Devoted Hosting Blog

As the saying goes, content is king and having good, unique content is usually much more important than the design and/or domain of your website (although of course, having a nice design and domain are important too; they just usually aren't the most important factors). This is because a visitor will come to your website (primarily) to find out information. And so having good content will draw your visitor in, which increases the chances that they will re-visit your website again in the future.

Below are various factors which you may want to consider when writing your content:

1) Use Good Spelling, Punctuation And Grammar Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes a website developer may have some important information that they want to convey to their visitors (or simply provide clear links for guests to register, for example). Such information can go un-noticed if they are put into the middle of the page's content. In these cases, it can be beneficial to have a small box 'floating' on top of the page (in one of the corners, for example) where visitors are likely to see it.

Please note that this tutorial gives the code required to have a static 'floating' box on your website (i.e. one that stays where it is and doesn't move). Due to usability concerns, we don't recommend having this box float along with the visitor as they scroll down the page (this can be intrusive and put visitors off your website). Nonetheless this box will still be noticeable since it appears above any other content. It will also include a "Close" link, so that a user can close the box if they wish. Feel free to make this box as large or small as you wish, but just remember not to make it intrusive/too big since it can put off your visitors. It is also usually recommended to put such a box on only the homepage (or whichever page its content is relevant on), not every single page.

The basic code for this is very simple Read the rest of this entry »

Once your website is up and running, with most of your content in place, the main task is then to get visitors to your website. Keeping the visitors coming back to your site is then a combination of having good content and a community (along with a good design to initially draw the visitor in). However in some ways there's a catch 22 situation - visitors can't "keep coming back" if they don't know about your website! And the search engines do rank your site (amongst other things) on how 'active' your site is. So how can you get a good search engine rank, and get visitors in, without any/much initial traffic?

This article seeks to answer such questions. Most methods described in the sections below are free methods, however a basic paid method of advertising will also be discussed.

Having a SEO-Friendly Website

You will find that, for established websites, the majority of their new visitors will be from the search engines (and mostly from Google, for that matter). Hence it is important to Read the rest of this entry »

Choosing your domain name (and equivalently your website's name) can often be a difficult task. Coming up with a good name can be difficult enough, and this problem can then be worsened since quite a few domain names are already registered. This can be annoying since you could come up with a great site name (let’s say Your Great Name), only to find out later that YourGreatName.com and/or YourGreatName.net  are registered.

This means that you must then either try and re-choose your name (and then have to re-check if the equivalent domain is free to register), or that you register a less well-known domain extension (YourGreatName.org, YourGreatName.info etc) of your original idea.

There is a third option - and this is to try and buy YourGreatName.com and/or YourGreatName.net off their owners. However Read the rest of this entry »

So you have just had an idea for a new website. Some people, right after getting an idea, like to start creating the website straight away. However this can be a bad idea, since you may end up making some crucial mistakes that a small amount of planning could have prevented. It's usually wise to, before making the website, follow these steps:

• Research existing websites with a similar or same niche to your idea
• Have a clear set of objectives and goals
• Plan on paper a brief website layout and structure

This is a similar (albeit perhaps more brief) set of steps to the development of a product - i.e. plan and know the market before working on your own product (or, in this case, website)

Research Existing Websites

Whilst you may feel you know your target market (and what your target audience are looking for from websites in your target niche), it's nearly always sensible to simply visit similar websites to your idea. Read the rest of this entry »