Web site development is the art of creating and developing the world wide web. Using tools, graphics and programming toward the development of the world wide web. This article gives you some great resources to get your feet wet in the development field.

First, to learn a little about my skills in web development. I am 24 years old and I started my first online business at 12. I started hand coding HTML for fun and learned to love web sites. I have built web sites for small companies to large corporations.

There are so many resources available on the net so that you can get involved designing web sites. However without any sort of knowledge in the field, it can be very confusing. Common questions that probably run through your head are “what development tools should be used”, “how do I get web sites on the internet”, and “how to I create applications”. I am going to go briefly over these different questions and provide you with great resources to learn more.

Next step in the development process is that you need to obtain a domain name (or web site address) - this can be accomplished by searching google for domain names. You will also need to find a web site host to manage your files. A web site host simply stores your web site on a computer in a datacenter that can be accessed by the entire world wide web.

Now let me give you steps to learn how to build a basic site. First off, I want to give you an understanding of the best web development tools to use (in my opinion of course).

When building a web site, you can utilize many different tools. Some of the easiest tools to use are programs such as Frontpage. However if you are interested in working long term in this field, I would grab a book on Dreamweaver - dreamweaver is a program that must be purchased. For great tutorials on using this program search google for dreamweaver tutorials. This program is great, simple (considering its power) and offers amazing scaleability.

You will also need a program called a FTP client. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is a program that allows you to connect to your web site (at your hosting company) and add your files. I recommend Filezilla. Great filezilla tutorials are available on the internet.

Another program you may find useful for image design & development is Adobe Photoshop. This allows you to create quality and complex images, and comes with great tutorials.

Now you must understand web site structure when building web pages. All HOME PAGE files you find on the internet are called index files. A home page file is the first page everyone sees when they land on your web site. Your index file is a page named index.html, (could be index.php or a few others) - The most common is index.html. The sites landing page will always have an index file. For example when you go to google.com - you are actually accessing google.com/index.html. You can name any other pages whatever you want, but you always need an index file in the main folder of your web site.

After you have a main index page, you will need to create additional pages that you will eventually link together from your home page. Good examples would be contactus.html, about.html, jokes.html, and etc. You can create new pages in your web site editor (dreamweaver) and then you can go to your index.html file and create a link to the new pages you created using the link icon.

This was a quick overview of the web development process. To find great resources on the internet google “web development tutorials”, “dreamweaver tutorials”, “web design tutorials”, and so on. If you are interested in becoming a web site programmer learning languages like PHP, ASP, JAVASCRIPT and so on. I would recommend checking out classes at your local community college or searching google for “beginners guides to programming”.

A quick recap - the web development process works like this. You will build your home page in dreamweaver and save the page you create as index.html - Then you create sub-pages such as contactus.html, aboutus.html, services.html, and then you link to them from the home page. Then you will proceed to upload your index.html file and all other files using filezilla to your hosting accounts root directory. This directory is often times named http, httpdocs, www, home.

Hopefully this helped!

For many, HTML looks very difficult and troublesome to comprehend. When taken in steps however, it is the opposite; easy and insightful. It is important to look at the codes closely rather than declaring it seems hard to learn at first glance. HTML is very useful even if you just learn the basics, and as you apply these you may need more knowledge as you progress. Either way it is always useful.

- 1. Get a web-space
Whether you learn by using a book, a friend, a website or a tutorial true knowledge will only come when you experience building a web-page by yourself. It’s now left for you to search the web to find a free hosting site to host your learning project. All you need to do is search on a search engine for “free home page,” or “free website”. There are many available so chose one and sign up.

2. Choose a topic
After you have selected your hosting site you need a topic to base your website on. It is not necessary that you get a top ranking topic. You only need it for your learning purposes. Next, based on the topic you selected, write a few paragraphs and chose some graphics. Now you are ready to start.

- 3. Select a reference
You have probably selected a tutorial to learn from already but in case you haven’t use w3schools. This website offers the best resources to learn HTML on the internet. Everything is provided; from basic to advance with detailed references. In addition, the website allows you to practice your skills and display the results on the same page in HTML format.
Helium also provides HTML articles such as “A Beginners Guide to HTML” which you can use. And of course there are numerous text books and also your friends available to help you learn. Which ever learning route you chose, the main thing is that you start.

- 4. Get the print on the page
It is not necessary that you learn everything about HTML before you can start to build a webpage. It is always more productive to learn in steps and grasp the concepts. The good thing about website designing is that it can be modified as you progress in building it. Firstly you need the main content, after you can learn how to format it, arrange it, color it, size it, add graphics, links and widgets.

- 5. Links
One of the best things you can do to take advantage of the web is to link your pages to other sites. Take some time to search for other sites that offer more information about your topic and add links to their pages.

SEO experts know that all search engines use spiders. But before you reach for that shoe to crush the pesky little critters, you should know that spiders are nothing more than robots, tools used by search engines to scour the web and look for webpages. Once the spiders have collected data, they bring the data back to the search engine for indexing.

Since 1996 meta commands have been able to control how these spiders behave. Here are the six most popular commands, along with guidelines on how to use them.

. meta name=”robots” content=”index”

This is one of the most common, and least helpful, meta commands. It simply tells the spider to add the page to its index, which all search engines automatically do anyway. Include it if you like, but know that it won’t make much of a difference since all search engines will index your page unless you tell them not to.

. meta name=”robots” content=”follow”

This command requests that a spider follow the links on a page. Like the previous command, it is also redundant since search engines automatically follow links unless otherwise indicated.

. meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”

This is the opposite of the index command, telling spiders not to index a page. If your page only uses this command, however, spiders will still follow the links on the page. Why would you use this command? Search engines have difficulty reading dynamic pages. If you were to replace your dynamic pages with static pages, you could put the noindex tag on the dynamic versions. Search engines would have an easier time accessing your site because you directed them to your static page.

In its Webmaster Help Center, Google says,

“Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages.”

. meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”

This tag tells spiders to index the page, but not to follow any of the links on the page. Let’s say one of your partners asked for a link on your site. Although you felt obligated to give it, you really didn’t want that partner to affect your page rank. By using this tag, you are effectively telling the spider that there’s nowhere else to go from your page.

. meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”

This tag effectively makes the page invisible to all search engines, telling the search engine not to index the page or follow any links on it. What’s the point of such a tag? If you place it on pages of a site that legitimately have duplicate content, you can keep search engines from devaluing them. For example, if your website has a page for England and a page for the United States that have duplicate content, the spider will bypass the page without penalizing you. Without the tag, search engines would see duplicate content and give lesser value to both pages.

. meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”

Almost all search engines provide a cached version of a website along with the current listing. This cache shows what the page used to look like. If content on your website is time sensitive, this tag would keep spiders from indexing a cached version of your site. Let’s say you own a business and you’re having a huge sale to try to drum up sales. Once sales are up, you discontinue the sale. You obviously don’t want a cached version of your website to show up on a search engine, leading people to believe that you’re still having sale. This tag keeps users from accessing your time-sensitive information later.

Knowing how to use meta commands can enhance your websites effectiveness and relevance, and can help you build a user-friendly, successful website. For additional help in using META tags, consult an SEO expert or internet marketing specialist.

Many people are interested in starting a business on the Internet. Believe it or not, there are millions of people who have started with only a dream and are now fully supporting themselves, working from home. The first step is to get your own website. One of the best solutions for beginners with no prior web experience, as well as for those on a budget, is a website starter kit.

There are a lot of people that don’t know how to get started and end up spending countless hours looking for all the components they need to start their own website. This method is purely trial and error and not only wastes time but the components may not be compatible or even work at all. The best thing to do is search on the Internet for professional companies that sell an entire DIY website kit. These kits contain everything that is required to set up a website. It’s very easy and anyone can do it. You don’t need technical skills.

The DIY dynamic website kit is very inexpensive and is a great way to get a professional-looking website. There’s no expensive software or equipment to buy. It’s very easy to set up and you don’t have to have your own computer, just access to one; for example a friend’s PC, a library PC or an Internet cafe. That is all you need to have your website up and running in no time. The website is hosted by virtual servers that are available 24/7, so there’s no need to spend any money for web hosting. There’s also a facility that update your website anytime you wish. You’ll save a lot of money by not having web designers and programmers to do this.

Another advantage of having a DIY website kit from a reputable company is that they offer technical support in the event you have a problem while putting your site together. These companies have 24/7 customer service to answer any questions and resolve any issues you may be having.

The biggest advantage of a DIY website kit is that you can use it anywhere in the world that has a PC and access to the Internet. There is a main control panel within the website where the website can be managed and updated anytime you wish. Because this is online the website can be operated anywhere in the world.

A DIY website kit has been produced by professionals that have many years of experience. The package lets you design the website and have it running by just following the simple instructions. Most of these website starter kits come with a choice of templates that are professionally designed.

Search engine optimization is a confusing art. It is not a science. It’s also a moving target that changes a lot. Experts have written books about it. Software programmers have written programs trying to automate it. SEO consulting firms are constantly testing it. I don’t believe anyone really has the answer carved in granite. So, what are you going to do?

Understand that search engines send out spiders or bots. Once there, the spider starts reading all the text in the body of the page, including markup elements, all links to other pages and to external sites, plus elements from the page heading including some meta tags (depending on the search engine) and the title tag. It then copies this information back to its central database for indexing at a later date which can be up to two or three months later.

Well there are some basic rules that most experts agree on. This is a very simple generalization but these are a great start for any website.

1. Most web developers/designers either don’t take time to code a site properly or don’t know how to. Yes the site may look good to you but does it look good to the search engines? Graphics look great but spiders don’t see them. Avoid pages which are 100% graphics and no text, such as pages that contain all images, or are Flash-only.

Furthermore, if the first thing a user encounters is a log-in page, before being able to see the site’s content, then that’s what a spider will see and it won’t go any further, either. All your content might be hiding unless you have a great site map or a robots.txt file.

2. Knock off with all the Flash. It’s a waste of bandwidth, time and spiders don’t index it. Yes your web designer is great but he or she is killing your ranking. If you got to have it that’s fine but you will pay a price for it. If you’ve encased a link in a fancy JavaScript that the spider won’t understand, the spider will simply ignore both the JavaScript and the link equaling a lower ranking, sorry.

3. Once you’ve built an SE-friendly Web site, you then need to be sure each page is also SE-friendly. That’s right each page. Even your FAQ’s if you have it.

4. There are two primary areas of a Web page. The area contained between the “head” “/head” tags and that which is contained between the “body”"/body” tags. What information you place in these areas has a huge impact on how a page is indexed and, to a certain degree, what will appear in the SE results page. All the fluff elsewhere is not going to help much.

5. Keywords need to be 3% to 7% density in the top half of the page content. You have probably heard the term “keep it above the fold”. Search engines put more value on keywords closer to the top. The algorithm (a mathematical formula) they all run factor in where the keyword is located. These algorithms are unique to each SE and are constantly changing, but, in essence, all the search engines are looking for the important words on your page (based on word densit, how often a word or phrase is used in relation to the total amount of text) and they assign a value to these words based on the code surrounding the words.

6. Determine the main topic of the page and try to use it as the title. A page about high-performance running shoes from manufacturer ABC should have the title “High-performance Running Shoes.” If the brand is important, then add it to the end of the line like this: “High Performance Running Shoes - ABC.”

7. Write a unique description for each page. If you use the same meta tag across all pages, the search engine will pick up on this and potentially ignore the content of the meta tag or possibly the entire page.

8. Search engines love content that appears in header tags (h1, h2, etc.) yet very few web sites actually use them. Their original intention was to be the visible title of the page (long before web browsers actually supported graphics), with the primary title using h1 and subsections of the page encased in h2 tags, and so forth. To avoid spamming search engines, a web page should have only one h1 tag. They can have as many h2 tags as necessary.

9. Graphic designers love using tables to slice and dice a graphical design to use on the Web. Unfortunately, these designers never really understood that the web is the web and not a printed page and that designs should be easy to code into web pages.

The problem with tables is that all the slicing and dicing can create web pages containing tables embedded four or more deep to accommodate the design and all the good content ends up inside the inner-most embedded tables.

From a technical perspective, search engine spiders can read tables, and even embedded tables, but once a design gets to be more than about three tables deep, most spiders run into problems. Either it’s simply too much code for them to keep track of, or the search engine thinks you placed that content deep in the page because it’s not important, and so the engine gives it little or no value.

10. If there is an important phrase in your content, be sure to tag it appropriately. This is good for the user experience and since you’re telling your users that the words are important, the search engines are likely to think the same way.

Keep in mind that these are some “On Page” SEO considerations. Most experts agree today that “Off Page” SEO is more important. We will address those tips in the next article.

Graphics are great, but content is king. Don’t hide your website.