Free Web Builders Devalue Web Designers Work

It can be slightly frustrating for any professional web designer out there when you are questioned regarding your work and how it is worth what they are paying due to the mass amount of advertisements of applications that suggest you can have a your own website up and running at just the click of a button.

Sure, it is very true that you can indeed have a website of your own live within minutes but those kind of services are far from professional, client's may not always realise that and the fact they will assume that is how websites are built can be a little annoying to say the least.

From Freewebs to the entire social networking community such as MySpace and Bebo etc, a lot of the popular websites you visit today now let you alter the way your page looks such as layout and colours or in the case of Freewebs you can completely create a site without a single line of code in sight and without paying a penny.

The difference that really matters when it comes to having a site designed professionally is that you get a lot more than just a better looking and better coded website.

Some of the advantages of having a website coded well as opposed to using any kind of visual site builder.



Accessibility - When a site is created, accessibility is often neglected and you are instantly ignoring a certain percentage of your visitors and quite possibly losing yourself potential leads and sales not to mention that it is actually a legal requirement to make sure your website is accessible to all including blind, deaf partially sighted and any other common disabilities.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - This would be one of your major sources of traffic should you have a well made site, search engines crawl websites with bots than scan the code of your pages to look for keywords and tons of other information to rank you in search result pages, a poorly coded web page just makes the life of those little bots that little bit harder, the term is known as "Code to Content" and you want to keep your code as clean as possible.

Cross Browser Compatibility - Ok, so most of you probably stick to using one browser and any bugs you find you may get fixed and make sure it looks good but only in the browser your using, coding a site so they validate with W3C can help you achieve cross browser compatibility much better than ignoring validation. There are still some minor differences between browsers and how they render your code but for the most part coding well will make sure the majority of possible issues never occur.

Page Load Times - I can't think of anything more tedious than a page that takes a while to fully load, a lot of load time can be reduced simply by creating pages correctly by which I mean validating and and not having useless code dotted around the place. Many visitors to your website may even hit their back button due to slow page load times so it is something to consider.

Those are a few of the most important aspects of having a professionally made website to consider.

So to sum up this article, you can indeed have yourself a website setup after just a few clicks of your mouse but is that going to give you a website that really works for you? How much do you really care about your visitors experience during their time on your website?

Most importantly, how serious do you want your visitors to take you?

So remember, when you pay good money for web design there is a reason behind it and it is not done in the "Drag Drop" environment that is often assumed.

vBulletin SEO

Are you running a vBulletin forum and want to know how you can get more traffic? Well there is a great product available from vBSEO that will help you rank much better is search engines under keywords that matter.

vBuleetin search engine optimization will help by rewriting all your URL's to include keywords and also change the extension from PHP to HTML which is always better when it comes to ranking well.

The vBSEO solution enables your vBulletin forum to get more web visitors from all search engines including Google, Yahoo, & MSN Search.

I have been using vBSEO for a while now and I promise it was the best move I ever made.

It costs $150 which may turn you away but when you understand the benefits you will change your mind, after all, if you want to make money then you have to invest it.

Some other great things that come with vBSEO are:

Trackbacks - A Trackback is simply an acknowledgment. This acknowledgment is sent via a network signal (ping) from Site A (originator) to Site B (receptor). The receptor often publishes a link back to the originator indicating its worthiness.

Trackback requires both, Site A and Site B to be Trackback enabled in order to establish this communication. Trackback does not require for Site A to phisically link to Site B.

Pingbacks - A Pingback is also a signal (ping) sent from Site A to Site B. However, it's also a link. When Site B receives the notification signal, it automatically goes back to Site A checking for the existance of a live incoming link, if it exists, the Pingback is recorded successfully. This makes Pingbacks less prone to SPAM than Trackbacks.

Both sites must be Pingback enabled in order to establish this communication. If a site is Pingback enabled, each time you link-out you will be "pinging" external sites. Pingback requires for Site A to phisically link to Site B.

Refbacks - A Refback is also a link. However in this case, Site A (link originator) does not need to "tell" anything to Site B (receptor). Instead, the receptor Site "discovers" this link immediately after the first web visitor gets to the site by clicking on the link. This is done by analyzing information carried by this web visitor's browser referer header.

This is an easier method than Pingbacks since the Site originating the link doesn't have to be Pingback enabled (Posting a link back within any webpage is good enough).

I would suggest really having a look at it because it is more than worth the money.

Check out my forum running it if you like here: Huxley Forums

Or if you want to learn more or get a copy then visit the vBSEO website now!

Go To vBSEO

I hope you enjoyed this article

Apogee Search SEO Glossary

This is a great website where you can find all the technical terms for everything related to Search Enging Optimization along with various terms about general web talk.

Often you may find your self browsing a discussion board or asking questions and the answers are always worded with technical words for everything which just leaves you needing to ask more questions so why not check out this amazing SEO glossary and get the upper hand now.

The glossary is laid out in a very simple alphabetical order so finding what you want is super easy

How Google Ranks Websites

All the secrets and information is about to be unleashed. The mystery is over and the secrets are open to showing you how your website is ranked through Google

Links have always played a significance in determining sites value. Links pointing towards your site help evaluate the value of a document. The more links pointing towards something of significance is shown as a greater value. Though, search engines continue to add some additional standards to always keep ahead of the game.

In the precise years, the amount of incoming traffic or links have reached higher results, but a additional twist has been rather or not the incoming traffic is quality and benefit searchers. This kind of action was becoming very popular, with a lot of black hat seo tricks which made it harder for searchers to find what they were looking for. And the end result was poor quality for search engines.

Getting In Google Searches Other Than Dot Com

Well this is my first entry to this blog and I think it is a good one to get some interest.

Have you ever wondered how to get into a search engine under “Pages In The UK Only� results as well as staying in the world based search of Google.com for example?

Well I am going to share with you how you can make sure your site covers more searches than just Yahoo.com, Google.com, MSN.com and so on.



It is actually quite simple really but read carefully anyway.

There are only two factors that play a part in where your website will appear in searches.

1. You domain category i.e. if it is .com, .co.uk .net and such
2. Where your web server is located

If you want your website to appear in UK and .com searches then there are 2 combinations that would work for this.

If you have a .co.uk domain name then all you have to do is make sure you get it hosted in a server in the US and then it will appear in UK searches and .com searches.

If you have a .com domain then you need to have it hosted in the UK and that is it.

If you were to buy a .com domain and get it hosted in the US then you would only come up in Google.com searches, well it would be the same for Yahoo, MSN (etc).

Remember that I have used the example of getting in UK searches just to keep it simple but it works for example if you wanted to be in .nl searches then you could get a .com domain and be hosted in the Netherlands or get a alternatively get a .de and be hosted in the US.

There is one thing to look out for when looking at hosts though and that is the fact that just because a host may claim to be a UK host it does not mean their servers are in the UK so when you look at hosting packages be sure to ask them the question of where the servers are located.

Anyway I hope that was simple enough to follow, if it is not clear enough or you have more questions then please feel free to contact me.