How To Make A Website - Graphics And Blogs
So far I've covered some of the basic steps on how to make a website but I haven't covered images & nor creating a blog. The images are a very important part of your website in regards to keeping visitors interested & for search engine optimization. A blog is going to keep content your website fresh and if you can write content that's valuable, it's going to keep people coming back to your website.
Tip 7: Images & Photos
How often to you revisit websites that don't spice up their site with images or illustrations? For me, it's rarely. I like to look at images & photos because it can answer questions without having to read through tons of content.
It's important to place images on your website but don't over do it. Many people still use dial-up for their internet connection so it's important to use images that aren't to large or exceed 72 pixels/inch. Most monitors don't resolve more than 72 pixels/inch so you're just making the images larger for no reason at all.
Another important part of images is the 'alt' tag, obviously search engines can't figure out what an image relates to so it's important to give your file a descriptive name and use the 'alt' tag. A good example of this would be something on the order of <img src="chrome-wheels.jpg" alt="Chrome Wheels" />.
To break this down you're telling the search engine that your image is named 'chrome-wheels.jpg and the alt tag is another way of describing to the search engines what the image is related to. It's important to use the alt tag as often as possible because it's a way of optimizing your web page for search engines.
There is a huge selection of image editing software on the market from free options like Gimp to higher priced editors such Adobe PhotoShop. I personally use both, I use PhotoShop for editing photos and I use FireWorks for creating and editing images such as banners & buttons. The later two offer advanced features so be sure to research them before making a decision.
Tip 8: Blogs
I'm running long so I'm going to make this short. Blog is short for Web log that consist of regularly updated entries displayed in reverse chronological order. Essentially an online diary or journal. The great thing about blogs is that search engines love blogs because of they are generally updated with new content and generally updated with unique content. You'll find that almost every single web host offers a blog application with their hosting services.
There are a lot of different options in regards to blogs from hosted versions such as BlogSpot.com to versions that you host under your own domain such as WordPress. I personally use WordPress because I can host it on my own server and there are so many features that you can add to it. By the way, no matter which you choose, blog software generally is free.
You'll find that we offer WordPress with all of our web hosting accounts as well. One final thing, I've covered just a very small area of blogs. In my opinion the best website regarding blogs and how to make money with blogs is at ProBlogger.com. I personally check with ProBlogger.com about 2 - 3 times per week so it's a great idea to check them out.
In my next post I'm going to cover a couple of SEO, search engine optimization techniques.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com