Avatar News March 24, 2006

Written By:
Steph Beecher
Edited By:
Mark Rocket
Published By:
Avatar Web Promotions Ltd

Blogging, Site Maps and March Mayhem!

Howdy Campers!

Ah, it's good for the soul to see that there's more than a few mad March hares hanging out in cyberspace this month! Aside from our usual tidbit frivolity, our offerings this month include a quick guide to blog life and we're giving away... yes, you read that right, we're giving away free site maps to a few lucky souls.

We've also got just the thing to keep you busy, as those nights start to draw in. Check out our guide to the Top 10 Health Checks you can do, from the comfort of your warm, snuggly armchair, to keep your Web site healthy.

This month, take a tip from bloggers everywhere: don't get mad, get even... and blog about it!

In This Edition

Rocket's Guide to Blogs and Blogging

If you haven't come across blogging before, we can assure you that it is a real term and not one that we Avatar folks have dreamt up in moments of March mayhem.

So let's talk blog. A blog is a Web site on which items are posted, typically on a regular basis, and usually displayed in diary or journal format in reverse chronological order.

The word 'blog' comes from the shortened form of weblog or web log. Items posted in a blog may be text, images, links to audio or video, or pretty much anything that the blogger wants to and/or can post. Blogging is the term given to the maintaining of or adding articles to a blog, and 'bloggers' are the people that do it.

Blogs are having an enormous impact on the way in which public and private opinions and information are shared and aired in the 21st century. Blogs are used by diarists, journalists, politicians, corporate bodies and advertising agencies. Last month, we reported on influential bloggers having their online plugs pulled out, as it were, by Google and Yahoo! at the request of the Chinese government. This month, blogs are used by both Google and Yahoo! staff to post comment about their recent bad press.

Want your own blog? If you want to set up your own blog, or find out more about blogging, check out blogger.com.

Site Map Special

A site map (or sitemap) is a Web page which acts as an index for all of the Web pages making up one Web site and which provides active links to each page.

What site maps do? A site map helps human visitors and robots (search engines) to find their way around a Web site. If it helps, think of a site map as the online equivalent of a librarian's A-Z of book stacks or simply visit Avatar's site map to see an example.

Why are site maps useful? Site maps help market a Web site from a search engine optimisation point of view as they help search engine robots to find most, if not all, of the pages of a Web site. They are useful for Web sites of any size. Many search engines will follow a finite number of links from a Web page, so additional optimisation strategies need to be employed, but nonetheless, if you haven't already got a site map on your Web site, it's a useful addition.

This brings us to this month's special offer! If you commission a new Web site design project from Avatar before the 15th April 2006, we will include a site map for your Web site for free. Contact us for more information, quoting the reference "mad March hare".

Alternatively, if you're interested in a site map, but prefer to DIY, we'd suggest taking a look at Google's site map generator, which offers comprehensive on-screen instructions to follow. With a Google site map in place, you'll also be able to track which pages from your site have been pulled up by Google search queries. Google site maps offer a number of cool features which we're aiming to write more about in an upcoming edition of Avatar News.

Top 10 Health Checks For Your Web Site

You can help keep your Web site 'healthy' by checking a few basic things every month. The big 'physical', the thorough testing of every aspect of your site, should happen when the site's newly born. However, we highly recommend that you conduct regular monthly health checks for your Web site. These don't need to be time-consuming and can keep your site looking professional and up-to-date.

Top 10 Health Checks

  1. Home page. Read your home page text again. Is it really selling your services and calling on your site visitors to take action? If not, rewrite it and try a new angle. After all, you don't always have the exact same conversation with your face-to-face customers every day of the month, do you?
  2. Special offers. Make sure your special offers are up to date and you have relevant terms and conditions for your offer up and running on your site.
  3. Up-to-date information. If you've made any changes to your business such as pricing, services, terms and conditions or staffing make sure you have made these changes to your Web site. Make sure any dates are kept current too.
  4. Contact mechanisms. Check that the links throughout your site to your preferred email address are current and functional. Enter your details into your forms, send them to yourself and check whether they are working as they should be.
  5. Proofreading. Arm yourself with a dictionary or spellchecker (and remember, US English spelling differs from UK or New Zealand English) and check your text. Check for consistency in how you're using capital letters, colons, hyphens, as well as other formatting such as bold face or italics.
  6. External links. If you've got links on your pages to external sites, make sure those sites are still there and the links still active. If you've got a small site clicking on each link won't take long, but if you've got a larger site you may prefer to use a link-checking tool, such as Xenu Linksleuth.
  7. Internal links. Give all the links between your Web pages the once over while you're at it.
  8. Images. If you've moved things around your site, it's easy to leave images behind. Check they're all where they should be.
  9. Browser friendly. Your site should be viewed without any hitches by different browsers on both PCs and Macs. Have a look at your site using Internet Explorer, Navigator and Mozilla Firefox browsers.
  10. Check yourself out. If you're spending 14 hours a day monkeying around in front of your computer, drinking endless litres of coffee and listening to 1980's New Romantics, you're already on the fast track to Web nerd-dom (welcome aboard).

There are a lot of companies (including us) who will offer to do Web site health checks, performance reviews and analyses for you, but if you've got the time, why not tick off the easy to action points in our Top 10 yourself.

Interesting Tidbits

Sites of Interest

Here's a selection of sites we've designed, updated and/or promoted recently...