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.
In our effort to ensure all website owners are given the opportunity to learn search engine optimization (SEO) and how to apply it to their website correctly, these video courses will now give Sandvox and RapidWeaver users the ability to learn at their own pace, and have a much better understanding of ways of driving more traffic to their websites.
The SEO Video Courses will train users on the basics of search engine optimization, and give them step-by-step instructions on how to apply it to their site, taking away all of the guess work. Our instructions are based on Google’s recommendations for making a more search engine friendly website.
The courses go above and beyond, giving users additional how-to tips, as well as introducing RAGE Software applications, and showing users the benefits of using these applications to make your optimization process a lot smoother.
Earlier in 2011, we made a post/video about publishing a website to FTP in iWeb SEO Tool. We have recently updated that video to clear up some confusion that some users were having. The updated video is listed below for your viewing pleasure.
Video Transcript
This tutorial is going to strictly cover publishing a website to FTP using iWeb SEO Tool. We will cover all of the main points involved with publishing, and then we will discuss the biggest issue users have when publishing their website. That issue is the directory path.
So the first thing you will need to do is press the publish button, and then make sure Publish to FTP is selected, and then press the next button.
In the FTP field, here is where you will put your server address. Sometimes the server address may look like the one I have here, but more often than not, it will just be your domain. So if my domain were publishingtoiweb.com then that is what I would put in this field.
Do not include http, www, or ftp in this field. Just put your domain.com or .net or whatever the extension may be.
Your username and password must be accurate otherwise logging in will not work, and you will not be able to publish.
Next, I want everyone to check to see if you have all of your FTP login details entered in correctly. To do so, press the Browse button. If you are able to see files and folders like we see here, then you have logged in correctly. If you get an error similar to this, then your FTP information is incorrect. You must get the correct FTP information before proceeding to the next step.
Now we’re going to discuss the Directory Path field. This is the area where most users experience the most difficulty. Chances are, if you are watching this video, you need to enter something in this field.
Firstly, If you use RAGE Web Hosting, you should type in /public_html. For everyone else, please refer to the following method;
The first thing I want you to try to do, is publish your site in from iWeb SEO Tool by typing a forward slash in the Directory Path field. If that still doesn’t publish your site, refer to the next step.
What you want to do is open up iWeb, and go to the publish page of the website you want to publish in iWeb SEO Tool. Take a look at the current FTP information you already have. In the directory/path field, there may or may not be some text. If there is some text, I want you to copy it. If there is no text in there, don’t worry, just bear with me for a moment.
Go back to iWeb SEO Tool, and in the directory path field, paste the text you just copied. Make sure there is a forward slash at the beginning of this text.
This next step applies to everyone, even the users who did not have anything typed into the Directory Path field. Go back to the Publish page, and now copy the text that is in the Site Name field. Then go back to iWeb SEO Tool and paste this text beside the text we pasted earlier. If you didn’t paste any text earlier, then this will be the first time you are pasting anything into the Directory Path field. If you have multiple words in your site name, you will need to add underscores to separate each word. Underscores are the default word separator that iWeb adds to your site name.
Your site should publish properly now.
I want to make a note that this method should work for 95-99% of users. Since there are so many variations when it comes to publishing, some users may not achieve success using this method. For example, if you host multiple domains on one hosting account, or if you use our method for shortening your iWeb URL, this method might not work for you.
If this method does not work for you, submit a support ticket at ragesw.com/support and we will be happy to assist you. Be sure to include your FTP login details which includes your server address, username, and password, to help speed up the process.
You can check to see if you published your website correctly from iWeb SEO Tool by visiting your website in your web browser, and going to View in the menu bar, and then selecting view source.
Then press Command and F to bring up the search feature, and type in the following:
head_code_set
If you see this code here, then it means you have published your site correctly from iWeb SEO Tool and all of your optimizations should be present.
If you do not see that code, then I want you to quit your browser, and re-launch it and visit your site and follow the previous steps again. If you still do not see that code, it means your site was not properly published from iWeb SEO Tool and you must try it again.
This is just a friendly reminder that all of our software is compatible with Apple’s newest version of OS X, Lion. If anyone has any suggestions for us, please don’t hesitate to send us a message through our support system and let us know!
MailShoot, our powerful newsletter and email management application has been updated to version 2.2.
MailShoot makes it extremely easy to create online subscription forms that lets your website visitors automatically sign up to your mailing list. Then you can send out personalized emails to each users at the click of a button. MailShoot lets you easily manage multiple mailing lists and send out targeted offers to the right customers.
MailShoot 2.2 makes it easier to create styled text and HTML newsletters. This means your emails look more professional and can attract more attention when your customers read your newsletter.
Download the free demo to try it out, or upgrade your registered version for free.
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