| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| aceofwands |
Web siteJust realised although I use the internet everyday, I dont know how to set up a web site!I would to set up a site with help and advice about Yoga, and maybe sell some stuff. Any help would be appreciated. Thankyou Mike |
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| Brownbear |
Fee designs web sites. She's quite good at it.
I dare say there are others here who do the same. |
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| OtleyLad |
Having a website is only half a solution. Getting people to visit it is the real challenge! There are millions of sites out there and in order to get people to visit yours you will inevitably have to spend some money (or some serious time promoting it 'by hand').
A lot of people talk a lot of cr$% about 'search engine optimisation' as if its some mystical dark art that will suddenly flood your site with thousands of visitors, but the hard truth is that you need some serious plugs to get your site noticed. Some suggestions: A positive write-up on an existing (and very busy/respected) website/websites about your product/services (not a quick mention but an article). A spot on a local/national radio show. An advert/advertorial in a magazine that is dedicated to your target customers. Don't spend a penny on building a site if you don't have a strategy (and the resources) to promote it afterwards - otherwise it will sit there unvisited no matter how beautiful/technically superior it is. I am sure there are lots of tips you can get from other downziers who have got their sites to work for them using all sorts of different strategies. Best of luck! |
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| Chez |
Search engine optimisation is quite easy, I think - it's just that you need to be very tight about what search-words you want to get hits from and be patient about getting known. I am quite chuffed because if you type 'barnevelder hen' in to google, I come up about half way down the first page.
It is very easy to do a bad website and less easy to do a good one. If you are doing your own, then keep it simple. Have a clear idea about how you want it to look and be realistic about your capabilities. I find it easiest to use HTML written using a text editor (like notepad) to do things. Other people, who do more complicated sites, use software packages that will generate code for them. Don't know what Fee uses - she does more sophisticated stuff that I am prepared to tackle, though (  @ Fee).
You will firstly need a domain name. And then you will need some space to host your site. I use 123-reg as they do both and I have found them simple to use. The W3C site is the definitive place to learn about HTML. |
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| Lorrainelovesplants |
email Fee - she does mine, and she's very good. Much better than the last chap. I have had so much more bsuiness since she's been in charge, (and that is the aim, after all) 
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| Emyr |
SEO is a dead cult as Google tries to make their algorithms better at identifying valuable sites, and harder to manipulate using SEO tricks.
Nowadays, a site which is well-designed from a readability point of view and is technically elegant (no tables for layout etc) should be enough. Google's main ranking mechanism relates to links from other sites. There is little you can do about this without your site being genuinely popular. A link in a relevant paragraph from a valuable site is a big boost. A link on page full of other links is pretty worthless, as the value contribution of the linking page is shared out between al the sites linked to. A good strategy might be this:
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| alison |
Totally agree. Fee is fabulous. |
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| Chez |
Well, whatever it is, I'm doing something right 
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| vegplot |
Blogging tools such as WordPress are often used as web sites. They are a useful introduction to managing and owning a web site with little, if any, cost implication. | ||||
| JB |
Well there is such a thing as SEO but it's not worth paying anyone to do it for you. The basic rule for SEO is make your content relevant and meaningul to the reader. If you sell hiking maps make the page title 'hiking maps' and not "The Itinerant Cartographer". Congratulations your page is now optimised for search engines. Obviously there a few more guidelines than that but the bottom line is make your pages contain meaningful text. |
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| vegplot |
You gauge the effectiveness of SEO by the number of SEO agencies and consultants who spam, sorry market via email, vying for work, it's an inverse relationship. | ||||
| Chez |
I thought that they just did that because if people have any sense at all then they do their own ... and therefore there are a lot of people around who have no idea about it and are prepared to pay big bucks because they think it's a Black Art. | ||||
| orangepippin |
I agree with the first part of the above, but I don't think there is any issue with using tables or not using tables for layout, as far as Google is concerned. It's only an issue for CSS addicts, personally I find table-based layouts are often more sensible than layouts based on zillions of meaningless divs. |
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| orangepippin |
I agree that SEO these days is mostly common-sense. However I've had a couple of clients who have paid big money to SEO organisations even when I told them it was a waste of time, and have been surprised to see quite dramatic improvements in rankings. It can be done - if you pay enough! |
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| jema |
Agree 100%, I have done tableless layouts and found it to be little more than a pointless intellectual exercise. Rows and columns are generally the basis for a sensible layout and that's what tables do and do well. |
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| Emyr |
Tables cause problems for the blind/partially sighted who use screen reading software, and anyone who uses a mobile phone to browse (except iPhone and Android).
As for search engines, using appropriate HTML tags and CSS can give search engines extra semantic information. This is why HTML5 now has <article> <header> <aside> etc tags. |
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| vegplot |
Don't get bogged down with tables/no tables issue. As long as the HTML is properly mark up it shouldn't be a problem. Only be concerned about using tables for content layout (as opposed to laying data) is when your audience includes a significant proportion who use screen readers as tables make it more difficult to render content. | ||||
| aceofwands |
Thanks everyone for advice.
Seems I need to do some more research! Mike |
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| vegplot |
Mobile phones are a different ball game. The limited screen estate can be a problem and the constant zooming and panning is a pain even with the iPhone and it's larger screen and intuitive controls. We've overcome most of the problems in our CMS to re factor HTML content which is easily readable in HTML format on the majority of phones. |
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| JohnB |
I'm using tables for my Eco-Hamlets site, as I've got plenty of things to do without having to learn CSS. As I'm aiming the site partly at people who may have little money, I used a fixed layout that would display on a 640x480 display, on the assumption that they may have old computers. Almost every visitor has used a higher resolution display than the 1280x800 I've tested it on, and practically no one has a display it won't fit on.
To me, speed is important too, as I use mobile internet at painfully slow dial-up speeds most of the time. People don't seem to bother about huge images that take ages to load. I have JavaScript disabled by default, and it's amazing how many flashy sites don't warn you that they don't work properly without it. You just kind of guess you need JavaScript when something looks a bit odd  .
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| Chez |
My personal belief is that all websites should work on a 286 connected to the rest of the world with string.
I like CSS, though. I just use them with tables. |
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| vegplot |
Any reason for disabling javascript. I'm not a huge fan of client sided processing as a general rule but it does come in handy every now and again. Any reason you site implement .php on each page? There doesn't appear to be any functionality not handled by serving static HTML which would make the site slightly quicker - not that it's slow. |
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| JohnB |
Because some JavaScript slows down page loading. I rarely get more than about 30-40kbps, and often have a really dodgy mobile phone signal, so I block everything I can. I use NoScript quite ruthlessly. Apparently I regularly visit sites with lots of advertising, but didn't realise it was there.
There's a database driven member's site, and some data from it will gradually appear on the public pages. The members area is growing into something far bigger than the public pages. The News and Links pages are linked to the database, and the little yellow news item on the Home Page. The menus and a few other items that appear to be static are generated by PHP too. On the members pages they change according to the area of site you're in. So what you see is only a small part of it
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| vegplot |
The PHP bit make makes sense. | ||||
| JohnB |
You mean the JavaScript bit doesn't! |
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| vegplot |
You have JavaScript on your site. |
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| JohnB |
I know, but there's always a No Script alternative . I'm just a rubbish self taught programmer who doesn't know a better way of doing it  .
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| Fee |
Re: Web site
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| orangepippin |
IMHO all the best programmers are self-taught, just like the best guitarists. I don't think it's something you learn by going on a course. |
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| Emyr |
A degree teaches you different way of thinking about programs, abstraction/modelling etc.
Swapping a roll-your-own php website for Drupal or Joomla would probably make sense though. |
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| marigold |
And so are the worst...
A course is a quick intro to the basics and, if well-taught, can fast-track you to producing useful work and give you confidence, but like most skills you get better at programming with practise. |
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| JohnB |
No it wouldn't. I wasted days messing around with various CMSs. They are so slow that it can be like watching paint dry when you're working on a dodgy 30-40kbps mobile internet connection. I'd have gone mad and given up on the whole idea by now, if I hadn't given up and written it myself. I also couldn't find one with the facilities I need for the member's area. There would have been so many compromises that it would have been unworkable. |
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| orangepippin |
I agree. I'm not a great fan of package solutions - they certainly have their place, but they can be too big, clunky, unfocussed etc. It's often better and quicker to roll your own. |
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| orangepippin |
Yes, good point. I didn't really mean "don't go on courses" (I've been on, and taught a few myself) but I do think that programming is primarily a self-taught thing, augumented by books, courses, tutorials and so on. The best programmers I have worked with all started out programming first, then went on the course, if you see what I mean. |
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| vegplot |
When we devised our own CMS (now our standard method of publishing and managing web sites) we did on the premise that we have full control over the development cycle rather than being reliant on propriety or open source solutions.
We need bilingual capability and be able to run from XML bases datasources and there wasn't a product in the market place which offered that capability. We also faced a problem with synchronising our development cycle with new vendor releases which often meant a major re-write of our code to accommodate changes made. Rolling your own is an option worth exploring and off the shelf CMS's have their place if you're willing to accept their limitations and put up with unwanted features. |
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| Fee |
IMHO the worst programmers are self-taught. |
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| Fee |
Cor, lots of posts while I was replying That'll teach me to leave a window open mid-post 
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| OtleyLad |
Even though I am a programmer (COmputer Science degree no less) I know that the most important thing is not the technical wizardry used to build the site (assuming it basically looks and functions ok). As far as your potential customers are concerned, they don't give a hoot whether you used javascript/php/spaghetti/whatever to put your site together.
The key issue is how many people (who are likely to want to buy what you are selling) you can get to come and see what you have to offer! The key is advertising - and you can spend a fortune on it and get no-where. But you need your site to get noticed and talked about in the right 'communities'. If you can get that right you will get plenty of sales - but otherwise your baby will sit in a corner unvisited and unloved forever... |
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| Fee |
I don't care if my customer cares if a site is correctly formed or not, how are they to know? I care and so should anyone else who builds websites. | ||||
| vegplot |
Indeed and sometimes it is critical to use correctly formatted compliant code especially when catering for those with visual disabilities. Advertising isn't the key, it's an important element but unless you can convert site visitors to customers then advertising is in part wasted. What is key is getting your message across and making visitors want to use the site. One in five web site visitors find web sites difficult to use and a 1/3rd believe it's rare to find a site that's really well designed and easy to use. Overcome those obstructions and you'll have a web site that is working for you rather than discouraging visitors.[/i] |
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| davidgeary |
Oak BarrelsThanks Emyr I'll check it out! |