Step 1. First things first, you’re going to need to work through an existing personal account for Google+. If you have a Google account already, or a Gmail account, then you probably already have this step taken care of. Just visit https://plus.google.com and log in using your existing personal Google account.

Step 2. Next up, it’s time to set up your business page…Go to https://plus.google.com/pages/create This link will take you to the “Create a page” dialogue within Google+.

Step 3. Choose the category that best suits your business from the “Pick a category” menu on the left hand side of the page. Right now, Google+ offers options for the following:

• Local Business or Place
• Product or Brand
• Company, Institution or Organization
• Arts, Entertainment or Sports
• Other

If you hover over these menu buttons, Google+ provides some helpful examples of which kinds of businesses fit under which respective category. In the end, it’s really up to you to choose what seems to make the most sense for your business or brand.

Step 4. Input your business information after you’ve selected the appropriate category. Depending on the category you’ve chosen for your business, Google will ask you for certain information which might include your “Page name,” your website URL, your sub-category, phone number, and so on, so forth. The more information you can provide, and the more accurate it is, the more professional your page is likely to appear to viewers—something to keep in mind here. Once you’ve entered the requested information, select “Create.”

Step 5. You’ll be prompted for additional information for your page. This might include a “Tagline” and a profile photo which could be your logo or other business-identifying image or icon.

Step 6. After you’ve populated the requested info for your page, it’s time to spread the word. Google+ will automatically suggest that you tell the people in your personal circles about your newly created business page. If you choose to do so, just follow the prompts.

Step 7. Your page should now be created and live to the world. Now it’s all up to you to promote it and use it wisely. Google+ will provide some helpful tips and suggestions on doing so at the conclusion of the sign up process.

A couple of additional pointers to keep in mind:

• It’s definitely wise to use appealing graphics for your brand image and header on your page. If you have existing artwork or image files in place already from your website or other existing social media accounts elsewhere, it might be a good idea to tie them all together by using the same consistent imagery here as well.
• Be sure to create a “brand/business” page with Google+ and not just a Personal page. It’s easy to get confused here, but know that there are better integration and sharing options available for brand pages than there are for personal pages.

So what else are you waiting for? Getting started with Google+ for your business is a breeze!

How do you make a Twitter page for your business?

Well, in step-by-step terms, it’s actually very easy:

1. Visit http://twitter.com and find the “New to Twitter? Sign Up” box on the right hand side of the page. You’ll need to enter your name, email address, and a password here and press the “Sign up” button. Use your real name here.

2. Next, you’ll be prompted to come up with a Twitter handle. This is the nickname you’ll be identified with on Twitter and what will be shown publically. Good idea to use something identifiable as your business or brand with this handle.

3. Following the prompts, your account is now setup. Continue to work through the Twitter setup wizard and suggestions. They’ll help you connect with people you already know and get your account profile, bio, and images setup and added.

That’s all there is to setting up a Twitter page for your business. The rest is all in actually using the page to its fullest extent to communicate and stay in touch with existing and new clients and customers.

Here are some additional pointers and tips to keep in mind as you make a Twitter page for your business:

A Twitter handle cannot be more than 15 characters long. This means you might not be able to use your full business name, so you’ll have to get a little bit creative. But don’t get too creative. Keep it straightforward and professional.

Choose a Twitter handle that relates ideally to your brand or has a similar name. You don’t want to pick a Twitter name that is totally random and unrelated to your business. And for a general business Twitter page, you’ll probably want to have it be associated directly with your business and not just use your personal name or handle.

Use a good bio. Again, Twitter is all about keeping it short and sweet. Use just few words to say who you are and what you do. It’s almost like a tagline that you would use on your business cards, etc. Be sure to put your website’s URL in the bio. If you don’t have one, then put your Facebook link in there.

Setup searches that relate to your business. This will help keep track of who your fans are and what they are looking for.

Try your best to use a consistent branding strategy. For example if you have graphics already for your website background, Facebook header, or logo, try to work those in to the mix with Twitter too so all of your online presences have consistency.

Choose the right profile picture for your business. Best practice would probably be to use your business logo for your profile pic. Or maybe use a picture of your building or something else that properly represents your brand. Don’t choose something obscure or hard to see and interpret—doing so is a surefire way to get ignored by people.

Making a Twitter page for your business is really pretty simple stuff. You’ll be started in no time flat, and then actually using Twitter is fun…with a bit of a learning curve for those who’ve never used it…but fun nonetheless. Enjoy and all the best of success using Twitter for your business!

In fact, even if you don’t plan on taking an active role with your business Facebook page, at the very least, just go ahead and set up a basic business page profile that includes your address, basic information, website link, and the basics. The more you can really use Facebook and put it to work for your business, the better—but just being listed is better than nothing at all. It might just be how your next customer decides to try and find you. Will they be successful?

So, to help you get things off to a running start, here is how you can create a Facebook page for your business:

Step One—Visit Facebook’s Create a Page option. Here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Step Two—Chose the right option for creating your page. The options are as follows:

• Local Business or Place
• Company, Organization or Institution
• Brand or Product

Use your best discretion on which option is best for you. For those that want to be listed as an “open to the public” location, it would be best to choose Local Business or Place as the option. For larger companies with possible multiple locations or those that are not exactly open to public foot traffic—the “Company, Organization or Institution” option is most likely going to suit the cause. Brand or Product might actually be what you’re looking to promote via Facebook.

Once you’ve selected the best option for your Business, go ahead and complete the requested information that includes your particular category, business name, and possibly your location depending on the option you chose.

Step Three—Sign in via your existing personal Facebook account or create a new personal Facebook account if you don’t already have one. This is confusing to many, but Facebook Business Pages must be created and managed by an authorized individual. If you are that individual, it will be from your personal Facebook account that the Business Page is managed under. Don’t worry—you can go in and add other admins to your business page later once it’s all been created initially.

Step Four—Add your information to the new page. Facebook will prompt you through a series of options to set up your new Business Page. These will include adding a Profile Picture (possibly use your logo or some other image that is closely associated with your business), a quick “About” statement, your regular website address, and setting up your specific Facebook address URL.

Step Five—Once your basic business page has now been setup, simply follow Facebook’s prompts on inviting friends, adding additional information and images to your page, and getting the message out in general. The new business page format of Facebook is pretty self-explanatory, and the new Admin panel for pages is designed to make adding your information as simple as filling in the blanks or taking a suggested action.

Congrats—setting up a Facebook page is just that easy. You can have it all ready to go in just about 5 minutes or so. Of course, the more you invest and “work” your page in the future, the better you will do with the strategy, but as for just getting started, it’s a breeze.

What Makes Social Media Great?

Eyes and attention, that’s what. Your customers are checking their social media accounts dozens of times a day. A giant percentage of the country is totally addicted to social media. As such, you have multiple chances to put your message in front of this captive audience each and every day.

What Makes A Website So Great?

People don’t go to their social media account to read a top quality blog post or learn about a product or company in depth. They might find a link from their social media, but it’s up to the website to do the heavy lifting and build a trust relationship here. Websites are the long format way to present your information and message the way you want. You own it and you can custom-tailor every detail to your advantage and liking. It’s not just another page amongst millions on the social media’s site (which conveniently have their brand logo at the top, their advertising on the side, and their profits on the line).

They Really Go Hand In Hand.

You’ve heard it before, but think about it again for a second: a website and social media are just the same thing as the old hub and spoke model. Your website is the hub—the place where all of the action is—the center point of what everything else should revolve around. Your individual social media accounts and marketing strategies are each spokes that transfer the weight back to the hub of your website. Your website and social media should go completely hand in hand for the most successful strategy possible.

Don’t Put All Of Your Eggs In One Basket.

Websites are here to stay. Social media could be here today, gone tomorrow. Just look at MySpace, for example—yes, it still exists, but when was the last time you checked your account there?

Also, it’s important to consider the fact that your social media account could literally be erased…wiped totally clean…overnight, either purposefully or by mistake. It could be server glitch at the social media company or someone could errantly report your account as spam or copyright violation. As just one of millions of account holders, can you guess what the social media company’s response is going to be? Deletion happens every day, and even when it’s a mistake, your account and all of your hard work is gone just like that.

Use social media to your fullest advantage to drive traffic to your website and drive traffic to your business, but don’t put all of your eggs in one basket and lose it all when the ship sinks.

Enter CSS (stands for Cascading Style Sheets).  CSS makes a web designer’s job bearable because using the design/programming standard puts a great majority of a website’s design code in just one specific and well-organized place. From here, individual web pages “pull” a copy of this CSS file, filled with all of the rules of design for the site. They use this instead of trying to re-define or reinvent the wheel by needing to include all of these design rules individually in every single page’s code.

There are many significant reasons why CSS is the standard and is an absolute must for modern web design:

CSS makes changes to the look and feel of the site a breeze.

Instead of having to wade through who knows how many individual pages on a site to get all of the updates done to a design, with CSS, the changes can be made just once in one single file and be applied site-wide.

CSS helps with SEO.

When you try to include all of the design code markup directly within your HTML files, you’re creating a nightmare of confusion that search engines need to weed through. They must decipher whether a particular piece of code in that HTML represents content or something humans may be interested in, or if it is just part of the site’s design code. When you separate the two functions, it makes the whole site’s markup much more organized…giving the search engines a break and promoting better SEO accordingly.

CSS provides speed and bandwidth optimization.

Because a visitor’s web browser needs to only load the CSS file once into its memory (cache) regardless of how many pages the visitor looks at on the site, this massively improves speed and bandwidth utilization because the visitor isn’t reloading this file dozens of times in just one brief visit to a website. And improved page speed is also a good thing when it comes to SEO. Double the benefits here!

CSS is the basis for many design standards.

Let’s face it, to not use CSS is pretty much the equivalent of stepping back to 1998 in web design. There’s just only so much you can do with HTML as far as design goes. Since CSS became the norm, it is really the preeminent way to design and each evolution of CSS development has introduced more and more design features that we have all come to expect these days. CSS is essentially the only way to use these modern design features.

CSS is not going away any time soon.

CSS3 has taken the web by storm over the last couple of years. And now that all modern web browsers are compatible with all of the latest features of CSS3, rumor has it that CSS4 is coming soon and will be a radical game changer once again. The good news is that while each new version of CSS adds improvements and new features, sites built with previous versions of CSS markup will continue to work just fine.

The bottom line: CSS for web design is a must, it has been for quite some time, and it will continue to be the way of the future.

Clearing The Safari Browser Cache For Mac

Assuming you’re using the latest generation of Safari for your Mac, then the steps are simple:

1. With Safari open, on the menu bar under the dropdown labeled “Safari,” find and select the “Reset Safari” option.

2. A “Reset Safari” window will open. Here, you’ll want to check all of the options that you would like to be reset. Unless you have specific reasons to keep any certain data saved to your Safari cache, it’s probably a good idea to check all options listed. Next, select the “Reset” button at the bottom right.

An important note: There’s also an option in the Safari dropdown menu to “Empty Cache.” Once you’ve reset Safari using the steps above, it wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and select this “Empty Cache” option as an additional extra step, but doing this alone will not necessarily clear everything that needs to be cleared…only resetting will.

Clearing The Safari Browser Cache For Windows

Clearing Safari’s browser cache for the Windows version of Safari is simple as well, and very similar to the steps listed above for Mac. Here are the Windows steps:

1. In the upper right hand of the Safari browser window, select the gear icon for Settings.

2. In the drop down gear/settings menu, select the option labeled, “Reset Safari.”

3. In the “Reset Safari” window that opens, check all applicable checkboxes. Again, unless there is a specific reason not to clear any of these individual options, it’s best to just go ahead and check them all for best results. Finally, press the “Reset” button.

And that’s all there is to resetting Safari for Windows.

1. Towards the upper right hand side of the window find and select the Wrench Icon Button.

2. Under the Wrench icon menu, select Tools and then select “Clear Browsing Data.”

3. In the “Clear Browsing Data” pop-up window, select the options as follows:

a. Obliterate the following items from: (Select “the beginning of time” from this dropdown).
b. Check the Clear browsing history box;
c. Check the Clear download history box;
d. Check the Empty the cache box;
e. Check the Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data box

Optional: Check the Clear saved passwords and Clear saved Autofill form data boxes if you don’t mind clearing this information from the cache.

4. Press the “Clear Browsing Data” button at the bottom right of the pop-up window.

5. Close the Chrome browser and then re-open the browser.

6. Navigate to the page that you would like to view and once you are on the correct page, hold down the shift key while clicking the refresh button. With or without having already cleared your browser cache, doing this SHIFT-REFRESH keyboard/click combination will force the browser to do a hard refresh…or in other words, to attempt to reload all components of the page and not just those that are not already in memory.

That’s it!

Browser caching is a very good thing, except that is, when you’re trying to view something that is brand new or otherwise doesn’t get shown in the browser due to an older saved (cached) version showing instead. It can especially be a headache when viewing a website that’s constantly being updated during development.

If this is the case, you’ll simply need to clear out your browser’s cache. It’ll just take a second and here are the exact steps to follow with Firefox 10 (for Windows):

Open Firefox.

1. On the top-left of the Firefox window, click on the word Firefox with the dropdown arrow indicator.

2. In the menu that drops down, select Options, and then Options again.

3. In the Options window that opens, select the Privacy icon that shows a mask.

4. In the Options/Privacy menu, select the blue link that says “clear your recent history.”

5. In the dropdown for “Time range to clear,” select the “Everything” option.

6. After you select the “Everything” option, an additional details section with several checkboxes will display. To clear your browser’s cache, you’ll need to ensure the box next to “Cache” is marked with a check box. If there is no particular reason that you know of that you are saving all of the other options to memory, go ahead and check the additional boxes here as well.

7. Once you’ve checked “Cache” and any other items you’d like to reset, press the “Clear Now” button.

8. Close all options windows until you’re back at the main Firefox browser window. Now, navigate to the page you’d like to view and once you’re there, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard while pressing the refresh button in Firefox.

Following the steps above should clear your Firefox browser’s cache, enabling you to view the very latest available content for a specific URL. That’s all there is to it!

• Step 1: Plan & Outline
• Step 2: Register Your Domain
• Step 3: Establish Web Hosting
• Step 4: Draft The Design
• Step 5: Code The Site
• Step 6: Search Engine Optimization
• Step 7: Test & Launch The Site (What you’re reading right now)

Testing The Website

Now that the site has been carefully planned, designed, and developed, it’s time to take it to the world. But there is one final step that must come first before officially launching the site…that’s right—it’s time to test!

Assuming that all development was done correctly, website testing should be a piece of cake. After all, most testing will have been done at each individual level of the programming process. But it’s still necessary to do some final pre-launch testing. Here are some of the things to look for:

Cross-browser compatibility – A website performs differently depending on the browser it’s being viewed in. For example, a website viewed in IE6 will often appear drastically different than a website viewed in the latest version of a modern web browser like Safari or Firefox. New technology in browsers can have a significant influence on how a website functions. A competent web pro will always design with the latest standard in mind, and usually some degree of backwards compatibility too (supporting ancient browsers like IE6 is another story altogether).

Standards compliance – Does all of the website’s programming check out and validate as fully compliant? It’s always a good idea to do a final check for valid, compliant code…even if that step has already been done repeatedly through the process, the final version of the site that’s ready for launch could have one little backslash in the wrong place in thousands of lines of code that causes the entire site to be “invalid” from a standards perceptive. Thanks to the help of validity checking tools, it’s incredibly simple to run a final check and quickly touch up any small glitches before giving the “all systems go.”

Launching The Website

Usually the launch process is simple. For brand new websites, the final site will need to be uploaded to the web hosting and the domain set to point at that hosting. For websites that are being updated to a new version, doing the switch might require a brief downtime to swap out all of the old files on the hosting with the new—a professional can get this done remarkably fast though.

Other than that, it’s really all about marketing the new site and announcing the big launch. And of course, giving yourself (and your designers) a well deserved pat on the back for getting through the project successfully.

Wrapping It All Up…

At first glance, it would seem that making a website is a breeze—just design a quick site and put it online, right? Well, as we’ve revealed throughout this blog series on how to make a website, the facts would suggest otherwise. Professional web design and development is a fairly complex process. There are many, many pieces that need to fit together just perfectly in order to create a truly professional experience for your website visitors.

Quality SEO Is A Holistic Approach.

Professional website designers and developers know that SEO isn’t just about tweaking a few words of content after the website has been launched. At first light, some first-timers might perceive this to be the case. But effective SEO takes place little by little at each step in the “how to make a website” process: SEO is part of planning, it is part of domain name s, it is part of good quality hosting, it is part of design, it is part of web development, and it is part of web content.

In other words, optimizing for performance and for the search engines really needs to take place constantly in each individual step of the new website process.

How Do You Do SEO?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a one size fits all approach to SEO. It’s very complex—and when it comes down to it, it is really about giving the search engines exactly what they want to share with their own visitors: excellent quality content, presented in a well-organized and easy to understand way.

In web design, SEO comes into play when setting up a great organization structure to the site. Easy to use, intuitive navigation is just one specific example that happens to be relevant here.

In web development, the SEO process has a lot to do with writing clean, standards-compliant code. It’s about putting the right elements of the site in the right place. Developing for speed and performance is also becoming increasingly important in this area of focus.

With web content, SEO mostly means having the best possible content—unique, authoritative, and completely original—that is available anywhere on the web for your specific topic. If it sounds daunting, it is. But when it comes down to it, this is how you get the best results. SEO also factors into choosing page titles and headlines.

What Not To Do When Optimizing A Website…

Way too many people fall for the notion that SEO is just about one little area—again, tweaking a couple of words. Others fall for online scammers that promise the world when it comes to results. The tell tale signs of an SEO scam usually involve lots of secret, proprietary formulas that apparently only the SEO company knows about. Truth is, there is no magic or secret to good SEO—the search engines actually publish public manuals that spell out exactly what they’re looking for.

When planning the exact steps of how to make a website, be sure to include plans for SEO each step of the way…or if you just don’t want the trouble and hassle that comes with the do-it-yourself approach, at least be sure to work with professionals that understand the ins and outs of optimization and how important they are.