Hana Yori Dango – Wish by Arashi
Watch the adorable love story between cute dolls. Awwww… 
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8 Things You Must Know To Build A Great Website
Tim Knox
Last week we talked about how a bad website can do your business more harm than good. That column brought several emails asking what is the key to building an effective business website. I replied with the same answer I always give: building an effective business website is a simple matter of definition.
Before the first graphic is drawn or the first line of code is written, you must define the website窶冱 budget, purpose, target audience, design, navigation, and content. And when that窶冱 all said and done you must define the marketing that will bring visitors to your site.
It sounds easy, but you窶囘 be amazed at how many really bad business websites there are out there. Yours might even be one of them. If so, listen up. For nearly ten years now my company has been building and rebuilding websites for every kind of business you can imagine: from mom-and-pops to multinationals. We窶况e designed (or redesigned) a couple hundred websites and along the way I have come to the conclusion that most business websites do a pitiful job of working for their owners.
What窶冱 that, you didn窶冲 know your business website should work for you? You think it should just sit on a server somewhere taking up digital space and collecting digital dust?
Wrong. Every website, business or otherwise, must serve a purpose, and that窶冱 usually where most websites falls short. They serve no purpose because the website owner never gave much thought to it. It窶冱 not the website窶冱 fault. A website is inanimate. It is only what you make it. The only life a website has is the one given to it by its designer and owner. If the human element doesn窶冲 do a good job of defining the building blocks, the website will serve no purpose and eventually die a digital death.
Building an effective business website isn窶冲 brain surgery, thank goodness, since that窶冱 how I make a nice percentage of my living. Building an effective, well-designed website that works for its owner, that actually serves a purpose, is all about definition.
Define the Budget
Every website, no matter how large or small, must have a realistic budget, with 窶徨ealistic窶・being the key word. I can窶冲 tell you how many times I窶况e sat with a potential client as they listed off the eight million cool things they wanted their website to do, only to find out that their budget was just a few hundred dollars. I always feel like saying, 窶弩ell you just wasted three hundred dollars of my time, so here窶冱 your bill窶ｦ窶拿r
Define the Purpose
Every website must have a purpose. Purpose drives everything: the audience, the design, the navigation, the content, and the marketing. I could do an entire column on purpose, but suffice it to say that there are five categories of purpose under which most websites fall: the purpose to inform, to educate, to entertain, to generate leads, to sell, or a combination thereof. If you fail to define the purpose of the website, all else is just wasted effort.
Define the Target Audience
Your target audience refers to that segment of the public that you hope to attract to the site. For example if you sell shoes, your target audience would be anyone with feet. Taking it a step further, if you only sold women窶冱 shoes, your target audience would be women (with feet) Why is defining your target audience so important? If you have no idea who your audience is, how can you expect to design a website that will appeal to them? Your target audience could be customers, investors, job seekers, info seekers, etc. Define your target audience, then figure out how to serve them.
Define the Design
Website design theory has changed over the last couple of years, primarily because the search engines now ignore graphic heavy websites and give preference to those that take a minimalistic approach to design. If you look at some of the big boy websites like GE, Oracle, Raytheon, HP, and others you will see that in many cases the only graphic on the homepage is the company窶冱 logo. Search engines now give higher preference to websites that offer keyword-rich text over flashy graphics. Don窶冲 fight the design trend. You will lose.
Define the Navigation
Bad navigation is the number one reason website visitors abandon a website. Navigation refers to the chain of links the visitor uses to get around your site. If your site has an illogical navigational hierarchy or too few or too many links or is simply impossible to get around, you窶况e got problems. We live in a microwave society. We stand in front of the microwave tapping our foot and glaring at our watch wondering why it takes so damn long for a bag of popcorn to pop. Why can窶冲 a three-minute egg be done in thirty seconds? If it takes a visitor more than 3 clicks to get to any page on your site, your navigation needs improvement.
Define the Content
Content refers to the information on your website, be it graphics, text, downloadable items, etc. Since the top search engines no longer use HTML Meta tag data to index websites, it is vital that your website content be text heavy, succinct and well-written to appeal to the search engine spiders.
Define the Build Method
Next, who will build the website for you? Will you do it yourself using one of the point and click website builders or will you hire the kid next door? Will you hire a freelance designer or a professional firm? Budget usually dictates the build method, but be warned, when it comes to website development, you get what you pay for. Sure, the kid next door will throw up a site for you if you buy them a pizza or make your daughter go to the prom with them, but you will end up a with a website that looks like and performs like it was designed by the kid next door.
Define the Marketing
If you build it, will they come? Not on your life, at least not without a good marketing campaign. Your website should become a part of all your marketing efforts, online and off.
Put the website address on your business cards, brochures, letterhead, and all collaterals. Include the address in your ads; print, TV and radio. If you prefer to do online marketing, figure out where your target audience surfs and advertise there.
If marketing is foreign to you, do yourself a favor and call in an expert. Many businesses fail because they simply do not know how to market their products and services effectively. This is also the downfall of most business websites.
Here’s to your success!
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7 Top Ways To Avoid Link Theft
Tony Simpson/p>
If you have a link directory on a website, how do you stop link theft by sites that don’t link back, or trick you into thinking they do?
Whether link theft is anything to get concerned about depends on how many links your website has, the quality of those links (Google Page Rank) and how many of those links you lose. Search Engine Ranking is certainly something that’s becoming more dependent upon the links to your website.
You might be forgiven for thinking that when a website no longer links back to you, that it was an accident your link was removed from the link directory. Of course accidents happen as I know from using some link manager software. Just one click in the wrong box and a website link disappears the next time you update your link directory. But the real link thieves are those people that use methods to rob you of a link.
Here’s 7 Top Ways Link Thieves work and how you can avoid being their next victim.
1. If a website asks you to exchange links, don’t link to them until they have given you the URL location of your link in their link directory. If you link to them first they may forget to add your link.
2. Visually inspect your link by visiting the website page your link has been placed on. In your web browser, view the source code of the page. In Internet Explorer go to View then Source and this will open up your default text editor.
Using the text editor search on the page for your website domain and ensure when you find it that the link is a standard text link of the form:
Link Title.
The target=”_blank” just launches a new browser window when the link is clicked.
The link should have no JavaScript code like:
Link Title.
Links like this JavaScript one can be made to look visually identical when viewed in a web page browser, but to a search engine it’s as if this link is not there. Whilst a visual inspection to catch this form of theft is always the best, you can catch some, but not all of these types of links by using reciprocal link manager checking software.
3. Check that your link on the other web sites page is not being put through a redirect. By hovering your mouse over the link, check what link text appears in the status bar of your web browser.
If your link appears as:
“http://www.theirdomain.com/page.html” or
“http://www.theirdomain.com/redirect.asp?id=2273″ and not
“http://www.yourdomain.com”
Then your link is on a redirect.
Any form of link that has theirdomain and not yourdomain in the link URL is only of benefit to the other site owner and not you. Links like this point to their domain and not yours which gives the other site the link benefit in the eyes of the search engines.
Don’t link to this site if you want some search engine benefit from the link.
If you just want traffic from visitors clicking on the link, that’s the only benefit you’ll get.
4. If you want to get search engine link benefit, don’t link to web sites that have dynamically generated link pages. If your link is on a dynamically generated link page the URL of that page could be something like :
“http://www.theirdomain.com/links/index.php?&lk=5″.
The fact that the URL has a ? or & in the URL means that most search engines will never read that page, so they will never see the link back to your site.
5. Use the Google Toolbar Page Rank Tool to check the PR of the page your link is on.
If the PR is 0 but the PR of the home page is much better, this could mean either the link directory is new ( not likely if it has a lot of links ) or there could be something about the page which is preventing Google from reaching it.
Using your web browser view the page code as in 2 above and check for the robots meta tag at the top of the page between the and tags.
If it says :
or
then all is OK.
If the tag says :
or
or
or
Then this page is not being given full access to the search engines. Do not link to this sort of page.
6. If the robots meta tag you checked is OK but you still suspect a problem with a low PR then you should check the sites robots.txt file. To do this type the main URL of the site into a web browser but add robots.txt for example:
“http://www.domainyourlinkingto.com/robots.txt”
The robots.txt file is read by the search engines and it tells it the directory and files it can access. A simple robots.txt file might look something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /forms
Disallow: /contact.html
If the URL of the page you were linking to was :
“http://www.domainyourlinkingto.com/dir/web-design.html”
Then you would want to be sure that in the robots.txt file you should NOT see :
Disallow: /dir
Disallow: /dir/web-design.html
This is telling the search engine robot not to index or follow the links in the link directory called dir and to ignore the links page web-design.html.
And you should not see :
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
If you see :
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Then that’s OK.
All sounds a bit complicated I know, but there is no easier way to explain this sort of thing. Some reciprocal link manager checking software will also detect the incorrect use of the meta robots tag and also check the robots text file.
However some link manager software I have experienced, incorrectly reported a link page as blocked by the robots text file because it read “Disallow:” as prohibiting the search engine when in fact it means allow (see above). It is “Disallow: /” that would tell the search engine not to index the site.
7. Once you’ve completed your link exchange and done the checks to ensure you’re not being cheated you must then check your links at regular intervals. Once you have more than about 50 links you will soon find link checking becomes a time consuming process. It’s far better to build your link directory using some form of link manager software that will automatically check your links at intervals you specify.
Of course not all link theft is intentional, sometimes it’s just the webmaster not knowing that the way he has set up his link directory will not provide search engine link benefit to anyone that links to them.
However some link theft is intentional, the webmaster knows exactly what they are doing and by following this advice you can avoid being their next victim.
About The Author: Tony Simpson, has been into Website Design, Promotion & Optimization for 5 years. He provides advice, product reviews & products at http://www.webpageaddons.com/ to Make Automation of Your Web Site Work for You.A related article is “10 Mistakes to Avoid When Setting Up a Link Directory” at http://www.webpageaddons.com/link-manager-mistakes.htm!
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Last Unicorn MTV
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