Sharing and Editing Your Web Content

I love writing articles and blog posting but they can be time consuming and when you want to share more important text with other collaborators you need to be able to keep up with changes and be able to work together easily. I want to share a couple of free web based applications that I use successfully to do this.

Writeboards
There is a wonderful company called 37 Signals that has a series of very useful web based apps that you can use, from contact management to project collaboration. I love using their apps but I wish they had a 'one app for everything' solution for me. It's one of the complaints you hear by other users but I guess you have to look at the pricing and structuring to realize that 37 Signals would have to charge an awful lot for that, or not - if they want to have as many customers - and so their business model works best for them.

Anyway, one shouldn't complain too loudly - they offer great services for free. One of them, used completely solo, is the writeboard.

Other project collab solutions offer similar systems, calling them different names [like whiteboard] but they are essentially the same: a place where you can write and make changes, by yourself or with others.

For my writing, even for posts like this, I find writeboards very useful. You can create a document and then compare it to other versions. I know you can do this with MS Word but it is laborious. With 37 Signals' solution you can just check and uncheck dated and times versions and see the similarities/differences in an instant. And if you are savvy with RSS you can subscribe to be notified of any changes!

Go to writeboard.com and read up on this brilliant FREE service - there's little point me rewriting it all here, just know that I give it 2 big thumbs up.

Google Docs
This service from Google offers a suite of office apps like you'd get from MS Office. The features are not as rich but for sharing a document or spreadsheet with a group it is really handy. And if you are the one doing the sharing you can set up a report so you can see who has made changes to the documents on a moment to moment, or daily, basis.

You can also set up the 'master' sharing rules for the document so that those you share with can't invite just anyone and everyone to work on the doc too. Upload and download is also very easy, and combined with a gmail account makes working online very easy when you are on the road.

Editing Tip: when you cut and paste from different apps, web based or not, you can get a lot of annoying extra behind the scenes coding. Notorious for this is MS word. This behind the scenes text can really mess up your HTML and if you are a web design newbie you may not be able to work out why.

A good way to remedy this is to cut and paste your text/document into notepad or other pain text editor and then cut and paste again into your HTML editor/blog editing window/other document. You will lose your formatting [like bold, italic, heading sizes etc] but if your document is not too reliant on formatting it's preferable.

Make a Color Statement With Your Web Site

You don't have to be an expert in graphic design or art to put together a web site that looks esthetically pleasing. It helps, but it's not mandatory. With a myriad of resources available on the Internet you can easily put together a color scheme that will look like a professional designer did it for you.

When I am designing a color scheme for a client's web site, I often look at their logo to lead me in my color choices. Existing marketing collateral is taken into consideration also.

But what if you want to design your web site's color palette? Visit these web sites for some great color combination ideas:

Is there a web site you like and want to know the colors used in it? This site helps you quickly select and test website color combinations: ColorCombos.

You can buy software that will do what this site does for free - color scheme generation.

I have this software and it's great. They have an online scaled down edition at colorschemer.com.

Like some colors in a photo you saw online? Use this site to tell you the Hex values.

And on the same lines: ColorHunter.

Use this online app to take a base color in hex format and create a palette of ten shades of that color for you.

Click on one of the hundreds of little boxes to see the color values in expanded mode at colorjack.com.

Another free online tool for color matching and palette design.

Colors, palettes and even backgrounds for your web site at colourlovers.

Color harmonies, matching and tint searches at EasyRGB.

And finally

Get fresh color scheme ideas every day.

If You Build It, Who Will Come?

Just because you spent time putting a web site together, and maybe a good amount of money too, it doesn't mean anyone will come to your web site. Oh, the horror! Yes, pretty awful to hear the truth, but that's how it works - if you don't try and drive traffic to your site then no one will come, even if you have the most fabulous concept, or cool games.

So how do you get traffic - especially if you are trying to build a web site within a limited budget?

Easy Traffic Builder: The Page Title
There are many ways to build traffic but I will just go over one here for now: the title of your web page. And for arguments sake we will presume that you have a website about widgets and not a Carmen Electra photo gallery fan site - a site that will, by its very nature, get a lot more visitors than a site about widgets.

Your widget site must at its very base level have good content. But let's bypass that and just talk about how to get visitors to be curious enough to feel like clicking on a link to your site. If you just wrote a great piece on your site about the latest, greatest widget then by titling that page 'Widget X" you will not create a surge of curious visitors to your site. Take a leaf out of the tabloid press' book and create titles that make you want to click [turn that page].

Linkbaiting is when you create unique and interesting, and/or controversial content [not solely with web page content, but other media like videos and games too] that other web sites will link to. The main purpose of setting up linkbait is to get links, but that is not really what I am talking about here.

You won't get visitors to stick around your site if you brought them toy our site under false pretenses - "Carmen Electra Loves My Widget" might bring some traffic but they are looking to see what it is that Carmen likes, not your widget. A better hook would be something like "5 reasons why Widget X makes you cool," if indeed it does.

People love to know things in a condensed version, know that it won't take eons of scanning to get to the juicy part. Giving a "Top 10" of something, or if you can't think of that many - a 5 or 3 of something, will pique interest too. A negative works well also - "5 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Buy X, " or a little mystery: "The Secrets of X Revealed" help bring traffic to your site. Tips for things, or information for 'Beginners' or 'Newbies' works well too.

So remember to make the title interesting, but relevant, and then people will be a lot more likely to click on your link. Later on I will talk about some great places to put some of those links to help drive traffic to your site beyond just the regular search engines.

The Basics of Onpage SEO

Search engines do not rank whole web sites, but individual pages within the site. When doing some Page Rank research you may see that pages within a web site can have very different rankings. Therefore, with single web pages in mind, start small to build up your rankings within as many pages of your site as possible. You need to use what is known as onpage SEO to give your web page the best advantage, and if you have many highly optimized pages they will help you more than just a homepage with a good ranking.

The most base level onpage SEO techniques that you need to encompass within your web pages are as follows:

1. Page title
   This is what appears in the blue bar at the very top of your browser window. This 'title tag' must list your keywords. If you leave your title out it will be listed by default as 'Untitled'. This is to be avoided as your title tag lets the search engines know what your page is about. So, 'untitled' doesn't tell them anything other than you omitted the title. In a search result the title tag is displayed so you want to keep it short and to the point using about 7 or 8 words. Make sure all the pages on your site have different title tags.
   
   
2. Metadata
   This is coding found before your 'head' tag. Search engines used to use metadata for page rank much more than they do these days, but don't overlook your meta tags - Google differentiates between your pages by using your metadata. List your keywords in your meta tags, do not list words that you don't have in your content.
   
   
3. Web page content
   Use a light peppering of keywords throughout your web page content but don't overdo it and 'stuff' your pages. The search engines will regard that as a negative. As long as your web copy is relevant to your title tags and keywords you are OK. Think big picture and 'theme' your web page. And try using synonyms as well as your keywords so that your text reads properly.
   
   
4. Links
   Link to pages within your web site using your chosen keywords. This internal linking will inform search engines that the keyword has importance. Refrain from linking all over the place within your web copy as your theme will 'bleed'. Keep things tight by controlling where your links go out to, and remember this means content links here, not your menu links.
   
   
5. Your domain name
   If you want to improve in the search engine rankings it helps to have your keywords in your url. If your keyword is "weightloss tips" you should chose weightlosstips.com which will rank much higher for your keyword term than, say, healthyeating101.com. Of course you have to make sure each page is fully optimized too.

Remember as you optimize your web page content to make sure that it reads well. Naturally flowing text will make your visitors feel like sticking around, and later returning; and by using these few, easy to follow pointers, your onpage SEO will be a success.

10 Tips for Web Page Content Layout

If you are one of the many small business owners who out of necessity to stay within a budget, has become a newbie web author, then you need to know a few easy to remember guidelines for publishing reader-friendly, relevant and effective web page content that will have your visitors staying around for more.

Studies have shown what we already know is true - reading a web page is very different to reading a printed page.

Many people dislike reading on the web so intensely that they print out web pages and articles to read in greater detail later. And the truth is that most visitors to your web site will merely skim through your content and make a lightning fast judgment as to whether or not it is worth printing and reading later on.

So what can you do to ensure that visitors to your web site will stick around until the last paragraph? Make your point - and make it fast!

You have to grab your visitor's attention immediately so that in those few precious moments that they scan your web page content to see if it is relevant to them, they can see that it is. So, what is the best way to get your message across effectively?

Here are my ten top tips to writing effective web page content:

1. Well written, relevant content is important - use a spell checker so typos don't let you down
2. Use your keywords in a manner that won't bore the reader - don't needlessly repeat them
3. Give concise information - get to the bare bones fast, don't waffle!
4. Use short sentences and very short paragraphs - a few sentences per paragraph tops
5. Break up long content and link it to bullet points at the top of the page
6. Cross-reference your content with other pages
7. Format your page's text content width to narrow
8. Keep content relevant to the subject header - extraneous information should go elsewhere
9. Make use of white space to make your text easy to read
10. Bold/enlarge your subject headings so that they are clear

Small business owners are often too busy to frequently update their web sites and often leave them full of old, stale pages. If you are in this situation, but you want to write relevant, effective web page content and don't have time to add new copy, use my tips and re-work what you already have. You don't need to spend hours generating new text, as often just a few aesthetic enhancements, like those listed, can go a long way to making your web site an easy read.