Last year Carrie Stack of the Say Yes Institute and a certified Life Coach, asked me about helping her to launch a s site for her new project entitled EO. EO stands for Emotional Orgasm which is a term she and her business partner Michele Lazcano came up with to describe a moment when you connect with another person and the both of you realize that the connection has moved both of you forward to living your life fully.
I have to say I had a few EO’s of my own with this project. In collaborating with Katharine Navins of Tallow Studio for the visual aspects of the site, I came to realize that the “splash page”, long considered a no-no among designers, can actually be a very effective tool in focusing the user’s attention on the site’s various sections before they dive right into the content. Katharine’s use of the gentle blue and white gradient tile in the background and the clean look of the EO logo makes for a very soothing inital impression and prepares the viewer for a relaxing enjoyable time spent reading about Carrie and Michele’s vision of how we can all connect with each other and live our lives more fully.
One thing that was a fun challenge in developing the site was finding a way to display the beautiful navigational buttons Katharine designed without having to resort to javascript or tables. I found that giving the unordered list that contained the navigation its own id and then using relative positioning to place it on the page, then allowed me to style all of the links with some universal styles, such as visibility, borders, margins, padding and line-height (to fool IE into expanding the clickable area to cover the entire button). Then, giving each list item its own id gave me precise control over where the link was displayed via absolute positioning and also allowed me to display a different background (the various buttons) for each link.
Social networking, by its very nature, is also a big part of EOyourlife’s focus. In addition to the text links to Twitter and Facebook at the bottom of each page, I also installed the Add-to-Any plugin so users can easily share the site with friends. Also in use are the plugins; MailChimp/Analytics 360 to help maintain the newsletter email list and monitor site traffic, Cforms, for the site’s contact forms and All-in-One SEO pack to enhance the use of page titles and optimize the site’s content.
Check out EOyourlife.com and share the good vibes!
Posted 5 days, 21 hours ago at 4:13 pm. Add a comment
I need a web site for my company, but where do I start?
Here are 4 steps to getting ready to create a site that will reflect what you do and help your business to grow.
Step 1. Get your site name (URL, domain name).
To get set up with a domain name, it’s a good idea to start by finding a hosting company with a good reputation that’s inexpensive and will also give you a way to reserve the domain name as well as host your future site. Yes, reserving a domain name is a separate service than hosting your site. Registering a domain name is staking your claim on the url to make sure a competitor can’t use it. Hosting a site is renting server space that the hosting company maintains, thereby giving your site a virtual home on the internet.
Here’s a pretty good list of hosting companies to start with.
When you go to a hosting provider’s home page, look for a domain check service, either on the home page itself, or as a link such as “domains” or “domain check”.
Oh no! The domain name that I wanted is taken already!
If yourcompanysname.com is taken, don’t fear. I’ve had a few clients that this happened with and they used yourcompanysname.net as an alternative. .Net and.com endings for commercial sites are pretty much interchangeable, but .org is for non-profit organizations. .Biz and .info aren’t used very often and so a lot of spammers use them and therefore, you should investigate alternative domain names. Your guiding mantra is “Easy to find, easy to remember”. Search engines will “grab” a site to display in search results based on a number of factors, but the site’s name is a big one.
For example, you might have been building a graphic design business based on friends and word of mouth and now you want to “hang your shingle” on the web and drum up some more business. You have been using the name Designs by Jane for a while, but when you go to reserve the name designsbyjane.com it’s already taken. Don’t panic and register designsbyjane.biz or designs-by-jane.com. People are conditioned to hear .com at the end of a site name and the .biz may confuse them. And people don’t like hyphens when they are typing a url into their browser’s address bar. Is designsbyjane.net taken? If not, that’s a good alternative. It still has a familiar sound to web users. Or, if .net is also taken or you have your heart set on a .com, try using your name: janedoe.com or, janedoedesign.com.
It really helps to have a name based on something people are highly likely to use when looking you up in a search engine. Someone who has heard your name will find you quickly if they simply type your name into a search or if they are looking for the service you provide, or the topic your site deals with, it really helps to include that in your web site’s url.
Step 2. Set up your site’s hosting.
A while back I wrote a guide to choosing a hosting company for people to learn about how to decipher all the bells and whistles that the hosting companies out there offer. Over the years I’ve seen some companies that seem to offer great deals and the site owner ends up tearing their hair out when they want to do anything to their site, and some good ones that offer an easy way to find help when it’s needed and packages that don’t force you to sacrifice services for a good bargain.
Rather than repeat the info in the guide, here’s a few FAQ’s that have come up over the years.
Q. I registered my url with a hosting company, but I want to host the site somewhere else. Can I do that?
A. Yes you can. When you have chosen a company to host your site, look for a way to transfer a domain. Otherwise, when you try to set up the url you want hosted, they will tell you it’s not available. The hosting company’s web site ideally has information on how this process will be handled. It usually involves changing the Domain Name Server (DNS for short) on the registrar’s end of things to point to the hosting company’s DNS.
Q. Can I have an email address that reflects my url without having to check on a different email address than my regular one all the time?
A. I have yet to come across a hosting company’s email account dashboard that doesn’t let you forward you@yourcompany.com to you@yourhomeemail.com.
Q. The hosting company I want to go with offers these templates for putting my site up quickly and cheaply. Should I just try to go with that?
A. Well, this is a tricky one ethically. As someone who makes a living creating web sites for clients, I can honestly say this: Some template systems are better than others. I have actually recommended this service to someone who was getting a lot of good word of mouth business via online listing services, but was so busy running their business that they knew they didn’t have time for a full-on website just yet. Then again, I recently met with someone who had done their web site through a major hosting company and we both almost lost our sanity trying to figure out what had happened to her template site’s dashboard. Since the template service was free, her site was not backed up by the hosting company and she realized that in order to make the slightest change, she needed to re-do her entire site’s template.
In the end though, everyone I know who’s tried hosting company templates always ends up running smack into the template’s limitations sooner or later.
Step 3. Think about what your site needs to do for your audience.
What is the main reason someone needs to go to your site? To hire you? To learn more about what you do? To buy what you are selling? Whatever that reason is, build your site around that. If you are going to have products for sale, you need to determine how you are going to implement a shopping cart. If you are going to provide information, you need to have a way for people to find it easily. If you are going to provide services for a potential client, they need a way to easily find out what those services are.
Step 4. Look at some sites that you want to emulate.
Sometimes they are your competitors’ sites, other times it’s sites you find really useful or, maybe it’s just sites that you and your friends/clients/colleagues rave about. Look at a few and make notes. What makes those sites effective? You can create an absolutely stunning site visually but if it’s not efficient for the user, they could click away before your fabulous flashy splash page even loads. If you can go to the site and find what you are looking for in less than a minute and a half, that’s a good site. Visuals count though. What’s my pet peeve? Sites that make you click in 4 different places to do what you most likely landed there to do. Good site design doesn’t beat around the bush.
Posted 1 month ago at 11:58 am. Add a comment
Although there’s an iPhone app for everything short of walking your dog, sometimes there’s an easier way to something that’s a little off the beaten path. I was taking photos of some artwork that a friend of mine did with our daughter on New Year’s Eve and in the midst of sending it to my twitpic account, I changed my mind and came up with a way to post a photo to a Flickr photo stream and Facebook simultaneously. Continue Reading…
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago at 6:19 pm. Add a comment
As much as everyone loves the NextGen Gallery by Alex Rabe (myself included), a comprehensive guide to how to actually use it seems to be as scarce as the proverbial hens’ teeth. The first time I installed it for a client, I have to admit the sheer amount of options and settings was a little overwhelming. At any rate, you came here for a manual so here it is. Continue Reading…
Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:33 pm. 1 comment
