Beginner
How to get your website indexed
So you've built a great new website, and you've uploaded it onto your shiny new domain. Everything is looking good. You sit back and wait for the search engine spiders to come visiting, checking your web stats package every hour to see if there's been some activity... A question many affiliates ask is how to get the search engines crawling your website in the first place. Do you have to submit your site to the search engines? Can you just get some links to it and let nature take its course? Do you have to create a... (gulp) ... sitemap? Once you've done this once, you'll wonder what you were ever worried about. But for now, here are some ways to get your pages indexed in the search engines. 1) Get a link Search engine spiders are just basically tireless wanderers. They wander around the internet following links and seeing what they discover. Therefore the most straightforward way to ... read more »
Web design troubleshooting
Sometimes when you upload your site, or look at it on a different computer, things can look wrong. Your text might be sitting in completely the wrong position, you images might have disappeared off the face of the earth, or your multicolored masterpiece might turn into a black and white tribute to Times New Roman font once you hit the "upload" button. In this lesson we're going to troubleshoot a few common website problems that new players often encounter. My fonts look wrong on my friend's computer! You can only see a font on a webpage if you've got that font installed on the computer you're trying to view it on. If your fonts look different on your friend's computer, it is probably because he/she doesn't have that font. Fortunately, there are some fonts that come standard with pretty much all the major operating systems out there. You can use these fonts on your website and be reas... read more »
Good housekeeping
In this lesson we're going to look at some "good housekeeping" aspects of web design. These are issues that aren't immediately going to affect your success as an affiliate, but will help you further down the line as your site grows. Why should you care? Websites have a habit of getting very large, very fast. If you've done something wrong on fifty pages, fixing it can take up a lot of your precious time. And time, as we know, is money. If you can nail these concepts from the outset, you'll save yourself a lot of re-jigging later. Naming files: When you're creating files for using on the web, there are a number of conventions you should observe: Keep file names lowercase. photo.jpg Photo.JPG The reason for this is that file names are very often case-sensitive on the web. In other words, photo.jpg and Photo.JPG are NOT the same file. Instead of spending hours trying to fi... read more »
Anatomy of a web page 1
In this lesson we're going to look at some of the more common structures that make up a web page. Even if you're not writing your HTML by hand, it's important to be able to recognize some of these things, particularly when you come to do your search engine optimization. Let's start right at the top! <html> .... </html> When you make a webpage, it will always include these two tags. They wrap around pretty much everything else on your page, to say "this is HTML". The "Head" section: <head> ... </head> This part of the page is invisible when you look at the page in a browser, but provides the browser and the search engines with information about your page. Most importantly it houses your Title and your Meta tags. It might also tell the browser where to find a CSS file that you're using to set the colors, fonts and other styles for your site, or any scripts th... read more »
Step-by-step: Building a basic web page
In this lesson I'm going to show you how to create a very basic webpage with a title, a header, a link and an image. But that's not all... we're going to create the same page three times using three different web authoring softwares! The aim of this lesson is to show you, firstly, how easy it actually is to create basic webpages. Secondly it's to give you a peek inside three different authoring environments, so you can decide which one is best for you. Here's the page we're going to create: (IMAGE) Dreamweaver (note: This lesson was created using Dreamweaver MX (2004)) Once you've fired up Dreamweaver, we need to create a new document. File > New > Select "basic page" and "HTML" > Click "Create " The first thing to notice with Dreamweaver is the three buttons in the top-left of the page, called "Code", "Split", ... read more »
Don't know where to start?
Suggested order to follow for site building lessons.
- Beginner
- Registering a domain name
- What to look for in a hosting provider
- Linking your domain with hosting
- Step-by-step: Building a basic web page
- Which website building software to use
- Anatomy of a web page 1
- Anatomy of a web page 2
- Uploading your website with Filezilla
- Good housekeeping
- Web design troubleshooting
- How to get your website indexed
- How to move your pages with 301 redirects
