Here at Promotion Web Design, we are familiar with the importance of designing your website to be compatible with various browsers.  For instance, if you aren't careful you might create a website that looks wonderful in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but breaks down when viewed in Mozilla's Firefox browser.  Now it appears there is another one out there to be aware of: WebTV.  And this one may be a little more...interesting...to design for.

One of our clients contacted us after she received an e-mail stating that her site was not appearing correctly in WebTV.  Here is how the site looks when viewed in Internet Explorer:

Now here is how it looks when viewed on a WebTV viewer (a freeware downloadable viewer that theoretically gives you the same view a WebTV user would experience on their television).

I tried looking at some other sites using the viewer, such as CNN and Foxnews.com.  They looked so bad as to be unsurfable.  

In fact, the only site that looked just fine in the WebTV viewer was webtv.com.  Imagine that!

You can see what your website looks like in the WebTV browser by downloading the free viewer for yourself.  The URL is http://www.freewareweb.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?ID=481 .  Or just Google webtv viewer.

I'm not sure we're going to rush to redesign all our sites to be WebTV friendly.  No one else is, apparently... maybe it is going to be up to the people behind WebTV to get it working more like a conventional browser a la your PC or Mac.  Still, it's something to keep in mind.  For now, there are a few things you can do to be more WebTV friendly, according to About.com.

It's worth looking into and keeping in mind for future web designs. 

Posted by pwdesign at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I thought it would only be polite to follow up that last blog entry with the good news that we finally settled upon a name for the our Catholic blog: St. Peter's Point.

It's perhaps not as clever as some blog names out there, but it's not completely brainless either... it's a bit of a play on words.  The church is in Stevens Point, which everyone around here calls "Point" and it is also the "other St. Peter's" (the original of course being in Vatican City - that would be, St. Peter's Rome vs. St. Peter's Point).  So it's not so much the name but the picture that gives you the idea behind the title. 

There you go, one more blog successfully named, I believe.

Posted by pwdesign at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We are webmasters for our Catholic church's website, and one thing we recently decided to do with it was to add a blog.  I am all ready to start playing with a design for it in Adobe Illustrator, but first, it needs a name.  I am really hoping we can come up with something interesting.  Here are the conditions it needs to fulfill:

1) While it can be humorous, it cannot be dated or irreverent in any way.

2) It should reflect the overarching theme of the blog, which is the daily struggle of lay Catholics trying to achieve holiness as they go about their day to day life.  There will be a lot of advice, spiritual direction and resources for such people in this blog.

3) It should somehow reflect that we are a true Vatican II parish... meaning, we read the documents and we want to live them out in our parish.  If you're an active Catholic, you'll understand what that whole concept is about, or you should.  Anyway...

I've seen some catchy names out there in the Catholic blogosphere, like Young Fogeys, American Papist, and The Cafeteria Is Closed.  I'd love for us to come up with something equally catchy, if not as polemical sounding. 

Any ideas?

Posted by pwdesign at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How do you know if there are any websites linking to yours? 

Well, you have to ask the search engines.  And some are better to ask than others.

GOOGLE 

Google will show you some of the websites that link to yours, but it is definately not the best source.  Still, it's good to see what they have.  So, go to http://www.google.com and in the search bar type in this:

link:http://www.yourwebsitename.com  

OK, obviously, you insert your domain name in there.  For instance, if I am looking for backward links on my folk's bed and breakfast site, I would type in,

link:http://www.dreamsofyesteryear.com

Google finds 15 links, which are web pages which link to www.dreamsofyesteryear.com, many of which have 0 page rank (a value Google gives to sites showing their importance).  Some of them are familiar to me because they are directories we list the site in, or some of our sites that we link to hers with, or her blog, etc. 

YAHOO

Now let's try going to http://www.yahoo.com and in the search bar type this:

links:www.yourwebsitename.com

I am going to enter the Dreams of Yesteryear Bed and Breakfast site in again here.  This time I get 102 results, way more than Google gave me.  Here we find some newspaper websites that wrote an article about the bed and breakfast, the Yahoo Directory link, several other directories, personal websites of guests who stayed in the bed and breakfast and either blogged or made a web page about it (very nice of them eh), a website we made to advertise a bike package she does with another B&B, a link from Promotion Web Design, various local lodging websites, etc. etc.  Of couse there are a number of useless links here, some familiar as among the hundreds of link exchange requests she receives (and doesn't reciprocate... these haven't been helpful and there are way too many to try to establish worthwhile link relationships with them). As you can tell, Yahoo has a much more comprehensive list.  It is much more what you'd expect from a site that's been online since 1998.

There appears to be a similar function provided by Yahoo at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites

MSN - LIVE 

Huh, you can't use them anymore for getting your back links apparently.

But here is a nice tool you can use to check for your own links and compare to your competition's websites: http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/

It is a little more complicated than just looking at the results from Google and Yahoo, but interesting to compare.

What does all this mean?  Well, nothing specific.  By doing this you can get an overall feel for the popularity of your website.  Each link coming into your site is a "vote" for your site that the search engines take into consideration when deciding if your page should show up on page 1 of their search results, or on page 20 or page no-where-to-be-found.  Incoming links, in general, are a good thing and you want them. Quality links are what you are going for.  Again this is only speaking generally!  But your typical link exchange (someone e-mails you and says they'll put your link on their site if you link to them from yours) is not usually very helpful.  Much better are natural links that develop because people like your site and they write a little something about you in their blog or in an article, or something like a press release, or an article you write to have placed on someone else's website, etc. Links that come from pages about a topic related to yours (anything travel related, for instance, in the case of the bed and breakfast) are more helpful than links from unrelated sites.  But don't be too picky.  Ultimately, links are links and links are good.  This does include, by the way, links on your own site that link to your home page.  Always remember to link to your home page. 

If you do your backlink check and find out you have very few or no links coming in to your site, you need to get going on a link building campaign.  Write more pages for your own site.  Write articles  which include your URL and have your friends upload them to their sites.  Do an online press release (a topic for another day), etc.  Or you could always hire someone to help SEO (search engine optimize) your site.  There are companies that do that kind of work ahem ahem.

Posted by pwdesign at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a unique perspective as someone who grew up in the family (traditional) small business and still helps my father with handling his advertising, and someone who has online businesses of her own.  Because of the latter, I have an understanding of how links work, and what kind of links are helpful and which kind are virtually worthless.

One of the areas I help dad's small business with is yellow pages advertising.  I design display ads and small text ads for the multiple print directories he advertises in, and I handle the sales people and make sure we get our ads in to the directories each year, since sales people sometimes drop the ball or they switch companies, etc. and don't bother to make sure we renew the next year.  Invariably, when I'm talking to the sales reps of big yellow page directory companies, they try to sell me a package that includes their online yellow pages. 

I refuse to pay to be included in online yellow pages.  Why? A) Because you can be listed in them for free, for what it's worth which B) isn't worth much, because people looking for a business online will search Google, not the online yellowpages and C) you want links that help your site rank, and the listings in these yellow pages don't help.  They are not static links.  They only show up on results pages if someone happens to search that site... and I doubt much of your local client base will be there searching for your goods or services.

One time a sales person tried to tell me that paying for an ad in the online yellowpages would get me on page one of Google, because their directory is in the top 10 results on Google for the search term "online yellow pages" or somesuch.  I said I would buy on ad if they would give me a static link on their own home page.  That was a short conversation.

I just offer this as a word to the wise. Maybe as a small business person, you don't have a son or daughter experienced in web design or who understands how ranking on the internet works.  Consider me your surrogate family member who just wants to help small business owners avoid being tricked into buying worthless online advertising.

That is not to say you should never pay for online advertising, however.  You just have to choose the right kind.  More on that soon.

Posted by pwdesign at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)