Month: November 2018

Charles Tips – Do-It-Yourself Sites

Do-it-yourself website builders make it sound SO easy! And they can be. But there can be a steep price to pay.

I see ads every now and then boasting about how you can build a website in an evening with no previous experience. Several times a month we have people who have fallen into that trap, then contact us to help them out of it.

The biggest issue with these do-it-yourself sites is that you don’t own your site! The platform/servers the site is built on is proprietary – so you’re locked in to that company. Couple that with the fact that the site can’t be easily customized. Also, your site looks like numerous others. Many of these sites are not found well in the search engines. They have layers of coding that makes it easy to make changes but harder for the search engines to “see” what they’re about.

Do-it-yourself sites are generally not through local companies either. So if doing business with local people who will send business back to you is important – that’s another reason to avoid them.

When thinking of having a website built, take the time to ask a developer about options. Simply ask, “Do I own my website?”

Charles Tips – Spam

We get many questions about spam (Junk E-mail). Spam clutters up your email. It’s also used to deliver online scams and malware/viruses.

A common question is “Any idea of why I’m seeing spam emails in my Inbox?” Spammers most likely got your email address from your friends or acquaintances – people you know and correspond with – whose computers or phones were compromised. Their contact lists get added to the spammers lists. Spammers also get emails from when we purchase online and from finding email addresses on websites.

Spam is difficult to avoid. One way to handle it is to hit the delete key. That’s much the same as just throwing junk mail away that’s delivered by the mail carrier.

However, spam email can be filtered. The good news is that better than 98% can be filtered into a junk email folder.

One filtering problem is determining which are actually spam – Home Depot, Lowe’s, Staples or other vendors are spam to many and not spam to others. Good mail servers allow users to “mark” items as not spam in that case.

There are numerous email servers that behave in just as many ways handling spam. If spam is an issue, check with your email provider about your options for handling it.

Charles Oropallo (Charles@CharlesWorks.com) started CharlesWorks in Peterborough NH in 1998. His team does website design, hosting, search engine optimization (SEO) and related web services.

Charles Tips – WordPress

Websites don’t just appear out of thin air. They must be built. There are numerous products to assist with this. Many are what are called Content Management Systems (CMS). The most popular today is called WordPress. Nearly 1/3 of all websites use it.

WordPress Logo
A somewhat typical
WordPress logo

WordPress started as a blog software. It’s capabilities evolved over time to include pages, navigation and all the components needed for a web presence.

Just as anyone can build a home or paint a house or even perform their own dental work – anyone can make a website. All you need are the right tools and lots of time to spend learning how to do it, right? That’s why we hire contractors and painters and go to a dentist. WordPress developers save folks the time of developing the website – so they can be busy doing what they are best at.

WordPress software is free. However, website development takes time and is best done by professionals familiar with it.

Be wary of the promise of a website “anyone can build”. Those result in trapping you to a particular vendor – meaning you do not own your website. With WordPress you can go anywhere and most importantly you own the work you paid for.

Charles Oropallo (Charles@CharlesWorks.com) started CharlesWorks in Peterborough NH in 1998. His team does website design, hosting, search engine optimization (SEO) and related web services.

Charles Tips – Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of raising a site’s ranking with the search engines. Sites can have different rankings on various search engines. Each search engine’s scoring methods vary and are closely guarded secrets. Where you “rank” is how close you are to the top (e.g., 1 vs 100).

No one can promise a #1 placement. Only paying the search engine itself can guarantee that! However, there ARE things that can be done for better placement. Understand that search engines are like artificial intelligence. They “read” the text in a site to gain understanding of what a site is about – much like humans do. They understand context and categorize topics.

There’s no magical trick to gaining website search engine ranking. Plenty of information in a website’s text about its products or services is key. More written info about a topic equals more relevant search results.

While photos help aesthetics, text still “tells” search engines what a site’s about. Don’t be afraid to write in great detail about your products and services. Remember: The more pages there are on a site about a topic – the more relevant the site becomes about that topic.

Charles Oropallo (Charles@CharlesWorks.com) started CharlesWorks in Peterborough NH in 1998. His team does website design, hosting, search engine optimization (SEO) and related web services.