Online Web Design Course

The best tip for beginning Website developers is to take things one step at a time. It's easy to become overwhelmed by the thought building an entire Website, so just look at each task in the process as individual projects.

Every HTML document consists of two parts, the head and the body. The head contains your HTML title, META tags, and other relevant data. The body area contains the part of your Web page that will be publicly visible. These two distinct parts of your document represent two separate steps in the building process.

You can break things down further by itemizing each major piece in the head and coding these step-by-step. For instance, you'll enter your title tag details, style sheet reference, and the META tags you have chosen to use.

Do the same with your body. Create your main table or div elements, and then slowly work your way inward.

Save your progress after each tag or attribute you enter. This will allow you to avoid the chaos of having to start over in the event your work is interrupted by a power surge.

Also, you can leave hard return spaces between lines of code in your HTML editor. These won't show up as extra spaces on your public HTML page, and they make it easy for you to find specific areas when you need to make changes or updates.

And you can use the comment tag to make notes to yourself that will only be visible when viewing the raw code. This is helpful for breaking the document up into more manageable sections.

Through practice you will begin to see the overall document clearly. The initial sense of anxiety and confusion that comes from opening a piece of raw code and trying to find your way around will pass.

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Everyone wants a search engine friendly Website, but many people don't understand how to go about getting one. The truth is it's simple, and this article will prove it.

Nearly 80% of all transactions begin with a search engine query. Having a search engine friendly Website is an absolute must in today's competitive marketplace. In fact author and professional blogger Dave Taylor says if your customers can't find you in Google your business is already dead.

The truth is there are plenty of other good ways to promote your Web presence. But building a search engine friendly site is so easy; it just makes good sense to do it.

There are numerous things you can do to optimize your files and pages for the search engines. But this article will focus on three very easy steps that you should incorporate into every Web page you build from here forward.

Step One: Your Title Tag

When it comes to on site SEO, the most important tag in any HTML document is the title tag. This tag is essentially your first impression on the spiders and bots the search engines send to crawl and index your pages.

How many times have you landed on a page and seen something like "index" or "home" in your browser tab. This is a horrible title strategy, unless you want to build rank for the word index!

It's incredible how many people just leave the default title tag in place. It takes less than 60 seconds to change this tag to a good keyword phrase, and doing so will improve your chances of being ranked well by a factor of ten or greater.

Your title tag needs to reflect one to three of your primary keyword phrases. When using multiple phrases, you can separate them using the pipe ( | ) character.

For example, one of my sites sells a great course on Website design. And since I want to keep getting traffic from the search engines, my title tag looks like this:

Learn Web Design | Website Creation | Learn HTML

My ongoing keyword research tells me these terms get lots of traffic, but are not impossibly competitive. As a general rule, the keywords you choose for your pages should follow the same ideal; popular but not absolutely saturated.

You should also be aware that your title is the headline that is displayed when your site comes up in the search results. A relevant title is more likely to get a click than a heading that makes no sense or reads "index".

And be sure to give each page on your site an appropriate title. Don't just slap the same title tags into the top of every file unless you want to miss out on some great opportunities to pull traffic to all of your pages with different keywords.

Step Two: Your Heading Tags

Use a strong H1 tag at the top of every page. Search engine bots will recognize anything you put in these primary headings as an important phrase.

By placing a keyword rich headline at the top of every page using the H1 tags, you will be feeding the search algorithms exactly the kind of solid relevance they are looking for. Many of your competitors will underestimate the value of doing this on every page, so you'll have the edge when you put this tactic to use.

Step Three: META Description Tag

Use the META description tag to improve your ranking and click through rates. There is always some debate going on in the SEO community as to whether or not META tags are still relevant.

They are! Don't let anyone tell you otherwise; I've seen my pages ranked over the competition solely on the strength of keywords placed in my META description tag!

What you need to do is create a good, compelling description of one to three sentences, and be sure to include a couple of your primary keywords. The search bots will acknowledge this, and even more interestingly the META description is the summary text that shows up underneath your title when your site appears on the results pages.

Think of this like a classified ad, because that's essentially what it is. Searchers will look at your description and decide whether or not your site has the info they are trying to find.

The majority of marketers neglect this tactic, so you can be well ahead of the curve by putting it to work for you.

There is a lot more to SEO than these three steps, but if you execute everything in this article every time you build a Web page you'll be off to a great start.

Check out our robust Web design course for even more great tips on powerful Website Creation.

Often a Website owner decides to "dress up" their menu display by using button graphics instead of plain text links. It's a great idea to give your navigation more punch, but I recommend you avoid going with image files for your buttons and instead choose a simple CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) layout.

Here are my reasons:

Graphic files can increase the time it takes your site to load into a browser.

Search engines cannot read images.

CSS, when used properly, will give you far more control without the need for java script.

Using a little bit of CSS, you can create a very nice menu array that your visitors will think are dynamic image files. When you hover over any part of this kind of CSS menu you can even watch the buttons change color and seem to depress into the page.

Pretty cool huh?

CSS menus require no heavy java script code that could slow your load time. You simply add a short section to your external style sheet to tell a browser how to display the buttons in terms of size, colors, font style, etc. and then reference these specs in the HTML document where the menus reside.

In simplest terms this is a two-step process that takes all of ten minutes to complete.

And search engine spiders will read the anchor links placed in this sort of menu as direct text linkage. What's more, you can apply the title= attribute to further enhance your onsite SEO.

Here is the code you'll need to add to your external CSS to fly this sort of menu:

.buttonscontainer {width: 120px;}

.buttons a {color: #;

border: 1px solid;

background-color: #;

padding: 0px;

padding-left: 0px;

font: 12px Arial, sans-serif;

font-weight: bold;

text-decoration: none;

border-color: # # # #;

display: block;

margin: 3px;

width: 100%;

text-align: center;}

.buttons a:hover {border: 1px solid;

padding-left: 0px;

padding-top: 0px;

padding-bottom: 0px;

padding-right: 0px;

background-color: #;

border-color: # # # #;

color: #;

text-decoration: none;}

Of course you'll need to edit the color specs above, in addition to changing any borders, margins, etc. as you see fit.

Open your HTML pages and, exactly where you need to define your slick new menu buttons, open two divs with class="buttonscontainer" and class="buttons", add your button text and anchor, and close both divs.

Play around with this coding in your own design scheme. The sample menus I showed you are really only the beginning of what you can do with this foundation.

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Basic Web design is easy to learn and you will always get the best results using real code. WYSIWYG "wizard" software that promises to do all the work for you typically causes more problems than it solves.

There are numerous software applications that allow you to drag, drop, point, and click your way to a Web template without ever typing the first line of code. These tools are often called WYSIWYG, meaning What You See Is What You Get. Most such devices are junk and should be avoided at all cost.

Due to the heavily promoted simplicity of WYSIWYG tools, many people use them for their basic Web design needs. But the bottom line is these tools limit your flexibility, create sloppy code, and in many cases simply do not work the way you want them to.

Learning the basics of Web design is easier than you might think. And in the long run you'll save time and money, plus end up with a much better site, when you create your own code in lieu of using a WYSIWYG.

Let's look more closely at the primary drawbacks of this type of software.

Limited Flexibility

No matter how slick, expensive, and high-tech a WYSIWYG editor, it's not as robust and expansive as the human mind. There's simply no way one of these utilities can be programmed for every possible parameter.

And frankly in most cases point and click Website builders are seriously flawed in terms of what they allow you to do.

As long as you stick with the basics of putting a table here, dropping an image there, and so forth you'll be fine. But when you decide you want to align a block of text outside and to the right of an existing table, suddenly the software stops responding and you are unable to make the seemingly simple change you want.

WYSIWYG software is not intuitive in many scenarios. And there are a variety of design tactics and format changes you simply cannot do without going directly into the raw code.

Sloppy Code

Neat, properly formatted HTML (and other code) is critical for the success of your site. And it's totally impossible to duplicate this level of quality when using a WYSIWYG.

When your HTML code is entered incorrectly your site obviously will not display properly. WYSIWYG software generally enters the basic structure correctly, but numerous small errors appear throughout a document created with these tools, and this will cause your pages to look different from one browser to another.

Also, the structure of your code is an important part of onsite search engine optimization. The kind of jumbled slop produced by a WYSIWYG tool can actually harm your search engine rankings, whereas proper hand coding can greatly enhance your position within the results listings.

Just Won't do What You Want

Even at the level of basic Web design there are times when the developer wants to do something a little outside of the ordinary. And few things are more frustrating in a Website development scenario than wanting to create a specific effect and not being able to do so.

When using WYSIWYG technology you will often discover there is simply no way to create the format or effect you'd like to see on the screen in front of you. The "wizard" must adhere strictly to the rules it was programmed with, and even if the change you want to make is very minor, it just isn't possible if the WYSIWYG doesn't understand how to do it.

On the other hand, once you have even a preliminary grasp of basic Web design code, you'll be able to make any changes you like in a matter of seconds. There are very few limitations when handling raw code, whereas a WYSIWYG will allow you to perform only a pre-determined range of commands.

With the right educational material, the average Internet user can become proficient in the art of basic Web design in 30 days or less. With only a small amount of practice you'll be cranking out Web pages that are ten times better than those produced by the most expensive WYSIWYG on the market.

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