Web Site Building

Web design made easy

The folks at wordpress.com, blogspot or tumblr blogs, google or yola sites all do their best to make the job of designing your own web site easy for their users. They do it by providing lots of templates to choose from.

After you pick the one you like best you can almost always make some changes. In some cases you may only be able to change background colors or banners and maybe fonts, in others you can change everything from fonts, font sizes and colors, background images or colors, banners and even the layout of your pages. If you know a little HTML or Css you may be able to tweek it all even more.

The template you choose becomes the basic layout or the bones of your web site. Often the hardest part for someone putting up their own web pages for the first time is simply seeing the possiblities for change.

Remember that even something as simple as changing the page banner and the background color of the site to match your own logo or business colors will make your web page look and feel more like your own and less like the generic template you started with. After you add your own copy and photographs you will likely be surprised by how much the visuals seem to have changed. There are only so many ways to combine rectangles on a page and keep the copy front and center for the viewer. Don’t feel that you have to come up with some grand plan for shifting things around to make your web site stand out.

Here are a couple of page clippings of blogspot blogs that I set up to show you some of the possibilities, go to blogger.com to see more;

A mixedmediashop page from blogspot
E.M.Schumacher's Science Fiction and Fantasy blog page at blogspot.

Google is just in the process of introducing a new user interface for their Blogspot (Blogger) blogs that is clean and intuitive to use. Didn’t take me but a minute to get used to the changes. No complaints there.

I found their templates some of the easiest to customize. There are lots of background images to choose from, various color schemes for your headings, links and text, fonts can be resized or changed and so can the layouts of the pages. My point here is just that it is easy to design your own site with a little help from a hosting service. Not to mention the designer who laid it all for you to start with!



Making SEO easy

SEO stands for search engine optimization and a visit to the related wikipedia page will tell you it comes in ‘White Hat’ and ‘Black Hat’ versions, just like the cowboys in the old westerns. There is good SEO and the dastardly stuff that trys every which way to trick the search engines and visitors to the site too.

The wiki says ‘SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.’ Getting a web site or blog found by the people looking for exactly what you are selling or what you are enthusing about, is after all pretty important to any one who wants either customers or an audience.

I think the best way to get SEO to work for you is to get it in there right at the beginning;

  • Think about how people will find you – pick a url that will help get them there and don’t be too long winded with it. You’ll be lucky if people remember it if there is only one word, like in ‘stuff.com’. Reallynicegoodusefulstuff.com might get a few people mixing up the word order, that is if they remember all the words anyhow.
  • What you actually do might be more useful for getting your site found than your company name and remember that you can, if you want, point more than one url to the same site. Where you operate is important and if you combine that and what you do in words you choose for your url your ranking is likely to start off higher. And whatever you do, don’t forget your own name in your contact information and on your pages. Surely your friends, at least will search for that when they want to do business with you.
  • Think of titles and headings as the condensed version of a web page, keep headings accurate and to the point. If you take everything else off the page your title and the headings should form a brief outline of page subject matter.
  • When I used to write press releases for the local papers I soon found that the important information ‘who, what, when, where’ comes first. I don’t think web pages are much different. As well as leading with the good stuff, get a shortened version of that information into your meta description for each page.

    • I really don’t like thinking about SEO. After I get a new post up I want to be finished with it right then and there. The last thing I want to do then is work on SEO, so now I try get it done first.

    To get more information on how to make SEO work for me, I went to the source and downloaded and printed out Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide for nights when insomnia threatens. I think it helped, but I’d still rather forget about it.


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    Free websites for Canadian Businesses

    Google and partners (RBC Royal Bank, Rogers, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Globe and Mail, Yola and Silver Lining Ltd.) are offering Canadian businesses a free website through the site gybo.ca which includes a .ca URL for one year, a free Yola website and free advice and resources. This offer was first announced at the end of March of this year.

    Sound too good to be true? I don’t think so. The only catch I found is that the free Yola website comes with a small banner ad for Yola on the bottom of each web page. There are no other ads, as a matter of fact it looks like you can ad your own AdSense code to your site’s pages.

    Google is giving everyone a $50.00 voucher towards AdWords advertising for their site in the hope that more ads will be purchased from them and some of the other partners have offers on hand as well. Fair enough.

    In actual fact anyone can get a free website at Yola, but not a free URL. Free websites come with a web address like www.yournewsite.yolasite.com. Yola sells URLs starting at $17.95 US for one year and e-mail addresses for $9.95 a year. If you upgrade to Yola Silver for $99.00(US) a year you get a custom URL with privacy protection included and access to premium templates as well as other extra features. That’s it. They are trolling for paying customers, but no pressure and the templates are surprisingly flexible and come with widgets gallore!

    You can work directly on your pages and see changes as you are making them. The user interface is intuitive and you can add html and custom CSS to make changes too. If you are a beginner Yola templates offer a simple path to a professional looking web site. If you know a bit more there is a lot of flexibility here. You can also upload a whole slew of different types of media files to your site. If you like you can publish a blog as well. Five sites are allowed on each account.

    Usually I am really, really ridiculously suspicious of free offers, but I couldn’t find much here to worry me. The reviews I found on Yola’s web services were generally positive. It might worry some that a credit card is needed to sign up for this offer, but CIRA, Canadian Internet Registration Authority, is strict about verifying the address of anyone who registers for a .ca and apparently this was the simpliest way to do it.

    To me this looks like a good opportunity for Canadians who need an online presence to help grow their businesses to get one. And I liked the Yola site-building software at least as much as I like WordPress. I wonder if they are related?

    Other sites by EMS

    Elma's art SF/Fantasy Blog