Building a Non-SharePoint Site for a Change – Part Deux
I’ve had a few more thoughts from working on my wife’s Web site (now publicly available at http://koochiku.com). Being a Webmaster should not be dismissed as a pedestrian task!
Accessibility
Not all sites have to be fully accessible as defined by the various regulations and guidelines that exist out there. (Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 Priority 2 and 3 in the US, etc.). That doesn’t mean that you should totally ignore the rules. It’s worth doing a quick scan to see where your site might have issues. One good scanner is freely available from Hi Software at http://www.cynthiasays.com/. You can decide which rules you want to pay attention to. Keep in mind that things like alt tags for images aren’t just useful for screen readers, but also for regular users who want to get some sort of descriptive text for the image to understand what you’re showing them. Some of these rules have a lot of common sense behind them as well as the accessibility goals.
Search Engine Optimization
I had a “what a bonehead” moment when I went to create a Sitemap for Google for the site. I had written this neato little JavaScript menu generator for the site (mainly because I thought it would be fun – there are umpteen of these things out there for free). When I used one of the free Sitemap generator sites (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/), I realized that, by putting all of the logic into JavaScript, the search engines weren’t going to “see” most of the pages. Oops. I backed off on my neato menu generator and instead embedded the HTML in the pages. Whiz, bang, the next scan went just the way I wanted it to, “seeing” all of the pages that I wanted the search engines to index.
And speaking of SEO, I’ve posted before about some steps that you can take to get your blog noticed. The same steps work for pretty much any site. Here are a few of the links you’ll definitely want to visit:
- Add your URL to Google
- Live Search URL Submission
- Yahoo! Submit Your Site
- Free Website URL Submission – Submit Google, Yahoo, MSN
Once you have your Sitemap in place, you can also submit your URL to Ask.com by going to this URL:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//[site name]/[sitemap path]
And by no means should you fall for the “We’ll get your site indexed by Google and others in 7 days for $29.99/month” trap. The search engines are going to do their thing regardless – it’s what they are out there for. If you submit your site to the links above, you’ll give yourself a leg up, maybe accelerating the process a tad, and it won’t cost you a dime.