Helping put the 'Master' in WebMaster

If you have a website then you know that getting traffic is an important thing to achieve. However, no matter how much or little traffic you get on a daily basis you should try to utilize this short time you have, to optimize their visitation.

1. First off you want to decrease the amount of times people visit and immediately leave.  To achieve this you want to make sure you catch their attention no matter which page they visit first, especially the front page any way you can.

2. Most people do not like to waste their time, making people have to search through your site to find something is not a good thing, make sure the important things are easy to find.

3. Make sure your website width is scaled properly, you want your website to fit well in at least 1024×768 screen resolution so that it is not too big and people wont have to scroll left to right. Although this may not sound like a big deal it also makes your website look more professional no matter who visits.

4. Ensure that your website works properly on all browsers, not all people use the same browser so although you may have programmed it in one does not mean it will look or act the same in another, they are usually minor differences but better to be safe.

5. What someone sees right when they get to your website is important make sure you dont have too big a banner or logo or anything else that makes it hard to see what your website really has to offer.

6. Try and utilize their visit by making ways to get a return visit such as having an easy to use mailing list they can sign up for and turn their one time visit into a reoccurring one.

7. If you have a specific goal in mind you want from your visitors, such as clicking on your Ad’s, or downloading your E-book, try to separate it in some way with an outline or however you can to make it visible and stand out from the rest of your website.

8. Don’t waste your precious website space with useless animated GIF’s or things that have no purpose or usefulness on your website, if you want to make your website look good, the simpler the better.

These may seem too simple to be effective, but no matter how little traffic you receive any little optimization you can use for your website can help.

Once you have a website up and running one thing you will more than likely want to find out is how many people are actually visiting your website. The way to find this out is to use a stat counter. A stat counter can do a lot of things depending on what type you use, but its basic use is to keep track of how many people visit your website. Many times your web hosting service will provide you with a stat counter, but even if it did it does not mean that it is the best you could be using. There are options on what type of counter you can use:

Google Analytics

Google analytics is a free stat counter service provided by of course, Google.

Stat Counter

This is another free web stat counter that I personally use and find very good, can hold 500 entries at the free level, for any more you need to upgrade.

If you dont like the one your web host offers or those two there is always the option of looking at others, but these should do quite well. Something to keep in mind is that each service may calculate their statistics in different ways, for instance Google Analytics seems to show less statistics than my web hosting service’s stat counter. Understanding your service’s features and how they check visits can help you understand your results. Some statistics you may run into:

Bounce Rate – This shows the percentage of people that visited your first page and left without going any further.
Referrals – These are the sites that brought you the visit, lack of one may mean they typed in your URL directly. Search engine means that a visitor found you through a search engine, possibly even show you the keyword they used in finding you.
Entry Page – The page the visitor entered onto.
Geography/Map – Will show where the people visited from.
Browsers/OS – Shows the browser the visitor used and the Operating System they were on.
Unique visitor – This is tricky, could be absolutely unique or unique for the day or even unique just for a couple of hours, depending on the service and how it is calculated.
Returning visitor – Shows the amount of visitors that were coming back again.
Pageviews – Shows how many pages were viewed, since visitors may visit more than one page this should never be smaller than the visit count.

What can I do with this information? Once you have this information you can use it to determine who you are reaching most and who is bringing you the traffic, then you can focus in on what you need to change or even enhance what you already have.

HTML is the basic web design language, standing for HyperText Markup Language.  In its basic form it is comprised of merely tags.  Tags design the web page and can manipulate the text within it.  HTML tags all use the same style “<tag>”, where the command is surrounded by a less than “<” and greater than “>” sign.  To demonstrate HTML web design I will use the “<b>” bold tag as an example.  To make a word bold you need to surrounded the words or letters you want bold with the “<b>” bold tag and its ending tag “</b>”.  All ending tags have the same style using the backslash before the command in the tag.

<b>Bold text</b> and not bold text.

HTML result:

Bold text and not bold text.

Anything inbetween the starting tag and ending tag will be modified appropriately.

Something to note, not all tags have an ending tag.  A tag that can operate independently does not require an ending tag.  Such a tag is the “<br>” break tag, which will skip the current line and start a new one.

This is one line <br> and this is a second line.

HTML result:

This is one line
and this is a second line.

Now to test out your HTML web design skills you just have to pull out your favorite text editor such as notepad and insert the code then saving it as a .html file and open it in your favorite browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.  To explore HTML and web design further it is a good idea to learn all the tags available, you can start here.

When playing with the idea of building a website you will need to find a web hosting service.  You can either get a free domain or buy one depending on its purpose and your budget.  If you are setting up a business or doing anything not for personal use I would recommend just going ahead and buying a domain which usually comes with a monthly payment.  However if you do want to get a free domain there is a good place to look up a lot of the free web hosting services out there and look at what they offer.

Free Web Hosts

Assuming you do not want that route I will continue and go over paying for a web hosting service that is right for you.  There are a lot of them out there, too many to list them all, so a good way to find the one right for you is to do a lot of research.  Before choosing a web hosting service decide what type of website you are making and by that I mean determine ahead of time what features you will be needing and how much of it, no need paying for 2,000 email accounts when you only need 10.

Its important to understand how much you need for your website in order to pay for only what you need, for instance if you know you will be getting a lot of visitors or will be doing a lot of downloading/transferring of data then you will want a lot of monthly bandwidth.  If you are going to need a place to store data, you will need a database like MySQL.

Once you spend enough time contemplating what you will need, then choose the web hosting service that is right for you.  Many times they will have more than one package to offer, as the features grow so does the price which is why determining what is right for you can be crucial in not wasting your hard earned money.  Lastly, before finally choosing, it may be a good idea to find out how good their performance is, making sure that they aren’t known for having their servers down a lot which means no one will be able to access your website, last thing you want is to get scammed. Here are some places you can start in your web hosting search, realize however there are many more:

bluehost
1&1
Go Daddy
Network Solutions

This blog is intended to inform other webmasters of useful tips that can hopefully bring them success in their adventures operating a website of their own.  Running this blog I hope to in my effort also learn a few things on the way.  I will be writing about anything I can think of that has to do with websites and website related things, keep up to date and continue to visit my blog, I sure will enjoy your visit.