from david walsh's handy site
A place to store my fumblings through the internet.
04:27
So you want to make a website but don't want to pay a penny to get it done. Its not as hard as you may think.
There are some great free tools I highly recommend:
Paint.net For image editing
Notepad++ For text editing of html, css and js
Firebug For tweaking and testing changes
IE Tab for a quick swap between firefox and IE (the 2 most used browsers) for testing (as Internet explorer is not a standards compliment browser so makes web creation hard)
There you have it, you don't need to buy expensive software like photoshop or dreamweaver, the above make free replacements - sure paint.net does not have as many features but its much more user friendly and sure notpad++ is not a WYSYWIG editor and is not as powerful as dreamweaver but its free! and it will make you better at writing code from scratch. Remember you can always use free templates as a starting point.
I'll list some of the sites I have made with the above soon.
08:14
This SEO and Analitics tool lets you check page rank Yahoo indexed backlinks and all sorts of great stuff, that are a bit cheeky and make you use a image you have to put in a webpage - which is fair enough for a free tool - but no fear a note pad page or opening a new tab and using firebug to edit the html will suffice.
08:43
Great post about HTML tag crimes I have used some of these on my sites *ashamed face* but I have at least never used blink or marquee.
Labels: design
08:15
Lots of traffic is great but if people leave your site unhappy or confused or disappointed or not having done something you like your visitors to do then that's bad.
Conversions are a really good measure of site success. If your an eCommerce site Conversions are sales. However they can be other things as well. This includes, signing up to a newsletter, getting a phone call or email about work or just having people read your content. Whatever you want to call it, conversions are the reason you set up the website in the first place (I want a website to promote my shop, or to promote my theories, or make money etc). So make sure you measure them and they are the focus of your site. Success pages when a person signs up to a newsletter or buys a product are a great way to know your conversion rate or percentage. Pick a page (or 2) that you would ideally like all people to see and measure it. If its a theory or idea you're promoting make sure people have spent a long enough time on the page to read it.
Traffic is a means to an end dont just focus on traffic(via SEO'etc)
Labels: Conversions, SEO
08:01
I guess about a year ago I took over the site kwokwingchun.com and moved it to www.kwokwingchun.co.uk. I had wrote some of the articles for the original site when it launched but did not know anything about web design back then. A few years later and hours and hours of re-factoring I'm getting closer to the site I want. I can't help but think if only I knew everything I know now back then. But I guess that's the case with most things in life. The site is about Wing Chun a martial art and it is becoming very popular its just reached the 10,000 hits a month mark (which i think is good for my target area - second highest alexa rank for a wing chun site).
But If I got to start from scratch it would be great. On my next big web venture before i write a line of code I want to plan:
- The navigation structure (how pages link to eachother via what urls)
- The content (how to cover all the topics logically)
- An SEO friendly design that has tags from H1 -> H6
- JavaScript plugins to each page for non important content that make it easy to update all pages (centerally held announcements)
- Analitics - set targets and set up ways to monitor conversions and traffic flow
- Viral marketing strategy
- Then the design
- Then the content
I will also make sure I am using a robots.txt file from the start and an XML site map and search engine WML plugin - then I would like to make sure the images have logical SEO type names - alt tags - titles - custom tool tips. As I write the pages I want SEO all the way down the content. I want fast loads from the start this means compressing javascript and css but keeping backups of the original (separate) scripts. compressing images to the exact size and making sure the height and width are specified in the code. I would also like make sur i dont commit accessibility crimes. I would want a good blog and RSS and favicon linked in from the start.
Then It would get submission and be awesome.
If you try and do some of this after you end up having to do redirects robot excludes rewriting css all the time - losing images and re-uploading them having to compress later and it makes far more work and is soul destroying.
14:14
Instant Javascript breadcrumb navigation Great bit of code (after you strip it down a smidge).
Labels: js
06:26
So you link to other sites and would like to know how many clicks those links get? An easy(ish) way i have started to use is to add an extension /outbound/ to my website and then make a page for each outbound link i want to track (that's the "hard" bit) the url now looks like http://www.mywebsite.com/outbound/yourwebsitename then on that page you add google analitics and a 301 forwarding javaScript that sends traffic to the target website. You will also want to add the address /outbound/ to your robots.txt disallow so it wont get indexed. Or add a no index rel tag to the link. Now in google analitics you can see how many page views http://www.mywebsite.com/outbound/yourwebsitename has and this will tell you how much traffic you have sent another site.
I wont lie this is pretty hacky, but it works well. The only implication is that the site you link to many not get the same amount of page rank because they did not get a straight link (but im not sure about this).
I think Facebook use this method (with nasty auto generated URLs) - well they gave me the idea anyway as facebook links seem to do this.
Labels: analitics
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