Give It Some Thoughts if you are ready to get your first personal/ business website or if you are about to re-design your already existing site. In this document are some helpful thoughts and questions listed that should be considered in order to create a successful web presentation. Download PDF [ 72 KB ]

You have a website and now you would like to do minor changes or updates to your site yourself. Below you find some helpful tools to take over.

Contribute 3 (for Win/ Mac) makes it easy to update and publish your existing website. A 30 day trial version available by Macromedia. The program is an affordable way to keep web content current and relevant - without knowing HTML.

TextWrangler (for Mac) is a text editor. At its most basic, a text editor is a tool for simply editing text. You can use a text editor for a wide variety of tasks from cleaning up data,..., to writing HTML or coding. You can download it for free at Bare Bones.

Notepad (for Win) is a text editor which usually comes already with your computer/ operating system.

What are meta tags? According to Wikipedia, Meta tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such elements are placed as tags in the head section of an HTML document. more

Description and keywords are the most common used meta tags. They help search engines to find data throughout the world wide web. In addition, meta tags help ranking one's site. The description is a very short summery of your website content - around 150 characters, never more than 250. Whereas the keywords are catchwords that people may type-in in order to search the web for finding certain information. These words should be related to one's site content and listed in the order of importance (limit: 1024 characters).

So if you have to come up with keywords and a description for your site, think about who comes to your site. What would people type-in in search of your service or product. What words would you use if you were looking for your business?!

After you placed the meta tags accordingly, check how good you did by testing the site on a Meta Tag Analyzer!

Visit subject related links:
Writing Effective Meta tags By Donald Nelson
Different engines, different rankings By Yelena Shapiro with Etelka Lehoczky
What search engines don't like searchengines.com

Web usability and credibility have gotten more and more attention over the last years. It's not only important anymore "to provide a website" to clients and customers it is also highly important to provide it in a way of being trustworthy, informative, and easy to use.

No matter if you are selling products or services, every visitor to your site is a potential customer. Therefore, your website has to be presented perfectly in the very moment one hits your site for the first time. You got only one shot to persuade the visitor to stay or to leave right away forever.

In order to make a "perfect" website (user-friendly, web creditable), there are some guidelines you can follow. First, long loading time, or annoying splash pages should be avoided - unless there is a real need in providing a flash intro or splash page. If you use sound make sure, it can be turned off or is played only a limited time. Keep in mind, loading will increase. Provide images in a nice quality but reasonable "size" - don't make the viewer wait forever to see the image.
User-friendly means also that a visitor can find his or her way easily around on your site; thus keep the navigation consistent in looks, positioning and order. To convey your message, provide rather less information, but deliberate. If you have big chunks of text, break it down with with interesting imagery ("nicely" compressed).

For more information on this topic, visit following subject related links:
Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
Webcredible

Find recommendations and help not only for your web presence on this blog...