Your Web Department now provides 3 easy methods for you to display your Twitter feed on any page of your website.
1. Using the Twitter Feed tool, “Plain list” display style
Any YWD website comes with the Twitter Feed tool. You simply add it to a page, enter your Twitter account/username and specify the number of tweets that should be included. The new default display style is called “Plain list” and will show your most recent tweets as a plain vanilla list. The text and links colours will inherit your website’s by default, but you can override them if you want.
Also, the text will expand to the maximum width of its container (e.g. the Main column of your page) but you can limit it to a width. And you can also apply an autoformat to the content block if you’d like to have a border or padding around it, for instance.
This style is great if you’d like your Twitter feed to integrate seamlessly with the rest of your website.
2. Using the Twitter Feed tool, “Stylized box” display style
This style will place your tweets inside a scrollable box, with a thumbnail of your profile photo, links to your Twitter page and more. You have a few options in terms of customizing its look and feel, like the shell background colour, the tweets area background colour, the shell text. You can also choose whether you’d like the box width to auto-expand or not.
This style is indicated if you’d like to show your Twitter feed very prominently, especially if your YWD website package doesn’t include the Embed Code tool.
If your YWD website package includes the Embed Code tool then it's just a matter of grabbing the code Twitter generates and pasting it into an Embed Code content block.
For more information on Your Web Department’s Twitter Tool, visit this Help page.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Some of the most prolific people utilizing our website management platform are designers who previously had little or no experience creating websites. If you’re print designer and in the past have avoided accepting Web work for whatever reason, I think you should reconsider.
Why the Web is for you
You’re already in business The mere fact that you have a business -- whether it’s struggling or not -- gives you an edge over geeky programmers. I bet you have much better people skills, can understand a budget and adhere to deadlines. They often can't.
It’s much easier now
You don't need to buy giant those think and confusing tomes on how to learn Flash, PHP, Joomla, etc. A website management system like Your Web Department lets you build a website yourself for free for your clients, no programming required.
You’re better qualified than anyone
The same overall design principles that you’re familiar with can and should be applied to the Web. It’s just a matter of making some adaptations. After all you’re a communications professional and can understand your client’s needs in that respect better than anyone.
Your clients expect you to do it
Gone are the days of clients spending thousands of dollars on a simple website, unless it has some really specific functionality. Most expect that in addition to their branding or printed material, you’ll also be doing their website and that they'll be able to update it on their own. In the past, you might have hired someone to "program it" for you. That’s not required anymore.
Simple tips
Design your websites and images at 72dpi
Work on your concepts at 72 dpi, not 300 dpi. High resolution images won’t look any better on monitors and only make everything load much slower.
Use RGB
Monitors work in RGB, not CMYK.
Scrolling is fine!
The days of tiny Flash websites loading in fixed-height rectangles with tiny type are over. Flash itself is dead. While you should keep critical information and calls to action above the fold, it’s perfectly OK for people to scroll down on long pages.
Web fonts
In the past you had to stick to the so called “web safe” fonts like Verdana, Arial, etc. But Your Web Department platform loads fonts on the fly now. So in addition to a few dozen built-in fonts, you can also select from amongst thousands of fonts from Adobe Typekit or the Google Web Fonts (free) library. And by the way, don’t use bitmapped/rasterized text for your headings and the like. Use live, editable (and searchable!) text.
So there you have it. Next week I’ll be introducing you to a studio that has successfully incorporated website building into their practice. In the meantime, you may want to check out Gustavo's related post about why a designer switched to YWD.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Your Web Department includes a nifty Assets Manager so you can upload your images and place them anywhere on your website. But what if you’d like to insert images that reside elsewhere – on Google Photos, for instance? This way you can quickly add a picture without even having to download it to your computer and then upload to YWD.
It's quite easy to do it and you may already know it, but here it is just in case.
Uploading your photos to Google Photos
If you have a Gmail account, you can launch Photos simply by selecting the option under More. It’s pretty easy to upload photos to it from your computer, you simply click the big red UPLOAD NEW PHOTOS button and select them. Google Photos lets you create albums and place the photos there to keep things organized.
You can also upload photos directly from your mobile into Google Photos, you just need to download their free app.
If you have lots of photos on your computer, you can also download the free Picasa software from http://picasa.google.ca which lets you organize and share your photos directly with your Google+ account.
Google Photos has useful editing features that allow you to crop, resize and apply effects to the images. It does a lot of the things small business owners need to do in terms of basic image manipulation for their websites. And unless you have a ton of images, it’s completely free: no need to buy Adobe Photoshop.
Inserting a photo into your website page or blog
Easy. Locate the Google Photo image that you’d like to insert and click on it. Then right-click on the image and select Copy Image Location (that’s in Firefox; other browsers may call that option something else, like Copy Image Address for instance).
Assuming your using Your Web Department as your website managing system -- then again, why wouldn’t you ;^) -- edit any Word Processor content block, Content Slider slide, News Manager news item or Blog post – any type of content that uses our editor, really.
In the editor, click the Insert/Edit Image icon as usual, and in the URL field paste the image location that you’ve copied from Google Photos. The image can be right or left aligned, resized, etc. -- just like a “local” image i.e. one that you’ve uploaded to YWD’s Assets Manager.
That’s it! Once you save your change, the image will be displayed on the page:
A couple of notes:
This won’t work for the Image Gallery tool, because it can only use images stored in YWD's Assets Manager.
If the image is removed from Google, it'll also disappear from your page. That's because YWD is only using the image location, it didn't actually make a copy of the image file to your website.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
On previous posts, we’ve mentioned that your navigation should be restricted to essential pages on mobile. However, you can still use navigation effectively. Here are a few examples from real YWD websites. Have a look at them on your mobile phone.
Large buttons appear horizontally right beneath the page banner, and links to sub-pages (if any) on rows underneath. YWD lets you choose the colour of the buttons, the font size, etc. If you only have very few pages in the top level of your mobile website, that’s a simple and effective option.
Vertical dropdown
When people tap on the little icon on top of the banner (alternatively, the word “Menu” can be used)...
As you can see, a website management system like Your Web Department provides different options in terms of mobile navigation without programming. This way you can easily match it to your specific needs.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Intuit put together this infographic, which is a great guide for your mobile website. Although we have no relationship with Intuit (we do use QuickBooks for accounting) we happen to agree with their points and have the same philosophical approach to mobile.
As it is mentioned on the graphic not caring about mobile equates to losing businesses. Just look at the stats in point number one:
55% of people who own a cell phone use their phone to go online
31% of mobile internet users say they mostly go online using their phone
57% of mobile web users wouldn't recommend a website they had trouble accessing on their phone
34% of mobile web users would visit a competitor's mobile website instead after a bad mobile experience
Point number two is dead on the money,YWD is just one of the many options available for creating a mobile version of your web site - “no code experience necessary”.
Point three and four are great reminders of design basics you should always keep in mind, your customers needs should be your primary focus (this goes for the desktop website version as well) a website is not for you, it is for your audience. Keep it simple and make sure what your visitors are looking for is easy to find.
Points five and six are about testing the different phones and adapting to changes. Today’s Android based phone and iPhones are the most popular, but this could change in the near future. Just think how fast we went from phones that did only text and email to what we have now. Who knows what the next medium would be, Google glasses?
A website and its mobile counterpart are a must for any business. There are no excuses for not having both, with YWD, you could have both a good desktop and a mobile website for less than what you spend on coffees.
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
So you just went live with a new website for your business. Congratulations! Now you go to Google, search for it and... nothing. Oh, you must have typed something wrong, of course. You search for something more unique within the content and... nada. OK, this is starting to get on your nerves. You then search for the name of the website itself and... nothing again. What’s going on?
Your website needs to be indexed first
How does Google know about all those gazillions of websites out there? It relies on a piece of software called a Web crawler (also known as a Web spider). Google and all other search engines like Bing have their own crawlers that are constantly browsing the Web, identifying websites and automatically going through all their links and then indexing them. Google’s is called Googlebot.
Until your website has been indexed i.e. added to their giant database (which it uses to search and return the results) your website will not “exist” for Google. Unfortunately, there is no set time for Google to initially index your website. It can take even a few weeks for that to occur. But there are a few things you can do that can help with that.
Have actual content
Sounds obvious, but sometimes people forget that. In order to index your website, Google needs to find content -- words, sentences, text! Make sure your pages have relevant copy, especially your Home page. Describe what you do and what you offer, and name your pages properly. That makes sense not only for Google of course. For instance, having a Home page with just a giant image and no text will not help you, because Google will not know what it’s about. And since we’re talking about images, add a descriptive text (also known as the “Alt” attribute) to them.
Submit your website
If your website is completely new, you can manually submit it to Google. It will eventually be reviewed by a human (or an alien, who knows) and may be added to their index before Googlebots crawls it.
Site verification is a process that enables you to use certain site management tools provided by the search engine. This will enable you to use other tools such as Google Analytics, and will also serve as one more reminder for Google that your website exists. A website management system like Your Web Department makes it very easy to verify your website with Google, Yahoo, Bing and even Pinterest.
Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.
Whether you just got a website for your business or you’re converting an existing one, it’s highly recommended that you set up Google Analytics so it can start tracking its traffic for you. But in addition, it certainly may give Google a heads up that a new website is now live.
If you can, get other websites to link to yours. These links should come from real websites, not phony ones (in which case Google would actually penalize you). Clients, suppliers, partners and others may be interested in exchanging links with you.
Use social media
If you have profiles on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. add a link to your website from them. After all, Google gets to your website by crawling other websites, and social media websites count too. And make sure you share your website on social media as well.
Have other suggestions? Please let us know. And good luck with the new website!
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
If you have a Gmail account, you can launch Photos simply by selecting the option under More. It’s pretty easy to upload photos to it from your computer, you simply click the big red UPLOAD NEW PHOTOS button and select them. Google Photos lets you create albums and place the photos there to keep things organized.
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