Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

So, you want to make a website? Whether business or for personal, there are several general guidelines you should follow. These are made to be flexible for most types of websites, however may not work for everyone. After webmastering several sites for almost 8 years now, these have been guidelines I have followed when creating projects. Some have flopped, and some have succeeded, but these have always been a great guideline to follow.

Because this is so long, I will be breaking it into parts. This is Part 2 of this series. If you missed the other, please read So You Want to Make a Website: Part 1

2. What can you invest into your website?

Will you be able to invest time into your website? Will you be able to invest money into your website? These are important and merely optional depending on the website owner/ webmaster choice in how to bring the site into existence.

Making a website takes time, sometimes even money, especially when having it hosted with a paid web host. If you are unable to design a site, then obviously you will have to invest money into having it designed and coded. Some web designers are cheap and others are expensive, but nevertheless, it is an investment to bringing the site together. The same can be said about web hosting. I actually sell off my server web hosting for as little as $25 a year at Host Solutions, which are perfect for bloggers and my server is geared to support WordPress.

For bloggers in particular, free hosting will only do for so long. As a website owner, you need the control to monitor your site’s success and breaking out on your own is ideal.

In regards to investing time, it can be a very finicky issue. The content will obviously be the main part added once the site has a general layout to portray it. However, it is also the part that takes the most time. You as the website owner will have to take time to put this together, if not, hire a webmaster who can. This can be an issue as some cannot utilize the internet efficiently and have no idea how to add their content, while others may not have the time.

A webmaster can make the changes necessary. Some web designers may even offer Site Maintenance/ Webmaster services. Like web design, it may be expensive or cheap, but make a good choice on someone that is reliable. A hired webmaster who seems like they are hard to contact and get any site updates done in a decent time is not exactly ideal.

Also, for both time and money, how will you get your site out? Do you plan to invest money in advertising, or do you have a lot of friends who can spread the news like wildfire? Getting the word out on a website is not easy. It takes a lot of time, even a lot of money, and even though you could reel in quite a bit of visitors, you have to maintain this, seeking larger areas to reach more of your audience.

Are you still free hosting, but find that your site is quickly becoming popular? What is holding you back from investing in your website? What kind of plans do you have for your website in the near future?

If you already have invested some, is your site succeeding or are there areas that you need to focus on that are not up to your satisfaction?

A lot of people like to debate on which is better – Blogger or WordPress? For those not familiar with these two, you can skip the first part as I will give a little background on each. Background of Blogger Blogger started in 1999. In 2003, Google acquired Blogger. Most Blogger users are typically found on the Blogspot.com domain. This is a service that is totally online and done through Google. There are no free downloads to install. Background of WordPress WordPress started in 2003 and was forked off from b2/ cafelog as an open source software. In those days, Read More →

The page jump is a simple HTML trick that involves the anchor tag and a little naming. The page jump allows visitors to click and jump to a different part of a page. This is a great trick to use in FAQ type pages, especially if the list is quite long. 1. Create your hyperlink code with the URL. 2. Add after the URL ‘#’ and a name for your url. <a href="URL#nameyourlink"></a> 3. Place the following anchor where you want your topic to jump to on your page. <a name="nameyourlink"></a> Simple, right? By the way, if you have a Read More →

[This is a guest post by Eugene. Eugene is a recent college grad, an avid blogger, and a SEO specialist with Net LZ. Eugene manages a variety of blogs and SEO campaigns, with a focus on web 2.0. In addition to professional interests, he is an avid reader and takes much interest in history, politics and international affairs. Eugene can be found on Twitter @wecomparebooks.] Today the magic bullet of SEO doesn’t involve getting tons of traffic to your site, but rather it consists of getting targeted traffic to your site. It is much more beneficial to get 100 targeted Read More →

So, you want to make a website? Whether business or for personal, there are several general guidelines you should follow. These are made to be flexible for most types of websites, however may not work for everyone. After webmastering several sites for almost 8 years now, these have been guidelines I have followed when creating projects. Some have flopped, and some have succeeded, but these have always been a great guideline to follow. Because this is so long, I will be breaking it into parts. This is Part 1 of this series. What is the focus of your website? Do Read More →

Why should you guard your email address? Most people know when you see an email address that the text is blue and underlined, you can simply click it and your default email program (like Outlook Express, Yahoo, or Thunderbird) will open up with a way for you to immediately write that person. When you display your email address to the public that way, you are welcoming a lot of trouble, like being spammed. Every day there are computers designed to scan the Internet for information. Many are for good, and others for bad. Some that are good do not discriminate Read More →

Producing content and using social media techniques have not been a fad – something that will go and come on a whim. Before the Internet, people were using other types of marketing methods. It was not until recently, “social media” became a popular term in exchange for “marketing” in general. As Mike Spakowski pointed out in his article Content is the New Black people do not have to have a Public Relations job to utilize the concepts behind social media. You can share your content on social networks like Facebook and Twitter any day at any time and as frequently Read More →

There are so many ways you can monitor your site. Google Analytics, Quantcast, Woopra, and much more. But with all these bars, graphs, and numbers – what do they mean? This article will discuss how you can analyze your site stats. The Terms Visits – This is pretty much self-explanatory. Average Time on Site – This is how long your visitors stay on your site. You want them to stay on your site as long as possible. This means you have to provide interesting, relatable, and valuable content. Bounce Rate -Google explains bounce rate as: Bounce rate is the percentage Read More →