Website Development, Email Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Tools & Resources

A very common issue I come across is that my clients pay a developer to create a website for them and then do not get all of the files used in the site’s development. This is plain wrong! Can you image buying a car and then finding out that the manufacturer requires special tools that they wouldn’t sell to anyone? You’d have to send the car back to the factory for minor repairs; sound rediculas, then why do people let their web developers pull the same trick. If you pay to have a website developed, that website is yours. You are entitled to all of the files necessary to make changes to the website in the future. If your developer will not provide these, or is resistant, or has a clause in the contract maintaining ownership of the files; find someone else.

Here is a short list of items to ask for when your site is developed:

• If the website is from a template provider, get the template installer, or an extracted copy of the template.
• Demand all Graphics files used for fancy text, logo’s or color changes. Be certain to specify that you do not want only the rasterized graphics used for text (these are more or less useless if you don’t have the original font, or know the exact settings), but that you want every master image file used.
• If your website uses Flash, get the .fla file, it’s required for editing a flash movie. Just a note: If this file is lost, our company will charge a minimal fee to convert an existing .swf (flash format read by your browser) to an editable .fla.
• A full copy of the website that was published to your web hosting company.

Your Developer may use many other files to develop your website, but the items above are the most common. Also remember to keep copies of anything you send to your developer, you never know when you may need them. See my post on Backing Up Your website.

When I develop a website, I include all of the master image files inside the website. That way, my clients can get to them anytime they want. I will also provide a cd with all development files upon request. If your developer can’t, or won’t do this for you -find someone else!

Filed under: Web Development on January 31st, 2005 No Comments »

If there is one point I can’t stress enough, it’s Backup your website! I know you have probably heard this before, but have you heard the horror stories? Recently, I have come across a number of scenarios where my clients have found themselves in a world of hurt. Luckily, none of my clients completely lost their sites, but then a two year old copy isn’t always as good a save as you would think. Here are a couple of examples to emphasize the need to back up your website!

Hosting Company Shut down site:
Recently one of my clients missed an email from their hosting company stating that their credit card information needed to be updated. Unlike most companies, this company didn’t provide a grace period. End result; no website. My client then contacted them , and contacted them, and contacted them to no avail. With no recent copy of their website and a company that didn’t want to respond (so that we could pay them to activate the site and get the files back), we were forced to relocate to a new server. Of course since it was my client, I did have copies of her website. The problem is that I hadn’t done any work for her in nearly 2 years and my copies were out of date.

Hosting Company restored a old copy of a website, erasing the Current Version
A few weeks ago, I had a client call me because their website wasn’t coming up. I took a look and found that all of the pages had been converted to 0KB files (If your not a propeller head, this means that all the files in the site were replaced with blanks). I called the hosting company and told them to restore the site, two weeks later the site still hadn’t been restored, so I called again. This time I told them to restore a copy a few months old. The hosting company responded with a short impersonal message stating they couldn’t restore the site. Again I ended up placing a two year old site online, in order to get my client back up and running.

I think the point is simple, back up your website. You wouldn’t buy a brand new car and not ensure it, so what possible excuse can someone have for not backing up their own website. If you want to take the chance go ahead and leave it up to fate, but it could be a costly mistake.

Filed under: Hosting on January 27th, 2005 No Comments »

Always striving to make Global Presence your One Stop Marketing & Development Resource Online, we have modified the homepage with some great new information.

Take a look at these great features:

• Database of over 200 links to marketing, development, graphics resources and more
• Links to top notch hosting companies
• FrontPage Template Stores
• New Articles & Downloads

Filed under: Site Notices on January 26th, 2005 No Comments »

Great new site!

Employee opinion surveys can help you to make the most of your management team. Peter Barron Stark & Associates are experts at using Surveys to maximize employee retention and customer satisfaction. Try their free online survey demo and see what you think for yourself.

www.employeeopinionsurveys.com

Filed under: Employee Management on January 25th, 2005 No Comments »

I listened to Tom Antion’s Bloging cd (you can read about it on his Blog) and decided to give them a shot. Initially, I tried
BlogSpot.com, as it was free and I thought at the time the easiest way to go. Turns out I was wrong. Now don’t get me wrong, it was free and it was extreamly easy to setup, but it wasn’t the easiest way to go.

I use a hosting system called CPanel on a number of my website solutions (when I want more control of the website, but don’t want to be calling the hosting company all the time). I was just browsing through my control panel options one day and discovered that it could install a blog for me in less than 3 minutes! It actually came with four different blogs, but I went with Word Press since Tom mentioned it on his CD. The installation script for my Blog, and a lot of other cool applications, was hidden in an option of the Cpanel called Fantastico, and it is!

Here is how it worked:

• Logged into control panel
• Clicked on Fantastico
• Selected Word Press from the menu on the left
• Clicked new installation
• Chose Username, Password, selected the directory to install to, and a few additional items
• Clicked Finish Setup

That was all she wrote, My CPanel built the database and installed the files into my website. It didn’t customize the blog for me, which is why it is green and not my typical Orange/Blue combo, but I have time to do that later.

Why would I want the Blog in my website instead of on Blog Spot?
This is a tricky one, as I can see a positive reason to use both WordPress on my website and BlogSpot hosted on the Blog Spot servers. The reason I decided to place the Blog on my website, is that I want my website to get credit for the content and not Blog Spot. If I had the blog hosted on the Blog Spot servers, the search engines would view the content as belonging to the Blog Spot domain name and not mine. On the other hand, if I used the Blog Spot servers, my blog would get established quicker, because of the Blog Spot domain and linking from other sources related to Blog Spot.

Here is a simple example:
Possible URL for Blog Spot - myblog.blogspot.com
Actual URL for my Website - your-propeller-head.org/seblog

Note how blog spot adds a sub-domain for your blog, but is still part of Blog Spot. Then look at the global Presence URL where the Blog is an actual directory.

In the finial evaluation, I decided it would be better in the long run to build traffic to the Blog manually, and let all that extra content add to the content of my own domain name and help my rankings in the search engines.

If you need a hosting company that supports CPanel, so that you can setup your own Blog as quickly and easily as I did, check out the following company. Hostgator is very offer plenty of bandwidth, unlimited number of domains, excellent storage capacity, unlimited number of databases, etc. Hostgator

Filed under: Blogs Forums CMS on January 18th, 2005 No Comments »

I just finished listening to Tom Antion’s CD Web Logging (Blogging) for fun and profit and had this Blog setup in under 5 minutes. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

I decided to try one of these free blogs, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a free hosted blog, in contrast to a blog hosted on an existing web server. The search engines can be fascinating little arachnids, and often very unpredictable. So if your going to use a blog to market your products or services, I figure it’s a good idea to see what they are up to before going through a lot of unnecessary work.

The questions I have are:

• Since the free blog servers are larger and have much more link popularity, would the results of search engine spidering have a higher impact on the free hosted version -vs- the version installed on my website?
• Will the news feeds pick up on the hosted version faster?
• If the hosted version is more effective, can it be used to point to other blogs? If so will the other blogs gain more credibility?

Well that’s what was going through my head. Only time will provide the answers I am looking for.

Filed under: Blogs Forums CMS, Marketing & Publicity on January 5th, 2005 No Comments »

I just setup a hosted BlogSpot blog for a client (wheat-grass.blogspot.com) and man this thing is easy! Basically, type in a few preferences and your ready to go. I aslo configured his blog to use an rss feed for his My Yahoo account, this should increase the overall traffic to his Blog. After all, if no one reads your Blog, there really isn’t much point in writing it.

I think I’m going to do some testing on GNU Blogs, to see what kind of performance/fetures differences there are.

Filed under: Blogs Forums CMS on January 5th, 2005 No Comments »

Amsterdam Nights Theme avalable from www.AlexKing.org

Filed under: WordPress on January 1st, 2005 No Comments »