Thanks to Iain at http://www.omega2webdesign.com/ for suggesting I had a look at Adobe Master Collection Cs5.5. Great collection of programs from Adobe including Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Fireworks and Flash Builder amongst others. My system could do with an upgrade to handle some of the more memory hungry tools but I am really impressed with changes to Photoshop since I used it last especially the Spot Healing Tool and its content aware option and also the Puppet Warp tool. I must admit to not being a convert to Dreamweaver yet but I did like the Widget browser and I should be able to change the scripts in Dreamweaver then capture them to include in my pages. Hopefully more programmers will add their widgets in the future.
I made some changes to my index.html ( www.derrykyle.com ) and added the google analytics script which gives "insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness".
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Sunday, February 5, 2012
The Doire Choill Project part 3
The site now has twenty eight pages, I included more about myself and my artwork, puffers, my garden and a charity event I'm running, so that people can maybe feel they are dealing with a person rather than just another site. As well as the personal pages I added a page on meta tags and a site map, if you have more than fifteen pages a site map is a good idea. I also made a twitter account and a face book account for the business. The twitter account is @DoireChoill and a face book search for Doire Choill should find it.
I also embedded a twitter widget into the contact web page on my site which updates with any tweets I make. Why bother? I hear you ask. Well its all to do with being found by the search engines and prospective customers.
I have more images to add alt tags to and now I need to take a re look at the navigation of the site as the including of the extra pages has made my navigation buttons a bit confusing.
I also embedded a twitter widget into the contact web page on my site which updates with any tweets I make. Why bother? I hear you ask. Well its all to do with being found by the search engines and prospective customers.
I have more images to add alt tags to and now I need to take a re look at the navigation of the site as the including of the extra pages has made my navigation buttons a bit confusing.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
The Doire Choill Project part 2
Since my last post I have done some changes to the website, the first thing I did was cosmetic, I moved the page header image to the top of the page and added alt text to it, this will help with indexing. I then made this blog embed on one of the website pages and made a facebook page for the website. I should explain a bit about driving traffic to your site at this point. External links "off site optimization", links from other sites are the single most important ranking tool in search engines nowadays, so with making this blog and the facebook page I have trippled my external links, if the 57 friends of mine I invited to "like" my new facebook page all were to add it then this would greatly increase my indexing.
The second most important tool is "on page optimization" this is basically selecting the best keywords for each of your pages, now its really easy to have "website design" as a keyword but Google discovers 1,630,000,000 results for that search so there is next to no chance of being on the first page of results. I would be better having words that my potential customers will type into google, "connemara website design" might be better, I will need to really think about my keywords. You also have to make it as clear as possible to the search engines that the page is relevant to the search keyword. I need to do some work in this aspect as well.
Content is King, my site is lacking content so I added a page about how to get your business online and the cost of registering a domain name and web hosting. I will make another page about keywords and meta tags.
If you have any comments about the sort of content I should include in the site or any other topics please email me at robshairp@gmail.com
The second most important tool is "on page optimization" this is basically selecting the best keywords for each of your pages, now its really easy to have "website design" as a keyword but Google discovers 1,630,000,000 results for that search so there is next to no chance of being on the first page of results. I would be better having words that my potential customers will type into google, "connemara website design" might be better, I will need to really think about my keywords. You also have to make it as clear as possible to the search engines that the page is relevant to the search keyword. I need to do some work in this aspect as well.
Content is King, my site is lacking content so I added a page about how to get your business online and the cost of registering a domain name and web hosting. I will make another page about keywords and meta tags.
If you have any comments about the sort of content I should include in the site or any other topics please email me at robshairp@gmail.com
Friday, February 3, 2012
The Doire Choill Project
Doire Choill is a small village in Connemara Ireland and I have a website design business here with the same name, Doire Choill Website Design. This blog is about the development of my website and the things I will endeavour to do to increase traffic and hopefully get work through the website.
I am starting off with a very basic, tiny website that has quite a lot wrong with it and over the next period I will try and improve the site, blogging about the changes I am making. I would love input from anyone who would like to comment on my ideas and changes.
Looking at the website www.derrykyle.com the first thing that is really noticeable is that its called derrykyle instead of Doire Choill, Derrykyle is the English spelling and something I shall have to live with as the domain name has been registered already. This will effect the search engine ranking as doire choill isn't mentioned in the URL. I shall have to get the other optimisation aspects better.
The next thing needing sorted is that none of the images have alt text, you can check this by viewing the page source and a lot of the search engines look at the alt text when they are indexing the page.
The site is also very short of content so it would act as a first contact brochure I suppose but wouldn't really do a proper job of informing potential customers of prices and other information. so adding pages is also a priority, adding this blog as an embedded object will be one of the things on my list to do.
Next time I shall look at navigation and linking the site to other sites on the Internet.
If you would like to contact me with any ideas please email robshairp@gmail.com and I will post your suggestions on this blog.
I am starting off with a very basic, tiny website that has quite a lot wrong with it and over the next period I will try and improve the site, blogging about the changes I am making. I would love input from anyone who would like to comment on my ideas and changes.
Looking at the website www.derrykyle.com the first thing that is really noticeable is that its called derrykyle instead of Doire Choill, Derrykyle is the English spelling and something I shall have to live with as the domain name has been registered already. This will effect the search engine ranking as doire choill isn't mentioned in the URL. I shall have to get the other optimisation aspects better.
The next thing needing sorted is that none of the images have alt text, you can check this by viewing the page source and a lot of the search engines look at the alt text when they are indexing the page.
The site is also very short of content so it would act as a first contact brochure I suppose but wouldn't really do a proper job of informing potential customers of prices and other information. so adding pages is also a priority, adding this blog as an embedded object will be one of the things on my list to do.
Next time I shall look at navigation and linking the site to other sites on the Internet.
If you would like to contact me with any ideas please email robshairp@gmail.com and I will post your suggestions on this blog.
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