Secure Payment Facilities

I've been discussing payment options with a few customers recently. A lot agre with me that PayPal is useful for those who are just setting up - it's very cost effective and a well known brand name. But others have been told by other people not to use it and would prefer to take credit cards themselves.

Now this worries me. I can safely capture credit card details and store them on a secure database, away from the customer's address and other details. My side is not a concern, but when you are a small shop setting out, is this really the way forward?

Consider that for a few months at least, your site is not going to have a page rank. Google took 6 months to update last year and there's no guarantee that even then you get a respectable page rank. If I was a customer considering buying and had to give a shop my credit card details then I'd want that shop to look respectable. If the entire site is grey barred, I'd be worried straight away.

The problem is with handing over the credit card number and the 3 digit number on the back that once you have done that you are trusting the person the other end not to mis-use this information and to correctly destroy all records as soon as the transaction goes through.

Say the assistant prints out the details then jsut throws them into the recycling. ANyone could come along and take them out of the bin and they then know everything about you to be able to start using your credit cards.

OK, maybe this is a subject more suited to my anti phishing blog then web design, but a few years ago it was something like this that resulted in an unknown person spending thousands on my credit cards, so I'm very wary.

I think that without a well known brand name, and that doesn't have to be internationally known, just known within your customer base, it's safest to stick to the more popular payment providers. They might cost a few pence more per transaction, but this extra cost could easily be recouped if more people are shopping with you.

Think carefully before you go your own way, it might come back to bite you.

Websites Make Shopping Harder???

Why when people invest in an e-commerce website do they then make things more complicated? I'm talking here about the average high street shop that ventures out into the internet.

I was recently in a hardware store and the person being served wasn't sure what size lock he needed - he'd forgotten to measure it. The owner simply said "If it doesn't fit, bring it back and we'll swap it."

Sounds fair enough? Looking at the shop's website, the terms and conditions for that shop run to 2,000 words, without postage etc details. Lots of complicated terms about rights to cancel an order, how to return, when to return etc.

Why?

They aren't the only ones. I saw a restaurant website that had a huge page of T&C, including that you must be over 18 to visit the website and that if you do anything that damages the website you are liable for costs? I'm guessing they had copied the T&C from an adult website.

Then there's the shops that go into great detail about how secure their shopping services are; that you see the padlock during the whole order process and that your order details are encrypted. When you actually order there's no encryption - just your order passed to PayPal. Another case of someone copying irrelevant T&Cs.

It happens loads of times. There's tons of websites out there with endless T&Cs, and I know for a fact that a lot of their T&Cs are actually against UK trading laws - for example not allowing enough time to return unwanted goods (as stated under the distance selling regulations).

If you are creating a shop website think before you create your T&C. You don't need to add lot's of conditions. Protect yourself & the customer, but don't over do it!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

And never is this more true than in Web Design!

How many times have I produced what I thought is a beautiful site. I then show it to the customer and they ask for their tweaks and changes and by the time it's finished they are delighted, but I'm left wondering if I should admit to the site in my portfolio.

Sites have been known to go through extreme colour changes. One started off as nice pastel shades, with gentle sweeping graphics. By the end of the build it had doubled the curves and gone to mustard colours. The customer was absolutely delighted!

Then you get the customers that ask that you take inspiration from certain sites and what is produced you see as a combination of these examples. But when the customer gets back they have seen something totally different in the sites and can't understand why you have given them the sample you have done.

Even time can make a site look different. Frequently, I think that looking too hard at a site to decide if you like it makes you dislike it. But also websites do age. When I first put in my mortgage site I really liked it. Now, I think it could do with a lot of work.

When we look at a website, we don't all look at it in the same way. And that makes pleasing people very difficult!

SEO Experiment - Page Rank Update

Here's the current page ranks for all pages listed in Google for the SEO experiment sites, a bit late updating today because of access problems, so only a quick post:

Site 1
PR 0 pages:
November Archive
November - hogmanay-in-highlands-new-year-in.html
October - how-to-plan-leaf-viewing-asheville.html

Site 2
PR 3 pages:
Home page

PR 2 pages:
November Archive
December - eating-in-paris-gastronomical-guide.html

PR 0 pages:
December Archive
December - self-catering-cottages-for-families.html
November - multi-leg-flights-explained.html
October - advanced-diver-in-lanzarote.html
October - diving-in-playa-blanca.html
October - hello-from-austria-going-back-to-my.html
October - things-to-do-in-boulder-colorado.html
October - costa-rica-beaches-most-beautiful.html

Site 3
PR 2 pages:
October - family-vacation-ideas-in-washington-dc.html
October - traveling-with-children-in-ireland.html
October - playa-blanca-beach-diving.html
October - hello-from-austria-hiking-through.html

PR 0 pages:
Home
December - ways-to-mark-your-luggage-for-easy.html
October - car-hire-malaga-tips-to-hire-car-in.html

Of note, is that there are more pages with page rank on the site not using target="_blank" than the site with it, but even though site 1 should not have any links, three pages do have page rank 0. It's a little confusing that sub posts have a higher page rank than the home page on site 3 - as I've said before, this is mos likely due to RSS sindication and maybe these posts have been syndicated and link back to the test sites. That's probably how two of the posts on site 1 are page rank 0.

The big difference is the home Page Ranks and the archive Page Ranks. Would much rather be site 2 than either of the other two.

Maybe it's time to drop target="_blank" when we are link exchanging.

SEO Experiment - January Update

Aside from a mention or two around the time of the last page rank update, I've not looked at the SEO Experiment results since December, as part of my quest to see if target="_blank" could damage / hinder link building efforts.

Site 1 - (no links in, 16 posts). 17 pages cached in Google, although the home page and 1 archive don't actually return any cached results. The other archives were cached 17 & 32 days ago, the posts 7 X 12 days, 1 X 13 days, 1 X 17 days, 1 X 34 and 3 X 37 days ago.

Site 2 - (links without target, 17 posts). 19 pages cached - home page 7 days ago and the archives 5 days, 2 X 11 days and 12 days ago. The posts were cached 5 X 5 days, 7, 2 X 8 days, 10, 11, 3 X 12 and 13 days ago.

Site 13 - (links with target, 17 posts). Manages 20 pages cached - home page 4 days ago and for the archives, one was 9 days ago and the other 3 were 12 days ago. The posts were archived 5, 6, 9, 2 X 10, 2 X 11 and 8 X 12 days ago.

There is a very noticeable difference there - the average site 2 page was cached 8½ days ago, the average site 3 page 10½ days ago. For site 1, the average is 20½ days since last cached!

Next time I'll take a look how the sites have their page ranks distributed. But given that the sites are near enough being treated the same, there is a noticeable difference between the sites.

Lycos Web Hosting

Lycos offers some great and easy to use packages, and as a lot is aimed at easy to use market, I'll put it after the DIY Web Builders.



There are a range of web hosting packages, starting from a great offer of one £1 to register & host a 'family' type website for a year, up to easy to use e-shops.

The Lycos web hosting packages include things you would expect from a full host - email facilities, web hosting, dns management, URL registration etc.

The Lycos web hosting selling points are their price and the simplicity of the ease of use of their service. Well worth taking a look at - especially if the £1 offer is still on when you read this!

DIY Web Build Services

Before we look at where to host, you also must consider how you are going to build a website - the 2 go hand in hand. If you are wanting to build your own website, but not sure where to start, then why not try a DIY service that includes templates and hosting?

With the DIY web site builders you can usually choose from a range of templates, customise them to suit your needs and away you go. They can be a really easy and cheap way to get online at first, before you either invest time in a site or money in getting a web designer to build a site for you.



Most of them come with a free trial - "Do Your Own Site" does - have a look by clicking the link above. They might not give as much satisfaction as a website you built yourself from scratch, but if you are just starting to build your own website then these are a quick way of getting online and not too expensive. Once you have found your feet, then you can build a new site and fully optimise that one.

Where To Host

Mad, mad, busy here at the moment but trying to get the time to continue posting daily. 20:00 is a little later than my usual 09:30 posting time - but being busy is good - isn't it? A touch less presure would be better.

I'll continue looking at building your own website over the next few days by looking at alternative types of webhosts. There's free hosts, paid hosts and those whereby you use their tools to quickly create your website.

I'm sure there's more types than that and it's not going to be an extensive list - how much I do depends on time available to me (if today is anything to go by then not much - my to do list, which I had under control yesterday and was quite short, exploded late afternoon!).

I'll provide a few links to various web hosts - maybe in the future it will be a useful resource to refer back to!

A final Web Hosting Consideration

So you have registered a URL and decided where you are going to host the website. Does this mean that you are ready to start building?

Not quite. There is one more consideration to look at and that is what platform are you building and testing your website on. There are slight subtle variations which need to be considered.

The first will not apply to everyone. That is, where do scripts run? With my hosts, if I am using a .pl script then it must run from a directory called /cgi-bin. I can place a sub directory within the website and create a /cgi-bin folder within that, but any perl scripts must run within this folder.

Also, and .asp files must also reside in the home directory, not within sub-folders. Not very handy on larger sites...

So what does this matter? Well if you start writing code using these then load you website and find the code is in the wrong place, not only do you have to redistribute the code, but you have to check every page for links to these scripts.

Also, and this affects more people, some platforms are case sensitive. This means that Logo.jpg and logo.jpg are totally different files. This is quite important when writing your site! For safety, whether you are on a platform that is case sensitive or not, it is worth while always having lower case file names. Just in case...

Why Do DNS Changes Take 72 Hours?

I mentioned yesterday that once you change DNS settings it can take up to 72 hours for the website to become available. But why?

Well, it's not just DNS settings that can have this affect. For example, if I move a website from Windowos to Linux, or Windows without ASP to Windows with ASP, then the same delay can occur.

It's not always 72 hours. I have seen it take place as quick as an hour, and over the last couple of years at most 24 hours. But what's happening?

Basically, the DNS settings are passed to the domain controller (the company with overall controll of the high level, e.g. .com, .co.uk etc). This tells them where to look for your website. The actuall address of the machine is also passed to them.

Now every time you type in a URL your ISP has to look up from this list where to go for that website. If every time a URL was entered they had to go to the master list, there would be a lot of unnecessary traffic to and fro quering this list. So instead each ISP takes a copy of this list at regular intervals. This might be once a day or whatever, but no less than once every 72 hours.

In my experience, most ISPs do collect it every day, so 24 hours is the worst you can expect to wait. I've noticed that .co.uk names do seem to become available quicker than .com, so maybe my ISP collects the .co.uk list even more often than that.

But that's why you have to wait 72 hours when you change your DNS records...

DNS Changes - Building Your Own Website

If you are registering the URL with one company and hosting with another, this is the way to do it. It's the proper way to do it as all websites have these records - even if you are hosting with the same company as you have registered with. The problem is that it requires the ability for you to enter the domain name into the host's system - not usually possible with a free host.

What are they then? Basically, DNS entries tell ISPs where to look for the website. By entering the correct values (2 or more are given - in case the first fails) any ISP can find your website.

You give the registrar of the domain the address provided by the hosts and tell your hosts the domain name you own. You then publish your site to the host and they also look after your email services.

This is the way all websites run. You can look up the DNS records for any site using tools you can find easily on any search engine. The only problem is that after changing the DNS entries it can take up to 72 hours for the changes to take full effect.

Framing Redirection - Building Your Own Website

After a week's desitraction, back onto building your own website and continuing the look at Redirecting A Website.

In this one, in one way or another the visitor remains on the site they typed in, but is instead shown an alternative site using frames. This can also be done in two ways.

First, framing within the code. You put onto the website a piece of code that makes a 'window' on the page. This can be 100% of the height and width and allows the user to see the target website as if it's your own.

The second is through the hosts, using similar processes to above.

With framing, you are usually left in full control of the page's title, description and other meta tags (we'll come back to these in Search Engine Optimisation). But the search engines will ignore the content of the frame, although I have seen Google following the frame link as though it was a normal hyperlink. It is possible to give alternative text if you are coding the frame, we'll come back to that when appropriate.

The technology behind framing is the same as is often used on web pages. For example, look at my Compare Mortgage Rates website and you will see on the home page an application form. This is delivered via a special type of frame, called an I-Frame, but they are all the same in the end. But I-Frames can be included in part of a non-framed page.

Do Affiliate Links Damage Your Site?

Have you got a lot of affiliate links listed in your site? Ever wondered what the effect of all of these is?

The aim of any search engine is to be used by as many people as possible. That way they earn their commissions. If one of these people searches for a certain widget and the top 100 listings are all the same widget, just different affiliates giving the same widget's details and then pointing at the same shop, then there is little real choice for the person who ran the search. They are just getting the same result back many times, will get fed up and then try another search engine.

Therefore, it is in the search engines' interests to detect affiliate sites and only display the merchant. The obvious way is to look for long affiliate links through known affiliate providers.

But do they do this? I was looking at a few links pages on an existing site a while back and noticed that some were PR3, others PR4. When I looked carefully I realised that on some of the links pages I'd added affiliate links. I'd done this for 2 reasons - first the chance of a sales and second getting more content / links immediately. When I re-examined the pages every PR3 page had affiliate links.

But then so did a couple of the PR4 pages. So I looked more carefully and noticed that on the PR4 pages with affiliate links, the actual links were hidden from the search engines.

Now PR doesn't always exactly relate to traffic volumes. But I took it as an indication that Google didn't like pages with (3 or 4) affiliate links. That's not many at all.

So what do you do? Many people use redirects or as I've already talked about, put the affiliate link on one page and the rest of the site links internally to that page.

Page Rank Update - Not Clear Still

In the October Google Page Rank Update there was a clear demarkation mark within this blog as to which pages had been cached and which hadn't. If you looked at the pages more than about a week old (Read in full here) they were PR0, older than 3 weeks they were PR1. And this held true throughout the site, with the home page being PR3. Not bad for a new blog!

This time around the line isn't clear. I've looked at a website I published on the 27 December and that's PR0 and all pages on this blog since then are grey barred. Now I did notice Google was very active over Christmas - presumably gathering it's data for the update. So maybe around the 27th is the correct cut off.

But before then there's no rhyme or reason as to what the posts are ranked. Some are grey barred, some PR0, some even PR3. There's no simple pattern. Some of the page ranked posts are long, some not so long. On the whole, it's possible that the shorter posts are grey barred, but there are some posts that are grey barred that are longer than ranked posts.

There are probably several factors at play here. All of the posts are linked roughly the same way and amount of times. So unless there are lots of people using RSS to syndicate some of the posts, then something on certain pages is making them more popular to Google than the posts the days before & after. If only I had time to sit here and work it all out - it would help with my page ranking for other sites!

Importance Of The Title Tag

I was reviewing my own website and wondering why the portfolio page had dropped from Page Rank 3 to grey barred, along with the system status page. Still not convinced myself why the latter changed, but the former I've worked out.

Rather annoyingly, it goes back to something I mentioned in a December Post. Then, the prices page shared the same title & description as a new page. I corrected that when I rebuilt the site over Christmas, but at the same time when I put the portfolio page into the new format page I forgot to change the title tag. As I copied the home page, the portfolio & home page share title tags. Home page dropped 1 page rank, portfolio page dropped all together.

That really does spell out the importance of keeping these little lines different. The ones that were the same until December are now both back up to PR3. I just need to see why the system status page is also grey barred, when that was PR4 before the update.

It's documented that this tag shouldn't be excessively long, 66 characters is about all that Google displays, so keep within that. But in this case it was only 13 characters, so I was wondering if there is a minimum limit as well? That's hard to work out and prove. So plenty for me to be looking at over the next couple of weeks!

Latest Google Page Rank Update

I am slowly continuing to look at the latest google page rank update to see what might have changed and I'll report what I am finding. How quick this is depends how much time I can devote to it each day!

What I noticed last night was that Google is now reporting a lot more link backs to each site that I look at. Whether this is genuinely that there has been a lot of work on these sites or whether it's because the link back filter has been reduced, I haven't had the time to investigate. But as none of the sites that I've checked have shot up in page rank, one has even lost a page rank in the update, then I suspect it's more something global than the success of my link building.

For example, my mortgages web site was showing 12 back links before the update but now reports 88, with 69 showing in the main results. I'll need to check most of these to see when they were added to know for certain what has caused the changes.

One change I have noticed is that a lot more of my changed sites are showing links back to themselves! This could be because I've improved the internal links, rather than any major changes. And there are plenty of links showing that are new, or are on pages that have probably newly been found by google / given some sort of page rank. If I get time, I'll start through the list of links today and compare to records of when they were added. Not an easy process...

Page Rank Update January 2008

Continuing my look at the January 208 Google Page Rank Update and comparing it to the October 2007 Update.

It's strange to note that some of the blog pages on this site that were page ranked by the last update seem to have continued with their page rank, but new pages have not got a rank, and the monthly archive pages also seem to have lost their page ranks. On the whole, most changes are new sites getting PR0 or odd pages going down.

What is interesting to look at is the change to my experimental blogs. Both were only a couple of weeks old at the October update and went to PR0.

The one linked to using target="_blank" is still showing PR0. Then something strange happens... For October, the archive page is Grey Barred, but 5 posts are PR2, 2 are Grey Barred. For November, the archive is PR2 and all 4 posts Grey Barred. December has the archive as PR2 and all posts PR0.

On the site not using target=_blank, has now gone to PR3. This time, the October archive is again Grey Barred, but the posts are this time split 2 PR2 and 5 PR0. November has 1 PR1 and the rest Grey Barred. December is PR0, with 1 PR2 and 2 PR0.

As for the site with no links, well it's home page is Grey Barred, as you might expect, as are most of the pages. But 1 October post, 1 November post and the November archive are PR0. Now this is not the pattern you would normally expect, and I think this might be very important in analysing the results of the experiment.

I suspect that people with RSS feeders are linking to the blogs by publishing some entries and I'm gaining Page Rank from them. Very useful, but I should have prevented that to get accurate results... If we accept that some posts / archives having better PR than we expect are caused by this, then the result so far is that by including 'target="_blank"' in an incoming link, you are absolutely destroying that link. Having also looked at my own web design site, the portfolio page that links to a lot of sites using that command has also dropped. This could be accident (more tomorrow???) or maybe part of the same thing. Maybe Google is using the heavy inclusion of 'target="_blank"' as an indicator of link building, and punishing the page the links are on, meaning that there is no PR for the target pages to inherit.

Page Rank Update

I'll break off for a day or so to look at what has happened last night with a Google Page Rank update. On the whole, apart from new sites I can only find sites that have stayed as was or dropped 1 PR. Is there a theme?

A PR5 site has dropped to PR4. Shame! Interesting to note that the add resources page is now grey barred (from PR3???) and some content pages have gone from PR4 to grey barred. These were a bit off theme - her site is about accommodation in Oxford, but she also shows adds for accommodation in Italy & South Africa. Now whether Google is that clever, I don't know. But I suspect a couple of internal pages dropping PR could be enough to bring the home page Page Rank down by 1.

Lots of new sites now have Page Rank Zero, which is progress. I put in a load of changes to my own Janric website, hoping the new pages were there in time for the update, but it seems to have taken place quicker than I expected. 2 previously grey barred pages are back to Page Rank 3 but the portfolio page is now grey barred. Possibly because the portfolio is quite big and links to 57 sites from the one page? Maybe it's time to split that down a little.

Another web design site I work for has only 29 sites in the portfolio. It's a newer site and that page rank has gone from grey barred to 2, giving weight to too many links.

Sadly, after all my efforts recently for my mortgage rates site there's been no change there and it's still hovering between pages 5 and 7 of the results.

On a positive note, remember the first Seo Experiment? Well, one of the sites in that has gone to page rank 3 - the other 2 are grey barred. It's the one WITHOUT the target=_blank in the links that's made this change. Maybe there is something in that experiment after all?

Redirect Website - Building Your Own Website

With redirection, when a visitor types in your URL they are immediately transferred to the alternative website. For example, they type in abc.com but are shown def.com. When this takes place, there can be the option to either leave the entered URL in the address bar or show the real URL.

Which is best? It depends on what you want people to see. If it's as simple as you are redirecting from abc.co.uk to abc.com and don't mind people seeing the real URL, then show them the real URL. That way, if they bookmark, email links or whatever, they are using the real URL and this gets more traffic to the main site.

But if you are redirecting from abc.com to abc.myfreehost.com, then you might prefer them not to know the real URL. In that case you would choose not to show the URL after the redirect.

Redirection, when done properly, will be followed by the search engines, but this may lead them to listing the target URL, not the URL you are getting your visitors to type in.

Redirection can also take place through code (PHP, Javascript etc), but this is not really to do with hosting. For example, CompareMortgageRates.co.uk uses this to control where links lead to. There are various links throughout the site for which the supplier changes. They all point to a page that redirects to the current chosen supplier. This sort of redirection tends to stop search engines following the links and there is a theory that having some types of redirection on a page is enough to stop them listing that page. But no doubt we'll come back to this at a later date!

Redirect, Frame and DNS - Building Your Own Website

I mentioned yesterday about pointing a domain name at the hosting. If you are not hosting the website with the same company as you have the site registered at, then you need to tell the registration company where to find the website. Here's 3 ways of doing that.

First, redirection. Either the host does this or you can put a single page up to do this - but we're assuming the second isn't the case - you would need hosting... Basically all that this does is when the visitor types in your URL they are they sent - redirected - to a different URL. For example, this may be to a free hosting system.

Second is framing. Here instead of transferring the visitor to the new site, your visitor instead sees the other website displayed in a window on the page - known as a frame. Done properly, this can show the URL that was entered rather than the actual URL.

Lastly is DNS settings. This is how to do it properly - we'll look at the pros and cons tomorrow. Here you simply say 'for this website, go to these hosts'. Personally, this is the best way forward, but this is not always possible. For example, I don't know any free hosts that you could use DNS settings with as the host also has to use the real website name.

Free or Paid Hosting - Building Your Own Website

If you are building your own website, should you use free hosting or paid for hosting?

Given the price of hosting, unless you are creating a hobby website, then for any professional / business website that you really should go for some sort of paid hosting. Here's why.

If you were to visit a business website and noticed that the URL was a free hosting service at an ISP, would you trust them? You might notice this in the status bar, the address bar or when you hovered the mouse over a link.

You can also tend to get better support on a paid for hosting service - after all you are paying for the service, so should get something for your money. There may be extra tracking tools to monitor traffic, more reliability and all sorts of advantages. It depends on what services you are looking at. Also your choices for pointing your domain name at a free host are far more limited than with a paid host (more tomorrow there...).

Lastly, there is a theory that search engines such as Google do give more weighting to sites that are professionally hosted over those hosted on free space. Therefore, if you are hoping for any search engine traffic, it could be worth paying for hosting.

Hosting - Building Your Own Website

Once the name is registered, you have a choice of how to host the website.

First, what is hosting? Basically, you put a copy of your website onto a fast computer that is permanently connected to the internet, usually with backup connections to the telephone network ready for high loads and failures. The alternative would be to use your own computer, but that would mean never switching it off etc.

You might hear terms such as servers etc, but a server is just a special type of computer. All that matters for us is that you load your website to the host and it becomes available.

So how can you host it? The most obvious choice is to use the company that you registered the URL with to also host the site. It depends on what they are charging. Or you can equally easily use a competitor to host the site or even use free space. You might have free hosting site through your internet provider or you may want to use the hosting of one of the many free website creation tools.

.co.uk or .com Part 2 - Building Your Own Website

Following on from yesterday there are a few more considerations when deciding whether .co.uk or .com is best.

Many people are link building (we'll come to that later) and searching for links. If they are aiming at getting links from the same country, then .co.uk is a good indicator and an advantage.

The same happens when looking for a site when you want to contact the company. I'll sometimes scan down the list of results for a .co.uk name knowing that many of the other companies are likely to be American so not able to help me.

And what convinces me for my own sites is quite often the cost. It costs me more to register a site name using .com than it does using .co.uk – and the .co.uk name, whilst cheaper, lasts for 2 years instead of just 1. Granted with a .com you can register it for up to 10 years, but you are still paying more per year than for 2 years with a .uk name. Now this might only be a small amount. Say £6.36 for 2 years .co.uk and £9.38 per year for .com. Over 2 years, this is over £17 saved. With over 100 .uk domains in my account that's over £1750 saved in 2 years. Almost £900 per year in my pocket. That's worth registering .co.uk for. As as my Website Portfolio increases, that saving is getting dramatically bigger.

.uk or .com - Which Is Better Building Your Own Website?

Being in the UK, customers quite often ask whether a .com address is better than a .co.uk address? As quite often happens, there's no fixed answer, but usually I think that .co.uk is better than .com.

If you want to appeal to a multi-national audience, then .com can be better. For example, my own Godiving.org website has a 'US' domain name as I wanted the site to appeal to any diver. I didn't want foreign divers thinking it was just aimed at a UK audience.

But on the other hand, CompareMortgageRates.co.uk is aimed only at a UK audience. It only displays UK Mortgages and financial products. And when searching on terms such as "Compare Mortgages", if the site is returned in the list then the .co.uk at the end instantly shows the site is aimed at the UK, so visitors know they can see what they want there.

The other advantage of the .co.uk is in search results. Going back to yesterday's post about using keywords in domain names, I mentioned it can help. Well if someone searches for Mortgage Rates UK, then using a .co.uk name puts the UK into the domain name and should help in the search positioning.

Keywords In Domain Names – Building Your Own Website

Are there advantages to using key words in domain names such as CompareMortgageRates.co.uk?

Well, I have to say that in the past that site has appeared well for the terms 'Compare Mortgage Rates' and 'Mortgage Rates'. It's dropped a little (maybe not such a little!!!) since the October update. But it did do well for those words in the domain name.

Now maybe this is in part because people linking to the site used the domain name and therefore there are a lot of links in using these keywords. That definitely helps. But if you look down the results list for any search you will usually see a site or two with keywords in the domain name.

But this isn't a guaranteed success method. If the text within the site doesn't support the keywords, then the site will probably be deemed spam and dropped by the search engines.

In fact, looking down a few results lists, the obvious websites full of keywords have stopped appearing. If anything, it could be that Google is using these keyword rich domain names as an indicator to be cautious with a site.

Personally I think that having keywords in the domain name can help, but shouldn't be the driving force in choosing a name. If some fit in then use them, else good practices and a well written site are probably a better choice.

What's In A Name - Building Your Own Website

What's in a name? How do you choose the name of your new website?

It's quite often easier said than done. You can spend hours thinking if a name only to find it's already registered. But do you want to use the business name as the website name? Is there even a business name?

As I web designer, my customers might be looking for me by my business name, so it made sense to use the business name as the website name - Janric. This wasn't our first choice of name, but the first choice where the domain name was free. We could have registered "JanricWebDesign.co.uk", but we were trying to avoid anything too long.

We've also started other little ventures since then, all still under the same business. So these needed other URLs. Obviously we couldn't go for the business name, so we've since used URLs that describe the offering instead.

And that, I think, is a good starting point for choosing a name. If you are dealing face to face with customers and they might want to later refer to your website, just go for the business name. If you are hoping that they will remember the name when they see it, then choose something easy to remember and type in.

If you are hoping for a site that gets a lot of search engine traffic and people find it rather than type in the name then you can try longer and more complicated names. Is it worth it? Does a name such as CompareMortgageRates.co.uk hold benefits over other names? We'll look at that tomorrow.

Building A Website - Registering A URL

Registering a URL might be almost one of the last steps you take, but the website name might be mentioned so many times in the site that you usually need to know what URL you will be using before you start. For example, you might list the URL in:

• the about us page
• the contact us page
• whenever you display an email address
• links to paypal or another shopping basket / payment provider
• maybe in banners and graphics
• copyright statements, maybe even overlaid onto pictures
• terms and conditions

The list goes on and on!

Checking the URL is available is fairly easy, but it's not just a matter of typing in the URL and seeing if there's a website. Too many customers have done that then I've had to tell them the URL is registered, just without a website.

There are various tools that you can use to find if the domain name is available, else just go to a site to register the domain name and give it a try. Quite often they will tell you alternatives if the domain is already registered.

Should you register it now or later? Well last month a customer checked a domain was available and sent me an email asking me to register the URL. The email was sent late Saturday so I picked it up on the Monday. I automatically checked if it was available and someone else had registered it on the Sunday. Same happened in about October 2006 - a domain we had previously checked had been taken, only this time it had taken the customer a year to get all of the content to me.

Both of these were unlucky, especially the more recent. But it meant in that case that I had to review the entire site and change every occurrence of the domain name, as over the weekend they had passed me the text with it in.

Where do you go to register a domain name. Well I've listed a few UK Domain Registration companies that you might find useful on my own website.

Tomorrow - what's in a domain name?

How To Build Your Own Website

I thought since it was a New Year I'd start a new theme this month, and over the next 2 or 3 weeks I'll look at what is involved if you decide to build your own website.

What do you need to do? What do you need to know? What will you need to pay for - and where from? And who tries to take your money from you dishonestly?

I'll start from almost the beginning - I'll assume you alredy have the basic idea of what the business is and a few possible names. So the firs logical step will be registering a domain name - and of course finding someone to do that for you!

Hosting doesn't necessarily come next, but for people useing build your own website tools, these can be built into the hosting so that will follow registration.

Then I'll look at design considerations - where are you placing the buttons, colour schemes, accessible code etc. Then probably search engine optimisation and getting the site noticed, maybe finishing off with advertising your site.

Should keep me quiet for a few posts!