Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Before you do anything else on this page, let’s go back to that list of keywords that we created before you went to bathroom. Remember them? In our example, we were going to use “auto repair torrance”. If that’s what we were going to use, then I would make the username on this page “auturepairtorrance”. We want to have all of the keywords in the URL of our site. That’s SEO trick number one.
That would cost you $25 from an SEO expert.
What are your keywords? Pick the 3 that best describe your business. How will people most likely find you in the search engines? If this was printed, I’d make some empty space below, but since I don’t want you writing on your computer screen, go find a piece of paper and write some down. I’ll wait here.
Just pick the obvious ones. Quite trying to over think it. Yes, this may determine whether you drive a Ferrari or sleep on a park bench, but just pick them. Come on. I’m waiting. No pressure, but…
OK. Are you back now? Let me see what you picked. Ah. Good. Are you sure about that one? OK. I’ll buy that. Those will work fine.
In my example above, using “Auto Repair Torrance” as keywords, I actually set up http://autorepairtorrance.wordpress.com/ to make sure this would work. It took a while to get it indexed by Google, but I linked to it from a couple other sites that I have. That’s the easiest way to get it indexed, by the way, not submitting it. After about 3 weeks, it’s #5 on the search results page for that search. Try it. Auto Repair Torrance
Posted in web site build |
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Now, back to the WordPress page. See where it says “Username”? Type in your three keywords, in order of importance. Now put in a password. No, not the name of your cat.
Bam. There it is.
Use numbers and letters and make sure you can remember it. There. That’s good. Put it in again, to make sure you didn’t make a typo, not that you would ever do that.
Put in your email address so they can send you a confirmation email to activate your account. They want to make sure you are a real person. Check the legal flotsam, tell them you want your blog and click “Next”. Bam. There it is.
Posted in web site build |
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
They will send you an email with a magic URL in it. Wait for that email to show up and click the link to tell them you are really at that email address. Is it there yet? How about now? OK, go get something to drink then.
Are you back? Did you get the email yet? If you don’t get it within 30 minutes, tell them to send it again. There should be a link right there to do that. Check your spam filter. Wait some more. It’ll show up.
After you clicked on that link, your account should be activated. Go to your “dashboard” and I’ll give you a tour around the place.
Posted in web site build |
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
There are some things that we’ll set up and never touch again, to begin with. These are all located over to the right in the “Settings” tab. When you click on that, it takes you to the “General” tab. Here, you want to change the Blog Title and the tagline to something that works with your keywords. You probably want those keywords in there some place, if there’s room and it doesn’t look stupid. Also, change the timezone to one that’s appropriate.
Now, let’s talk about the “Discussion” tab. Most of the time, having a nice discussion is a great thing, but this tab is where allow people to leave comments on your site. At this point, I’m going to say that you probably don’t want people doing that, so I’d say that you should turn them off. Go down the list of checkboxes here and set things the way you want them to be. You and I can have a discussion about the benefits and liabilities of allowing commnets, but not now.
Posted in web site build |
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
The next thing we’re going to do is the most fun for you. I’ll let you run free with this one. Over under the “Design” tab, you want to go to “Themes”. This is where you get to pick what your site looks like. There are pages of themes to choose from, some better than others for what we want to do here. Go ahead. Look through all of them. I know you want to. When you find one that you think you might like, click on it.
Your site will pop up on the page, using the theme that you choose. Most of the time, there’s a graphic at the top that we might be able to change to one that you upload, so don’t sweat that too much right now.
On my example site, I have Contempt, but you might want to use one that’s Neat! or maybe one that’s Simpla. When you find one that you think you might use, click on the “Activate Theme” link on the top right.
Since I forgot to tell you to go look at your site before, let’s go look at it now. Click on “Visit Site” at the very top.
Every place we’ve been so far I’m going to refer to as the “Admin” or the “Backend”, since only a admin can see it. The general public can not see it. It’s the stuff behind the curtain. The public pages, the stuff the everyone can see, I’ll refer to as the “Front end”. Now, you should be looking at the front end.
There are some more new terms that I’m going to use like you know what I’m talking about. The top part is the “header”. The skinny side areas on the side(s) are “Sidebars”. The stuff at the bottom is the “footer”. The links to the pages are the “Navigation”. Do you need to go to the bathroom to think about all that for a bit?
Posted in web site build |
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Before we go any farther, we need to figure out what you’re going to put on this site. I’m sure you have some idea. You can always change it later, but it’s good to have the basic plan figured out first. You should have some general buckets of information that you want to put this content into. Big word alert. Information Architecture. There. I said it. Just like building a house, you need to have a plan, a blueprint, if you hope it’s all going to hang together right.
Get out your piece of paper again and scratch out what information you want on this site and how it will be organized. Maybe you only have, like 4 pages of basic stuff. That’s cool. Maybe you have a bunch of pages that are all alike and need to be organized together. That’s cool too. This is a time for thought and maybe another bathroom break. People are going to wonder about you.
Posted in web site build |
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
What else do people want to know when they come to your site? Prices? I don’t want to hear your sales pitch. I want to know what it costs. Then maybe I’ll check your features and benefits. I know you want to tell everyone how great you are, but no one cares what you want. We only care what we want, so give it to us and we’ll be happy. Prices, products, descriptions, features, locations, sizes, colors, styles, services, recommendations, photos, support, downloads, a way to yell at you. Just give us what we want.
Now, do you have the list of buckets written out? (This is different than that movie, the Bucket List. This is a list of buckets.) On to getting that information into the CMS. (Did you remember what that stands for? Good. I’m proud of you.)
WordPress started out as a blogging platform, so it was built around “posts”. Things that you wrote every day, that were displayed in chronological order and disappeared off the front page as you wrote newer posts. You don’t want that (for now anyway. I’ll talk to you into a blog later.) What you want are static pages that stay where they are and are always in the same place. No chrono-nothing to do with these. Well, WordPress calls these, (wait for it), “pages”. A “page” is different than a “post” in WordPress in how and where they are displayed. Similar, but different.
Posted in web site build |
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Every time you create a new “page” in WordPress, you are also adding a link to that page to the menu. Think about this before you go all crazy on creating a bunch of pages.
Pages can also be “under” other pages. You might have a top level page that describes things generally, then detailed descriptions on pages under that. Those pages under the top will not be in the top level menu. Some themes will do drop downs menus of those detailed pages, but some will not.
What are your pages about? What will a user go to first? What do people want from your site?
Posted in web site build |
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
Now that you have all of your pages, which has created all of your menus, and are filled with all of your content, what else do you want the site to do? On your free WordPress.org web site, under the “Design” menu, there’s an item called “Wigets”.
Widgets add some bit of functionality to your site in the side bar. Every site has a body, a main section where all of your content goes. Each one will probably have at least one “sidebar” and maybe 2 or even 3.
These are those areas at the side of the main content. There are a set of installed widgets that come with your site. Each will display something in the side bar.
First, pick a sidebar to use. There’s a drop down at the top to pick and then hit “show”.
Second, pick a widget to add and hit “add” next to it. This will pop it over to the side bar. You can click and drag each one to change the order from top to bottom.
Each widget may have some options that you can change. Click on the “Edit” link on each one to see what the options are for each. When you’ve made your changes, click “change” to make the changes stick.
If you want to remove a widget, click “edit”, then “remove” and it’ll go away.
When you’re done messing with your widgets and your options, click on the “Save changes” link at the bottom, or you’ll lose everything.
After you’ve saved everything there, go back and view the front end of the site. Make sure that the right things are showing up in the right places with the right information. If everything is good, you should actually be done with your web site at this point.
Posted in web site build |
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
After you have everything set up the way you want it, look at every page. Go back and click on all of the links. Is everything spelled correctly? Do the links works? Is the information complete?
Now, is it organized the way you want it? Do the menus all make sense?
Look at it from a user’s point of view. Try to find some basic information that you think your users will want when they come to this site. Is it there? Is it easy to find? Does the way you get to it make sense?
Now, find the stupidest person you know, over the age of 12. Ask them to look at it. Ask them to find some basic bits of information. Watch them while they look at your site. See what they have trouble with.
Is it the stupid stuff that everyone should know? Well, you’re wrong. They don’t know it. Make it more obvious. Make it simple.
I got to watch a test of a web site that I had worked on, with real people, from behind a one way mirror. It was a lab used for testing toys with kids. While we watched in amazement at how stupid our users were, we slowly realized that we look at the world much differently than the normal user does. We understand all the backend logic and the lingo and the organization. It makes sense to us.
Make sure that everything makes sense to the stupidest person you know.
…and, we’re done! You have a FREE small business web site.
Posted in web site build |
Saturday, November 1st, 2008
There are a ton of web hosting companies out there. You will probably not get the traffic that requires some huge, bullet proof servers and bandwidth. You’ll be fine with a shared server and a lot of bandwidth.
Small business web hosting has become so easy and common that it’s a commodity these days. You want to look for price first, but the determining factor now are reliability, customer service and ease of use.
Reliability
When I first started to publish a fan site at survivor.com, I was getting a huge amount of traffic. I bought space at PowWeb, who I use now, and was fairly happy with them for the most part. They advertised “unlimited bandwidth”, so we were cool with the huge traffic spike every Thursday night.
Customer Service
That is, until it all stopped. One day, they decided that I had too many connections within a specific time, so they just turned it off. I had no site. I was furious. Of course, I found this out after I got home from work and their office was closed. I was screwed.
When I did contact them, they pointed out some fine print in that “unlimited bandwidth” section of the terms and conditions. They could shut me off any old time they wanted to with no warning. I was still furious.
Ease of Use
I shopped around and decided it was time to get a dedicated server with a specified amount of bandwidth. I was making good enough money to pay for it and it seemed like it was time to take the plunge. I had a 30 day satisfaction guarantee. I signed the year long contract and had the server set up. I found that the interface was horrible. I couldn’t manage the domain names the way I wanted to set them up. I didn’t have access to the MySQL settings. There were all sorts of little nuisances that I didn’t have with the shared server.
I was shocked at how hard it was to manage this thing. I couldn’t do half the things that I could with the shared server. I canceled the contract and asked for my money back. It took them 60 days to get that back to me.
I’m sure that there are better dedicated servers out there, just like there are worse shared servers. The key is to get in and play around with whatever you buy. Make sure that you can do what to do with it and that it’s easy. They have gotten much better today, so you shouldn’t have any problems, but you might.
After that fiasco, I went back to PowWeb, since I had paid for a year of their service. It seems that as soon as I decided that, they changed their terms of service and were promoting the amount of bandwidth they include. They no longer can decide arbitrarily, but they have a specified amount of bandwidth you can use. They tell you how much you’ve used and when you might run out.
I feel much better about being told that I have a “Monthly limit: 15400.00 GB” than it being “Unlimited”. That makes me a little nervous. (I just checked and they are advertising “Unlimited” again. Hmmmm…) Since I went back to them, they’ve given me absolutely no trouble at all. They’ve been 100% reliable. I’ve been able to do everything I need to. I’ve recommended them to clients who are also happy with them.
I would recommend PowWeb 100%.
There are other good, cheap hosts out there. I have nothing against any of them. Check them out. Make sure you can do what you want and that they give you a money back guarantee.
DO NOT DO ANY BUSINESS WITH NETWORK SOLUTIONS!.
Posted in web site build |
Saturday, November 1st, 2008
So you think you need a web site for your small business. You’re right. If you don’t have one by now, you’re behind the curve. If you have one that sucks, you need to make it better.
Don’t worry, we’ll walk you through the steps to get one up and running. The overview of the process contains the following steps:
1. Register a domain name.
2. Find a web hosting company.
3. Set up the domain name to point at the web host.
4. Design the web site.
5. Develop the web site.
6. Post them to the web host.
7. Maintain it.
There are a lot of companies out there promising to do it all for you for cheap, but be careful of who you give your money to and what you get stuck with. There are deals and there are dangers.
The first rule of web site development is DO NOT DO ANY BUSINESS WITH NETWORK SOLUTIONS!. They are evil. They will suck you into a black hole of fees and never let you go. They are the La Brea tar pits of the Internet.
Each of the steps above has it’s own page dedicated to it and they are many other resources out there on the web for information about each subject.
Posted in web site build |
I don't want to offend all the Toyota owners. 
