Ever wanted to add a forum to your iWeb website? Well now you can. This quick tutorial will show you a very easy way to add a forum to an iWeb website. Also see our post on how to add a mailing list signup form to an iWeb website.
Video Transcript:
In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can easily add a forum to your website in iWeb.
The first thing we’re going to do is open our web browser and go to nabble.com.
Next, click on the Start a Free Forum button. Type in a username that you want to use on the forum, and enter your e-mail address and a password.
Then think of the name that you want to give to your forum. Don’t worry too much about making the perfect name as you can easily change this later on.
You can put a description in if you want, otherwise leave it blank and type in the Captcha, and then press Create Forum.
When you are done, you will be taken to your forum. You will need to then open the confirmation e-mail that you will be sent, and then click to confirm. When you have been confirmed, your forum will look something like this.
Next, click on Options, and then select Embedding Options. Now highlight this embed code that you are given, and copy it.
Now let’s open up our sites in iWeb. Add a page by clicking Add Page, and selecting your template and then highlighting the Blank page and pressing the Choose button.
Delete the text box that says Text in it. Drag the HTML Snippet widget onto the page, and paste the embed code that we just copied.
Adjust the snippet so that the forum fits nicely on your page.
When you publish your site, your forum will be live and your users can begin having discussions.
In the following video tutorial, we are going to cover how to add custom buttons to your iWeb website using ButtonDesign. With these custom buttons, you can create your own navigation menu, or include other buttons such as Buy Now, Learn More, etc.
Video Transcript:
To add custom buttons to your iWeb website using RAGE Software’s ButtonDesign, follow these simple steps.
First, choose the button template that you want to use. Next, type in your button caption. This will be the text that will appear on the button.
Adjust the button’s width and zoom as you want it to be.
When you are done, click on the Export To Web Site button in the top right corner of the application.
Make sure the option to Save As HTML Button is selected. Select PNG as the Image Type, select the location to save the button, and then press the Save button.
Next, open up iWeb, and drag and drop the .PNG button onto the page you want to add it to. Move the button to your desired location.
With the button still highlighted, click on the Inspector button, and then go to the Links tab. You can now link the button to your desired destination.
Repeat this process for as many buttons as you want.
This is what an all button navigation menu looks like.
The site menu consists of all of these links, usually located at the top of each web page. The site menu is another good place for you to include some of your keyterms. So instead of having our menu links have text such as Home, Photos, or Links for example, we can make them more descriptive and include our keyterms in them.
To change the text of the site menu, you will need to change each page individually. Simply double click on the page name, and type in the term that you want to show in the site menu. You’ll be able to see the change take place immediately when you look at your site menu. Repeat this process for all of the pages included in your menu.
Some of the principles for the Page Names apply when you are naming the titles in your site menu. Do not make them too long. If you make the titles too long, it will not look very nice, and you risk having some of your page titles not fit in the menu. Try to use keyterms that are only one or two words in length.
Make sure that whatever you choose actually relates to the page it takes the user to, and that it is not a word that might confuse or mislead any of your visitors. Remember, in some cases, it might not be necessary to have a keyterm in the site menu. A link to a Contact Us page wouldn’t need to be any more descriptive than it already is, even though it’s a very generic term.
Check out the SEO For Sandvox Video Course to watch the entire course in a very easy-to-follow manner.
If you already have pages with poor filenames but are actually successful with search engines, do not change the filename as this will ruin your ranking. Just be sure to apply this optimization tip in the future.
When we begin adding different pages for our sites in Sandvox, they will show up in our site outline with names such as Photo, Untitled 1, Untilted 2. These page names are a great place for us to include our keyterms. To change your page name, you can highlight the page in the site outline, and then in the URL field at the bottom of the application, type in your new page name. A few tips when creating this page name. Don’t make it excessively long. You can only make it a maximum of 27 characters in Sandvox, which should be good for about 4 or 5 words, which seems like a good amount. Separate your words with dashes, as opposed to spaces or underscores. And finally, use a keyterm that is relevant to the content on the actual page.
With the recent release of WebDesign 3.5, we are extremely excited to spread the word of WebDesign’s new Inspector feature, which allows users to click on areas of their site in the live side-by-side preview window, and automatically be taken to that part of the site in the code. The following video will demonstrate this great new feature, and show exactly how it works.
Video Transcript:
WebDesign now offers the all new inspector feature, which is a click and edit option using the live side-by-side previews. Here’s how it works.
Simply move your mouse cursor over certain areas of your site on the live preview. You will see how a red rectangle will appear over certain elements on the page.
If you click on any of these elements, it will highlight the code on the left side, making it very easy for you to edit each part of your website.
This feature makes it even easier for any user who is not all that familiar with HTML, but wants to quickly and easily edit a template.
WebDesign is now an even better option for users looking for alternate website builder to iWeb.
You can also click your navigation links, to be taken to the code for your navigation menus. If you want to change the text in the links on each page, then you can edit that right from within your page. BUT, if you want your navigation menu to appear the same on each of your pages, you will still need to edit the actual include file itself.
To do this, just open up the site manager, and open the include file that you want to edit, and make your changes there.
As most of us know, iWeb was intended for personal use, but its extremely friendly user interface and vast template selection has led many small-medium businesses to use it as their in-house solution for web design.
In this quick start guide, I am going to give users some great suggestions on the best ways to use iWeb for business purposes, and how our products and services can help you.
1) First and foremost, having a professional business domain name with a professional hosting company is a must. We still see many iWeb business sites have a me.com address. While this may be good for a personal website, it can be a big mistake for a business site. Visit our hosting page and see how we can assist users with iWeb web hosting.
2) Getting listed in search engines often troubles many iWeb users. If you have an iWeb business site, this is certainly not going to help you get any new customers. The best way to get your site indexed in search engines is by creating an XML Sitemap. Think of an XML Sitemap as a blueprint of your website, designed specifically for search engines. It will list all of the pages on your site in an XML file. You can then publish this file and notify search engines of its existence. Some users have reported being indexed in search results within 24 hours of submitting their Sitemap. Sitemap Automator will allow you to quickly and easily do this. There is also an easy video tutorial to follow along with.
3) As mentioned earlier, iWeb was designed for personal use. So when using iWeb for business purposes, there are a few obstacles that we must overcome. One of which is the website’s search engine friendliness. This obstacle is pretty simple to overcome with our tool called iWeb SEO Tool. This tool will allow you to add many important items to your site, such as Title Tags, Page Descriptions, Alt Text for images, and analytical codes.
4) The speed at which your site loads can have an impact on where you rank in search results, as well as if your website visitors decide to hit the back button or not. If you notice that your site is loading at a slow rate, try out WebCrusher and see if it helps speed up your site. The simple drag and drop method will cut out the fat and make your site load much faster in user’s browsers.
5) Some users who visit a website buy a product or contact the business owner to conduct business. Some do, but most don’t. Stay in touch with the ones who don’t make a purchase by having a newsletter signup form on your site. You can build up your list and send out e-mails about new product launches, or sales, or whatever you want. MailShoot will allow you to easily embed a signup form by simply copying and pasting some code.
6) Using PayPal to sell your products is an easy way to launch your site quickly. You can follow this popular tutorial to see a step-by-step method for adding PayPal to an iWeb business site.
7) Everyone using iWeb for business purposes should do a complete search engine optimization makeover to their site. This includes everything from making the navigation menu search engine friendly, to creating great content, to adding headers and titles. You can learn everything you need to know about SEO For an iWeb site from the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial.
Welcome to the SEO For Sandvox Video Course. This is the first of about 25 video tutorials in the SEO For Sandvox series. To view the entire video course in an easy-to-follow manner, please visit the SEO For Sandvox page.
Video Transcript:
Hello and welcome to the SEO For Sandvox video tutorial. My name is Jeremy, and over the next little while, I will be showing you how to properly optimize your Sandvox-made website so that you can have the best chance of ranking at the top of search engines.
This video is being provided to all Sandvox users for for free, courtesy of RAGE Software. We are providing this video to meet our goal to educate all owners of small businesses, so that they can have a better understanding of how to make their websites more visible to search engines and thus rank higher. In this video, I will be showing some of our software that will really help you during your optimization. You are not obligated to purchase the software, however, you will see how the applications can really make your life easier, and we encourage you to purchase anything you like, and help further support our goal.
So what is search engine optimization? Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of attracting more visitors through search engines. You will notice how I do not define SEO as having a top ranked site. This is because even if you have a site that ranks at the top of all search engines, there is no guarantee that searchers are typing in the specific keywords you rank for and will even click your website in the search results. In this series of tutorials, we will cover the basics of how to discover highly searched key-terms and how to determine which ones are best to target.
These tutorials have been created to help you to understand the major optimizations, and how to implement them on your site. With so much information available on the web, search engine optimization can seem very confusing and time consuming to learn. These tutorials are to-the-point, and allow you to visualize what needs to be done, so that you can have a better understanding at a much quicker pace than if you had to sift through a 400 page book.
Sandvox makes the process of optimizing our sites for search engines quite simple. If you are unsure of what the proper techniques for optimization are, then this tutorial will definitely help you. Having the background knowledge of what search engines recommend, is a must if we want to have our optimizations go smoothly.
SEO is a process that we must go through in order to achieve our desired results. It is not something you do once and just forget about. It’s a form of marketing and if you want to keep on improving your chances at success and growing your business it is something you will constantly evaluate. Remember, if SEO were an easy thing to do, every site would be number one in search engines which is simply impossible.
This video will be broken down into three stages. The first stage, called the Planning stage, will be the briefest. We will go over a couple of things that we should do before we even begin optmizing our website. The second stage will be the on-page optimization stage. This is where we will be looking at the different methods for making our actual site more search engine friendly. On-page optimizations are only a portion of the battle to gain more traffic, but they are essentially the building blocks for your SEO campaign. The third and final stage will be the off-page optimizations. Off-page optimizations are an extremely important part of our attempt at gaining a positive reputation for our sites, as well as a means for gaining additional traffic from other places on the web.
The video will be shown in step-by-step format. This does not mean that you must follow this plan perfectly, but it is setup that way so that those who require this type of instruction still have that opportunity.
Remember, if you have any questions or do not understand one or more of the concepts, you can start a thread in our SEO forums, or submit a ticket through our support system.
This video tutorial will show you how you can easily add a Google Plus One (+1) button to your website in iWeb. For more SEO tips for your iWeb site, check out our SEO for iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial.
Video Transcript:
You might have noticed these +1 buttons next to your search results when in searching in Google. These buttons can tell Google that you like this link and essentially recommend it to all friends connected to you through Google’s new social networking service, Google+. When you plus one a link, and when someone connected to you does a similar search, any website you have +1’ed will appear at the top of the results for your friends. Your goal is to get as many people to +1 your website. In this video I am going to show you how you can add this button to your website in iWeb.
So to add a Google Plus One, first visit the Google Plus One page. You can pause this video to type in the URL you see here, or you can do a search for Google Plus One and click on the Google +1 button result.
Next, you will see a link on this page that says Get The Code. Click on that link.
On the next page, the first thing you will do is choose the size of the plus one button that you like best. You can then select your language. Next, click on the Advanced Options button, and type in your URL, in the URL to +1 field. I have noticed that it is best to include http:// and www in this field.
Now we can highlight all of the code and copy it.
Open up your site in iWeb, and drag and drop an HTML Snippet onto the page. Paste the code that you just copied. You should now be able to see your Google Plus One button. If you want to put the button on another page or pages of your website, then paste the code in another an HTML snippet on that page. If you want to leave the URL to your home page, you can do so, otherwise, you can add the page extension to the URL that is already typed in there.
If you paste the code and you don’t see anything at all, first, make sure you typed your URL in with http:// and www. You can also try publishing your site to the web to see if it becomes live once the site is published.
I just want to show you what happens when you either leave the URL field blank, or do not include http:// and www.
You will notice that the HTML Snippet shows up as this huge box which I am not dragging along with my mouse. I could minimize this box until it is the size of the the Plus One button, however, that can take me a while. So just take note of these things if the button is not showing up for you.
Otherwise, that is how you add a Google Plus One button to an iWeb website. Be sure to check out our other helpful iWeb tips and tricks videos which are located in the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial or our iWeb SEO blog.
Although WebCrusher lets you publish your website directly to your FTP server some users want to use their own FTP client. If you like using an FTP client for publishing your website, you still have that option after you have run your site through WebCrusher. Follow the instructions in the video tutorial to learn how.
Video Transcript
To publish your WebCrusher optimized site using a third-party FTP client, follow these simple steps.
First, locate your optimized website folder by clicking Export, and selecting the Open Enclosing Folder tab. Then press the Next button, and your optimized website folder should appear in the Finder window.
Open your FTP client. For this demonstration, I am using CyberDuck which is a free FTP client which you can download from cyberduck.ch or the Mac App Store. Once your FTP login information has been entered, and you’ve connected to your server, locate the directory on your server that your website is associated with… and then drag and drop the optimized website folder into that directory. When your site has finished uploading, you can visit it and view the source code to make sure it has published correctly.
If your code looks tightly squeezed together like you see here, then you have published it properly.
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