Webpage Standards

Hi - thank you for taking my question. I am a photographer but am just now learning how to use adobe photoshop to make a web page of my pics. It is asking me for a web page size - could you please tell me what the "standard," web page size and number of pixels per square inch should be.
Thankyou very much.
Pete

Hi Pete,The default webpage size is 800 pixels by 600 pixels with 72 dpi (dots per inch) resolution.
Hope this helps!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Get Google to crawl meta tags

Hi Annette,

I can't get Google to correctly crawl my meta tags.At least a month ago, I updated my meta tags on the following website: www.humorandwisdom.com as follows:

META name="title" content="Jokes and Riddles, Humor and Wisdom by Kuder.

META name="description" content="An organized and screened collection of jokes, riddles, puzzles, and lifestyle enhancing wisdom."

META name="keywords" content="Jokes and riddles, Joke, jokes, riddle, riddles, puns, Kuder, humor, wisdom, wealth, happiness, affirmation, affirmations, aphorism, aphorisms, rebus, rebuses, words of wisdom, positive affirmations, blonde jokes, blond jokes, Halloween jokes, Halloween riddles, Halloween humor, Christmas jokes, Christmas riddles, Christmas humor, jokes riddles, difficult riddles, hard riddles, answers to riddles, funny riddles, math riddles, logical riddles, funny puns, office humor."

When I put "humor and wisdom" into a Google search, it comes back with:
return to kuder's home page Jokes and Riddles, Humor and Wisdom by Kuder Click flag. Jokes The best of the best. Riddles The cream of the crop. Words of Wisdom Ditto! ...

The above are random words from my home page, but isn't what I submitted and isn't what I want my listing to say. Clicking on what Google cached, it reads:

This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.humorandwisdom.com/ as retrieved on Oct 17, 2006 11:59:35 GMT.G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web. I have re-submitted my website a couple of times. How can I get Google to get my meta tags right? Also, Google isn't picking up the other key words I submitted.

Roger

Hi Roger,

That's because Google doesn't use the description metatag as what they display in the results. If you had "humor and wisdom" in your description tag, which you don't, it might display that, but not necessarily.

When you enter a keyword phrase in Google's search it crawls all the content of your homepage or entire site (depending on your robots follow tag). What is displays in the results is text around that phrase that appears in the content of your page. You don't have "humor and wisdom" in your text of the page either.

Also, you don't have the phrase "humor and wisdom" in your keyword tag. In fact, your doing that tag all wrong. You should NEVER use single words as keywords. You should always use 2-4 word phrases. Second, those phrases need to be in the text/content of the page too. Third, you should only have 2-4 keywords in that metatag, with the most important one first.

When you say Google isn't picking up the other keywords you "submitted" are you meaning the ones in your keyword tag? Not sure what you mean here. Google hardly pays attention to metatags other than the title tag. Other search engines might, but you have to do your tags correctly, as I've described above.

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Website Feedback Form

Hello Annette,
Is there any type of free web feed back form that I can use on my web site. The web site I have does have a from available but I doent' seem to want to repond to sending me and email that feedback has been received.

What I want is a form that visitors can submit and the form will come to me first before it is actually posted on my site. I have a guest book but I am trying to get a web form also.
Thank you, Martha

Hi Martha,
I'll bet what's happening is you haven't set your form up correctly. Sometimes because of your website hosting package, you have to make sure to route your form to an email that included your domain name, i.e. info@yourdomain.com.

Hope this helps.
Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Free Guestbook

Hi Girl Geek,
Is there any type of free guest book that I can add to my web site that has the option of reviewing the guest book entires before they are posted to the web site? Thank you
Martha

Hi Martha,
You might try Bravenet.net for free guestbook. Beware, as guestbooks get spammed alot.

Otherwise, I'd suggest a blog. You can get a free one at http://www.blogger.com/ and set it up to moderate comments.

Thanks for asking!


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Helpful Programs to have for Web Design

Hi Annette,
I've just got started building my own website from scratch. Tried Dreamweaver, but it just took too long to learn. So I've decided to use CoolPage. It's a pretty basic, but quite easily understood web design program. My question is, what are the most popular or most crucial pieces of design software to have while building a very basic website. I'd like to have a shopping cart and newsletter on it. I've got Photoshop and a good little free button making program. What else would I need in terms of software. Nothing too fancy like flash or others. Just the essentials for a beginner website builder like myself.
Thanks
Rob

Hi Rob,
The other thing you will need is a way to compress images, as filesize usually is large and slows down page loading time. Photoshop does that when you tell it to. Click "save optimized for web."

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Friends Building Sites for Friends

Hi:

My friend is running a restaurant. I would like to create a web page for them. But i have no experience. Can you tell me how can i begin and is it possible for customer order the food through the internet and them fax it to fax machine.

Thanks
Tat

Hi Tat,

Designing a website for a business takes each of the following skills and knowledge:

1. HTML coding or use of a WYSIWYG editor, like Dreamweaver or FrontPage
2. Knowledge of search engine marketing
3. Visual design and graphic skills
4. Adding features, like fax in orders
5. Excellent writing skills and knowing how people read websites, which is different than print
6. Designing navigation

Unless you have all of those skills, I would recommend you have your friend hire a professional web designer. Putting a "beginners" website online may create a bad impression of your friend's business and do more harm than good. About 50% of my business over the last 4 years has been fixing sites built by well intentioned friends.

I'm sorry, but I had to laugh at your message because your grammar made it sounds like you want to fax the food to a fax machine.


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Making Site Look More Professional on a Budget

Hi Girl Geek,
I was thinking it might be wise to get a webdesigner to help me make my website look more professional and to make my store look more credible, but I don't have much money to spare. I don't think I could afford to pay someone per hour, or just that they'd make the code easy enough to read that I could make changes as needed. What do you think I should do? Also do you think highly of paypal.com as a means for a business shopping cart?
James

Hi James,

Even if you have a small budget, it's worth it to have a professional looking site. I'd be glad to look it over and give you some ideas of how to do this on a budget. You can buy inexpensive templates and build the site around that. Although it wouldn't be customized, there are some pretty good templates out there.

Yes, I use PayPal all the time for shopping carts and think very highly of it. It's cheap and it's secure, and it can do whatever most businesses need.

Thanks for asking!


Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free initial consultation
1-877-866-4335