I had my web site done before by a customer, we did it kinda quick & it never really came out the way I wanted. I really need to change and update it soon.

The guy doesn't do it anymore and I wanted to actually do it myself this time.

So I am asking any of you talented web gurus what would you suggest is the best software or books to learn how to do this?

And do I have to learn 6 months of code and read a whole library of books just to get a good lookng site?

Thanks in Advance

After about 25 sites under my belt and I'd guess about 1000+ hours of time into them, I'm finally fairly competent in using them!

But then again, I'm a slow learner!

Like making signs, its not just a matter of buying the software or tools to make them. There's a whole logic behind the building of them - thats where it takes a lot of experience to produce a nice, functionally cohesive site.

And its not just building a site which you need to know how to do - its marketing the site as well.

Perhaps a class on web programming might be a place to start.

Good luck!

By the way, Bob - I checked out your current site - I thought it looked good! It definetely looked professional!

Dan

[ October 21, 2001: Message edited by: Dan Antonelli ]

Macromedia Dreamweaver is a good web authoring program, you dont need to learn any code at all to use it, but sometimes it helps to know a little.

If you need a book for it, I recommend one called "The Dreamweaver Bible". I have this one stashed away in the closet for reference, it's a good book, I just haven't had to use it much cause Dreamweaver is pretty straightforward.

I'd recommend a layout software that has an active users support group. Those folks (like these BB folks) can save your butt when you run into hair-pulling situations.

I just checked out our site on "infoseek/Go.com" by typing in "Signs Ontario" (since I am really more interested in jobs that are in the province)..we came up #19.

I did the same thing on Yahoo and came up #2.

I haven't tried all the other search engines we are registered with.

BUT!!!!

Regarding meta tags and keywords, in researching competing websites I have found some of them at very high spots in the search engines (top 5) do not even use keywords or meta tags. The key is to make the text content of your web page include the words which people would type into the search engines when looking for what you do, or the products you make/sell.

Defining keywords and meta tags behind the scenes in html won't hurt your ranking as long as you don't have a zillion words listed there that you do not have on your web page text.

This is what is known as relevancy. Search engines analyze content (text) and determine if it's actually relevant to the phrase or word searched, based on the percentages of the searched for words or phrases showing up in the web page text and headings and title.

If I load up my meta keywords with 100 types of signs, but on the web page itself I only mention two or three types of signs that are listed in the keywords, some search engines may penalize or toss out my submission to their search engines because it's "keyword weighted". Also,since "sex" or sex related words like "porn" is the number one searched word on the internet, if I put all kinds of descriptions of smut in my keywords but my site is about signs, it will probably get my site rejected from the search engines because it's not relevant.

On the other hand, if I have no keywords, or just a few main ones, but my content mentions words and phrases that most people search for, and those words and phrases are relevant to what my site is about, I will get higher placement because the keywords mentioned in my text (not in the html code) form an important percentage of the total number of words.
This percentage will vary from one search engine to the next. Too high a percent is just as bad as too low.

The web "spiders" (the programs that search engines use to go through a site and determine their ranking) must be able to crawl through your site.

Don't use large GIF images for your text/content. Sure, you can get the exact look you want that way but the spiders cannot read the content, therefore they will reject the site. Bitstream has what they call "TrueDoc" technology. CorelDRAW users have seen this mentioned before, no doubt. TrueDoc is really cool, it allows you to specify fonts for your web site and the surfer's web browser will use them regardless if the font is on their system or not. The way this works is you buy Bitstream's program that can take a font and generate a condensed version of it, which then gets placed on your web server. The web surfer then has to download a special plug-in for their browser (it's a small download) and your fonts will show up on their screen as they are supposed to. For those that pay good money for their fonts or even generate their own, no worries. The condensed file has code embedded into it that makes it work only on the website specified when the file is generated so nobody can snag that file and use it on their site.

Using Java is one good way not to get ranked in search engines as most spiders toss out sites that use java and javascripts for their navigation because they cannot crawl through the links.

Using image maps also hurts your ranking. Spiders cannot read image maps, therefore they cannot follow the links.

Websites using frames are likely not to get ranked either, the first page on a "framed" site (index.htm/l) contains no content and no navigation, it only has the code to tell the browser to generate frames and load other pages.. therefore with no content or navigation, the spider cannot crawl that site and will reject it.

Sites that take too long to load often get rejected. Web spiders are impatient just like web surfers so if a page takes a long time to load up, it will not be indexed.

The "deeper" your navigation/links go, the better (within reason though, too many "useless" clicks can discourage web surfers). A site that has a main page and then secondary pages for each main section but no further content is likely not to get indexed. The spider will crawl through the links on your site, but if it can only crawl into the next page and no further before turning back, it could reject the site.

Another important thing is external links. Links on other sites pointing towards your site will help your rankings. Some spiders completely reject sites that have no other sites pointing to them. Links from your site to other sites also help rankings.

Another note about META tags.. The Keywords and Description tags are pretty generous in the amount of content you can include in them, but going back to the web spiders, some spiders will reject a site that has those tags completely loaded up. You can use the tags, just be cautious about how many items you list in them.

[ October 24, 2001: Message edited by: Mike Pipes ]