There are a lot of terms or website features you may hear about but don't understand.  Webmasters often throw these out because we are accustomed to thinking about them but forget that the average person planning a website is much like the owner of an automobile (you know some things about your car but aren't a mechanic!).

As these questions come to us we will add them to this list.  Hopefully you will find the answer to your website question right here!

What is Search Engine Visibility and should I care about this?
What is a Site Map page and why do I want one?
What is a WYSIWYG Editor?

What is Search Engine Visibility and should I care about this?

Search Engine Visibility or Search Engine Optimization can be a powerful online marketing strategy.  Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and others are the main way that internet users discover websites.

You might already have a way to reach out to provide your website address to your customers or others you wish to visit your site.  If you are confident about your existing networking mechanism you may not care about this.  However most of us do not and SHOULD care about Search Engine Visibility!

Typically a user goes to Google and types your name or other keywords to expecting to get a short list of websites to view.  Often if your site doesn't show up in the first page they won't bother looking further!  Given that Google is searching for those keywords from literally millions of sites containing billions of pages, this first appears to be a daunting task.  It is possible to be found and listed on the first page, but you need to work on it!  If you are not convinced, try a google search on "used websites".  We are a small website business but when we search this term Google often lists Fred's Used Websites as the first entry of the first page!

More to come...

What is a Site Map Page and why do I want one?

A site map page is simply a single page on your site that provides your visitor an overview of your site in a single glance.  If you have a small site with only a few pages, you don't need a site map page -- it would be overkill to dedicate an entire page to repeating what you already have on your navigation links.  However if you have a large number of pages you will need to organize your site in a heirarchical manner.  It can be hard for your site visitor to find a particular page they have seen while browsing.

Imagine yourself browsing a website that not only sells but has useful information about teas.  You were browsing and found an interesting page on the history of Oolong teas that you clicked because you were looking at a particular oolong product.  Later you try to find this page again and get frustrated poking all around the site trying to remember what sequence of pages led you to this in the first place.  The answer is the site map page.  A quick scan of the outline of the site pages should help you quickly get back to that page!

If you care about search engine visibility for your site, Google says the following in their Webmaster Guidelines. 

"Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site."
"Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site."

If you DO decide to have a site map you should have the link to it in a prominent place such as on your main navigation links.  If visitors can't find the map page it will be of little use.

It can take a lot of extra work to make sure that a website's site map page is accurate.  If you have an average site, you or your webmaster will need to carefully review every page and make sure that it is listed and in the right heirarchy on the site map page -- and that you have removed any links to pages you have deleted!  However, if your site is hosted on Fred's Used Websites, your site map page is always dynamically generated and always reflects the current layout of your site.

What is a WYSIWYG Editor?

WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get.  A WYSIWYG Editor is one that allows you to see the format of your web content while you are editing it. 

Most computer users today have come to rely on applications such as Microsoft Word to format documents for printing.  When you have a document open for editing, you can see what it will look like when printed.  Likewise an HTML editor for a website can present you with what you will see rather than the raw HTML.

Consider this: "A formatted section of text that contains things such as BOLD, italics, font size, underline, color, or combinations of these can be pretty complicated in HTML".    The HTML for this is:

"A formatted section of text that contains things such as <strong>BOLD</strong>, <em>italics</em>,<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">font size</span>, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">underline</span>, <span style="color: #ff0000;">color</span>, or <span style="font-size: large; color: #ff0000;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em><strong>combinations of these</strong></em></span></span> can be pretty complicated in HTML"

Once upon a time you needed a webmaster just to manually format your pages.  Now webmasters use applications such as Dreamweaver to format text for a webpage.  You could use applications such as this yourself if you wish to spend the money on this to maintain your website. 

We offer a better alternative.  You can edit the content of your web pages hosted on Fred's Used Websites with a WSYIWYG editor from any computer using only a web browser!  You can try this out now by going to our sample edit page.