Today’s hint or website suggestion contains two of our favorite things:
“free” and “improve web traffic”. I sat down this week and started what seemed like a gigantic task, to create a website for http://www.PikesPeakAtlas.com with close to 100 pages to it. While working on this I also started to consider how to get Google to see all of it in a timely fashion. Google loves sitemaps, but sitemaps are NOT written in conventional HTML usually, so I went looking for a site that could help.

XML Sitemaps - usually called Sitemaps, with a capital S - are a way for you to give Google information about your site. This is the type of Sitemap we’ll be discussing in this article.

In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website.
Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

http://www.makeasitemap.com was just what I was looking for. It was super straight forward, gave me the simple options that I needed. Of course two of my favorite things about it is that it is FREE and WEB-BASED, no software to download.

This bookmark suggestion comes from:

Pete Van Vuren
http://www.pikespeakatlas.com

No matter how simple your website you will probably have at least one or two colors in it. There’s no reason for it to be ugly even if there is proof that ugly still sells.

COLOURlovers is a website I found that produces lots of color palettes for you to choose from. It also has a lot of patterns for you to review as well.

So start here if you need some ideas or just something to get the creative juices flowing.

COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color
trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for
ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification -
a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit
news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

::ToddS
DW Kickstart - Learn to build and market your own website

If you are a non-techy kind of person then name your home page either index.html or index.htm and skip the rest of this article. That should work 99% of the time for you.

Still here…?

Okay, let’s start by saying that for the most part it doesn’t matter which combination of default, index, html, or htm you use. These are just settings on the web server and can be modified.

Default and Index are the two common default directory documents. Meaning that if you don’t tell the server specifically what web page to load, it will check that directory to see if one of those two files exist and load it.

IE If your default document is index.html and you type http://www.dwkickstart.com it will load http://www.dwkickstart.com/index.html.
More …

I get asked that question a lot it seems, and it’s kind of a loaded question. My answer is usually, “It depends.”.

But actually, after you build a couple of websites you will find that for the most part they have the same basic framework and most websites are the same steps repeated over and over.

So building a website using Dreamweaver might look something like this:

1. Purchase Domain Name
2. Purchase Hosting
3. Create a FTP account
4. Setup a Adobe Dreamweaver site definition
5. Create page design in Adobe Fireworks
6. Convert page design to Dreamweaver template
7. Create new page using template
8. Push web page to web server
9. Test in multiple browsers
10. Repeat steps 7-9 until website is complete

That might seem like a lot of steps, but you will find that none of them are particularly hard. Especially after you have had a bit of practice.

Over the next couple of days I will break those steps down for you so they don’t seem so daunting.

If you just focus on one piece at a time, you will have your site up and running in no time.

::ToddS
DW Kickstart - Learn to build and market your own website

That’s a really good question. You will find that most experts aren’t even completely sure and you will most likely get a different response depending on whom you ask.

If you ask a web developer, they are probably inclined to refer to RIA which stands for Rich Internet Application. They will probably start spitting out buzz words like AJAX, Flex and Flash.

For the web developer Web 2.0 is about getting the web as close to a desktop experience as possible. Which means it would look and act more like the applications you use when you are off the web. Things like drag-and-drop and sections that expand and collapse like an accordian.

You can find a really good example of a Web 2.0 at the Backpack website.

Now if you ask an online marketer what Web 2.0 is, you will most likely get a different response completely. They tend to think of the social aspects of Web 2.0. For them it’s about getting the web to interact with the user. You will hear them talk about tagging, blogging and bookmarking. Some examples of that would be like Flickr, MySpace and YouTube.

And finally to make it even more confusing there is the merging of both perspectives in Web 2.0 sites like Facebook.

So you should be able to see why this can be a bit confusing for people.

Examples of Web 2.0:

• Backpack - Keep your notes, to-do list, and calendar online
• YouTube - Share videos
• Facebook - Interact and have fun with your friends
• Flickr - Share your photos

::ToddS
DW Kickstart - Learn to build and market your own website