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Building your website always involves some trial and error as you work to translate your ideas into reality. Even when using such an easy to use product as EverWeb to build your site, you may find that your original ideas about your website may need adapting. In many ways, this is a great, creative process and ultimately will lead you to building a satisfying and rewarding website. Even after your website design is complete, you may also find that you want to go back to it at a later date to update its content or design.

Your EverWeb Project file is where you collect together the files that you need, for example, images, audio and video. When building your site, you may find that you add such files to your Project file but end up not using them. You may also want to load the files that you want to use in your site in to your Project file before you start building your website’s pages.

Adding assets to your EverWeb Project file is easy to do, but sometimes you may want to perform some maintenance on your Project file to streamline its performance and to make it easier to work with. This is especially true if you are working with a large number of assets in your Project file. In this case you may want to organize them in the Assets List as well.

If you also use very large files in your Project file, these may take longer to load in to your computer’s memory and can also be slower to work with when they have loaded. Large files will also slow down your page loading times in your published website, so should be avoided where possible.

With these factors in mind, here are some ways in which you can save time, effort and space to make your EverWeb project file leaner, and make editing your pages snappier!

Check Your Files Before You Add Them To Your Project File

Performing some simple maintenance tasks on your site is easy, but perhaps what is more difficult to do is some preventative maintenance. This really starts with looking at the files that you want to use before you add them to your Project. For image files, there are two key things: first is the file size and second is the name that you use for the file itself.

If you have many large image files in your Project file, this can start to affect the loading time of your Project. It may also start to affect things such as how quickly you can swap from one page to another in your Project, or on your page editing tasks. The other big issue with large image files is that they will drag down your page loading times in your published your website. Typically, photography websites have slow loading pages as the image files used are unnecessarily large. It’s not needed to have such large files. No one likes slow loading pages!

So the key here is to look at the file size your your images and if they are large, try to optimize them so that they are smaller. For example, a quick win is when you have .PNG files. You can convert these such files in to JPG files and save a lot of file space in doing so. The second way to reduce file size is to reduce the dimensions of the image e.g. if you have an image file that is 2500 x 1800, why more reduce it down to e.g. 800 x 600. This in itself will save you plenty of file size space. The last quick tip here is to use software that strips out unnecessary file data. This can also save you lots of file space.

These steps should be done before you add the files in to EverWeb wherever possible. If you have already imported your image files you can see how large they are by clicking on the Assets tab, then clicking on the ellipses within a circle icon that is between the plus and minus buttons. Select the ‘Show File Info’ option to see details of each file in the Assets List, including their size. You can also sort the Assets List to see where the largest files are so that you can reimport them after using the tips above to reduce their file size.

Remove Unused Assets

As you build your website project, you may find that you have added files to the Assets List that you actually will not be using. You can easily remove theses files from your Project file by searching for unused assets, then deleting the ones you no longer want to keep.

Removing assets from your website’s Project file is easy to do.

1. Start by clicking on the Assets tab
2. Click on the Settings button (the circle with the ellipsis inside it) between the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ buttons.
3. From the menu, select ‘Find Unused Assets’ and click on it.
4. EverWeb will now search the Assets List for any asset that is not currently being used in the pages of your Project file.
5. Once the search has been completed, all unused assets will be highlighted in the Assets List. EverWeb will ask you if you want to delete these files.
6. If you click on Yes, the files will be deleted immediately. If you choose No, then the files will still be highlighted in the Assets List for you to review and manually delete if you want.

Stripping Out Duplicate Assets

One of the great things about EverWeb’s Assets tab is that when you add an asset, such as an image file, to it, you can use it as many times as you want in your project. There is no need to repeatedly add the asset again if you want to use it more than once. If you have accidentally done this, then delete the duplicate assets from the Assets List. Use the original asset that you imported to replace the now deleted duplicate assets on the pages of your website.

Stripping out duplicate assets will help keep your Project file size healthy and it is also easier for you to manage and use your image file assets as well.

Link To Your Media Rather Than Embed

If you have large media assets in your Project file, such as video content, you may find that it is better to offload this media on to another platform, e.g. YouTube or Vimeo, and then link back to your media from within EverWeb. There are already YouTube and Vimeo video Widgets available directly within EverWeb to make this easy for you to do. You will also find that services such as YouTube and Vimeo will also compress your video files to make them load quicker.

The upside for your EverWeb Project file is that you can remove the video files from the Assets List altogether which will save space and improve your Project file’s loading time and editing response time.

Managing the files in your Assets List with a little maintenance once in a while can help you with faster Project loading times, snappier Project file editing and faster page loading times when publishing your website!

If you have a question for us about EverWeb, please let us know in the Comments section below.

When it comes to designing your page in EverWeb, one of the first choices you will need to make is which page layout style will you want to use? It is an important decision, especially if this your first time building a website. Making the choice that is right for you can save you time, effort and frustration. In this blog post we will explain the page layout types that are available to you as well as the pros and cons of using each type. In this way you can make the best choice for your website project.

EverWeb’s Page Layout Types

When you launch EverWeb for the first time, you will be greeted by the Projects Window which lists all of the website projects that you have created on the right hand side of the dialog box. As it is your first time launching EverWeb, there will be nothing in the list. So you will need to create your first EverWeb Project file by clicking on the large ‘Create a new website’ button. What happens next is that you will see EverWeb’s Theme Template Chooser. This is where you can choose from one of over 200 predefined Themes that you can base your website upon. Alternatively you can choose a ‘blank’ theme if you want to design your website completely from the ground up.

When you look at the list of Theme Templates you will not be able to tell which type of page layout each Theme uses. You can, though, filter on the type of Theme by clicking on the dropdown menu at the top of the Theme Template list. The dropdown has four options: All, Fixed Width, Responsive and New. The default is set to ‘All’ so that you can see all of the Theme Templates that are available. The ‘New’ option shows any new Theme Templates that may have been recently added to the existing themes. For the moment, we are interested in the Fixed Width and Responsive Theme Templates.

Fixed Width and Responsive Themes and Page Layouts

Before filtering the list of Theme Templates, or choosing a Theme Template from the list, it is worthwhile explaining what is meant by ‘Fixed Width’ and ‘Responsive’ themes. or page layouts. if you are not familiar with these concepts already.

When EverWeb was launched back in 2015 it introduced three page layout types: Left, Centered and Dynamic. Of these three, only the Centered page layout is used in EverWeb’s Theme Templates. The other two layout types are very specialized and we would not usually recommend that they are used.

In 2018, EverWeb 2.8 launched, with its main new feature being the introduction of Responsive Website Design. This type of page layout replaced the now defunct ‘Dynamic’ page layout style. The Left Aligned page layout style remains, though, as a legacy layout and is not used at all in Theme Templates or in any EverWeb support documentation.

Essentially you now have two Page Layouts to choose from: The Centered page layout being a Fixed Width page layout and the Responsive page layout having a flexible width layout.

What Is a Fixed Width Page Layout?

In EverWeb, the Centered page layout is, therefore, synonymous with a Fixed Width page layout. As its page layout type suggests, the Centered page layout has a fixed width. The width is defined in pixels and defaults to 1000 pixels wide. If you choose this type of page layout, you can see this information in the Page Layout section of the Page Settings tab of the Inspector Window. Here the Page Layout type will be displayed as ‘Centered Layout’ and the ‘Content Width’ field will have a value of 1000 pixels. The page width is usually suitable for desktop screens, although some users find a width of 980 pixels better to work with. The only problem with this page width is that it does not suit mobile phones or some smaller tablet devices. These devices usually are about half the width (or less) of a desktop screen.

To solve the problem, you should create a fixed width (Centered) page layout specifically for mobile phones to compliment the page you created for desktop devices. If you currently have the Theme Template Chooser open click on the ‘Algonquin’ theme and you will see in the pages list on the right hand side that there is a ‘Mobile’ page available. This page layout has a width of 480 pixels which is suitable for most mobile phones. In EverWeb we can link the two page types together so that you always see the right page layout on whatever device you are using, mobile or desktop.

The Fixed Width, Centered Page Layout type is great if you are new to website design as it allows you to place objects anywhere you like on the page. The downside is that you will probably always have to maintain both desktop and mobile versions of your pages. In this day and age, mobile pages are even more important than desktop pages as people spend most of their time browsing on their phones rather than on desktops. Mobile pages are also prioritized above desktop pages in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

What Is a Responsive Page Layout?

The Responsive page layout debuted in EverWeb in 2018 and uses a flexible page width that matches any device that the page is displayed upon. If you use this style of page layout, you will see that the Content Width field in the Page Layout section of the Page Settings tab is greyed out as it is not needed. If you have used the Centered Layout before, you may also notice that there is no Header section either on the Responsive page and that the Minimum Header Height field is also greyed out. In Responsive Web Design, the header is not necessary.

All the content that you add to a Responsive page will always be contained within the page’s boundaries. The page boundaries, and the content within it, adjust, or ‘respond’, automatically to suit the device the page is being viewed upon. This means that using a Responsive Page Layout only requires you to make one page layout. You do not need to create a corresponding desktop page for your mobile page. This makes managing your website easier as you have fewer pages to lo maintain and update. The downside, however, is that you must be more careful in how you design your page in the first place. This is often where some experience in website design may help you. For example, your design can become quite complex if you want to show different content on your page for different devices e.g. on a desktop device you can allow yourself more text on the page with fewer images, whereas on a mobile device you probably want more summarized text and more images. Designing a page that accommodates all your requirements, from mobile to desktop, can initially take time and effort, and some trial and error.

Choosing Your Way Forward…

Coming back to our original discussion about choosing a Fixed Width or Responsive design, Theme Template or page layout, we would recommend that if you are brand new to the world of website design that you use a Fixed Width page layout. If you have experience in website design, and/or Responsive Web Design, then a Responsive page layout is for you.

You can always change your mind later on and redesign your website using a different type of page layout if you want. There is no ‘correct’ page layout style that you need to use, just go with what you feel most comfortable using.

Remember too that there are always resources to help you such as the EverWeb User Manual (from the Help menu in EverWeb) which will step you through Fixed Width and Responsive website design. There are also video tutorials on the EverWeb website and on YouTube as well as EverWeb’s User Forum and Support Service.

If you have a question about page layout styles or about anything EverWeb related, please let us know in the Comments section below!

As we put the finishing touches to EverWeb 4.0 before unleashing our new software on to the world, web are reminded that with each new EverWeb version there is always some new learning involved. EverWeb 4.0 has some totally new features such as Membership and Subscription sites – which is huge! There is also the overhauled Text Inspector which will make building your site even easier, giving you the flexibility with fonts and text both now and in the future.

These are just a couple of examples of what’s coming but no matter how much we craft EverWeb to be as easy and intuitive as possible, you may want to dig deeper to get the best and most out of its features. Here are some suggestions on getting a fast start on discovering and using new EverWeb features.

The EverWeb User Manual

The EverWeb User Manual is your most detailed resource for all of the features of EverWeb. The manual is designed for first time EverWeb users as well as for experienced users who just want to dip in for some specific information. The EverWeb User Manual is updated with every release of EverWeb, both on Windows and on Mac. The manual is in PDF file format so you can easily search its contents, save a copy locally, or even print it out if you want to.

You can find the EverWeb User Manual in two places in EverWeb: As a link in the bottom left hand corner of the Projects Window or from the Help-> EverWeb PDF Manual menu option.

EverWeb’s Help Icon

Context sensitive help is always at hand within EverWeb though the Help Icon. This icon is displayed as a question mark symbol within a circle. You will see this icon displayed beside many of EverWeb’s features and also in the Widget Settings of many of EverWeb’s widgets. When you click on the icon beside a feature, a pop-up window will display with an EverWeb website, or YouTube, video describing the feature that you asked for help on.

The EverWeb Website

Help is always available on EverWeb’s own website. If you are completely new to EverWeb and to building a website for yourself, there is a great beginners video series available for you. If you are a photographer, amateur or professional, there is also a series for you to help you get the best out displaying your photos on the web. This series is currently being updated, so check out our YouTube and Facebook pages to discover the latest videos! getting your website up and running quickly if you are new to EverWeb. If SEO is important to you, or your business, there is a special series on EverWeb and SEO that contains short, to the point, videos on all aspects of EverWeb and SEO.

The EverWeb website also has other resources to explore such as its own blog where you can keep up to date with the latest in the world of EverWeb. If you need third party theme templates or widgets, check out the EverWeb Third Party Vendor page. This page is also great to find add-on products to connect you with other vital internet resources.

EverWeb’s own site can also be used to tap in to Support resources such as knowledge bases and contact with support personnel. Check out the menu options to find the right kind of support that you need!

Videos and Blogs

We all have our preferred medium for accessing help and support resources. Many people prefer to help and instructional videos. We try to make our videos short and focused so that you get to the help and support that you need in a timely manner. We also aim to make any instructions clear and concise. You can find EverWeb videos on our own website, on YouTube or FaceBook. If there is a video topic that is not there for you, please do let us know so that we can include this for you.

We also try to update videos on a regular basis to take in to account of new EverWeb features and also new technologies that are constantly emerging. We also try to expand EverWeb world by connecting and integrating you with other products e.g. financial and commercial product, calendaring and scheduling products, event management products, internet marketplaces and so much more! Again, if there is a product or service that you want to integrate in to EverWeb that there is no video for, do let us know in the Comment section below.

If video is not for you then blog posts can offer a great experience for you. EverWeb includes many instructional videos where we try to bullet point the steps along the way to make it as easy as possible for you to get to where you need to be. As with the videos, if we do not have a blog post for what you need, let us know.

You can find blog posts related to EverWeb on EverWeb’s own website, Rage Software’s (the maker of EverWeb) site, All About iWeb, iWeb Unlimited and Everything EverWeb.

EverWeb on Social Media

You can also find help on EverWeb’s social media accounts. This is a good place for keeping up with all the latest EverWeb news, videos and blog posts. It is also a place where you can ask questions to us as well. At the bottom of this post you will find the links you need to keep updated with EverWeb!

The EverWeb Forum

Use the forum for any questions that you may have about EverWeb. The forum is also announces the availability of new beta test versions of EverWeb if you want to try them out, as well as notifying you of official new releases. The EverWeb Forum is a great place to connect with the EverWeb Community and its third party providers.

EverWeb has the complete range of resources to help you discover new and updated features and to get the most out of them, quickly and easily. If there is anything that you think is missing in our support for you or if you have an idea about how we can improve, please let us know in the Comments Section below.

Enjoy EverWeb 4.0! Coming Soon…

Building a contact form for your EverWeb made website is a straight forward activity for most website designers. When EverWeb 3.0 launched with the new Contact Forms Advanced widget, designing a contact form became turbocharged both in terms of the scope of what a contact form could be used for and the ways in which you could customize the form.

Since its initial release, the Contact Form Advanced widget has added plenty of new features to give you even more flexibility and customization options.

If you are new to EverWeb, you may have noticed that there are two widgets available for creating contact forms: The Contact Form widget and the Contact Form Advanced widget. We always recommend using the ‘Advanced’ widget as it offers more security from spam through using reCAPTCHA in your form and it also has more built in security features for you and your website visitors. Furthermore, the widget’s customization options far exceed the very basic Contact Form widget, which is kept as a legacy widget if really needed in your website.

Setting Up Your Contact Form

Setting up the contact form is the first thing that you should do before starting your form design. As the Contact Form Advanced widget can be customized for multiple purposes you may want to use it as a contact form, as a survey form, as a newsletter or even as a multi-choice menu! Remember also that you can have more than one contact form in your site or even multiple forms on one page in your site!

To start, go to the page where you want to add your contact form. In this example, we are going to use a contact form on a Contact Us page. Drag and drop the Contact Forms Advanced widget on to the page and fill in the first field in the Widget Settings. This is the ‘Email Address to Send Form to’ field. The next field is optional depending on whether you have purchased EverWeb’s Contact Forms Enhanced Addon. If you have purchased the Addon, select the addon from the dropdown menu. This will make form Controls such as File Upload available for use.

You can name your form in the Contact Form Name field which is important if you are using the Contact Forms Enhanced widget or where you have more than one form in your website. To allow your form to interact with the outside world, select the option in the Mail Sending field that applies to you: SMTP Details, PHP Mail or EverWeb. If you have EverWeb+Hosting we recommend using the EverWeb option. If you are using SMTP, complete the details required in the SMTP Settings section.

Once you have finished these fields you can start your form design, however, you may also want to complete the SPAM Protection section of the Widget Settings first. This section uses Google’s reCAPTCHA as a way to stop your contact form from being spammed. To use this feature, click on the ‘Sign Up for reCaptacha v2’ button. This will take you through a set up so that you can add a reCaptacha Site Key and Secret Key to your contact form.

Once finished, you can start designing your form!

Form Controls: The Heart of Contact Form Design

The heart of form design in the Contact Form Advanced widget is the Form Controls section. This is where you add fields to the Form Controls list that define the form itself. When you start a new contact form, you will see three fields in the Form Controls list by default: Name, Email and Message. Click on the control called ‘Name’ and you will see the options available for it under the Form Controls list. The first option is the Control Type. If you click on this field, you will see a list of seventeen different ‘Controls’. In the upcoming EverWeb 4.0, this list will expand to nineteen. More about that later….

Select the type of form control that you want to use. The ‘Name’ form control uses a TextBox type control but you can change this to a different Control Type if you want. All control types have their own options as well so that you can customize how the person filling in the field inputs their data. As well as changing the type of control, you can also change the Form Control’s name. Double click on ‘the’Name’ in the Form Controls list. As with all other fields in EverWeb you can now edit ‘Name’ to be whatever you want e.g. ‘First Name’. When you press enter, you will see the Form Control name is updated as is the widget in the Editor Window. Let’s duplicate this control. With the ‘First Name’ control highlighted, click on the Duplicate button which is just below the Form Controls list. ‘First Name 1’ now appears at the bottom of the Form Controls list. Double click on the ‘First Name 1’ label and rename it as ‘Last Name’. Once you have done this, drag and drop the ‘Last Name’ control to under the First Name control.

The Form Controls list works like all other Assets Lists that you find in the Widget Settings of a Widget. So you can easily move controls up and down the list, delete controls and rename them as above with ease. You can even select multiple controls and change their Control Type, e.g. if you select both First Name and Last Name controls, you could change their Control Type to e.g. Text Area.

To complete the look of your Form Controls, use the Fonts and Styles section of the Widget Settings so that the look of your form matches the rest of your page and website.

Form Design Considerations

The power of your contact form comes in determining which fields to include in your contact form and which Form Control to apply. Our advice is to plan out the form beforehand so that you can then just use your preprepared design when using the Contact Form Advanced widget. Learning more about the different types of Form Control will also be of great benefit to you as well, both now and in the future.

EverWeb’s Contact Form Advanced Widget is a great way to go beyond just creating a Contact Form. Gaining knowledge of the different types of Form Control available will prove invaluable for expanding what a contact form can do for you. There is also EverWeb 4.0 to look forward to which will include some new Form Controls and also some new powerful options for some Form Controls. EverWeb 4.0 will be available in the near future so stay tuned for the forthcoming announcement!

Building your own website with EverWeb is easy to do and should be a rewarding, creative experience. If you are creating a fixed width website, you have great design freedom as this type of website allows for a free format design approach. When creating a responsive website, though, you may need to more time to find solutions to design problems due to the nature of responsive web design.

In this post we are going to look at an example of a responsive website using EverWeb’s Responsive Row and FlexBox widgets.

Scenario

In this example, I want to design a page containing five section. Each section will have an image and some text side by side. Under the text will be a button that my visitors can click upon to take them to another page. The five sections on the page alternate between text on the left, image on the right and text on the right, image on the left. On mobile devices, though, I want the image to always be above the text and button.

Designing the First FlexBox

In my responsive page design I first add a FlexBox widget to the page. The widget uses two Embedded Objects: the first is a Styled Text’ Object type which contains my text and a button which links to another page in my website. The second Embedded Object Type is an ‘Image’ object which contains only an image. In this example, the default and minimum widths for both objects is set at 240 pixels with a maximum width set to 480 pixels. Spacing is set to 10 to give a bit of a gap between the two Embedded Objects.

The first FlexBox widget will also have ‘Wrap Objects’ set to ‘Reverse Wrap’. This is set this way so that on mobile devices the Image object will appear above the Text object.

When setting up the FlexBox widget, consider setting a top and bottom margin so that there is spacing between each widget as you add them to the page.

To finish off the work on the first FlexBox, next go to the Metrics Inspector and add a left and right margin e.g. 30 pixels each. Also check to make sure that the Full Width field is checked.

The first FlexBox widget is now complete. In the Editor Window the text is displayed on the left hand side with the button underneath it and the image on the right. There is also a 30 pixel margin on either side of the FlexBox.

Cloning The FlexBox Widget

Now that the first FlexBox widget is finished, copy it to the Clipboard then paste it in to the page again to create the second section of the page.

In this section, you only need to change two things: First set the ‘Wrap Objects; field to ‘Wrap’, then change the order of the Embedded Objects so that the Image object first in the list and the Text object second in the list. When you do this, the image will then appear in the Editor Window on the left with the text and button appearing on the right. Change the image, text and button link to be what you want them to be for the second section of the page.

For the third FlexBox widget, I simply copy and paste the first FlexBox widget and move it to under the second FlexBox widget if needed. Again, change the image, text and button link as required. Repeat the same process to create the fourth and fifth FlexBox widgets on the page.

The FlexBox Page in Action

Once all of the five FlexBox widgets have been added to the page, Preview the page to see how it looks and works. If your browser has a responsive design mode, you can see how each section of the page has the image on top, text under the image then the button at the bottom of the section. Using a desktop browser, you will see sections alternating with image left, text and button right, then image right, text and button left and so on…

Extra FlexBox Widget Styling

Creating sections to separate out your content may make you want to add in some extra styling to visually differentiate one section from another. To add styling to a section, select the FlexBox widget that you want to style, then go to the Shape Options tab. From there you can use the Fill options to choose a background color, or color gradient for the section. You can also use EverWeb’s Dividers feature to create specific top and/or bottom visual section separators!

EverWeb’s FlexBox widget is a super powerful tool that lets you be creative and saves you time as well in the design process. And EverWeb’s Fill Options and Dividers feature also help you add flair to your page design too!

If you have a comment about this blog post, please let us know in the Comments Section below.

EverWeb on Social Media

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

Facebook

Flipboard

YouTube

Twitter

Instagram

Starting your own business is an exciting time, turning your dreams and ideas in to reality. It’s also a time where you are likely to want to get your EverWeb website up and running to promote your business and sell your goods and services. Here are some suggestions as what tools you may want to use when starting out…

It Starts with a Name…

When you start a business, one of the most important things to decide is your business name. You may want a name that tells your potential customers or clients what your business is about. The problem new businesses have is trying to match their business name with their website domain name. More often than not, someone is already using the domain name you want. So be prepared. Make a list of four to six business names that you like, in order of preference. Then check with your Chamber of Commerce to see if any of these names are available.

You can look at choosing your business name in another way. Is the domain name for the business name I want available for purchase? Quite often, businesses choose the website name first, then check to see if the business name is available at the Chamber of Commerce. By getting the website name first, it is more likely that the business name will also be available for use. You can check if a domain name is free using EverWeb’s Domain Name Search feature.

When choosing a name you also will want to look at the scope of the name. This comes down to looking at the extension that is used in the website name e.g. everweb.com. Most websites aim for a ‘.com’ suffix but other extensions are available e.g. ‘,org’, ‘.gov’, ‘.edu’ or a country e.g. ‘.co.uk’. ‘.nl’, and even ‘.eu’ for the European Union. This may give you more flexibility when choosing a website name, but bear in mind that some extensions are designed to be used for a specific purpose.

Finally be careful of names that are very similar to other names or using hyphens to try to differentiate your name from someone else’s. For example, you want to call your company ‘abcd business’ but the website name ‘abcdbusiness.com’ is already in use. So you decide to make ‘abcd-business.com’ your business name. We would not recommend this. When potential customers search for your business, you may find that they actually click on your competitor’s site instead of yours.

Choosing Your EverWeb Version

Once you have your website name and have registered your business with your Chamber of Commerce, the next step is to build your site. The next decision to make is where to host your website? You can either host your website with your own Hosting Provider or with EverWeb. The choice is yours. You can still build your website in EverWeb and publish it to whichever Hosting Provider you have chosen. We usually recommend hosting with EverWeb as you get hosting features built directly in to EverWeb itself. You do not have to worry about the Hosting end of things at all as EverWeb takes care of this for you.

Also remember that EverWeb comes with a free stock image library of over 500,000 images to help you choose the perfect images for your site. Just click on the Media button in the Toolbar and select the ‘Free Stock Photos’ option. Enter in your search criteria, then drag and drop the image you want to use into the Editor Window.

SEO Matters…

As you are building your website, you may also be aware that you need to get your site’s pages as high up in search engine results pages as possible. So remember as you design your pages to add in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) key words and phrases to pages that you want to be relevant for SEO. You do not need to include SEO for pages such as Contact Us and About Us type pages. Check out our SEO for EverWeb Video Course for a full tour of SEO and how to easily and quickly apply it to your website.

If you are selling good and services online or your need to maximise your website’s potential, you may also want to consider EverWeb’s SEO PowerUp Addon. The Addon lets you refine your SEO allowing you to assign priority and frequency to your website’s pages, creates and SML Sitemap that can be crawled by web crawlers, optimises your site for search engines, submits your pages to Google, Bing, Yahoo and Alexa, and makes your pages load faster for your visitors using GZip Compression.

And keep an eye on this blog and the EverWeb User Forum for exciting news coming for SEO in the upcoming EverWeb 4.0 release!

Securing Your Website

Whilst SEO will help your page rankings improve, your site’s security is ever more an important issue to keep in mind, both for your site itself and also for your visitors. Most sites today are secure so you see a padlock next to your site’s name in the browser search bar. This indicates to your visitors that data transmitted to and from your site’s server is end to end encoded. The other plus point here is that search engines rank secure websites above non-secure websites. All of these features are available with EverWeb’s Site Shield Addon including Enhanced Security Settings for advanced website security. EverWeb Site Shield Addon is available for purchase through your EverWeb Client Area.

At the moment Site Shield Addon is available only to EverWeb+Hosting customers, but stay tuned as that is about to change in the new EverWeb 4.0 release which should make this addon available to everyone.

Contact Forms

Communication and interaction with your customers is vital to keep a thriving business, especially online. EverWeb’s Contact Form Advanced widget enables you to create powerful, flexible forms to help you engage more effectively with your customer base. You can take your contact management one step further though with EverWeb’s Contact Forms Enhanced Addon. This addon is great when you want to store email addresses for later use and collect data from contact form submissions for analysis. You can design your contact forms for specific campaigns you want run through your website.

Contact Forms Enhanced also lets your visitors upload files to you through the contact formant mass emailing features are also available. For details about purchasing this addon, check out EverWeb’s Online Store. There will also be more features in EverWeb 4.0 to further revolutionize contact form design!

Membership Sites…

Our final consideration is to add a Membership Site to your website so that your visitors can access free and paid for content by signing up to your Membership Site. Easy to use. Easy to set up. Easy to administer and fully featured. It’s coming soon in EverWeb 4.0!

Setting up your website and adding in the features that you need to make your business safe and secure and profitable is easy with EverWeb. Our upcoming EverWeb 4.0 release is going to add great new features and enhancements to make your website building experience even better.

If you have a question about this post, please let us know in the Comments Section below.

Reading text based articles on the Internet puts the medium to one of its best uses. We now have the ability to build websites, create blogs, use micro-blogging tools and so on. In such an immediate, online world, often text based articles are mired in poor spelling and grammar. This typically leads to a poor user experience, may deter visitors coming back and may also have reputation consequences in business.

When building your website in EverWeb, you can easily make sure that your spelling and grammar are up to speed at all times. Here are some ways in which you can avoid the the common mistakes that can occur. Including the double ‘the’ we just put in for fun!

Adding and Spell Checking TextBoxes

One of the great things about EverWeb is that you can easily add TextBoxes to the pages of your site. This is great for headlines and sub headings as well as standard ‘body text’. If you have a reasonable amount of text, you may want to just use a TextBox for the purpose. When doing so, you may want to turn on the Edit-> Spelling -> Check Spelling While Typing menu option. In this way you can capture any spelling mistakes on the fly. As you type, if the spell checker thinks it has found a misspelled word, it will underline it with a thick red line so you can then correct it.

You can manually correct your spelling, or use the Spelling and Grammar dialog box from the Edit-> Spelling -> Show Spelling menu option to find the correct spelling of the word that has been misspelled. When using the Check Spelling While Typing function, it is probably best not to have the Show Spelling function running at the same time. The reason for this is that if you are typing and misspell a word, the Spelling and Grammar box will immediately come in to play. The dialog box will expect you to choose a suggested replacement word to correct your spelling mistake, or type in a replacement word yourself. Typically, though, we continue to type ahead even after making a mistake so you could find yourself typing in to the Spelling and Grammar box instead of in the TextBox.

Using The Spelling and Grammar Dialog Box

Our recommendation is to use the Check Spelling While Typing menu option on its own to check your spelling as you type. If you need help correcting a misspelled word, you can then activate the Show Spelling option. Quite often misspelled words are typos more than anything else so this may be the best option for most people.

The other way to spell check your text is to write the text first then spell check it afterwards. Use the Check Document Now option in conjunction with the Show Spelling option. In this way you will have the Spelling and Grammar dialog box visible so you can make your corrections all at one time. Close the Spelling and Grammar dialog box when finished.

Writing and Spell Checking Longer Text Articles

if you already know that you are going to be typing a lot of text, or that you are going to be writing a long blog post, you may find it better, and easier to use a word processing app instead. There are some advantage of using a word processing app when writing larger text articles. A word processor is probably better for organizing and structuring your text. You can take advantage of the words that your word processor has already learnt when spell checking other documents you have created and you can use built in grammar check and you can easily track your changes as you work. In this way you can take advantage of your word processing app’s capabilities then just copy and paste the finished result in to your EverWeb page or blog post.

SEO and Your Text

If SEO is important for your site and business, you should try to get your most important keyword(s) or phrase in to the first or second paragraph of your text if possible and in context. Remember, though, not to sacrifice the readability of your text, or your first paragraph messaging just for the sake of SEO. Your content should always come first over and above SEO.

Proof Reading Your Text

One final thought and that is to proof read your work before publishing it to the Internet. This task is usually best done by someone who is not the author of the text being published. A second pair of eyes on the text to be published can be valuable. If you do not have anyone to proof read your work, if you can, take some time away from the article you have written then look at it later again. This may give you a fresh insight in to what you have written and if it needs any reworking.

Spell checking in EverWeb is easy to do, but think about how you can get the best out of your writing experience as there may be more suitable options open to you.

In the early days of personal computing, the emergence of websites was limited by restrictions in the choice of colors and fonts that you could use. The choice of fonts that you could use in a website was extremely limited. There was also the problem of font compatibility between Mac and Windows PC. Fortunately such days are long past so using fonts in EverWeb to build your site is much easier and simpler. Using fonts in your website can be done in three basic ways as described below:

Web Safe Fonts

The compatibility issue that we mentioned above led to the creation of a set of fonts that are ‘web safe’ i.e. can be used on both Windows and Mac platforms. The fonts were chosen to make sure that websites developed on one platform would look the same on a different platform. The list of fonts include stapes such as Arial, Impact, Times New Roman, Comic Sans and Courier amongst others.

The advantage of using web safe fonts in your website is that they are reliable on Mac and windows and on mobile and desktop. The disadvantage is that there are relatively few fonts to choose from. Fortunately for website developers there are two solutions to this… the first is to use External Fonts and the second is to use Google Fonts…

Custom Fonts Make Web Design More Interesting!

It became quickly apparent that there was a desire for web pages to be presented in fonts other than the limited set of web safe fonts and this led to the development of more fonts for the web. These fonts would have to be loaded on a server so that they could be downloaded for use on a visitor’s browser as needed. Such custom fonts can also be used in your EverWeb website. When using custom fonts, make sure that you have the rights to do so before installing and using them online.

Fonts on a Mac are usually either True Type Fonts (rtf) or Open Type Format (oft). Your system fonts are located in the following system (not user) folder:

/Library/Fonts/

1. Add the .ttf and or .otf fonts that you want to use in to your /Library/Fonts/ folder.
2. To install your custom fonts, drag and drop your .ttf and/or .otf font files into the Assets List of your EverWeb Project. The fonts will be listed in the External Files section at the bottom of the Assets List.
3. Next create a TextBox on a page in EverWeb, then use the open open the Fonts panel either using the Toolbar, or by using the Cmd+T shortcut key.
4. Select your custom font. Remember that you must have your font installed on your computer for this to work.
5. Make a note of the Font name as it is listed in Font Panel. You will use this name in the code you will be entering in the step below.
6. Apply the custom font from the Font Panel to your TextBox.
7. The final step is to make sure that EverWeb publishes your website with the custom font file(s). Click on your Project file name in the Web List or use the File-> Edit Publishing Settings menuto go to your Site Publishing Settings.
8. Go to the Head Code field and enter the following code:

<style>

@font-face {

font-family: “FONTNAME”;

src:  url(“FONTFILE”);

}

</style>

Replace the word FONTNAME with the Font name that you made a note of in the Font Panel. It must be exactly the same in the code as it is in Font Panel.

Replace the word FONTFILE with a reference to the actual font file in the Assets List. To do this, go to the Assets List. Right click on the Font file in the External Files section. From the dropdown menu, select ‘Copy Relative Path’.

Now go back to the FONTFILE reference in your Site Publishing Settings and replace FONTFILE with the reference you copied to the Clipboard. For example your code may look something like this…

<style>

@font-face {

font-family: “Tribeca”;

src:  url(“{!-ASSETSPATH-!}External%20Files/Tribeca.ttf”);

}

</style>

Publish your site to test.

Using Google Fonts

The final type of custom font comes from Google in the form of Google Fonts. Google provides hundreds of free to use fonts that do not require installation on your website’s server in order for them to work. For many website developers this is makes adding custom fonts to their websites easy.

1. Start by going to the Google Fonts website at www.fonts.google.com
2. If you know which Google Font you want to use, simply search for it in the search box. 
3. Alternatively, browse the fonts and choose those you want to use in your website. 
4. One you have found the font I want to use e.g. Open Sans, click on the font, click on the Download Family button to download the Open Sans font family to your computer.
5. The downloaded fonts will be in a .ZIP file format.
6. Once the fonts have been downloaded, go to your Downloads folder on your computer and click on the ZIPfile. A finder window will open showing you the .ttf and/or .otf font files.
7. Next, I will click on the arrow on the right hand side, to download the fonts. In the popup window that appears, I will click on the .zip file to download these fonts.
8. To install the fonts locally, just double click on the .ttf file, then click on the Install Font button on the popup window appears. Repeat this process for all the fonts you want to install 

Once the fonts have been installed, you can use them in EverWeb as you would any other font.

Adding fonts to customize your EverWeb site is easy to do, and you have great choices to suit your needs, internal fonts, custom fonts or Google Fonts!

For the last few years, responsive web design has been the must have feature for website designers and EverWeb introduced this feature back in version 2.8. The goal of responsive web design is that you only have one page design which automatically adapts, or responds, to whatever device the page is displayed upon. Since its inception, responsive web design has become the standard for designing websites, but this does not mean that it is suitable for everyone’s needs…

Challenge, Complexity and Simplicity

Responsive Web Design successfully solves the challenge of the ‘one page fits all’ design challenge, but does so at a cost. The most cited cost is that it is more complex conceptually and also in implementation. It is certainly a different design paradigm that can lead to a frustrating design experience. Over the years, however, software developers have improved the tools that they create to help website designers build responsive websites. For EverWeb, the goal was to find a way to implement responsive web design in a way that you could still use EverWeb in the same way as you would building a center aligned page. The result is what you see in EverWeb today – the same experience whatever page design you choose to use.

If you have been an EverWeb user for a while, you may also have noticed that the tools used for creating Responsive pages in EverWeb have also evolved over time. Widgets have gained new and enhanced features to help making designing responsive pages easier, and other features have gained responsive capabilities. This is a continuously evolving and exciting process.

One of EverWeb’s own goals is to make designing the site that you want as easy as possible. So with that in mind, here are some tips to get you more comfortable about designing your first responsive website!

Rethinking Page Width

When you choose a theme template with a responsive page layout, you will notice that the ‘Content Width’ setting in the Page Layout Section of the Page Settings tab is greyed out. This is because a responsive page always takes up 100% of the width of the device it is being displayed upon.

There may be times, however, where you will want to limit to how wide an object can be on your page. You can use the Maximum Width setting in the Metrics Inspector to limit how wide an object can be.

You will probably also want to set a left and right margin on your page, which you can easily do, again using the Metrics Inspector’s Left and Right Margin settings in the ‘Size’ section.

Why There Is No Header on the Page

You may also have noticed that there is no Header section on the page and that the ‘Minimum Header Height’ section in the Page Layout section of the Page Settings tab is also greyed out. In responsive pages the header is just another full width object on the page, just placed at the top of the page, so it does not need to be treated in any special way.

Getting to Know Full Width and Fixed Objects

If you are new to Responsive website design, you may get thrown straight away when you add your first object to the page. For example, if you add a TextBox to the page, you will find that it takes up the full width of the page, which may, or may not, be what you wanted… A full width TextBox is probably great for a title, heading, or subheading on your page. Just add left and right margins from the Metrics Inspector and style your title text and you are finished! The same technique can then be applied to the body text of your page as well.

There might be instances where this may not be the solution you want, especially if you want to combine text with images, shapes, buttons and other media or objects. In this case, you should experiment with using widgets that easily let you combine such objects e.g. the Responsive Row, Text Section or FlexBox widgets.

Horizontal, Vertical and Freeform Perspectives

One thing that is very obvious with responsive websites is that all content is laid out horizontally in rows. Even if you see content displayed vertically in a column, this type of content will actually be structured within a row. Responsive website design is a structured approach which is needed so that the objects on your page can scale, and fit, properly at any page width.

If you are used to a more freeform approach in web design that is offered by EverWeb’s Center Aligned page layout, you may find responsive design restrictive. In reality, responsive web design is just structured as opposed to freeform. You can build a responsive website with a lot of flexibility and flair, it is only the design approach that is different, Designing successful responsive websites usually requires rethinking the way in which you design your site as well as using EverWeb’s responsive widgets which will help you creatively.

Keeping Everything In The Box

One of the keys to working successfully with responsive design is to remember that everything needs to fit inside ‘the box’ at all times. The box is the web page your are viewing. It is a flexible box so that you can easily change its height and width, which is exactly what you do when resizing your browser window.

Each row in your page is also a box which takes up the whole width of the page. As you change the browser with, each row will dynamically resize itself to suit the new outer box size. These rows can contain content (such as text, shapes or images), or may also contain boxes within themselves, for example, the FlexBox widget or Responsive Row. These boxes will, again, typically hold content.

So Responsive Web Design is analogous to working with flexible boxes within boxes within boxes. The main problem with this comes when page designs create boxes which are too large for the box they are wrapped in. If you create such a design then your page may at times, be too wide for the device it is being displayed upon. If you find yourself in this situation, check out our Solving Horizontal Page Drift video which explains how to easily fix the problem.

Conclusion

Working in a responsive web design environment may mean that you have to ‘think different’ and is a learning process too. It may not suit everyone’s needs but it is the best way to create a scalable site easily.

If you have a question about building a responsive website in EverWeb please let us know in the Comments Section below. We would love to hear about your experiences!

Once you have established your EverWeb website, you may start to think about the possible ways in which to expand its scope, possibilities and reach. For example, starting a blog, adding a storefront page or even monetizing your site through advertising on your website’s pages. In this post, we will take a look at whether you should be running advertisements in your EverWeb website. We begin with a question…

Is Advertising On My Site Going To Pay?

This is the first question you need to ask yourself. To answer this question you need to look at your site’s metrics. Is your website getting enough visitors to make placing advertisements on your site viable and profitable? Typically, website publishers get paid for placing advertisements by impressions and/or by advertisements being clicked upon by your visitors.

Two metrics are important to look at, the first is the amount of content that your website contains. You should only consider placing advertisements on your site if you have around 50 or more quality blog posts on your site. The second metric to look at is whether your site receives more than 100 organic visits to your site per day on average over a period of a few weeks.

If you meet the above criteria hosting advertisements on your site could be worthwhile. The next step is to look at the actual pros and cons of advertising on your site.

The Pros and Cons of Placing Ads on Your Site

Once you have decided that placing advertisements on your site is viable, you should then consider the pros and cons of placing advertisements on your site. Here is a fast summary…

Pros of Placing Advertisements on Your Website

• Advertisements can be monetized.
• Advertising can help fund your website.
• Advertisements are not limited to time slots.
• The Internet is a unique way to advertize and your site can be seen on all platforms.
• Advertisements run on your web pages 7×24.
• You can track the results of your advertisement placments.
• You can leverage your site’s existing SEO or build out your site’s SEO.
• You quickly see results, unlike SEO which can take time.

Cons of Placing Advertisements on Your Website

• You need to have enough good quality content (e.g at least 50-100 blog posts).
• You need to have enough hits on your site to make advertising viable (at least 100 per day).
• There are a lot of spammers offering ad placements.
• You might find that you are paying more for hosting advertisements than you earn from advertising.
• The time, effort and cost in maintaining and adjusting your advertising may make it prohibitive.

Choosing Your Advertising Partner

If you decide that placing ads on your website is still good to go, then you will probably be looking at Google as your provider. Most businesses go with Google as it is relatively easy to setup and work with. It is also a well known brand. Advertisers and website publishers also find it to be the most successful way of placing ads. Using Google also gives you the reassurance that you will not be working with a trusted parter and not a spammer or fraudulent business.

Google offers two products in this area: Google Ads and Google AdSense. Whilst the two products offer a lot that is the same as each other, there are differences as outlined below.

Google Ads versus Google AdSense – Which To Use?

First of all it is important to define what Google Ads and AdSense are…

Google Ads: You use this service if for advertisers who wants to promote their products and services on Google Search, YouTube, and other sites on the Internet.

AdSense: This product is for website publishers who want to earn money by placing ads on their website.

Whilst the two services Google Ads and AdSense have many similarities, you can see that they aim for two different audiences. As a website publisher, you would probably choose Google’s AdSense product.

Before You Start To Use Google AdSense

Before you start to use Google AdSense, make sure that you familiarize yourself with how it works and what the terms and conditions are for placing advertisements on your site. There are many things that you can and cannot do when placing an advertisement so make sure that you read up on it before starting to place advertisements on your pages.

Using Google AdSense on Your Website

When using Google’s AdSense you will use the following process:

• Make sure you have enough space on your pages to display advertisements: AdSense works by generating a code snippet that contains code that displays the advertiser’s advertisement.in EverWeb, you would add the HTML Snippet widget on to your page, then paste in thecae that y0u have copied to the clipboard from AdsSense into the ‘Code’ box. Press apply to finish. You would then move the advertisement displayed in the Editor Window to where you want it placed. ou will need to decide where you want to place the code.
• The advertisers’ bidding process: Advertisers bid in a real-time auction to be able to show their advertisements on a website publisher’s website. The advertiser with the highest bid will have their advertisements displayed on the website publisher’s website.
• The Website Publisher is Paid: Google manages and pays the website publisher directly for the advertisements placed.

Conclusion

Adding advertisements to your website can help you monitize your site, but there are caveats to doing so. Placing advertisements on your site may actually cost you rather than earn you money if your daily site traffic is low and if you do not already have good SEO practices and good content already in place. You should also make sure that you build out SEO for website so that it is as visible as possible to potential visitors. This in itself may be better, more efficient goal as it will get more visitors to your site. Playing advertisements that are only visible to a few visitors per day will not monitize your site, so build out your content on your site first, add SEO and see what effect this has on visits to your site over a few weeks. If all of that gives you confidence that you have the metrics you need to succeed with advertisements then why not give it a try.