more links back to your site now!

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If you’re new to blogging try this free online course by Anik Singal and Rosalind Gardner. Their guarantee is that you’ll have traffic within 10 minutes of your first post. I’ve been blogging for a while but I’m going to check it out and see what new things I can learn, or find out what I have maybe been doing wrong. Maybe I’m just curious to validate their guarantee….

You can find it at www.blogclassroom.com/blog/.

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This post is designed to give an overview of the importance of using a Site Map on your web site. It is only an introduction and not an exhaustive article on the subject.

What is a Site Map??

A Site Map is little more than a page of links to all the pages on your web site. It serves 2 purposes:

1. Providing Easy Navigation and Site Search for visitors:

It provides a quick overview for visitors to your site to be able to see at a glance what is on your site;

1. Providing ‘food’ for Search Engine Spiders:

This is the function that we will concentrate on here.

Search Engine spiders depend on links to the content of your site in order to find something to index in the Search Engine’s databases.

As Search Engine spiders cannot ‘read’ graphics, scripting such as Javascript and Flash, you need to provide links that they can read. A Site Map can be a great way of getting sites with dynamically generated pages found by spiders that may not otherwise found. It provides a set of static links that point to your dynamic, script generated pages. A Site Map is the ideal way of providing your site links all in one place to find as once the spider gets to the site map page, it is able to go to every page on your entire site.

The importance of having as much of your site indexed in their databases is simply this: the more content from your site is indexed, the more likely you are of being found when someone searches for content that is related to your site.

What Does a Site Map Look Like?

It can vary according to how you produce one. Essentially there are 2 ways:

1. Automated Scripting
2. Manually designed

Automated Site Maps:

There are good PHP and ASP scripts that you can get that will automatically create a Site Map according to which file types to include or exclude. This has the advantage that whenever you add new content to your site, the script automatically adds the link to that content in the Site map. But you need to keep an eye on it when you add new content to make sure that you keep up to date the file inclusions and exclusions in the script to make sure you don’t add content that you don’t want other visitors (or spiders) to see.

The creation of Site Maps is made even easier if you are using a Content Management System (CMS) or Blog, such as Wordpress, as there are numerous plug-ins and modules available that are easy to install and configure. For Wordpress I have used Dagon Design’s Sitemap Generator Plugin. You can get it at http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/

Manually Created Site Maps:

This is simply creating an HTML page on your site with text links to all your pages. The downside to this is that if you have a big site, you’ll have a lot of typing to do!!

Creating Your Site Map:

Whether you use an automated script or add a page of text links yourself, as a minimum you need to add links to all the most important pages in your site. My personal view is that the more pages you add, the better, as this gives spiders more.

Summary:

Providing a Site Map is good both for site visitors and for Search Engine spiders. Your site visitors get to find their way round the site easier and so are more likely to not get frustrated and go to another site, and the Search Engine spiders can find their way round your site, increasing your chances of getting indexed.

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I have just updated my links directory - Global Search Directory.

This uses the fantastic PHP script PHP Link Directory. They have 2 versions - one is free and the latest version (v 3.3) costs a mere $25 (if you link back to their site). There are some nice new features in the latest version so I took the plunge.

Altogether this means that the site has more functions:

• Link Details Page - each link has its own separate page where you can view some useful stats, including being able to see the site’s Alexa rating.
• You can now submit custom META tags for links - so you can select relevant Keywords and a Description when you submit a site to the directory.
• New Articles Module - allows articles to be added into categories. Articles provide fresh content for Search Engines and gives you some exposure to your own web site.
• ..and more!

Visit the site at www.globalsearchdirectory.com and submit your web site or blog to get more links back to your site and more traffic.

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I’ve given this site a bit of a makeover by converting it to a Wordpress blog. For those of you who have visited the site before you’ll know that I used to be a freelance web and multimedia designer and do Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing and more.

As I have been out of business for a while I am starting to build it up again. I will mainly be focusing on advertising, Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing.

More soon…

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