WordPress and Plugins

Of course, you will have to know how to tell when something has gone wrong so that you can then get on with fixing the situation. Perhaps you, like many beginners are using WordPress since it’s very versatile and user-friendly. Most of the technical problems that arise with WordPress are due to plugin installation issues. For example, if your theme is not working as you wish, a recently installed plugin may be to blame. Check the status of all of your installed plugins and be sure to always update to the latest available version of WP. WordPress has a good troubleshooting system in place that walks you through most problems as well as having a forum available you can access to get help from experienced users. If your data is corrupted beyond repair, the only solution is to reload your data from your backup source. For this reason you should be sure to backup your database on a regular basis to avoid losing everything.

Web Hosting

If you find that your site is unavailable for extended periods of time, get a hold of your hosting provider to see if they are having issues. If it is experiencing hardware failure for example and is having problems with just one component of the server, the entire server can be unavailable. All you can do in this case is wait for the hosting provider to fix the problem. Your site may be unavailable during peak internet usage hours or parts of the internet may simply be slow. Quite often, by the time you figure out why your site is unavailable, it will have somehow fixed itself.

Coding Issues

If you are seeing a blank space below your footers on some of your pages, the problem most likely is in your code. Some browsers will cause this to happen and may require a background color to be applied to the html. You can troubleshoot this problem by seeking the help of experts in coding forums online.

Housekeeping

You may receive a comment on your site from a visitor telling you that your site is not visible to them because they are using the Google Chrome browser. The reason for this could be that  Chrome detected code on your page that loads content from or redirects to a flagged site. To fix this, you will have to remove all links, iframes, etc to any blacklisted sites. You can also try using Google Webmaster Tools to determine whether or not malware is present.

If you are running a business online, you want to be sure that your site is available at all times so that you can always be found by those potential customers out there who are searching for your products and/or services. You can easily locate website security tips for businesses on the internet wherein you will be walked through steps necessary to solve site issues and problems you may be experiencing.

While all of this may seem overwhelming, the fact is that many things can go wrong with your site regardless of how careful and diligent you were when constructing it. A good way to avoid problems with your site is to use a website downtime program such as mon.itors.us. This service instantly reports your site outage and response time. By taking advantage of this free website, server and traffic monitoring service you are assured that your site will maintain a high up-time and optimum level of availability. You can use this service for your e-commerce sites, blogs, forums, company and personal pages.

If you are considering hiring a web design company to assist you in setting up your space on the internet, you should consider hiring a local web designer. There are so many design companies today to choose from and they are located all over the world. While it is fine to use a design company located far from you, it could become a problem if a face-to-face meeting is necessary in order to go over some fine details concerning your website design.

You can benefit in many ways by going local with your web designer. Maybe you would like your designer to walk through your company in order to get a good, overall picture of what you do. Perhaps some drawings on paper are necessary so that you can understand fully what the designer has in mind for your site. In both cases, having your designer located on the other side of the world are of no benefit. Just having some regular, short meetings at a local coffee shop together with your designer can help to clear things up that may otherwise take a lot of emails and phone calls to clarify.

If you need a website built for your local business, it is nearly impossible for an outsider to fully understand the nature of the people living in your area. If you hire a local web designer however, he or she will understand how your potential customers think and feel. Adding a bit of local flavor to your site’s design is always a great idea and certainly an outsider will never be able to do that as well as someone who lives near you.

Hiring a local web designer is also a great way to support the economy in your area. Communities everywhere are trying to reduce the number of jobs that are sourced out as   outsourcing can eventually lead to both social and economic collapse.  Instead of contributing to this detrimental effect, you will be helping other business people in your city or town.

Finally, if and when your website runs into problems, your web designer will simply give you a call and perhaps invite you to his/her office so that you can sit down together and hammer out a solution. On the other hand, if your designer is located far away from you  in another time zone for instance, they may stop working on your site all together until they can reach you – which will delay the launching of your site.

A good resource for hiring local talent is www.craigslist.org. Another good resource is to simply search in Google for a local designer.

Once you have decided what type of website you wish to build, then you must choose the best resources to use. This will save you a lot of frustration when building your site and it is not even all that necessary that you understand HTML in order to build an effective site.

Web Templates

A template is a complete website layout without the text and links. Templates give you a layout and format from which you can create your web pages. Templates have many uses. They allow you to create a website without needing to know any website design as the layout is done for you. Templates also help you to launch your site quickly as you need only to add the text and then load your site to the web. You can either buy templates or get them for free and they come in a wide variety of styles and colors. Once you download the template you like, in most cases they’re ready for deployment. Your pages will load quickly and your site visitors will have a nice browser experience.

Content Pages

Providing great content will make your site a place that visitors will want to come back to again and again and a ‘sticky’ site is a successful site. The easiest way to make your site sticky is to provide helpful articles. Be sure that the articles you put on your content pages are keyword rich, informative, relevant and useful to your visitors.

HTML Editors

If you do not know how to write HTML there are many free editors available that will do the job for you. Choosing the right editor will determine how quickly your site will get online. The best HTML editors will allow you to quickly and easily add content to your pages. Depending on the editor you pick, it will make your life easy when adding graphics, icons, photos and background images to your website – in most cases it can be drag and drop.

Content Management Systems

A content management system (CMS) allows you to make changes to your content without having to hire a programmer. You can edit, delete, modify and remove any content you want even if you have no HTML knowledge or skills. A CMS offers consistency to all of your web pages. If you have a content-rich site and you need to update and edit that information on a regular basis then consider a content management system (CMS) to help ease the process of adding new content.

Blogs

[This bit is important! -->] The easiest way to publish content on the web is through a blog. Blogger and WordPress are two of the most user-friendly blogging platforms out there today that allow you to quickly input your text and then publish it. Blogs are search engine friendly, so if you want to spread your information across the web, a blog is a good way to do that. Blogs are indexed often and quickly by the search engines so if you have your website connected to your blog, you should enjoy a good deal of traffic. Be sure when blogging to make good use of keywords so the search engine crawlers or spiders will pick them up for indexing.

Using the right resources when building a website makes your site contemporary and users will benefit by receiving something of value which will help to contribute to the continuous growth of your site. Your website will become attractive when you use the correct tools and it will display as it should in the different browsers used by your visitors, resulting in them being happy to visit your site again.

Millions of us rely on a printed newspaper as a way to read the happenings in the world. A newspaper is in fact, a very good example of a static media. Once a story has been printed on a newspaper, it cannot be changed as its type has been set. You will simply have to wait until the next edition is printed in order to receive the latest news. Much in the same way, a static website cannot be changed until the webmaster or someone familiar with HTML or flash edits and/or updates the content.

A dynamic website, on the other hand, offers the owner the ability to upload information on their own, usually via a password protected interface. It is not a requirement that the owner knows HTML or website design. He can simply change the site as he pleases.

If you are attempting to rent out a cottage on a beach somewhere, and you just need to show a few photos of the outside and interior of that summer home, provide the rental rates and your contact information, a static site would be perfect. On the other hand, if you were in the real estate business in a very competitive market, you need to keep your information updated on a regular basis with your new listings. In this case a dynamic website is the perfect solution.

You may wish to go with a static website when:

• Your objective is simple. You will provide some text and some images in an eye-pleasing manner
• You do not plan to change the content often, if at all
• You are quite sure that you will not need to change or add any functionality to your site for some time well into the future
• You are not all that concerned with optimizing your site for the search engines
• You have no plans to enhance your online business

If you are serious about getting your site ranked well, you will have to update and refine your content on a regular basis. It is possible to change and update the content on a static website, but it is not convenient and does require that you know HTML.  A static website can be looked at as an online business card as it is a good way of providing additional information about your existing business.

Advantages of a static website:

• Very quick to develop
• Inexpensive to develop
• Inexpensive to host

Disadvantages of a static website:

• Web development skills are required in order to update the site
• Not as useful to the user
• Content can become outdated

You may wish to go with a dynamic website when:

• You plan on selling products online
• You plan to update your website on a regular basis
• Your site will be updated by more people than just yourself
• You may want to add some functionality to your site at some time in the future
• It is very important to you to optimize your website for the search engines
• You want to gain visitors to your site

Advantages of a dynamic website:

• A highly functional website
• Very easy to update
• Fresh content draws visitors back to the site and helps in search engine ranking
• More than one user can develop/work on the site

Disadvantages of a dynamic website

• Takes longer to develop
• More costly to develop
• Costs more to host

Summary

If you are a small business owner or if the services and/or products you offer are few and easy to explain, then a static website would suit you just fine. But, if you have a lot of products and/or services and you want to allow your site visitors to be able to search through your inventory, a dynamic website is best.  A static website is rather limited in its functionality while the dynamic site has a great deal of potential in terms of functionality, but it can be complex to use.