off topic but

[Greg McCorkill]

looking for sugestions trying to finish my new web site http://www.gregscabinetsandwoodworking.com It does not come up on yahoos search engine(made in yahoos web builder on their small business hosting server).please look and see what you think thanks Greg

[DanEpps]

Greg

Please don't take any of my comments as a swipe at your site. These are the same rules I (and most developers) use when creating websites.

Think of your website as your storefront in the cyberworld. Is there anything that makes the customer want to leave the sidewalk and come inside?

Envision if you will, a shopping district in the Victorian era. The streets are lined with stores, all selling pretty much the same things. The store front has display windows (home page) that attempt to tease customers into walking through their door.

Each merchant's display is designed to show a peek of what is offered in various departments inside the store.

Okay, now lets look at some specifics:

First, CHECK YOUR SPELLING!!!!! Refridgerator should be refrigerator, Polyuerthane should be polyurethane. There might be more but you get the idea.

Also CHECK YOUR GRAMMER!!!! When using a hyphen, there should be one space on each side, i.e. Rolling Island- Unfinished Birch/Pine should be Rolling Island - Unfinished Birch/Pine. Check this throughout also as this is just one example.

Then step back and ask yourself these questions:

1. Who is the intended audience?
2. What does the customer learn from the site?
3. Is the information on the site relevant to the customer?
4. Does the site explain every piece of information in terms that the customer understands?
5. Does the site present your business in the best possible light?

Now I'll look at each question a little deeper.

1. Who do you want to reach--homeowners, builders, interior designers? If you are going after all of the above, I would suggest having relevant sections for each. Make the main page targeted toward the most desired customer base.

2. Customers want to learn something from websites. Give them some information about what you do and how you do it.

3. Don't fill your site with \"feel good\" information, look at it from the customer's prospective when choosing what to put on the site. Ask youself \"So what?\" after every piece of information on your site. If you can give a compelling answer as to why the information is important to the customer, don't include it.

4. When explaining materials, joinery, finishes, etc, use terminology that customers will understand. If you are targeting homeowners the language is different than you would use if you were targeting builders.

5. Use a professional photographer and don't show your work sitting on saw horses in the yard or shop. Customers want to see what it will look like in their house, not in their yard.

As for search engines, it takes time. Every site is not crawled by every search engine indexer on a daily basis--that would be impossible. Make the information on your home page such that it contains the words your want search engines to index. For example, if you want cabinet to be the most hit word, it must be used most on the site. Don't just include words because you want them to show up in searches though. Crawlers analyze sites as they are indexing them and will ignore such pages or even whole sites. In fact, most search engines will blacklist sites that attempt to get higher rankings by including such pages.

I hope this helps and if I can help further, please let me know.

[Kerry Fullington]

Greg,
As Dan said, the search engines basically take time. Meta Tags aren't as important as they used to be but I think they still help. You can do a search to learn more about them and I think there are still some free meta tag generators out there to help you along. Another thing that really helps over time is to get your site listed in the Open Directory. Over the years this will get you listed in a lot of search areas. I also was lucky enough to get a free subscription to Fire Factor, which is a search engine submission service. They re - submit your site to thousands of search engines every month and send you a report showing your search engine rankings as well as sites that link to you etc. This just speeds up the process of getting onto the search engines. Had it not been free I probably wouldn't have used it but it is something to consider. It also helps to have text on your home page that has the meta tag keywords that you want search engines to identify. As Dan said don't over do it but make sure your index page has your business name and words like cabinets, kitchen, etc. that describe your business.
The search engines look at text not pictures.
It has been about four years since I started my site but Kerry Fullington comes up on just about any search engine you use.
Kerry

[Greg McCorkill]

Thanks for your comments they are appreciated.This is new to me and I'm trying to make my site as nice as possible so i can give people an idea of the different kinds of work i do By the way how do you turn some thing into a link

[Kerry Fullington]

Greg,
You have to insert code into the body of your HTML document that creates a link.
Here is an example of the code to create a text link to my website.
<a href=\"http://www.kerryfullington.com\" target=\"_blank\">Kerry's Web Site</a>
The <a> and </a> ar the tags that designate the start and stop of the link code.
The href=\"http://www.kerryfullington.com\" is the url of what I want the text to link to
The target=\"_blank\" is the code to open this link in a new web page.
The Text that shows on your web page as a link is Kerry's Web Site

There should be some tools in the Yahoo Site Builder that will let you establish text or images as links.

If you are going to do much of this it is good to learn to write HTML even if you use software to execute the code for you it is nice to know what all the tags are and what they do.
I learned by finding tutorials on the INTERNET.


Kerry

[Joe Dusel]

Greg,

Another no-no is the dreaded \"Under Construction\" on a page. If a page is not ready for viewing it should not be uploaded to the server.

Joe

[DanEpps]

Here is a link to some tutorials on building websites.

[DanEpps]

Here is a link to a keyword analyzer.

[Mike Bowers]

Here is a link to a keyword analyzer.

Nice find Dan
Mike

[Jody Wilmes]

One more minor tip is to get the smallest filesize you can for your pictures. This will keep your site running fast.

This does an alright job...
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