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[So you know what your website is going to be about - how do you set out to design it?]

So you know what your website is going to be about - how do you set out to design it?
You need to think of two things. What content are you going to have on your site, and secondly, what is your site going to look like? And what will the layout of the pages look like, the colours etc.

Content

The first thing to think about is the possibilities that a website gives you. Even if your website is going to be an online store, do not think about the site as a catelogue. The benefits of the web is that your website does not have to follow a linear format - it is not restrictive like a book. The format of the web means your visitors will be able to dip into your site at any point, and also be able to jump around to those parts which are the more interest to them.

Don't, therefore, set your site out like chapters in a book, where later chapters rely on information which has been picked up in earlier ones. Instead your pages should all be able to stand as items of interest in their own right, and have links through to other relevant information your visitors might need!

No one needs to start with a blank sheet of paper - there are millions of web sites already out there. The first thing you can do is research. Look at what other people have done - no, you are not going to copy their ideas, but you are trying to see what appeals to you, what you think works well, and what turns you off completely!

So you've looked around, had a few ideas. How will you know that your ideas are going to work? How can you waste hours of abortive effort?

What you want in three clicks.

Want to know the golden rule? You should make sure your site visitor can find what they want in a maximum of three clicks! You should remember the three click rule when deciding how to set out your pages.

A common suggestion is to use a story board approach but the problem with a story board is it makes you think in a linear way - and as we discussed above, with a website you've got the ability to go backwards and sidewards as well as forwards!

One method of thinking about designing a new website is to use a mind mapping process, or to draw up a spider diagram.

You start with just your main subject in the centre - this will be your home page.

First layer
Next think of the main topics which people may expect to find in a site such as yours - on a retail site for example, the first layers may well include the catelogue as a general heading. On a site about dogs the first layer may be 'breeds'.

Second layer
You are now able to go further into each of your subjects. A catelogue for clothes may be divided here into Men's clothing, Children's clothing etc., and the dog breeds may now be listed as Gun Dogs, Toy Breeds etc.

Third layer
Not all of your first layer menu items may lead to a third layer, but some will. To continue our examples above, Chidren's clothing may now be divided into boys and girls. The Gun Dogs will be divided into the Retrievers, Spaniels etc.

By playing around with your ideas on paper in this fashion you can see where your topics fit best. It may be that some third level pages fit under two second layer pages - no problem, you can link a page to each, and have it appearing on more than one menu. It is what makes sense to the visitor that counts!

Having your site set out in a diagram also makes it easier to see how to link up your pages using hyperlinks, i.e., but clicking on a word on your site, the visitor gets taken to a different page without having to go back through the menus.

Colour scheme, templates etc.
Once you have the plan of what you are going to put onto your site you can start to think about individual page layout and colour schemes.

Again, look at other people's sites, especially those you like. What looks good about them? Sites which have a uniform layout on each page often look far more professional than those which experiment with different colours on every page and different templates. This isn't to say that every page must be the same, but have some consistency, for example, where you place the menu buttons, so that people know they are still on your site. If the navigation menu buttons are always in the same place people will quickly become familiar with the feel of your site, and be able to move round it a lot quicker, and therefore take in a lot more of the information which you want to provide them with.

Making your site look professional is important unless you are just putting up a few pages to share with family! Let's assume the reason you wish to make a website is to earn some extra money at home, or to advertise your business or promote an activity. Apart from colour and consistency here are a couple of other tips. Firstly, look at the size of font you use - don't mix it up too much, or use too many different colours. Make your the type face you use can be seen clearly on the background colour. Secondly, is it easy to get to the information

The most important person!
Finally, don't forget that YOU have got to like your site. You will be having a very close relationship with it and it will be very demanding on your time, especially in the early days. Take advice from friends or colleagues, but at the end of the day, go with what you are happy with. If you are uncomfortable with your site you will not have the same enthusiasm to work with it.

Your first pages
Now you have the schema for your website, you have chosen your colours and background, you can start to put together your first pages.

Here are a few tips:

1. Get a few pages together and get your site up there and published! It will take anything from a few weeks to 7 or 8 months to be indexed by the search engines. The main search engines such as Google like to give comprehensive listings only to mature sites. The sooner you get your site published the sooner you will get good rankings in the search engines.

2. Do not use the words 'under construction'.

3. Get other people's opinion on your site - good comments will give you confidence. If your hosting company has a forum you may be able to showcase your new website there to get advice from others using the same software.

Conclusion

A website doesn't just emerge – it takes a lot of work and an awful lot of planning. But if you make the investment of time you won't lose out. If you don't have a website no one is able to tap into your knowledge or see your creations. If you build your website badly your visitors may not be able to find their way around, and a lot of what you do will be wasted. If you take that bit of extra effort and care you will have a site that is very easy to use, and which will become popular because of that!

Pat Ransom has worked in the IT industry for 15 years and is experienced with local government and company websites. Having designed and published a successful and acclaimed website in her own right the secrets of website design and publishing are now available to be shared at http://www.webmasterproductions.co.uk

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Pat_Ransom

[Content is King]

(Revised May 2024)

Content is King
The most vital aspect of your website is its content. It's essential to create material that's both engaging and informative, aligning with the intent of your visitors. Think like a search engine: prioritize clarity, relevance, and value.

Technical SEO
Modern search engines can parse complex scripts, but it's still best to ensure your content is accessible and indexable. Use JavaScript and other non-HTML elements judiciously, enhancing user experience without hindering crawlability.

Quality Matters
Spelling and grammar are more crucial than ever. Aim for flawless writing to establish credibility and trust. Keep sentences and paragraphs concise for better readability and engagement.

Originality
Avoid plagiarism at all costs. Search engines have sophisticated methods to detect copied content, and penalties can be severe.

Tags
Title Tags -- The title tag remains a cornerstone of SEO. It should succinctly describe the page's content, with your company name at the end, if included.

Meta Tags -- Meta tags have evolved. Beyond description and keywords, include tags for content type, language, and structured data to enhance understanding and visibility.

Alt Tags -- Alt tags are mandatory in XHTML and HTML5. They should accurately describe images and include relevant keywords.

Local SEO
Incorporate geographical locations into your content and tags where relevant, as search engines often favor local results.

Link Building
Cultivate quality backlinks from reputable, relevant sites. Mutual linking can be beneficial, but focus on the value and relevance of each link.

Privacy Policy
A comprehensive privacy policy is non-negotiable. It's a trust signal for both users and search engines.

Traffic
Genuine, organic traffic growth is a positive signal to search engines. Avoid artificial traffic spikes that could raise red flags.

Advertising
Paid advertising can increase visibility and traffic, but monitor your campaigns closely for the best ROI.

Crawlers
Ensure search engines can discover and index your site. Use legitimate methods like sitemaps and consistent, quality content updates to invite regular crawling.

Patience Pays Off
SEO is a long-term strategy. It may take months to see significant results, but persistence and adherence to best practices will lead to success.

Remember, SEO is an ever-evolving field. Stay informed and adapt your strategies accordingly.

C. Thomas Wright III, author and webmaster of Zelo.com which has brought the web such pages as First Names & What They Mean (#2 Google [first names]), Zelo Nursery Rhymes (#1 Google [nursery rhymes]), and his ever-funny Blonde Jokes (#1 Google [blonde jokes]) is at it again with a brand new web site... Name-Stats.com.

Says CT3 (his nickname), "this site goes beyond the origin and meaning of names and explores the popularity of names from all over the world. A lot of time researching popularity of names, not just here in the United States but from other countries is something I have not seen on the internet before, and thought it was time people had easy access to such information."

Name-Stats.com includes name statistics for first names (male and female) and surnames (last names [US only] from countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Belgium, Sweden, Scotland, and more are being added every day. Like all of his web sites, this web site is basic in design and heavy on information.

CT3 says he has plans for a site about people's birthdays as well as other ventures he is working on. He can be reached at zelo(at)zelo.com.

FTP Live is a Free File Transfer and Editing from your Web Browser

This service is great for making those quick-but-essential file uploads, downloads, or edits when on the go.  This service is free and you can even include it in your own web pages!

Simple design yet very affective and easy to navigate. Great job, keep the great work going, if you need a design feel free to ask me and we can work out some negotiations.

After (and everyone else).  Feel free to plug your services in the "Advertising" forum at

Yes, the simple and easy-nav designs are really "in" right now, so thats cool.  I noticed a could things additionally:

1) You do not have a standard navigation bar or anything.  Is there a reason for that?

2) You linked to hostned at the bottom using the text "web hosting".  That's really great!

3) Your header links to page "index.php" and not "/".  Is that intentional?

Well, when you carry a positive balance in your PayPal account (have $$ in there) it is automatically put in to a Money Market Fund (a type of mutual fund *).  A mutual fund is very much like a savings account that you would open at a bank, but they are known to have slightly higher interest rates in exchange for minumum balances (i.e. $500 or however much).  In recent years, mutual funds have become so popular that ther sometimes is no minimum balance, as is the case with Pay Pal.  So every month you get paid $$ for having a balance in there.  It encourages you to keep a higher balance so you can accrue more money in interest.  The contraversial thing about it is that I have not met anybody who would advise to keep a lot of money in their PayPal account, mainly, I assume, for security reasons.  From what I understand, it is not FDIC insured 


* Money market funds have relatively low risks, compared to other mutual funds (and most other investments). By law, they can invest in only certain high-quality, short-term investments issued by the U.S. government, U.S. corporations, and state and local governments. Money market funds try to keep their net asset value (NAV) — which represents the value of one share in a fund — at a stable $1.00 per share. But the NAV may fall below $1.00 if the fund's investments perform poorly. Investor losses have been rare, but they are possible.

Thanks Afterburn.  Yes, I remember you are very talented with graphics and such.  HostNed may commission your services again soon.   

A sincere thank you to user RWILSON and unknown perp from Dubai, United Arab Emerites for working so well as a team to get our web sever listed on SpamCop.  Way to go guys!  It really helped to leave the form to mail script wide open in your web space without any password protection at all and allow the form to enter in unlimited number of recipients and any "From" address he pleased.  Hey, now THAT is a SPAMMER's dream come true right there

Took engineers a LONG time (and cost HostNed a lot of $$) to find out who was connecting to our web server to send 100,000+ spam and phishing emails!  Yes, got our server listed by SpamCop and also got the user's site Suspended and our Arab friend blocked and reported to FBI!  WTG guys.

One user FFSPIRA on a shared linux server was found today to have multiple directories full of other directories and files all with universal Read.Write,Execute (777) permissions.  Uh oh! HUGE sucurity NO NO there.  That got his site suspended right away.  SWEET!

[MSG - Slowly Poisoning America]

Do you believe that many of the foods we eat are slowly poisoning us?  In this web site
MSG - Slowly Poisoning America
the author makes the following claims:

The MSG triples the amount of insulin the pancreas creates...

Not only is MSG scientifically proven to cause obesity, it is an addictive substance: NICOTINE for FOOD!

The big media doesn't want to tell the public either, fearing legal issues with their advertisers.

Are you a believer or it it just hype?

[Basic RSS]

Get feeds from the forum in RSS format.  Here is the info to use:

Basic RSS
https://my.hostned.com/forum/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss2

Advanced RSS
Limit to certain board
Example: "Domain Names" = board #10 so use the following RSS URL
https://my.hostned.com/forum/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss2;board=14
Also limit number of items
Use the "limit" command so to limit to three items, use the following RSS URL
https://my.hostned.com/forum/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss2;board=14;limit=2

I agree with zelo here.  From what I am aware of there is a decent graphics tool for Linux called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program.  It has versions for all three -- Windows, Linux, MacOS-X.  Now THAT is impressive!  Now For "Web Site Editors", here is where Linux falls a bit short.  We all wish our favorites like Dreamweaver and FrontPage would just port over a version for Linux users, but for now there are only some less familiar options.  Linux of course has great text editors (Pico, Vi, Nano) for doing those raw edits, but for real dynamic development there is just Composer (yes the old Netscape Communicator component.  Then there is Sun's Star Office (OpenOffice) which has an HTML editor built in but it falls short in many ways.  So is there any possible saviour here for Web Dev on Linux?  Some say maybe the future is in Screem, which is very advanced but does not provide a WYSIWYG interface.  For my money, there is nothing like the dualing screen (HTML and WYSIWYG at the same time) to get that must-look-good-and-be-done-yesterday type stuff done!

[Here is your initial form:]

Let's say you have a web form and you want to make a couple of the fields required.  To keep this as simple as possible we will involve only three fields, "Name", "Email", and "Message".  In this example, all three fields will be required.

Here is your initial form:

Code Select Expand

<form method="post" action="whatevermailscript.php">
<input maxlength="256" size="35" name="email">
<p>Comments:  <textarea cols="55" name="Comment">  </textarea></p>
<p><input type="submit" value="Send" name="submit">
</form>
You might have noticed I didn't put a Reset button in there.  I think they are stupid, so I dont use them.

Now we need to plug in the validation.  We do this with good old JavaScript!  We will use a function, define the variables (the fields) and call for it on submission (when you click send).  So here we go.

Step 1. Add this in your html form page between the <head></head> tags:

Code Select Expand

<script>
function ValidateContactForm()
{
    var name = document.ContactForm.Name;
    var email = document.ContactForm.Email;
    var comment = document.ContactForm.Comment;

    if (email.value == "")
    {
        window.alert("Please enter a valid e-mail address.");
        email.focus();
        return false;
    }
    if (email.value.indexOf("@", 0) < 0)
    {
        window.alert("Please enter a valid e-mail address.");
        email.focus();
        return false;
    }
    if (email.value.indexOf(".", 0) < 0)
    {
        window.alert("Please enter a valid e-mail address.");
        email.focus();
        return false;
    }
    if (comment.value == "")
    {
        window.alert("Please enter a description or comment.");
        comment.focus();
        return false;
    }
    return true;
}
</script>

Step 2. Add this as an attribute in the form tag:

Code Select Expand

onsubmit="return ValidateContactForm();"

Finished Product

Code Select Expand

<html>

<head>
<title>Form Validation Example</title>

<script>
function ValidateContactForm()
{
    var name = document.ContactForm.Name;
    var email = document.ContactForm.Email;
    var comment = document.ContactForm.Comment;

    if (name.value == "")
    {
        window.alert("Please enter your name.");
        name.focus();
        return false;
    }
   
    if (email.value == "")
    {
        window.alert("Please enter a valid e-mail address.");
        email.focus();
        return false;
    }
    if (email.value.indexOf("@", 0) < 0)
    {
        window.alert("Please enter a valid e-mail address.");
        email.focus();
        return false;
    }
    if (email.value.indexOf(".", 0) < 0)
    {
        window.alert("Please enter a valid e-mail address.");
        email.focus();
        return false;
    }
    if (comment.value == "")
    {
        window.alert("Please provide a detailed description or comment.");
        comment.focus();
        return false;
    }
    return true;
}
</script>
</head>

<body>
Use this form to leave a comment:
<form method="post" action="whatevermailscript.php"
name="ContactForm" onsubmit="return ValidateContactForm();">
    <p>Name: <input type="text" size="65" name="Name"></p>
    <p>E-mail Address:  <input type="text" size="65" name="Email"></p>
    <p>Comments:  <textarea cols="55" name="Comment">  </textarea></p>
    <p><input type="submit" value="Send" name="submit">
    <input type="reset" value="Reset" name="reset"></p>
</form>

</body>
</html>

I hope you will be able to take this example form validator and use it in your own scripts successfully.  Enjoy 

Welcome to the HostNed Forums Afterburn!

I think i tried smartftp last year or so.  It seemed impressive.  I actually recommend that one to our users.  Personally I like Filezilla since it is great for server admins due to the sftp (SSH2) mode.  Since I am used to using Filezilla for root level stuff, I use it for personal stuff as well.  I like both FZ and SmartFTP.