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Write the Web™ 
The Web for You
Archive for the ‘Level: Novice’ Category
Friday, June 27th, 2008
I just stumbled across a very interesting site that I thought I should share with my readers. It’s a site called Cafe Press. This site offers a wide variety of print-on-demand products from clothing to housewares and other gifts. You can add your own images to the products to create your very own styles, logos, catch-phrases, etc., which you can sell online in your very own Cafe Press store. The best part about Cafe Press is that you don’t have to spend any money to get started. Because Cafe Press doesn’t produce any products until someone orders them, there are no setup fees or minimum purchases required. Without spending any money, you can create as many custom products as you want, and sell them in your own, personalized online shops.
Each product has a “base price” that covers all of the costs of manufacture and production. To make money, simply set a “markup” price that you will earn as commission on sales of your product(s) (Just a word to the wise…be reasonable: I saw a thong for sale for $200 while I was browsing the site!). That’s all there is to it. It was so easy to get started that I’ve already created my own online shop with a few products that are available for immediate purchase, which I’ve included below as an example of what you can do. Of course, you can also buy your own products directly for the base price, without paying the markup.
Although it is tempting to think that I’ll soon strike it rich by selling my custom products at Cafe Press, the reality is that, like most online money-making opportunities, I’ll be lucky to pull in a few dollars per year, and that only if I can talk my friends and family into purchasing my products. There are probably 10 million unique products currently being sold at Cafe Press, so don’t expect massive sales right off the bat. However, if you have a good enough idea/design, you just might be able to create a popular product line and make decent money from your sales. But whether I make money or not, it’s fun to see what my ideas will look like on customized products. And maybe, just maybe, I will actually be able to pull in a few dollars each year for my efforts. There is one caveat worth mentioning: if you don’t make at least $25 per year, your earnings will be forfeited and returned to Cafe Press (I think I was mistaken here…after re-reading the terms, it looks like your earnings will only be forfeited if you fail to provide a valid mailing address).
And, if you’re just interested in creating a custom coffee mug, shirt, sticker, notebook, or other product for your own personal use, you can easily do that as well – you don’t have to sell them in an online store or in the Cafe Press marketplace.
As I said, I don’t think that Cafe Press is a great way to make a living, but it might be a nice way to help promote your site or your cause. For example, you might consider shelling out some of your own money to purchase your custom-branded products to give away to family and friends, or to offer as incentives to bring people to your site or blog (“Sign up for our e-mail newsletter, and you will automatically be entered to win an exclusive {Your site/brand name} coffee mug!”). In addition, your customized products can be sold as a part of a fund raising campaign to raise money for your cause or your site.
New products to support my new tagline: Write the Web™
Feel free to check out my new online store at http://www.cafepress.com/WriteTheWeb. I’m not pressuring anyone to buy my products, but if you are interested in seeing what an online store at Cafe Press looks like, this might be a good place to start. I’m currently offering two designs on a limited selection of products.
Drinkware:
The first products I created were my drinkware collection, containing the “I write the Web” logo variation, along with some self-promoting HTML on the reverse. See my product page for more details and the exact HTML codes in plain text (readable) format.
Intimate Apparel:
The next design I created was a flirty take-off of my new tagline for my “intimate apparel” line, just for the fun of it. The boxer shorts and thong feature the “Write Ride the Web” design.
Write Ride the Web (boxer)
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Write Ride the Web (classic thong) |
Whether I sell any of these products or not (I do plan on purchasing a mug for myself, at the very least), I’ve certainly had fun designing the products, and I plan to offer some new designs when I get a chance to come up with a few more image ideas. I won’t bother the readers of this blog with every new design I come up with, but if you are interested in hearing about new products, you can either subscribe to my Lockworld Herald Site News RSS feed or, for a simpler solution, visit my online store and subscribe to my store e-newsletter (That way, you will only receive notices about new products if you don’t want to get all of the selfish news I post about my site!).
That’s all for today…now get out there and write the Web!
Posted in e-commerce, Establishing a Web presence, Level: Novice, Product/Service Review | No Comments »
Monday, March 31st, 2008
In my last post, I explained how you could use del.icio.us to add a simple RSS feed to your site. The benefits of this method mainly lie in your ability to quickly and easily add any Web page to your feed, particularly if you make use of the browser buttons available from del.icio.us. Just navigate to the page you want to include in your feed, click the button, and enter a title, description, and tags. This method also allows you to easily create many feeds, and add items to as many of the feeds as you need all at the same time.
While this method should work well for the average Web site owner looking to create an RSS feed, it might not be suitable for every purpose. The two primary limitations to using del.icio.us to create and publish your RSS feed are the lack of rich text editing, and the 255 character limit to the description field. Many users may want to include more information in their RSS feed, or include graphics, links, and other information. For these users, del.icio.us may not be the best solution.
However, before you start creating a detailed RSS feed with lots of custom information in the feed itself, you need to understand the wide variety of standards for feed readers. Most importantly, it is important to understand that many feed readers are unable to capture both the Web page and the feed details together. Most online feed readers will only capture the description you enter into your RSS feed’s description section, and will give the users a link they can click on to view the page that you’ve referenced in the feed’s URL section. Locally installed feed readers, on the other hand, may have any number of different ways to display this information. For example, the feed reader I use at home is the built-in RSS aggregator available in Mozilla Thunderbird. This feed reader allows me to choose whether I want to view the feed details for all of my feeds, or just view the Web page (which is not available when I’m offline). I don’t have the option to customize this for individual feeds, and I don’t have the luxury of viewing both automatically. This presents a problem for me, since I read most of the RSS feeds I’ve collected while I’m offline. If I set my preferences to automatically show the Web page, I get a blank screen when I’m offline. However, if I set my preferences to view the feed details only, I typically get only a short paragraph or two, and have to wait until I’m online to read more. There are other applications, however, that do a better job of handling the problem of how to deliver a Web page and an RSS feed together. My favorite is the Microsoft Outlook plug-in, IntraVnews. This handy plug-in is free for personal use, and manages to download the RSS feed details as well as a copy of the referenced Web page. This is particularly handy for news feeds, as the articles may not be available on the Web for a long time. But since they’ve been physically downloaded and embedded into an Outlook message post, you can read them whenever you want.
Understanding the different ways your viewers will see and interact with your feed is very important. For example, if you are creating a feed that often refers people to external Web sites, you need to understand that many of them may never see your RSS feed description, which explains why the link was chosen for your feed. In these cases, it might be useful to use the Awesome Highlighter recently featured on Lifehacker. This service allows you to send people to a unique URL that will display the page you want them to see, with the text you want them to see highlighted for them. It might not be as good as providing a brief description of the page, but it’s certainly better than nothing. Incidentally, the service is also good for providing a shortened URL to the page your referencing.
All of this is very important to understand if you’re serious about publishing an RSS feed, but it’s a bit beside the point for today. Since del.icio.us may not be the best solution for everyone’s RSS needs, I wanted to point out a way that you can create a free RSS feed that can contain more details, formatting, images, and other links (but try to remember that some people may never see all of the “extra” details you provide). If you need to provide a more detailed RSS feed, simply start a blog using one of the many free blogging tools available, such as Blogger.com, TypePad.com, WordPress.com, or the like. Once you’ve created your blog, you can easily add new posts with full rich-text capabilities. If you want to point the RSS feed to a location other than your blog, simply enter the appropriate URL into the “Link” field under your post title (at least, that’s where it is in Blogger…other services may vary, but should give you the option to specify a URL for your post). Your resulting RSS feed will simply refer to the Web sites you’ve entered, and no one will ever have to know that the feed originated with a blog, especially if you’re using FeedBurner to track your feed traffic.
Between del.icio.us and Blogger, anyone can quickly and easily create an RSS feed in minutes. And, if you follow the instructions in my last post, you can track how many people are subscribed to your feed, allow e-mail subscriptions, and enable visitors to your Web site to automatically “find” the RSS feed(s) you’ve made available.
If you’re still not sure about starting an RSS feed, here’s a quick tip….go ahead and start one using either of the two methods I’ve described (or both). Your feeds will never be noticed until/unless you start promoting them by telling people how to find them. So, if you need to practice a little bit before you’re ready to commit to creating a formal RSS feed for your site, you can!
Once you’re confident that your RSS feed will be a valuable tool for your site visitors, just embed the links to it on your site and let people start subscribing. One word of caution, though…don’t get too hung up on checking your feed’s stats on FeedBurner. If you have a personal or small business Web site, you’re not likely to get thousands of subscribers to your feed right away, if ever. The stats FeedBurner provides are simply interesting information, but unless you have some serious goals for your Web site, trying to keep too close a tab on your stats will just be a waste of time, and likely a huge disappointment. As I’ve said before, the average personal or small business Web site is never going to directly compete with the “big dogs,” so don’t go in believing that just because you have a Web site you’ll have thousands of people visiting your site every day.
That’s all for today. I hope you’re ready to create your RSS feed to start delivering your updates directly to the people who need to or want to know, rather than waiting for them to check in with your site.
Posted in Level: Novice, RSS | No Comments »
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
In my last article, Search Engine Optimization: What it is, and why you shouldn’t care, I suggested that Search Engine Optimization (The practice of designing your Web page in such a way that it appears as high as possible in a list of search results) was not only misleading to both users and Web designers, but that it opened the door to malicious practices. To make matters worse, current SEO “rules” are suppressing many great innovations even while they allow deceitful Web sites to gain high rankings.
In a comment on my last article, Frank summarized what I expect are pretty general feelings about Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, Frank suggests that Search Engine Optimization helps provide “good no-nonsense copy that helps a searcher get their question answered.” Frank suggests that “search engines are not something to be fought but rather embraced.” In general terms, I agree completely. As I said, who could imagine life without search engines? And isn’t it obvious that Web designers should consider how their Web site will be placed in search engine results pages (SERPs) when they build their site? Of course it is. The basic ideas behind SEO are very valid, and are not to be fought.
Needless to say, however, there are some pretty significant flaws in the whole process that need to be addressed. This blog is primarily aimed at small business and personal Web site designers – people on a typically low budget who need to (or want to) build a Web site and attract visitors. In my last few posts, I’ve offered several different methods for building a content management system. The idea behind content management is that you can write the HTML code for your page once, and make changes frequently and easily without having to delve back into your page’s codes or re-upload your page or site every time. Unfortunately, every method of designing such a content management system has one major drawback: They make the page’s content completely invisible to search engines! This is, in my opinion, the most serious flaw in search engine technology. The robots and spiders used to index Web pages do not index any content delivered through JavaScript (which includes all of the content delivered by the easy-to-create content management systems I’ve described). Search engines view each Web page using a text-only process. For example, consider a recent article I wrote and placed on my site using my favorite content management system, Texty. This lengthy article should show up (albeit far down in the list) in searches for “One Laptop per Child,” for example. Unfortunately, search engines will never see this term because they do not pay attention to the actual contents of the page. For comparison, take a look at the article itself and compare it to this page, which shows what the search engines actually see. You’ll notice that not one word of the article appears to the search engines. This is bad enough, but consider an e-commerce site trying to build a manageable e-commerce system. Their entire catalog, including any product details pages, would be completely invisible to search engines (see catalog and detail search engine views).
What does this mean to small business and personal Web site owners? Essentially, it means that without using more advanced (expensive) Web design and building tools, or spending much more time working with the raw HTML of their pages, their sites are forever banned from search engines results pages (SERPs). And, if their pages are not included in SERPs, no one will ever see them. Search Engine Optimization is almost impossible for small, low-budget Web sites. Although many people may think this is OK (after all, they might say, I don’t want to see a bunch of low-budget Web pages when I do a search!), small business owners know that the information they provide on their Web sites is just as valid as the information that larger Web sites have. Don’t they deserve a chance to be recognized?
My question to the search engines is, why not index the Web the way people actually see it? Why ignore content just because it is not hard-coded into the HTML for the site? Most search engines would reply that they use text-only indexing because most braille-based browsers for the blind view Web pages the same way (they only show the text-based content). Unfortunately, that’s not an answer, it just deflects the question – why, then, do braille-based browsers show only the HTML-derived text, and not the “true” content of the page? Search engines will also say that they only index the text-based portion of the page to prevent “tricks” that would display one type of content to the search-engines, and another to the viewer. In truth, however, using a text-only indexing method, search engines are allowing (possibly encouraging?) this practice, rather than preventing it. It would be very easy for me to put some search engine-friendly text within the HTML codes for my page, but then use the same content management tools I’m using to display different content to the user. This is actually a very common practice. Have you ever performed a search for something, clicked on one of the results, and found that the page did not have anything to do with what you were searching for? It could be that the page uses the search engine deficiencies to allow it to be indexed for one type of search, while displaying a completely different type of content to the viewer.
Fortunately for me, the contents of my site are meant to serve as examples of the techniques I describe in this blog. So if my Web pages are not indexed by Google or other search engines, I’m not too upset about it. However, many of my readers will not be so lucky. They are actually trying to attract customers or visitors to their site. How can they do this if the search engines are ignoring their good content?
It’s time for search engines to update their methodology to start indexing the Web as people actually see it. Rather than dictating how Web pages should be built, search engines should be accomodating the way pages are really made. While I don’t have any problems with the way search engines weight results based on incoming links to a particular page or site, I do have a serious objection to the practice of ignoring good content just because of the way it is delivered to the viewer. Let’s face it. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all have plenty of money to invest in research to find new ways to index the “true” Web. So why not start indexing what people see, rather than what Web developers are able to fit into the extremely narrow limits of outdated search engine tools?
That’s all for today. In my next post(s), I’ll talk about creating an RSS feed for your Web site. I’m also working on an interesting process for building and delivering an e-newsletter using Zoho Creator to collect and manage subscriptions, build content, and deliver the e-mail. It’s been a pretty interesting project, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you!
Posted in Articles, Level: Novice, SEO | No Comments »
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