21 Days

Day 2 – Let’s get ready to build

Woah there! Just because we now have the perfect iWeb theme doesn’t mean we can jump straight in and knock up a web site in a matter of minutes. As I mentioned in yesterday’s lesson a web site should reflect you, your product or service and it should do it very well. Rushing into a web site will just produce shoddy results which will only need correcting in the near future; if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing well……and it’s worth doing once! Today’s watchword is ‘ORGANIZE’.

[premium level=”1″ teaser=”yes” message=”Sorry, you need to be an active subscriber to view this post.”]The purpose of day 2 is to allow you to get all your iWeb site’s contents altogether in one place. Whether it be on your desktop (this is what I like to do as it makes dragging and dropping so much easier) or a neat an tidy folder somewhere with Finder collecting all of your images, videos, text and, if you use it, sound all in one place will save you digging around for it later. There has been many a time when I have found an image on the Internet, saved it to folder for later use and then when I was halfway through a web site I couldn’t find it again.

It is now that you must also loosely plan your iWeb site in as much as how many pages you are going to have and what they will be called. Doing this now saves time later and helps with planning the navigation for your site. You may want to tweak the layout of your chosen theme, an element may look better on the left rather than the right for example; now is the time to play before we get our hands dirty.

Not only should you gather all of the items I mentioned above however, we should thoroughly check everything to make sure it is as best as it can be. That’s why I have given a whole day to this lesson, don’t rush it.

I prepare all of my text with either Pages or TextEditor. I would then take this opportunity to read through everything again, spellchecking as I went. Formatting isn’t an issue at this stage as this will all get sorted out when you put it into iWeb but don’t get caught with bad spelling all over the place.

And while you are reading through the text why not check for popular keywords. We will be covering the issue of SEO in a later lesson but regular readers of All About iWeb will know I published a few posts on the subject so why not give them a quick review now; the links are at the bottom of the page. In a nutshell though, keywords are just that, key words. They are the words that you think and want visitors to your site to type into a search engine to find your site.

You may have noticed on All About iWeb that I use the phrase ‘iWeb site’ instead of just ‘web site’; that is because I think users will type iWeb site into Google to find my site. Furthermore, as my site is aimed at iWeb users I don’t want regular (pc based) web site designers visiting my site and getting annoyed because there is nothing of use for them at AAi.

Whilst we are touching on the subject of SEO it is normally now that I make sure all my images are given SEO friendly names. A quick explanation: below are two images, both identical, one has the name given to it straight from the camera, the other an SEO friendly name. Don’t underestimate the power of image search engines, they are just as useful as regular text searches, particularly if you are an artist or photographer who has published their portfolio via iWeb. A search engine will use the names of your images as keywords and show your images too, a user will click on your image and visit your site and then who knows what else they will find.

Users are far more likely to search for Sacre Coeur Paris than DSC00487.

The same can be done for your videos too. But don’t think that is all for them, watch them one more time, you never know what you might have missed in post production.

So now that you have all your images and videos sized correctly, looking gorgeous and named efficiently, your text is spellchecked and stuffed full of useful keywords and your sounds, be they podcasts, mp3s or other formats ready we are all set to start building our iWeb site.

We are finishing today’s lesson with a bit of revision; SEO for iWeb. In order to help you prepare your iWeb site’s content to help with your placement within search engines take a few moments to read over these posts on All About iWeb.

SEO for iWeb Part 1

SEO for iWeb Part 2 – Meta tags

SEO for iWeb Part 3 – Keywords

SEO for iWeb Part 4 – An Example

SEO for iWeb Part 5 – More Keywords

You can do SEO with iWeb

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