Welcome to the February RapidWeb newsletter

Topics:

1. Site Design Checklist
2. Search Engine basics
3. New RapidWeb web sites

Site Design Checklist

When building a new site or updating an existing one it is important that certain critical elements are included. What's the best way to do that? A checklist of course. Mitchell Harper creates and explains a list that makes lots of sense whether you are creating a new site or just revising your existing one. His article appears at: http://www.WebmasterBase.com/article/655/44 . What follows is a highlight of the article and how it relates to RapidWeb.

One of the reasons that RapidWeb designs are so powerful is that steps one through four are handled as a comprehensive part of the assessment and design process. Once they are in place it is very difficult to not comply with them (although with a little ingenuity and work you can).

1. Select a color scheme and stick to it
2. Design for cross-browser compatibility
3. Provide an intuitive, easy to use navigation system
4. Underline and color your hyper links

You have control over the next 6 list items as you build your site and need to always keep them in mind:

1. Create a consistent page style to your site
2. Open external links in a new window
3. Optimize your images
4. Tell visitors who you are and what you do
5. Use customer testimonials
6. Provide contact details on every page (this also can be done as part of the design template)

Following this checklist when building your site won't guarantee that you will have a great site but it will guarantee that you focused on the major issues and will certainly contribute to having a much better final product.

Search Engines- a basic primer

Estimates of the total size of the Internet vary but it is somewhere over 2 billion pages for the world wide web. In the early days of the Internet if you just built a site, visitors would come. Now however, for a site to be found on the Internet it takes conscious effort and a bit of planning.

If you think of the Internet as a series of interconnected streets and your site as a shop on one of those streets, the first question you ask is 'how to I do I move from a cul de sac to a street that gets me some visibility'. Unlike a bricks and mortar building. on the Internet you can move to higher rent district by increasing the visibility of your site and moving it closer to where the action is. This may seem irrelevant to a site that is used only by local visitors but you can even increase local visitation by being sensitive to the issue of increasing your site's visibility. At some point, I belief that Yahoo (or some similar service) will replace the Yellow Pages as the way you find your way around town. And the sooner your site is positioned on the Internet the better prepared you will be when that time arrives. One way to achieve greater visibility is by developing a search engine placement strategy.

There are three types of search engines technologies.

• Directories- These are created by people based on submissions and the editor selects where and how your site gets ranked. Two examples of large directories are Yahoo and the Open Directory Project.

• Spider Based Engines- These engines launch software that follows the links on the Internet and each time a new page is found the results are sent back to a large database and indexed automatically. Examples of this type of search engine are Google and Inkatomi. These engines use a computer formula to rank your site as opposed to using a human to establish the ranking. Their criteria include relevant information on the site, how many other sites link to your site and how important those sites are. If you can get Microsoft to link to your site it carries more weight than if Joe's Toaster Shop does.

• Pay for View Engines- This is the newest type of engine that lists your site not based on relevancy or content but on how much you pay for someone to click through to your site. Bids range from $.05 per click through to $5 and more on popular search terms. These services like Overture.com (goto.com) are having a major impact on search results because search services like MSN and AOL make a percentage each time a site is clicked and they are thus motivated to rank "pay for view" sites higher.

Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google, Lycos, Excite and Altavista are frequent destinations for surfers looking for a web page. There are a raft of others search sites as well. However, over the past year, there has been a tremendous consolidation of companies and services in this arena. For example in the past Excite maintained its own directory and spider based database. Excite@home went bankrupt last month and their portal (home page) was purchased by another company. The search results are now exclusively provided by Overture on a strict "pay for" ranking basis.

Also you will find that the web has become so big and complicated that almost every search site contracts all or parts of their searchs out to others. This allows them to provide better coverage of the Internet and generate profits from the searchs that originate from their site. MSN utilizes Overture.com and the first few sites (which MSN refers to as SPONSORED SITES) listed in the results are directly from Overture. AOL uses the Open Directory results for some of their search results, Overture.Com for "pay for" placement results and Inktomi for spyder results. Even Yahoo uses Google for their secondary results and Google uses Open Directory for sites that they haven't indexed yet. Confused? If you want to see a summary of who gets what search results from whom: http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/alliances.html

This site also offers great insight into all issues relating to search engines and understanding how they work. Understanding who gets what from where, will allow you to develop a focused plan that achieves results but is also cost effective.

As a note, if you are too busy to become your own expert in search engine placement, we offer search engine placement planning services.

Let us know if you have any comments, questions, rants or compliments (we promise to publish them in our customer testimonial section).

Mike Blumenthal mailto:mike@blumenthals.com