Archive for the 'Contents' category

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.

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!

You may want to think that your best work is the most recent one, but visitors disagree and made some posts as most popular either by page views or comment count. Since those may be far from the front page make it simpler to jump to them by adding a list of these to your sidebar or menu, with one of the popularity-oriented plugins.

When you look for images, you often want to find pictures not only based on a keyword, but find something similar to one of the results shown. Live Search and Google offer such technologies.

YLovePhoto describes such image seach engines based on similarity.

Useful to populate your web site with exactly the right image/picture/photo content.

A sizeable part of your traffic will always come from the exterior (search engines, StumbleUpon, Digg). It is important to convince them that they arrived in a great web site. One easy way is to show them what other interesting things they could find around. Just use one of the many plugins that find and display “related posts” (posts that have the bigger chance to keep them reading and coming back later for more). Show such a list near the end of your best posts (or all of them).

To illustrate a web site, it is often useful to have access to a photo library. Most of the Internet-based photo stocks are fairly cheap, but you can do better with some totally free photo libraries.

• The Smithsonian Institution : large-size images, of mostly historical interest.
• George Eastman House Museum : black-and-white and very brightly colored picutres covering most of the XXth Century.
• The Library of Congress : First-class historical photos, including protraits of American Presidents and collections of very famous images – but size may be limited.
• The New York Public Library : Less striking than most of the others, but very deep list.
• NASA exposes huge stacks of space and sceicen photos.

Source: Photojojo.com, via YLovePhoto.com.

I am not sure this is a necessity, but it may become very useful when designing a web site layout: 960 Gridder uses a Javascript extension to offer the possibility of aligning a kind of grid on your web site in order to help identify the exact position of elements.