Tag Archives: politics

HTML 101: Your HTML Cheat Sheet

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Hosting

Once your website is up and running, you may find yourself wanting to make some small additions or edits. Contacting your designer or a webmaster for every little change can become tedious (not to mention expensive), which is why it’s so helpful to understand some basic HTML. HTML is the language that most websites are coded in – it drives the layout, fonts, colors and other formatting and functionality aspects of your website. You may be thinking, “That’s great! But I don’t know any HTML.” If you’re in this position, this short cheat sheet will serve as a guide to making basic HTML changes to your website. This way, if you’d like to change some minor formatting on a page, you can quickly make these changes yourself.   What is an HTML tag? An HTML tag is a snippet of code that tells the website how to read or format your content. HTML tags are surrounded by the < > characters. All HTML tags must be closed with corresponding tags. This tells your website where your formatting changes begin and end.   Where do I make HTML changes? Before we get started, it’s important to note where these changes get made. In most content management systems (CMSs), you’ll find that each page has two views. One is a design or visual view. This lets you see the page as it will look when it’s posted to your website. The other view is often referred to as the text, code or HTML view, depending on which CMS you are using. HTML changes should all be added to the text, code, or HTML view. To enter a change, you’ll need to find the section of the page you’d like to change. Simply scroll until you see the text you’d like to alter or the space where you’d like to add new content. There, you can add the appropriate tags. After this, make sure to check the design view or preview the page to make sure everything looks the way you’d like it to.   Make text bold using HTML To make text on a web page bold, use the HTML tag . For example, if you wanted to make the sentence, “This is important” bold, it would look like this:   This is important   Make text italic using HTML To make text on a web page italic using HTML tags, you would use the HTML tag . This is short for emphasis. For example, if you wanted to make the sentence “This is important” italic, it would look like this:   This is important   Add a link using HTML Adding a link is somewhat trickier than simply changing the formatting of your text to be bold or italic. If you’d like to add a link, you’ll use the HREF tag. HREF tags tell the website what text should be linked, where the link should go, and how the link should be opened.   For example, if I wanted the text “Google” to be linked to the Google website, it would look like this:   Google   For contrast, if I wanted the text “Yahoo” to link to the website for Yahoo, it would look like this:   Yahoo   Additionally, if you’d like your link to open in a new window or tab so that users aren’t directed away from your site, you can add some additional information to the HREF tag. For this example, you would tell the code that you’d like to open the link in a new window by indicating that the target is blank. In this instance, the HTML code would look like this:   Yahoo   Add a picture using HTML Adding imagery is a great way to help users connect with your content and become more interested in what you have to say. To add an image, you’ll first need to host that image somewhere online, either on your CMS or on another service. Once you’ve uploaded the image to the place where you’re hosting it, simply add an image tag. As an example, an image tag should look like this:     Images are somewhat unique because they do not always have an end tag. The code does not need to know where the image ends – the image itself can dictate that. However, you can link images to a web page. For instance, if you wanted to link your image to your home page, it would look like this:     You’ll notice that, in this case, the code for the image simply replaces the text in the HREF tag. Obviously, these few tweaks only scratch the surface of full HTML coding. However, simply knowing how to handle these simple changes on your own can save you big money by minimizing the need to contact your web designer every time edits must be made. Start with these HTML 101 steps and continue to grow your coding skills as you go! Continue reading →

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A Guide to Using Google Web Fonts

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Hosting

Not so long ago, standard monospaced fonts were the norm in computers. Then, a young Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class in college and eventually built a computer capable of housing endless font options. The Internet was slower to catch-on with the digital font revolution. When was the last time you took notice of a font on a website? We’ve been staring at the same old standard fonts for so long that we neglect customizing how our content looks from the first typed letter. If you’re ready to take the next step in customizing your web fonts, there are a few things to consider before taking the plunge. First of all, just because web fonts can be creatively customized doesn’t always mean they should. Your body copy should be easily readable, which is what makes fonts like Helvetica or Arial so popular. Instead, employ creative and innovative fonts in your titles or headers to bring some personality to your copy. Using a new web font also requires a little coding before you’re up and running. But don’t let digging into the backend of your site intimidate you. A tool like Google Fonts holds your hand throughout the process from font selection to instructions on inserting the code into your website. And best of all, it’s free to use!  Here’s how to get started:   Step #1 – Back-Up Your Website Before you touch your current fonts, back-up a copy of your website according to your local hosting provider’s instructions. You never know when you might hit a bump or a wrong key and need that latest version.   Step #2 – Getting Started To choose the font that’s right for your site, visit Google.com/fonts for a collection of 629 (and counting) font families. Look at the top of the screen and locate the tabs reading “Word, Sentence, Paragraph and Poster.” Pick the option you want to see and type the text you the “Preview Text” field. Next, pick a font size and start scrolling down to view your text in a wide variety of fonts. Each cell of text features a different font option ranging from Meriweather Sans to Caudex, making it easy to compare and choose your favorite.     Step #3 – Filter Your Results The left-hand side of Google Fonts offers a “Filters” section. Click on the “All Categories” drop-down and choose between serif, sans serif, display or handwriting and hit “Okay” to see your new preview. You can also select your font thickness, slant, width and script to customize your results to find the exact kind of typeface you’re looking for.   Step #4 – Build Your Google Web Font Collection Once you find the perfect font style, hit the blue “Add to Collection” button. You can also customize more font options and build up a collection of different options that are ready for use. Just be careful about the number you select. Google will end up taking all the font collections you choose and giving you a code to insert into your site. Stick with one or two fonts or risk dragging down the speed of your site.   Step #5 – Review Now, look at the bottom of your screen. There, you’ll see your Font Collection on the lower left-hand side. Highlight the collection you want to see and click “Review” to see your font in action.   Step #6 – Use Your New Font Once you’re ready to go, select your Font Collection and click on “Use” in the lower right-hand corner of your screen to read through the available options. Be sure to check out Google’s handy icon that displays your new font’s estimated impact on page load times and the tip, “Using many font styles can slow down your webpage, so only select the font styles that you actually need on your webpage.”   Step #7 – Add to Website Ready to integrate your new Google Web Font into your website? Scroll about halfway down the page until you see the option for, “Add this code to your website.” Stick to the standard option to copy and paste the code into the header of your site. Google Fonts will give you instructions to paste the code as the first element in the of your HTML document. You’ll also find instructions on how to import the code into your stylesheet or use JavaScript.     Step #8 – Integrate the Fonts into Your CSS Don’t worry about how the fonts will look in different browsers. Google Fonts’ API will go ahead and generate browser-specific CSS to use your new fonts. That said, you still need to add the font name to your CSS styles to make it all work. Here’s an example CSS style that Google Fonts gives to keep you on track: h1 { font-family: ‘Metrophobic’, Arial, serif; font-weight: 400; }   Step #9 – Test Your Site Hit “Save” and preview your site. If you’re not seeing anything different, try opening a different browser or clearing your cookies first. You might be staring at a cached copy of your site.   Step #10 – Take a Short Cut If you’re using a WordPress template for your website, consider taking a quick and easy short cut. Download the Google Web Fonts plugin and directly customize your font options from within your WordPress dashboard. Google Fonts regularly adds new options to its library, so keep checking back if you’re looking for a specific style. But don’t worry about missing out if you’re using the WordPress plugin. It will tell you when an update is available, unleashing a whole new world of fonts at your fingertips. Continue reading →

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10 Sources For Web Design Freebies

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Hosting

While “Content is King” still rings true on  many levels, it no longer tells the entire story of digital marketing. Content might prove the foundation for your kingdom, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Web design, SEO, user navigation and social media strategy are just a few of the other key players required for long-term success. Chuck Longanecker of Digital-Telepathy , a user-experience design firm, knows the importance of good web design in internet marketing. In a post at Mashable, he wrote, “the ‘beautification of the web’ is upon us.” But don’t confuse the idea of web beautification with fancy graphics and expensive landing pages. Just look at Pinterest and Tumblr to see how simple, clean design can attract an enormous following. Fortunately, enhancing your web design doesn’t have to cost a small fortune or take a lot of time. Here are ten design freebies that can help enhance your web presence today:   Premium Pixels Find handcrafted micro icons, textures, brushes, iPhone chat bubbles, textures and more at Premium Pixels . Unlike many free web design collections, these can be used for both personal and commercial use. BittBox BittBox offers design tutorials, along with vectors, high-resolution Photoshop brushes and textures. Look for posts in the series Freebie Fridays and Free Texture Tuesdays for fun giveaways, featuring everything from weathered wood designs to grunge splatter brushes. These freebies are yours to use as tools during the design process – even if you’re planning to sell your creations. Just be aware that users can’t redistribute or post them for download in their original state. Open Source Web Design Download and share your own free web design templates at Open Source Web Design . If you’re not sure where to start, look through the OSWD’s collection of Favorite Designers or share an idea through their Suggestion tab. There’s plenty of great stuff to be found! Design Moo Dubbed, “The world’s greatest source of free and commercial design resources,” Design Moo features free PSDs, vectors, textures, patterns and fonts, among other design goodies. Become a Design Moo member for quick access to a robust collection of design elements. Or, upgrade to a paid membership with access to exclusive design resources, perks and the ability to sell your own creations. Best PSD Freebies Best PSD Freebies offers icons, sliders, buttons, banners, ribbons, web themes, Photoshop files and more. The site has earned its bragging rights with over 200,000 downloads to date and no signs of slowing down. Flickr Creative Commons Don’t forget the photos and other images when it comes to web design. Flickr offers photographers and artists the option to offer their work through the Creative Commons license at Flickr.com/CreativeCommons . Flickr uses ridiculously easy license icons to show how each image can be used. Some allow you to use the image in any way you see fit, but only if credit is given. Other artists choose the option, “No Derivative Works” – meaning that others can copy, distribute and display verbatim copies of the work. Icon Finder Hunting down just the right icon can be a taxing and time-consuming chore. Save yourself some time and head to Icon Finder and do a quick search for anything from “mobile icon” to “social media icon” and find a comprehensive list. Not all icons are free, but clicking on the “Free” tab will help narrow down your results significantly. Pixeden Download free design templates, tab bar icons, iPhone mock-ups, PSD frames texts effect and other web sources at Pixeden . The site was designed as a one-stop shop for developers and designers in need of free elements to get their projects in gear. A premium membership grants you access to support services and the ability to make further modifications to their design elements in your projects. Smashing Magazine Though Smashing Magazine is an online publication for design pros – not a design element repository – it also offers a freebie category . Past freebies included “Typeplate: A Starter Kit for Beautiful Web Type,” free WordPress themes, icon sets and templates for mobile projects. Best of all, Smashing Magazine’s target audience of designers, meaning that all the freebies that are up for grabs have been looked with a discerning eye. Da Font Where would your content be without a good font? Da Font hosts an archive of free downloadable fonts organized by style, author, popularity or alphabetically. There’s not much you won’t find here. The site’s font collection is vast, ranging from groovy to “foreign look” and plenty of scripts.   With so many freebies readily available for use, there’s really no excuse to neglect your web design. But there’s also no shame in asking for help and tapping a professional to usher in the next stage of your design strategy. That step might mean a complete design overhaul or a simple logo update to better align with your brand and overall messaging. Remember there’s no magic formula to web design. Start by integrating a few key elements, from icons to a new web template, to refine your site’s style and usability. Keep making adjustments until you find the right combination for your growing online presence. Continue reading →

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Smart Ways to Update Your Stale Website

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Hosting

Does your website feel stale and uninspired?  Have you avoided making any updates to your pages, due to a lack of time or technical “know how?” Well, then, it’s time to move past these trite excuses and start updating your stale website! In today’s digital world, websites must be more than simple, static billboards that telegraph the same information day in and day out.  Your users are expecting an engaging, dynamic presence – and the easiest way to convey this feeling is to regularly update your content.  At the same time, regular site changes are important from an SEO perspective, as the search engines value and prefer to reward websites that feature “fresh” content. You don’t need to undergo a complete website redesign every month to keep things interesting.  Instead, consider the following strategies for ways to update your stale website without a significant investment of time or energy:   Tip #1 – Add a blog Blogs are great from both a reader and an SEO standpoint.  When you install and regularly update your company’s blog, readers come back again and again to see what new information you’ve posted.  The search engines also reward your site, as the inclusion of more content naturally creates more opportunities to get picked up for different keyword-specific search results pages. Installing a blog is easy when you use tools like WordPress or Joomla.  Truly, the harder part is setting and sticking to a consistent publishing schedule.  Though it can be a challenge to marshal the resources necessary for proper editorial standards, the effort is well worth the rewards of a regularly updated site.   Tip #2 – Revise your “About” page Most companies slap together a generic “About” page – only to realize later on that it isn’t connecting with readers in a meaningful way.  If you find yourself in this position, don’t worry.  It’s easy to update your “About” page in order to make this content fresher and more engaging for viewers. To revise this all-important page, start with the “5 Ws”: Who are you? What do you do? When did you open for business? Where are you located? How are you achieving your business’s aims? It’s a simple framework, for sure.  But by following these guidelines, you’ll create the kind of punchy “About” page that both answers readers most pertinent questions and encourages them to dive more deeply into your other content.   Tip #3 – Add a new special to your home page Want a quick and easy way to freshen up your website’s content?  Simply post a new special on your home page!  For example, you could: Offer a special discount on shipping costs to new customers Give away free product samples with purchases over a certain dollar amount Provide discounts in exchange for referrals to your business Remember – your website visitors are always looking to get the best possible deal they can.  Adding any of the different specials described above to your home page both captures their attention and helps them to believe that their getting great value by working with you.   Tip #4 – Feature a new product or service Similarly, showcasing a new product or service on your website connects with readers in the same way as featuring a home page special.  Most shoppers like to believe that they’re on the cutting edge – that they’re “early adopters” who try new things before others.  Featuring new products or services on your home page appeals to this instinct, while also putting different offerings in front of your regular readers’ eyes. You don’t even have to launch a new product or service to take advantage of this effect.  If you offer a product or service that doesn’t generate many sales, giving it a spotlight on your website’s home page can help to freshen the look of your site while also raising the impact of underperforming offerings.   Tip #5 – Try a new template Finally, if you want to go all out and truly freshen up your website, you can’t do much better than trying a new template. If your website operates on WordPress, Joomla or any other popular CMS, updating your stale look and feel truly is as simple as purchasing and uploading a new template.  Of course, with any template swap, you’ll likely have to do a bit of clean-up work to ensure that your information displays appropriately within your new site.  However, the time and cost of doing so still comes in dramatically lower than having a custom site built from scratch, making this a smart way to update your stale website. Do you have any other ideas for ways to freshen up the look and feel of a dated website?  If so, share your recommendations in the comments section below! Continue reading →

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How to Diagnose Sudden Drops in Website Traffic

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Hosting

Logging in to your Google Analytics account and seeing a sharp downward trend in your traffic stats can be scary.  What once looked like a promising trend in upwards traffic growth can quickly degenerate to visions of closed doors and scrapped expansion plans in the absence of the natural search traffic you once relied on. Fortunately, some causes of traffic drops can be easily remedied, while others will take more time repair.  So before you start to panic, walk through the following diagnostic steps to determine exactly what’s caused your declining visitor counts:   Step #1 – See if your site is up and running Though this first step might seem a bit obvious, your immediate reaction to a decrease in website traffic should be to determine whether or not your site is live. Any number of things can take down a websites – from hosting issues to problems with your domain name registrar and more.  If you see that your site is down, contact your hosting provider immediately for information on what might be causing your current outage.   Step #2 – Make sure your analytics code is installed correctly If your site is live, your next step should be to check your analytics code integration.  This is an especially important step to take if you’ve added your analytics code to your site using a plugin, as the presence of multiple plugins can cause conflicts in which one program interferes with another’s operation. Additionally, making changes to your site’s code or introducing third-party analytics code modifications can all cause your site to stop reporting traffic data correctly.  Check this before you become concerned about more serious causes of traffic drops.   Step #3 – Determine whether or not your site has been hacked Next, if your site is running and your analytics code appears to be installed correctly, you’ll want to see if your site has been hacked, as this may result in your traffic being funneled to an external site. The easiest way to check to see if your site has been hacked is to enter the query “links:yoururl.com” (without the parentheses) into Google.  If you see any spam content in the snippets that appear, chances are you’ve been hacked.  Contact your hosting provider or a qualified website developer for help reclaiming your site.   Step #4 – Log in to your Webmaster Tools account Another important step in the traffic drop diagnosis process is to log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account (assuming you’ve set up one before noticing your traffic decline). Once you’re inside, navigate to the “Messages” section.  This is where Google notifies webmasters of major issues that have arisen; including sites that have become inaccessible to Google’s indexing programs, sites that have been detected violating the company’s webmaster guidelines and sites that have been issued manual penalties in the search results. If you see a notice here, you may be able to gain some insight into what’s gone wrong with your site’s traffic and what steps you’ll need to take to repair the situation.  But if you have no new messages from Google, you’ll need to move on to the final step in the diagnosis process…   Step #5 – Check the SEO blogs for news of an algorithm update Google and the other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms.  As a result, a sudden drop in traffic could mean that your site no longer meets the engines’ standards and has gone down in the natural search rankings – leading to a corresponding drop in traffic. The easiest way to determine whether or not one of these updates has occurred is to head over to popular SEO blogs like Search Engine World or Search Engine Land , as these sites are often the first to report on changes within the major engines.  They’ll also be the first to report on the methods that sites can use to reclaim their lost rankings, which may be instrumental in your ability to regain the traffic your site has lost. Be aware, though, that the process of recovering from lost traffic due to algorithm changes can be difficult and time-consuming – if you’re ever able to recover fully at all.  Because this type of traffic drop can be devastating to a business, it’s best to avoid using grey or black-hat SEO techniques, as these can jeopardize your site’s long-term stability.  Instead, focus on adding plenty of great content to your website and build links in natural ways – rather than using manipulative techniques to improve your search rankings. Hopefully, the cause of your sudden traffic drop will be something that can be easily resolved, as in the first few steps described in this process.  But if this isn’t the case, know that recovery is possible, though you may be facing a long road to return your site to its former traffic patterns. Continue reading →

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