Today, we’ll resume our running discussion of blogs and web sites and what you need to do to develop them. First, I’ll tackle a few questions from readers:

Cori asked:

Randy, I am interested in starting a blog. If we quote someone, maybe you let’s say, and we give you attribution, are we supposed to seek permission first?

Also, what is the cyber acceptable procedure for including links on a website or blog? Do we need a signed contract of acknowledgement from the originator?

Randy sez: The usual copyright rules still apply. If you quote an entire article on your web site or blog, you’d better have permission from the real author. With Google at hand, it’s easy for me to check if somebody is quoting my articles without permission (and sometimes they do it without even an attribution, so it looks like they wrote it).

If you quote a sentence or two from a blog or web article, that’s generally fine, but you should link to them. That’s not only polite, it even helps them.

As for links to other web sites or blogs, I’ve never heard of anyone complaining about an incoming link! Those are good! If you want to link to my web site or blog, feel free! Even if you don’t want to, do it anyway! 🙂

Incoming links strengthen a web site. There is no down-side to an incoming link. No need to ask permission. Just do it.

Camille wrote:

ehhhmmm…. good question Cori. Maybe I should have asked that one before I put a link to Randy’s blog in my last blog post. (I had some very scathing things to say about this blog and the appalling lack of in-your-face advertising.)

Randy sez: Thanks, Camille! Scathe me all you want, as long as you link to me! 🙂

Sesgaia asked (regarding the YouTube contest I blogged about last week):

I’m curious- how does something like this contest figure in to an already existing goals plan? Would it be considered an interruption, or would it just require re-arranging other priorities? Because it certainly seems time-consuming…

Randy sez: From a time-management perspective, a contest like that is an interruption. When an opportunity like that comes in, I ask whether the payoff is worth the time investment. If not, then I skip it. For me, the time to create a YouTube video is not much. I spent about half an hour total writing my script. I filmed a test video on my iMac using the built-in camera. Right now, the audio quality isn’t great and I need to make a couple of tweaks to the physical environment, but I’m almost ready to shoot the final version. For me, the biggest problem has been that I didn’t have much experience making a movie with iMovie until I tried this, so I’m burning some time learning that. However, I was planning to produce some video products in the next few months anyway, so I might as well learn it now as later. For me, the time is worth it, but it’s also delaying my current Short Term Target, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

OK, let’s move on to talk about web site requirements some more. Some days ago, I posted a list of 9 questions you should ask yourself before you design your web site or blog. I’ve discussed 4 of those in more detail. Today, we’ll look at #5, along with some possible responses:

Question 5) How interactive do you want your site?

Answer a: I just want to show information; the user just needs to be able to get from one page to the others by clicking links

Randy sez: Good! This is simple and you could easily learn to do those links yourself. So you have options. You can build your whole site, or have a pro do it and then update it yourself.

Answer b: I may have a few forms on my site, (for example, a form that sends email)

Randy sez: Forms are a simple type of interaction, and you can easily do those without any help from anyone, if you take the time to learn how.

Answer c: I want fancy graphics that move around; show me some glitz, Baby!

Randy sez: Sigh. Once again, make sure you have a good reason for this, because this is going to cost you in terms of time, energy, and aggravation.

Answer d: I want my users to be able to leave comments (for example, comments on a blog)

Randy sez: This is relatively easy to do, at least within a blog, because all you need is blogging software, which is freely available.

Answer e: I want users to be able to enter information into databases so my site can display that or do computations (for example, an income tax calculating web site)

Randy sez: This is much more work, unless you can find software somewhere that does exactly what you want. But normally, this requires you to create a database and then write software in some language such as Perl, PHP, Java, or Ruby to hook up your web pages to the database. It’s doable, but be prepared to pay for it, either in time or money.

We’ll look at the next question on the list tomorrow.

We’ve been discussing blogs and web sites for a couple of weeks now, and I’d like to get caught up on comments that have come in the last couple of days. Next week, we’ll pick up again and continue discussing how you define your web site and/or blog requirements.

Bonne said (regarding the Simpleology YouTube video contest):

I don’t have the right camera ~ just the little one built on top of my Mac.

Randy sez: That’s all I have–an iSight camera on my iMac plus the iMovie software. That’s all I need for the video I’m going to make. I wrote my script and timed it and I need to shave 34 seconds off it before I make the video. I hope to get it made over the weekend. And yes, I’ll put up a link to it when I put it on YouTube. I plan on having some fun with this video.

Beth Goddard wrote:

Can I ask a blog and website related question here because I’m still mulling over all the information from last week? I happen to share my name with a British actress and I get tons of hits from people from the UK searching on Beth Goddard. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. My thinking is hey, if even one of those people buys a book . . .

I suppose my only option, if this isn’t a good thing, is to rework my website and blog under a different form of my name. Any thoughts?

Randy sez: Traffic is traffic is usually good. In this case, it probably won’t help you but definitely won’t harm you unless you were getting millions of hits, which would tend to jam up your site. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. These folks probably aren’t interested in you–they’re interested in the actress, and you aren’t her.

Gerhard posted some excellent comments on the web site I analyzed on Wednesday that seemed to be almost invisible to Google (www.ThePathOfFaith.com). He made some good points, so check those out in yesterday’s comments. By the way, if you Google that URL now, there are three results in the search, two of them from this blog. So we’ve added some link power to that site.

Several of you posted comments discussing whether I should have more graphics and/or links to my products on my blog. I appreciate your interest in my well-being! Thanks to all of you.

I have always liked to keep the ads to a very low profile on both my web site and my e-zine. The e-zine in particular has never accepted paid ads from anyone. Once in awhile, I’ve taken a guest article, and quite often I’ll mention one of my products or a product of somebody else that I myself use. I don’t remember whether I’ve ever recommended a product unless I own it or unless it is essentially the same as a product that I use. (For example, I use 1shoppingcart.com to handle my emails and I recommend it, but I also recommend prosender.com and aweber.com, which are very similar in quality. I only need one email system, but the two that I don’t use are less expensive, so it seems very reasonable to recommend them.)

In general, I prefer to keep the “ad static” as low as possible. Whenever I release a new product, I send out a short notice to my e-zine readers. That’s about the extent of it. I know this is “not the way things are done.” I subscribe to most of the other writing-related e-zines, and it appears that my ad ratio is very much lower than everyone else. I like it that way.

As for this web site and blog, I want to strike a balance between the two extremes: “too many ads” and “how do I order this product I want?” As yet, I’ve resisted the urge to put Google AdSense ads on every page. It’s possible that I could make my products a little more visible, but I also feel that “less is more.” Again, that runs counter to the prevailing wisdom, but it’s my site and I’ll run it my way. Let me assure you all that it does just fine.

Next week we’ll pick up the topic of web sites again. There is still a lot to say!

Want to write a best-selling novel? Of course you do. So do I. So does everybody with a pulse.

The question is how to do it.

Since today is Valentine’s Day, I don’t plan to blog tonight. So I thought I’d post a quick blog early in the day about something that just came across my radar. We’ve been talking about web sites and blogs for a couple of weeks, but let’s switch gears just for one day.

Mark Joyner, the Simpleology guy, author of four #1 bestsellers, will soon be launching some new courses. I’ve taken several of his courses, and am in the middle of one right now on Viral Marketing which I really like a lot. Mark has a great ability to break things down to simple, simple, simple terms. I’ve read way too many academic journals, so I appreciate simple stuff.

Mark’s new course will be on “How to become a best-selling author.”

Hey, sign me up! That was my first reaction.

Then I saw the cool contest Mark is running right now. Create a 2-minute YouTube video and post it by February 26. The top three videos will win some prizes, INCLUDING a custom-crafted marketing plan created by Mark specifically for each winner.

Just for entering this video contest, you get an e-book valued at $147 on how to write exceptionally fast.

Check out the rules for the contest on Mark’s web site.

I’m going to start writing the script for my 2-minute video this afternoon. Hope you will too!

A reader asked a question a couple of days ago that posed an interesting mystery. I’ll quote it again here, because this is a topic of general interest.

Sylvia wrote:

I just remembered that a friend of mine did her own ministry site. She posted all her articles on it. Later, however, when she did a “search” for it, it wouldn’t come up on Google. I don’t know if she tried some of the other search engines or not. A ministry site that can’t be found is of little value!

She called a tech, and got such an involved answer that she finally thanked him and hung up. What can she do?

Randy sez: Yesterday, I asked Sylvia to email with the URL of this missing web site so I could investigate. She did, and gave me permission to discuss this on the blog here.

Here is the URL of the site: www.ThePathOfFaith.com.

I had a look at the site today. It’s quite “pretty” but it is, apparently, completely ineffective because Google and other search engines seem to be ignoring it. What’s the deal?

The deal is that Google actually does index the site, but it’s lost in the noise. Here are some of the things I did to test that:

1) First, I Googled the actual URL of the site: “www.thepathoffaith.com”. (I didn’t enter the quotes, just what’s inside them.)

The result was one single entry, the home page of the web site. We conclude from this that Google knows this site exists. That’s the first step. The site is not being blackballed for some strange reason. But there are obviously no incoming links to this site, because if there were, the search above would have found them. (As an experiment, Google “www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com” and see how many results you find. It’s about 1950 as of this minute.)

2) There is an “Articles” section on the site. As I understand it, the purpose of the site is to make these articles public. I clicked on the button to take me to the “Articles” section. I was taken to a page that told me to go to the Site Map in order to get to the articles. This is a needless roadblock for site visitors, and it may explain why nobody links to it–the articles are pretty well hidden. It would be far better to put links to all the articles on this page.

3) I went to the Site Map and clicked on the first article. It’s titled “A Barrier to Trusting God” and begins with the phrase “Mandy struggled with trusting the Lord”. I Googled this exact phrase (including the quotes). The reason for using the quotes is that it tells Google you want to find all articles that contain that exact phrase, with all those words in exactly that order.

Google responded with one result, which was in fact the article I was reading. So that’s the second result–Google has indexed the entire site. However, if you Google that phrase in the normal way that people usually do (without the quotes) then that page does not appear on the first three pages of results from Google. The reason is that the site is not considered “important enough” by Google to rate a result near the top.

How does Google decide which sites are “important” and which aren’t? Part of that answer lies with their famous “PageRank” formula, which determines the rank of every page on the web, based on how many incoming links that page has. The formula is not complicated, but solving the formula requires some basic linear algebra methods which I don’t dare go into here.

The owner of the site could help things immensely by getting some incoming links to the site. In fact, she’s already begun, because my blog now links to her site. So within a day or two, if you do a search for her URL, you’ll see that there are now two results. I won’t be surprised if the first result is this blog entry, but we’ll see.

All of this ties in nicely with what I’ve been saying the last couple of days. A “pretty” web site may be completely ineffective. There are many ways to be ineffective:
* Nobody knows about the site
* Nobody links to the site
* Nobody comes to the site
* Nobody “takes action” after visiting the site

“Taking action” is what happens when a site visitor does what you want them to do. That’s up to you to define, which is the whole point of setting the requirements for your web site. You need to know why your site exists so you can guide your visitors to do whatever it is you want them to do. If you don’t know, they won’t know, and so they won’t do it.

If you want people to be inspired by your site, then the bar is pretty low. You just have to have good inspiring content and make sure people arrive at your site.

If you want to sell thousand-dollar widgets on your site, then the bar is a lot higher. You have to get people to your site, make them a sales pitch, close the deal, collect the money, deliver the widget, and do it all well enough to avoid chargebacks. That’s a whole lot harder.

Let me comment a little more on “pretty sites” since that drew some comments today.

Rob wrote:

As humans, we are visual creatures. So, if someone creates a barebones or cheap-looking blog and website, then it can make it hard for customers to take an author seriously. It’s like you’re sending a signal to the world, “I care more about saving money, than investing in myself and looking like a professional.”

Believe me, content always trumps graphics..you must offer real value for any book or message to sell. But, it’s also important to “package” your message professionally, which establishes more credibility with your audience. It’s hard to take someone seriously if they look “homemade.”

There’s nothing wrong with saving money on a website or blog, but make sure that it looks professional enough to save your career.

Randy sez: Folks, Rob is a marketing expert who really knows marketing of books. Check out his blog at http://wildfiremarketing.blogspot.com/. I had a nice chat with Rob a couple of weeks ago on the phone and we’re on the same page on a lot of things.

I think both Rob and I will agree that “prettiness” is not everything, but it counts for something. The question I would urge every web-site owner to ask is this: “How much does prettiness count with me?”

If you are a professional speaker or a high-level author, then you probably need a pretty site, because that’s what’s expected of professional speakers and bigshot writers.

If you aren’t, then you probably need a much lower level of “prettiness”. Now I would never suggest that you intentionally make an ugly web site. But content is king and always will be on the web. Get great content and get the word out well. As your profile rises, make changes to your “prettiness” as appropriate. An unpublished writer simply doesn’t need a $3000 web site with Flash, dazzling graphics, and hard-to-read grayscale fonts. I would argue that a nice template for a blog might be a reasonably “pretty” and yet inexpensive investment for the beginning writer.

I just got home from critique group and answered a billion email messages, so I’m going to just answer some of the comments you posted today. Tomorrow, I’ll continue with our ongoing discussion on web sites and blogs. Yesterday, I posed the question “Are Pretty Web Sites Effective?” A number of you responded. Let’s look at those comments:

M.L. Eqatin wrote:

But one other question on pictures: Dreamweaver lets you put in little alternate text tags for every picture. Don’t the search engines read those? Somebody told me that google will pick up the picture tags first.

Randy sez: Yes, pictures can be tagged with the “alt” tag, and the search engines will notice those. So, if I have a picture of myself, I might add an “alt” tag that says, “Randy Ingermanson, America’s Mad Professor of Fiction Writing.” And the search engines would see that. That would be good.

However, suppose I had a pretty banner with my picture and the words (in graphic format as part of the banner): “Randy Ingermanson, America’s Mad Professor of Fiction Writing.” Would the search engines see those words? The answer is no. The search engines can’t interpret pictures of words. That’s why “alt” tags exist–to let the search engines know what’s in the pictures.

Heather wrote:

Magically, after complaining about not receiving your newsletter for months and months, this past letter came through. It’s like asking the clerk to help you find a book after searching for hours only to discover it’s been in front of your nose the whole time.

Randy sez: If you have either a Comcast or Yahoo email address, odds are high that they’ve been filtering out my e-zines lately. This is an ongoing problem, and I would love to fix it. Today, I changed my e-zine subscription so that all new subscribers receive a confirmation email with a link that they MUST click in order to complete the subscription. I boo-booed and accidentally had my system send out emails asking all my uncomfirmed subscribers to confirm. They can if they want, but I don’t think it’s mandatory. Those who do should get my e-zine more regularly than those who don’t.

Sylvia wrote:

I’ve noticed that your e-zine, and many of the comments that are posted on your blog, fill up only about half of the page. For reading that is great! For printing it out — it takes a lot of paper. I’m sure there must be a reason for that, and I’m not sure it is worth taking up space on your blog to answer it. Just thought I’d ask.

Randy sez:

Email programs break lines in different ways. Some will break an overly long line at 60 characters, some at 80 characters, and some won’t break it at all.

That’s a problem, so the rule for e-zine writers is to manually break all lines at around 55 characters or so. That way, they can be guaranteed not to send emails that some programs will display as horribly jagged looking blocks of text.

That’s a problem for those who print out my e-zines. (A surprising number do–something that I never would have guessed when I launched the e-zine.) A 55-character line only takes up half the page or so on a piece of paper.

For blogs, the main text column needs to be quite narrow for comfortable reading on the screen. If you print out the page, that means it’ll be narrow on paper. There, you have the option of manually stretching the page, but it’s still a bit awkward.

I don’t know what the best answer is. The primary mode of reading both my e-zine and blog is on the screen, so I optimize it for that. But it does mess up things for the paper-lovers. I guess you could cut and paste the text into a text editor and remove all the line-breaks. It’s a hassle, but that would at least work.

Sylvia wrote:

Me, again! I just remembered that a friend of mine did her own ministry site. She posted all her articles on it. Later, however, when she did a “search” for it, it wouldn’t come up on Google. I don’t know if she tried some of the other search engines or not. A ministry site that can’t be found is of little value!

She called a tech, and got such an involved answer that she finally thanked him and hung up. What can she do?

Randy sez: If you email me privately with the URL of the web site, I’ll look into it and see if I can come up with a reason why Google is not indexing it. I have solved puzzles like this before for my friends. There is always a reason.

David wrote:

The local extension of our nearest community college is offering an evening class, about 15 to 18 hours of instruction, on web pages using FrontPage. I’m thinking of taking this. Any thoughts? Is FrontPage good software for a beginner? From your in-post statement, you seem kind of down on it. I just can’t see plunking down a few grand for a professional site during my unpublished phase.

Randy sez: Go fer it! FrontPage is neither awful nor spectacular. It works quite well and I know at least two good internet marketers who use it. It’s easier for a beginner to use than DreamWeaver, but DreamWeaver is more powerful for experts.

Mary wrote:

I think it depends on the person who wants the site. It’s the same with yards. I’m in love with flowers and herbs and garden paths, so I garden a lot. It’s important to me. I also love graphics. It’s important to me that my website reflect my bent toward the aesthetic.

I truly believe you can have both. I have a nice looking website that I can change the content on, the best of both worlds.

Randy sez: I would agree. An effective blog or web site can be extremely beautiful, just like a great car can be beautiful. But it’s possible for an effective blog or web site to be pretty plain, just like a great car can be plain. There are some folks who try to make us believe that “pretty” and “effective” are the same thing, and that we therefore MUST plunk down the big bucks. ‘Tain’t necessarily so. I think public speakers are held to a different standard. A public speaker needs to dress well and have a very professional looking site. But writers? Uh uh on both counts.

Bruce wrote:

You might want to comment, even if ever so briefly, on your definition of “pretty”. I can think of several conflicting definitions, such as:

“Graphic intensive”

“Layout, white space arrangement, readability”

“Artistic color palette”

“Easy to navigate”

Randy sez: All of these are components of “prettiness.” So is the existence of Flash or JavaScript-driven graphics that show a lot of moving parts. (I met one webmaster who insisted that any site without motion on it was useless. He was about 20 years old and was not particularly adept at marketing.)

Please don’t get me wrong. All of these “pretty” things on a site are nice to have. But they’re not essential for a marketing platform. Millions of dollars are earned every year by people with pretty dull sites that are not “pretty” by any definition of the word.