Prof Web Marketing

I have to say I learned a few things from tonights webinar.  I think the best thing I learned was to always include the  trailing / after a directory.  I can totally understand why also, it will definitely  cut down on server load and thus decrease page load time.

Learning to do a site map and wireframe prior to construction is also something I have to concentrate on in the future.  I usually just pick a template and start hacking away at it till I get what I want.  This isn’t the most efficient way of doing things obviously.

On the subject of CMS(content management systems), I think tomorrow, I’m going to put Joomla on a spare domain and start playing around with it.  I guess it is the way of the future as suggested by tealcool in the Template vs. Custom website thread.  I really don’t like the idea of using Wordress as a content site, but would definitely work and Google indexes blogs alot faster than other design forms.

8 Ways to Make Your Site Load Faster and 10 Guidelines for Usability

A lot of the things Jeremy pointed out here are highly related to good SEO practices also.  In fact, I thought thats what he was talking about for a few minutes as I my mind started to wander like it usually does -on how I’m going to apply all of this- of course.

• text navigation
• no Javascript or Flash navigation
• using alt attribute on images and title attribute <—- many people mislabel these as “tags”
• No Frames
• Limit scripting, i.e. Ajax
• Keeping Flash to a minimum

All of these things are as important to your search engine rankings as it is to maintaining a good user experience.

Product Recommendation

Jeremy touched briefly on using forms on your website.  A form is anywhere you (or your site’s visitor) enters in information in a box.  This can be for signing up for something, registering on your blog or site, or contacting you on your contact page. (You do have one don’t you?)

CoffeeCup Web Form Builder is a useful tool for making any type of form you need for you site.  Although, I tried it on 1 of my wordpress blogs and couldn’t get it to work, I still find it to be a great tool.  It creates the form in Flash (yes, in this case its okay, you don’t want your contact form indexed anyway) which hides the info from the spammers. <— At least it used to, they may have moved past this.

The pluging I use for my contact page here is a plug-in called WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection. Its configurable Via the Wordpress options in the backend.