A few general tips you should really take into account when building your website...

Note: I’m aware that my website is far from perfect and I’m aware that I’m not an omniscient webmaster-guru... Nevertheless there are a few things...

Chapter 1: Notes about the navigation menu

Chapter 2: How to make your website be successful

Chapter 3: Making money and getting rich with a website (Google Ads and more...)

Chapter 4: Other things you should always keep in mind

Chapter 1: Notes about the navigation menu

The navigation is the heart of your website. If the content of your website is great but the navigation is a mess then the whole website gets to be a mess.

iWeb automatically adds every single page you add to it to the navigation menu. If you have 20 pages on your website 20 pages will show up in the navigation menu. I sometimes see those kind of websites. The navigation menu takes about half the height of the screen. Does that look good? No! Of course not! It’s a total no-go!

A good navigation menu should take only one row, not five or ten rows. Maximum is two rows. In the navigation only the main categories/topics of your website should show up. That looks much cleaner and clearer. Much more organized. Well structured. Hence much more intuitive to navigate.

Have a look at the Navigation menu FAQ for more informations and tutorials on how to have pages which do not display in the navigation bar and much more.

Chapter 2: How to make your website be successful

First thing to do is, of course, have it appearing on the major search engines. First of all Google. Google has more than 70% market share. In addition to that if your website appears on Google it is more than likely that it will appear on the other major search engines as well.

“NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING”

If you don’t do anything for its success it will most likely not be successful. You have to promote it. Promoting a website is hard work and pretty time consuming as well.

Nowadays people mostly browse the web starting from a search engine where they type in the keywords related to the topic they are interest in. Different keywords give different results. You have to write your content so that it includes all the keywords a potential visitor of the website could search for. Which is not as easy as it may seem. You also need to find out what people are looking for, what they are interested in, what they want to see when they get on your website and so on. It’s pretty huge. Read the Google FAQ to know how to get your pages showing up on Google.

In addition to the search engines another really big source of traffic are the interest-communities. Interest communities are websites, mostly forums, where people interested in the same topic get together to discuss about it. As an example for iWeb it’s the Apple iWeb Discussion Forum, Macrumors forums and so on... You need to be part of the community and make the community aware of the website. The best advertising is, as always, the mouth to mouth propaganda (not just from you but from other people in the community as well). If your website is good other people of the community will link to it as a reference. If that happens that’s the best thing because it tells you that you’re doing a great job. Beware: do not blindly post the link everywhere, that’s spamming which is the wrong way, not appreciated and has the opposite effect of the desired one. It needs to have something to do with the topic that is being discussed. And of course there will still be people accusing you of spamming but if you link to the site “in the right measure” and “in an appropriate way” those people will be only few and negligible. Especially if most of the other people think that your website is a great product...

Chapter 3: Making money and getting rich with a website (Google Ads and more...)

Some people think that it is really easy to earn with a website: FORGET IT!

“NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING”

If you want to get rich do something else. Pick up a guitar, go to town and start singing. Either they’ll pay you because you’re so good at playing the guitar and singing or they will pay you to stop singing and playing.

Even if a website is successful that still doesn’t mean that it’s generating money.

Building and updating a serious website is a very time consuming thing and with a website you will most likely earn little to nothing. Things of course are different when you have a product to sell (like a software, handcrafted stuff and so on...) I’m now talking about website-only kind of websites.

- About Google Adsense: Avoid them.

1. They look bad on the pages and destroy the whole design.

2. People don’t like to see them on your site.

3. They sometimes are totally off-topic. Example: “meet thai-girls” on my iwebfaq.org website when I had them.

4. 4.You will not earn anything out of them. Believe me.
   

1. -PayPal Donation Buttons: Oh well...
   

Ask yourself: “Would you donate? Will you donate to iwebfaq.org?”

Unfortunately for me you most-likely will not... Why not? Because the content is accessible for free, you have access to it even if you don’t donate, so why should you donate?! Would I deserve it? Of course I would, I’m sure you agree on that seen the amount of work and time I spent on it... But... You will probably not donate anyway... So unfortunately with Donation buttons you earn little to nothing since we’re all human beings here...

Bottom line: Trust me. What you earn from a website is nothing compared to the incredible huge amount of time and work you put into building and updating it.

Do not overload your website with ads and rotating banners or whatever. It makes it difficult to read the content and people don’t like it (I bet you don’t like those kind of websites either so why should other people like them?). If you do overload it people are not so likely to come back or provide the link of it to friends and so on.

If you want to put ads on your website make sure they fit the content of your website and also the design. Ads should be part of the content, the website and its design not a standalone disturbing non-matching part of it. Best would also be to advertise only products you know or you would buy yourself.

Chapter 4: Other things you should always keep in mind

Avoid text turning into images (read Note 3 of the Google FAQ to know more about that).

Always keep in mind that “NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING”.

Always ask yourself: “If I were a visitor... What would I do and what not? Would I donate? Would I like the navigation? Would I like the design? Would I... ?”. If you ever find yourself answering a question with “No” or with “I wouldn’t” then you know something’s going wrong.

If you like your website most likely your visitors will like it as well. If you don’t, most likely also your visitors will not.

If you have any other must have tip share it on my Forum.

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- Cédric -