Maximising Your Website – Course Notes
Posted by EssexMax on 20 February 2012 under Course Notes | 
2 Comments to Read
This page is intended to supplement the Maximising Your Website Course, which is run at South Essex College in Southend-on-Sea.
The links on this page will be referred to throughout the course, and are updated as the course goes along.
Maximising Your Website – Week One
Understanding your audience is key. In the first week, we look at the basics of web stats.
- Webalizer or AW Stats are often provided free with your website. Example of AW Stats
- Free webstats: Google Analytics (Example: Sample Google Stats)
- GetClicky.com – Powerful stats, plus Live Spy.GetClicky Review
- Clicktale – See what your visitors are up to, and get heatmaps (Examples of heatmaps)
A great way to find out what your site visitors think of your site… is to ask them!
-
Limesurvey (Requires site installation)
Maximising Your Website – Week Two
In this week’s course, we look at how to health-check your website to make sure that there are no significant problems. It will be helpful to have Google Webmaster Tools set up on your site. To do this, create a free Google Webmaster Tools account, add details of your website, and follow the instructions to “validate” that you are the owner of your site.
We also look at HTML validation and the W3C Markup Validator
We also discuss “404 – Page Not Found” handling, and touch on the basics of Search Engine Optimisation (See our SEO Course).
Maximising Your Website – Week Three
We look at ways to interact with your audience, including forums, blogs, comments, newsletters and social media. Some handy links:
- Forum software: phpBB and YaBB (both free)
- Blogging Software: WordPress or Google Blogger (See our Blogging for Business course)
- Newsletters: Mail Chimp, PHP List, Bravenet
- Feed Management: Google Feedburner
Maximising Your Website – Week Four
In the final week of the course, here’s more on Social Networking, then details of how to get your site to start making money. We also look at site maps, site search, Live Chat and Multi-variant testing.
- Duplicate Content Checker – Make sure your site isn’t being penalised
- Add live chat to your site: Live 2 Support
- Make money by displaying ads with Google Adsense
- Affiliate Advertising: Affiliate Window or Amazon Affiliates
- Add a site search with Google Custom Search
- Add a site map, to help both humans and robots: Sitemap Generator (free download), Site Map Pro (paid download)
- Multi-variant testing: Google Website Optimiser
Wrap-up
If you’ve enjoyed the course, you may want to consider the Search Engine Optimisation Course, or the Blogging For Business Course, both of which include other ways to get more from your website.
Gill said,
Hi Pete
Contacted my website ISP to find out if my .com is forwarded to my .co.uk address or a 301 redirect is in place, this is their reply:
“The way you have this set up is definitely not a 301 redirect, it is just two addresses pointing at the same web space and site. In fact it is not even technically forwarded, but rather a reference set to point the domain directly at the same site files.”
I have added Rel=canonical not sure if I need to do more now? your help would be appreciated.
Thank you for such an interesting, informative course.
Gill
EssexMax said,
Hi Gill,
I’ve sent you a mail on this. Looking at your specific example, there is a risk of duplication as you have two domain names pointing at identical content. In similiar situations, I would redirect the .com domain to point to the co.uk. If that’s not possible, then you may want to consider rel=canonical on each page.
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