When you plan out how to make a website, there’s one very, very important step that is simply part of the process when results matter to you. This step, search engine optimization, a.k.a. SEO, usually happens right alongside the rest of the website creation process.

Quality SEO Is A Holistic Approach.

Professional website designers and developers know that SEO isn’t just about tweaking a few words of content after the website has been launched. At first light, some first-timers might perceive this to be the case. But effective SEO takes place little by little at each step in the “how to make a website” process: SEO is part of planning, it is part of domain name s, it is part of good quality hosting, it is part of design, it is part of web development, and it is part of web content.

In other words, optimizing for performance and for the search engines really needs to take place constantly in each individual step of the new website process.

How Do You Do SEO?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a one size fits all approach to SEO. It’s very complex—and when it comes down to it, it is really about giving the search engines exactly what they want to share with their own visitors: excellent quality content, presented in a well-organized and easy to understand way.

In web design, SEO comes into play when setting up a great organization structure to the site. Easy to use, intuitive navigation is just one specific example that happens to be relevant here.

In web development, the SEO process has a lot to do with writing clean, standards-compliant code. It’s about putting the right elements of the site in the right place. Developing for speed and performance is also becoming increasingly important in this area of focus.

With web content, SEO mostly means having the best possible content—unique, authoritative, and completely original—that is available anywhere on the web for your specific topic. If it sounds daunting, it is. But when it comes down to it, this is how you get the best results. SEO also factors into choosing page titles and headlines.

What Not To Do When Optimizing A Website…

Way too many people fall for the notion that SEO is just about one little area—again, tweaking a couple of words. Others fall for online scammers that promise the world when it comes to results. The tell tale signs of an SEO scam usually involve lots of secret, proprietary formulas that apparently only the SEO company knows about. Truth is, there is no magic or secret to good SEO—the search engines actually publish public manuals that spell out exactly what they’re looking for.

When planning the exact steps of how to make a website, be sure to include plans for SEO each step of the way…or if you just don’t want the trouble and hassle that comes with the do-it-yourself approach, at least be sure to work with professionals that understand the ins and outs of optimization and how important they are.

Learning how to make a website is a big feat. It’s worth it for those who are interested, but actually making it happen from start to finish takes quite a bit of time, energy, and effort. We’ve covered many of the steps of how to make a website—everything from planning the project, to hosting, to registering a domain name, and everyone’s favorite step—the website design process. That leaves us at step 5—actually programming the site so it works in the real world.

How do you program the website?

First things first, you’ll need to know what language and/or platform the site will be developed with. Is it going to be built with an integrated CMS (Content Management System)? Is it going to have blog software as part of the overall system? Will WordPress play a part in the overall website project? Custom shopping carts or other hand-built features needed to make it work?

HTML & CSS is the standard. But you’ll also run across PHP, SQL, MySQL, XML, other databases, and many other languages used in coding. AJAX, JQuery, and many more…even Flash. All things considered, if you were to pick any major website at random, the chances are pretty good of it using pretty much all of these languages and web development techniques in harmony to create the overall functionality the website needs. Long story short—web development is very complex and really not the territory for amateurs.

What about developing your own website from scratch?

Well, for the persistent crowd that wants to learn the ropes and make it happen from scratch, the easiest place to start would be to keep it very simple with just the most basic HTML/CSS platform. Just the basics. Even this takes time, but with some good tutorials you might be able to find here and there on the web, it is possible. The best bet for the determined do-it-yourself’er who has time and the level of commitment that it takes to learn to program for the web would be to find a good book or class that covers one web language at a time from the very beginning. Again, HTML would be the place to start here.

The thing about web development is that there are lots of pros out there who can seemingly breeze through the whole site’s programming, A-Z, in just one coding session. That might be a little bit exaggerated, but the experts who write code for the web day in and day out know their stuff and are very fast and efficient at going about what they do.

And when you consider what a web design/development team can do, the efficiencies begin to add up. For example, here at Sleepless Media, our web designers know exactly what the development side of the project will need to do what they do best. A team based approach is actually very practical—and there is a ton of time and money to be saved when the entire process of how to make a website is part of one proven system from beginning to end.

When thinking about how to make a website, it’s safe to say that 9 out of 10 times most people just jump right in and start with the design—the graphical look and feel part of the overall website project. It’s the design that gets people excited and motivated about making a website. And this is a good thing!

As you move forward though, please remember that there is a lot more to the big picture than just the graphical design itself—a professional website will always be based on impeccable planning and will be designed and developed on a solid platform of quality hosting and a well-researched domain name. Design is the fun part, but it’s actually a reasonably small piece of the overall pie.

How do you design a website?

Because web design (graphical) and web development (coding & programming) are actually two very unique and separate areas of focus, most quality websites skip the what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) all-in-one web design programs. They might be okay for very, very basic use, but just don’t cut it for robust, professional design and development. There are other web design programs like Adobe Dreamweaver that really require quite a bit of skill to use—in other words, they might appeal to the DIY website designer, but they’re really pretty complicated and geared towards power users and professional designers.

Most professional web designers rely on Adobe Photoshop and/or Adobe Fireworks for the graphical design phase of the web design project. Here at Sleepless Media, we prefer Fireworks for design work. Either way, these are pro-grade design platforms, and when used be experienced creative web design professionals, they deliver the most professional results. Again, they’re probably not going to deliver the best results for the first-time designer with little to no experience.

Once the graphical user interface of a website has been designed, the image files can then be used by the web development team to code up and program the website into a functional, interactive piece of work. We’ll cover development next time in this series.

Are there do it yourself options?

Yes, there are a few DIY options out there for creating a very basic website that will actually look and function pretty decently. The best of the bunch when it comes to this category will almost always be in the form of a web-based service that uses various templates and allows you to pick and choose the design right there. Not exactly an “A” grade for originality, but it can get the job done if really necessary. The other general rule of thumb is to avoid any design software (pretty much anything that comes on a disc or via download)…there just aren’t any good design programs out there that will get the job done in a professional way—although most are really good at selling themselves to would-be designers who’ll ultimately become very frustrated when trying to use the programs.

The bottom line on web design…

If you’re considering all of the intricacies of how to make a website, sometimes design is the first one you’ll think about. It’s a great idea to jot down your ideas and vision for the site. Just keep in mind the fact that professional designers are able to deliver professional results when it comes to the web design phase of the project. There’s a time and place for learning how to design—even creating a personal website or blog as a hobby—just don’t risk your business or organization’s professional image by using amateur design.

Welcome back to our intro series on how to make a website. In previous installments, we’ve taken a look at what it takes to get started making your new website and the basics of registering your domain name. Today, we’re going to cover the next important step in the process—establishing and setting up your web hosting.

A lot of times, people will just assume they should obtain hosting from the same place they registered their domain name. More often than not, this is probably not a very wise idea. Web hosting is an interesting facet of the how to make a website process—you don’t necessarily need the most powerful or most expensive hosting when you’re just starting off, but there is a such thing as bad web hosting…something you’ll certainly want to avoid.

What makes a “bad” web hosting service?

Hosting servers and resources are shared by hundreds or even thousands of websites…on each server.  This inevitably causes problems from time to time when just one of these thousands of neighbors installs something on their website that is a resource drain, gets hacked, or ends up being a spammer themselves. It’ll slow your site down too…or break it altogether. Worse, your site could wind up being penalized or blacklisted by the search engines for a long time by sharing an IP address with a spammer.

Web hosting that isn’t designed for the task. In other words, you won’t want to try to host your website on your own computer or server at your office or home. Work and home computer systems just aren’t designed for the robust kind of connectivity and uptime that hosting a website professionally requires.

Another sign of a bad web hosting service is poor support. Finding a web host that fully understands their own product and system is often a challenge in and of itself. And then there’s the commitment required to keep the system up to date and maintained for peak performance. Finally, and probably most importantly, is the customer service factor—does the webhosting service have full time support service staff that will actually pick up the phone, be able to fix and issue, and are able to communicate with customers in a common sense, down-to-earth way?

So clearly, you’ll want to be on the lookout for these possible scenarios when setting up your web hosting.

What are the different types of web hosting?

Shared hosting: This is when you share as web server and resources with several other websites. For those just getting started, this is a good thing as long as the hosting service is committed to maintaining great performance and keeping the “bad neighbor” situation under wraps.

Virtual dedicated hosting: This is kind of like shared hosting, but instead of sharing all of the same resources with other websites, you’re guaranteed a specific allotment of storage and memory on a specific server. It’s a good balance for the intermediate website.

Dedicated hosting: This is when your website is hosted on its very own server within a web hosting data center. It’s quite expensive and typically reserved for complex, high-traffic websites that really need more control and more resources.

It’s easy to get caught up in the do-it-yourself mentality when making a website and setting up hosting…but it’s also important to remember that sometimes there is a better way. And when it comes to hosting, there is such thing as an excellent full-service web host that really doesn’t have to cost much more than the bargain basement variety.

Set your website up on the right foundation by using the top-quality web hosting. It’s well worth the headache and frustration you’ll save by avoiding bad hosting.

If you’re having trouble seeing new updates or changes to a website in IE9, chances are pretty good that you simply need to clear your browser cache and refresh the page in order to see the latest updates to a web page.

To make a long story short, sometimes the web browser doesn’t recognize that it should be automatically looking for a newer version of the page…so instead, it pulls a copy of the page from its saved cache or archive. This cache is stored on your local computer and is designed to speed up your web browsing experience so you don’t have to download a web page every time you look at it. But again, the problem is when a page is new or updated and actually needs to be reloaded in order to see the changes, but the browser doesn’t do it like it is supposed to.

In this case, the solution is to manually clear your browser cache and refresh the page. Here’s how to do it with IE9:

Step 1:  Select the “Gear” Icon for Settings in the top-hand right corner of the browser.

Step 2:  Select “Internet options” from the drop down menu.

Step 3:  On the first page of the Internet Options Menu (Under the General Tab), Find the Browsing history section; press the “Delete” button.

Step 4:  In the “Delete Browsing History” window, ensure that the following boxes are checked:

• Temporary Internet files
• Cookies
• History
• Download History

These four options are essential to check in order to clear IE’s cache—but if you would prefer to totally reset the browser, go ahead and check all boxes in this window.

Finally, press the “Delete” button at the bottom of the Delete Browsing History Window; Close all remaining settings & options windows in IE.

Step 5:  Refresh the web page.

Visit the page you would like to view, find the circular arrow refresh button in the address bar section and left click on it. Alternately, you may right click on a blank part of a web page and select the “Refresh” option from the resulting dropdown menu.

And that is how to clear your browser cache in Internet Explorer 9.

In this installment of our “How to Make A Website” blog series, we’ll take a look at the next step in the website creation process after planning and outlining are complete. Specifically, the next step is all about selecting and securing your name…domain registration.

Step 2: Domain Registration

Your name is important–just as much so online as it is in real life. Through your domain name, visitors will be able to identify and locate your website. And of course, domain names also serve as a form of branding for your organization. So it’s wise to take the time to get this right.

First things first, you’ll need to know what your domain name will be. Because most of the good, single-word or common phrase domain names were long ago taken, sometimes this is a creative process in and of itself when coming up with a good domain. Make a list and be sure that your domain name choices are not trademarked or copyrighted by another party.

A few rules of thumb when choosing your domain name:

Keep it short and memorable. Don’t use a whole sentence, something that has overly odd spellings within, or too many dashes between the words. You want to be able to share your domain verbally and have the person hearing it be able to remember it and correctly type it in to their browser later. Don’t risk confusion.

Choose .com .net or .org. With an array of other options available these days, like .us .tv and .info, it might seem tempting to try one of these domains instead of the standby big 3 options that have been around since the beginning. But the thing is, these newer domain suffixes have really never caught on and very often come across as unprofessional. Again, don’t risk it.

Register your domain name for as long as you can. It’s easy and cheap to register a domain name for just one year. But if you are serious about your new website, you’ll want to choose at least a 5 year term for your new domain, or preferably even a 10 year term if you can swing it. This serves two functions…first, it keeps you from forgetting to renew when your term is up every year; and secondly, it shows search engines and site visitors that you are serious enough about your website and your business to lock that domain name in for the long term (and they do look more often than you might think).

Chose a reputable domain registrar. Sure, there are lots of options out there when you’re ready to register your domain name. There’s no sense paying and arm and a leg for your domain name when you can buy it for $10 to $15 per year. This rules out a good number of domain registration services. And with others, while their advertising campaigns are massive and their price just fine too, the popular services are just downright spammy and difficult to use. Here at Sleepless Media, we recommend Namecheap. They’re professional, easy to use, not spammy, and very affordable. It’s a win-win scenario.

As you learn how to make a website, you’ll discover that domain selection and registration really is an important step. Many take it for granted, or assume that it’s automatically a part of web hosting services (it’s not), and ultimately, many make the rookie mistake of jumping the gun on this step just because they saw a great ad on t.v. last night. Your name is your foundation, so be sure to give it the respect and thought that it deserves.

Next up in our blog series on how to make a website, we’ll examine the next important step, Step 3: how to set up your website hosting.

So you’re thinking about building your own website, but need to know the steps of how to make a website and what all goes into the process. First of all, congrats! It’s always fun and rewarding to learn something new–and by learning more about how to make a website, you’ll definitely come away with more insight and a significantly better working knowledge of the web design and development process. Let’s jump right into it then.

Here Is The Lowdown On How To Make A Website…

Step 1: Plan & Outline

You probably already have a vision of what you want your website to look like when it’s done. And if you’re like most, this big picture will change multiple times as you go through the web design and development process until it evolves into its final form.

The single most important thing you can do to create a website that is professional, effective, and ultimately meets all of your goals and objectives is to plan out the entire process with total precision. This is a big step, and there is a lot that goes into it. For example:

• What pages will you want to include as part of your site?
• How will the navigational structure of the site flow?
• What parts of the site will be top level pages in the menu?
• Which parts will be sub-level pages?
• What CMS (Content Management System) will you use to power the site?
• What is your timeline for completion?
• Will you do all of the graphic design work yourself or hire it out?
• Will you do all of the web development coding yourself or sub it out?
• Where will you find your stock imagery and photographs for the site?
• How will you achieve your conversion goals through the website?
• What 3rd party systems or custom coding will need to be completed for e-commerce or other proprietary components and features of the website?
• How will these systems integrate with each other and with all necessary external providers?

In other words, there really is a lot that goes into making a website, and planning it all out at the very beginning is immensely important to completing the project with any kind of success at all. Don’t be too afraid here though–planning is a matter of sketching out your vision, fine tuning the vision, and defining each of the components that will make the website complete.

Getting the overall flow and navigation of the site down pat will help make the other parts much more understandable. Many designers use flash cards, one for each page of the site, and lay them all out manually to help figure it out and visualize how each piece of the site puzzle will fit together. This is an excellent strategy.

Making a website is a big challenge. It’s not impossible for the do-it-yourself’er, but like anything, the more complex the website needs to be, the more difficult it will be to learn how to make the website and ultimately complete it.

Food for thought at this stage…You’ll definitely want to at least consider talking to a professional upfront before immersing yourself too far in the process–it’s a great way to get some pointers on the process, as much of the planning and outline stage is similar whether you are developing the site yourself or actually end up hiring a professional web designer to handle the heavy lifting for you and save you the time and trouble.

That brings the planning & outlining installment of this series to a close. It’s a big one because it is so important to the overall process of how to make a website. Next up, we’ll take a look at some of the next steps, including registering a domain name and setting up web hosting. See you next time!

Writing good, effective meta tags for your website is just as important today as it was 10 years ago. This needs to be said because over the last few years, it almost seems as if the focus on properly using meta information on web pages has gone by the wayside…designers and developers have had a tendency to write them off, dismissing them as no longer necessary for SEO, and perhaps even figuring that their clients won’t know any difference whether they’re there or not (because they’re not immediately visible to the untrained eye).

Here are the facts. Good meta tags are still an essential part of good SEO. And even more importantly, having good meta tags can be vital to usability and accessibility on a website. There are no excuses to skip them.

So how to get the meta tags right then? Here 10 quick tips on writing good meta tags for your website…

Your title tag is the single most important tag on the page…

1. Write it for the visitors’ eyes, much like a headline. They’ll see it as the clickable title text when they do a web search. Be enticing enough to make them want to click through instead of going to the next result in the search results page.

2. Use your most important keyword or keyword phrase for the page at the beginning of the title tag.

3. It’s probably best to keep the tag short and sweet. A good rule of thumb would be less than 10 words, or less than 70 characters total in the title tag.

Optimizing the keyword meta tag…

4. Use your web page’s primary keyword or keyword phrase first in the list.

5. Don’t go overboard…keep the list of keywords extremely accurate to your page’s content and don’t do any more than 5 or so keywords per page for this meta tag.

6. Within your list of comma separated keywords for the page, start with the most specific and work towards the most general.

How to write a good description meta tag for your web page…

7. Use your primary page keyword or keyword phrase exactly, as close to the beginning of the description as possible.

8. Use a variation of your primary keyword phrase within the description meta tag.

9. Be accurate, descriptive, and visitor-minded when writing the description meta tag for a page. The search engines often use it as the description that searchers will see in the search results page for your site…use this to your advantage to pique potential visitors’ interest.

10. Keep the description tag to a maximum of about 25 or 30 words tops. Or if you’re looking at character count, you’ll want it to top out at around 175 characters. Any longer than that, and it will get cut off when the search engines display it in their listings.

To sum it up…

When it comes to SEO in particular, the Meta Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords tags discussed above are the most popular and most optimized in general. Of course, there are other mega tags that also are part of a web page’s code–things like Meta Content Type, Meta Language, Meta Robots tags, and so on. Google even has their own set of special “Google Meta Tags” now that people are starting to pay attention to.

So there are a lot of things to consider when getting this all right. The bottom line is to just make sure it’s getting done and getting done the right way.

Identity theft is rampant. In fact, the chances are pretty good that almost everyone reading this has probably been victimized by identity theft in one way or another. And with all of the personal information we have floating around out there, it’s no wonder that identity thieves can get their hands on our private information so easily.

As individuals, most of us are starting to learn how to protect ourselves from being victims. We’re all generally a little bit more reluctant than we may have been in the past when it comes to sharing our Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, and other sensitive information on the web. We’re looking for things like the “security padlock icon” that indicates the connection is authorized and secure when we do any kind of online financial transaction. In other words, the very basics of online security are starting to catch on among average web users…but we still have an incredibly long way to go.

SSL security should be used pretty much any time any information is shared, including:

• Sending and receiving emails (especially away from your own home or work network)
• Sharing addresses, names, or other identifiable contact information
• Inputing usernames and passwords
• Using Facebook and other social media where personal information and details are frequently shared

Actually, a good portion of the time, a savvy identity thief really only needs one or two tiny snippets of your information before they can use those details to gather other readily available personal information. From there, they can rapidly put together an entire profile on their identity theft victim that includes everything they need to do significant damage. So guarding every small snippet of personally identifiable information possible is very relevant.

And as website owners, the bar really needs to be significantly raised as well.

Website owners are expected to keep sensitive information under lock and key. Your visitors, when they provide any type of personal information, expect nothing less. And more and more, when they are not 100% certain that you’ve set up proper SSL certificates to protect the transfer of their information, they’ll click the back button and never come back to visit again.

SSL certificates should definitely protect:

• All online forms
• All forms of file transfer
• All control panels & back-end interfaces

Any time a visitor to your site provides you with any information, there is a certain level of obligation on your part to protect and treat that information with utmost respect and care. You certainly wouldn’t want your website to be part of the equation that an identity thief uses to take advantage of an unsuspecting victim.

Why not just use an SSL Certificate to cover your entire domain? It’s simple enough to setup and it’s not that expensive either. Making the commitment ensures your visitors and customers that you care about their security…and it’s a mark of professionalism as well. Doing so is quickly becoming the new standard in website security.

It all boils down to this: There are two ways of sending out marketing emails–the way that is invited and welcomed by the email recipient…and the way that is uninvited by the recipient and could even be illegal.

Most of us have the best of intentions when sending out emails, email newsletters, and marketing related forwards.  But that alone doesn’t cut it anymore.  You must send email marketing newsletters and other mass communications emails the correct way or you could end up with some very unhappy email recipients (or worse).

So, what is the correct way?

Opt-In Subscribers Only

First, the people you send your emails to must always be “opt-in” subscribers.  They must specifically provide their email address with consent and acknowledgment that you’ll be sending them occasional or frequent communications to that email address accordingly.  And yes, this means that it is wrong to just manually add a client’s email address to your marketing or newsletter list just because you assume that they won’t mind receiving the emails.  The correct approach is to have them provide their contact credentials and consent to opt-in as they subscribe to the communications.

You’ll hear a lot about “double opt-in” as well.  This is where the recipient receives an email after they sign up for your list that asks them to click a link to confirm their subscription.  This is a best practice as it ensures the email address was correctly supplied by that particular individual that is subscribing.  These days, it’s always a good idea to utilize a double opt-in strategy.

Privacy & Transparency

Tell your potential email subscribers upfront exactly what you intend to do with their email address and how often you’ll be contacting them.  It’s a good idea to show them a sample of what you’ll be sending them and give them a good degree of confidence that you’ll respect their email preferences.  If you plan to share their email address with others or use it in any other way, you MUST tell them you’re doing this and explain it to them in as much detail as possible.  To do anything else is wrong and probably against the law.

Also related to the transparency department is the need to include your official mailing address and contact information as part of each email.  This is usually added to the footer section of the email and helps recipients know who you are and how to reach you in case they’re not fully familiar with the email they’ve received in the first place.

Unsubscribe Options

All compliant email broadcasts need to provide the recipients of the email a way to promptly unsubscribe.  This is usually done with an unsubscribe link in the footer of the message that allows them to automatically connect with your list management program and opt out at any time.

Use A Professional Solution

Many folks are tempted to try and keep track of all of this themselves.  But without tons of custom programming, there really is no easy way to just do this and provide all necessary forms, opt-ins, list management features, and unsubscribe options when doing it manually.  And no, using BCC to add in scores of recipients to a regular email broadcast doesn’t make it okay–it generally makes it spam.

Spam is serious stuff.  You want to avoid it at all costs, firstly because it’s annoying and everyone hates unsolicited email spam.  Most importantly, it’s in violation of the law in the majority of cases (here in the USA, it’s the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003…other locations have their own rules and regulations that apply).

The best approach is to simply avoid any risk of spam.  Treat your email newsletter or marketing campaigns with respect and give them the legitimacy they deserve by using a quality email marketing/list management service like Constant Contact.

And one final rule of thumb to keep in mind–if you wouldn’t want to receive it yourself, don’t send it…it’s probably spam.