djswirl
25-02-2007, 04:31 PM
Web Design, the true behind the myth.
Like it or not you need a website now days, yellow pages just can’t cut it anymore. More and more people are turning to the web to find supplies of all sorts. The biggest advantage that the net has is how much information is can display over a standard yellow pages add. Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a yellow pages advert, but have a smaller one with you contact number and web address.
Although DJing is my main job, more of my time now days it being taken up with programming, I am a windows and net based programmer specialising in custom make content management systems for some well know high street names
So why have I decided to write this? I keep seeing people talking about web sites and yellow pages stuff on this forum, and as like most other DJs we search the net for local DJs so see what they are doing, and my god there are some **** sites out there. Remember, when a user clicks on to your site the first impression is what’s going to count. I am going to try to break down into sections the dos and don’ts of building your site.
Can I build this site myself?
99% of you will say “yeah, no worries”, the truth is, 50% of that 99% should have paid somebody who knows what their doing to do it for them. Putting your site together isn’t just a matter of going round every else’s site a stealing their graphics and putting it together in FrontPage or even worst Word!
Why should I pay for hosting? There are loads of free hosting companies out there!
Nothing is this world is free, these free hosting companies normally mean you have advertising all over it, or a old slow server, remember these adverts are put in by the server, you have not control over them or what they advertise. If you are paying for a service and it stops working, and thus people can’t view your site you can ring somebody up tell them to fix it, that’s why your paying them. Free hosting companies, well the response is normally “what do you want for free?, will have a look at it when we can”
Is having a domain name important?
Yes, yes, yes, and oh, YES!! Got it yet? Although trying to find a domain can be harder now days you really need to get one. Try not to have ones with hyphens in them, users get confused, eg www.mymobiledisco.com is easy to tell people than www.my-mobile-disco.com although it may be so easy to read, the trick is when advertising your domain name you can put each words in a colour, or capitalise the beginning of each letter
www.MyMobileDisco.com you should try to look for a name that does contain you disco name, or if that is to long something that is close to it. The main thing about your own domain is that you can move it about on to different hosting companies, with a free domain such as www.mydisco.freehosting.com you can’t, and now you need to reprint all you cards!
I have a domain pointed to my free web space!
No, no, no and NO !!! in order for people to find your website you need to let search engines know about it. Some of the bigger ones like Google are not indexing (this is when your web site content is looked at and stored in the search engines database) free hosting companies because of all the advertising they have all over them, in order to understand why they are not you need to understand how they work. A simple way to explain how Google works is this, a script is run by Google, this reads the content of your site (the words on the page), picking out key words a phrases and making a note of them.
Now lets say you have the following phrase on your page “Joe Bloggs Wedding Mobile disco” and somebody searched for “Wedding Disco” you could come up (I say could as optimising your site for search engines is a whole new world). Now with this in mind if you have a free hosting with advert all over it and Googles script comes along it starts indexing the advert and not your site, this means the content is not accurate for what the site is really about. So to this end Google is now getting picky over what it will index
I have seen some really cool sites made using Adobe (MacroMedia) Flash, I want one of those.
Oh no you don’t, having flash on your site can be very cool and looks great, I use flash myself for small graphics and banners. You should not make a complete site at of Flash as search engines can’t index the content because they can’t read the flash files, so no indexing, no search ratings !!
My site is great, I have 50 pages of information, pictures and loads of cool graphics I stole off other sites.
MMMM yes, we all know what I going to say, so I will say it. When users find you site they need to know 3 things, 1) does this disco do want I want them to do 2) do they travel to my area 3) how much is it going to be, or how do I contact them. I have seen some DJ sites where the menu down the site scrolls off the bottom, and I’m using a 17” monitor. The key points of your service are
• Brief background, and maybe a link to another page giving a full history. You should also give the user the option to view some information, never force them to see it.
• What type of service you offer
• Visuals, users like photos to see what they are going to get (will go into that when we get into the design of the site)
• Contact
You need to give the user enough info to get them interested but no so much as they don’t need to contact you and let you do your selling
Now although users do like visuals, the animated mirror ball and the hand spinning the turn table (and we all know the ones I am talking about), well they are ****, a waste of space, mean nothing to you and just take longer for the page to load, besides every other DJ site has them and we are trying to design a site for you, not the same as rest of the world
Planning my site
As I said putting a website together that works isn’t s as easy as you make think. The best way to approach building a page is to make a list of all the bits of information you want to put on the site, from this list you should be able to work out how many pages you need, example
Home page
History of me
Discos
Karaoke
Lighting hire
Photos
Helping you plan
Contact
Now you don’t want links to each page on the menu, you need to work out sections, using the above example you can have 5 main links on your menu which link to the page with the information on it or a sub section page with a small amount on info it which links to a more detailed page, example
Home page : Welcome to my site, to find out more about me use the link below
¦- History of me
What we Supply : We can supply the following, please use the links for more details
¦- Discos
¦- Karaoke
¦- Lighting hire
Photos : your photos
Helping you plan : info to help user
Contact: Your contact info
¦- Enquiry Form
Now it’s important that the 5 main links are shown on every page, this way the user can move about the site easily. In the case of Discos, Karaoke, Lighting hire you should have links at the bottom of the page back to the What we Supply section page, this way the user does not have to scroll back up the page they just read to click on the menu link to get back to the What we Supply (you may also want a link to the photos page as well)
There are 2 very important reasons why you want to do is this way, firstly you don’t scare the user off with to many links, secondly is you start supplying a new service this can just be added to the What we Supply page
Now we have a basic layout of our site we need to design it. We will get into writing the wording later, but for now lets look at each page. Just before we do when I refer to images being small medium and large these are the sort of sizes I am talking about
Small = no bigger then 100x100 pixels
Medium = no bigger then 300 x 300 pixels
Large = no bigger than 600 x 600 pixels
Home page
This should have a welcome, info on what you do, where you cover, and one or 2 medium pictures to give a nice layout. The pictures should not be big as this page needs to download very fast as users will not hang about.
What we Supply
This should have a brief paragraph on each service you supply, at the end of each paragraph a link to a more info on that service, you may want to show each section with a small picture. Do not try to put to much info in, the idea is for the user to click on the more info to find out the full details of that service
Discos, Karaoke, Lighting hire
Each one of these pages should go into more details on each service, you should look at putting about ½ to 1 page of info per service. But remember, don’t try put to much techy stuff down, user don’t care if you have this light and that light, what they do what to know is that this light looks like this and dose this when running.
Example
“We have 2 x Twister 4 that are fully DMX” = Wrong
“We have lighting effects that send out lots of coloured beams of light that dance about the room and create a great effect” = Right
Photos
This is where most people go wrong. A photos page should only have small pictures on there that when clicked shows a large picture. Some people spend a lot of time on these pages, putting together pictures in groups of different events they did. This is not a bad thing but does need to be kept up to date because if the last set of pictures shown was from a job 4 months ago does not make you look very good.
Helping you plan
This is a section that can make you look good, very good. Giving free advice you users is always a good thing, be honest, tell them that there are good and bad DJs. Help them spot the difference, tell them that a good DJ sends out contracts, lets them choose music etc. What in effect you are doing is saying “well I do this, this is what pro DJs do, so I must be a pro DJ”
Contact
This should only really have 3 things on it. First your contact number, never just use a mobile, always put down you land line and mobile. Second email address, and third a link to a enquiry form
Enquiry Form
The use of a form is a very good way to get all the info you require before you call the client back. Details like, name, email, contact number, venue name, date of event, how many people, event type, start time, end time and so on. The best reason for this is you can print it out, ring the client and you don’t have to ask all these question.
Writing the text for your website
Before you start writing any text you need to work out what your ‘keywords’ are for each page or section, you need about 25 words in order of priority. A keyword is something that describes your product or service for this page or section. If you sold DVDs you may have keywords of, DVD, movies, films, music, CDs etc.
This list of keywords is important to get right, spend time thinking about your list of keywords, and remember you are trying to second guess what users would type into a search engines to find your site. One of the best ways is to ask colleagues or friends what they would type in to find your services
Once you have worked out your keywords
There are hidden bits of code at the top of the web page, these hidden bits of code are used by some search engines to index your site.
These hidden bits of code are used as follows:
The ‘keywords’ is the list of words you have already worked out.
The ‘description’ should be about 25 words long, this sentence should describe what is on this page using as many of the ‘keywords’ as you can, but must make sense to the user so you can’t just put a list of words together
The ‘page title’ works very similar to the ‘description’, but if a user bookmarks this page this title will appear in their favourites list, so once again this sentence should make sense
Page Text
The text on a website is very important, not only for your users but for search engines. Most search engines are adopting the Google approach to indexing your site, which is looking at a combination of the hidden bits of code, and the text on the page to work out what’s really there.
When writing this text you should use all of your keywords as many times as you can, you should have a frequency of at least 2 of each keyword per page. But you can’t just put a list of them, search engines will see this as trying to spam their database and you will be black listed.
The trick is to use the same keywords in different ways, while still informing the user of your service,
e.g.
“Welcome to ABC Media, Top movies, films and DVDs. We stock the most recent films, movies and CDs as great prices. ABC Media is one of the UKs largest stockiest, currently we stock over 20,000 top title DVDs of the latest chart movies and chart music CDs.……….“
Do I have the skills or should I pay somebody?
The cold fact is it takes a long time to know how to build a site that works on all the various web browsers. So far I have told you what you should have on your website, having the skills to do it, well that’s another story. If you say use Dreamweaver, FULLY understand it, know what META tags and REBOTS are then you could make a good site, if at this point you have no idea what I’m talking about then you should pay somebody.
Brian
Like it or not you need a website now days, yellow pages just can’t cut it anymore. More and more people are turning to the web to find supplies of all sorts. The biggest advantage that the net has is how much information is can display over a standard yellow pages add. Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a yellow pages advert, but have a smaller one with you contact number and web address.
Although DJing is my main job, more of my time now days it being taken up with programming, I am a windows and net based programmer specialising in custom make content management systems for some well know high street names
So why have I decided to write this? I keep seeing people talking about web sites and yellow pages stuff on this forum, and as like most other DJs we search the net for local DJs so see what they are doing, and my god there are some **** sites out there. Remember, when a user clicks on to your site the first impression is what’s going to count. I am going to try to break down into sections the dos and don’ts of building your site.
Can I build this site myself?
99% of you will say “yeah, no worries”, the truth is, 50% of that 99% should have paid somebody who knows what their doing to do it for them. Putting your site together isn’t just a matter of going round every else’s site a stealing their graphics and putting it together in FrontPage or even worst Word!
Why should I pay for hosting? There are loads of free hosting companies out there!
Nothing is this world is free, these free hosting companies normally mean you have advertising all over it, or a old slow server, remember these adverts are put in by the server, you have not control over them or what they advertise. If you are paying for a service and it stops working, and thus people can’t view your site you can ring somebody up tell them to fix it, that’s why your paying them. Free hosting companies, well the response is normally “what do you want for free?, will have a look at it when we can”
Is having a domain name important?
Yes, yes, yes, and oh, YES!! Got it yet? Although trying to find a domain can be harder now days you really need to get one. Try not to have ones with hyphens in them, users get confused, eg www.mymobiledisco.com is easy to tell people than www.my-mobile-disco.com although it may be so easy to read, the trick is when advertising your domain name you can put each words in a colour, or capitalise the beginning of each letter
www.MyMobileDisco.com you should try to look for a name that does contain you disco name, or if that is to long something that is close to it. The main thing about your own domain is that you can move it about on to different hosting companies, with a free domain such as www.mydisco.freehosting.com you can’t, and now you need to reprint all you cards!
I have a domain pointed to my free web space!
No, no, no and NO !!! in order for people to find your website you need to let search engines know about it. Some of the bigger ones like Google are not indexing (this is when your web site content is looked at and stored in the search engines database) free hosting companies because of all the advertising they have all over them, in order to understand why they are not you need to understand how they work. A simple way to explain how Google works is this, a script is run by Google, this reads the content of your site (the words on the page), picking out key words a phrases and making a note of them.
Now lets say you have the following phrase on your page “Joe Bloggs Wedding Mobile disco” and somebody searched for “Wedding Disco” you could come up (I say could as optimising your site for search engines is a whole new world). Now with this in mind if you have a free hosting with advert all over it and Googles script comes along it starts indexing the advert and not your site, this means the content is not accurate for what the site is really about. So to this end Google is now getting picky over what it will index
I have seen some really cool sites made using Adobe (MacroMedia) Flash, I want one of those.
Oh no you don’t, having flash on your site can be very cool and looks great, I use flash myself for small graphics and banners. You should not make a complete site at of Flash as search engines can’t index the content because they can’t read the flash files, so no indexing, no search ratings !!
My site is great, I have 50 pages of information, pictures and loads of cool graphics I stole off other sites.
MMMM yes, we all know what I going to say, so I will say it. When users find you site they need to know 3 things, 1) does this disco do want I want them to do 2) do they travel to my area 3) how much is it going to be, or how do I contact them. I have seen some DJ sites where the menu down the site scrolls off the bottom, and I’m using a 17” monitor. The key points of your service are
• Brief background, and maybe a link to another page giving a full history. You should also give the user the option to view some information, never force them to see it.
• What type of service you offer
• Visuals, users like photos to see what they are going to get (will go into that when we get into the design of the site)
• Contact
You need to give the user enough info to get them interested but no so much as they don’t need to contact you and let you do your selling
Now although users do like visuals, the animated mirror ball and the hand spinning the turn table (and we all know the ones I am talking about), well they are ****, a waste of space, mean nothing to you and just take longer for the page to load, besides every other DJ site has them and we are trying to design a site for you, not the same as rest of the world
Planning my site
As I said putting a website together that works isn’t s as easy as you make think. The best way to approach building a page is to make a list of all the bits of information you want to put on the site, from this list you should be able to work out how many pages you need, example
Home page
History of me
Discos
Karaoke
Lighting hire
Photos
Helping you plan
Contact
Now you don’t want links to each page on the menu, you need to work out sections, using the above example you can have 5 main links on your menu which link to the page with the information on it or a sub section page with a small amount on info it which links to a more detailed page, example
Home page : Welcome to my site, to find out more about me use the link below
¦- History of me
What we Supply : We can supply the following, please use the links for more details
¦- Discos
¦- Karaoke
¦- Lighting hire
Photos : your photos
Helping you plan : info to help user
Contact: Your contact info
¦- Enquiry Form
Now it’s important that the 5 main links are shown on every page, this way the user can move about the site easily. In the case of Discos, Karaoke, Lighting hire you should have links at the bottom of the page back to the What we Supply section page, this way the user does not have to scroll back up the page they just read to click on the menu link to get back to the What we Supply (you may also want a link to the photos page as well)
There are 2 very important reasons why you want to do is this way, firstly you don’t scare the user off with to many links, secondly is you start supplying a new service this can just be added to the What we Supply page
Now we have a basic layout of our site we need to design it. We will get into writing the wording later, but for now lets look at each page. Just before we do when I refer to images being small medium and large these are the sort of sizes I am talking about
Small = no bigger then 100x100 pixels
Medium = no bigger then 300 x 300 pixels
Large = no bigger than 600 x 600 pixels
Home page
This should have a welcome, info on what you do, where you cover, and one or 2 medium pictures to give a nice layout. The pictures should not be big as this page needs to download very fast as users will not hang about.
What we Supply
This should have a brief paragraph on each service you supply, at the end of each paragraph a link to a more info on that service, you may want to show each section with a small picture. Do not try to put to much info in, the idea is for the user to click on the more info to find out the full details of that service
Discos, Karaoke, Lighting hire
Each one of these pages should go into more details on each service, you should look at putting about ½ to 1 page of info per service. But remember, don’t try put to much techy stuff down, user don’t care if you have this light and that light, what they do what to know is that this light looks like this and dose this when running.
Example
“We have 2 x Twister 4 that are fully DMX” = Wrong
“We have lighting effects that send out lots of coloured beams of light that dance about the room and create a great effect” = Right
Photos
This is where most people go wrong. A photos page should only have small pictures on there that when clicked shows a large picture. Some people spend a lot of time on these pages, putting together pictures in groups of different events they did. This is not a bad thing but does need to be kept up to date because if the last set of pictures shown was from a job 4 months ago does not make you look very good.
Helping you plan
This is a section that can make you look good, very good. Giving free advice you users is always a good thing, be honest, tell them that there are good and bad DJs. Help them spot the difference, tell them that a good DJ sends out contracts, lets them choose music etc. What in effect you are doing is saying “well I do this, this is what pro DJs do, so I must be a pro DJ”
Contact
This should only really have 3 things on it. First your contact number, never just use a mobile, always put down you land line and mobile. Second email address, and third a link to a enquiry form
Enquiry Form
The use of a form is a very good way to get all the info you require before you call the client back. Details like, name, email, contact number, venue name, date of event, how many people, event type, start time, end time and so on. The best reason for this is you can print it out, ring the client and you don’t have to ask all these question.
Writing the text for your website
Before you start writing any text you need to work out what your ‘keywords’ are for each page or section, you need about 25 words in order of priority. A keyword is something that describes your product or service for this page or section. If you sold DVDs you may have keywords of, DVD, movies, films, music, CDs etc.
This list of keywords is important to get right, spend time thinking about your list of keywords, and remember you are trying to second guess what users would type into a search engines to find your site. One of the best ways is to ask colleagues or friends what they would type in to find your services
Once you have worked out your keywords
There are hidden bits of code at the top of the web page, these hidden bits of code are used by some search engines to index your site.
These hidden bits of code are used as follows:
The ‘keywords’ is the list of words you have already worked out.
The ‘description’ should be about 25 words long, this sentence should describe what is on this page using as many of the ‘keywords’ as you can, but must make sense to the user so you can’t just put a list of words together
The ‘page title’ works very similar to the ‘description’, but if a user bookmarks this page this title will appear in their favourites list, so once again this sentence should make sense
Page Text
The text on a website is very important, not only for your users but for search engines. Most search engines are adopting the Google approach to indexing your site, which is looking at a combination of the hidden bits of code, and the text on the page to work out what’s really there.
When writing this text you should use all of your keywords as many times as you can, you should have a frequency of at least 2 of each keyword per page. But you can’t just put a list of them, search engines will see this as trying to spam their database and you will be black listed.
The trick is to use the same keywords in different ways, while still informing the user of your service,
e.g.
“Welcome to ABC Media, Top movies, films and DVDs. We stock the most recent films, movies and CDs as great prices. ABC Media is one of the UKs largest stockiest, currently we stock over 20,000 top title DVDs of the latest chart movies and chart music CDs.……….“
Do I have the skills or should I pay somebody?
The cold fact is it takes a long time to know how to build a site that works on all the various web browsers. So far I have told you what you should have on your website, having the skills to do it, well that’s another story. If you say use Dreamweaver, FULLY understand it, know what META tags and REBOTS are then you could make a good site, if at this point you have no idea what I’m talking about then you should pay somebody.
Brian