Ok, so Christmas is over, and new year’s is approaching rapidly. This is the season that we all make our resolutions (you know, the same ones from last year!).

So, what are mine?

1) …..

Ok, so I don’t really make resolutions. BUT, that doesn’t mean that I am not resolved. Or resoluted. Or whatever the word is.

The new year is a great time to try new things. If you’ve been thinking about starting that new business of your own, now may be the perfect time. What evidence to have to this claim? Absolutely none, just a gut feeling.

According to me the new year is a good time for a new business because many people will be thinking along these lines. So, what does that mean for you? It means that there is a potential market that may not be there (at least not in the same numbers) at another time. New businesses require services and products, maybe yours.

This leaves the one eternal question? How will I fund my new venture. If you’ve come here to have that question answered, I’m afraid you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

The most expensive thing if you’re in a service industry is probably advertising. Rates are REALLY Expensive. Just today I got a quote from a daily national paper. A full page ad PER DAY = R100 000! Not bad work if you can get it!

Another area of advertising is in the online arena. This is where we can really help you. If you need a website, we can make a killer one for you. We can do it all; from static, simple pages to CMS to shopping carts to database driven to…. well, we think you get the idea.

If you need web hosting, for your new site designed by us, or an existing site, look at our cheap web hosting packages.

Of course, once you have a website you need to consider online advertising. The best online advertising at this stage? Google Adwords. If you need help with your google adwords advertising, give us a shout. We are currently looking into Microsoft’s online advertising, but we’ll wait until they’ve answered our questions before we say anything else (don’t hold your breath).

Happy new year, let this be the year we make our millions!

John

If you would like to take a shot at designing your own site, but you have limited or no experience, then there are some tools available to help you.

1. Sitebuilder: Sitebuilder lets you use a wizard interface to create your site using their templates. Each hosting account you register with SoftSmart.co.za – Hosting comes with Sitebuilder, but it is not preinstalled, simply send an email to [email protected] to have it activated.
2. Web templates: Log into your CPanel account and look for the web templates link. Here you can choose between hundreds of free templates. You will need some tools to edit them. These tools are covered in the next two points.
3. For the graphics, use Xara Xtreme. It will cost you a small fee, but its really worth while. It is a corel-like, very powerful, easy to use graphics design environment.
4. For the html, go to Web Tutor to learn some HTML. There is no registration and its free!

Before embarking on your new venture, you need to decide whether your needs are better served by learning to do it yourself, or if its in your best interest to pay someone else to make your dream site. If you are putting up a personal website, then go for it. If you are putting up a business site, then think seriously about having SoftSmart.co.za give you a quote.

You need to bear in mind that the search engines must find your site, it needs to look professional and it needs to load fast.

Ok, so we know that SEO is more than just google, but lets face it, they are the main search engine on planet earth at this stage. SEO techniques should (in my opinion) focus heavily on google. By focusing your SEO on google, you’ll probably do pretty well with the other search engines too.

I’ll be posting many more articles about Search Engine Optimisation over time, but I wanted to raise one quick point here. Many people ask a common question, “Can google see my website?“.

Although the search engines are getting better, I think you should still be cautious of using only javascript navigation menus. You should always have a text based version of your navigation menus. This does not need to be a complete listing, but should point to category pages, which in turn can list individual links within that category. Take a look at www.softsmart.co.za to see what I mean. The main menu at the top is javascript and the bottom text based menus are not exhaustive, they lead to menu pages for that category.

Another point to note is that while making links out of images (.jpg, .gif, etc) may look great, the search engines cannot read what the images say. So, you need to have alt parameters in your img tag.

Having links that the search engines can follow will make your SEO far more effective.

So, how sure are you of your sites links? Here’s how to find out if your links are SEO friendly

1. Put a file called delorie.html into the root folder of your website (this file can be blank).
2. Go to: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http://www.yoursite.com

This will show your website in a text-based browser which is more or less how the search engines see your site. Using a text only browser you can see if your menu links are working, and you can also see if images have alt parameters. If you have an image that links to a page called “john-is-great.html” and the image is called img1.gif, then in the text browser, you will see img1.gif, not really great for SEO. If however you have <img src=”img1.gif” alt=”John is really great”>, then you will see “John is really great”.

Well, it is Christmas today, so I’ve really written this little blog very very quickly. I hope is makes sense??

Please post here to let me know if it does make sense and also to let me know if you discovered something about your site that you didn’t realise before by looking at it through the eyes of google.