Website Swamp. Help! I'm Sinking!

[Mrs.Clooney]

My head is spinning, lol. I've been reading threads on setting up a website and I'm feeling swamped. Where does one begin?

What I particularly don't understand is the stuff about domain names and getting your website to be picked up by a search engines and using target words to get hits and be recognized etc...etc...etc...

I just don't understand it at all. Can any helpful geeks spell it out for me S-L-O-W-L-Y and S-I-M-P-L-Y please.

 

[siteforsoreeyes]

Hi

It is like a mind field out their but can I make a suggestion try and stay away from free website offers they will come with excessive un related adverts and yuo never achieve gold with yahoogle in broad search terms.

 

[user 28883]

Try Microsoft small office for your website, they are free and advert free also. You just need to choose a domain name which is free for 2 years if its a .co.uk one then £10.99 for 2 years after the first 2 free years. You can also purchase a personalised email or just use the @live.co.uk ones for free.

With the google thing, I just signed up into the google features and added my business to the business manager and also have free adds placed all over like freeindex and touch local etc.. this helps to keep me at the top when searching for mobile hairdressers in my area. It all works really well for me and i get a vast majority of new clients through this.

 

[siteforsoreeyes]

Sorry my last response wasnt exactly full of info,

To set up a domain name and hosting is not to difficult you just have to follow the instructions online and depending on the package you buy the domain name will already be attached to the hosts server. If you bought your domain name from company A and hosting from company B you will need to point your domain name to the hosting companies servers.

Moving onto the indexing of search engines and this is where most people fall, people are still under the impression that Keywords are the way forward but before you fall into the trap dont pay to much attention to keywords they have very little relevance when search engines are sending the robots out to test your pages. In fact keywords can do more harm than good if you get it wrong.
Once your website is fully completed you need to keep in mind a couple of extra things that people always tend to miss, firstly you need a robot.txt file this is to help tell the search engines what to search in your web site and a Sitemap.xml this basically tells the search engines of your pages and how often they get updated something that google loves is a web site that is updated on a regular basis.


Can I just add before you jump in with both feet, get it in your head what you would like from your website


Do you want:-

To sell products to customers online?
Do you want to achieve a top placement in google?
Do you want to have an online database so people can make bookings through your site?
the list could go on for miles.

I have said this many times before in different posts its all well and good wanting to create your web site yourself but are you aware of the back end coding, this is what the search engines see not your customers.
If search engines dont like what they see you will have a website that is lost in planet www.

You do need advice on this by professionals, we as web designers would never try and learn the beauty industry by having a Girls World and reading tutorials how to do make up and pig tails.

The search engines change the goal posts on a regular basis so keeping up with them while your trying to juggle your own business is not an easy task.

I will extend a little on free web sites like freewebs, all well and good but are they really what you want to give you that professionalism the consumers of this industry expect, people use websites the same as when visiting your salon, they walk in before they have opened their mouth they have made their opinion of the place.
If people see www.freewebs.com/beautysalon in the web address browser you have given people the impression your business is cheap and likes things free.
Dont attack the messenger on this it is just peoples perceptions on the stupidiest things.
It would be much better to have a website address www.thisismysalon.co.uk
And that is just the start of the page before we have moved to the content, If you are still leaning towards a free service you will need your web pages to be out of this world, and search engine friendly which with no disrespect to anyone is something that only a web designer could do.
I am not saying that you wouldnt make a good looking site I refer to the back end coding that I know is not picked up overnight by reading tutorials.

If you are going down the route of a free web site then I would steer in the direction of just setting up a facebook page and inviting people who live in your area as friends, set up special offers on your wall etc, that way its a dam good way of easy work and contacting your specific market. This is a good base to get people who you know use the internet while you decide what you really want from the site.


Hope this helps

 

[stoney]

Hi

It is like a mind field out their but can I make a suggestion try and stay away from free website offers they will come with excessive un related adverts and yuo never achieve gold with yahoogle in broad search terms.

Actually It depends on what you want from your website. I have a freewebs one and several people have said they dont even notice the advertising.

My website is completely fit for purpose, I am the only nail technician in my town and have all the other free listings such as freeindex, yell.com, bebo, facebook. If someone googles nail techs/bars in my hometown I'm the first 3 or 4!

I dont know where you live Mrs C, or what the competition is like but my advice is dont over -complicate if you dont need to.

 

[Martin Duffy]

The Microsoft Office Live webdesigner is excellent - it is banner & advert free, you can buy a decent domain name for pittance & there is a function to put in metatags etc to boost your site's findability.

In the grand scheme of things a salon's client base is likely to be local, which is what I have trouble getting through to friends of mine who are webdesigners - I don't care if I'm not on the first page of search results when people type in "beauty salons sussex", what I do care about is if I come up in a search for "beauty salons arundel", which I do. This kind of findability is adequately provided for by using Microsoft Office Live, which is free. In fact register with Google for free & you can have your business at the top of the front page by the map with a link to your site anyway!

It also provides e-mails linked to the site, a report function so you can see how people found your site & the words they typed into the search engine, so enabling you to alter your metatags etc. Have a look at mine to see you needn't spend out a fortune for a straight forward professional looking site that comes up in the searches you want it to. If you do go the Microsoft Office Live route I'm quite happy to explain what I did!

 

[siteforsoreeyes]

I can fully understand where you people are coming from for local searches and reaching high on google, but can I give you a little bit of an advanced warning why you need advice of people with the knowledge of how sites work
There is going to be a time in the not to distant future that web standards will need to be adhered to especially now court cases have started where companies are being given sued for using websites that are inaccessable to people with poor vision and other handicaps.
If this does happen which with my experience I can almost put my life on it then what it means that if your website is inaccessable or the back end code is faulting then you will not appear on the search engines full stop.

Have you tried
The W3C Markup Validation Service
and
TAW. Web Accessibility Test

you may not like the findings but this is what you need a professional for.

 

[Mrs.Clooney]

What I particularly don't understand is the stuff about domain names and getting your website to be picked up by a search engines and using target words to get hits and be recognized etc...etc...etc...

I just don't understand it at all. Can any helpful geeks spell it out for me S-L-O-W-L-Y and S-I-M-P-L-Y please.

Oh dear, this is all just too technical for moi! Can I ask you kind souls to please deviate from the technical talk please and help this PC numpty. I am sure I am not the only one ......... or am I ??

What is a domain name?
What makes a website inaccessable?
What is back end coding?
What are metatags?
What words do you need to use to get you site picked up by a decent search engine?

 

[Bonkers]

oh no it totally confused me too and still does to be totally honest. i have a simple one with vistaprint you can have a look if you like www.dazzlemobilebeauty.co.uk

i have had it up a week and half and now have started to get lots of work from it, i think a website is about what you put into it though.

good luck.

 

[siteforsoreeyes]

Right here goes

What is a domain name?
A domain name is basically the web address ie www.mrsclooney.com and its what points users to the space on your hosts server(where you web site sits)

What makes a website inaccessable?
With this one it could be a number of factors and some that you would never even think about.
1-incorrect background colour to text colour
2-No alt tags on images, this is if someone is using a text viewer to see the internet due to poor vision other disability, an alt tag on images is just a string of text that describes the picture that should be their.
As long as you have a light background with a reasonable size font that is dark, you will be ok.

What is back end coding?
This is the code that your web browser reads select "view" on the navigation bar at the top of your screen then select source a text file will open with all the back end coding. Getting it wrong here causes the search engines to only view up to the point it is broken meaning a small disaster.

What are metatags?
These are meta data basically telling search engines of the content of your site, but there is a move away from metatag keywords, concentrate more on the descritpion meta tags

What words do you need to use to get you site picked up by a decent search engine?
This has to be the best question of them all, there is no single words that you can use, nowdays it goes alot deeper than this due to people 10 years ago flooding the search engines with keywords, This is the best I can do in laymens terms for you i am afraid

The user for example puts in the search engine "nails in this place"

how the googlebot works is that it indexes your frontpage and in that front page you need to have what is called h1 tags, these are heading tags google likes to read H1 tags and H2 tags, meta descriptions, and content and how much their is of it. (And google knows if you have copied your work from another website and penalise's you)
The best way I could describe using the correct words and this is where you bang your head on the keyboard trying to make it sound right.

You need to write your content whilst including several search terms, for example iif you put this in your content.

Mrs C's salon is a situated in the high street just past mcdonalds

People would have to search for Mrs c's salon near mcdonalds
but if you changed the wording to

Mrs C's nail salon is situated in the heart of the midlands which serves area 1 area 2 area3.

You have opened yourself up to broader search terms so if someone now writes "nails in area 3" google would think hold on Mrs C has got a salon their so lets get her on page 1

hope this helps

 

[tigi]

I think that you might like to have a look at mr site. its a package that i have used for my websites and I love it because , its dead easy to use, its not complicated at all AND it guides you through the process.

You dont need website experience at all and you have full control over it. I use mr site pro for my wedding products business, i am a website thicko, but I am able to make a pretty decent site, look after it myself and have mastered some simple but effective skills. The handbook is written in plain english, and its not thousands of pages long either! .

best of luck and if you need to see a website that a computer thicko like myself has done , then pm me and ill let you have the addresses, i dont know if i am allowed to put them on here.

tigi
xxxxxxxxxx

 

[rachael204]

Definitely have a look at mr site - we used it (www.hrhbrackley.co.uk) and it turned out ok I think!! It was really easy to use - if I can do it anyone can.
Good luck xx

 

[Mrs.Clooney]

Right here goes

What is a domain name?
A domain name is basically the web address ie www.mrsclooney.com and its what points users to the space on your hosts server(where you web site sits)

What makes a website inaccessable?
With this one it could be a number of factors and some that you would never even think about.
1-incorrect background colour to text colour
2-No alt tags on images, this is if someone is using a text viewer to see the internet due to poor vision other disability, an alt tag on images is just a string of text that describes the picture that should be their.
As long as you have a light background with a reasonable size font that is dark, you will be ok.

What is back end coding?
This is the code that your web browser reads select "view" on the navigation bar at the top of your screen then select source a text file will open with all the back end coding. Getting it wrong here causes the search engines to only view up to the point it is broken meaning a small disaster.

What are metatags?
These are meta data basically telling search engines of the content of your site, but there is a move away from metatag keywords, concentrate more on the descritpion meta tags

What words do you need to use to get you site picked up by a decent search engine?
This has to be the best question of them all, there is no single words that you can use, nowdays it goes alot deeper than this due to people 10 years ago flooding the search engines with keywords, This is the best I can do in laymens terms for you i am afraid

The user for example puts in the search engine "nails in this place"

how the googlebot works is that it indexes your frontpage and in that front page you need to have what is called h1 tags, these are heading tags google likes to read H1 tags and H2 tags, meta descriptions, and content and how much their is of it. (And google knows if you have copied your work from another website and penalise's you)
The best way I could describe using the correct words and this is where you bang your head on the keyboard trying to make it sound right.

You need to write your content whilst including several search terms, for example iif you put this in your content.

Mrs C's salon is a situated in the high street just past mcdonalds

People would have to search for Mrs c's salon near mcdonalds
but if you changed the wording to

Mrs C's nail salon is situated in the heart of the midlands which serves area 1 area 2 area3.

You have opened yourself up to broader search terms so if someone now writes "nails in area 3" google would think hold on Mrs C has got a salon their so lets get her on page 1

hope this helps

Thank you for this info. It does help. Much appreciated.

 

[Mrs.Clooney]

Thank you for your replies geeks. :hug:

 

[siteforsoreeyes]

You dont need website experience at all and you have full control over it.

I beg to differ on this, if you want your website to work correctly wand have no faults on your pages then you need experience in this field you may say mr site is good but for example sorry rachael204 but you have over 230 errors on your page.

What does this mean?

I will try and explain it to you in laymans terms, lets say you start reading a book and the first paragraph is perfectly written english, then you move onto the second paragraph and it starts getting to like text talk, then the third paragraph is completely alien and you have not got a clue what it says.
Then someone asks you what the book was about, you aint got a bloody clue, this is exactly what yahoogle does when indexing your pages, if you have faults on the page yahoogle will read the first paragraph, the second and then the third, then have to report back about the content on your site, guess what, it hasnt got a bloody clue.

Then yahoogle will question where in the library you should go, and it will be that quiet corner where they stock "english to jiberish translations"

I could sit here till I am blue in the face about the importance of the back end coding, their will be a day in the not to distant future that "www" will not index you pages until the back end code is clean.

You have been warned

 

[user 28883]

I dont understand what these mistakes are that you keep going on about. All I see is a load of jibber on that W3 thinging.

 

[siteforsoreeyes]

I dont understand what these mistakes are that you keep going on about. All I see is a load of jibber on that W3 thinging.

This is why I keep banging my head against the wall, as a web designer I wouldn't be expected to know the difference between a eponychium and a lunula, I dont expect people in the beauty industry to understand the back end code.

I know what people are thinking when they look at the results of W3, my god whats this rubbish on about, and the second thought is normally oh well my site looks ok no one will ever know. Well this is where it gets messy because the robots that whizz through all the pages will see it, not only that if you have faults on your page then remember that your site may not work on other peoples computers, cant remember off the top of my head but I think there is nearly 100 different browsers out their that people use.

Internet Explorer7 is the most popular with Firefox second and I know google chrome is flying up the pecking order. But Internet Explorer 6 is still being used by 18% of 52million online users a month, with my experience the biggest pain in the bum is to get sites working in ie6.

And you may be thinking that oh I am ok because my listing appears in google business, or google maps at the top of page one in local searches, another point a hell of a lot of people overlook is that not everyone uses google, I know its hard to believe but there are 00's of 000's of your potential customers out there who dont even know you have a website.

You as professionals wouldnt carry out the front side of a spray tan and leave the backend to sort itself out, well this is what you are doing with your websites.

I am now going to bang my head somemore

 

[Martin Duffy]

I think you also have to understand that a website is also only a very small cog for many small salons. I know webdesigners seem to feel it's the be all & end all of promotion, but the reality is that for this type of service there are other methods of promotion that work equally well, if not better. Indeed, the majority of my clients hardly ever use the internet, many of them don't even have a computer, let alone an e-mail.

I regularly question my clients on whether my e-mail newsletters have arrived & were viewable, and how they find my website & I have yet to encounter any problems. As Google & Yahoo seem to be the search engine the majority of my clients use I couldn't really care two-hoots if my site doesn't appear on some obscure search engine result. My website does the job I want it to, which is mainly act as a vehicle to keep existing clients up-to-date - I have no desire to start some global dot com empire & appear on the first page of every search result known to man.

 

[user 28883]

And how much do pro websites cost per year, month, upfront etc??

I have used that tool for w3 thingy, and have done some searches on some well known websites and they are worse than anyones from here for errors and warnings, so not even the pros can overcome this then??

 

[siteforsoreeyes]

I think you also have to understand that a website is also only a very small cog for many small salons. I know webdesigners seem to feel it's the be all & end all of promotion, but the reality is that for this type of service there are other methods of promotion that work equally well, if not better. Indeed, the majority of my clients hardly ever use the internet, many of them don't even have a computer, let alone an e-mail.

I regularly question my clients on whether my e-mail newsletters have arrived & were viewable, and how they find my website & I have yet to encounter any problems. As Google & Yahoo seem to be the search engine the majority of my clients use I couldn't really care two-hoots if my site doesn't appear on some obscure search engine result. My website does the job I want it to, which is mainly act as a vehicle to keep existing clients up-to-date - I have no desire to start some global dot com empire & appear on the first page of every search result known to man.

Not at one point have I mentioned that a website is the be all and end all of all promotions, and if you would care to read the post this is going on about the back end code and messy back end code, I can promise in the not to distant future the internet bots will not index your page full stop, so this will be an end to the website with messy code period until you get it repaired.

I think you are missing my point, you say that all your EXISITING customers use Yahoogle, well have you thought this may be down to the fact that this is the only place they can find you, I am not sure if you are aware but who do you think powers the search in Yahoo? thats right google. So you maybe losing POTENTIAL customers who use different search engines, how do you know that 3 people a day are searching for your business using another search engine, you dont, because you dont appear on them. Someone is rubbing their hands together with the bisiness generated

I am not at all saying that you should start a global.com company this is not what its all about, if you are happy plodding along with your EXISITING customers then thats your choice.
There is a large number of business people that want that extra tool in the carpenters box, in my 15 years experience I have come across a number of people who owned a business, spent money and turned their website into a massive selling machine which in some cases when product sales was their target created more income than their business premisies.

How did they turn it into a massive selling machine? firstly by sticking to W3 rules and by understanding the benefits of appearing in the top page of organic listings of all search engines. Not just in local maps, and not just sticking to Yahoogle, normally the thoughts of an inexperienced person who builds a website and has the blinkers on because they use google, yahoo themselves so just because I use it everyone must use it,

If you offer a service or use any products on your clients for either pre or post care or you have a little glass cabinet where your customers can buy products then believe me their is money for you to make on the internet.