What to look for. Simple ways to know your webdesigner knows what they are doing!

2011-01-02T23:01:00.003-05:00

As you can see, from the date of my last entry, I fell down on the job. As it's the first of a new year, it's obviously a good time for a resolution to start a regular posting schedule.

First, I'd like to mention my latest professional training. At the end of this past year, I had a 3 week webinar on professional social media management through Planet Ocean Communications – one of the best SEO businesses online. And I'm really excited at the prospect of now having the tools to help my clients achieve success with promoting their online professional presence.

From here on out, I intend to post at least twice a week (I expect my coach will remind me that I should be posting daily, but I'm going to start small and plan to increase my output) and pass my knowledge to you.

But back to making the major decision of having a professional do your website for you. What do you look for? How can you tell you are getting someone who truly knows what they are doing?
Back to the problem of WYSIWIG programs. It's easy to spot a site built with Frontpage as well as check out how much a webdesigner knows about SEO (search engine optimization), let alone HTML (Hyper Text Mark up Language = the code a good designer can write from scratch).

If your browser is Internet Explorer, look for “view” on your toolbar at the top of the screen on a webpage you'd like to investigate. Click on “view” and look for “source” as an option at the bottom of the drop down list. Click on that.

If you're using Mozilla Firefox, it's also labeled “view” and you want to look for “page source.”

For Safari, look for the second symbol in from the right at the top of the page. The first one on the right is a gear, the second one looks like a page with the top corner bent down. The page will say “display a menu for the current page” when you hover the cursor over it. Click on that and look near the bottom of the list for “view source” and click on that.

In Google Chrome, there's a button with a wrench on the right hand side at the top of the page. Click on the wrench (it says “customize and control Google chrome” when your cursor hovers over it), and look for the “Tools” option halfway down the dropdown menu. When you hover over “tools” yet another menu opens up and you want to select“view source” halfway down that page.

In the Opera browser, you have two options depending upon how your screen is currently set up. If the menu bar is visible, you will see the options starting at the top of the left hand side of the page – it says “file,” “edit,” and “view,” etc. If it's hidden, you'll see a bright red button at the top left hand corner with a big Opera “O” and the word “Menu.” Click on “Menu” and select “show menu bar” at the bottom of the list of options.
When the menu bar is open, you will see the “file,” “edit” and other options at the top left hand side of the window. Select “view” on this bar, and a new list of options drop down.
The last choice on the list is “developer tools.” When you hover over this, yet another list opens. Click on the first choice, “source.”

In all cases, you will have a new window (or tab) open up and you can see the code that a developer (or their software) has written for any given webpage. This is what a computer “reads” to show you what you see on your screen.

First of all, the code will tell you who or what generated it.

At the very top of the page, , you should see
!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"

Keep in mind that all of this code will be in brackets. You'll see code that says
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"

If you don't see the !DOCTYPE code at the top of the page, chances are it was
created with software and not typed by a real person –
if so you will have -
meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0" (or some other type of software that automatically generated the content).

If it's actually been humanly created, in my case I always identify myself –

META name="author" content="Roberta Marley; ITP Webdesign"
META name="date" content="11/22/2010 6:13 PM ET"
meta name="distribution" content="national"
meta name="copyright" content="the name of the person who owns the site goes here"
meta name="Language" content="EN” (meaning English)
meta name="Robots" content="index,follow"

A good designer will always update the date and time stamp when they work on any given page. This will tip off the search engine robots that the page should be spidered (or “read”) again since there's new content there.

And if they've been properly trained, a designer will add additional meta tags for the search engines to aid in the indexing process – and not just this one tag -
meta name="Robots" content="index,follow"

But the tags that tell the search engines what's there that you'd like indexed -
META name="description" content="a few detailed but concise sentences about that page's content."
META name="keywords" content= “the most important words or terms that are actually used on that page. These should be the words or terms that someone will likely type into a search engine that would lead them to your page.”

Another time saving short cut that I myself have been guilty of (and I can promise that I no longer do) is repeating the meta tags for description and key words from one page in a site to the next. And ditto on the title tag – that is the tag that generates the title in the blue bar you see at the very top of every page. Very bad move for the simple reason that the search engine robots won't “read” and index all of the individual pages in the site. If the same description, key words and title appear from one page to the next, the robot will assume that the pages are all the same.
There are those individuals that will argue that meta tags are no longer that important with the search engines. But why, when they only take a few minutes to do, omit them? Especially when experience has shown me that using the same ones means the search engines will not index the individual pages in the site. For me, it's just a no-brainer. I do it because I want to be sure I'm doing everything I can to get my clients' sites indexed with the search engines.

There's something else you need to know that your developer is doing, and there's an easy way to find out if they are. Ask them if they know what a site map is and if they use them in their sites.

This is a trick question. There are two kinds of site maps and both are important. The obvious one is visible to site visitors. It's a single page in the site that gives text links to every page in the site. It's important for two reasons – first, if your site has a navigational toolbar that's is coded in javascript (or any other code other than basic HTML), there are some people running very old, outdated browsers that may not read these codes. If they can't get around on your website, they obviously aren't going to stay. Second, if someone is looking for a specific piece of information, and the terms used to index or link the pages in the site don't readily show them where they want to go (or not every single page is listed in your site index), it will save them considerable time if they can access a site map that lists and gives information about every page. Again, without a site map, there's another visitor who won't stay on your site.

The second type of site map is the one that's the vital one if you want your site to show up in Google's indexing. This type is all code and it's invisible to the average site visitor.
But you can access a website's site map if you know what you're looking for.

To look at my business site's site map, type in http://itpsites.com/sitemap.xsd into your browser or click on that link. This site map lists every page in the site that I want
Google's robots to index. It tells Google the most recent date that the content on any given page was changed or updated.

Not only is a site map of this type included on every website that I am maintaining, but I go into a section called webmaster tools on my business account at Google and inform them that the site index needs to be re-indexed every time I make changes or additions on a website. (And when I do these updates, I update the sitemap as well).

Another interesting detail that not every designer takes the time for is checking how a finished webpage looks at all the available screen sizes and on all the major browsers.
While the most popular size is 1024 x 768 (and chances are if you have a newer computer yours was automatically set at this size), the second most popular size is actually the smallest – 800 x 600. I not only have Internet Explorer loaded onto my computer, but I also have copies of Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome. While I prefer the smallest screen size, I check how any given webpage looks on all the major browsers and at all the possible screen sizes.

Why do I bother? Have you ever visited website where you couldn't see everything on the page in your screen? Were you forced to scroll back and forth with a bar at the bottom of the screen as well as the usual one on the side? It made viewing content a nightmare, didn't it? That's because the person (or software) responsible for designing the site did not do their homework. They didn't take the time to be sure that the site looked good in all the possible combinations of web browsers and screen sizes. It's the sign of a very unprofessional job. (Either that of they just don't have the time or aren't making the time to do some important detail work).

Why is this important? Well, think about it. If you were frustrated from trying to scroll around on the page or things weren't displaying properly, did you stay and look at the rest of this site? I would say no. That site lost a visitor. You went elsewhere.

These are just a few of the time consuming but important small details that I always attend to when I'm designing a client's webpages. Does your webdesigner do this? I certainly wouldn't want to pay for someone's services if they aren't taking the time to do this.

Next time – some important new statistics about why social media (that includes Facebook, Twitter and blogging), and using it properly, so very important if you want your business to succeed in the 21st century.

Getting started . . . So you've decided you want a website. . .

2009-09-01T17:50:00.001-04:00

Welcome to my blog. After working in webdesign for about a decade now, I've finally decided to give in, and join thousands of other people who freely offer their opinions online for the rest of the world to (hopefully) read. :-)

What I'd like to do in this weekly “column” is talk about what goes into a website and offer advice and insight about the process of webdesign.

If you've decided you want or need a website, the first question is are you are going to do it yourself or will you hire someone to design and maintain it for you?
You will find there's plenty of software out there – from the cheap to the very expensive – some of it good, some of it practically useless. And most of it will produce mediocre to poor results if you really don't know what you're doing.

Ten years ago, I stumbled into webdesign when I used some “WYSIWYG” software (pronounced the way it's spelled - “whis-see-wig” meaning “What You See Is What You Get!”) and thought Wow! This is fun! And they PAY people do to this?!

Problem is, while it's very simple to drag and drop photos and type on a screen much the way you use a word processing program or write an email, I soon discovered that this type of software leaves no room for you to refine your work, let alone customize a design or layout.

Before I learned HTML (that's “Hypertext Markup Language” or the code a webdesigner types out that “tells” your computer what to display on your screen), I was pretty much at the mercy of what I initially placed on the page the first time. Forget moving the results around if I wanted to change something. It really was easier to start over from scratch. Either way, it was very time consuming and often frustrating.

Why hire someone to do it for you? Because if you want a quality product, you hire a professional. But take your time and do a little research. Not every every webdesigner is truly “professional” and over the course of this blog, I plan to explain what it is you need to know and look for.

Back to the “WYSIWIG” software for a minute and a story from personal experience. I had potential clients referred to me through an established client who lives in Chicago. (I live on the east coast, in Pennsylvania. But don't assume that makes me “regional.” Thanks to the internet, I'm truly global. I've collaborated with German friends on one website, have had a client in Ireland, and currently my most distant client is on the west coast).

Anyway, back to the potential clients in Chicago. They told me their current webmaster was quitting the business and was giving them plenty of time to find someone to take over their website. What they really wanted was someone who would set up a site, and then be able to show them how to use their “WYSIWIG” software so they could do site updates and correct errors themselves. Thus, they reasoned, this would potentially save them hundreds of dollars in web maintenance fees.

Yes and no! on that money-saving angle. Because, in the course of our conversation, I discovered that their current webmaster was apparently using WYSIWYG software. They had noticed that time and again, they'd ask for updates and he'd make them – and end up with inexplicable changes in the layout or text format he hadn't made - and couldn't seem to correct.

This was an obvious tip-off to me that they had been working with yet another individual who'd bought do-it-yourself software and never learned to truly write (let alone understand) HTML. When you invest in a program like this, you can get the idea that if you can do this yourself. Who needs to pay ridiculous prices to some professional! At this rate, anyone can be a webdesigner! Until, as I said, the software takes over the design process for you and you can't fix the mistakes it makes.

So how do you know you're getting a true professional? Ask. Ask if they write their own HTML (can they code from scratch?). What kind of software do they use? Sorry, but Frontpage is a WYSIWIG program and it generates quirky code. I “inherited” a site written by a son-in-law for one client, and I had to re-code the whole thing because if you really can read HTML, don't even bother trying to figure out Frontpage.

Are they a member of the HTML Writers Guild or the International Webmasters Association? Do they know what the W3C is? And yes, you're wondering, why is this important and why should I care?

If you care enough to establish an online presence for yourself, your business or your product(s), obviously you want to be sure that you've invested your money wisely. Is this website going to do what it's supposed to do? Based on who you choose to design and maintain your website, how can you be sure? Keep reading! I'll be giving you the answers to this and many other questions in the days ahead.

itpwebdesign

What to look for. Simple ways to know your webdesigner knows what they are doing!

Getting started . . . So you've decided you want a website. . .