Getting Noticed

One of the great challenges of web design is attracting people to your shinny new web site. In the past, common wisdom was search engine optimization or SEO for short.

So you got excited and dropped a bunch of cash on a fancy consulting firm or did your homework to come up with your own SEO strategies. But after all this time and money, you’re still dead and buried on page 12 of Google. After trying everything and pulling your hair out, you give up on traditional site optimization and investigate alternative strategies.

You then discover Pay Per Click advertising, or PPC. This is perfect! For a few bucks you are guaranteed that people show up to your site. So you beg, barrow, and steal to cobble together a small advertising budget. Your PPC campaign is off and running! Problem solved. Right?

You abruptly discover that the key words you selected will cost you $5 a click. After some simple math, you discover that your paltry $150 a month budget equates to a whopping 30 clicks a month. Hardly the stellar traffic you were projecting when you started this project.

So what’s the magic bullet of web marketing? The answer is…there is no magic bullet. Perhaps in the past you could have implemented a few simple tweaks to your HTML and you were all set. This just doesn’t work in today’s ultra competitive environment.

You need to master multiple techniques to get noticed in the digital ocean. You need to master SEO, PPC, Blogging, Social Networking, and anything else you can think of to attract that precious click. And if someone does take the time to check out your site, make sure it is the absolute best site you can imagine. Because if someone comes through the door to discover broken links and crappy design, your toast.

To read more about this topic, check out “New SEO, success and a new approach!” on iMedia Connection.com

Web Page DNA

So, what exactly makes up a web page? What does our web browser retrieve from the Internet when we visit an Internet address?

The answer is, files. A web page is just a text file, and inside that text file there are HTML tags, that reference other files on the internet for the browser to retrieve and show as part of the web page.

And nowadays there are many different kinds of files that make up an ordinary web page. It is not uncommon for a web page to be comprised of text, image files, video and sound files, and animation files.

Since a web page is just text, an HTML file does not look any different in our web browser than if we had viewed it in an ordinary text editor, except for the fact that we cannot change the text, because the web browser is meant to view data, not change it.

WYSIWYG vs Notepad

In our HTML training DVD, we demonstrate writing HTML code using Notepad which is an easy to use and free software widely available on all Windows computers. Or if you are a Mac user, you could use either Simple Text or Text Edit.

But you might be wondering, “Why would I use the simplest text editor on my computer to create a killer web page? Hasn't someone already made the best HTML editor on the planet?”

The answer is yes they do exist. There have been many WYSIWYG HTML editors created since the start of the World Wide Web, and yes their creators make good money off of them, but that does not mean that they are right for you. If you're not sure what the acronym WYSIWYG means, it stands for "What you see is what you get". But what I really think it should stand for is "What you wish you saw is what you hope you got", but that's just my opinion.

There are many open source HTML editors, and many small utilities available that can generate HTML code, but the two most used applications in this area are Microsoft Office Front Page and Adobe Dream Weaver. Front Page and Dream Weaver generate HTML by using drag and drop WYSIWYG interfaces.

So why not use one of these programs to create my web pages? Wouldn't it save me a lot of time, and when I was done I would still have a great looking web page?

The difference is like finger paints compared to an artists brush. In general, HTML is meant to be human readable; that means that if you open an HTML file you can usually tell how the final page will look when viewed in a browser. The only thing in common between all of these WYSIWYG designers is that all of them create bad code, and I mean bad code; and while that may sound a little harsh, it is no secret. The code is difficult to comprehend and hard to maintain. But while all of these faults are bad individually, most of them you could live with if the program just generally worked well, and exported a web page that looked like what you expected.

Again these programs provide an experience that is less than perfect, and if you manage to invest enough time to design a fairly complex web page using one of these editors, I suggest you save your file often, because they tend to crash and burn and take your hard work with them.

If you are interested in learning more about our HTML tutorial DVD, you can check it out at http://HtmlTutorialDvd.com.

The Perfect HTML Color

Trying to find the perfect color to use for your web page or trying to determine a color's hex code can be a real hassle. Unless you are using a WYSYWIG editor that has a color picker, it is practically impossible to determine the exact hex code for your desired color.

Fortunately, W3 Schools has posted a very helpful and comprehensive chart of 150 HTML colors and their associated hex code. You can check out the chart on thier web site at www.w3schools.com.