Megan's Web

Firstly, thank you to all the amazing artists who have taken up Megan’s Web artist template sites to manage their online presence. I hope you’re happy with your website, and if not, please contact me to let me know what can be improved. It’s through your feedback that I can improve the sites, both in terms of what your site visitors see, and how easy it is for you to manage the sites.

Please read on for the latest news about:

• Updates to the online help files, including some new troubleshooting topics.
• Some important notes about image sizes.
• New insert gallery button.
• New distraction-free full-screen editing mode.

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Recently a friend commented that she had been getting a surprising number of comments on her blog – every day she was receiving multiple comments and compliments on what she thought was a fairly obscure blog post. “They’re not spam,” she said, “they’re just people saying they enjoyed reading the post.”

Being of a suspicious nature when it come to matters of the web, I decided to take a look. Unfortunately, deserving of compliments though her blog posts are, I quickly identified that the vast majority of her apparent fan mail was, in fact, spam. Now this friend is not a fool, and if she can be caught out by the spammers, many others can too. Some of the tricks they use are easy to miss for the unaware, but very easy to spot if you know what to look for. (more…)

Your domain name is one of your most valuable business assets, yet there are many pitfalls for the unwary that can result in losing your domain name. Follow the tips below to make sure this does not happen to you. (more…)

Content management systems and blogging platforms such as WordPress provide an excellent, simple way for website owners to add content to their website without having much technical knowledge. There’s a few pitfalls for the novice though, and being aware of these things can have a big impact on the performance of your site.

People who know me will have heard my periodic rants about “the terrible code” in some website or another, and I can see you all rolling your eyes and thinking “who cares about the code, only geeks care about the code”. Here’s one of the reasons why I care about the code: (more…)

This morning I attended a Sitepoint webinar with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts Kristen Holden and Mike Hudson. In a field beleaguered by snake oil merchants and charlatans, it’s good to get some plain old commonsense advice on the topic, so I’m writing this post in an attempt to crystallise some of the ideas in my own mind and share a brief outline of the important points.

What is SEO?

In the most literal sense, SEO means what it says - optimising your website so it can be easily found and indexed by search engines. If you just put a website up without SEO, there’s a good chance your site won’t be found, no matter how good it is. I’ve seen businesses here in Tasmania with websites (often those built in Flash) that don’t come up on Google even if you search for the exact business name and town – a good indication that something has not been done correctly right from the beginning.

But simply being found isn’t enough – you need to be found by the right users. There’s little point getting to the top of Google results if the users that search brings to your site don’t find what they want.

Another important aspect of SEO is online reputation management. You may not be able to control what others say about you or your company online, but you can do a lot to counter any negative or inaccurate material by working to make sure the information you want seen comes up higher in search results. (Antony Mayfield’s book and blog Me and My Web Shadow is an excellent resource on this subject.)

The good news is, SEO is not black magic; a lot of it just comes down to common sense. While the algorithms that search engines use to decide how to rank pages are extremely complex, there’s plenty of good commonsense things you can do that will start you out on a good footing. (more…)