Website Creation

Webmaster Tools You Can Use – Part 2

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Karilee in Website Creation 4 Comments

Part 1 of Webmaster Tools You Can Use introduced you to four great free Firefox Extensions that I use to make my job of building great websites for businesses easier. Here are four more from my personal webmaster tools experience, all free and all wonderful time and frustration savers.

Webmaster Tools I Recommend, Continued

MeasureIt

MeasureIt is the perfect webmaster tool for those moments when you really want to know how wide an image is, or how much room you have in a sidebar. I use it almost every day. Just click the ruler button, drag over the element you want to measure, and get its size in pixels, instantly. What could be easier? Read more

Add A Privacy Policy To Your Website

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Karilee in Website Creation 3 Comments

There are several reasons to take the time to add a Privacy Policy and and Terms of Service to your website.

Cover Your Ass-ets

Of course there’s the legal coverage they give you – in particular, your Terms of Service can protect you from future litigation. Read more

Webmaster Tools You Can Use – Part 1

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Karilee in Website Creation 4 Comments

Anyone who sits looking over my shoulder as I build websites soon asks “How’d you do THAT?” – and often they’re talking about one of the free webmaster tools I use on a daily basis.

My website tools let me work smarter instead of harder, while getting better results for my clients. If you’re working on your own site, they’ll help you understand what’s going on and create better results both visually and in terms of site performance.

I use the Firefox web browser, which I consider the best browser choice for anyone building websites on a PC. These webmaster tools are Firefox Plugins, and while some may be available for other browsers, I’m assuming you’re using Firefox for the purposes of this article.

Webmaster Tools – The Essentials

I lost my main hard drive and had to reinstall everything last week, and these are the Firefox Plugins I installed right after I installed Firefox: Read more

What Your Website NEEDS

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Karilee in Website Creation 4 Comments

There’s a lot of confusion about websites, and every day I see the result of people spending absurd amounts of money on the wrong things. So what does your business website really need… and what doesn’t it need?

Your Website Has 9 Needs:

A Goal

We’ll assume for the rest of this article that your goal is to draw targeted traffic that can convert to a cause or sale, who will find the site useful, informative, helpful or entertaining.

Basic On-Site SEO

You MUST have proper keyword usage, Title Tags, Heading Tags and Alt Tags for your site to rank well in search engines, and so be found. Read more

Screen Resolution and Your Clients

Posted on February 20, 2011 by Karilee in Website Creation 1 Comment

What Screen Resolution Does Your Client See?

Many business owners and bloggers, and even web designers, forget that their viewers may not be seeing their site in the way they expect. Keeping screen resolution in mind really matters, especially if you work on a large monitor as I do.

If your site is unattractive or difficult to navigate for your client or potential client, they’ll leave. Read more

A Successful Website? 10 Essentials

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Karilee in Website Creation 1 Comment

Defining the Successful Website

It’s always a good idea, before you start any project or activity that requires some effort, to take a few moments to visualize what success would look like. There’s no question that this is important before you start the process of creating a successful website. So what would the requirements of your successful website be? Here are the ten requirements I think are most important for your businesses’ successful website:

Gets found easily by search engines, especially Google
Brings in targeted traffic (your “right people”)
Is easy to navigate and search
Is “sticky”. Visitors hang around and look at several pages of information
Showcases your products/services and evokes interest in them
Captures leads, to help you convert visitors to clients
Looks professional (design, lack of typos, writing style, no broken links)
Has an emotional feel appropriate to your business and you as an entrepreneur
Is easily maintained by you, keeping your costs down
Generates INCOME for your business Read more

Better Website Client Service

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Karilee in Website Creation 47 Comments

How’s Your Website Experience?

There’s nothing more frustrating than a website that fails, because our visitor’s expectation is 24/7 service. It’s important that you make sure your site is serving your clients well, and that if it does fail, they’re not at a dead end. Here are three ways to ensure your client’s experience on your site is what it should be.

Fix Your Broken Links

First, make sure your site isn’t littered with broken links. If you’re running WordPress, the Plugin Broken Link Checker makes this easy. It will monitor your site for links that no longer work, and point them out to you for repairs. Remember that a link may appear broken if a site is down temporarily, so don’t rush to fix a broken link that just appeared. If it’s still there in a day or two, get on it! Read more

Market-Responsive Skills

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Karilee in Website Creation 22 Comments

Creation of Marketing Materials Fast is Useful

They say “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, but this site was. WordPress installation, the first 17 pages of content, plugins, basic SEO… it all went up fast, because I needed a site and I had the knowledge that would let me build what I wanted.

I used a free theme, because I wanted this site to be representative of a basic business site that you could build inexpensively. I already had hosting, but for a starter business, a site like this could be up for the first month for under $10, plus the builder’s time.

Edit: Site is now running on a “Premium Theme”. We’ve matured to the point of needing it for Portfolios and such. Read more