Category : Developer

Minimum requirements for website development

Posted by admin at 9:52 pm

Over the next few months I will be exploring the different aspects you will need to get your message “out there” by website development.

Many people still see a website as a static electronic brochure, useful for showing a few product pictures, getting contact information out there. For many people the most sophisticated innovation is the contact form.

The website is potentially your greatest marketing asset or if badly executed, can make you look like a rank amateur.

Firstly, let me start off with the basics your website absolutely requires, If you don’t have the ingredients here, you should turn off the website and not show it to anyone till you have completed the basic website development that is needed to revitalise it.

Look and Feel

A website does not have to cost thousands of dollars, It does not have to have many pages and lots of things that swirl and flash. What it does need is to be attractive. and pleasant to the eye.  Some points to note in this regard

site consistency

Navigation bars and menus need to be uniform across the site. If you have a different menus or navigation links on different pages , your visitor will need to spend more energy than they want to just figuring out how to get around.

colour scheme

What is the most important thing about the colour scheme of the site?  The answer is really simple – tasteful not tacky.  Your website is the representation of your business on the web. As such the scheme  need to speak to the visitor. Avoid clashes and bright colour combinations that are distracting and hard on the eye.   Avoid really dark backgrounds with strong contrasts such as green or white  on black. It is very hard to read and can look unprofessional

Content

The content is obviously very important. You not only need to have good quality content (see the post on search rank) You have to be careful with your spelling, grammar and the information presented. for 90% of business websites, the literacy requirements of anyone you are writing for should be at about the level of a 15 year old education reading level.
One way of achieving a fast and lovely look and feel is to use a Content Management System like WordPress. These take the heavy lifting out of building a website with a consistent look and feel.

Remember hostpossum offers wordpress and many other packages free as part of it’s web hosting plans. You can create a wordpress installation using the fantastico installer in under 5 minutes.

Another advantage of setting up a CMS package is they are fairly easy to Optimise for search. many themes are SEO enabled or you can install an SEO plug in. These assist you in getting all the tags in the correct spots.

Hostpossum can help guide you through the SEO process. contact us if you would like our assistance.

If you want a fast answer you can always give us a call. We can set it up quickly make it look fabulous and teach you how to drive it. We charge very reasonable rates and we deliver very quickly.

Contact Page

It may sound simple but it is vital.
forget the mailto: tag use a form!

• So many more people use gmail these days, and the mailto html tag will
  not work a lot of the time.
• It’s clunky. It brings up a whole other application – The email program that the viewer has installed.
• You can capture exactly the information you need
• You can capture in a variety of ways – database, textfile, spreadsheet, email etc

SEO Warfare: Beware of your Competitors Linking Practices

Posted by admin at 1:11 pm

I just picked this up as part of a thread on http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4084419.htm

Quote from Alby
“What Google is doing is amazingly irresponsible in my opinion.
The fact that Google constantly repeats the statement that “What a competitor does can’t hurt your rankings” doesn’t make it any more true, and by now almost everyone is aware that it is a lie.
Unethical webmasters are killing off competitors by the hundreds (or maybe thousands) on a daily basis and Google does nothing about it. People’s lively hoods are getting destroyed by no fault of their own, and Google doesn’t seem to care.
It is so easy to take out a competitor by posting a large amount of low quality footer links from unrelated websites. It has happened to two different websites that we have in the last two years, and it is practically impossible to get your rankings back.
The sad things is that this would be a relatively easy problem to solve if Webmasters were allowed to use Google Webmastertools to “block” links by basically saying: “These are sites that we do not want to be associated with in any way, and links from these sites are not something we have been part in creating.” However, by allowing this Google would have to admit that bad incoming links does hurt your site. So instead Google just pretends that everything is fine, at the cost of Webmasters.
People who are repeating Google’s mantra “Incoming links can’t hurt you” are either not actually looking at what is happening or are in uncompetitive industries where this type of behavior is still rare.”

As I mentioned in a previous post “Page Rank” is determined by quality links. The Wikipedia Page Rank definition discusses the selling of links from high quality sites :

From Wikipedia
“For search-engine optimization purposes, some companies offer to sell high PageRank links to webmasters.[17] As links from higher-PR pages are believed to be more valuable, they tend to be more expensive. It can be an effective and viable marketing strategy to buy link advertisements on content pages of quality and relevant sites to drive traffic and increase a webmaster’s link popularity. However, Google has publicly warned webmasters that if they are or were discovered to be selling links for the purpose of conferring PageRank and reputation, their links will be devalued (ignored in the calculation of other pages’ PageRanks). The practice of buying and selling links is intensely debated across the Webmaster community. Google advises webmasters to use the nofollow HTML attribute value on sponsored links. According to Matt Cutts, Google is concerned about webmasters who try to game the system, and thereby reduce the quality and relevancy of Google search results.[17]“

I should have emphasised the importance of Quality Links. The gaming aspect of linking was very common practise a few years back. I have not heard of anyone who actually did this for some time, It appears the practise continues.

Google has a strict policy regarding deceiving practices. If they are unhappy with your SEO practices, they can ban your site. Do not load pages with hidden text, or reduce the relevancy of the search engine result for more information, please refer to the webmaster guide. Of course , if this is all to hard, hostpossum.com can help you achieve a better result with our sensible, SEO methodology.