If you look at the menu bar at the top of the screen, you’ll see there’s a link to my demo site.

On the home page of the demo site, you can sign up for a short (3 messages) email series which shows you how an Automated Follow-up System works.

There’s a demo of a Lighbox pop-up as well.

The whole site is created with WordPress, and i’ve included a Theme Switcher so you can toggle through some of my favorite themes for business websites and blogs.

Go ahead – take a look! Demo Site

Follow-Up System Demo Site is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

What’s the first thing you see when you go to Amazon.com? Is it… a splash page? (You know what a splash page is. It’s a web page that appears before you get to the real home page of a website. It’s usually accompanied by a link like: “Click here to skip the intro”.)

Some splash pages are static – maybe with a logo and a picture and a link that says ‘Click here to enter’. Some splash pages make you wait for a Flash movie to load, and then make you sit through the movie itself.

There’s a very good reason why you won’t see many splash pages in the top 500 websites. The reason is simple. They annoy people. They don’t do anything useful. Most people will click on the link within a few seconds, to avoid waiting for the splash page to load. Or, of course, they’ll just leave. Sorry, that’s 3 reasons.

What it really comes down to is simplifying the user’s life. Get them straight to your meaty content as quickly as possible. People are less patient than they used to be. If it takes more than 15 seconds or so for your page to load, there is a good chance that they’ll click away.

So why on earth do people still use them?

There are a couple of good reasons to use splash pages. If you want to give visitors a choice of languages before they enter your site, a splash page is one way to do it. If you are running a porn site, you may need a splash page to inform visitors of the legal terms of use of your site. If you’re a graphic design artist, you can use a splash page to show off your abilities.

But there are many reasons to avoid using splash pages. As I said, visitors don’t like them. Search engines don’t like them, either. Having just a graohic or Flash movie on your home page doesn’t help the search engines work out what your site is about. You may find that your entire site can’t be indexed by the search engines because your designer decided to use JavaScript-based navigation. You might also find that your visitors don’t like to link to them, which results in fewer incoming links to your site.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, read what Marketing Sherpa has to say about Flash intro pages.

Web Design Mistakes: Splash Pages is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

There are a number of ways to build a website. You can enter HTML code directly into a text editor like NotePad, then upload the files to your web server. Many people prefer to do it this way, because they retain the most control over their site. Of course, you need to be very familiar with HTML, and preferably also with CSS. This method works well for simple 1 to 5 page websites.

If you want to step it up a level, you can use a WYSIWYG HTML editor like Dreamweaver or NVU. These are software packages which run on your computer, and which work rather like a word processor. You can switch between a view of the web page as it will appear, and the underlying HTML code. Once you’ve created a web page, you can upload it to your server from within the program.There is a bit of learning curve, especially with Dreamweaver, which is incredibly powerful.

Up to now I’ve been talking about static HTML web pages. If you want to add dynamic features, where a web page is created ‘on-the-fly’ based on the user’s input, a database is needed. With this kind of website, everything gets stored in a database on the server and is recalled when the page is rendered by the browser. Websites like Amazon.com, eBay and of course Google would be impossible without scripting languages like ASP, ColdFusion or PHP.

Dreamweaver can create pages using these scripting languages. However, most people will find it simpler to use a Content Management System (CMS) of some kind.

A CMS is a script which runs on a web server. It acts as a framework for a website, meaning that everything doesn’t have to be created from scratch for every new website. It will include support for various common activities, such as publishing content, allowing user searches and comments, updating and editing content, and generating web feeds. A big advantage is that you can access the script from any computer on the Internet, as long as you know the user name and password.

There are hundreds of CMS scripts available, many of which are licenced under the Gnu Public Licence (GPL). Some of these are are optimized for specific purposes, for example Moodle, which is intended for e-learning systems. Forums, wikis and blogs all use some form of CMS script.

Popular ‘general purpose’ or ‘portal’ CMS scripts include XOOPS, Drupal and Joomla. You can add features to these scripts by installing additional modules or plug-ins. You can also change the way they look by installing different templates or themes, or you can create your own.

WordPress is a popular script which was originally designed as a blogging platform. From a structural point of view, blogs are websites where the articles or ‘posts’ are listed in reverse date order – in other words, the most recent posts appear first. With the addition of the ability to display static pages as well as posts in release 1.5, WordPress started to bridge the gap between ‘blogging platform’ and ‘CMS’.

Fans of the various CMS scripts can get a bit, well, fanatical. Each CMS script has a unique mixture of strengths and weaknesses. My personal preference for most purposes is WordPress, because it is flexible enough to cope with most requirements, yet easy to understand. Some of the other CMS scripts use cryptic terminology and concepts which I find confusing.

Based on the number of visitors to the website, WordPress is the most popular of the CMS scripts at the moment. This means that support is widely available.

Website Building Blocks is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za