Computer, Software and Service Requirements for Building Webpages

Computer requirements for building your website can range from a pretty basic set up if you are using a web based web page builder like those offered by Yahoo Business or more demanding, like if you are using Dreamweaver.

Let's start with the advanced set up:
Intel Pentium 4 or Better
1024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card
DVD-ROM drive
Internet or phone connection for activation and site loading
2GB of RAM or more recommended
Enough hard drive space for software and site folders

Software:
CS3 Professional or Dreamweaver and PhotoShop

Services:
Web page host (See Lunar Pages, in right nav ads)
Domain name registration (Go Daddy or other, web host may also provide)
FTP program (may be offered through web host)
Template or build your own (See Template Monster)
Web Stat Tracker, such as Statcounter.com or Google Analytics
Training if needed: Lynda.com
Stock Photography if needed: See Jupiter or Getty sites

Over 2 GB of RAM is definitely recommended for multi-tasker types, because when I tried to use Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop and a security program on top of the operating system my system was not happy even with 2GB of RAM, not to mention that I also usually add in Word, an email program and Pandora for music.

Really basic (and limited) set up:
If you use something like Yahoo's SiteWizard or Microsoft's FrontPage you only need something like this -
A 133MHz processor
32MB memory
28.8KB modem

Though I have a friend that could not get the SiteWizard to work on a Mac so you may want to research that if you own a Mac. But basically, any newer laptop should be able to publish these type of pages.

Software:
Microsoft's Front Page if desired

Services:
Yahoo Site Builder or similar service
An Internet connection

Software:
Photo editor for resizing and cropping of images

Of course once you get the computer, the software and set up the services you face the hardest part, building your site.

Another Site Launch: Blueprint Bluepers Constuction Humor Site

Last night a site I have been working on for the last week was launched. The site is Blueprint Bluepers and is site dedicated to construction humor, published by the Nigro Firm, Inc.

This site was tons of fun and interesting from a writers perspective in two ways. First, how I first imagined the site changed as we went along dramatically, it evolved. Compared to most construction humor sites, this one is much different, it has all original content including the cartoons and is quite intelligent. Secondly, they allowed me to have a page on this site and I learned that writing about yourself is much different than writing about someone else, I will have to run that page through my editor so he can make it represent me and my work better. As mentioned in previous posts, every writer needs an editor.

Anyway, please go visit this site, even if you do not work in the construction industry you will enjoy the quality construction cartoons by artist Chaise Payan.

Blueprint Bluepers

Author: Pamela S. Stevens, SEO Jive

Another Site Launch

I just finished the content for another site this weekend, we basically built this one and completed it in less than three days. It is a clean, simple yet amusing site that is lots of fun.

If you are a dog lover you will love this site. It is a site created for a newsletter published by The Nigro Firm, Inc, but it lacks the staunchness of most corporate related sites, we wanted it to be fun and a refreshing break from the norm.

Beagle Review

Bad Old School SEO Tricks

If you have been in the SEO business a while you have likely seen many search engine tricks come and go. Maybe you are even employing a few still or you have old sites that still have old stuff on them.

Overall, the search engines want to rank high- good sites. Sites that people like, sites with unique content and sites that have good basic coding construction.

Bad Old School SEO Tricks

• Invisible keywords: You have likely seen this from time to time by highlighting a blank looking section or a section of background to make dumped keywords appear. Naughty, naughty and Google doesn't like it.
• Link Spamming or Link Dumping: Go to any popular blog site or abandoned forum and you will find this, literally tons of keywords with links back on unrelated sites. This was used to obtain high ranking site link backs. It is likely the links will not even be followed back unless you do it yourself. Good sites do not have to pay for links back nor do link spamming, good sites are linked back organically by customers or visitors who want to share your site or by legitimate associates or partnerships.
• Redirects: This was popular till it was frowned on by search engines, it involves a company creating numerous fake or keyword laden sites with redirects to a single site that they are trying to push. The idea was to spread out your web presence with multiple sites instead of just one, this is still popular with and without redirects. Sometimes this happens for legitimate reasons, like a company name change, which can be done with care, but shouldn't be tried unless it is necessary.
• Keyword Dumping: Often webmasters will dump tons of keywords into the code that may or may not be in the content or directly related. This was done to try to capture visitors who are searching secondary terms. It is better to list keywords that are specific and in your content and keep in mind that many searchers nowadays are entering up to three terms at once, such as "Seo, Tips, Blog."

I am sure you can think of many more, but this is my list of bad SEO tricks that must go.

Author: Pamela S. Stevens, SEO Jive

See my Newest Site

This site was launched last week for the Nigro Firm, Inc. It is for a small Utah company that has an interesting, hard to market construction service. I did all of the content development and writing. We are still working out the kinks and will clean up the code soon. But over all it looks good, considering a content person and a graphic designer did most of the work. Though, like many sites it looks better in IE than FireFox.

The site includes all original content, graphics and images. The website launch will be followed by a direct marketing campaign, since the product is relatively unknown. The site, though SEO friendly, is more for information than internet marketing. Some services, like this one, are rarely searched for online and more general search terms are highly competitive, making it a challenging project that must include direct marketing and word of mouth to succeed.

Nigro Firm, Inc.

Last Minute Things to do Before Launching a New Site

If you are like me, you are a content development person or a writer, and not a coder, but there are things you can do to make sure your site looks good and is functional before launch.

• Cover the basics. Make sure your page titles and descriptions are good. I have seen many sites with a page title of “home page” or “about us.” About who? Try to get your company name in there, for example ABC Technologies: About Us.
• Make sure your images are labeled. Often images are left with an empty “alt” tag, so when someone mouses over the image or the image does not display alternative text is not displayed.
  
• Check all links. Check links in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox and other browsers if your visitors commonly use them. Also check email links and verify they work, send a sample email to yourself to test.
• Ask for a third party grammar, spelling and content edit. Often we fail to see our own errors or we think we have conveyed information well, but we have not. Always ask for a third party opinion.
• Look at every page. Check for good spacing, image placement and so on. Is it easy to read? Can the user learn about your product in the less than three seconds they may visit your page? What stands out?
• Check dates. Do you need to update any dates or other dated information that you may have written a long time before launch? Are your copyrights current?

After all of these checks and your third party review, you will still find errors, so keep tweaking your site, good luck with your launch.

How to Keep your Writing Team Motivated

Keeping (or even getting) your writing team motivated can be difficult. Writing is not like many other types of tasks, it does not involve simply moving box A to shelf A and calling it a day.

Writing often involves taking chaos ( chaos in the form of massive volumes of information and bosses who are not quite sure what they want) and turning that chaos into something that makes sense and makes everyone happy. So frustration is common, which can result in what appears to be lack of motivation and direction. So how do you steer the boat into smoother, faster moving waters?

In my experience, the number one reason writers get frustrated involves dealing with clients or marketing directors who simply do not really know what they want.

So how do you fix that?

Client:
It is true, you probably do not really know what you want, you have a basic idea, but have not really nailed it down yet. So what do you do?

When you communicate with your writing team try to convey your ideas to the best of your abilities, including the desired outcome of the product, the style or toned desired and your imagined audience. Make sure to stress the major points that must be included and give clear deadlines. If you can give them an idea about the space the content will be posted or published in and how many words that may help. Do you want article style or bullet points? This may seem like a lot of things to think about, but how is the writer going to "guess" what you are thinking? They cannot, they need as much information as you can give them and even then there will be a bit of guess work involved. Sometimes it is helpful if you can give them some sample pieces that you think are similar to what you are imagining.

Writer:
Working with clients or employers who do not know what they want, but want you to render it perfectly for them, is going to happen. So part of your job is it help them figure out what they want.

When approached with a new project ask as many questions as possible, try to get them to solidify their ideas better and make them commit to them. Unless you are a mind reader and a damn good psychiatrist you cannot guess what they are thinking and even then how can you turn that into a product that directly mirrors their ideas?

Make them become involved in the direction of the content. Make them make choices, give them rough outlines to review so you don't waste your time creating content or marketing material they do not like. Make sure you clearly understand the major points they want to address and their most important objective.

You have to be a bit of a crack psychiatrist as well, listen to the language they use, how they present themselves, note how they feel about their product, take into account their business background and so on, use this information to try to get an idea of how they want the content presented, what kind of language will make them comfortable. And of course, ask, ask, ask....as many questions as they will answer.

If all else fails, write several versions of the introductory lines or paragraphs and let them pick which one they feel best applies. Or have several writers on your team write a few samples and let them pick from those. Yeah it sucks, yeah it takes time, but remember they usually do not quite know what they want, so you need to help them figure that out.

Other things to help keep your team motivated and on task:

• Break large projects into manageable sections.
• Promote group thinking, many brains on a task can see more than just one.
• Set firm deadlines and intermediary deadlines.
• Follow through, don't drop the ball and run, follow through with your agreements.
• Foster a solid writing team, writers who understand each others talents and abilities and can trust each other to meet their team deadlines.
• Be flexible, it may take some writers 6 hours to do what you want and others 10, build a pay schedule that allows this kind of flexibility in a fair manner.
• Pay your writers what they are worth. Underpaid writers will under produce. Of course do not over pay bad writers, they will just keep being bad writers, weed them out, find good writers and pay them well.
• Let them know when they do something that you like, so they know for future projects what works.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate.....
• Let your writers, who know the subject or product well, help you figure things out, their hours and hours of research should be put to good use.
• Good writers should also be good researchers, ask them to explore some ideas or strategies before your assign them a task you are not sure about.
• Let the team work how they work best, which means that some writers may work well in marketing while others prefer technical writing, use the talents of the team. Don't assign a marketing email blast to your tech writer or the privacy policy to your creative, marketing writer.
• Keep in mind that figuring out what you want is hard work, let your writers get away from the keyboard every now and then, let them go for walks or to the gym. Since they are likely sitting at their desk spacing out anyway, you would be better off letting them go for walk to clear their minds.
• Writers have a tendency to over analyze. Make your intentions clear and to what level you want them to dive into a project, if you just want them to jump in and out, tell them that, because they may analyze it to death, wasting time and money.

Author: Pamela S. Stevens, SEO Jive

New Site? Writing Content for New Sites

If you are working on a new site, the scope of your work will likely fit into two possible scenarios. Either you are developing the entire content, including what pages will be on the site, the keyword strategy and the marketing writing. Or someone else has decided what is going to be included on the site and you are assigned pages or articles to write and are usually given a keyword list.

If you are developing the entire content for a site, there is a lot involved. But here are some questions you can ask your client to get you started.

Questions to Ask a New Client

1. What is the purpose of your site? Believe it or not, many people don't know. Is the site just for information, is it an eCommerce site?

2. What is the level of quality you desire? Some people are only interested in creating a temporary, junk seo site, others want a site with high quality, researched articles.

3. What style do you desire? Ask them how they want the information presented do they want it upbeat, serious, casual, quirky, scholarly?

4. What is your time frame? When do you expect the site to be ready to launch?

5. How much maintenance is expected? Does your content need to be updated often? Do you want new content to be added often? Or will the site stay about the same once it is live.

Questions to Ask Yourself

After this first interview, you likely will have a good idea if the clients expectations are reasonable. You should also know whether you want to pursue the project at all. For example, I do not do junk, SEO writing, while other writers enjoy writing repetitive product descriptions and are fast at it. It is also important that the time frame and pay matches what you feel good about. Good clients pay not just for the completed product, but also for the research and development time. If you are doing junk SEO writing you will likely get paid much less, but they usually do the research and development for you.

So how much do you charge your client?

This depends on the area you live in, where I live, Utah, the wages are quite low compared to SF or New York. But I charge out at about $17 to $25 an hour, I pay my editor $40/hr. If I am doing the site development it is easy to get $20 an hour or more, but I can find writers here to do the low exposure page content for around $12-14/hour. For marketing writing I charge more, for example logo writing, high exposure pages, grant writing and other demanding, creative work could creep up to $40/hr, but it is more likely to be charged by the piece. If you live in a higher wage area, you will want to increase over my rates. Keep in mind, these are experienced writing rates (with a degree) in Utah. If you do not have experience, you may be expected to build up your portfolio before you demand a nice salary. Also, full time employee rates are usually lower, but the trade off is steady work and benefits.

Should you Hire an Editor?
Yes, everyone should have an editor. It does not matter what kind of work you do, a second opinion is always a good idea. If you cannot afford an editor, you might be able to find another writer who you can trade edits with. Although editors cost a bit, they should be able to get through your work fast and provide good feedback. For example, my editor can edit about five to seven web pages in less than an hour. Hand in your work polished, so your editor can get through your work fast and in a cost effective manner. If you are a self employed writer, you can write off your editor as a business expense.

Once you get through all of this and start your new project, your next obstacles will be staying on task and figuring out the psychology of how to provide your client a web site that meets their expectations.

Author: Pamela S. Stevens, SEO Jive

Writing About Us Pages

The "About Us" page is your place to show off your company, your location, your history and your people. It is not however, where you go through and list all of your services again or regurgitate what you have already published. There is no point in having your about us page compete with your home page.

Keep your keywords concentrated on your company name instead of general keywords and make sure to include ways that your visitors can easily get to the pages you want them to go to like your sales pages or your sign up page.

You can link to multiple pages from your about us page that are "about us" related. Such as links to your corporate history, corporate environment, contact us, management pages, team member pages and so on.

Most about us pages are brief, see PC World, though usually long winded is brief here and CNN just has a short intro with links to other areas.

The about us page is not usually a high traffic page or one that people land on through a search engine, it is more about having it because people expect it to be there and may be interested once they are already on your site.

Author: Pamela S. Stevens, SEO Jive

Writing Page Titles

If you have an unknown company or product, you may want to include more than just the name of your site or company in the page title. If your page title or company name does not relate what services or products you offer you should add a brief description. For example, here are some good page titles:

Woot.com
Woot: One Day, One Deal (SM)

Craiglist.com
craigslist: san francisco bay area classifieds for jobs, apartments, personals, for sale, services, community, and events

Wikipedia.com
Main Page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Author: Pamela S. Stevens, SEO Jive