Web Maintenance: Customizing your Website
This section will dive into adding/removing or overall customizing your website. This one will be more educational and driven towards the end users who have a site that was made for them and they would like to make a few changes without the hassle of bothering their designer or just want to learn to do it themselves.
HTML Editing – This means you want to change the content of a single HTML file to make that particular page customized to your liking. This is a very easy task. Just open the HTML file in your favorite editor (yes that can even be notepad). Locate the code on the page that you want to change. The easiest thing to do is highlight it, look at the source code on a live site, then search for that code in the file. Once you have found the code you want to change, just replace the old code with your new code and you are home free. A small change can be made in a few minutes, and I would be happy to walk you through it over the phone if you needed, and phone advice is always free!
Reading Code – This section again will lack detail only because at this point I do expect people to know if they are ready to dive head first or if they just want to get their feet wet. Remember if you get in over your head it is always better to stop and ask for help early, than have to have someone fix things that were not started correctly to begin with. HTML code is pretty easy to read, as there are “tags” for everything. Ever see <body> </body> ? That is the open and close tag of the main body of a website. That means anything in the body of the site will be located inside these two tags. Then from there you can add more and more tags to perform your desired action. <p></p> to do a paragraph. </br> to insert a line break, or if you are into more advanced designs you can use <div></div> to create smaller sub sections inside the body of the HTML page.
Basic SEO Tactics – This is the newest addition to the lineup offered here at Netstratix. Now what I do is not an SEO program, and SEO programs are the best source of direct results, but they are also very expensive. Most costing between $200 and $1000 a month. Applying some basic rules to your website will help increase the SEO of your pages. Let me list those rules here:
- Always give your page a title, description, and a few keywords.
This is done by adding <meta keyword=”keyword1, keyword 2, keyphrase here too” /> or <meta description=”This is a description of this page so the search engine knows what I have located here”>
- Always use your keywords somewhere on your site. Use the words inside paragraphs or as the title of a picture.
- Always label your content. Add titles and subs for all pictures.
- Always make sure your page has NO FRAMES. Most engines will stop looking once it hits a frame.
- Make sure your code is clean. Do not leave any broken tags or broken code on the site, as this will complicate things for the search engine and that is never good. You can have your code checked by going to http://validator.w3.org/
If you are interested in learning a little more on this subject, also see my post in Web Maintenance called “No sense recreating the wheel”. It has some good advice when it comes to website customization.
As always if you need help in this area feel free to contact me with questions or comments.
Until next time!
~Geoff
