Do you have a website? Do you have a Google Webmasters account? If not, you need one!  This document outlines how to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and explains a few of the basics.

Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters and sign up for an account.

You will see the Home page.  Scroll down and click the “Add a site” button, and add your website address.  Then, under “sites” click on the domain you just created.

You will now see the dashboard.  It is an overview of several tools:  Top search queries, Crawl errors, links to your site, keywords, sitemaps – you can click “More” under any section to see more information.

When you are done exploring the dashboard, look to the left.  There are 4 main navigation sections: Site Configuration, Your site on the Web, Diagnostics, and Labs.

First, click the + sign next to Site Configuration and go to  Settings.  You can see the current crawl settings and change them here.

Now, click the + sign next to Diagnostics.  Here, you will find HTML Suggestions.  Here, you can get a good look at how many pages that are indexed have duplicate meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, etc. It’s a good idea to look at this section often and see what can be fixed when you notice new items have appeared.

Last, click the + sign next to Labs.  When you use the “Fetch as Googlebot” tool, and enter any page from your site, Googlebot will show you exactly how it sees that page.  Click on the word “Success” next to any fetched page to see the results.

Under Site Performance, you will see a performance overview of your site.  It takes several days for this page to update after it takes a reading, you may have to give it a week in between updates.  Scroll down and you will see it offers page speed suggestions for improving your website load time.

If you have any questions about the other sections in Google Webmasters that I did not discuss, submit them here!

==

Jessica Franke is the owner of Green Web Design, a full service Website Design, Web Hosting, Domain Registrar, and Online Marketing firm.  She is also the owner of 50 States Classifieds, and has been providing Free Classifieds online since 2002.  For more articles written by Jessica Franke, visit her blog.

Do you need a skilled webmaster or programmer? I am an experienced website designer located in Tucson, Arizona.  I can create your website from scratch, or update your existing website.   In addition to HTML, I am also knowledgeable about PHP, MYSQL, ASP, PERL, Flash, and more!  Contact me for a free quote!

I am pleased to announce the creation of a website for Mystery One Bookstore on Prospect Avenue in Milwaukee.  For a good read, there’s nothing like a mystery. They have the best selection of mysteries in Milwaukee and many signed copies.

• Full service new mystery bookstore
• An extensive selection of new and out-of-print first editions
• Mystery One carries most mystery fiction titles that are in print
• Searches for out-of-print books
• Mails everywhere UPS goes
• Discounts 15% off hardcovers, 10% off paperbacks, 10% off signed hardcovers

I was looking through my facebook friends list the other day, noticing all of these talented people that I know who are self employed and doing fascinating things with their lives and their businesses, and I was thinking I should do a “Meet My Friends” series, where I showcase some of the other companies that I work with and the other small business owners that I know.  This is the first installment.

I have accumulated a large number of friends who are my fellow web designers, programmers, technicians, and other assorted geeks throughout the years.  We each have different specialties and talents, which naturally leads us to call upon each other for input, collaboration, assistance, or just to talk shop with someone else who speaks our language from time to time. This is where I will be starting.

Without further ado, allow me to introduce you to Matthew Ramirez from Digital Marauders and Touch Clothing.  Matt and his crew make awesome eCommerce shopping cart websites as well clothing.  They specialize in the fashion and music industries.

Here’s an excerpt from his business website, Digital Marauders

We are a think tank. A cutting edge design house. We are a group of artists who are passionate about the look and feel of the world around us. We love to skate and ride fixed gear bikes on our way to a red carpet fashion event. We enjoy the movement and progression of art and the vibrations of the music that passes though our office floors. It is our goal to help bring your passions, your vision and your dreams to life. To effectively convey your vision and imagination to your customers and clients; to help you meet your goals; to help you become a Digital Marauder.

As if all of that wasn’t impressive enough, in 1998, he and his friend Amadeus (both of them talented DJ’s in the rave scene in the 90’s, which was also one of my passions at the time) started Touch Clothing. Here is an excerpt from their website:

Despite living in a world that allows people to stay connected in coutless ways, human interaction is on the decline.  We are increasingly losing touch with our true nature and our surroundings, often suffocated by the burden of work, money, and the drone of mass media.  Touch Clothing derives its strength from a tight knit family of loyal supporters.  Our designs represent an attempt to share this vision with the world. Join the Touchcrew and always stay true and loyal to friends and family.

I met Matt a few years ago, through our mutual client, Viktor Viktoria, who will need no introduction if you’re from Milwaukee and like fashion.  We also share a common client in the Brooklyn based Music Skins,  who make durable vinyl protectors for iPods and other electronic devices.  I will be doing blog entries about both of these fascinating companies in the near future, so I’ll just leave it at that for now.

Digital Marauders is responsible for the gorgeous designs of both of the above websites.  I came to the team after the sites were already open for business.  Viktor Viktoria was looking for a local Milwaukee online marketing company that could also provide some support and design services when needed.  Music Skins was also looking for an online advertising company who had the technical skills to work on their website when needed.  Since Matt & I were already working on Viktor Viktoria togther with great results, he recommended me to Music Skins as well.  The rest, as they say, is history!

As is often the case in this increasingly digital world, though we’ve looked through each others’ photo albums on facebook and could recognize each other on the street, and despite the fact that we’ve been working together via email, phone, and ftp for almost 3 years, I haven’t met Matt in real life yet.   I think that a visit to New York will be in my near future.  Not only will it be great to someday finally meet my co-worker; I’d also love to hang out in some out of the way corner of his office and see what it’s like to be a new york fashion and web designer for a day.

It has been my pleasure to introduce you to my friend Matt in NYC.  If you need an eCommerce shopping cart website that is professionally designed by a very talented group of geeks, check out Digital Marauders.  If you need awesome clothes, check out Touch Clothing.  If you are in LA or NY, check out his newly launched Fashion Classifieds site, HoozDooz.com!

==

Jessica Franke is the owner of Green Web Design, a full service Website Design, Web Hosting, Domain Registrar, and Online Marketing firm.  She is also the owner of 50 States Classifieds, and has been providing Free Classifieds online since 2002.  For more articles written by Jessica Franke, visit her blog.

Have I mentioned I love Google?  What other search engine takes the time to make their webmasters make useful, high quality videos for other webmasters?  In this video, Google’s Eric Higgins shares some very easy to implement tips for webmasters whose websites utilize the PHP programming language.  Thanks Eric!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sibg0T3wKs4

For more information:

http://code.google.com/speed

As someone who began designing websites in 1995 as an assignment for a computer class, and eventually went on to own my own web design company, I feel that I have a few things to say about web design which may be considered useful by many hopeful web designers.

This is the first installment in a series of entries that I will be writing about the various tools that are used in professional Website Design.

First and foremost on the list of important things:  Website Editing Software! I started out coding mostly by hand in notepad, and alternated between that and Netscape Composer.  But when you get to the point where you are managing 60 websites and you don’t want to edit each and every page by hand anymore to say, update 1 link on the footer of a page, then you need to think about professional grade editing software!

When I designed my first website in 1995, there weren’t many tools available. I took a class where one of my assignments was to download a copy of Netscape Composer (which was one of first free “WYSIWYG” editors available for free on the web.) WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get”. In other words, you could point and click and it would create very basic HTML code for you so that you could format your text size, color, or font; insert a picture; make a link; center something; etc. But if you wanted to do anything more complex, you would need to read an HTML book and use trial and error until you got it to work. This software was actually pretty advanced for a time when the Internet was new and most browsers were text based.  Until I took that class, I had been running Lynx on a DOS based PC.  I finally decided to upgrade to Windows 95 and Netscape Navigator after using them in class.

Our class only spent a week on web design, but I was hooked. I started a free geocities page, something with a silly name like geocities.com/enchantedforest/neighborhood15/something/something – and went to work on a personal website. I asked the teacher some questions – how can I do this, how can I do that? – and he didn’t know. He said that half of what I wanted to do was simply impossible. And the rest, he had seen but didn’t know how to do. So, I picked up a copy of the gigantic HTML Bible, which I still have sitting on my shelf to this day, despite the fact that Google and the Open Source community and their websites have rendered it pretty much obsolete.  Sometimes there’s still great satisfaction in picking up a book and looking it up.  Especially when you have an Internet outage and can’t read a tutorial website.

Over time I developed what was, at the time, a fairly complex website design for a beginner. (Later I moved it to its’ own domain name, and it is still intact and looks the way that I designed it all those years ago on a free geocities server).

The next year, I bought my first version of dreamweaver – a student version of – at the college bookstore.  For my professional websites, I still use Dreamweaver today.  (The version I use is by Macromedia, but Adobe has bought them out since then).  You can read about and purchase Dreamweaver here.

There are many, many, many other tools out there.  However, I can’t recommend any of them.  Years ago, I took a computer class where students received a discount on Front Page (made by Microsoft) and was dismayed to find that it broke my javascript codes (which had taken me many painstaking hours to get working in the first place), it inserted proprietary code that often messed up my clean, crisp, HTML code, and in general, annoyed me at every turn.  I have also tried a few others, like Xara WebStyle, CofeeCup, and several online WYSIWYG editors, but never got the functionality that  I needed out of them.  Several of my customers used to use such programs, but later hired me after they either got confused and gave up, or realized that what they envisioned for their website was not possible to create with the tools they were using.  Many had the desire to learn proper web design, but not the time.  Which is where buying the proper software and making enough time to learn it, or knowing when to hire someone who has already made those investments, comes in.

If you are only maintaining 1 website for your business and don’t want to rely on a web designer, then some of the above tools *might* work for you, if you don’t want your website to be overly complicated.  They can certainly build an adequate website with a few pages describing your products or services, store hours, contact information, etc.  But you will never make a really great shopping cart website to showcase your hundreds of products with these types of software, so you really need to sit down and figure out what your plan is before you invest in editing software.  What are you trying to achieve?  Will the software that you are considering do what you need it to do?

The other problem I have with most simple editors is aesthetics.  Many times, WYSIWYG editors come with pre-created website templates for users who  want to get started right away.  They are great and very useful when used as a learning tool.  But sadly, they usually look like a 3 year old drew them with a crayon.  Or at best, like a 12 year old made them with a WYSIWYG editor. Yet many business owners use these templates almost “as is”, simply adding text and a few pictures.

I will be the first to admit that aesthetics have nothing to do with usefulness.  When marketing your website, an ugly website can be just as successful as a pretty website if it is programmed correctly.  Often, all the stuff that goes into making a website pretty, makes it more difficult for search engines to crawl through.  There are things to be said in favor of ugly websites.  And yet, no one wants to be the business with the ugly website.  Which is why these beginner and DIY tools are fantastic for learning the basics, but should never be relied upon by anyone who is serious about becoming a professional Website Designer, nor should they be used by any business who wants to impress potential customers who find their website.

If you are just starting out and can’t afford to jump in and buy professional software yet, don’t despair.  There are many website editing programs out there that will allow you to try them without an expensive commitment.  That way, if you decide that web design just isn’t for you, and you would prefer to hire a professional to assist you with your website, you won’t be out a huge amount of money.