Designing Your Home Page
Let’s take a few minutes and discuss software for web site design. If you design
your own site, I assume you have already chosen the software that you want for
that purpose. If you hire someone to do it for you they will have their own
preferences as well. I am not here to sell any particular kind for designing web
sites. In actuality, if you are adept at html code, you can use Microsoft
notepad to create a web page.
The bottom line is most of the popular software available to the consumer
accomplishes pretty much the same thing. Some of the software comes with “wizards”
or “templates” that you can use to create a site. This is fine for
getting started and many people are able to develop some pretty good web pages
with available templates. Which ever you chose to use, the basic necessities for
good web development can be accomplished by any of them. For the html
“challenged”, myself included, there is Microsoft’s Frontpage,
Dreamweaver and Adobe to name just a few.
We are going to begin to develop our site. The first thing I would suggest doing
is to create a basic layout on paper. Decide what you want to do with
your website and sit down and spend some time developing it on paper. We have
already talked about a “Home Page”. In my site I am going to have an “About
Us” page and a “Site Map” as well. I am selling custom ball caps and
I believe that my pricing can’t be beat by anyone, so I am going to create a “Product
Price” page. I want people to see some of my artwork I have used on some of
my previous customers so I’ll have a page called “Custom Design Samples”.
The sky is the limit with what you create but always keep in mind that you want
it easy to understand, simple to follow or navigate, and gives your
customers the information needed to make a decision. You will find that your
site will evolve. Lay out a design before you start and build from there. It is
easy to modify and add pages to your site, especially if you design your own.
A simple design on paper might look like this:
Home Page > About Us > Site Map > Prices > Custom Designs > Ball Cap Styles and
Colors > Order Page > Links Page > Contact Information
More than likely you will want to be able to get to any of these pages from
anywhere on your site. We will cover that a bit later.
As we more closely discuss how we are going to create your home page, we are
going to discuss how to create it based on your customer’s needs, your
marketing plan and what is needed to keep the search engines happy.
With that said let’s look again at the search engine monsters.
As much as we may want to be mad at them, we need them. Without the search
engines nobody could find us. Not all search engines work the same way either.
They all have the same basic goals in mind but how they achieve those goals can
be quite different. Currently, the most widely used search engine is Google,
followed by Yahoo and MSN. Other search engines to mention would
be Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Overture, All the Web, and
many more. It actually gets quite ridiculous when you start thinking about how
many so called search engines there are. In addition to the search engines there
are also “community data bases”. These are sites operated by volunteers
who add web sites to a growing list. You can “submit” your site to them for
inclusion. One that comes immediately to mind is DMOZ.COM
As search engines become more and more sophisticated, they also become more
specialized and this could be very helpful. As an example, if I wanted to start
a search engine of my own and call it “Maine Search” I would include only web
sites that are based in Maine or sell Maine made products. If you have someone
interested in Maine made products and/or web sites, they can use my search
engine and not have to filter through thousands of other search results just to
get to those that are in Maine. I would suggest doing some experimenting with
different search engines and when you find one or more that seems to give you
the results you’re looking for, use it.
Back to the Home Page creation. There are two parts to every page of every web
site. There is what we all see when we visit someone’s web site and then there
is stuff that is only seen by the web developer and the search engine robots.
This information is “hidden” under the stuff you see on a web page. A lot of it
is html code and a lot of it is text. What is html code? It is a
“language” if you will, that is used to generate events or effects on a computer
screen. If you wanted to make a box appear on your web page, a particular html
code will do that. Much of the software we talked about earlier will generate
the code for you simply by telling the software you want a box.
In simplistic terms, when we use our “browser” software to view
somebody’s web page, the browser program locates the site, reads the html code
that a designer used to create the page, and paints it onto your computer
screen. The viewer doesn’t see the code only the result of the code.
If you design your own web sites you have more than likely seen and dealt with
the “hidden” codes etc. Below is an example of what a “coded” web page might
look like:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<title>Laugh Maine Site Map</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="Laugh Maine Site Map">
<meta name="description" content="Laugh Maine Site Map">
</head>
<body>
<p align="center"><font size="5"><b><i>Laugh Maine Site Map</i></b></font></p>
<p align="left"><a href="default.html">Laugh Maine Home Page</a>: Links to all
pages and up to the minute humorous news from around Maine</p>
<p align="left"><a href="About_Laugh_Maine.html">About Us</a>: Read all about
who we are
and what we do</p>
<p align="left"><a href="Advertising.html">Advertising Rates and Policies</a>:
Go here to find our rates if you are interested in placing an ad</p>
<p align="left"><a href="Confused_Are_You.html">Are You Confused?</a>: We will
help you
understand Maine talk and expressions</p>
<p align="left"><a href="Contact_Information.html">Contact Information</a>: Who
to contact via email, snail mail or by telephone</p>
<p align="left"><a href="Maine_Jokes.html">Jokes</a>: All kinds of Maine jokes,
stories
and downright lies</p>
<p align="left"><a href="Black_Fly_Blog.html">Black Fly Blog</a>: Writings of
thoughts
and muses from travels around the state and beyond</p>
<p align="left"><a href="Laugh_Maine%20Links.html">Links Page</a>: Find all your
favorite funny
places to go</p>
<p align="left"><a href="Maine_Funny_News.html">News from Around Maine</a>: In a
hilarious
To most of you this doesn’t mean much and that is fine but you need to be
familiar with it at least to the extent of knowing how it is used. We discussed
in an earlier lesson how search engines send out “robots” or “spiders”
or “web crawlers” to web sites all over the world gathering information.
It is this part of your web site they are interested in, not what you see when
you visit a site online.
Let’s discuss how a search engine robot (for simplicity’s sake, I will refer to
them mostly as “Robots”) actually finds your site to begin with. Search
engines do not necessarily “know” that you have a web site. They have to find
you. In years past the only way you could be found was to “submit” your site to
a search engine and hope they would come and visit or crawl your site. We still
have to do that but as the robots become bigger and better, they are finding new
sites quicker.
You can submit your site to Google and Yahoo and many more. Sometimes it takes
months before any robots will come and visit and until they do, the only traffic
you will get will be from people you personally have told how to find your site
by giving them your “address” or “URL”. We will spend more time
later discussing web site submission. Today, the fastest way to get Google or
Yahoo or any of the major search engines to “crawl” your site is to get
linked with another web site. That site should be active and is crawled
regularly by the robots – the more popular site you can get your link
onto the quicker you will be found.
A link is a way of getting around on the Internet. Most times it is in
text form and when you click your mouse on it, it will take you to another
location either on or off your site. A text link might look like this: Click
here to see Ball Caps. Typically these are viewed in blue on a computer screen.
That is the default color but you can change the color as a web designer.
Search engines like good links, especially links that take them from one
good site to another with similar or relevant content. Example: I am able to get
a link from BallCaps.com the worlds largest supplier of ball caps to the rest of
the free world, to my site TomsBallCaps.com. When, for example, the Google robot
visits BallCaps.com, they will find the new link to TomsBallCaps.com and make a
note of it. As soon as they can, depending upon the “Geeks” who programmed the
robots, they will go and check out TomsBallCaps.com. I hope this is clear.
So what happens when one of these robots lands on your web site? The first thing
it does is look to see if there are pages that it can “crawl”. A web designer
can actually include code that tells a robot not to crawl a particular page or
pages. Once it determines that it has found “crawlable” pages it begins its
work.
Robots read page content in the same manner that you and I read – top to
bottom and left to right. After it finds there is no code sending it away it
reads the information in your “header”. If you refer to the example I gave
earlier about what the html code on a page looks like, you’ll see at the very
beginning it reads <html>
<head>
<meta>
<meta>
<title>
etc. etc. etc.
The <html> tells the robot that what it is reading is in fact html code
(there are other codes that robots can read so it needs to be told). The
<head> tells the robot that following that is information contained within
the “header” of the page – i.e. what language it is written in, this is also
where you would tell the robot not to crawl the page and other information to
let the robot know what kind of site this is.
The <meta> contains perhaps the most valuable information about your
site. Included with the <meta> is <title> This is what you title
your page. In this example it is the site map to Laughmaine.com. Below that you
will see <meta> keywords and <meta> description. Let me try to explain
what those mean and how important they are to your website.
The “keywords” are exactly that. When you go searching on the Internet,
you type in words or phrases that you think will help you find what you’re
looking for. Example: You are looking for New England Patriot Ball Caps so you
type in “new england patriots ball cap” and do a search. What you typed in is
called a keyword or key phrase. When you design your web site you need to
include as many keywords and/or phrases as you can possibly come up with. A
robot reads this information. You are telling the robot that at this site you
will find …………. – which is the list of all your keywords. This list could be
several hundred long to only a few. Don’t get cute here and think that if you
include keywords that don’t pertain to what you are selling. Robots are robots
but they are programmed to understand that a keyword “naked body” doesn’t belong
with ball caps. The search engine can “punish” you for being bad. I will help
you a bit later on with how to add those keywords and create a keyword list.
The other <meta> (by the way, these are called metatags. The two <> on
either end of meta are called tags. Thus, we get metatags) is a description
metatag. This is vital as well and should be thought out before going to
far. When you do a search, a results page appears on your screen. Each
individual results show a title and then usually some text to read to give you
an idea of what is on that particular site. Not all search engines show the same
results but many do. The title that is displayed is usually the metatag
<title> that you named your web page. In this example it was named “Laugh
Maine Site Map”. The text that you see is many times the <meta> description that
you gave about your page. In this case the description is “Laugh Maine Site Map”
because that is all that is on the page. If I had a page that showed my custom
art work it might read: See the incredible art work and original designs done by
world renowned graphic artist, Tom Remington. Blah, Blah, Blah! Get the idea?
All of the words in the title and description should be thought of as
“keywords” as well. Some search engine robots will visit your site and
read only the header, collect all the keywords and page description and file it
away for user reference. Others, like Google read everything that is on your
page. So everything is important that you put on your web page even it can’t be
seen by your customers. Remember, the customer generally doesn’t care how they
landed on TomsBallCaps.com. They just want to find what they are looking for.
This gets us beginning to design our home page. Next we will expound some more
on what robots see, how to incorporate that into a well designed home page and
still be able to stick with our market plan. As we crawl through this
information, I will also refresh your memories about basic dos and don’ts in web
design.
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