Tutorials and articles for improving your website

[paolo]

Writing for the internet

How to write good property descriptions for your site or ad (by yours truly):
http://www.laymyhat.com/newsletters/new ... 2.htm#tips

Make a personal connection:
http://www.marketingwords.com/articles/ ... sonal.html

Put the good stuff at the top:
http://www.marketingwords.com/articles/ ... edown.html

Writing a good headline:
http://www.marketingwords.com/articles/ ... lines.html

Using the right descriptive words:
http://www.marketingwords.com/articles/ ... tives.html

Appeal to the five senses:
http://www.marketingwords.com/articles/ ... enses.html

Use a human voice:
http://www.nickusborne.com/articles_art3.htm

http://www.nickusborne.com/excessvoice6



Search engine optimisation (SEO)

What is SEO?
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters ... hp/2167921

SEO basics
http://www.searchengines.com/

Keywords – what they are and what you do with them:
http://www.marketingwords.com/articles/ ... words.html

Keywords – how often to use them:
http://www.marketingwords.com/articles/ ... rmula.html

How to please Google:
http://www.plattsburgh.edu/intranet/web ... es/seo.php

High Rankings - SEO discussion forum - excellent resource:
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/

SEO - more advanced - what Google likes and doesn't like on and off the page:
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/interne ... actors.htm


Design

Tutorials on html and making a first webpage, for absolute beginners:
http://www.tips-tricks.com/begin.asp
http://www.virtuallyignorant.com/index2.htm

html tutorial
http://webdesign.about.com/library/begi ... torial.htm

Index of articles on html for beginners:
http://webdesign.about.com/library/week ... inning.htm

Cheap and free html editors:
http://www.virtuallyignorant.com/editors.htm

Basics of web design - 14 tips to better pages:
http://webdesign.about.com/od/webdesign ... 070504.htm

Articles on usability from usability guru Jakob Neilsen:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/



General

Richard Speigal, who posts here as BungleBob, has a good page of articles on internet marketing:
http://www.vacationrentalsdirectory.net ... .php/3.htm

[Evie]

Thank you.
What a fantastic amount of useful information.
As a beginner, I hardly know where to start.
Do I need broadband to read all this online.

[paolo]

Evie,

If you want to minimise the time you are online but you want to read a lot of pages there are several options:

1. Open each page you want to read in a new browser window and leave them all open on your desktop.

2. Highlight and copy the text you want to read and paste it into a Word document. If you'd rather read from paper you can print this off.

3. Save pages to your hard drive by clicking on File, Save as, then selecting 'Web page, complete' for everything on the page, or 'Web page, html only' which will save all the text without the graphics and make smaller files.

4. Techies will put me right on this but I think that if you click on every page you want to read and let it download, you can then revisit the pages by clicking on the same links when you're offline because they will be in your computer's cache memory until you turn your machine off.

And finally if you already knew all this I apologise but it may serve someone else.

[Christine Kenyon]

A big, big "thank you", Paolo. This is brilliant stuff. Just hope I can find the time to absorb it all. Some of it goes over my head, but all of it makes sense.

I spent last weekend completely revamping one of my cottage websites, based on what I'd already learnt from the Forum, and I would certainly welcome a peer review. But first, I'm going to have a good look at the articles you've shared with us ... and then I'll be back (as Arnie has been heard to say).

Cheers for now

Christine

[livinginitaly]

Paolo wrote:

I think that if you click on every page you want to read and let it download, you can then revisit the pages by clicking on the same links when you're offline

If you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can just add the selected site to your 'Favourites', then from the 'popup' tick the 'Make Available Offline' box.

As Paolo says, this will then download all the pages and store them on your computer for viewing without being connected to the internet.

[Topcat]

Paulo, this is a wonderful resource. I haven't built my website yet, and, to be honest, have given up in despair and now a friend is doing the techie stuff for me, but this has certainly helped me to look again at my copy and improve it.

Thank you so much.

Pauline

[ravetildon]

I loved the writing tips. I will go back and try to find ways to improve the copy for my Twain Harte, CA rental.

[omar]

I might just have to check out every link for tips even if they are a few years old. I just created my new site so any info will help.

Thanks Paolo


Omar~