Mac SEO Blog

For those of our users in the Northern Hemisphere, spring is on its way which usually means it is time to do some spring cleaning after winter and get in to shape for the summer. So, why not do a little bit of spring cleaning on your EverWeb website project file as well?

When you create your website you will undoubtedly modify some of your ideas along the way. You may even find that you need to make sweeping changes as some of your initial ideas just don’t translate as well as you thought they would when you actually come to build your website’s pages.

Building a website can lead to lots of abandoned, and modified, ideas. It can also bloat your website project file size if you do not do some maintenance on a regular basis. So, keeping cleaning up your project file’s assets is worth doing on a regular basis.

Why Project File Maintenance is Important

There are a few reasons why maintenance is important and good to do once in a while:

1. Smaller Project File, Faster Initial Loading. As project files grow, they will take more computer memory when loading so will tend to load slower over time as they get larger in size. Keeping your project file size down will help it load faster.
2. Smaller Project Files Make Editing Your Project Faster. With each version of EverWeb we optimize its code and find ways to make important tasks such as page editing, previewing, publishing and published page responsiveness even more better than before. The other way to keep EverWeb’s performance excellent is to keep your project file is ‘mean and lean’ with a well designed website that uses optimized assets.
3. Regular maintenance of your project file will also get rid of any clutter that you no longer need in your site. This makes it easier to organize and manage your assets.

The Clean Up!

1. Check for Unused Assets: The first part of cleaning things up is to check to see if you have any assets that you are not using and will not be wanting to use in the future. To find these assets, just go to the Assets tab and click on the Settings Cog. From the dropdown menu that appears, select ‘Find Unused Assets…’ If Assets are found, they are highlighted in the Assets List. You are also asked if you would like these Assets removed, which is an action that cannot be undone. If you have any doubts, click ‘No’. The unused assets will still be highlighted so you can manually decide which ones to keep or delete. Deleting assets you do not need will reduce the size of your project file.
2. Check the Size of Your Image Asset Files. Whilst on the Assets tab, click again on the Settings Cog. This time, select ‘Sort by File Size…’ This will sort the files in descending order of file size, so the largest file will be at the top of the list. Are there any files that are appear to be very large? As you probably know, if your page contains large image files, this will will drag on the loading speed of the page in a browser. Where you have large files, try reducing the dimensions of the image in an image editor (even Apple’s Preview will do) e.g. some stock images can be 5000 pixels wide when you typically only need image widths of about 1920 wide or less in your site. Furthermore, you can reduce the resolution of the image e.g. the image may be 600dpi when in a browser you may be able to use an image of 72-170 dpi without any noticeable loss in image quality. Once you have reduced the size of the image, you can use EverWeb’s Replace Asset feature to substitute the smaller image file for the larger.
3. Manage Your Cache Files: Typically you will not usually need to manage your cache files, but if you are a bit low on hard disk space, you may find this useful to check, especially if you have a large project file. Go to the EverWeb-> Preferences-> Backup tab. Click on the ‘Manage Cache Files…’ button. You can choose to clear the EverWeb’s Preview and Publishing caches. Note that these files will be regenerated the next time you preview or publish your site. The last option is where you can clear your Backup files if you no longer need them. Remember, however, that if you delete the backup files they be moved to your computer’s Trash can from where they will be deleted according to your computer’s emptying trashcan schedule.

Remember: Keep Your Site Up To Date

Spring cleaning your site every once in a while is a good thing to do to keep everything working properly. If you have replaced some files to reduce the size of your project file and to help with page loading times, you may want to publish the full site using the File-> Publish Entire Site menu option. This can be especially useful if you have updated your version of EverWeb as your whole site will benefit from the new version’s optimizations!

And don’t forget, whilst doing maintenance on your site, check for things that may be out of date or need updating in your content. For example, if you have copyright notices on your pages, remember to update the year every year to keep up to date. If you’re site has news, now is a good time to update your home page and share the news! or is it time to update your blog with a new post. And don’t forget to give your SEO a freshen up too! In a changing world you need to keep your site fully optimized at all times!

Remember: Keeping your site fresh is the best thing you can do to keep your visitors coming back!

EverWeb on Social Media

You can also find EverWeb on the following social media platforms:

Facebook

Flipboard

YouTube

Twitter

Instagram

The speed of your website is extremely important. It not just improves your visitor’s experience, but it also helps ensure higher search engine rankings.

Super Faster Websites With EverWeb 1.9

Over the last few months we worked on a new feature of EverWeb that combines all common assets uses on Master Pages into one directory. This means that your media files and styling information are only exported once resulting in;

1. Faster website publishing and uploading
2. Smaller websites
3. Faster loading websites due to browser caching. This means that for every subsequent visit to your website, they will load faster for your visitors. Also, each page visited by your customers will load faster

Plus we added a few more tricks to get your websites loading much faster;

1. Better support for retina displays using new HTML5 tags. This means modern browsers such as the latest versions of Safari, Chrome (for desktop and iOS) and Firefox, as well as many other browsers, will load your websites much faster and use less bandwidth.
2. Faster mobile redirects using optimized code that gets executed as the first instructions to your browsers so mobile pages gets redirected much faster than before. Plus we follow every one of Google’s recommendations for properly optimized mobile pages, without any additional work on your part!

EverWeb 1.9 also has these highlighted new features which we will discuss in more details in future blog posts. We also made a video tutorial outlining the new features for you.

We went even further with EverWeb 1.9 with some highly requested features and enhancements;

1. A new popup window option under the hyperlink tab so you can link to a page that pops up over the current page
2. A new presentation mode (Window menu->Presentation mode) to maximize the space given to the design canvas. This feature hides the web page list, toolbar and Inspector so smaller screens can see their entire website design
3. The ‘open in new window’ option under the hyperlinks tab now works for the link to ‘one of my pages’ and ‘to a file’ option. Now you can open PDF documents for example in a new window without any additional code or widgets

Easily Update To EverWeb 1.9

We’ve got a lot more packed into EverWeb 1.9. You can easily update by;

1. Launching EverWeb and going to the EverWeb menu at the top of your screen and selected ‘Check for Update’
2. Downloading EverWeb from the EverWeb website.

Remember, you won’t lose any previous data when updating since your website project files are stored elsewhere on your computer.

Do You Like EverWeb 1.9?

Tell us what you think, head over to our growing discussion forum and lets talk about the new features in EverWeb 1.9!

Helping Each Other

Oh and one more thing, we’re really obsessed with offering the best support! One big issue we found is that sometimes we need your website project files which can be BIG. So we built in a way to quickly share your project file with us. Simply click the little arrows in the projects window and select the ‘Send to RAGE Software Support’. Your project file will be automatically sent to us, no more using dropbox or other file transfer service.

With the release of EverWeb 1.7 we made some changes to the way directories work, but don’t worry, you can easily return to the old functionality with a simple checkbox.

Directories in EverWeb 1.6 and earlier would be their own page. Which means that if a visitor to your page clicked the directory name in the navigation bar, they would be taken to the page you designed for that directory.

On a desktop computer, when the mouse hovered over the directory page in the navigation menu the visitor would see the drop down menu. On mobile devices there is no mouse hover. The visitor has to click on the directory page to see the drop down menu. On iOS this worked pretty well, when you clicked on a directory in the navigation menu you would see the drop down menu. Clicking again would take you to the directory page.

On Android devices this wouldn’t work this way. Basically clicking on the directory page would instantly take you to that page and never show the drop down menu.

For this reason, and because it is unlikely that a visitor would visit that specific directory page, we changed the default behavior. As of EverWeb 1.7 a directory page is not an actual page. So you will now add sub pages to the directory but you can’t actually edit the main directory page.

However, we did leave the option of going back to the old behavior if you preferred that. Keep in mind though, this will cause problems as mentioned above on Android devices.

To return to the old behavior, select the directory in EverWeb and go to Page Settings in the Inspector (first tab). Under the Web Page Description field you will see the option that says ‘Redirect to first child page’. Uncheck that and EverWeb will work as it did before.

We’re very excited about the latest update to EverWeb, our easy to use website builder.

EverWeb 1.3 is our biggest update yet with a lot of new, and exciting features. Here are some of the highlights;

Direct FTP Publishing
One of our most requested features was direct FTP Publishing and we’ve added that to the latest release. You no longer need to publish to a folder and use a third party FTP client. EverWeb can publish directly to most FTP servers right from within the software.

This helps reduce publishing issues and makes publishing your site much faster and much more convenient.

E-commerce Widget
We’ve added a very powerful new e-commerce widget that lets you add Paypal ‘Buy Now’ buttons or add a fully featured Shopping Cart.

Now you can easily start selling your products or services on your EverWeb website.

Password Protection
Although iWeb provided password protection you could only password protect your entire website with one username/password. EverWeb lets you create an unlimited number of usernames/passwords and it lets you password protect certain sections of your website only.

This means part of your website can be public and used by anyone, while another part can only be accessed by entering a username and password.

This is a great feature for creating a members only or private section on your website. This feature requires EverWeb One-Click Publishing.

404 Not Found Page and 301 Redirects
This new feature may sound advanced but it is extremely easy to use and very powerful.

404 Not Found pages let you assign a page that should appear if a user tries to visit a non existing page on your website. For example, they could be following an outdated link or they could have mistyped your page in their browser. With this feature you can make sure they see an actual page and not a cryptic error message.

This feature requires EverWeb One-Click Publishing and can be accessed from the Site Publishing Settings screen.

301 redirects lets you completely migrate an old website to EverWeb while keeping your current search engine rankings. Lets say you had an old iWeb site and you wanted to transfer it over to EverWeb. The page URL may be different so this feature lets you forward a specific iWeb page to a specific EverWeb page.

Simply copy and paste your old iWeb URL (visit it in your browser and copy the URL from your browser) into the Redirect field (at the bottom of Inspector->Page Options) and EverWeb takes care of the rest. Now whenever someone goes to visit your old iWeb page, they will be redirected to your EverWeb page.

Other features include integrated Video tutorials, lots of bug fixes and improvements and faster website publishing.

Download EverWeb today

If you are a current EverWeb user, you can replace your existing version without losing any data.

We’re please to announce a new update for Sitemap Automator which adds the ability to create and publish XML Sitemap files for EverWeb hosted websites.

Sitemap Automator creates specially formatted files called XML Sitemaps that list all your web pages along with details on how important each page is, how often each page is updated and the last time a page was updated. This file then gets submitted to all major search engines to help them properly find and index your entire website.

Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask search engines rely on these XML Sitemap files to determine how to prioritize and properly organize all pages on your website.

EverWeb is our all new, drag and drop website builder for OS X. It works very similar to Apple’s discontinued iWeb software. With this update, Sitemap Automator automatically recognizes your EverWeb built websites and publishes them directly to your EverWeb account.

This new update also improves support for OS X Mavericks and updates the user interface. In addition it fixes a few issues with scanning certain websites.

We’re very please to announce the second major update to EverWeb.

EverWeb is the easy to use website builder that takes up where Apple’s iWeb left off. EverWeb lets anyone build professional, modern websites that work in any web browser, including Internet Explorer.

EverWeb 1.2 adds Master Pages which let you design your website once and have any changes automatically be applied to every page on your site. With Master Pages you design your site once, then assign the Master Page to each page on your site. Each page that uses the Master Page will use the same design and can be updated by simply editing the Master Page.

See How to Use Master Pages in EverWeb

EverWeb 1.2 also fixes problems when working with large websites and improves all around stability. This update is free for users who have an active EverWeb support license. You can also start using EverWeb for free to see if it is right for you.

With EverWeb 1.2, upgrading from iWeb is even easier. You can design your iWeb site once as a Master Page and assign that Master Page to all pages on your site. You won’t have to redesign each page on your site.

Let us know what you think of this update by commenting below.

* EverWeb is a drag and drop website builder that allows you to make your own website without any prior website building experience.

If you haven’t heard of EverWeb (formerly EasyWeb), our iWeb replacement app, you can join the Facebook group and get in the discussion.

EverWeb is currently in beta testing phase but we wanted to show off how easy it is to create a mobile website.

This video tutorial will show you how you can easily create your Mobile site in just a few steps.

What is EverWeb?

EverWeb is the all new, drag and drop website builder. If you loved Apple’s iWeb, you’ll love EverWeb even more. EverWeb builds off where iWeb ended adding features such as;

1. Mobile websites
2. Drop down menus
3. Built in search engine optimization
4. Fast loading websites
5. Social media integration
6. Much more…

Best of all EverWeb is FREE for Web hosting customers.

Join the EverWeb Facebook group to learn more.