It is often difficult to recommend a way to publish your posts on your web site. But Raymond Chen enlightens us about a technique provably efficient to prepare in advance the posts that will be published later: “How does Raymond decide what to post on any particular day?“.

It is often difficult to create a web site if you do not have all the steps in your mind. It’s easy to forget something or to loose your aim.

LifeHacker has a very good article titled How to Build a Web Site from Scratch with No Experience which will guide you through the needed steps:

1. You Need a Goal and a Good Idea
2. Set Apart Some Time
3. Identify the Tools for the Job
4. Start Making Mistakes
5. Get Some Books
6. Stand On the Shoulders of Giants
7. Profit

It’s clear reading and definitely useful, even for more seasoned web site developers.

Do you want to get a synthétic view of the operation of your web site? Go check Is My Blog Working to know all about your blog.

Do you want to make your web site compatible with the iPhone (or most of the intelligent mobile phones)? This is relatively easy. I found two good solutions for you:

1. For WordPress users, why not install and use WPtouch which will build a theme compatible with the small screens of these phones out of your web site?



2. For the others, there is DoYouFeed. It will take your RSS feed to present it right. Not hard if you have an RSS thread containing full posts (rather than summaries); But you already know that this is the right thing to do…

Do you want your blog to become visible to press people in the mainstream press media? This used to be nearly impossible, but the Internet is bringing a solution. Not perfect, but BlogBurst offers exactly that: International exposure into the small but influential world of big media (both paper press and some big Internet web sites).

Your content has to be very powerful and mere exposure does not mean that you will be immediately considered as a worldwide expert on the issue you blog about, but it could be a sort of blog-japckpot.

Technorati has quickly become the reference in blog tracking. You want happy visitors favoriting you on Technorati for others to know. Make it easy. First, claim your blog in your account. Then add a button like this:

(#if you click it you’ll favorite YWantVisits!)

It’s easy. Technorati provides the code of this button along with many other widgets.

I had told that you should have a special page to be contacted directly. But this is not sufficient to be easy to call.

It is also critical to let your visitors know who you are: A company, an association, a Church, an NGO, an individual. This is not because Internet allows you to appear whatever you’d want to be that you must hide behind a virtual mask. Many a visitor wish ti understand whose words they are reading. This adds credibility and supports your writing.

So, open an “About me” page. ou “A propos“. Present yourself, and make sure that you’re looking good in the context of your web site. Follow the advice from ProBlogger: How to Write Your “About Me” Page.

But never let you reveal information that you may be ashamed of, at any time, in any place, under any circumstances: What is published on the Internet will stay forever and may haunt you.

As a friend tells sometimes: You may find it funny to reveal how drunk you were in this gutter, but it won’t have the same appeal to your ex-future employer.

There are many ways to follow a web site. The easiest is to regularly come and visit and, of course, you know RSS threads. But we can use Twitter too: a message per post update on the site.

That is the way I started using Twitter for my own YLovePhoto.com web site (for the English version as well as the French one). It’s simple: Any time an article is published on the site, it sends a message/twitt to http://www.twitter.com/ylovephoto_en (for the English version) in order to immediately inform the followers. This is quite the same as an RSS thread, but ultra-quick.

The principle is simple, but the implementation could have been a bit more complicated if I did not stumble upon an easy solution under the guise of a WordPress plug-in: TweetMe. It does the job neatly. You only have to install it, give it the coordinates (name and password) of the Twitter where to publish the updates and it generates a message containing the post title and a short link to jump straight to it.

Easy!

It’s not a matter of copying from them, but you don’t want to miss a new trend and be left behind. It is necessary to know what’s going on in your field and you cannot afford not knowing what your visitors read when they go to your competiors. I the industry it’s called “Strategic foresight“.

And you may even find reasons to link to them or to extend one of their posts with your own rant.

The Internet is based on cooperation and reciprocity. When you link to another web site, be as nice as possible:

• Mention the web site name if possible – no typos please
• Include a link not only an URL
• Keep the link in a readable position (in the post body, in normal text size)

In short: “Link as you would like to be linked.”