Frequently Asked Questions about website stuff

1. Can I update my site myself?
2. Forget the hype. In what practical ways might a website be of real benefit to my business or organisation?
3. How can I improve my search engine ranking?
4. How do I set up my POP3 account in Microsoft Outlook?
5. How does a search engine work?
6. How many pages does a website need?
7. How often should a website be updated?
8. How should I promote my website?
9. I already have a website, but it's not performing. What can I do?
10. I have a new site, why isn't it in the search engines yet?
11. My business is small. Could a website be of any benefit?
12. Optimize for Download Speed
13. What are the advantages (and disadvantages) of web publishing over conventional printed materials?
14. What are 'Web standards'?
15. What does it mean to optimize a website?
16. What is a web browser? - Web Browsers Examples
17. What is web site accessibility?
18. What is web site usability?
19. What is 'GIF'?
20. What is 'Internet'?
21. What is 'JPEG'?
22. What is 'PNG'?
23. When I can get free software that promises 'Quick and easy website development' why would I want to pay you to do this for me?
24. Why does my new site appear inconsistently in Google?
25. Why Should I Optimize my Website?

1. Can I update my site myself?

   We have designed websites with a view to their owners subsequently maintaining them themselves. Depending on the level of skill the client or their staff wish to acquire this can be tackled in two ways...

   1. The necessary HTML code to edit and transfer files to the website can be learned.
   2. The site can be programmed so that one or more pages, such as a news page, can be updated via a simple password protected form page, with minimal training.

   If the client wishes to maintain their own website then Netrenz Internet Solutions can advise on the best way of going about this as well as supplying training and support if required.

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2. Forget the hype. In what practical ways might a website be of real benefit to my business or organisation?

   An effective website should help you make money, save you money, or better still, do both of these.

   Make money

   Depending on your organisation, you may make money either directly, or indirectly from your website.

   If you have suitable products or services to sell then your potential customer may be able to conveniently order or book and pay online anytime of the day or night and from areas or countries outside your normal geographical region. In other cases, such as industrial machinery, your potential customer could conveniently obtain much required information, illustrations, specifications, etc, in advance and already be in a buying frame of mind when he or she contacts your sales department.

   For a knowledge or people-based organisation a website is an excellent way of presenting examples of projects undertaken, case studies, articles, and other credentials that will demonstrate technical or professional competence.

   A website form page makes it easy for potential customers to contact you at a time that suits themselves, whilst your organisation is fresh in their mind, rather than having to remember to telephone you on your next working day.

   Save money

   For many organisations a website can save them money whilst also improving customer relations.

   Potential customers can visit the website and immediately obtain all, or most of the information they need in order to place an order. This can mean huge savings in the staff time required to answer queries (often exactly the same queries over and over again) or in the cost of printing and mailing of catalogues and other literature. This is especially true for those prospects who contact your organisation only to find that you don't offer the product or service that they are looking for, thus accidentally wasting their own time as well as yours.

   If you have a product or service that needs technical support then this can often be effectively provided with a website 'Help' section. This means the customer can often get the help he needs, perhaps even when your office is closed. Another cost-saving example is the replacement of lost instruction manuals which can be made available for convenient download straight from the website at any time.

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3. How can I improve my search engine ranking?

   Entire books have been written on this subject, and complete websites devoted to it. However, here are a few simple suggestions...

   1. Ensure pages have full, meaningful titles. (Not just 'Home Page')
   2. Ensure that meta 'description' and 'keyword' tags are correctly used.
   3. Make sure the first paragraphs on the home page carry relevant content.
   4. Try to get links to your site from sites that are already being indexed and that have relevant content. The relevant content part is very important as if you just link to any and all sites then it could have a negative impact on your rankings. 
   5. Use search engines to check competitors web pages. If they are ranking higher than your own site then ask yourself 'why?'
   6. Allow time. With countless millions of pages on the World Wide Web it often takes six weeks or more for new sites or pages to get indexed.
   Needless to say, all these areas are taken care of for Netrenz Internet Solutions clients as a standard service. And then if you require us to continually tweak your website to stay ranked we would be more than happy to setup a consultation.
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4. How do I set up my POP3 account in Microsoft Outlook?

   • Go to 'Tools' > 'Email Accounts',
   • Select 'Add a new email account',
   • Click Next,
   • Select 'POP3' from the Server Types,
   • Click Next,
   • Enter your basic particulars; name and email address,
   • Your email address will also be your 'Username' and enter the assigned password,
     
   • Your 'Incoming mail server (POP3) will be 'mail.yourdomian.com', for example 'mail.netrenz.com' is ours.
     
   • Your 'Outgoing mail server (SMTP) will be your ISP's SMTP server. If you do not know what it is please contact your ISP or contact us and we will do our best to find out.
     
   • Click on the 'More Setting...' button, where it says Mail Account on the General Tab in that box give the email account a specific name so that it is easily distinguishable
   • Click 'OK'
   • If you would like to test the account click on the 'Test Account Settings...' button.
     
   • Otherwise just click the 'Next' button and
   • You're Done!
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5. How does a search engine work?

   Basically, search engines (SE) are gigantic databases that contain information about the contents of the websites that make up the web. The most popular search engine, Google, contains more than 3,000,000,000 websites. When you type in a phrase or word, the engine will search its database and return results in an order that is determined by its own proprietary algorithm.

   So, how do they get all of that data to begin with?

   Spiders

   Search engines employ the use of spiders to gather information from websites. The spiders crawl websites gathering data and following the links on the pages. The spiders are almost continually crawling the internet, gathering new and updated web pages in order to keep their results current.

   Data Handling

   The data that the spiders retrieve is handled differently by the different search engines. The search engines put 'weight' on different components of a website and on how it is integrated into the World Wide Web. In this way they determine the order that the sites should appear in the search results (the pages that contain the search results are commonly refferred to as 'serps' - search engine result pages).

   Getting in

   Most search engines update their databases with the information gathered by their spiders at least once a month. This is important to know if you have a relatively new website - if you release your website at the end of a ‘crawl’ and the spiders haven’t yet found your site, you will have to wait until the next update to get into the database. When you do make it into the database it will still take another one or two updates before your new website stabilizes in the search results.

   Most SE's, like Google, also have what are called fresh listings. These are short quick updates that usually won't update a whole site, but will add new and changing pages. These can add a new site, although it will commonly appear temporarily in the SERPS and then disappear. This is typical behavior, and nothing to worry about. Stable listings take time.

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6. How many pages does a website need?

   There are no hard and fast rules. The question can only be answered after having first established the objective of the web site. Netrenz Internet Solutions has worked on websites ranging from just one page to hundreds of pages.

   However, one of the special advantages of a website is that it can start very small, and then gradually build up over time as dictated by need and experience.

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7. How often should a website be updated?

   As with the question above, there are no hard and fast rules as the answer has to be tied in with the objective of the site. If it is understood from the outset that an organisation requires a website that will be updated rarely, if at all, then this will be allowed for in the design. (There is nothing worse than having a website referring to 'breaking news' that actually broke in 1997.) Having said this, there is a now also a tendency for search engine indexes to lose interest in sites that appear to be neglected. It is therefore worthwhile refreshing a site from time to time even if there is no actual news to post.
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8. How should I promote my website?

   Search engines are a very useful way of promoting a website, and full advantage should be taken of them. However, be sure to promote your website in as many other ways as possible. Here are some other simple suggestions that may help...

   1. Include the website address as part of your 'signature' on all out-going e-mail.
   2. Make sure the website address forms part of the address on all printed materials, letterheads, business cards, labels, catalogues, media advertisements, etc.
   3. Don't forget conventional media such as advertising and public relations, wherever appropriate.
   4. If you are already using, for example, press advertising, ensure your website address is included on all advertisements. Smaller, cheaper advertisements, but maybe more frequently, or in more media, can be highly effective when combined with a good website.
   5. Do not depend exclusively on search engines to bring traffic to your site.
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9. I already have a website, but it's not performing. What can I do?

   Here are a few quick possibilities to consider...

   1. Can visitors actually find the site via search engines?
   2. Is the site being adequately promoted by means other than search engines?
   3. Is the site slow to download, or is it too difficult to navigate?
   4. Is there any call to action, or any other way in which a site visitor response is elicited?

   Quite small, but appropriate, adjustments can have a profound effect on the performance of a web site.

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10. I have a new site, why isn't it in the search engines yet?

    Search engines do not automatically know what is on the internet.

    As a simplified explanation, search engines like Google use something called a spider to crawl the World Wide Web, reading web pages as it goes along and storing them in the search engines database. They go from page to page by following the links that they encounter on the web pages.

    The engines tend to update their main search index every two weeks or once a month. When this occurs, if your new website has been crawled it will appear somewhat consistently in the search engine results.

    It may occur that a spider only gets to a part of your website. If this happens, some of your pages may not show up in the search engine results. This is usually just a matter of time - after a few updates a spider will usually have your whole site.

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11. My business is small. Could a website be of any benefit?

    Yes. In many ways, the smaller the business, the more cost effective and useful a website can become. This is because smaller businesses are nearly always at a severe disadvantage when it comes to the budget available for advertising and promotional materials. However, an effective website really can help level the field. For instance...

    • Small, low cost media advertisements can refer to the website. Visitors then go to the site to find much more information than could ever be contained in an advertisement. For example, the site can have colour illustrations, case studies, customer testimonials, news on recent projects, etc.
    • High quality brochures, catalogues and other printed materials are expensive to produce and then costly and time consuming to send out. These costs can be eliminated or reduced when the organisation has an effective website.
    • Potential customers or clients can obtain extra information at any time, day, night or weekend, when staff might not be available to handle sales enquires.
    • Potential customers or clients can make first contact via e-mail, again at any time.

    A very small firm's professionally designed website can look just as good as that of a large organisation.

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12. Optimize for Download Speed

    Optimizing your website for download speed is a process where the components of a website are optimized so that the website will download rapidly and display quickly in a users browser.
    
    The rule of thumb is to display in eight seconds - you begin losing ten percent of your traffic for every second over eight seconds that it takes your page to display. There are many tactics to creating a website that will display quickly, and just like Search Engine Visibility, this is something that is best done at the start of designing your site. It can be done to existing pages, however quite often best results are obtained from a redesign.
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13. What are the advantages (and disadvantages) of web publishing over conventional printed materials?

    Website publishing is an alternative to conventional printing. Often they should be used in conjunction as one does not replace the other. Web publishing offers these advantages over print...

    1. Immediate updating.
    2. Immediately available to a world-wide audience, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without any printing or distribution costs.
    3. No limit to the number of pages.
    4. No cost implications for having colour photographs.
    5. All organisations, no matter what their size, can look good.
    6. Website visitor statistics can tell you how many visitors your site has had, and the pages they viewed.
    7. Visitors can immediately contact you or buy at any time via your website.

    Conventional print offers these advantages over the web...

    1. No matter how large or complicated the page, there is never a download time penalty.
    2. The appearance of pages is fixed by the designer and printer. Considerations such as the users computer hardware and software and Internet connection speed have no effect on what they will see.
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14. What are 'Web standards'?

    These are standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium to lead the Web to its full potential. In particular, web standards will help to ensure that all future browsers will work consistently.

    This will have the benefit of making it possible to escape from dependence on any company, or proprietary technology, as well as avoiding the time-wasting necessity of trying to create pages that look good on browsers that were deliberately designed to be incompatible.

    Additional benefits of strict compliance with latest standards are simplified website maintenance, smaller files that download quicker, improved accessibility for people with disabilities and increased usability on devices other than current desktop computers.
    

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15. What does it mean to optimize a website?

    There are several elements of a website that can be considered for optimization. When optimizing, a good web designer will try and find the appropriate balance* between these components, from the point of view of the site design and the site objective. Elements that should be considered for optimization include accessibility, usability, search engine visibility and overall page download speed.
    
    Some people may find it strange to place accessibility and usability as something that should be optimized; however, the Internet is a global topic. While the web exploded in North America, many other countries lagged behind and are still playing catch-up today.
    
    The importance of ideas of usability and accessibility will eventually become recognized on a global scale, but for now there are many countries where the web design lessons that for years have been cascading through North America are still just being learnt.
    
    In these countries, newer sites may contain the latest well thought out accessible and usable design (provided the designer can show the client that these qualities have benefits), many existing sites will need to be retrofitted or ‘optimized’ if they aren’t fully redesigned.
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16. What is a web browser? - Web Browsers Examples

    Web browsers are programs, generally free, that are installed on computers and used to see the pages of a website located on the Internet or stored on a hard drive, diskette, etc. These programs can are usually free to update their latest versions.

    Examples of browsers are:

    • Internet Explorer
    • Netscape
    • Opera
    • Firefox
    • Safari
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17. What is web site accessibility?

    The goal of accessibility is to make your website content accessible to all people - including those with disabilities, however this theme can also include making sites accessible to different devices (mobile phones, pdas) and internet connections (56k, adsl, t1).

    There are devices available for use by people with disabilities, such as screen readers and Braille displays for the blind, but also more basic features available in web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera and Mozilla. There are even more features that a web designer can build into a website by simply being informed about the many aspects of accessible web design.

    Benefits of an accessible website:

    - your site can pass its message to more users.

    - some accessibility modifications can improve search engine visibility of your site.

    - a properly designed accessible site should be written with code that validates to the w3c specifications - this has many benefits some of which are summarized here.

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18. What is web site usability?

    Usability refers to the user experience when interacting with your website.

    A website that is usable is one that makes everything clear and simple to understand for the user. Although it is impossible to make a website that will be clear and efficient for every user, it is possible to make a site that will present the user with a minimum amount of confusion.

    Going one step beyond this, planning for errors that may occur when a user is interacting with your website and developing smart ways of handling these errors is called contingency design, and together usability and contingency design can result in a user being satisfied with their experience on your website.

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19. What is 'GIF'?

    GIF, is the acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, is an image compression format limited to 256 colors. PNG is an image compression format approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a replacement for GIF files, because GIF files use a patented data compression algorithm and PNG is patent- and license-free.

    JPEG is considered best for photos and GIF and PNG for graphic images.

    This format is supported by most browsers.

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20. What is 'Internet'?

    The Internet was originally developed for the United States military, and then became used for government, academic and commercial research and communications. It is a combination of Hardware (interconnected computers) and Software (protocols and languages that makes everything work). It is an infrastructure of networks on world-wide scale (large main networks - such as MILNET, NSFNET, and CREN - and smaller networks that link to them) connecting simultaneously many types of computers.

    There are over six million computers that use Internet anywhere in the world and that use several formats and Internet protocols:

    • Internet Protocol (IP): a protocol that is used to route a data packet from its source to its destination over the Internet.
    • Transport Control Protocol (TCP): a protocol that it is used to administer accesses.
    • User Datagram Protocol (UDP): a protocol that makes it possible to send a datagram message from one computer to an application running in another computer.

    The Internet has several administrative bodies:

    • Internet Architecture Board: oversees technology and standards.
    • Internet Assigned Numbers Authority: assigns numbers for ports and sockets, etc.
    • InterNIC: assigns Internet addresses.
    • Also: Internet Engineering and Planning Group, Internet Engineering Steering Group, and the Internet Society.
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21. What is 'JPEG'?

    JPEG, is the acronym for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the name of the group that developed it. Is an image compression format for full color (high-quality) images.

    JPEG is considered best for photos and GIF and PNG for graphic images.

    This format is supported by most browsers.

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22. What is 'PNG'?

    PNG (pronounced ping) is the acronym for Portable Network Graphics, an image compression format approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a replacement for GIF files, because GIF files use a patented data compression algorithm and PNG is patent- and license-free.

    JPEG is considered best for photos and GIF and PNG for graphic images.

    This format is supported by most browsers.

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23. When I can get free software that promises 'Quick and easy website development' why would I want to pay you to do this for me?

    The development of an effective website requires many skills apart from the ability to write HTML code and transfer files to a web server. A website is an important part of the persona of any organisation, on view for 24 hours a day, seven days a week 365 days of the year. It could also be the first contact a potential customer has with an organisation, and the first impression gained may well be a factor when deciding whether or not to do business with it. Most organisations call in expert help for the creation of their advertising and promotional materials and it makes sense to adopt the same policy for website development as well.

    Also, once the time and effort required to learn how to produce effective and good looking results are taken into account, it can actually prove to be much more cost effective to call in professional help from the outset.

    Another benefit of using a professional to develop your website is the cross-fertilisation of ideas that occurs from project to project. For instance, an idea that worked well on one website may well be adapted to another completely different type of organisation.

    Finally, most authoring software currently on the market does not generate HTML code that properly complies with latest Web standards.

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24. Why does my new site appear inconsistently in Google?

    Some search engines, like Google, are able to quickly add new sites to the search results in between major updates to their database. This fresh data can be quite unstable - there one day, gone the next. This is normal behavior, and nothing to worry about. This type of inconsisteny exists before your site has been included in Google via the larger and more comprehensive monthly update.

    Once your website has been spidered (either completely or partially) and is included in Google via the comprehensive monthly update, your website will begin to appear more consistently in the search results. Generally, the stability of your site in the search results will improve as months pass and your site is included in more monthly updates.

    Even if your site has been included after a monthly update, sometimes while Google is maintaining their data they do revert back to old data (which they keep relevant with the fresh data mentioned above). When they do this, newer sites may temporarily go missing from Google, for a period of hours to days, and sometimes weeks.

    Keep an eye on Google and check to be sure that from time to time some of your pages appear in the search engine results. Generally give Google anywhere from 6 to 10 weeks to have your site appearing consistently, and think in terms of months for your site to become completely stable.

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25. Why Should I Optimize my Website?

    The more people that come to your site and understand it, the better chance you have of gaining clients or selling products. Its that simple. Business on the Internet is about visibility and user/client satisfaction. Spend all of the money you want on a website, if the above qualities aren’t taken into consideration you might as well not have a website.
    
    The most important element of a good website is that people can see it and understand it - if your website isn’t accessible, you will lose visitors. If it does poorly in the search engines, you’re losing potential visitors.
    
    With those two points you are diminishing the amount of traffic that comes to your site. Now, if the visitors that arrive to your website leave because it takes too long to download or because the information is difficult to find or understand - you are losing clients. Optimizing your site results in better Internet business.
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