Some of my clients are quite surprised at how little traffic they get to their site, especially brand new sites.
Of course, one of the first things you need to do is get the site indexed. Daniel Scocco at dailyblogtips.com posted a good article on how to get a domain indexed. It can be used as the first step in getting traffic to your site.
A favicon is the little icon you see to the left of the domain name in the address bar, when you visit some websites. A favicon is a great marketing tool as it allows you to display your brand logo to users. The favicon is an image that is saved as a .ico file. This needs to be a certain format for browsers to recognise it.
I found a great favicon generator at Dynamic Drive that will automatically create a favicon.ico from any image you upload. This is what I used to create the favicon for this site.
Why not give it a go now and let know how you get on.
More changes to the site. This time to the comments section. I have now added a website box, so you can leave your website address and it will provide a link back within the comments section of the article.
The other fields i.e. name, email address and text are required fields. Please note however, that althought the email address is required, this will never be published on the site or passed on to any third party.
I am adding new features to this site. The latest addition is to allow posts to be assigned to a category. I envision the categories expanding and new ones appearing as what I blog about will probably change.
This article on Smashing Magazine highlights some of the trends and examples in newspaper websites.
As a developer it is always good to look at other sites to gain some inspiration on features and trends being implemented on popular sites.
For a while now, I have thought about keeping a blog. Primarily the reason was to use it as a means of improving my online presence and try to bring in some work now that I am freelancing.
I looked at the blogging sites that were out there, such as blogger, wordpress and typepad. Then I started to think, as a developer, surely I shoulld be able to create and design my own blog site. That would allow me more freedom to design and customise it. If the blog site was designed in such a way, it could be easily incorporated in to other sites for my clients.
So here we see the reults. Over the coming weeks I will be developing the site and adding more features.