New Product Announcement: Web Studio Photo Collection CD
The Photo Collection consists of over 2000 professional photos organized into 33 different categories. The photos install themselves as 33 new collections in your existing Photo Gallery in Web Studio, ready for a simple drag and drop to your page.
The collection consists of fine art photography focusing on evocative landscapes, urban and business perspectives, a menagerie of animals, plants, flowers, landscapes, mountains, fields of flowers, deserts, forests, frosty landscapes, and creatures from all corners of the globe, business photos of people, groups, meetings, business objects, abstracts styled with brilliant colors using shape, line and texture to create compelling and highly artistic compositions, a great collection of popular and useful objects, all packaged for rapid use in Web Studio. The photos have been scanned, cropped, color corrected, sized and re-sampled for the web.
Available on CD, the collection features a video tutorial illustrating installation, use the photos, tips on cropping, special effects, making new photos out of the existing, and much more. The collection is available now at $49.95, click here.
Back to the Beach and Web Studio on the Radio
Web Studio and Back to the Beach Software will be the topic on the Dave Alexander Show on KCBQ 1170am radio in San Diego and Los Angeles, CA, Tuesday, October 4, 2005. The show is broadcast from 6:30pm to 8:00pm Pacific Time. To listen in go to http://www.kcbq.com and click the "listen online" link in the upper right corner. Steve Cochard, author of Web Studio, is the special guest.
Dave Alexander, a well known business consultant, helps small businesses drive continued growth through increase cash flow, marketing, sales, insurance, legal aspects and more.
The show will focus on Back To The Beach as a business, Web Studio as a tool for small business owners, how to get the most out of your site, search engines, and of course Web Studio. Listen in!
Pick the Perfect Holiday Gift
Our new Photo Collection CD, our not quite released Template Collection CD, the new upgrade from Retail to Deluxe package, the Video Tutorial CD, and the printed documentation all make great gifts for current Web Studio owners. And of course, you know the value of Web Studio to your enterprise, give Web Studio as a gift to friends and family this year!
We're exited to announce the release of our Photo Collection CD! Read the feature article for more info on this exciting addition to our product family.
Web Studio is going to be on the radio! Tune in on 1170am if you live in L.A. or San Diego. If not, tune in on the web, full details in the feature article.
We've had a lot of requests for an upgrade path from the Retail version to the Deluxe version. It is available now on our site, and makes a great holiday gift for any Retail Web Studio owner.
We've got lots of valuable search engine info for you as well.
Congrats to Nanoweb and Stephen, our Site of the Month winners for September!
Printing Newsletters
In the June 20, 2005 newsletter we discussed using Tables for newsletters. This was because certain email client software couldn't read the HTML files that used DIV tags. Using tables fixed that. Now that we've converted the newsletter to Tables, we find that graphics that span a printed page in a newsletter cause browsers to go "nuts" when you attempt to print them. They seem to think the graphic is infinitely long. Interesting that when we use DIVs for the same newsletter the printing is fine. Seem like we and you are always fighting some strange thing with the internet!
The good news is our newsletters display fine and print fine now. You should make sure your HTML EMails are done just like ours. Go to the Website menu's Web Site Properties dialog, to the Advanced tab and click the "" radio button to use Tables. Then choose Print from the File menu. And use the Preview feature to see if everything looks good. If not, see if you have any graphics spanning the pages. If so, make them not span and do the Print Preview again. Your emails and newsletters will work great then.
Search Engine Ranking Info: It has become increasingly clear to us that search engine and your ranking is very important to you, as it is to us. Here are some interesting tid-bits that have cropped up recently. We'll be adding more tid-bits of search engine lore in future newsletters.
Don't add Keywords to your pages. "What? That's the most important thing for good ranking", we hear you say! Possibly not. Google doesn't use Keywords (keyword meta tag) for anything any more. In fact, some think that they will grade you lower if you have keywords. Our information isn't conclusive about Yahoo's use of keywords at this point. So, you may want to keep them until that becomes clear. Here's the thoughts behind removing the keywords altogether. Since Google doesn't use them, who does? Your competition is the answer! If you are ranked highly, your competition is surely looking at your site and its source. If you have a bunch of keywords in there, they will be adding them to their site as soon as they can upload! If you are not highly ranked or are in a business that isn't that competitive it may not matter to you. But give it some thought.
The Google Sandbox is Gone. Have you asked yourself why your site wasn't listed in Google? Have you suddenly seen it appear after six months or so? We did! We were in the Google Sandbox. The sandbox was a "place" where Google would put your site after it initially found it. It would leave you there for six months and not rank you or list you at all. They did that because of some search-engine-spammers that would create a bunch of sites, link them all to their real site, get their 'real' site listed highly and then take them all down once their scam was over. Google has apparently figured out reliable ways to detect this type of behavior so they have gotten rid of the sandbox. They will now list sites as soon as they are uploaded to the web.
The No-Follow Meta Tag: There is a little known meta tag named "ROBOTS" that you can use to tell search engines how to and what to look at on your site. The NOFOLLOWversion of this tag tells the search engine to not look at any of the pages that are linked to the page with this tag. Why would you not want a search engine to look at a page? Maybe you have a section of your site that contains confidential info and you don't want it showing up on Google. A point to remember: if you have a link on a different page to your confidential info page, you'll have to add the NOFOLLOW tag to it as well! Here's the HTML format for this tag: <META name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
Speaking of Competitor's Keywords: Here is a tool, Googspy.com, that will tell you lots about your competitors. You enter their website address and it tells you all of the search terms that score in the top 10 of the Google free listings (also known as 'organic listings'). It then tells you all of the keywords (or search terms) that the company is bidding on in the paid Google listings (also known as Google Adwords). It then tells you the top 25 competitors for the company. We found out about some competitors we didn't even know of! When we run the tool on ourselves, we have a bunch of top 10 listings thanks to our three "marketing your website" articles. And a bunch of paid listings. With this tool, we'll be adding a bunch more. So can you! Remember the article above about not using keywords? If that's true, why would we care about the Googspy tool? You'll be using it to gather keywords that you can use in the text of your webpages! Not in keyword meta-tags.
