Online Marketing for Beginners – Part 3
Web-page design
When working with your template, unless you’ve been studying HTML for the past few years, you’ll want to buy some graphic website design software. Two to look at are Dreamweaver and Front Page.
The main page will suit your needs if you are not looking to create something too fancy. Some versions of Microsoft Office already include a copy of the Front Page. If you need to buy it, look on sites like Amazon as I have seen it advertised there for as little as $100.00.
Dreamweaver is known to be one of the best website graphic design software on the market, but it is also expensive. Again try to find this piece of second hand software.
The main thing to remember when designing your website is to keep it simple. Try to make your website a useful technical stop for someone who is looking for specific information. You’re just going to point him in the right direction.
Once you have your template on the screen in front of you in Front Page or Dreamweaver, you’ll probably find that you need to change a few things. You will probably see a navigation bar on the left with Product 1, Product 2, etc. You obviously don’t want your visitors to see that as your product pages need to be separate from your article pages as they will include links to your merchants. You don’t want your visitor to get the impression that you are trying to sell them something or that you are earning a commission in exchange for it. Replace Product 1, Product 2, etc. with keywords related to the site. Make sure the navigation bar fits your site and each link points to a page.
Place your own logo at the top of the page. Most graphics programs will allow you to create a simple .gif file that you can use as a logo. Make sure your logo conveys the name of your site. You can also just write your logo and animate it by making it bigger or changing the font.
Be sure to remove any reference to the company that produced your template. Sometimes they have bookmark links on each page that bookmark their site and not yours. Unless you know how to change this, just delete them.
When you use your web designer, it will save each page you create as a file name on your hard drive and then on the Internet. Try to use keyword-rich names relevant to your site here, not eg article 1, article 2, etc. Search engines like Google look at file names to determine relevance. Page titles are similar: Google also uses them to help determine relevance. The title is what you see at the top of an Internet Explorer window when you access a web page.
There is something called an H1 header on every web page; use it, as search engine spiders like to see relevant keywords written here. You probably just need to write above the header they’ve put on the page. Try to make your title as clever and catchy as possible to pique the interest of your visitors.
You are almost ready to launch your website into cyberspace. Be sure to take all of your articles and copy and paste the content into your template. Every time you enter a new article, save it with a different file name and its own page header. Once all your articles are on separate pages, you’re ready to upload them. Since you’re using a template, your pages should be formatted exactly the same, except for the header and the main body of text in the middle.