Resources for building and maintaining your website.
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Building a website.
A great free resource for building a website, is a site called Open Source Web Design.
At last count it had more than 2000 open source website designs to download and learn.
Here's a free html editor to use for creating sites.
NVU is an open source application that is available for Windows, Mac, Linux.
When you build a website, you need to build it to acknowledged standards so that your site will be able to be viewed across the widest number of operating system and browser combinations. The W3C is the "standards body" for the internet. Amongst the masses of infomation about all things internet, this is where you'll find a way to validate your HTML or XHTML, check your links work properly , and see if your CSS is compliant.
You should also try and keep your images small enough to not cause your users delays, and large enough to be properly seen. As a rule of thumb, logos should be saved as .gif and any photos should saved as a .jpeg. Try not to make any images larger than 30kb and try to keep your pages to less than 100kb.
Some people prefer to use .png files for images. (PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics)
It's said that .png images look better and cleaner and/or appear more crisp. However you may find that the images don't display in some versions of the MS Explorer browser. Obvoiusly, you need to aware that by using a .png, people may not see the image you are trying to display..which is defeating the purpose of having an image there in the first place.. : )
To find images that are high quality and low cost, the 2 places I've been happiest using for my site are iStockPhoto.com and Dreamstime.com. The images are Royalty Free and available for use across a variety of mediums. You can purchase different sizes of images and the type of license you want to use.
If you want to check how large and fast your site is once it is up and running on the internet, try the website optimizer speed check tool.
Search Engine Indexing and Blocking.
If you are trying to get your site indexed by the search engines, then you need to think about how your site is both seen by the search engines and also by the users of your site.
For example, normal site users won't be seeing or searching the robots.txt page, but if you look at your website's logs, you'll see that the search engines and various other web spiders and web robots regularly request the robots.txt and sitemaps.xml pages.
Sitemaps.
Sitemaps are a protocol that was introduced by Google in 1995 as a way to help webmasters tell the search engines which pages they want indexed. We believe that essentially every website needs to have a sitemap. In many cases it also pays to have several sitemaps. You may need a sitemaps for your normal site content, and possibly another for your mobile content.
The othet thing worth considering, is that Google likes to read .xml sitemaps, Yahoo likes to read ROR sitemaps, and people like to read HTML sitemaps. :)
The place I know and recommend that provides all of these types of sitemaps is XML-Sitemaps.com. They have a free service that allows up to 500 pages to be indexed, and a paid downloadable that allows you to have unlimited pages.
Google WebMaster Tools.
Google has it's own place for webmasters where sitemaps can be submitted, stats can be viewed, and errors can be discovered. A very handy resource for all webmasters and site owners. Amongst other things, the Google Webmaster Tools Service helps you to easily find your site's HTTP errors, unreachable pages, short meta descriptions, title tag issues, and urls restricted by the robots.txt page.
The WebMaster Tools also change regularly as more tools are added, and existing ones are improved. My favourite tools are the links tools and the robots.txt checking tool.
Robots.txt.
The robots.txt page is the page that 'asks' the various web robots to either scan or not scan specific pages or directories of your website. Also known as the robots exclusion standard, it is essentially a convention used to prevent webspiders and web robots from accessing specific parts of your website. It is not a guarantee that your site will not be scanned, it is purely advisory.
Redirection techniques.
Meta Refresh.
One of the easiest ways to redirect a user to a new page, the meta refresh is used to redirect visitors to a new page on the same site. An example of a url using this technique appears below.
www.whois.com.au/com_au_domain.html
Here's a stripped down version of the same code that appears on the above example.
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://www.whois.com.au/com-au-domain.html">
<title>whois.com.au | This page about the .com.au has moved</title>
</head>
<body>
This page about the .com.au has moved. If you are not redirected within 5 seconds please click this <a href="http://www.whois.com.au/com-au-domain.html" title="whois.com.au">link.</a>
</body>
</html>
Frame Forwarding a.k.a Stealth Redirection.
Frame forwarding aka stealth redirection is normally used when you want a site visitor to see one address, while they're actually at another. An example use for frame forwarding would be with product names and the parent company website.
Individual product brandname urls could each have frame forwards to the relevant sections on the parent company websites, enabling people who instinctively type in the product name and .com or .com.au to arrive wherever the company wants them to with the url visible that they typed in..
If you host your own server, here's an example of a frame forward to use;
<frameset rows="100%">
<frame src="http://www.example.net.au/">
</frameset>
<noframes>
Please follow <a href="http://www.example.net.au/">this link</a>
</noframes>
