Most of the clients I work with have no idea that their website domains can be purchased for usually about $7.50 instead of about $12.00, that’s a lot of savings, especially if you’re getting your website domain for multiple years. Usually they have a renewal code too, otherwise Godaddy renews your domain at the retail price, ouch.

You can do a google search for websites that list the discount codes, just type in something like Godaddy promo code and you’re bound to find something in the first couple results, works every time!

I just got done doing some more website updates for a client who’s website hasn’t gone live yet. I’ve gone through about 8 lists of modifications with them, with everything from “make the font-size bigger and bolder” to “add this country song to the front page and make it play automatically.” By the 8th time around, your developer probably won’t even tell you that adding that music to your website will a) slow down your site tremendously. b) won’t serve any purpose because your business has nothing to do with music. c) is copyright infringement (no, having the CD still doesn’t help) and most importantly, d) piss of your visitors.

In fact the only thing your website developer probably will tell you is that it’s going to cost an extra $50, not that he can’t do it in 15 minutes for a more honest $15, but now he can’t post the website in his portfolio because it’s embarrassing, number one. Number two, it’s interesting to see how much you’ll shell out for a such a mindless change. Anyhow, the point of this article is actually how to plan a website, sorry for rambling.

So, to plan a website out properly, you need these items, in this order:

1. The website’s goals. What is it going to achieve? Why do you need a website in the first place? This shapes the websites and gets your head in the right place.
2. Pages or Overall Content. To achieve those goals, what pages or content does the website need? What does it need to say?
3. Organization. How are you going to organize the website? Come up with a list of pages and how all the pages are connected? Will you need a content management system to stay up to date?
4. How to you envision the organization fitting into a design? This is where the website developer can start to help, and maybe help a little on organization too, but you need think about the content (2) before.
5. What kind of designs fit with your content and brand image? What kind of designs do you like? What kind of colors do you like? Do you have a logo? Find other websites that you think are similar in style or design and send them to your designer.
6. Write-up each page’s content. This is important to have before the website is created, otherwise you’ll have to pay for modifications because you’re bound to realize that you need more pages than you originally thought.
7. Gather all the pictures or use placeholder images in your content write-ups. It’s important for everyone to know what images will go where, especially if you’re going to need a content management system.
8. Approve as soon as possible. The longer you keep your website designer lingering, the greater the chance he’ll move on to other things and lose the enthusiasm he had in your website. With that gone, the code will get sloppier and so might the design. Keep the process fast and fresh, try to work on his time line and you’ll get a better product.
9. Pay on time. Don’t ever start a website if you don’t have the money.
10. When it comes to modifications, ask more questions. The idea here is that the website designer probably has a lot of reason for making things the way they are and they know a thing or two about what is right or wrong in a website. Ask questions and learn all the angles about something before giving a suggestion.
11. Test in IE6, IE7, IE8, Fire Fox, Safari (on a Mac), and Chrome. It’s important to test in multiple browsers – some website developers might forget to do this. Your site should work in all aforementioned browsers, otherwise the developer is shorting you.
12) Ask the developer if they have any type of affiliate program. Chances are you’ll know someone that needs a website in the future. If you like your designer, see if you’re able to get anything out of giving them extra business. Maybe free hosting or something, who knows?

Here are some qualities to look for in a host:

• Reliability – up-time is obviously one of the most important factors.
• Speed – having a fast loading website is another very important factor.
• Software/Tools – your website has certain requirements and not all hosts can meet those.
• Space – this is usually not an issue unless you plan on hosting hundreds or thousands of movies.
• Support – you will run into issues. Having a good support team will ensure your problems are solved quickly.
• Security – Another important and somewhat overlooked factor.

You basically have three types of hosts – shared, VPS, and dedicated. Shared hosting is basically for smaller website accounts. They come in different packages, allowing you to manage multiple websites on each. A shared hosting account is usually pretty good for most sites or small site administrators, controlling 10 small to medium websites or less. Small to medium would be something around 300 daily page views or less, but of course it depends on how much content each page view or visitor is downloading. Do the math and you can figure it out.

Over the years I’ve used several different shared hosting accounts through my own efforts and for clients. I’ll speak about some of the popular ones and what I found. 1and1 – I used 1and1 for a while, and still might have an account over there. They offer pretty good value, but the support isn’t too great. The reliability started off great several years ago, then sites weren’t always loading, or they were loading pretty slow. That’s when I realized they were going down hill. The next one is Bluehost. They give you a good amount of control, but every time I’ve used them, their speed has been terrible. With my experiences, I would stay away. Godaddy seems to be a popular choice now days. Godaddy is okay. Their support was relatively good the only time I had to call. Their panel, however sucks. It’s hard to get around and when you need to login to MySQL to do something it always takes forever. They don’t give you too much control either, and a lot of options are hidden and you have to dig for them, but most would know that if you’ve registered a domain with them, checking-out is like trying to get out of the center of a flea market. Their value is good for the speed and up-time they have. The speed isn’t anything too amazing, but for shared hosting and the price, it’s not bad. I also used DreamHost a few years ago. When I used them, they were pretty good, great control, pretty good prices, good speed and reliability. I haven’t used them for a while, so it’d be best to read how they are now and if things have changed. And another popular one I’ve used is Host Gator. They’ve been one of my recent favorites for shared hosting. I’d pick them over the other ones currently. Control is good there, speed is good for the price, and so far, haven’t had a problem with reliability.

A VPS is the next step for serious administrators that need all the tools and control available to them, but don’t need any serious memory for traffic needs yet. A VPS can hold several websites and handle a good amount of traffic as well, again, depending on how much content is being downloaded. I use a VPS the most and usually have about 60,000 monthly page views, which it handles without a sweat. Servint is pretty good, and many other companies have been offering VPS packages now, which I can’t really comment on because I haven’t used too many.

When you need a dedicated server, you have a lot of choices, and it’s good to get it right because they can be pricey. The one I used before was SoftLayer. I’d recommend them easily since they were great and I did a good 12 hours of research and a lot of phone calls before making my decision.

So there you have it! If you have any positive experiences (or negative) feel free to share them.

Nothing is worse than having to build around a messy site. What I mean by messy is lengthy URLS with pointless characters and crazy dynamic URLs! So here are my tips on creating an SEO-friendly site:

1) Use static URLs when possible. This might not be possible with really large sites, but if your site has less than 50 pages and doesn’t require new pages to be created all the time, this is definitely the way to go. This is definitely the easiest way and best for SEO. The second best is using an htaccess redirect to use a name in the URL and pass it as a GET variable. Something like this:

http://www.tampacreations.com/portfolio

In this case, portfolio is being passed as a GET variable, and you should always check this against an array of acceptable values! Combine that htaccess code with the proper rewrite condition to tack on the www, and handle forward slashes at the end too. Would you like to see it? Here’s the code I’m using:

Options -Indexes
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

So that’s the second best option if you have to go with dynamic URLs and it works pretty well! I believe I’m using PHP, then, to set 404 status of not found domains.

2) Search Pages can be a nightmare! Search pages can be problematic because they’re dynamic by nature and can end up having lots of variables in them. I think the trick here is to have a few of them indexed (the simple ones) and list those in your sitemap. The other ones you can let Google figure out or just deny it access.

3) Watch out for capitalization! Capitalization counts in URLs (just not the domain), so if I were to have a page Portfolio.html and portfolio.html, those are two different pages! If you’re using dynamic URLs, this can become a big problem with duplicate content.

4) Multiple websites. Lot of e-commerce site owners have the mentality that duplicating their entire store 5 times and putting it on 5 different domains helps their SEO out. Probably not a good idea. What ends up happening is since most stores have a lot of products, the owners use the same descriptions, same images, everything, and all the sites end up having duplicated content issues! I happy to report that a client I worked with who had this issue across 4 domains, downsized to one domain, and has twice as much traffic now after doing so in about 12 months. It takes time, but it’s worth it. The only way you should keep 5 different stores is if all the stores are different! Different product titles, different descriptions for each page, keywords, product descriptions, shipping text, contact text, etc. etc. etc. Everything should be completely different if you want to rank well.

\r\n

This is a line break, right? Well it can be. It depends on if it’s processed as normal text or not.

Let’s say a user is submitting a form and in the textarea, they add some line breaks. Let’s say they miss a field and  you have the form printing out it’s own POST values (so they don’t accidentally lose anything), like this:

<textarea cols="32" rows="6" name="description"><?=$_POST['description'];?></textarea>

This is pretty simple, it’s just printing out the value of the posted description variable. But like I said a minute ago, if they had put line breaks in their textarea, their information will be posted in the textarea again, but it will look like this:

Information on Line 1\r\nInformation on Line 2

The problem here is that the \r\n is getting changed to normal text. To change it back, we replace it with itself, but with double quotes, returning it back to code as opposed to normal text. Here’s the final result:

<textarea name="description" rows="6" cols="32"><?=str_replace('\r\n',"\r\n",$_POST['description']);?></textarea>

http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages

Once you’ve got your fan page going, you can add a couple useful applications to it to increase the usefulness of your page.

1) Social RSS: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=23798139265

Social RSS is an application that allows fans to see your latest feeds on your page (and wall if you choose). There are many options and customizations, such as tags, placement, and more. Remember that you’ll need a blog to use this application, just plugin your RSS feed and you’re ready to go!

2) Static FBML: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4949752878

Static FBML is an HTML editor that allows you to put HTML widgets directly on your fan page (or profile). If you want a big logo of your company or a call to action button that links to your website directly, this application will do just the trick.

Another Facebook Page trick is to use a customized URL. Once your fan page acquires 30 or more fans, head over to:

http://www.facebook.com/username/

Here you’ll be able to set a username for your Facebook page. This will make your page URL easier to remember, cleaner and better for SEO if you go that route. Get started and I’ll be sharing more helpful hints in the future.

Tampa Website Design, TampaCreations.com

The thing that makes Tampa Creations different from most other website development firms is that it offers a full range of web services, from website design all the way to social network marketing. This makes Tampa Creations a “web presence” provider, not just a website design firm. The benefit to businesses here is that one company handles the vertical integration of your online development and marketing, allowing each part to be connected and play a vital role in supporting the other.

Just how important is vertical marketing? Throughout years of working with clients, most clients don’t believe or don’t think about if they want to incorporate search engine optimization or website marketing techniques into their website in the future. Of course, many of those clients visit that possibility after they learn that traffic doesn’t come from nothing, you need optimization and internet marketing to drive the traffic to your website, after all, that’s one of the main benefits of having a website… free web traffic!

It’s important to look at your business and online strategy and decide if going after the web traffic is right for your model. If it is, having vertical integration allows your website to be built from the ground-up incorporating the best search engine optimization methods and even to start the marketing early on, kind of like priming an engine. If you don’t do this early on, it can become an overwhelming task to revisit and incorporate the right optimization, and even worse if the website has to be re-designed to allow it to rank properly. Don’t make these costly errors, put the additional small investment now into your website and design to prepare it for the future.

1) Domain. Probably one of the most important is the domain you’re going to establish your business at. Choosing the domain comes down to the ultimate goal of your internet presence. If you’re looking for SEO then you should probably have keywords in your domain. If you’re looking for branding, then you should probably have something creative and memorable. Perhaps you’re looking for both, try then to fit a keyword or two into one short, memorable domain. The reason a domain is so important is because you’ll be investing a lot of time and work into either telling clients about the domain or optimizing it for ranking in Google. In either case, changing the domain later on will be a mess!

2) Social Networking. Some people get too overwhelmed with the idea of running MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. accounts. Figure out what your clients are interested in/sign-up on and use one, maybe two of these. That way you’re not spreading yourself to thin. If you’re on every network and not updating each as much, no one will care to read what you have to say. If you stick to one or two, you’ll be able to update your profile more often and keep people interested in coming to visit you.

3) Blogging. Think serious about this, don’t just start a blog because you can. You’ll need to stick with it. What’s the purpose of your blog? Do you have enough time to invest into your blog to keep it fresh (like the social network thing)? How often will you update? Try writing a couple articles first to see if it’s as easy as you think. Also, if you’re looking into blogging just to help people stay updated on your company, consider news releases instead. You can even use the same Wordpress (or other) software, just brand your blog as a new release platform. That way, you’re not expected to write so much or so often.

4) Multi-Websites. It’s fine to have more than one website, but each website should serve its own purpose. Don’t lose sight of each site’s purpose, keep clear goals for each site and measure them to make sure each site is working its end. Many clients will want to have multiple sites because they got a couple great different domains. Just because you have two domains doesn’t mean you need two websites! A domain is about $7/year. Hold on to the domain until you find something useful to do with it (as opposed to hiring a website developer to create a whole other site you don’t need, confusing yourself to what really is the purpose). Also, don’t put up a mirror copy of one site on another domain! If you desperately need to use another domain, you can use it for memorability/ease of typing and have it forward to main website, but no mirroring! This can destroy your online rankings as I’ve seen it dozens of times with clients.

For our purposes, we’ll pretend your audience is strictly within the United States. The next step then is to think about what the main goal of your website is and how the colors will help reflect the attitude your website needs to achieve its goals. Here are some examples of associations:

1. Saturated colors are good for youth related items, and semi-saturated for fun, exhilarating, etc.
2. Pastel colors signify peace, relaxation, etc.
3. Dark colors can be good for evil, secret, technological, etc.

You also have some specific colors with some overall associations. Not to say they’re specific to these in particular, but they work well for what they’re paired with:

1. Royal/Dark Blue is typically associated with corporate.
2. Red associated with extreme
3. White associated with large/enterprise
4. Green associated with eccentric

These are just some examples. To find more, visit popular websites and see what they’re using to influence the vibe of their visitors. Influcing a vibe can be very helpful in raising conversions and accomplishing goals so when you’re thinking about your next color scheme for your website, be sure to put some extra thought and research into it instead of just going with your favorite color (pink).

Effective Communication
One of the most important requirements for your website is good communication between you and the designer you choose. Without a doubt, a local designer can meet face to face with you (although meetings might add more to the cost) which will typically increase effectiveness of the communication. But if another designer is remote, it doesn’t mean effective communication cannot be achieved. A good designer knows the right questions to ask to increase the effectiveness of the communication and ultimately, get you what you want. Choose the more experienced, better designer over the local designer in this case. In the case of international designers, the prices are typically good, but communication suffers drastically. You’ll probably end up spending more for an often, lower-end product in the long run, with lots of headaches as well.

Pricing
As noted, a local designer will usually be a little more. A good remote designer will know how to work efficiently, but a fair remote designer might lack the experience necessary to ask the right questions. An international designer will usually be the cheapest per hour, but will take several corrections to get what you wanted due to the communication barrier.

Scale
The larger the website, the more effective and efficient the communication must be. If you need a  large corporate website that ties into your existing infrastructure, you may not have any other choice but to hire a local company. Medium and small websites can be done either way, as long as you’re comfortable sharing files and information with new technology. If you don’t like to use e-mail or would be opposed to installing an FTP program, allowing you to upload large files for your designers, you should probably go with a local company.

Goals
Having your own website goals and ideas complete or close to it allows the designer to get started right away. If you’re unsure about several parts of your website, it may take a couple meetings with a designer to get your pages and ideas complete.