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Trying to create website or promote a badly built website is a pointless exercise in frustration. In order for you to be successful at promoting your website, you must have a site that is clear, clean and full of original, interesting content. You can spend a fortune on marketing and generate hordes of traffic, but no one will buy your products if your website does not inspire confidence and trust. Read the following tips for building a site that will draw visitors and make sales. Remember, your website represents you and your product. How do you want to be seen? GOOD CONTENT IS ESSENTIAL: Before you begin to build your website, make sure you have chosen a topic that you are familiar with and have an interest in. If you choose something that holds no interest for you, your visitors will be able to see that and judge your site to be worthless. Building a website around topics that you are not familiar with will be a constant aggravation for you to update. Make sure, however, you make your website interesting to other people. Explore what other people are interested in. If you can find something that matches your interests, try building a website around that topic. Once you have decided on the topic of your website, it's time to start writing. Always use a spell checker! No matter how brilliant a writer you are, you will still make typos. You want to make it look professional and easy to read. The text should flow naturally and be divided into easily read paragraphs. Your visitors want good quality content and they want a lot of it. Fill your site with articles (including other people's articles as long as they fit your site's theme), tips, and details of all the products and services on your site. Remember, the key to building a good website is content, content, content. DESIGN AND LAYOUT: Your first objective is to make sure your visitors can easily navigate your website and quickly access your content. Use a simple, no fuss style and layout with easy to find, well-marked links. If possible, don't make them use more than one click to move from one page to another. Sites that are full of graphics and are complicated to maneuver around do not work. Keep it simple. By keeping your graphics to a minimum, your site will load much quicker. If it takes too long for the pages to load, your visitors may not wait. We have all seen websites that are so full of blinking banner ads and other graphics that they look cheap and unappealing. META TAGS: Learn about META tags and add them to all of your pages. Meta tags are little lines of code that are placed between the HEAD and the /HEAD tags in your site's HTML code. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the content of the page. Many search engines use this information when building their index. These tags are not displayed to humans visiting your site, but they are used to influence the way your website appears in the search results. THE DESCRIPTION TAG: META name="description" content="A search engine displays the content of this tag below the title of your website when it shows up in the results." The contents of this tag are extremely important. When someone does a search on a search engine and your listing comes up, the description is displayed right below your title. Since your goal is to encourage people to click on your link, make sure your description will grab their attention and make them want to know more. If no description tag is found, the search engine endeavors to create its own description and often fails to describe your page properly. Create website description meta tags that are short but informative. Why should they be short? The search engine only displays a small part of the description in the results list. If the tag contains too many words, the extra words are cut off. You want to try to avoid that. Try to place the relevant information near the beginning of the description. THE KEYWORDS TAG: META name="keywords" content="hot dogs information recipes" The keywords tag contains words and phrases relevant to the website. Commas, spaces or both can separate the words. This tag does not appear to the visitors at your site, nor do the search engines display it in their results. However, many search engines read the keywords tag and give a small create website increase to the ranking for the words that are mentioned in it. You should only include words and/or phrases that are relevant to your page and you should never use a word more than three times. Try to keep the length to around ten words. REVIEW YOUR SITE: Once your website is finished, make sure you go over it with a fine-toothed comb and correct any typos, errors, or broken links. Nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a link and the link is broken. Visitors to your site will assume that you do not care enough to keep your site working properly and, therefore, will leave. You need to constantly keep an eye on your website, particularly the links, especially when you make changes that require you to change filenames. A good method for checking broken links is to use an automatic link checker. There are several free programs that do this. Make sure your main page contains your contact information. Always list your name, your email address, and any other pertinent information. When visitors see that you are available to contact, they will be much more likely to trust you and click on your links! Today the Internet hosts over 92,000,000 websites. How can you make yours stand out while displaying your products or services in the most compelling light? Here are some tips from an industry expert that will help you build a better site that effectively communicates your message. Robert Cowes is an expert at creating websites that spotlight products and drive success. He most recently worked at S1 Corporation as the web Technologies Product Manager and is co-founder of the consulting firm, Intra-Focus Marketing Solutions. According to Cowes, a successful site considers six critical create website elements: audience, objective, layout, navigation, content and imagery. It is important for web-based marketers to understand who will be using the site and for what purpose. "People surf the web to research, learn and purchase products. Content addressing these three topics is crucial," said Cowes. When a potential customer or client visits a site, they should be greeted by an intuitive "master plan" or site map. A site map helps visitors quickly and easily navigate to the information they are looking for. Well thought-out navigation helps create a positive experience for the visitor. Highly visible headers and simple icons should smoothly guide the visitor from page to page. In addition, rotating content not only gives marketers a chance to share more information, it keeps visitors interested and informed. Finally, relevant imagery reinforces your company's brand positioning and messaging. "An analogy is a create website store front," Cowes explains. "As with retail, your window dressing helps customers decide whether they will enter or pass you by." Encourage browsers to stop with interesting graphics that complement your brand, enhance your image and provide valuable information not readily available elsewhere. So you've made some web site improvements, but how can you know if they work? Consider a call to action. Requesting a response makes recording site traffic easier. For example, a toll-free number and an e-form are useful tools. Ask your visitors, "How did you hear about us?" or "Do you have any comments?" Eventually, there should be a correlation between the number of page views your web site receives and the number of inquiry forms submitted. By carefully considering your audience and objective, you can create content, imagery, a layout and a navigation system tailored to their needs while also improving product awareness. Next month there will be over 96,000,000 websites. Are you achieving your fair share of visits? By looking at certain areas of your create website, you will be able to determine why it isn't performing as you would expect, or, improve the performance it currently has in the search engines. What is the title of each page. The title of your page can be seen in the top left hand side of your browser. The title of each page should relate to the information on the page and be unique for each page. The title is a very important part of the web page and must be treated accordingly. create website descriptive meta tags The Description meta tag is normally used to describe your listing in the search engines. It is important that this description entices people to click on your link. It would not be beneficial to have the same listing description for each page. Make each page description unique. create website content Unique content is king. The more relevant content you have on your website the better. Always bare in mind the topic of that page and ensure that the page title, paragraph headings and text relate to that topic. The content should be well written and semantically correct. Headings actually have an order within the code, so ensure that this rule is used. It is the content that will be catalogued by the search engines and this is how they will understand what each individual page is about. Do you have a sitemap create website? It is important that the search engines can see all your pages. A good way of doing this is to add a sitemap which is accessible from the homepage. This sitemap will list all your pages by the topic of that page allowing a search engine to find every single page on your website. Are you sure that all of your pages are listed in the search engines? create website navigation links Ensure that your menu links contain the text of the topic or page they are linking to. Do not forget the links that are within your content. Try and use relevant text with your content to link to other pages within your website. create website dynamic page names Search engines have difficulty reading sessions (sessions are codes appended to the web address to identify users on the website). If you have session variables on your site, search engines may not index your pages. Are naming conventions used for your folders and files on your website. E.g. www.mydomain.co.uk/keyword.html? If you have keyword phrases are the individual words separated with hyphens? Also, does Google see your site twice (this is bad!) ?? Does http://web-studio.co.uk automatically goto http://www.web-studio.co.uk ? create website fast loading pages Are your pages quick to load. If they are not the search engine may not hang around to index them. The avrage age size should be less than 110Kb. If it is not then it is important to identify what is increasing the size of the page and correct it. create website web standards Have you updated your website to the latest web standards. The Internet is a forever changing media and standards have been suggested by the World wide web consortium (www.w3c.org) . By rebuilding a website using the latest standards we have the ability to separate the content of the website from the presentation (design). Benefits of this include being able to supply search engines with clean text, not blurred by coding. Also the ability to change design more regularly becomes affordable. create website disability and discrimination act Does your website comply to the DDA. Are blind people able to "hear" your website if they have the correct "reader". What about the partially sighted? Ensure that all of your images have labels correctly added to them (known as alt tags). Can people easily change the text using the browser text size facility? Summary These are on site areas to look at and will allow the search engines to determine what your site is all about. Never forget the need to look at off site promotion!

Getting started with HTML This is a short introduction to writing HTML. What is HTML? It is a special kind of text document that is used by Web browsers to present text and graphics. The text includes markup tags such as <p> to indicate the start of a paragraph, and </p> to indicate the end of a paragraph. HTML documents are often refered to as "Web pages". The browser retrieves Web pages from Web servers that thanks to the Internet, can be pretty much anywhere in World. Many people still write HTML by hand using tools such as NotePad on Windows, or TextEdit on the Mac. This guide will get you up and running. Even if youdon't intend to edit HTML directly and instead plan to use an HTML editor such as Netscape Composer, or W3C's Amaya, this guide will enable you to understand enough to make better use of such tools and how to make your HTML documents accessible on a wide range of browsers. Once you are comfortable with the basics of authoring HTML, you may want to learn how to add a touch of style using CSS, and to go on to try out features covered in my page on advanced HTML p.s. a good way to learn is to look at how other people have coded their html pages. To do this, click on the "View" menu and then on "Source". On some browsers, you instead need to click on the "File" menu and then on "View Source". Try it with this page to see how I have applied the ideas I explain below. You will find yourself developing a critical eye as many pages look rather a mess under the hood! For Mac users, before you can save a file with the ".html" extension, you will need to ensure that your document is formatted as plain text. For TextEdit, you can set this with the "Format" menu's "Make Plain Text" option. This page will teach you how to: * start with a title create website * add headings and paragraphs * add emphasis to your text create website * add images * add links to other pages * use various kinds of lists create website If you are looking for something else, try the advanced HTML page. Start with a title Every HTML document needs a title. Here is what you need to type: You can also make use of paragraphs and headings etc. for longer list items. HTML has a head and a body If you use your web browser's view source feature (see the View or File menus) you can see the structure of HTML pages. The document generally starts with a declaration of which version of HTML has been used, and is then followed by an <html> tag followed by <head> and at the very end by </html>. The <html> ... </html> acts like a container for the document. The <head> ... </head> contains the title, and information on style sheets and scripts, while the <body> ... </body> contains the markup with the visible content. Here is a template you can copy and paste into your text editor for creating your own pages: