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 have ever wanted to build your own widgets (web gadgets) for use in your website or blog, you might want to consider Sprout Builder.

If you are unfamiliar with what a “widget” is, just check out a few of their kewl demos for ideas.

They have built a free tool that allows you to create and publish your very own widget in as little as 5 minutes. It’s designed to be powerful enough for both beginners and advanced users as well.

Sprout Builder makes it simple for anyone to add their own live content into a personalized widget whether that be a blog, a web page, an RSS feed, or a video. They even have a calendar component.

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