June RapidWeb Newsletter
For previous newsletters, tips and general support information go to:
WhatsHappening
Topics:
- Search Engine Basics
- Search Engine Class
- Up time statistics
- JPEGS- how to make a skinny image
- New RapidWeb web sites
Search Engines- Basics
Building a website is no longer adequate to be sure that your site is found. You must now develop a specific strategy to have the readers you want find you site. In previous newsletters we talked about a range of free activities that would be useful in promoting your site to your existing customer base. Certainly every piece of traditional advertising, marketing and communications needs to mention your website. It can represent you "24/7" and with all of the work that you put into it, that is the least it can do.
But for your website to reach out to new customers and clients it needs to visible to search engines. Many companies offer to list your site with 200 search engines for $29.95. Mostly what they do is submit your site to inconsequential engines and if you let them use your e-mail address lead to lots of spam. The point? They are of little value in having your site found.
The top 5 search portals (places where people search from) garner roughly 148 million visitors a year. The next 5 search portals in order of visitation generate 41 million visitors. An even more telling statistic is that the average user spends 50% more time per month searching at the top 5 sites (13 minutes) than the visitors spend at the second 5 search portals (8.5 minutes).
The moral of the story is that for your site to be found when people are searching it really needs to be visible in the top 5 search portals and the bulk of your placement efforts need to focus on these portals.
For those of you who like to "roll your own" search engine strategies I have assembled 5 tools that I use and have helped garner rankings in these critical "top 5" search engines. You can read about them at: Search Engine Placement tools
Search Engine Class
Learn How to Develop a Strategy to Help your Web Site be more Easily Found by the Major Search Engines
June 19, 2002
StartUps Deli-Cafe
100 West Main Street, Allegany
9:30 - 11:30 AM
Target: Any business with a web site or planning a web site
Prerequisite: Basic understanding of the Web and search engines.
Class Details: Provide background information on the workings of major search engines and specific strategies your company can take to improve the ranking of your site. Understand how site construction techniques affect your rankings, how to focus your search placement efforts for the best results, understand the role of metatags and how they influence success and learn how to craft metatag information to improve your rankings. Examine real life sites to see how they fared and how they could improve
To sign up Call Meme at Greater Olean 716-372-4433 or e-mail her at Meme's e-mail
Up time statistics
As I have mentioned in previous e-mails we have contracted with an outside firm to provide a weekly analysis of our uptime and response rates.
We take our hosting responsibilities seriously and are constantly exploring ways to provide you with a more reliable and responsive service. Take at look at our "uptime" over the last several months:HostingStats
JPEGS Preparation (or how to make a skinny image)
The most frequently used image type on your web page is a .jpg image. The ideal .jpg file for your web site is one that is very small (less than 20k and preferably less than 10k) and fills just a small part of your browser screen real estate. The two things that you need to be concerned with to avoid problems with how fast your images on your pages download are the size of the JPEG in pixels (dots of colored information in the image) and the amount of JPEG compression that you have used. How do you make sure your image is just right?
A typical computer screen has a resolution of 800 x 600. That means that the screen can display 800 pixels of information wide and 600 pixels high. The typical browser has roughly 700 x 450 pixels available for page content. What happens when you place a 3”x5” scanned at 300 pixels per inch on your page? It consumes the page and then some.And worse it will take forever for your site visitors to actually see the image.Generally you will want your web page jpeg images to be on the order of 200 x 150 pixels and compressed enough to look good but get to their destination quickly..
More is better with some things, but not pixels; “just enough” is the order of the day. Or rather, just enough for the medium in which the image is to be viewed. To have avoided this scenario the web master needs to scan at 96 dpi, set their camera at a lower resolution, or resized their image, in an image editing program like Adobe PhotoShop Elements, Microsoft PhotoPaint or PaintshopPro. Are there times when more pixels are better? Yes but not in web pages.
Now on to compression. The JPEG file format standard defines a way to throw away information from an image that is to be later reconstituted. This is known as “lossy” compression. It's kind of like instant mashed potatoes in that content is removed for later insertion (although personally I think that the impact of JPEG technology on a photo image quality is vastly superior to the impact of dehydration technology on the flavor of potatoes. With JPEG technology you only ruin the image if you want to). JPEG compression can squeeze an image as little as 2 or 3 times smaller to as much as 15 to 20 times smaller. If the image can withstand lots of jpeg compression then by all means squeeze away.Your site visitors will thank you. An image that starts out life as an 200x150 pixel image will be 87 kbytes (k) big. When compressed using JPEG at high quality it might become 20k. You could squeeze this same image down to about 4k and it would still look ok (not quite as good as the 20k file but good enough to allow you to appreciate the image).A 20k file will take 6 seconds to load for someone with a 56k modem. The same file squeezed to 4k will only take 2 seconds. If you have 3 or 4 images on the page, your visitor might leave before they have all downloaded.
Some programs make these calculations relating the trade off between size, speed and quality an easy decision. One such program that has excellent preview information of an image to be saved for the web is PhotoShop (both full and Elements). This feature can save you hours of prep time, provide better quality and smaller images. All of that adds up to happier visitors.
Welcome to new RapidWeb Sites
http://www.wilymilo.com/ Headline reads "Local String Band Makes Good". The Wily Milo String Band just cut their second album and has been slated for an appearance at one of the East Coast's leading folk festivals - http://www.oldsongs.org/festival.html -this summer. To celebrate they have built a new web site as well. Any similarity between principals in the band and Blumenthals.com is not merely coincidental. But I never tire of plugging Jodi's great web work!
http://www.caseyhalwighartle.com Dennis Casey and Ken Hartle recently created Casey Halwig & Hartle by merging Casey Funeral Home with Halwig Funeral Home. Both had individually provided funeral services to the Olean area for many years. As part of their merger a decision was made to create a new logo and a new website that better reflected their merged companies. We created both. See what you think.
http://www.sthcs.org is now live. As a rural health cooperative serving the Southern Tier of New York their goal was to use their website to highlight their regional health programs, members and a comprehensive database of regional service providers. They provided us with a logo designed by Studio 4 East and Jodi did the rest!.
To see other recently designed sites go to: RapidWebSites
Mike Blumenthal
mike@blumenthals.com
