Can I Do My Own Website?
Many businesses or individuals in Windsor who want a website commonly ask the question: “Can I develop my own website?” The short answer to this question is yes, absolutely. In fact, developing a simple website is easier now than it ever has been. Programs such as Macromedia’s Dreamweaver or Microsoft Front Page have made it easy to develop web pages with little to no skill. Simply pick a pre-made template, type in your text, add a couple of pictures and voila! You have yourself a website, right? Well, sort of.

The simple fact of the matter is, you can’t expect to develop a professional looking, tightly coded, website just by plugging your text into a pre-made template with a code generation tool. Yes, software has greatly improved over the years with how it generates HTML, the markup code that defines the structure of your web pages, but generated code will always be bulkier, and less efficient than hand coded HTML pages.

Most professionals in Windsor develop their HTML pages by hand. In fact, most page developers rarely ever use anything but a text editor to generate their pages. Professional page developers will use HTML for what it was developed for, to describe the structure of a page, and encapsulate the content of said page via the markup tags relevant to the content at hand. What does all that mumbo jumbo mean? Well, simply put, it means that a professional web page developer is going to structure a page correctly, using the correct tags, not just using tags that look right when a page is rendered to the browser. A professional page developer never concerns himself with how the HTML makes a page look, HTML is there to structure a page, not describe how the style is defined. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) describes how the nicely structured pages should look when rendered to the browser. Moreover, the developer structures his/her pages so they render correctly in all browsers, a task that the code generators fail miserably at most times.

What’s In Your Page Source?
Alright, I will be the first to admit that most people don’t care how bulky their web pages are or how inefficient they are coded. Granted, most visitors are on high-speed internet and those extra 500 milliseconds your page takes to load isn’t going to matter, right? Again, sort of. You always have to be aware of how long your pages are taking to load, and how responsive they are for your visitors. Studies have shown that an average user will wait about 10 seconds for a page to load before they navigate away out of frustration. I have a feeling that this study was done before the vast majority of users had high-speed internet. I suspect that tolerance to waiting is actually much lower.

Experienced web developers and web designers will always optimize their images, and HTML to load as quickly as possible. Images that are not properly compressed can easily be 5 times larger than a properly compressed image. Improperly compressed images can easily increase a web page load by 5-10 seconds!

Got Google?
One of the biggest detriments of doing your own web development is the lack of search engine optimization. One of the most common causes of websites having poor search engine rankings is because the page is full of HTML errors which throw off the search engine crawlers. Web pages that are not structured correctly, and have a lot of styling information inline with the content will never rank well compared to websites that are structured correctly with nice clean content.

So does this mean that if you do your own website, you won’t ever get listed in the search engines? Of course not, but if a professional web designer or web developer programs your HTML pages, your pages are much more likely to get indexed correctly. Moreover, most web developers will put a link from their well indexed site to your new site, which will further help the crawlers find your site quicker. If your developer is experienced in search engine optimization (SEO), that will even further liken your chances to high rankings in the search engines.

How’s It Going To Look?
Ok, so we have established that yes you can do your own website. It might be coded terribly, and not rank well in the search engines, but you are still determined to do it yourself. Quick question, how is the site actually going to look? If you are a good designer, and can make a nice picture of how you want your site to look, you can use your code generator to make it look the same right? Not quite.

Getting your website to look the same as what you had envisioned is a very tricky proposition for an inexperienced web designer. Developing for the web is very different from developing a page for traditional print. In traditional print, you have a fixed canvas (the page), whereas on the web, you have several variables to contend with. First, you have no idea what resolution your users will be viewing your web-pages at when developing your website. What looks good at 1024×768 might look terrible at 1280×1024 resolutions. To further complicate things, different browsers can show the exact same HTML much differently. Specifically, Internet Explorer based browsers use a different engine than Gecko based browsers (Mozilla, Firefox etc). It can be truly frustrating even for experienced developers to try and keep things looking the same across the board, but for a do-it-yourselfer it can be an impossible task.

Ok, let’s say you’ve tackled all the compatibility issues. How will the website actually look when it’s done? Will it look professional? Or, will it look like a do it yourself site? If your website is being used for business, what image do you waAnt to attach to your company?

Are You Scared Now?
It really isn’t my intent to suggest that you shouldn’t try to develop your own website. I still maintain that a lot of people can develop a fairly decent site themselves, especially if they have a basic understanding of HTML and a fairly good design sense. One good approach to doing it yourself is to have a web developer that you can consult with on some of the more technical issues. You can save a lot of money by doing it yourself and letting your developer check your work for any major issues with the web pages. Many web developers in Windsor will gladly check your pages over at an affordable hoAurly rate, correcting any major issues.

Having a developer to walk you through some of the more technical aspects of web developing can be a very sound approach if you want to do your own web programming. You really do have to weigh the hourly rate of checking the code against the cost of having the developer program everything.

Sharbel Lutfallah is a Web Developer and Programmer in Windsor. Visit http://www.wiredsolutions.ca to gain more valuable information when looking for your own Web Developer and Web Programmer.

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The Big Idea

There are a thousands of people and companies who would want to advertise their services for web designs. The question here is, are you sure if the services that you have bought would be the one that you really like or the best deal in town? Think twice.

In this article, I would like to share tips and advice to Web designs. Yes, your own creation. But before we begin, we have to make sure of 2 important things. First, analyze your goals and needs then make a plan. Second, create a site specification on what you intend to do, what trend and technology (including how much you are going to spend) and the most important, the content you’ll need. If you are able to decide on this part, then you are ready to begin. Here’s the step by step process.

First and foremost, create a site definition. This is the initial stage where in you have to define your specification and objectives for the website you are going to make. Analyze the goals you have in mind and justify the budget and things required. In this stage, you also need to define the site content, the information resources that you will need to meet your prospects’ needs.

Second, website architecture. Programming, database design, search engine design, and data entry is performed in this stage.

Third, site design. This is the stage wherein you have to obtain its appearance as that of the page grid and overall graphic design. You have to visualize the content for the site that needs to be created. Plan, research, write, organize and edit the text content is done in this stage.

Fourth, website construction. This is the stage wherein all pages are completed and programming components linked. This is the time we could possibly say that it is now ready for beta testing.

Fifth, marketing of website. This is where optimization of site is done. Basically, this is the time that you need the expertise of a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Specialist to promote your site in many ways. Your website must be part of all marketing campaigns and corporate communication programs. Article submission, Link popularity, press releases, etc., is performed during this stage.

Sixth, keep track of your progress thru evaluation. By analyzing the server logs for your website, you can develop a quantitative data on the success of your site. There are a number of popular software packages wherein you can track down your visitor including their locations (state, city and country) and time, the keywords that they have used to find your site, the referrer sites, etc..

Now that you are done with it, after making all the links “live,” please do not abandon your site. It doesn’t end there. You have to maintain your site. You need constant attention and constant development changes in order to make it more and more capable. You must also need to check periodically if the links are intact and functional.

In website designing, you need not to set a budget that is too high. You need not to get an expensive service. You just need appropriate research and familiarity to make your own. Careful planning of an objective and clear purpose are the main keys to success in building websites.You can create the most unique or simplest design. What’s important is that you have done what you have always want it to be.

By: Marithe Milano, Search Engine Marketing Specialist for MegaWebDesigns
MegaWeb Designs offers a wide variety of website services and solutions like website designs, layouts and website development in different packages and affordable rates.

MegaWeb Designs: Web Design and Development Services
http://www.megawebdesigns.com
info@megawebdesigns.com

Mail to: info@megawebdesigns.com; marketing@megawebdesigns.com

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As any webmaster knows, designing and developing a website can be a daunting proposition. There are millions of websites out there to compete with, and whether your site’s purpose is to promote your business, inform, or entertain; web design is an important consideration if you want traffic. It’s tough to attract visitors and even tougher to keep them on your website once they arrive.

Fortunately, there are many tools out there for webmasters to make the tasks of design and development easier. Wading through the sea of web tools can also be a time-consuming process. In designing your website, you should be aware of all the components that go into successful development and how to use them to your best advantage.

The first step, other than developing great informative content for your visitors, is to put everything together in an attractive, user-friendly format. If you need a little help in manipulating HTML coding or CSS (cascade styling sheets), you might visit www.xhtmlandcss.com for advice and tutorials regarding these components. CSS in particular is an invaluable tool for webmasters; these are the programs that control the set of styles for your fonts, tables and many other attributes of your website. The ability to manipulate CSS allows you to customize sites such as web forums and blogs and create a website that stands out and gets noticed. You can also amplify the attractiveness and user-friendly attributes of your websites with e-mail and forum signature generation tools from www.needasig.com and brighten your format with free smilies from www.thesmilies.com. Internet users love extras, and adding customizable interactions such as signatures and smilies will help keep visitors coming back.

Once your site is developed, you must then undertake the task of optimizing your website for search engines. There are many ways to do this. One is to use relevant keywords throughout your content and page tags–without overusing them–that will help visitors find your website when they’re looking for information. Using a keyword generator such as the free tool at www.keywordmine.com is an easy way to find plenty of relevant keywords and phrases. When incorporating keywords into your content, you should make sure the text reads well. The practice of keyword stuffing to boost search engine ranks not only endangers your listings with search engines, it also turns visitors off to your website and will keep them from coming back.

Another component of website optimization is getting your website listed with search engines. If search engines can’t find your website, neither can visitors! After you have created great content with relevant keywords and lots of user-friendly extras, you should then begin the process of getting your website out there for people to find. You can submit your website URL and descriptions manually. Major search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo include links to their submission process for manual submission. However, these links can be difficult to find. You may want to consider using a search engine submission service to submit to several search engines at once; there are many good, free submission services that cover multiple search engines. It is important to remember that submitting your website once is not enough to get it noticed on the Internet radar. You should carry out the submission process on a regular basis. However, you also must realize that submitting your website too often can get your URL banned from some search engines. It is a good practice to submit to search engines every 30 days.

Beyond search engines, you should also list your website in as many relevant directories as you can find to increase your site’s exposure. Strive to find directories that don’t require linkbacks to your website for listings, because reciprocal links carry far less weight with search engines than strictly inbound links. One excellent directory service that doesn’t require linkbacks can be found at www.submiturlhere.com. You can find many directories for your website; just make sure they are relevant to your content.

If you have multiple websites or long website URLs, another great tool for you to use is URL redirection. You can get a short, easy to remember and easy to post URL for your website that will sit well with search engines and make it simpler for you to advertise your websites on forums and in e-mail messages and signatures. Free URL redirection tools are available at www.smoothredirect.com. Once you have more experience with URL direction, or if you are already an experienced webmaster looking for more ways to optimize your website, you should consider making use of tools like URL cloaking, path forwarding and frame killers. The website www.kingofurl.com offers free advanced redirection tools without those annoying, visitor-detracting banner ads you want to avoid.

Tracking visitors to your website is another important aspect of running a successful site. You should install a web counter that is invisible to visitors, but allows you to find out where your traffic is coming from so you can concentrate your promotion in effective areas. For example, a good web counter will not only tell you how many hits your website receives, but whether they are new or returning visitors and how they found your website, whether through a directory, a search engine, or an e-mail promotion. You can find free web counters with excellent tracking tools at www.webstatservice.com for your website.

There are many components that figure in to web design and development. Today’s webmaster is fortunate indeed to be able to find free tools for optimization and integration. Make your website interesting, interactive, and accessible to search engines through submissions and directories, and the visitors will come. While you’re designing and developing your site, be sure to bookmark comprehensive web tool repositories such as www.webmasters-cavern.com for easy access to great information. The more you know about web design and development, the easier you will be able to navigate the complexities of the Internet and find cyber-success for your business, informative or entertaining website. Making use of free web tools is a great way to get ahead of the competition!

Praveen owns a number of successful websites including Webmasters Cavern, The Smilies, Submit URL here, and many others.

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