Building Your First Web Site? Then Please Read On . . .

If you are confused by all the options available these days and are not sure where to start, then please read on. Hopefully this will help. At any time feel free to contact our “Web Guy” Justin Luey at justin@econoprint.net for more information, pricing etc.

If you’ve just decided to ‘take the plunge’ and are looking to establish your first web site then it’s very important you take a look at the whole picture.

What I mean by this is it’s absolutely no good to you if you have the best looking site in the world, but nobody can find you! Or your site is dazzling but nobody comes back to your site!

Unless you have a very ‘niche’ product or service you are going to find that getting into the top 10 or 20 with Google, MSN, Yahoo etc. is very difficult, but not impossible. This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) plays a very important part of your project. This is a FREE service at Econoprint.

Good and Bad SEO – What’s the Difference?   A word of warning. If you’ve received an email, or other marketing correspondence that promises to get your site to no. one with Google, Yahoo etc., be very, very wary! There are still numerous companies out there who use very questionable tactics to ‘boost’ your web site’s ranking and are banned by Google and Yahoo.

Good SEO   Firstly, SEO is not cheap. It takes time to ‘market’ a site correctly. If you can find a company that can build your web site and also have a full understanding of SEO techniques then you stand a much better chance of good results. The reason being they can build your site in a search engine-friendly way right from the start. This can save costs later on.

What does SEO involve?   Many books have been written on the subject, and because the search engines like to keep everyone guessing, SEO is not an exact science. However, if things are done correctly, without trying to ‘fool’ the SE’s (search engines), then good results can eventually be had. Inside a month of having our new website our numbers more than tripled. So yes this is important if you want people to find you.

Keywords   Basically, and I’m going to keep this short, your main keywords (the word or phrase typed into a search box in a search engine a potential customer would use to find your product/service) have to be thoroughly researched.

This keyword is used in your content (and other key places on your page) to help the SE’s figure out what the page is about.

Link Strategy   A reciprocal link is a link to another site, who also reciprocates by having a link back to you. The more incoming links (from sites in the same ‘theme’ as yours) the better. This helps to establish your site in the eyes of the SE’s. There are many good programs for automating many of the tasks involved with this process. We will help to set this up for you.  Reciprocal linking used to be the way forward, however these days the emphasis is much more based on one-way links. That is, an incoming link to your site, without a reciprocal link back. These are much harder to get, and that is where a SEO specialist will be worth his/her salt in garnering these important links.

Social Bookmarking   This has really taken off in the last few years, and can be a valuable source of incoming traffic. Think of this as your regular browsing bookmarks, but you share them with the rest of the community.

Articles/Press Releases   Again, a very useful method to drive visitors to your site. You will need to write plenty of fresh articles about your service, or product and submit these to the 100′s of article site now out there.

Blogs   Well worth spending time on and again, providing you have the time to update regulalrly can be a great source of traffic. If you allow comments to be posted on your blog, then keep a wary eye out for the persistent spammers out there. They can be a real pain!

Content   Good quailty content is extremely important. Rule of thumb: design your pages with content that your web site visitors enjoy, and the search engines will be happy also. You see so many sites that have their main keywords stuffed into every orifice, that a lot of the time the content just does not make sense. Always design for the site visitor first and you can’t go wrong. I’ve merely scratched the SEO surface above. If this is something you want to pursue, then there are 100′s of great resources online to help you find your feet. I would start by joining one of the many online forums where you will find everyone from experts to novices seeking and offering advice.

P.P.C. vs. Organic Listings!   What Do These Terms Mean?

P.P.C stands for Pay-Per-Click   This can be an extremely quick way of getting your site noticed, but it does cost money. Basically, you decide on what your main ‘keyword’ is (the term that you expect people to search for in a search engine) and you ‘bid’ for placement of your advert. The more you bid, the higher the advert will be placed in the sponsored listings, normally shown at the top & right hand sides of the search results. If you are in a very competitive market, then it’s important that you tread very carefully, otherwise your advertising budget could soon be wiped out.  There are many online forums specialising in PPC where you will receive lots of help and ideas on how to most effectively ‘word’ your advert.

Organic Listings   These are the ‘natural’ results that Google, Yahoo et al bring up when someone searches for your service or product. If you receive an email from an SEO company ‘guaranteeing’ they can get you no. 1 positions in the natural listings, then please be most wary. Very hard to get there and can be very expensive. Nobody can make that promise and achieve these sort of results legitimately especially if your main keyword is in a competitive market.

Getting Started with Your First Web Site   A couple of typical scenarios may look like this:  (A) You don’t have the time/inclination to do the work yourself. The call us at 905.682.6601.  We will help you choose a good domain name .ca .com .net etc. (You can check the availability of domain names at: http://www.checkdomain.com/)  We also can and will maintain and host your site, no need to go to different companies.

Important About Your Web Site   Be sure you explain fully what you expect from the site, i.e. if the main point of your site is to be found by prospective clients then make this absolutely clear. I would recommend you reserve a substantial part of your budget (unless you are going to do it yourself) for marketing of the site. Take your time here, this part of the project can make or break your online venture! OR you want to be able to change the information in your site easily, because of announcements etc that you may have. Or maybe you want your site to be very dazzling. Unfortunately, other than being dazzling these sites are not recommended generally. SE’s have a hard time finding these sites, making it harder to get ranked within the internet.   (B) You’d like to have a go yourself, but not sure where to start! If you have a lot of time available then go for it. If nothing else, you will learn many of the techniques required to build your site, get it online and know how to effectively martket it. Note: I would suggest you do not have your site hosted on one of the many free services. These sites don’t usually perform well on the search engines.

Template Sites   These are ready-made sites that you can load into Frontpage, Dreamweaver or whatever. They are fully customisable and an ideal way for someone without HTML knowlegde to build their first site. They are a great way to learn your way around site building, without all the hassle of worrying about the design aspects. There are many to choose from and all the hard work has been done for you. You simply download the files (which include a Photoshop .psd file, in case you wish to alter the graphics, fonts etc.), load the html files into your favourite html editor and insert your own content. Upload to your server and that’s it, your website is ready for public viewing.

There is a downside to this however. If the template you purchase has been bought many times previously, then it is feasible that you may come across the same template whilst browsing the web. Many cotemplate companies overcome this hurdle by offering you the opportunity to buy the template ‘exclusively’, which means once you have purchased the template, it is immediately removed from the site, thereby minimising chances of stumbling across the same template online.

Static Web Page   This is for the person who does not have a lot of money, but wants a web presence. You want to give your customers information on your products. Maybe where you are. Maybe information about the company itself. This is generally a simple 2, to 5 page web site. And we can do that too. Contact   justin@econoprint.net   for further information, including pricing and getting started.

Our Favourite and Recommendation….   A CMS, (Content Management System) which is basically a ready-built site (by us at Econoprint) that allows you to change/add content as frequently as you wish, without any HTML or programming knowledge. Works Here we built yoursite. There are many things that will remain the same and then all the new stuff. We will train you to use your new site. You will be able to change content very easily, as well as adding words, clip art, articles of information and so on and so on. You can also have several people making changings to your website. At Econoprint anything to do with Digital Copying is handled by one person, our Sign department is another person and so on. One person overviews the site in general. At one point we were making changes to our website so fast, in other words adding new information etc. that we have a contest within the company. Everyones computer home page on the internet is set to Econoprint’s home page. We pay a dollar a day to the associate who notice’s a new change to our website. Again because it changes so often.