Web Studio 4.0 Newsletter

...I don't want my page to scroll sideways. How do I stop it?
The key is to design your page so no objects extend far to the right. Web pages are sized by the browser so that their width is wide enough to hold the "stuff" you've put on the page. If your stuff is too far to the right, the browser will add a scroll bar to let visitors see it all. Use the "Target Design Size" feature in Web Studio's Website Properties dialog to help you design for a specific size monitor. Most people are designing for 800 or 1024 wide monitors these days.

...I dont want my page to scroll sideways even if my page is too wide ?
With a little bit of HTML you can do this. Go to the page you want to add this "feature" to in Web Studio. Go to the Page Menu in Web Studio and choose Page Properties. Click on the Page HTML tab. Click on the Inside Body Tag button. Now enter the following text into the text exactly as it appears here with the quotes and everything, but without the colon: style="overflow-x:hidden"

...I'm using Text FX from the CoolStuff gallery and it is making my page wide! How do I fix it?
If you add a lot of text to some of the Text FX the resulting object can be quite wide and will make your page scroll sideways. Here's how to fix it:

After you've added the Text FX, select it and grab the resize handle and resize it to the size you prefer. If it says it's locked, tell it to unlock it and then resize it. Next, Right click on the object and select Properties from the menu. You'll see the Width in there towards the bottom. Copy the width or just remember it. Now click on the HTML Content Tab. Scroll through the HTML, ignoring as much of the frightening HTML as you can, and find where it says Width=". Delete the number to the right of it, which is the previous width, and type or paste in the new width you just remembered. Now click OK and your done!

...How do I put a link on my site that brings up my email address when someone click on it?
The secret to an email link is prefixing the email address with mailto:. If, for example, your email address is joey@webstudio.com the email link would be: mailto:joey@webstudio.com. Here's a link to an FAQ on our website that tells you everything you need to know about links, all flavors!

...I want to add a link that will automatically add my site to a visitors Favorites or Bookmarks.
Drag a text object leave it blank for now. Right click on the object and choose Edit HTML Source. The HTML Editor will come up. Don't let it scare you, this is easy. Copy the single line of text below and paste it into the editor:

<A href="javascript:bookmarkMe( 'http://webstudio.com', 'Home of Web Studio 4.0' )">Bookmark me</A>

Where it says "webstudio.com" enter your domain name. Where it says "Home of Web Studio 4.0" put a desciption of your site. Where it says "Bookmark me", enter the text you want your visitor to see. Now, click Save and you'll see it in the text object. You can now change its font, color , size, etc., to match your site's text and links.

How Do I Get My Site Listed with the Search Engines?

The first question to answer is which engines should you try to get listed with. You'll see many companies on the web that will "submit" your site to 100's of search engines for a fee. Truth is, there are only a few that you really need to deal with since they "feed" most of the other search engines.

Google and Yahoo have many other search engines as affiliates. For example, AOL's search engine is actually Google's! And MSN has been powered by Yahoo. In fact, Yahoo powers AltaVista, Excite, Go2Net, InfoSpace, MSN, Sympatico.ca, Juno, Netzero, Dogpile, Metacrawler, Web Crawler, AlltheWeb, CNN, Cool Savings, Consumer Review Network, and Knight Ridder among others.

And Google powers AOL, Netscape, Earthlink, At&T Worldnet, AskJeeves, Lycos, InfoSpace, iVillage, and many more.

So, you see if you get listed on just Google and Yahoo you are actually listed on more than 25 of the largest search engines. What about the other 100's of search engines? They don't really amount to much and probably aren't worth the effort.

There are two types of listings: Free and Paid.

Paid listings are the ones that say "Sponsored" above them. They are normally at the very top of a page, on the right side of a page, and sometimes at the bottom of pages.

Free listings are the others on a page. Free listings are great because they are free! However, you are competing with all of the other pages on the web for a rank in the listings. In order to move your site up in the listings you have to optimize your pages for search engines. In reality, you have two different "customers" for you site: the people you want to go to your site, and the search engines you want to rank your site. In order to reach both, your pages need to be designed for both.

We had a series of articles on how to improve search engine rankings in previous newsletters. Those articles are on our site and best of all they work! If you follow the directions provided in these articles your site will move up to higher and higher rankings. However, it takes time, and lots of it. Search engines do their ranking about once a month. It will take 3 to 6 months for you to see a change. This means you should start optimizing your pages today!

Click on these links to read the articles, they are titled Online Marketing Part 1, Online Marketing Part 2, Online Marketing Part 3.

The rest of this article discusses Paid Listings. It is too long to fit it all in this month's newsletter so we put it on our site. Click here to read the article. Note that we could have made a two-part article out of this and put part two in next month's newsletter, but we hate it when people do that! J So, go to our site via the link above and get started with Google and Overture paid listings!