CREATING A WEB SITE

In this page, I'm going to be sharing what I've learned about creating a website and the resources I've found useful.

Site Creation

This site is rather low on fancy graphics, and somewhat plain looking. I'm using a template that comes with Microsoft Expression Web. For some businesses this is fine from what I can see. As an engineering firm, I doubt anyone expects fancy graphics on our site. From the feedback I get, people expect the site to be utilitarian, and easy to navigate. Judging from the hits we get, content seems to be more important.

In some businesses, customers expect more out of your website. If you are an architect, or any kind of graphic design business, I believe that potential clients want to see an attractive website. However, I don't think that gets rid of the need for functionality, content, and ease of navigation.

Depending on your situation, you may want to write your website yourself, or hire a good web page designer. No matter what, you want to exercise some quality control. For some guidance, check out this site: Web Pages That Suck. You may find it rather painful to look at where you stand, but it's better to find out yourself than lose potential business because your website is so bad. Here's a hint - get rid of the Flash graphics that start up when someone goes to your website, and take off the sound! Both are annoying and distracting.

Coding

Writing computer programs is a pain, and in the very early days many of us had to struggle with writing programs in FORTRAN on punch cards (the equivalent of hunting with a couple of rocks and a stone knife). Today, you don't have to generate all the code necessary for computer programs or websites yourself. However, it is necessary to sometimes go in and tweak the code yourself. With websites, you primarily use HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). It's pretty simple to work with, and fortunately there are some good on line references - here's one that I found: HTML Code Tutorial

Getting the Visitors

Once you have the website written, you have to get visitors. There are a lot of websites out there, according to the Netcraft September 2008 survey, there are over 181 million websites out there. Somehow, you have to be noticed. Fortunately, there are search engines (mostly Yahoo and Google) that will help you to be found. Otherwise, we'd never be able to find what we want in all of those websites. If you do home remodeling, someone has to find your site among all the sites about kittens, urban legends, government conspiracies, and so on. I'm going to keep this discussion and a layman's level and try to put some decent links to help you find more information.

First, let me go over how search engines find sites. Early in the web's history, search engines had people working for them that classified sites all day long and put them in big databases. It was inefficient, and wouldn't work today. Google came out in the late 90's with a system that rated sites with the number of links to them. The search engine uses a web crawler to go from site to site and track the links. Google's exact system is a closely held secret, and according to everything I've read, is very complex. However, the basic theory as I understand it is that the more links there are to your site, the more relevant it is.

Below is a very good video about the history of Google which covers everything better than I can:

Learn About the History of Google

For example, you have a site about home remodeling. Let's say it is really written well about how to replace windows. People like it so much they put links to it on their websites (much like I've put the links above to the HTML Code Tutorial). Each link is like a vote, showing how good your site is. So, your site builds up a lot of links from people talking about window replacement. Google picks that up, and when someone types in "window replacement" in Google, and does the search - Voila! Your site comes up at the top. Unfortunately, with 181 million websites out there, that's hard to accomplish.

So, what do you do? First, make sure your site is submitted to Google. I've wasted money paying for a "service" to submit my site to "hundreds" of search engines. Don't do that. You can submit to Google and that's enough. To do that, go here. That's it. You put in some information that takes about 2 minutes and you saved about $130, AND you don't have to feel like a sucker like me.

Next, you can advertise in Google. I have had varying success with Google Advertising. In the beginning it worked, but it doesn't now. I don't know what happened. However, it can work. You put in an advertisement, and it runs on the right side of the screen when someone does a web search for something related to your site. You basically put in keywords for your site, and when someone does a search on those keywords, your site can come up on the "sponsored links" side of the page. You pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad. Here is the site to get started.

Better than Ad Words is to get your site up in the search engine results. It helps to generate links. So, you can put your site in the directories for professional associations that you are a member of. Do web searches in "blogs" using keywords related to your site. Add posts to the blogs with your website address (make sure the posts are relevant and not just spam, otherwise they will be removed). Another trick that works well is to write articles on line about subjects relevant to your business and include a link to your site in the short bio about yourself. I've put up a couple articles in Content for Reprint. You can write articles and post them there, and they are available free for reprint to anyone as long as they give you credit. One of my articles made it to Helical Pier World. Ok, you put up the article for free (and miss a payment of what's usually about $150 - $200 that you get for a paid article). However, if it's a good article, it will get picked up, generate links to your site, increase your professional standing, AND generate free advertising. Can you beat that? No, you can't.

Building up your ranking in a search engine is called Search Engine Optimization. I found a good source of Search Engine Optimization tips to be the SEO Consultants Directory. Doing your own Search Engine Optimization takes time, but in my experience it yields results. You can also hire an SEO Consultant. I've been cold called by a few of these guys, and gotten e-mail spam from many more. Here's a hint - DO NOT engage someone who is an "SEO Consultant" that has a free e-mail address. If you are an Internet professional, you should have a vanity e-mail address. Oh, do you have a free e-mail address, or use an AOL, Earthlink, or other type of address for your e-mail? Bad! It's pretty cheap to get a vanity e-mail address. Look at the top of this page and you will see mine (a runkleconsulting.com address).

You have to be careful with SEO consultants. There are a bunch of them that will put your website into a lot of bogus links or "link farms", many of them in foreign countries. Google frowns upon this, and will penalize your site. You want a service that will go over your site's content and organization, and put get your sitelinks on to reputable sites. That type of service is expensive. Here's a good article on the subject.

Conclusion

There is a lot to this subject, and the space here is limited. Also, I'm not an expert at building websites. This is just a compilation of some of the things I've learned and is meant to help you find the information you need.