Les, the Photo Webguy

PROMOTING YOUR WEBSITE – SEO BASICS Part III, Keyword Research and Optimization

2011-07-06T22:52:00.001-05:00

Keywords exist in two places on a web page. One place is in metatags. These are tags in the code of the page that are not visible to the visitor but are visible to browsers and search engines. Not all sites use them, and there are metatags for a variety of different purposes. We will focus on two types of metatags – the keyword and description metatags.

Meta tags are tags that are in the code of a website page not visible to site visitors readable by the crawlers that search engines use to index sites. To develop a list of keywords you will think in terms of what someone would type into a search engine to find a business like yours. What are they looking for? What problem are they trying to solve?

Keyword Research

A useful trick is to do searches on keywords in a search engine like google and see what sorts of sites come up. Notice differences in variations. The search “web development” and the search “web development las vegas” bring up totally different kinds of sites. You can also use the Google AdWords Tool here:

Google Adwords Tool

to test different keywords and get data on how many searches are done on those keywords globally and locally as well as related keywords. This has the added benefit of allowing you to download your searches as a CSV file which you can open in a spreadsheet.

Another is to visit your competitor’s and colleagues’ sites and right click on the page and ‘view source’. This will show you the HTML and code that is presenting the page in the browser. Near the top of the code you will look for the keywords meta tag which will look like this (not all sites have these tags);

The keywords shown above are taken from and Italian cooking website. One thing to notice is that some keywords are single words while others are actually phrases (keywords are separated by commas). These phrase keywords are what is referred to as “long tail” keywords. Usually in the process of selecting keywords the single word keyword selections are obvious. But long tail keywords are very beneficial for two reasons. One, there is much less competition on these keywords and more chance they will place you higher in a particular search. Two, they help you appear in searches that are more likely to yield you results if the user clicks through to your site. One example of this is geographical targeting. An auto dealer in Austin, Texas would want keywords like “auto” and “ auto dealer” on their site but it would also be beneficial to include keyword phrases like “central texas auto dealers”, “auto dealers Austin”, “auto dealers in Austin” and so forth.

Keyword Relevance

You don’t want to just stack your web page with keywords that you think will get you good rankings. You want to use keywords that relate to the actual content on your web page/site. This gives them relevance. Put some thought in to this. Start compiling a list of keywords in a document and test them in the search engines seeing what kind of results they produce. You can use any document format. We have found that a spreadsheet works well for this. For starters you will want to compile between 25 and 100 keywords that appear to be of value.

Don’t forget to consider is the fact that keywords exist on every page of your website. You can adjust the keywords on each page to be relevant to that page. In compiling your document you will want to have a separate section or page for each page on your website. Using page-specific keywords will improve your rankings and will also help people find what they are looking for on your website that much faster in many cases.

Keyword Selection

Once you have your keywords you will want to pick the ones you are going to use for a start. It is a good idea to keep it down to between 25 and 50 keywords per page. Beyond that search engines tend to penalize for “keyword stacking”. Put the keywords in to the keyword metatags on your web pages or if you are using a CMS there is usually an interface in the back end to enter this information. Now you will want to give it some time and watch your analytics to see which keywords are producing results. We usually recommend an initial 90 day watch/evaluate/update cycle. Once you have had time to get results your analytics will show you which keywords, both on and off your page, are yielding results. You can use this information to eliminate dead weight keywords and to find new keywords to try. Be sure and give them time to work. This is the reason we recommend the 90 day cycle for most websites.

Description Tag

The other tag we mentioned is the description tag. This tag gives a summary of what your web page or website content contains. This is an important tag because it is used in the results returned by search engines. It appears in the little paragraph below the link in the results listing. Carefully crafting this summary not only helps build relevance but can also be used to encourage the user to click on your link. The description can be as long as you want; the trick is to put as much pertinent information in the first sentence or two so that it will appear in search results. Usually in the content on the page there is a summary you can draw from to create your description. This practice also improves relevance.

Keywords in Content

This brings us to the other place on your website that contains keywords – page content. You will want to check the copy on your website to make sure you are using keywords in your copy. One thing you want to avoid is keyword stacking in your copy. You want to write your copy for humans not for robots. Obvious keyword stacking in the copy on the page will also count against you with the search engines at some point. Other areas to use keywords are:

In your page titles.
In the headings in your copy.
In the alt and title tags of your images and links.

You now have the second part of your SEO foundation started. In the next article we will explore content a little more in depth both in terms of SEO and also in terms of the user experience and marketing effectiveness.

Addendum – Published Recommendations for Better Search Engine Rankings.

From Yahoo! Webmaster Guidelines.

Many factors influence whether a particular web site appears in Web Search results and where it falls in the ranking.

These factors can include:

The number of other sites linking to it
The content of the pages
The updates made to indices
The testing of new product versions
The discovery of additional sites
Changes to the search algorithm – and other factors

Bing engineers at Microsoft recommend the following to get better rankings in their search engine:

In the visible page text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your site.
Limit all pages to a reasonable size. We recommend one topic per page. An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 kb.
Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text link.
Don’t put the text that you want indexed inside images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo.

Google recommends the following to get better rankings in their search engine:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as cloaking.
Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

PROMOTING YOUR WEBSITE – SEO BASICS Part III, Keyword Research and Optimization

2011-07-06T12:32:00.001-05:00

Google Adwords Tool

Another factor to consider is the fact that keywords exist on every page of your website. You can adjust the keywords on each page to be relevant to that page. In compiling your document you will want to have a separate section or page for each page on your website. Using page-specific keywords will improve your rankings and will also help people find what they are looking for on your website that much faster in many cases.

In your page titles.
In the headings in your copy.
In the alt and title tags of your images and links.

Addendum – Published Recommendations for Better Search Engine Rankings.

From Yahoo! Webmaster Guidelines.

Many factors influence whether a particular web site appears in Web Search results and where it falls in the ranking.

These factors can include:

The number of other sites linking to it
The content of the pages
The updates made to indicies
The testing of new product versions
The discovery of additional sites
Changes to the search algorithm – and other factors

Bing engineers at Microsoft recommend the following to get better rankings in their search engine:

In the visible page text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your site.
Limit all pages to a reasonable size. We recommend one topic per page. An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 kb.
Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text link.
Don’t put the text that you want indexed inside images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo.

Google recommends the following to get better rankings in their search engine:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as cloaking.
Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

PROMOTING YOUR WEBSITE – SEO BASICS Part II, Search Engines and Keywords

2011-06-28T13:15:00.001-05:00

The term SEO is a general technical term that is thrown around quite a bit. The letters stand for Search Engine Optimization. The term is often used in reference to specific practices, but what Search Engine Optimization is in reality is a process. It has many parts and often they are intertwined. In Part I of this series we covered preparing your SEO foundation by setting up analytics to evaluate your website’s performance on the web and starting the process of getting your site indexed by the major search engines. In this article I will quickly cover the concepts behind search engines and keywords.

First, a little bit about how search engines operate. When a user types something into the entry field of a search engine, the word or phrase that they type in and submit is called a search engine query. Think of it as a request to the search engine. The words or phrases that make up that query then become keywords.

Once the user has entered and submitted the query the search engine must look through literally billions of documents to return results. In doing so it filters results and returns them according to their “relevance” to the search query and ranks them according to “importance”. The goal of SEO is to influence both relevance and importance.

What relevance means to a search engine means more than simply having a page with the words searched for prominently displayed. The search engine engineers have worked hard over the years to produce mathematical formulas so that the search engine will return results that the users will appreciate and enjoy. Many factors influence relevance and we will discuss many of these as we move along.

Importance refers to the perceived value of the result. This usually boils down to popularity – the more popular a web destination is the more valuable the information it contains must be. This is not determined manually - it would be impossible to do this in a timely manner. Instead, the search engine engineers have written mathematical equations to sort through all the data in their index and filter them according to this importance. These formulas take in to account hundreds of factors which are referred to as Search Engine Ranking Factors. The good news is that in order to influence your ranking and results in search engines you will find success by focusing on a dozen or so of these factors. A focused, methodical approach adhering to best practice guidelines published on the web makes the job suddenly manageable.

This is starting to look like it might be a lot of work, it will be. You may ask yourself, “Is this going to be worth the effort?” I can’t really answer that question for you, but I can point out several key points:

Search is very popular, reaching practically every online American, and billions of people around the world. Currently a majority of purchases begin with a web search.
Being listed in the first few results is critical to visibility
Being listed at the top of results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company/website.
A lot of offline economic activity is driven by searches on the web.

Once you have decided to do keyword optimization your first step is to find keywords that will work for you and produce the desired results. We will cover the basics of keyword research in Part 3.

If you decide to have a professional handle your SEO for you, you are now equipped with knowledge that will help you understand the concept and process. This will help you make decisions regarding who to hire and how to work with them. One thing I would recommend is having them show you the successful results of previous projects and provide references. Beware anyone trying to sell you a shortcut to make you #1 on Google overnight and such. Remember, good SEO is a process.

PROMOTING YOUR WEBSITE – SEO BASICS Part I, The Foundation

2011-06-17T02:58:00.000-05:00

Your shiny new website is online and live – all you need to do now is get people to find it. Of course you should remember to do the obvious right away. Make sure your web address is on your business card, printed material and any advertising you do. Use it on signage where appropriate. When you do put it on signs make it big enough to be seen from a distance. This is not an afterthought. Web addresses are often easier to remember than phone numbers.

Next comes the scary part - Search Engine Optimization. So much talk is bandied about on the term SEO and much of it makes it seem like so much voodoo. It’s like you have to be some sort of technical expert or wizard to make it work. The truth is Search Engine Optimization is a many-faceted process. Let me emphasize that last word, process – meaning ongoing. The good news is that there are certain essential foundation steps you can take to improve your website’s optimization immediately. These steps form the foundation for further improvement and tweaking. Follow these steps and you will see a significant improvement in your website’s traffic in 30-90 days.

If you are in business you know how important it is to be able to evaluate the results of your efforts. In order to do this with your website you will need statistics on your website visitors and search engine rankings. This is known as analytics. There are many tools available for this. I recommend the use of Google Analytics. It is free, you just have to sign up for a free Google account and you can get your own analytics account and track as many of your own websites as you like. It will provide you with detailed information on your site’s traffic and performance. Once you have a Google analytics account, log in to your account and copy the tracking code using cut and paste. You can paste it in to notepad and save it somewhere on your computer where you can access it easily. This code will be pasted onto your website pages for tracking. If you are using a blogging platform or a CMS like Joomla or Kentico you have a way to enter this code using the backend interface. Once the code is on your web sites pages (you want the code on every page you want indexed) in a short time you will see the status column in your Analytics account display an green checkmark indicating that your site is verified and being tracked.

Once you have your analytics in place the next step I recommend is signing up for a Google Webmaster Tools account and add your site to that. After you have added your site you will need to verify it. You will be given several choices for this, and instructions for each. You will also want to add a sitemap to your website and submit it to Google through Google Webmaster Tools. Again, if you are using a blogging or CMS platform a sitemap function may already be included or you can easily add it with a plug-in. One of the advantages of these types of setups is that they automatically update your sitemap for you when your content changes. If your site does not create one automatically there is an online service that will create one for you. Just go to this website http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/ and enter your website’s URL (web address) and it will generate one for you. You can then cut and paste it into Notepad (don’t use Word or any other word processing program, it will mess up the formatting) and save it as sitemap.xml. Then you will want to get it uploaded to your web host in what is called the root of your website. Once that is done you can add the site in your Google Webmaster Tools account and verify the site using your Google Analytics account and then you can submit the address of your sitemap in the form. If you have doubts about the address of your sitemap just enter the address in a browser. It will display in the browser if you have it right. If it is in the root the address will look like this http://<yourdomain>/sitemap.xml. It can take a while for Google to download your sitemap but once they do in your Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard you will have a report of the pages that were indexed as well as other important data on your site. If you manually created and uploaded a sitemap to your website you will need to be sure and update it whenever you add or remove pages from your website.

You will also want to add your site to the Bing search index. The easiest way to do this is to go to http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/ get a Windows Live ID if you don’t already have one and sign in. Click on Add Site and put in the address of your website. You will also need to verify your site for Bing and once you have submitted the site you will be given two choices to verify it and directions on how to accomplish this. It typically takes three days for any data to show up.

Now that you have analytics going and a sitemap submitted to get you indexed on Google and Bing you will want to register on other indexes. An important directory that a lot of people don’t know about is DMOZ. This is a free directory that a lot of search engines, including OL Search, Google, Netscape Search, Yahoo Search, and hundreds of other sites use. Just go to their website http://www.dmoz.org/ and click on ‘suggest url’ and there will be directions to walk you through submitting your site’s URL to the directory. Once your site has been accepted into the Open Directory, it may take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months for your site to be listed on partner sites which use the Open Directory data.

You can submit your site to Yahoo! Search for free by going to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit . It will require the creation of a Yahoo! Account. It may take several weeks for the site to be crawled. If you have a blog you can also submit your site’s RSS feed. Yahoo also has paid submission options which will guarantee quick submission in to the directory. For more information on these visit - https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/ . I usually recommend using the free solutions first and move on to paid solutions later if you need to.

Whatever you do, do not try services or software products that promise to submit your site to hundreds of search engines, generate thousands of links or something to that effect – unless you really like getting hundreds of junk emails a day. They will also list you on spam lists.

You have now laid the foundation for making sure that your site is “seen” by the major search engines which drive most of the traffic on the web. It’s a bit of work, but will pay great dividends. Any further SEO work you do from here on out will benefit from having taken these steps. The next layer of SEO is keywords and content. We will cover this as well as some basic search engine theory in the Part II.

Avoiding Spending More Than Necessary on a Web Site

2011-04-20T16:29:00.000-05:00

We’ve all heard the phrase, “ work smarter not harder.” Well the issue I am going to address here is spending for your business. Specifically, spending money on a website for your business. The key phrase here is “spend smarter, not more” and this is going to require a little work on your part. It has pretty much become a given these days that every business should have a website. It helps you look established and it helps build your brand identity. Important also is the fact that one of the first things people do when considering a new purchase these days is do some research on the internet. If your competitors are online and you are not you could be losing a lot of business to them.
One thing I’ve learned in all my years of web development is that most people have no idea what a good website should cost them. I’ve seen the costs run the gamut from $150.00 to tens of thousands of dollars. There are a lot of variables. I’ll tell you right now that I can’t tell you what a website should cost you, there are just too many variable and no one-size-fits-all solution. I will tell you that I know that if you do your homework and make a plan, having the website of your dreams won’t cost you any more than is has to. And, the process of getting it going won’t be completely daunting. The good news is, you won’t need to become an expert at HTML or webhosting or programming. You are already the expert- on your business.
I have heard many disheartening stories from people who come to me, almost defeated, with tales of months of time wasted and dollars spent to end up with a very disappointing web site that yielded no results. Some of these people never got their web sites finished. Either because a designer flaked on them or they got too busy or used up their whole budget before it was finished.
The biggest mistake most people make is approaching a web designer or web development company without a clear idea of how a web site is going to work for them. There are a couple of problems with this. Most designers you go to won’t take the time to know your business really well and will be focused only on the visual design aspects of your website. What a lot of people end up with is spending money on a website that looks great but doesn’t produce much in the way of results. Usually since it did not give immediate results it lost priority with the business owner and is abandoned and neglected.
Web development firms can give you more help along these lines, but if you walk in not having a clear plan of how your website will work for your business they will have to charge you for all the time they spend helping you figure that out. I am not saying that you should not use a web designer or a web development firm. What I am saying is that if you take the time to work up a plan you will get better results for less money. There will not be any surprises in terms of what gets budgeted and what is actually spend to finish the project.
If you make a good plan, it is entirely possible to get a decent web site going for little or no money that will work for most small businesses or even non-profits and community groups. You can do this without becoming a technical wizard or an HTML ninja. The most important part is your plan. Since you know your business and your goals better than anyone you are the most qualified person to make that plan.
As you begin your website plan and start to move forward you will need to keep in mind a few key points that only you can determine:
· Your Goals for your website.
· Your target audience.
· Your key message
· How people will find you.
· Things that make you stand out from you competition.
Your Goals for your Website
Starting with your goals for your website. What do you want your website to do? Or, more specifically, what do you want your visitors to do when they visit your web site? Some people may want to sell a product line on their website. Someone may want to promote their professional services as an independent contractor. A merchant with a brick and mortar store will want to drive traffic to their business.
Your Target Audience and Key Message – Standing Out
Once you have decided on your goals for your website you will want to define your target audience and this in turn will influence your key message. For instance, if you had a high end restaurant to promote you won’t talk about how cheap dining in your restaurant is or special cheap deals all the time. You will want to talk about the quality of ingredients, your atmosphere, wine list , and possibly your chef’s credentials. Once again, think “What’s in it for me?”, from the visitor’s perspective. This will help you decide on points that separate you from the rest of the competition.
How People Will Find You
In writing your content you want to think about how people will find you. With search engines you want to think about the terms people are most likely to use in a search for your particular type of business. Incorporating these key terms into your website copy will help you with search engines.
One thing you will notice as you move through this process. It is described as a series of steps, but the steps are all interlocking, dependant on each other. So don’t worry if it feels like you are a little out of order or if you have to go back over parts to adjust them.
If you looking to start a website or even revamp your old one these steps will be a tremendous help to your success. I will soon be publishing a report “5 STEPS TO CREATING A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS WEBSITE” that will outline step by step techniques for the whole process.
You can sign up to receive a special offer on the report the day it is published by going here
In my next post I will go in to more detail on developing content for your website. Stay tuned….

Promoting Your Website–SEO Basics

2011-03-08T10:45:00.007-06:00

(Editors Note: This is an excerpt from my 20 page report,"5 Steps to Building a Successful Website" available here for download - see sidebar.)
Your new website is up and live online – all you need to do now is get people to find it. Of course you should remember to do the obvious right away. Make sure your web address is on your business card, printed material and any advertising you do. Use it on signage where appropriate.

At this point you will want to do a couple of things that will help you prepare for the next steps on the web – promoting and optimizing your website.

In order to evaluate your efforts and the effectiveness of the site you will need statistics on your website visitors. This is known as analytics. I recommend Google Analytics. It is free, you just have to sign up for a free Google account and you can get your own analytics account and track as many of your own websites as you like. You will need to get a Google analytics account. Log in to your account and copy the code using cut and paste. This code will be pasted onto your website pages for tracking. Most of the solutions I mentioned earlier have a way for you to enter the code using the backend interface. You will also need to verify the site; you are given several options for this. We’ll cover this in more detail below. For now, just sign up for your account so you will be ready.

In order to use social media to promote your website you will want to have an account on each of the social media sites you plan to use. A couple of the very popular ones are Facebook and Twitter. Go ahead and get your accounts set up.

If your business is established and has a physical location you may already be listed in Facebook’s Places. Do a search on Facebook and see if this is so. If you find your business you can claim it and it will be transformed in to a Page for your business.

The next step is to do a little Search Engine Optimization. I mentioned above a Google Analytics account. Once you have your code in place and your page verified you will start receiving detailed analytics on visitors to your site. Later on you will evaluate these and tweak your SEO to improve your results. These will help you know what is working and what is not.

Promoting Your Website

Meta Tags and Keywords

Meta tags are tags that are in the head of a website page that are not visible to site visitors but are readable by the crawlers that search engines use to index sites. The two most important Meta Tags are Description and Keywords. To develop a list of keywords you will think in terms of what someone would type in to a search engine to find a business like yours. A useful trick is to do searches on keywords in a search engine like google and see what sorts of sites come up. Another is to visit you competitor’s sites and right click on the page and ‘view source’. This will show you the HTML and code that is presenting the page in the browser. You will look for the keywords meta tag which will look like this;
<meta name="keywords" content="Italian cooking italian recipes italian food italian style easy italian recipes cooking italian meals italian meals italian cooking italian pasta italian meats italian wines holiday meals italian desserts gelato bruschetta">

You can start to compile a list of keywords by visiting various sites. You can save them in a typed list or type them in to a word processing document or spreadsheet. When you are ready to pick keywords for your site you will want to limit your list to 25 keywords or so – 50 at the most. Search engines will penalize you for ‘keyword stacking’. There is also a factor called ‘relevance’, in other words search engines will grade sites based on whether their keywords are relevant to their content. If you have done a good job of writing your copy some of your keywords will actually appear in your website copy. If not, you may consider re-evaluating your copy and seeing if you can include some keywords or phrases in the content. Remember though, your content is for humans, not robots – don’t get carried away. Best practice is to optimize keywords for each page on your site. I know this can sound overwhelming, but it is an important step. The good news is you don’t have to do it all at once. If you can come up with 10 good keywords for each page that is a good start. Then, over time you can evaluate your analytics and see which keywords are working best and get ideas for adding and removing keywords. Also, don’t forget about keywords specific to your area, state or town as some people try to narrow their searches geographically.

The other important Meta tag is “description”. This basically contains a summary of what your page is about and will vary for each page. I have found that if I have written my content well somewhere on each page will be a summary that I can lift and paste in to my “description” Meta tag. This tag will look like this.

<meta name="description" content="Italian cooking is among the world's richest and most varied, with dishes perfect for every occasion, from the quick late night snack (spaghetti aglio e olio) to the romantic occasion (scampi alla busara) and the festive family meal (lasagna). Here you'll find hundreds of Italian recipes for every occasion, as well as advice on equipment, techniques, ingredients, wines, and more.">

Once you have these in place for each of your pages you have made a huge step towards drawing traffic to your site. It typically takes 90 days for these to really take hold on the web, but there are ways to speed this up a bit.

Social Networking

Next you can plan to make posts on your social networking pages. For this you will want to get a free account with bit.ly or some other url shortener that provides statistics on clicks. I like bit.ly because it allows me to customize my links so I can shorten the same link differently for different campaigns and keep track of how effective a certain post was and what kind of interest if generated. Bit.ly also allows me to share directly from their site so I can shorten my link and then tweet an announcement with it all at once.

The process works like this. You have something on your website you want people to see or act on. A sale or event or perhaps you just want to announce you new website. You grab the url to the page you want the visitor to land on, go to bit.ly and shorten it for your campaign and then write a post with the link in it. You can really have some fun with this on Facebook by using clever headlines and copy to grab peoples’ attention. You can even include pictures and videos. If you are consistent about doing this you can build a following and drive traffic to your site. Other strategies are to post links to content, information about your business or industry and include a link to your site in the post. You can also put a like button on your site for visitors who come there from other sources to connect to your facebook page.

I feel Twitter works best for promoting events or keeping a client base updated on your business and services. It is possible to include a Twitter follow button on your site and even a feed of your tweets.

One thing that can also help is videos on YouTube (yes, this is actually a social network). These can easily be embedded on your site. Most people don’t know this but YouTube is the third most used search engine on the web. A good strategy is to create your own YouTube Channel and post your videos there making sure to put a link to your website in the description. Then you can embed the videos in your website for interesting content.

Email Marketing

This is a very powerful way, done properly to drive quality traffic to your site. The real trick is building a good list. I recommend that businesses and organizations use a managed mailing list service like MailChimp or Constant Contact. The advantages are:

· Good looking email templates that help you build your business image.

· Easy list management – including sign up forms.

· Analytics on the results of your mailings, though you have to take these with a grain of salt – they are not 100% accurate. They will give you a good ballpark idea of how you are doing.

Ways you can build your list:

· Have people sign up at your place of business. Capture their email address on paperwork when you can.

· Be sure and have a sign up form on your website. The upper right area of the page body (below the header) is a hot spot for this.

· Post on Facebook to get people to sign up, offer an incentive like a coupon or an informative newsletter or have a contest.

· If you are selling online incorporate all of your customer’s emails in your list and keep in touch with them.

One thing you want to make sure of is that you don’t send people spam. Another good thing about managed mailing list services is that the emails include an opt-out link for anyone who decides they don’t want to be on your list. Even if someone signed up for you list if they change their mind and can’t get off your list they will perceive you email as spam. If you don’t use a managed email list you can manage this by putting something like this at the bottom of our emails, after the signature-“If you wish to be removed from this list simply reply to this email and put ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject field”. Then when you get those emails delete them from you list.

You can actually get creative and have a lot of fun with an email list. Let a little of your personality show through. This will help make it engaging and personal for your subscribers. Using interesting subject lines that will grab people’s attention will help your open rate and therefore your response rate. Most of all, try to be consistent in timing your mailings. Monthly or quarterly works well. More often than that is good only if there is really a lot going on in your business. For greater frequency you can use social media. Oh yeah, and you can put content from your emails in your social posts with links to your list sign-up.

One last email strategy I will discuss is one that works well if you don’t want to use a managed list service or even if you do. This involves having your announcement or newsletter as a page on your website and sending out emails with a summary of the message or content and a link to that page. This page on your website is an example of what is known in the industry as a “landing page”. This works particularly well if you want to use a lot of graphics as it won’t make your emails huge and it drives traffic right to your site. Writing a good excerpt or “teaser” in the email to entice them to click through to read the rest is good. Cliffhangers are great for this. Make sure and link to places in your site in the content of your email. For instance if you are making an announcement about a new product or service you can use a summary or description in the landing page and link to the page on your site specific to that product or service and hopefully there they can take some action and you have a conversion. There is a lot you can do with landing pages, but that is the subject of a whole other report.

Search Indexes

This is a very important step. I left it for last because it works best once you have all the other pieces in place. This is also a step that most people leave out. That is registering your site on search indexes. For Google signing up for Google Webmaster tools and registering a sitemap will get your site indexed. Some website solutions automatically create this sitemap and update it as your content grows and changes. You just have to point to it when you register it. A sitemap is basically an xml (text) file that lists all the content nodes on your site. Once you create one you need to keep it up to date. Opening the sitemap in a browser or in notepad to scan it will give you a good idea of when you need to update it based on changes you make. If your site does not create one automatically there is an online service that will create one for you. Just go to this website http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/ and enter your website’s URL (web address) and it will generate one for you. You can then cut and paste it into Notepad (don’t use Word or any other word processing progam, it will mess up the formatting) and save it as sitemap.xml. Then you will want to get it uploaded to your webserver in what is called the root of your website. Once that is done you can add the site in your Google Webmaster Tools account and verify the site using your Google Analytics account and then you can submit the address of your sitemap in the form. If you have doubts about the address of your sitemap just enter it in a browser. It will display in the browser if you have it right. If it is in the root the address will look like this http://<yourdomain>/sitemap.xml . It can take a while for Google to download your sitemap but once they do in your Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard you will have a report of the pages that were indexed.

Another important directory that a lot of people don’t know about is DMOZ. This is a free directory that a lot of search engines, including OL Search, Google, Netscape Search, Yahoo Search, and hundreds of other sites, use. Just go to their website http://www.dmoz.org/ and click on ‘suggest url’ and there will be directions to walk you through submitting your sites URL to the directory. Once your site has been accepted into the Open Directory, it may take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months for your site to be listed on partner sites which use the Open Directory data.

You can submit your site to Yahoo! Search for free by going to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit . It will require the creation of a Yahoo! Account. It may take several weeks for the site to be crawled. If you have a blog you can also submit your site’s RSS feed. Yahoo also has paid submission options which will guarantee quick submission in to the directory. For more information on these visit - https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/ .

This covers the big ones. Getting listed in all of these will over time help your site place well in search results. It will take about 90 days to really see results from this, but you will see a difference.
Do not try services or software products that promise to submit your site to hundreds of search engines, or something to that effect – unless you really like getting hundreds of junk emails a day. They will also list you on spam lists.
(In my next post I will publish an excerpt on ongoing optimization of your website - stay tuned, or better yet, subscribe.)

Managing Content–Manage What?

2011-02-18T17:29:00.004-06:00

There is a lot of talk on the web about Content Development and managing content for web sites. But what exactly are these people talking about?

It has been my experience working with clients building websites that detailed thinking about content is sort of an afterthought. Oh sure, they have some idea what they want to say and what they want the website to do, but they haven’t worked out any content management strategy in detail. Content Development is one of the latest buzzwords in the internet and web development community. Sounds mysterious and expensive doesn’t it? But there is really no voodoo involved. Simply put, the major work of creating a successful business web site has very little to do with programming or design work. Essential to the success of every web site is the task of organizing and presenting information – and then getting people to act on it. Organizing your content is very important, but it does not have to be complicated. As a matter of fact, the less complicated the better. If you take the time to outline your goals and the information you want to present, creating some basic content – then having a professional editor polish it up comes very reasonably. And being the expert on your own business you are the most qualified person to do it.

First off let us define content in this context. Content is what your website says – its message. This is composed of copy (text), graphics, photos, videos and downloadable documents. In my last post Avoiding Spending More Than Necessary on a Web Site I talked about defining the goals for your website and also deciding on your target audience for your website. These will define the ideas that will drive content for your web site. It is important that you give this consideration before moving forward.

Now, chances are if you own an existing business you already have content in the form of catalogs, price lists, brochures, flyers, business cards, signage and other printed collateral. You may also have photographs that you can use in promoting your business. You may even have video. Text that has been used in emails can also be helpful. The next step once you have defined your Key Message and Target Audience is to do an inventory of your existing content. Gather up samples and make a list. Catalog and evaluate photographs, video, audio and other media. Once you have an inventory you have something to build from. This will also help make sure that your message is consistent in all media as you move forward. If changes need to be made to fine hone your message you can make sure they are carried out across the board. Taking the time to do this step now will save time and frustration in the future and will help yield better results.

In developing content for a web site there are several considerations. Unlike other static media a website offers an opportunity for interaction with your visitors. This interaction can take many forms. By having goals defined for your website you have narrowed down the desired results of those interactions. You can now develop content to hold the visitor’s interest and guide them towards the desired result.

Another consideration is optimizing your content for Search Engines. The main point here is to make the content relevant to people who will be searching for businesses, products or services like yours. This will not only help people find your web site, but it will help the right people – people who will appreciate what you have to offer and act on it, find your website. Search engine optimization is a separate topic, but having good content is part of the basis.

People look at websites differently than they do printed material. Visitors don’t actually read on websites as much as they scan. So your information should be broken down in bite size chunks; short paragraphs, bulleted lists, calls to action. Keeping visual clutter down to a minimum on your web pages will help the visitor find information and act on it. As you can see, content development and design should go hand in hand on web sites. When you visit a web site that flows well and easily takes you to the things you need you can bet that some thought went in to the information that was being presented as an integral part of the design process.

How exactly does this work? Believe it or not the early stages of this process are decidedly low-tech. There are different approaches, such as:
*Putting all of your information on cards and laying them out in groups on a table. This way you can move them around and develop a flow.
*Iterative sketches of page content laid out on a table or tacked to a wall. Start with just lists of what should be on each main page and as you refine your ideas break it down to subpages. Then make hand drawn sketches of each page’s visual layout. (examples below)


All Pages – General	Page Detail	Home Page Visual Organization

(Pages start out very general and become more detailed as you move along incorporating content and features.)
As you move through this process you can refer to your content inventory and see where you can plug in bits of content you already have. These processes will also help you see how you will need to adapt your existing content for use on a web page. And, lastly you will be able to see what new content will have to be created.
This is a very general description of the process. It should give you an idea how a little bit of thought and effort can break the job of creating and using really good content for on website down to a manageable size. Hence – Content Management.

Using simple techniques and a little thought you can craft content for your website that will help people find you through search engines, get them the information they need and most importantly get them to act, bringing you the kind of conversions you need to add profit to your business.

In many cases these days the websites I do for my clients are built on a content management system (CMS) which makes it feasible for them to do most of the content maintenance on their own. The usual strategy is we develop a structure for the page hierarchy which gives the content a basic framework. As the build progresses the client gives us initial copy and photos to input and after the launch we train them to add content, consisting of copies and pictures, to the website. This approach works okay. By okay I mean very okay – mediocre. If we are replacing their old website they usually see a slight improvement in traffic and then hit a plateau. Generally speaking, if they are the least bit diligent in keeping the site updated they will see improved interaction and conversions. But almost without exception the results are limited. This is a real shame, considering the potential that having a website presents and the investment that my clients make in having a decent website. I think Content Management Systems are great, but unless you have a strategy for using them, for how you will manage your content, a CMS alone will not be a great help.

I go in to more detail on the process of DYI content development and design in my report “Steps to Building a Successful Business Website”. This report is a good read even if you are planning to hire a professional designer or developer. It can help you prepare for their process and save you time and money. To receive information on getting the report when it is released in March you can go here and sign up for a notification.

How Social Media on the Internet Works

2010-08-15T18:38:00.000-05:00

This is about why social media works and to a certain extent how. I have noticed that a lot of the discussion on social media is focused on technologies and popular applications. That is all fine and well, but it ignores the basic truth as to why social media works. The real reason social media works is that it fulfills a basic human need. We are social animals and we require socialization and social interaction to flourish. In order to get the maximum benefit from the use of social media one needs to recognize this.

The internet has been social from its start. Yes, the core idea behind its architecture was the dissemination of information, but this often ended up occurring between individuals who were identified as such. The early bulletin boards and forums with their posts and commentary relied on a social interaction to keep the discussion alive. There were hierarchies in place from the start, beginning with the moderators. Despite the theories involved there was an emotional component. I have witnessed enough flame wars on forums to know that is the truth.

Fast forward to today and the explosion we have seen in internet connection and participation in the past three to five years. Much of this has been fueled by the social media realm. People are coming to active participation in the internet in droves. First they come for the social connections. They have come to connect and maintain contact with distant friends and families, find dates, follow social trends, make business connections - all social functions. Where once they browsed a couple of sites and emailed friends they now connect on social media sites and share personal news and views and photos and videos. They participate in polls, games and contests. And of course, a popularity factor comes in to play. Or should I say, the perceived popularity factor and all the competition that goes with it. Competition is another human trait manifest here, along with pride in prestige.

Along the way they are exposed to information, either that shared by peers or made available through links, advertising and articles. I believe most folks avail themselves of this information and find it useful. And don't kid yourself, advertising is all about information. You want to inform buyers of your products and services so that they can consider becoming customers. Internet searches for comparison shopping is quickly becoming the de facto first step in a buying decision. And many of these seekers are not just concerned with price. They also want to find if there is a better or more appropriate product available. Reviews and comparisons of almost any product available are there for the viewing on the internet.

The wonderful thing about this for businesses on the internet is that it provides the most immediate mechanism for obtaining results on advertising (conversions)and measuring those results. This is true whether your desired conversion is a lead, a contact or a completed sale. Done properly the internet also has the best ROI of any vehicle available. This is due in part to the low cost entry point for participation and also to the efficacy of the medium. You just need to remember to factor in the time to craft a good campaign and manage it. The only comparably effective tool in recent history is the television sales ad with the 800 call in number and operators standing by. These are not cheap to set up but can be very profitable if you write a good pitch and have a lot of product to move.

Not to say that it is all about commerce. Many causes and community organizations use this to create awareness and to inspire and yes, facilitate action. Many educators and educational institutions have found wonderful ways to operate on the internet. Personally, a lot of my own ongoing self-education has been aided in a big way by the internet. People still come together in user groups and forums to share their interests and accomplishments. They teach each other and share opinion. A lot of the time this leads to them meeting and interacting in person. All much more cost effective than the old methods of mail, phone calls and printed newsletters. I have trouble these days finding people who remember these old ways of keeping organizations connected in any detail, or who have any idea of the amount of labor and effort that was involved, not to mention the cost. All in the past now for all but the biggest and most commercial organizations. Now you can get space on the web (often for free) and by following simple tried and true methods disseminate your ideas to hundreds perhaps even thousands of (hopefully) like-minded people. To me that is an amazing thing and an enormous trans-formative potential.

What does all this mean for businesses and organizations? It means that in order to use social media effectively on the web you need to consider the human social aspect first and foremost in the formulation of your strategy. We are lucky that today we don't have to invent or build a platform on the web to spread our messages. We can find a platform that fits our agenda and mold our strategy to work with that platform. It is not all automatic. It requires planning, work and thought. And your strategy should begin with your content. More about social media strategy in my next post.

Smithville Music Festival Site Chosen in Kentico Contest

2010-04-17T17:37:00.002-05:00

The Smithville Music Festival Website which was developed by S7 Media Design and ported in to Kentico CMS for ASP.NET was named one of the 'Best Sites on Kentico CMS Free Version" by Kentico. As a reward for his efforts, Les Warren received a license for the Ultimate version of the Kentico CMS for the site. This will enable S7 to add further enhancements to the site and lend better marketing support to the Smithville Music Festival.
When the Festival was first conceived as an annual fundraiser for a project in Smithville, Les Warren volunteered his services to develop a web site to help market the Festival. With only 90 days to plan and market the festival a quality web prescence proved to be crucial.
Les Warren worked with other Festival volunteers and designed a logo for the Festival and then created a website design following input from the festival committee.
Once the website was launched Les and the Festival committee got busy on Social Media. A Facebook page and Twitter account were created and committee members started visiting local event sites to comment and submit listings. The hard work seems to have paid off - even though advance online sales were bleak, on the day of the show 1500 tickets were sold to visitors from all over Central Texas. It is believed that the social media campaign and the website were crucial as there was no budget for advertising in other media.
The Festival was a first rate event, featuring headliner Jimmie Vaughan with rare guest perfomances by Hannibal Lokumbe and Lou Ann Barton. Eleven acts in total played the Festival making for a day filled with quality music and entertainment.
The Festival recieved some rave reviews in online blogs including Michael Corcoran's music blog in Austin 360. A pick of these reviews was quickly incorporated on the Festival website to begin promotion of next years Smithville Music Festival.
Looking forward to the 2010 Festival on November 6 the Festival committee and S7 have been busy adding to the website to promote the next show. Added was merchandising of T-shirts and posters on the site, and of course continual news updates on Festival developments. This is all facilitated by the sites being built on Kentico CMS.
Ticket sales will first be announced on Facebook and Twitter in advance of a general public announcement. The Smithville Music Festival currently has hundreds of fans on Facebook and this number is expected to grow as the next show draws nearer. With the new application license S7 Media Design hopes to develop a community portal around the Smithville Music Festival for fans of the festival and the performers playing there. S7 will also be looking for new and better ways to integrate social media with their marketing efforts.
Be sure to visit smithvillemusicfestival.org to see what all the hoopla is about and if you are a fan of music - to become connected to one of the premier musical events in Central Texas. VD3DQP9WN2XE

Porting an HTMLTemplate in to Kentico

2009-12-19T22:41:00.001-06:00

Back in March I published a post entitled 'My Kentico Design Workflow". I did this just to show an example of one designer's workflow with Kentico and the thinking behind it. I have decided to go into a little more detail on this, and actually show how some of the features in Kentico work in a design workflow. I also decided that screencasts would be the best way of doing this.
So I have started a series of screencasts that go over porting an HTML design into Kentico CMS. So far I have three of these screencasts done. I recorded these using Tech Smith's program Jing. I uploaded them to screencast.com. I like their format better than YouTube or Google Video. You can also find these on YouTube.

Part One of the series covers taking a complete HTML design with page code and CSS and creating a Master template while preparing for creation of page templates, navigation ,web part containers and transformations.

Part Two covers preparing the CSS and placing it in Kentico and getting it assigned to your site.

Part Three covers creating the page layout for the inner page templates and adding pages to the site using the layout.

There are three so far and I will have more coming soon. For now I am keeping them brief, under five minutes. I would love to hear what everyone thinks of these as this is a new sort of endeavor for me.

If you like these, stay tuned - there will be more.....

"Hybriding" in Kentico

2009-12-10T00:24:00.000-06:00

In this article I will introduce a new approach I have been using in Kentico configurations. This particular case involves a slider I configured for the LiveAir Networks site. The task seemed pretty straightforward in the web 2.0 world. I wanted to create a billboard banner for a home page that rotated through slides that included photos, graphics text and an action button. Of course, the site is in Kentico CMS and best practices would dictate that the slides be editable and configurable and html text would be nice for SEO. The first option that came to mind was data driven flash. I have done a similar thing with xml datadriven flash - http://tinyurl.com/ycvnpw6 . My problem in this case is that the client wanted to avoid Flash for a variety of reasons. The next option I looked at was one of the really nice sliders available in the MooTools or JQuery library. The problem with this approach would be making it easily editable by the user. After some serious brainstorming I came up with an approach which I will dub"Hybriding". In this approach I used native Kentico Webparts, CSS and Graphics to produce the results. What I am about to explain is how I ended up with the banner that went on the site's home page - http://tinyurl.com/liveair.

[screenshot of page]

The Web part I chose for this task was the Scrolling Text Web part. That may sound confusing, since there are graphics in this configuration. The reason I chose this over the image slider was to have easily editable text. It is possible to configure this control to any size you want, so all I had to work out was getting the photo image and the action button in. I configured the Web part to show the Document type CMSArticle, the reasons for that will become apparent. I knew what size the container had to be so I wrote a Custom Transformation which I named CMS.Article.ScrollingPreview and a Web part container which I named Banner
Slider.

I took a look at the code for the default Article transformation:


 <h1>
<%# Eval("ArticleName") %> </h1>


<%# IfEmpty(Eval("ArticleTeaserImage"), "", "") %>
<%# Eval("ArticleText") %>

Then in the CMS Site Manager I built the new one:



<div style="background: #fff url(<%# GetFileUrl("ArticleTeaserImage") %>) top left no-repeat; height:250px; width:565px;">
<div class="scrollingpreviewtxt">
<h2>
<%# Eval("ArticleName") %></h2>
<p class="content"><%# Eval("ArticleTeaserText") %></p>
</div>
<div class="buttonimg">
<%# Eval("ArticleText") %>
</div>
</div>

As you can see to get the photo graphic in I use an outer div with a background image which I pulled as the Article Teaser Image. I used inline style for this so that I could put the macro in the style - I wasn't sure this would work, but it did. Now the user can edit the image. Of course I had to build special images with white space for the text to fall on to with a nice fade effect. Next comes an inner div to hold the title and text, all of which get their styling from the CSS already in place. The CSS for the transformation is:



/*#Transformations/Scrolling Preview#*/

.scrollingpreviewtxt /*inner div to hold the text*/
{
width:240px; 
height: 220px; 
padding-left: 20px;
}

.buttonimg /*the button*/
{
position:relative;
bottom:10px;
left: 435px;
width: 85px;
height: 30px;
background:transparent url(/App_Themes/liveair/images/reg_button.png) top left no-repeat;
padding-top: 7px;
margin:0;
float:left; 
text-align:center;
font-size: 12px;
font-weight: bold;
}

.buttonimg a, .buttonimg a:hover /*needed to add this to the button hover - it inherited the rest*/
{
font-weight: bold;
}

One sneaky thing I did was using the Teaser text of the Article for the text in the body of the slide and the
Article text for the text in the button, wrapping it in the buttonimg div to make it an action button. Now the
client has a slider that they can edit the text, image and button text on from an easy form interface and easily
add slides from the CMS desk. How cool is that!

To hold it in place and give it a border a simple Web part container containing this div id:



#photobox
{
position:relative;
top: 0;
left: 20px;
width: 565px;
height:250px;
margin: 0;
background:#eeeeee;
border: 2px #cccccc outset;
padding: 0;
float: left;
clear:both;
}

All set!
Later I will do a post on a "hybrid" control using the native Kentico repeater wrapped in some Mootools javascript to create a slider with navigation buttons and text with links, then on to configuring JQuery UI for CMS desk editable tabs populated with articles. Stay tuned!

TWO GREAT UTILITIES FOR WEB BUILDERS - PT 1

2009-04-30T21:56:00.000-05:00

I have previously outlined my general workflow for designing and building websites. I take a pretty "hands-on" approach. This being said I would like to share a couple of powerful utilities that I use on every web project and have found to be invaluable in terms of saving time and keeping the quality of my work high. Both are available in both free and commercial versions. I think knowledge of these could benefit anyone involved in building and/or maintaining websites.

Irfanview - The Great Little Image Utility With the Funny Name

The first tool addresses the issue of image management. The scenario I will address as an example is this one. You have your design, the client gives you a disk or sends you several emails of various pictures to use, usually full size digital camera or scanned images. Now comes the task of re-sizing and optimizing these images to work in the website. If there are a large number of images involved, this is a time consuming and repetitive job that I hate to bill to my clients at full rate. There area number of shortcuts, but they usually yield less than optimal quality and dependability. The solution? Irfanview (pronounced ear-fan-view). The powerful little program with the funny name. Below is a list of some of Irfanviews many functions.

* Many supported file formats (the list is too long to include here.)
* Multi language support
* Thumbnail/preview option
* Paint option - to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
* Toolbar skins option
* Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
* Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
* Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
* Fast directory view (moving through directory)
* Batch conversion (with image processing)
* Multipage TIF editing
* File search
* Email option
* Multimedia player
* Print option
* Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF
* Change color depth
* Scan (batch scan) support
* Cut/crop
* IPTC editing
* Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
* Capturing
* Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
* Lossless JPG rotation
* Unicode support
* Many hotkeys
* Many command line options
* Many PlugIns
* Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like "I Agree" or "Evaluation expired"
* No registry changes without user action/permission!
* and much much more

To be honest I have never found the time to explore all of Irfanview's capabilities,but the ones I have tried worked well. Today I will be discussing using batch processing to take the clients picture files and convert them to use in a website. I create a directory, usually with 'websize' in the name and then open Irfanview. When you first open Irfanview you are presented with a simple user interface, with a screen for single images or movies.

On the file tab in the menu, you select 'Batch Conversion/Rename' or you can just press the B key on your keyboard. You will be presented with the dialog shown below.

Choose a Function - In the top left corner of the dialog you select the function you want to perform. A batch conversion will convert files to a specified format and will also perform other functions in the process; such as resize, optimize, sharpen,watermark, etc. More on that in a moment. Batch rename can rename a group of files and allows the setting of a naming pattern and the ability to serialize the names. This can be handy for making groups of images you use conform to your own naming conventions without having to keep track of doing individual files. It is also real handy for loading gallery applications that load using file names/directories. The last of the three choices combines the first two functions.

Choose Your Files and Output Directory - On the right side of the dialog is where you can navigate to the working directory and choose the files you wish to work on. You can do the selecting and sorting in this dialog or you can just open a folder and select and drag and drop the files you want to work with into the bottom left box on the dialog. To preview files you have added in the box, just select a file and it will appear in the image preview box on the left if you have the Show Preview image box checked. Or you can just press the P key on your keyboard. In this interface you can also move the files around or autosort them by different parameters to get them in order for serializing. By default Irfanview works from top to bottom.

Conversion Settings - On the left, under 'Batch conversion settings' you can set the Output format using the dropdown. Once you have selected your format you can click on the 'Options' button and you will be presented with choices specific to that format (jpeg/gif options shown below).

One of the coolest things here is the ability to set the filesize, using the RIOT plugin and the optimization is set automatically. To add other functions to your you click on the 'Advanced' button below the 'Options' button and you will be presented with the dialog shown below.

This is where the true power of Irfanview starts to show. You have a variety of options for setting resizing, cropping and resolution as well as make tweaks to the pictures. Usually I just use the resizing function, but the quality of adjustments made using this tool are quite high, of pro caliber (see the bottom of this article). When using settings here, pay particular attention to the MISCELLANEOUS choices in the bottom right corner. This controls overwrites and directory writing. You also have an option on the bottom left of this dialog to save settings (as and INI file) and to load settings you have previously saved. Another great time saver!

If you have selected a rename option in the 'Work as' section that will activate the 'Batch rename settings input. You can enter a name and then click on the options button which will show you the various settings you have available. It is all pretty self explanatory. One of my favorite features here is the ability to replace text in a file name - handy for versioning. Other than that, on the file management side, I usually have created a directory for the output and select Copy original/input files to output directory. I imagine most people would make the choice to keep the originals.

This brings us to the final choice in this flow, selecting the output directory. You can choose to input a directory manually (who does that anymore?), use the current directory (default),or Browse to choose your output directory.

With your images all loaded and sorted and all of your output options and your output directory select you are now ready to go. "Start Batch" or the S key on your keyboard and watch Irfanview work. The first time you do this you will be amazed at how fast it is. It reports its output as it goes and lists whether each conversion went okay and it gives a a little summary of files, errors and warnings at the end.

That is basic file conversion on Irfanview. I have used this utility for years and is has saved me untold man hours in putting together web projects. I also do photography and use it for renaming and optimizing proofs, renaming files for submission to editors and other task. As I mentioned before, Irfanview is free for non-commercial use and a license for commercial use is currently only USD $12.00, quite a bargain and well worth it to support Irfan Skiljan in his efforts to continue enhancements and improvements. This utility works on all current versions of windows, even 64 bit Vista. You can obtain Irfanview at http://www.irfanview.com/ .

Example: I have posted a couple of images for you to compare. The first if for the original image, a web image at 114 kb and the second is the same image, resized and optimized with Irfanview to 51k. You can view them in different tabs on your browser to compare or download them for comparison. This will give you and idea of the quality you can get with Irfanview.

Original

Optimized

Next up - JRuler!

My Kentico Design Workflow - An Overview

2009-03-01T19:38:00.000-06:00

I am going to do a quick walk-through of the workflow I use with Kentico,a commercial ASP.NET CMS application. I am primarily a designer, I work with programmers who handle the details of customizing code so the majority of my work is on the look and feel of the UI and the sites. So this will be a designer's view of working with Kentico. For years I have typically built sites with Adobe Photoshop and a text editor. I don't happen to be a big fan of Dreamweaver, but for the last year or so I have done a fair bit of work in Visual Studio 2008.

If you have not worked with Kentico before I would encourage you to download the trial version, you can also get a free license with limited features, though the limits are slight, you might want to get a look at the full feature set. When you install the application there are two very thorough pdf tutorials right in the application directory to get you started. There is also very complete documentation online. The two tutorials will get you through installation and the creation and editing of the site. There are two development paths you can take with Kentico. Portal engine development and ASPX pages development. The workflow I will be discussing is using the portal engine, which is very powerful and flexible, allowing custom CSS and page code, macros and custom macros and even the use of custom webparts and webpart containers.

My usual workflow starts with meeting with the client and discussing the website as a whole, its goals and functions. I take notes and draw sketches on paper during the meetings. I also get the client to supply me with any graphic element files they may have that will be incorporated into the site, such as logos, photos, text copy, etc.. When I think I have enough to go on I sketch up the pages in Adobe Photoshop and do a little back and forth with the client on the design, usually sending png files via email.

After finalizing most of the design decisions and getting a go ahead from the client I take the psd sketches and my favorite text editor, Textpad, and I write the CSS and test the pages in HTML, generating the graphic elements out of the psd file as I go. I check the pages in different browsers to check the CSS. This may seem rather cumbersome to many of you, but I have found that checking my code decisions like this saves a lot of hair pulling later. It also helps me make sure I have all the graphic elements rendered correctly. As an added bonus I get to look at the design in a browser and have the client look at it in a browser, which makes it seem more real to them than the png sketches and I often find little visual tweaks that I can do to make the browser experience better.

As I am writing the CSS and the HTML I comment liberally with Kentico in mind, noting the CSS I will use for webpart containers, where the page place holder and webpart zones will go in the HTML. I also note what goes on the master page and what subordinates to content.

When these bits are done and tested and the client likes where it is going I am ready to load it in to Kentico. There are some choices here, I have done it all different ways depending on the extent of the site and my time frame.

One can develop the site locally using IIs in localhost,or the built-in server in Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer. For the first choice you must have SQL Express installed on your computer for the database. Another choice is to install the pages locally with the web.config pointing to a database on a server. All you have to do to make this work is open up a local install and when you get the install dialog put in the connection information for your remote database. Kentico will write the connection information into the web.config as part of the install process. Then you can work on the site locally, make adjustments to the code when necessary without having to upload the files to test them and when you are done you just upload the files to the server and go live! This last path is a good choice if you plan to pre-compile the site using Visual Studio for better performance and security. There is detailed information on this in the Kentico documentation.

When you develop the site completely on your local box using a local database and you are ready install it on to your server you just do an export of the site, Kentico handles that and zips it up into the export folder in the site utilities folder. Then you install Kentico on the server, setting up the database in the process and upload the export file and import your site into Kentico. It unzips the file, imports all the database objects and sets up the site.

By the way,I found that no matter which route you go, making regular exports of the site as you go along is the best way to back up your work. That way, if something goes terribly wrong you can easily regain you work. It has saved me more than once! It will even save you if you have to scrap your database and start over (yes it's happened to me).

Back to getting the design in to Kentico. When it first starts up it will take you through a site creation wizard. I usually choose a new blank site for the portal engine. As you go through the wizard you can create your initial site structure by creating some blank pages. I usually skip this step and wait until I open it up in the CMS desk. A little tip here, if you should somehow goof with the license and get the message that tells you this you can always access the application by typing http://URLofthesite/sitemanager in the browser to get in to the Site Manager where you can fix these things.

Once I have the install going that I will be working on I make sure to create a folder for the site in the App_Themes directory and upload my page graphics into an images folder there. I use the naming convention of having my site App_Themes folder and CSS stylesheet all have the same name. The next thing is to open up the site in the CMS desk and switch to the CMS Site Manager. I go to the development tab and select CSS stylesheets from the application tree. I create a new stylesheet. I cut and paste my CSS to the stylesheet and save it. I edit the paths to images in the CSS so that they will show up. For images in the App_Themes folder this will follow the format - ./App_Themes/foldername/images/filename. Later I will come back and bookmark sections of the CSS in the CSS editor for easy editing (another cool function of Kentico). After that I return to the CMS desk and and go to the Root in the site tree (the desk generally lands there by default) and begin editing my page. In the portal engine and CMS desk there will be a master page tab when I am on the root node of the site in the site tree (left hand column in the CMS desk). Here is where I take the HTML I generated earlier and cut and paste it in to the Master Page around the content placeholder which will place the content on the pages. I adjust the path of any images placed with HTML. The path from the page follows this format - ~/App_Themes/foldername/images/filename .

Next I start on my home page. When I open it up in the page tab of the CMS desk I will see an empty master page. I switch to the design tab where I will see the location of the page template which is a green bar usually near the top indicating the content where the content placeholder has placed it. You can control the page template used by each page in the properties tab. I usually just use a page template called simple and then I open the template and start editing, again cutting and pasting code and also putting in webpart zones using the simple asp.net markup described in the documentation.

Editing in the Design tab is not completely WYSIWYG but you can switch back and forth between the page tab or even the live site tab to check you work as you go. I have a dual monitor setup and will often just open the site in another browser instance and check it by refreshing as I edit. Don't forget to save before leaving a tab!

The process moves along fairly quickly from here on out. I go through the pages and cut and paste code. I create documents for the various webpart controllers and create the webpart containers I use for the layout. I can create custom transformations to make the controllers look and act as I want them to. In the editable regions I put in some initial content, usually cutting and pasting from documents my client has given me. You can even cut and paste from word docs and the editor will clean it up. I am currently learning about the macros a very powerful feature of Kentico and using that a bit. Generally, from the time I start the install until I have the pages and structure set up for a complete site is an hour or two if I add much content. This is where all the work I did before pays off. I can just concentrate on the Kentico functions without having to fuss about the design. I occasionally have to adjust some margins if I have put something in a webpart zone to replace a div, but other than that it translates in a pretty straightforward manner.

Before long the site is done and I do a delivery meeting with the client. If they are going to be maintaining the content themselves I supply them with a copy of the Kentico CMS Users Guide pdf and give them a little training session walking them through all the different parts and functions of their site. So far, my clients have loved Kentico and I haven't gotten lots of phone calls saying "help me I can't make this work" which tells me Kentico is quite user friendly.

As I said earlier this is just a quick overview of how I personally work with Kentico. I am relatively new to Kentico, but it has worked so well that I try to use it on any project I can. I feel it is a very powerful and robust application. I would love to hear from other developers out there who are working with or who have tried Kentico, to know their various experiences and ideas.

ASP.NET CMS on a Budget

2008-12-29T16:29:00.000-06:00

This is a comparison between two ASP.NET CMS systems that are currently available, based on an experience of mine. But before the comparison, a little background...

The company I have been designing for this year had a client come to us wanting a dynamic website. It was a website for educational resources. We initially decided to try it out on the Umbraco CMS which is what the company's website has been running on.

As we moved into the project we realized that there would have to be a lot of custom coding and thought we might be looking at building something from scratch. I looked at this prospect and at the time frame we had to work in and thought, "There must be a better way". In the meantime we had done the site's design as a static site in ASP.NET. This was my first foray in to ASP.NET and Visual Studio. Looking over the specs to our project I began to do research on ASP.NET CMS packages and was pleased to find that most are very extensible, meaning we could start with one of these, add some code for custom controls and save a lot of time versus building the whole thing from scratch,testing it thoroughly and making it solid. Another thing I found out was that ASP.NET CMS applications can be very expensive to license. I thought if I could find a good affordable (less than $2000.00 a site) CMS solution, I would not only bring this project in within its new budget but I could also develop a workflow for producing really competitive dynamic sites.

On the project at hand among the things the site had to do was sign up members who could upload file resources, i.e. pdfs, Word docs, videos, Powerpoint presentations, and audio files that users could then download for their own use. There had to be an upload for users to upload the files and an interface to edit entries. It needed a specific table sort setup to browse, preview and download the resources. It also needed to have the standard newsletter signup and management capabilities, a Whats New box showing the latest uploads and a countdown to a twice a year webcast event that would be visible on the site. Fortunately most of these bases were covered by standard CMS.

As I looked over ASP.NET CMS offerings I narrowed my choices down to two. Sitefinity, offered by Telerik, maker of the Rad Controls for ASP.NET and Kentico, an offering from a company by the same name. I might also add at this point that another consideration was that the Client was very specific about the look of the site, so I would have to be able to implement the design I had done for the static site exactly.

After an initial evaluation I decided that Sitefinity would be the quickest and easiest to implement. According to the demo video on their site you can load an ASP.NET master page as a template, put in your exact CSS and have the pages look right. Custom controls were a matter of writing the control as an aspx file and uploading it into the controls available in the application. Sounded very doable. You could skin the controls with CSS and skin files. I opted to commit to Sitefinity first because it looked the easiest as Kentico worked off of web parts and seemed to have a steep learning curve.

And so the fun began. For development, Sitefinity worked best as a root install on the development machine using IIs. They had step by step instructions for this on their website, for Vista. My development box had XP Pro, but I didn't think it would be that big a deal. Boy was I wrong. I kid you not, it took me the better part of a week to get an install to work on my XP Pro box. I contacted support a lot and they pointed me to articles on Microsofts sites. I also perused the forums in their support site, mostly to find other people who had been having the same problem. I did find the answers I needed on their forum eventually. In between hair pulling sessions with that I did get an install of a different site working on another box with XP Home using Visual Studio. I did have to tweak the CSS on that one and still haven't gotten it 100% right.

Once I got the install working it was time to fit in the design. That turned out to be not as straightforward as I had anticipated. It turns out Sitefinity interpreted my CSS a little differently. After many hours I was able get everything shoehorned in and working and then it was time to start working with our programmer on the custom controls. We had decided that the resources, that is, the files that were uploaded by users for download should have their own directory and a seperate database. Everything was going along famously, the controls were intergrating into the pages and we were moving along towards a swiftly approaching deadline. Then suddenly, the CMS desk wouldn't work anymore. It would weird out on me and lock up. I thought I must have made an error in some code so I loaded an earlier backup and tried again, three times. Same result. I conferred with support on this, I even sent them copies of the files. They said it was working fine for them, it must be something with my machine. I tested the files on a couple of different machines, but no luck. I never figured out exactly what went wrong, but my guess is that since their CMS desk seems to be controlled mostly by ajax script, it must have been some sort of script collision.

At this point I became sort of frantic. I had committed us to this, used our resources and now the deadline was approaching and the site was broken and I couldn't get any answers. As much as I hated to I thought I better give it a try on Kentico as I had just spent too much time troubleshooting Sitefinity and the last thing we needed was to have this break after we delivered it to the client and not have any answers.

So I did a crash course in Kentico. I was lucky in this respect as the Kentico installation comes with extensive documentation in pdf and chm form and they have forums online. I also contacted support and told them I was building a client site and would be purchasing a license for the site as soon as I showed the client a working prototype. They were very helpful and started responding to my emails and helping me along. The support for Kentico was great. Once I figured out their master page and template format I was able to execute my design perfectly. After getting the hang of it working with Kentico was a pleasure. The learning curve had mostly to do with all the features that this application offers.

We were able to quickly get a working prototype going and showed it to the client. They liked what they saw and we did purchase a license. We continued to add custom controls to our installation and Kentico stayed rock solid. We demoed the site for the client and started working with them on it and they have been pleased with the results. I still have a lot to learn with Kentico, but I believe I have found a solution that will make it possible for me to build large cost-effective dynamic websites for a variety of clients.

As I mentioned before, for this implementation I did not have time to investigate all the cool features Kentico has to offer me. The recently released new version, version 4, has even more cool features. The price has gone up a bit, but they still offer trial and free versions of the application and support is excellent. The company I contract with (LiveAir Networks) has become a Kentico partner and we are building the new company website in version 4 of Kentico CMS. One example of the level of service their support gives, we found out that our hosting company, Mosso, which provides cloud hosting was not compatible with Kentico CMS. We told support at both Mosso and Kentico that it would be great if this changed. Kentico emailed us back and said they were getting with Mosso support on working on the solution. Within 2 weeks they emailed us and sent us a patch that made Kentico work on Mosso and said the next version would work with Mosso natively. Now that is what I call going the extra mile.

I will return to the subject of Kentico in the future and would love to hear from others who have an interest in or experience with Kentico. For more information on Kentico visit kentico.com

From Rock to the Web - A Technophobe's Journey

2008-12-23T02:27:00.001-06:00

I have had a love/hate relationship with personal computers most of my life. For a while I was a computer science major in college. Then I realized that sitting in a cubicle for hours a day hacking code, drinking coffee and grape soda by the liter and eating Fritos was probably going to put me in an early grave. So I ran away and joined a rock band. Became a technophobe. Really, I didn't want to ever have anything to do with computers again.
About two years later, I was out of the band and getting my start in the music business and my mentor, Greg Forest, showed me how the computer could be used as a tool. With his techniques he was doing the work of a whole office full of people by himself. This was 1988 and he was way ahead of the game. He was even doing some digital recording, turning out demos for songwriters. So I got interested in computers again.
At this time I was also doing a little bit of writing for a couple of music publications and through my relationship with editors got some work doing first typing and then layout. We were doing the typeset on computers and then doing a paste up of the layouts. We were doing the computer stuff on Ataris and Macintosh computers (yes the little self contained box). This is where I started learning desktop publishing and graphics.
Along about this time I went through a transitional phase of my life, so I wasn't doing much on computers as I kept moving around, working on the road some and changing jobs pretty often. Oh yeah, I might add that at this point around 1991-92 I still had never owned a personal computer of my own.
I got out of music and in to art. I was doing fine art photography and starting to show some work in galleries while supporting myself working as a restaurant manager and waiter. There were hints on the horizon concerning digital photography but I was into film and the darkroom and I stuck to that. Besides, good digital cameras were really expensive at the time and film would probably be around for at least another century, right?
One pivotal event in my path to the digital world was when I worked an agreement with a fellow in Austin to trade finishing out a cabin in Bastrop County for a year's rent. The cabin was on the edge of some wild woods, but there was a main house on the property that I had access to and it had computers and Internet. In my little escape to the woods I had managed to hook up with the whole world.
This was 1999 and I had heard a lot about the Internet, but had never really done any surfing. I hardly knew what a browser was. I was desperately behind and out of practice on computers but I got really interested in the Internet and started spending a lot of time up at the main house surfing the web, exploring and learning. It was along about this time that I published a calendar of my photos and thought that it would be a really great idea to have my own website, although I had no idea what it would take to make that happen. So I filed the idea away for the time being.
When I got done with the gig at the cabin I moved back in to Austin. My calendar was released at the end of 1999 and that coincided with my move back to town. I bounced around for a while, living with room mates, doing art. A friend of mine loaned me an apple computer he had and I started using it to surf the net, although it was often frustrating since I was on a dial up connection through an external modem. Soon I finally bought a computer of my own. I bought it at a pawn shop for four hundred dollars. It had an AMD K6-2 chip,128 MB of RAM and Windows 98. Adding more memory to this computer was the first of many computer upgrades I would do myself. About the time I made this purchase I also rented a loft/studio in Smithville and prepared to move there. An acquaintance of mine who was a web developer offered to help me out with getting a web site going. Unfortunately, before this was accomplished our relationship soured and that was the end of that although I did get my domain registered. I had no idea what it took to hire someone to do a website. I imagined it was pretty expensive. I had a free webspace with my dial up ISP so I created a little web page there. Then I found out about Dreamweaver and how you could download a free thirty day trial. So I downloaded it and started figuring out how to build a website. This would be version 1 of leswarren.com. I had Paint Shop Pro for the graphics, which I kept pretty simple. It was a frames based site with a basic black and white scheme. The Dreamweaver trial ran out, so I started learning to code by hand. Soon I was able to cobble pages together in a text editor. I still don't use Dreamweaver much.
Not long after this I was doing a photo shoot for a caterer who said they needed photos for a website and a brochure. As always with these local jobs I asked who would be doing the design and printing for the brochure. They said they didn't have anybody yet. As providence would have it, I had recently come in to some money from an insurance settlement and had used some of the money to buy good graphics programs, Pagemaker being one of them. I asked the caterer if they wanted to give me a shot at the brochure and the website. I convinced them that it would be a whole lot simpler to have one person handle everything and besides, I would take some of my payment in trade. I was able to complete both the brochure and a simple website satisfactorily and give my girlfriend an amazing catered dinner for Valentine's Day. Little did I know it, but I had started a new career path. It would take years to open up fully, but the work had begun.
I started practicing and studying in earnest. There were and still are a lot of resources on the web. I started learning about javascript and dhtml. My next job I traded a website for a van. It was a little more advanced with javascript slide shows and stylized navigation with image swaps. I also improved my own site. It would be years yet before I left my restaurant job and went full time. All that time I studied and improved. At some point I took some part time work in a commercial photography studio to learn digital workflow. Then I bought a digital camera. That camera paid for itself the first week I had it. I started studying Photoshop and how to work with digital photos and I must say, that is one of the hardest things I have ever learned. But I eventually became an expert, which not only helped me make a little money at photography but also helped a lot with websites. I put Linux on my computer and learned how to bash around in servers. I eventually had to replace my computer. And so the progression went.
Now I am a full time freelancer. I do graphic design and web development. I now work on big dynamic sites, usually working with programmers. I also do some photography. I live in a small town so I have to diversify to keep going. I still have to study continuously to expand my skills. Besides just the technical stuff I have had to learn about web strategies and how to make websites work for my clients. I don't anticipate ever being able to do this without doing a lot of homework to keep up. But thanks to the web and a lot of individuals who are willing to share their expertise and experience the knowledge is accessible. And I know I am not the only one who has learned this way. You might say the web is self-propagating.

Welcome to My World (Blog)

2008-12-22T22:33:00.000-06:00

Once again I begin anew my Blog. I began a blog a few months ago on my site leswarren.com but in the ensuing migration of my site to a different server the blog got lost. Or should I say, lost track of. At any rate here I am again and will soon be attempting to bring you some interesting and insightful blogging on a variety of topics including; web development and design, art, photography and strange politik. I hope this proves to be a fruitful venture for all involved.