Design / Usability

Programs I Use on My Website. Part 1. Basics Dr. Ralph F. Wilson , Web Marketing Today - Apr 27, 2010

Part 1 - Basics | Part 2 - CMS | Part 3 - E-mail

A few months ago, one of my readers asked, "What programs do you use on your website?" I have four primary websites for which I am webmaster -- Web Marketing Today, two large sites that carry my online Christian ministry, and a small website for the church where I serve an interim pastor. Over the course of my career, I've designed and built nearly 100 websites for others, but these four are my current responsibility.

When I develop a website, I do so with maintenance in mind. It's not just the initial website design that's important, but the ability for the owner to make necessary changes, updates, and add new pages, without relying on the "expert" to do everything.

Over the course of this series, I'll address a wide variety of software I use, including content management systems, e-mail marketing programs, social media, audio and video, advertising programs, e-commerce software, e-mail contact forms, and analytics.

However, to begin, let me address some of the very basic elements and programs that underlie my websites.

Web Design Program

Probably the best popular-level web design program is Adobe Dreamweaver. It's fairly pricey, but full-featured. But I'm "old school." I like what I'm used to -- Microsoft FrontPage 2003. It's showing its age, but it works for me, since I'm no longer designing websites for a living.

Server-Side Includes

Back in the dark ages of the Internet, I discovered a feature called Server Side Includes (SSIs). This feature of a webserver (or your a PHP program that runs your site) allows you to set up "boilerplate" files for each of the unchanging sections of your webpage: top, left menu, bottom contact information, etc. This way you don't need to insert the same text into every webpage, but just make a "call" for the SSI file with one line of code. The whole page is assembled from these SSIs each time a person lands on a webpage and his web browser requests to see the page.

The beauty of SSIs is that when you're ready to do a minor design improvement, you just update one or more of the SSI files and the changes are immediately reflected on each of the webpages in your site, whether you have a small site of 5 to 10 pages or a large site of thousands of pages.

Even if you don't design your own website, make sure your website designer uses SSIs. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars when you need changes made to the site.

CSS

The other underlying element of webpages you need to be aware of is known as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Style tags are built into modern HTML. The nice thing about CSS is that instead of defining your styles on each webpage, you can design them for the whole site. When you want to make a change, such as increasing the size of a font in your menu, you make a change to the single CSS file that controls the whole website. Using CSS saves lots of time in maintenance and keeps all the pages on the same, uniform track.

CSS can be very complex, however. The average person will need to spend some serious time in the HTML manual to get it right. It might be better to have a professional web designer set up your site with CSS, rather than you try to do it yourself. It could save you some grief.

One marketing warning: Some designers set up a custom-named style tag for each of the headlines and subheadings in a website. Rather, your main headline should be called "H1," with all its parameters defined in the CSS. Your subheadings should be H2 or H3. This is important because search engines look in these specific headline tags for keywords that give clues to the focus of the website.

JavaScript Programs

Modern web browsers read and implement the JavaScript instructions that occur on webpages, allowing greater functionality, accuracy, and user experience than is possible with HTML alone. Here are the JavaScript programs that I use regularly:

Random images of Nevada City, CA

Random Images. On some sites I have a series of graphic images that appear on the right side of my webpages. In one site I rotate book covers, so that one of my 15 to 20 books will appear. In another site, I rotate photos of the picturesque tourist town where my church is located. See an example to the right. Every time someone goes to another webpage on the site, a new image is displayed.

The JavaScript program to accomplish this is pretty simple. I list the URLs of the graphics in a pool of images to select from. Then the program dynamically selects one of these to display at random when a webpage is called for. My script is adapted from the Random Images script (www.hypergurl.com/randomimage.html) I found years ago at hypergurl.com.

Open a Small Window. A program I use all the time, especially on landing pages, is one that opens a small window when you click on a link. For example, try clicking on this to see how it works. Using a script like this you can explain the fine details about an item without including everything in the text of the page. This way you can keep your landing and product pages clean and uncluttered with details, unless they are specifically requested. You'll find a variety of JavaScript programs online that perform this function, such as those offered at JavaScript-Array.com (www.javascript-array.com/scripts/window_open/) and PageResource.com (www.pageresource.com/jscript/jwinopen.htm).

Menu.  You'll see many sites with human-friendly menu systems that display drop-down navigation options when you hover over a tab. For this I use a program called ACEMenu from Navsurf.com (www.navsurf.com/dhtml/acemenu/), available for $49.95. However, when I redesign next time, I don't plan to use JavaScript. Rather, I'll set up a navigation bar system using sophisticated CSS.

JQuery (www.jquery.com) is "a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development." Some of my programs use parts of this library. I object, however, to the size of this library which must be downloaded by your visitor before the JavaScript functions are available. It's designed for use by professional website designers and programmers, not untrained hackers -- but it's free.

Pop-ups. Pop-ups are controversial -- so much so that Google Toolbar and others will disable annoying pop-ups and pop-unders for you. I do understand that people don't want to be annoyed. Since keeping my newsletter subscriber base high is the lifeblood of my advertising-supported revenue model, I use one unblockable pop-up, carefully configured to limit annoyance. Visitors see the pop-up once -- after about five seconds on my site -- and after that (so long as the cookie remains) don't see it again. I found that using a pop-up for subscriptions nearly doubled my subscription rate. The program I use is Michael Hopkins' Dynamic Popup Generator (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/dpg.htm), a $27 program for your Windows computer that allows you to set the exact parameters for your pop-up window and then generate code you can paste onto your webpage.

Search

The final basic webpage program I'll discuss here is a site-search program. As opposed to web-wide search engines, site search programs search only the information contained on your own webpages.

For years I used a freeware program known as SWISH-e (Simple Web Indexing System for Humans -- Enhanced, www.swish-e.org). It is very configurable and can handle even very large websites. I used to schedule this program to generate a brand new index file on my server every night. Then when a visitor used the site-search function, the program checked information in the index and displayed relevant webpages links.

When I redesigned the site a couple of years ago, however, I moved to Google Custom Search. Google offers it free in exchange for you displaying ads on the results page that are relevant to the search terms entered, part of the Google AdSense program. If one of your visitors clicks on an ad, you make a few cents per click, and so does Google. Compared to the search results displayed by SWISH-e, Google's results are quite relevant and readable. Implementation is simple, and Google takes care of keeping the program up-to-date and protected against hackers. Sweet!

We've begun with the basics. In the next installment in this series, I'll discuss Content Management Systems (CMS) I have known and loved -- well ... mostly.

Dr. Ralph Wilson is a pioneer in Internet marketing, beginning Web Marketing Today in 1995. At present it reaches 100,000 subscribers each week. The New York Times named him "among the best-known publishers and consultants who preach the responsible use of e-mail for marketing."