Paula G. Web Design

When you’re updating a blog, website, or sending out an email newsletter, one of the great things you can do to personalize your message and make it look good is by adding images. It doesn’t have to be difficult or complex, but you do need to edit and save them appropriately if you want them to look good and work well on the web and in email. That means no more:

• Funny cropped picture
• Incorrect file types
• Incorrectly resized photos that look horribly unprofessional
• Massively large image files that grind your email to a halt

Working with images can be a career unto itself. Many fancy software programs exist for experts to do magical things. However, for the average person it is total overkill. For those quick do it yourself situations consider using a tool like Google Picasa. It is free and easy to use for your most basic image tasks. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve invested the time and money and have a brand spanking new website (or redesigned existing site). You’ve taken your overall business strategy into account and have your site well branded complete with a clear call to action. How do you know if your project was a success? Do you know if you are meeting (or at least improving upon) your goals? These answers and more can be found in your web site statistics.

While web hosting companies often offer free and paid traffic statistics, I have found using Google Analytics, which is free, to be the best bet. It offers you rich reporting in an easy to use format at the touch of your fingertips online.

How it works is that you sign up for an account and then have your web designer put the Google Analytics code at the bottom of all your pages (hint: if he/she is using site-wide templates or includes it should be a once and done quick update). After a short wait while Google starts tracking your results, you will be able to see your reports. The nice thing is that once you are set up, you can then access any time frame you choose (as early as the first date you installed the code, of course) to generate reports and view trend graphs.

While there are a lot of neat things you can see about your site, the basics you want to focus on include:

• # of visitors (how many people are coming to your site)
• Bounce Rate (% of visitors who visit only one page on your site and then leave)
• % New Visitors (how many are new vs returning visitors)
• Average time on site (how long do people stay on your site. measures “stickiness”)
• Traffic Source (where is your traffic coming from - search engines? referrals? direct?)
• Top content (what pages on your site are most popular?)
• Keywords (what search words people are using to find your site)

These are the main bits of information you want to know about your site. Of course Google Analytics can do much much more. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently learned of GoDaddy’s new feature of adding Google’s Webmaster Tools to the built in features you get with your hosting account. This is just another reason why I love to recommend them — they are always adding new features to benefit all their hosting plans.

What this new addition gives you is the chance to have all your sites hosted with GoDaddy automatically connected into the suite of webmaster tools that Google offers. So now from directly within your control panel you can tap into information about how Google sees your site. That is:

•  Is your site in the Google Database?
•  Are there any site issues where Google is concerned?
•  What do the crawl statistics look like?
•  What does your site’s visibility look like in Google’s search results?

Using a combination of the Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics (separate from the webmaster tools) you can get a LOT of information about your account for free.

If you don’t host with GoDaddy, you can still tap into the full set of Google Webmaster Tools at their website. Same great stuff just an additional step you need to take separate from your hosting account.