Directions Page

Directions Page

Google makes this easy. This is best done after you have established your business in Google Places. Simply search for your business on Google Maps and select directions option. After you locate it you will see a Link icon (chain links), chick on the link icon. Follow the “Customize and preview embedded map” link, now select the size you would like, then copy and paste the code provided to your company’s directions pages.

Adding a text description with landmarks should also be included on the page, along with any parking information. Recommend a parking lot if you do not have on-site parking.

Fonts Selection

Fonts Selection

There are many different font styles to select from. Some are simple others have a flare to them. For the most part simple fonts are better when you have paragraph of information for your website visitor to read. The fonts with flare work best when used as headers or to accent an area of text.

There are some advantages to using fonts that exist on your visitors system, these do not need to be downloaded and are ready for use reducing download time. Some of these safe font are: Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Lucida Console, Palatino Linotype, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Verdana, MS Sans Serif and MS Serif.
What if the font you selected is not available of the visitors system? This is where you have a font family. With the font family you select multi fonts; if the first one on the list is not available it uses the second one. Below is a sample of a font family code that would be present the CCS Styles for the website.

font-family:"Bookman Old Style",Tahoma,Verdana,"Myriad Web",Syntax,sans-serif;

If you would like expand your selection of available fonts Google Web fonts provides over five hundred fonts that can be downloaded to your user’s system when they view your pages. The Google Web fonts page provide you with the code you require and the load time hit that your page will encounter.
Don’t overdo your use of different fonts on a page. It is best to only use a maximum three different font styles on a single page.

Linked-in Company Page

Linked-in Company Page

Linked-in is a professional social network. If you are not familiar with Linked-in visit their website and set up a professional profile. In addition to individual profiles you can also set up a Linked-in Company page. This is a great opportunity for small businesses that engage in business-to-business transactions. In many cases this could be more beneficial than having a small company website.
Creating a Linked-in Company page is easy, you only require to have a Linked-in profile and a business email address (eg Joe@companyname.com) . Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo emails will not work.

1. Log-in to your Linked-in Profile
2. Click on the Companies Tab
3. Search for your company, I expect that you get “No company result found”
4. Under that there is a link to “Add a Company profile …”
5. Enter your Company Name and your email address
6. The rest is just completing the forms
7. The Overview Page let your followers see what you have been doing.
8. There is a service/products page where you can list the products and/or service that your company offers.
9. Also there is a Career tab where you can post job opportunities; I have not tried this feature.

Unlike the personal profile, the company profiles are open and can be viewed by anyone on the internet. Also Linked-in provides an easy method to obtain a follow button like the one below;

PDF Files

PDF Files

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a computer file format design by Adobe many years ago. There are many good uses for PDF files; however these are being over used on some websites. PDF files are relatively easy to create, but what is your goal? If it is more important to make your job easier at the expense of customer satisfaction, then go ahead and use PDF files rather than HTML code.

Typical PDF are much large than other file types, therefore the download time is much longer and you could be causing your customer to incurred higher download charges along with a longer wait time for the information.

Not all web based PDF files are bad, documents that are indented to be printed or read off line, such as forms, booklets and spec sheets are a good match for the PDF format.
Restaurant menus, and price lists are not a good choice for the PDF format. The customer just want to view the information and make a decision, don’t get in their way.

Share Buttons

Share Buttons

I recently added Share button to my L&M Website Design company website. These were so easy to add that I should have done it earlier. I am hoping that some of the visitors to my site will assist me in spreading the word about my site using these share buttons.

If you would like to add share buttons to your site just follow the links below:

Facebook – Link button: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
Google Plus Share button: http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/+1/button/index.html?utm_source=b2cp1&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=p1
LinkedIn Share Button: https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins/share-plugin-generator
Linkedin Follow Button: https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins/follow-company

Have fun with these!

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets

I recently start putting Rich Snippets into websites that I am designing. Rich Snippets were developed to highlight structured data embedded in web pages. They are not affecting your site rating directly. So what good are they? Google uses them to better identify relevant data on your website site. They use this to better present your listing to your potential customers. This in turn may cause potential customers to select your website over another that is listed.
There are several types of snippets that can be used with the Rich Snippets. The Mircodata for Event, Organization, Person, Product, Review, Review-aggregate, Breadcrumb, Offer and Offer-aggregate can be found at http://www.data-vocabulary.org/

Google Webmaster site has a good explanation of how to incorporate the Rich Snippets into you code along with examples.

They even have a Rich Snippets Testing Tool, it as simple as pasting the URL for your page into the test box and press submit

Incorporating a Blog

Blogs can be used in several ways to increase the relevance of your website.

• Keep your customer up-to-date on events or specials. You can create a blot that does not allow user comments, therefore only one or your representative can update the information for the blog.
• Get your customers more involve with your business by allowing them to participate in discussions that you have a common interest in, this will draws other to your website and business.
• Use them to share your knowledge about your profession. Establish yourselves as an expert by assisting others.

There are many blogging sites available; I am using Google Blogger for this blog. I also have experience with WordPress, both provide me with the tools I require to make a professional looking blog. One of the items that you need you consider, is where to host the blog. Having Google or WordPress host your blog is great, but if have it hosted as part of your website there is some added benefits. Every time you added a blog post you are updating your website. Search engines like websites that are fresh. WordPress comes in two different version; http://wordpress.org/ this provides you with the tool to post your blog on the some host as your website, http://wordpress.com will host your blog for you and can be easier to setup. I believe Google also offers both of these options. Either way, make sure you like your website to your blog and your blog to your website.