Expat Internet Services

Design and Purpose

Developing the appearance of your website can often be streamlined by purchasing professionally designed themes or templates and using them on your site. However, it is important to know what design elements contribute to an effective and flexible layout for your website. Using Web Design on a Shoestring you can learn the foundations of web design and, more specifically, the details that need to be documented in order to get the website your business or organization needs.

The summary on Amazon.com also notes that the author discusses how employing good markup and adhering to Web standards can make your site work on the widest range of browsers and devices and even goes over some fine points of proper XHTML. She finishes with some sage words on choosing and registering a domain name and comparison shopping for domain hosting. The book offers useful tools and reviews of content management systems and free resources to help a small team (or a team of one) to effectively plan and manage the development of a website.

Managing Content

If you have a website it is essential to think about updating your content to highlight news, events or draw attention to your products or services. The days of setting up a simple HTML site and creating multiple pages that require extensive editing any time the content changes have been replaced by a widespread reliance on content management systems (CMS). Numerous tools exist but two open source options tend to be easier to use when you are looking to manage your own website.

WordPress started out as a blogging tool and has evolved into a very flexible content management system that is well-suited for small to medium-sized websites. Despite the title, WordPress For Dummies, 3rd Edition has practical guidance for both beginners and more experienced users. With this book you can become better acquainted with WordPress functionality and management tips including: how to set up a MySQL database; the anatomy of a template tag; ways to enhance your blog with themes, polls, ratings, and widgets; how to manage multiple blogs and users; tips for tackling spam with Akismet (an anti-spam plugin); advice on optimizing for search engines; how to use WordPress as a content management system; and ways to style with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Another powerful and scalable CMS is Joomla, which also enjoys a strong developer community and numerous source of website theme templates and add-ons. In Joomla! 1.5: A User’s Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition) the author helps you to understand content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together. He also explains how to build Joomla! sites from scratch and systematically customize them to your needs. What may be particularly useful is the included case studies showing how to build Joomla-powered websites for a school, a small business, and a blog.

Getting Noticed

Once you have your website set up, the next step is to ensure that is gets noticed by search engines and can be found by visitors and potential customers (for commercial sites). This is where search engine optimization (SEO) becomes an essential aspect of your online marketing efforts. Certainly, there are companies and consultants who offer excellent services to help you improve your search engine rankings and visibility but this requires an additional investment beyond your website development and hosting. In some cases, particularly for non-profit organizations and small-medium businesses, there simply isn’t a large budget available for SEO consulting. With Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day, a website owner or manager can review and apply practical guidance on developing keyword strategies and planning advertising campaigns.

The book also looks at how business goals, creating appealing marketing messages and designing human-usable web sites form the foundation of effective SEO strategy. The authors include spreadsheet-based worksheets that you can use to accomplish specific SEO-related goals. The book’s guidance can be applied to small, individually-owned or large businesses.

Tracking Your Website Metrics

The final tool for website management involves measuring how and where visitors interact with your website. One of the more powerful utilities for this task is Google Analytics. The Google Analytics site describes the service as:

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

In Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, 2nd Edition you will learn about the installation, configuration, tracking techniques, and best practices of Google Analytics. Since this is a 2nd edition, the content has been updated to reflect changes in the Google Analytics interface and also addresses topics such as how to optimize your online and offline marketing campaigns and integrate Google Analytics data with third-party systems and applications, including your CRM system.

A useful overview of the importance of website metrics and how Google Analytics can be a valuable tool for small business is available on YouTube from justynalam in her video presentation entitled “Small Business Marketing – Why You Need Google Analytics”.

When you spend time developing your career or personal passion, you often want to promote them effectively. There are variety of ways to establish your personal brand for your professional activities or your personal interests. you can find numerous articles about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and how you can use them to create, and maintain, your online identity. There are even services that help you to consolidate your social personas and manage them from a central site – some examples include Chi.mp, Ping.fm and Card.ly.

Relying on other sites

When you rely upon other sites, like the ones above, you are usually confident that they will be around for a long time. However, if you are looking to create an identity that travels with you and can be crafted to reflect your experiences or professional achievements, creating your own web presence becomes a necessity. Spend some time creating and developing a website and you definitely appreciate the investment of your time and effort — but it doesn’t have to be costly in terms of monetary expense.

Create to fit your needs

Start out with a basic solution (e.g., shared hosting rather than dedicated hosting) and expand your site as needed. Consider using website building tools (e.g., WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla) that don’t require a commercial license. And you can use stock photos or your images (from Flickr) to add color and pictures to your site.

Your website (either a blog, photo journal or pages on social networks) makes it easier for people to find you and then begin to rely on you for advice, ideas and, possibly, partnership or professional collaboration. Depending on what you want to achieve you can use different types of websites -

• Web blog (or blog) – create a blog for a specific project or trip and then connect it to other blogs each with their own identity
• Portfolio website – a good way to showcase photos, projects or writing samples (white papers, brochures, creative writing, etc.)
• Professional Services – promote your expertise and increase visibility on search engines by adding content on a regular schedule
• E-Commerce stores – sell products (either manufactured or information) through a dedicated portal with secure transactions
• Affiliate sites or blogs – promote other people’s products and services by creating a blog or website that highlights the benefits of the products
• Learning Online / Teaching – use a content management system or a learning management system to deliver training course for as a public service or for profit
• Single page – sales letters, mini-sites, article directories, audio and video podcast websites can attract visitors in specific niches and offer highly specialized content for search engines

Find what you need to get started

The links above can connect you with the sites where you can download the content creation tools you need to set up a website. These tools are also available as part of the hosting accounts offered at Expat Internet Services. There are well established communities that support tools such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla (and other tools) where you can find free add-ons (plugins and modules) to add audio, video and image galleries to your website.