How To: Yahoo SiteBuilder
I speak to a lot of people each day who are frustrated or feel overwhelmed by the task of creating and/or managing their websites. Sometimes, this is due to having attempted a project that is beyond the scope of their abilities and other times it is a legitimate technical issue but in most cases it is something that can be easily resolved.
For those of you hosting your websites with Yahoo, I have created the following site that offers tips and gives examples of what can be done using Yahoo! SiteBuilder.
Yahoo! SiteBuilder 2.6 is the current version of this wonderful site building tool and it makes it relatively easy to create and publish a website even if it is your first time.
Pump Up The DNS
Why surf the internet if you can’t do it as fast as a pussycat? Faster pussycat!
Even with DSL or Cable broadband your internet connection can still slow to crawl at times or you’ll notice that you fail to achieve optimum speed on a regular basis. This is due to the way that your particular ISP handles DNS requests.
It starts when you type a URL into your browser, that URL is translated into a numeric IP address that web servers and routers can understand. To make things more user friendly, when you type in www.somedomain.com, a DNS server translates this into a numeric IP address so that you don’t have to memorize long strings of numbers in order to visit a particular website.
DNS servers live on the Internet, and your computer contacts them with the request to do that translation, which is commonly called name resolution. When you use an ISP, your computer will automatically use the default DNS servers specified by your ISP; you typically don’t need to set up DNS in any way. If you’re on a corporate network, your systems administrator may have set you up to use specific DNS servers.
If there’s a delay in contacting the DNS server, or if the DNS server takes too much time resolving the address, you’ll face a delay in getting to a Web site. So even if you’ve got the world’s fattest pipe, your Web surfing will be slowed down. If you could speed up the name resolution in some way, you’d be able to speed up your Web surfing.
Here is the simplest way to hack DNS in order to speed up your web browsing:
OpenDNS has a huge DNS cache with DNS servers around the world that makes it easy to retrieve IP addresses from it more quickly than from your ISP’s DNS servers. OpenDNS makes it fast and easy to configure your router so even those who are not tech savvy will find it a breeze to set up.
Web Design Basics
Website design requires planning and a little forethought. There are a lot of web hosting companies that will sell you on the fact that designing your own website is quick and easy, and it can be. But if you want to create a good website that will draw in traffic then you will want to take the following into consideration:
Users Are Scanners
If you think a typical user will read the entire content of your Web pages, you are wrong.
No matter how much useful information you put into a Web page, a visitor will only spend a few seconds scanning it before they decide whether to leave it or to stay.
If you want a visitor to read your text, be sure to make your point in the very first sentence of the page. After that you should try to keep them occupied with short paragraphs and interesting new headers all the way down the page.
Less Is More
Try to keep all sentences as short as possible. Try to keep your paragraphs as short as possible. Try to keep your chapters as short as possible. Try to keep your pages as short as possible.
Use a lot of space between your paragraphs and chapters. Pages overloaded with text will kill your audience.
Don’t place too much content on a single page. If you have a lot to say, try to break your information into smaller chunks and place it on different pages. Don’t expect any visitor to scroll all the way down to the bottom of a page with thousands of words.
Navigation
Try to create a navigation structure that is common for all the pages in your Web.
Keep the use of hyperlinks inside your text paragraphs to a minimum. Don’t use hyperlinks inside text paragraphs to send your visitors to every random page of your Web. That will destroy the feeling of a consistent navigation structure.
If you must use hyperlinks, add them to the bottom of a paragraph or to the navigation menus of your site.
Download Speed
A common mistake made by many web designers is to develop a site on a local machine with direct access to the data, or to develop the site over a high-speed Internet connection. Sometimes developers are not aware of the fact that some of their pages take a long time to download.
Internet usability studies tell us that most visitors will leave a Web page that takes more than 7 seconds to download.
Before you publish any content heavy pages, make sure they are tested over a low-speed modem connection. If your pages take a long time to download, you might consider removing some of your graphic or multimedia content.
Let Your Audience Speak
Feedback from your users is a very good thing. Your visitors are your “customers”. Very often they will give you some valuable wisdom, or advise you, completely free of charge, about what you could have done better.
If you provide a simple way to reach you, you will get a lot of positive input from a lot of people with different skills and knowledge.
