www.rosehillvet.com
Services:
Website Hosting, Web Re-Design, Maintenance
Background:
Rose Hill Veterinary Practice was founded in 1998 with the goal of providing full-service care to all animals in a previously underserved portion of the Virginia Piedmont. With headquarters in Rappahannock County, the practice has grown to include two full-service facilities.
Requirements:
Rose Hill was in a need of a overhaul of their current website in 2008. With the growing number of client they have and the list of potential clients on the rise, the need for a website that would keep clients informed and potential clients aware of their services was required. The important factor that they relayed was that they wanted the ability to handle all content and images, inside of the template, on their own. This would allow them to relay any information they needed to at their convenience. At the same time, Rose Hill wanted to have ways for clients and visitors to find information that otherwise would require them to find on by calling the offices.
Solutions:
We worked side by side with Rose Hill to create a Content Management System that would allow all information on the site to be handled by the staff at Rose Hill. They have the ability to manage all content, images, and photographs. They have access to a browser based administration panel that they use to make all updates to the website.
We also put an e-mail address with each of their staff members along with a contact form for visitors to the site to fill out if they had general requests. To make sure all visitors to the site could be helped in emergency situations, we developed a Google map that showed where all of the emergency clinics could be located with directions and contact information.
Inside of the Content Management System is a photo gallery that is full administered by Rose Hill. This has been used very well by the clinic.
Results:
The clinic has done a wonderful job of maintaining their site with the backend management system. It has proven helpful in handling many requests for information that, if not on the website, they would have to handle by phone or in person. Along with that, the site has helped the clinic to handle many of their clients needs after hours when the staff in not available at the offices.
On the other side there are new ideas being brought into the website marketing strategy monthly. Most of this revolves around how a website is created for to maximize search engine optimization. This is where a designer will make sure that the site is not only beautiful and informational, but it also is coded correctly for the search engine robots that come around to the website to determine where to index the site in the search engine.
I am not for sure what side you are on, but it is best to know both sides so that you can determine if your website is a full functional search engine optimized site. These ideas are not tied to any particular industry as it relates to all websites. Having an idea of what your website should be doing for you in the search engines will help you in your pursuit of getting the exposure you are looking for from surfers of the internet.
Let’s go over some of the ways a website can, and should be, optimized for a better search engine placement. These are in no particular order of priority or importance.
Keywords
Having an idea of what keywords someone would be using that you want to visit your website is important to have. Keywords can be placed in different places in your web page to help a search engine robot have a better idea of your website content and relevance in particular searches. One place keywords are put is in the head of a web page. For those of you who do not know, this is important information for the web page that a visitor does not see. In the header of the site you can list keywords that instruct the robot on the relevance of the site. You list your keywords in the meta tag with a comma following each keyword. For example:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”horses, horse, horse sales, horses for sale, equine, equine sales, equine breeding, stallion breeding, horse breeding” />
Now if you did not take the time to properly put the correct keywords in here and instead you used dogs, cats, mice, pigs, you would not be helping the search engines have a better understanding of your site.
Website Title
In my opinion the title is the most important factor in getting better results from search engine visitors. With a properly titled title you can pursuade people to click on your result from their search engine search. It is one thing to do good with your keywords and get a good ranking, but if you do not have a good title that catches attention, you will find that people will go right by your listing. Some good ideas for a website title:
- Use your farm name, stallion name, or your horse business name. This is important in that it tells someone who they are getting ready to visit.
- Use your keywords in your title. Make up a sentence that can integrate your keywords or use your keywords with a comma in between just as you do in your keywords. To me, I think it is better to make a sentence that summarize you so that a person has a better idea of the site they are getting ready to visit.
Description
Another meta tag that is used in the header of the web page is the description tag. With this, you will add a short description of the website. When I say short, I think 1-2 sentences if plenty. Anymore and the search engine robot will not even use it, and sometimes can be knocked against you.
Headers
When a search engine robot comes to your site it does not have all day long to be there. So it will look for certain information and collect the information that is found. One of the places it looks for in your web page content is in the header tags. These are used for titles that can be above paragraphs. They are put in the <h1> – <h6> tags. So your header would say:
<h1>Horse Farm News</h1>
Search engines know to look inside these header tags and think that this information must be important. There are some other techniques to get better use of the header tags that we will not discuss here.
Content
It is wise to plan out your content before it is added to the website. When you are planning the content you should try to focus on using your keywords. Of course you want to find a happy medium between your keywords and content that is useful for someone who is reading it. It is one thing to get your keywords in there for the robots, but if it is not enjoyable to read, what is the point? Try to find someone who has good writting skills that can help you on this.
Folders
When you have a link that in a sub page to your website, put that page as a index page and put in a sub folder. Then name that sub folder with your keywords and phrases. So for example, you have a horse sales page for your Arabian horses You would save the page as index.html and put it in a sub folder. Then you would name the folder arabian-horses-for-sale. These folders help robots gather more information about your site and this tells them that the pages inside this folder are related to Arabian horses for sale.
Clean Code
Having a beautiful site is always a goal of all website owners. Be careful though that you watch the download time of your pages. If the code that runs the web page is not clean and easy to read, it could slow down the speed of the page load. Not only this but it is helpful for the robots that have to look in the code to find your content.
Image Alternates
Images that are displayed on a web page has an “alt” tag which stands for “alternate”. This is text that is used to explain what the image is for those who can not view the image. This is more code that a robot picks up on but is not seen by the viewer if the image is displayed. So if you had a horse with a picture in your horses for sale page, you could add alternate text to the picture. So for example, you would have something like this:
<img src=”yourimage.jpg” alt=”Arabian Horse For Sale” />
Be careful with this as you want to make sure that the “alt” text is helpful for those who are not able to see the picture.
Linking
Something you need to try to do outside of your own website is to connect with other sites and try to establish a link connection. This is where they will put your website link on their page. What works best here for website optimization is if you find sites that are high on the rankings of your keywords to establish this link with. Of course you will probably have to add a link on your site for them, but sometimes this is not the case.
Summary
Day after day the algorithms used by search engines is changing and getting more complicated. Staying on top of this is important and helpful in your search engine placings. Having a well designed site will help in making sure that the robots can gather as much important information as possible about your site to put you in the right place for surfers. This is only a short list of what the search engines look for when visiting your website. Do a search on one of the search engines to find more information or contact me and we can talk about optimizing your website today.
Rob
]]>Web Editors For Beginners
Windows
Evrsoft First Page
Evrsoft First Page is a nice editor. It offers a lot of the features you expect from a professional Web editing package. It is advertised as completely free, but the free version has significant features (like WYSIWYG) disabled. To get them, you need to pay for the full license. The easiest way to purchase this product is to download Evrsoft First Page and then click on the buy now button.
SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey is the Mozilla project all-in-one Internet application suite. It includes a Web browser, email and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and composer – the Web page editor. One of the nice things about using SeaMonkey is that you have the browser built-in already so testing is a breeze. Plus it’s a free WYSIWYG editor with an embedded FTP to publish your Web pages.
CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor
The CoffeeCup Free HTML editor is a text editor with a lot of potential. A lot of the features it has in the menus are reliant on other CoffeeCup products to use – such as FTP, the photo gallery maker, CSS editing, and so on. This is still a powerful HTML editor, but I would recommend you purchase the full version of the editor to get the real juice from this product. One important thing to note: many sites list this editor as a free WYSIWYG editor, but when I tested, you had to buy the full version to get WYSIWYG support. The free version is a very nice text editor only.
PageBreeze Professional
PageBreeze Professional offers you all the features of PageBreeze Free HTML editor, but with a few extra features. You can purchase the software directly or get it free when you buy FormBreeze form processing for your Web pages. If you know you’ll have a lot of Web forms to maintain, this editor could be a very good deal.
Dynamic HTML Editor Free
The free version of Dynamic HTML Editor is a few revisions back from the paid version and it’s only free for non-profits and personal use. But if that is you, and you don’t want to learn more than file transfers for getting your Web pages to your host, then this program would work fine. It has some graphics editing and is easy to drag and drop the elements around on the page.
Macintosh
Rapidweaver
RapidWeaver is misleading. At first glance it appears to be a fairly basic WYSIWYG editing tool, but when you push beneath the surface, there is a lot there to surprise you. I created a site with a large photo gallery, a blog, and two stand-alone Web pages in about 15 minutes. These included images and fancy formatting. And it was fun to do. This is a great program for newcomers to Web design, as they can get started quickly and then advance to more complicated pages including PHP and other languages all with the same editor. I don’t like that it doesn’t validate HTML that you hand code and I couldn’t figure out how to add an external link in one of the WYSIWYG pages, but there are probably extensions or add-ons in the user community to do.
Freeway Express
Freeway Express is a great basic Web page editor for the Macintosh. It includes basic graphics editing and creation so that you only need one software package to create simple Web sites. One drawback is that you can only save your files as HTML 4, there is no support for any other DTD.
Create
Create is an extensive graphics manipulation program that also acts as a Web page editor. It provides WYSIWYG functionality to make it easy to place objects and elements. But it’s true strength is in the graphics manipulation features it has. You can create text and image objects and then manipulate them in many ways. It is quite fun to use. With version 14 it now offers CSS layout (rather than tables), but this is not turned on by default. This is a fine editor for kids and people who are new to Web design, but might get frustrating for designers who want more control over the content and less focus on the graphics.
Web Editors For Professionals
Windows
Adobe Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is one of the most popular professional Web development software packages available. It offers power and flexibility to create pages that meet your needs. I use it for everything from JSP, XHTML, PHP, and XML development. It is a good choice for professional Web designers and developers, but if you’re working as a solitary freelancer, you might want to look at one of the CS suites like Web or Design to get graphics editing capability as well.
Adobe Creative Suite Web Standard
Creative Suite Web Standard is the minimum a freelancing Web designer needs to build and maintain Web sites. It comes with Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, and Contribute. These give you graphics editing, HTML editing, and Flash as well as Contribute to provide your customers with support. It also comes with Bridge to manage your images and Device Central to work with mobile devices. If you don’t anticipate needing a lot of graphics manipulation, this is the perfect suite for a freelancer.? It also offers a lot of features that a member of a Web design team can appreciate like check-in check-out, templates, and integrated version control.
Microsoft Expression Web
Expression Web 2 offers everything professional Web designers have come to expect from a world-class Web editing tool, including HTML validation, WYSIWYG and text editor support, support for CSS, and lots of templates. The biggest benefit to Expression Web over other top-quality Web editors is the price. It is missing just a couple of the features of other high-ranked editors, but it has a lot of built-in support for ASP.Net and ASP.Net Ajax. If you work on ASP.Net pages, this is the perfect editor.
NetOjbects Fusion
Fusion is a very powerful HTML editor. It combines all the tasks you need to get your website up and running including development, design, and FTP. Plus you can add special features to your pages like captchas on forms and ecommerce support.
HTML-Kit Tools
HTML-Kit Tools offers all the features of HTML-Kit with a few extras. It is the next version of HTML-Kit, but the developers have decided to charge a small fee for their superb program. HTML-Kit Tools add features like snippets, project management, validating all your files at once, even creating videos.
Macintosh
Komodo Edit
Komodo Edit is hands down the best free XML editor available. It also includes a lot of great features for HTML and CSS development. Plus, if that isn’t enough, you can get extensions for it to add on languages or other helpful features (like special characters). It’s not the best HTML editor, but it’s great for what you pay, especially if you build in XML.
KompoZer
KompoZer is a good WYSIWYG editor. It is based on the popular Nvu editor – only it is called an “unofficial bug-fix release.” KompoZer was conceived by some people who really liked Nvu, but were fed up with the slow release schedules and poor support. So they took it over and released a less buggy version of the software. Ironically, there hasn’t been a new release of KompoZer in over a year.
Nvu
Nvu is a good WYSIWYG editor. I prefer text editors to WYSIWYG editors, but if you don’t, then Nvu is a great choice, especially considering that it’s free. I love that it has a site manager to allow you to review the sites that you’re building. It’s surprising that this software is free. Feature highlights: XML support, advanced CSS support, full site management, built-in validator, and international support as well as WYSIWYG and color coded XHTML editing.
]]>Commercial Image Editors
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PhotoLine is able to work with documents containing more than one page. This allows the creation of booklets and flyers. In contrast to classic image processing PhotoLine can create empty pages (pages without a background image) which can be used to place images, text and vector graphics.
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WebPlus X2 is the ultimate web design software, packed with everything you or your organisation needs to create outstanding, professional-quality websites – no complicated code, programming, or design experience required.
Free Image Editors
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.
PhotoFiltre is a complete image retouching program. It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments
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PhotoPlus is the amazing photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance digital photos, create stunning bitmap graphics and even web animations.
]]>Below are a few ways you can try to prevent stealing of your images on your website. There are other ways that are more advanced, and if you want to find out more about these ways you can contact me and we will discuss them.
Hotlink Protection
Hotlink protection is direct linking to an image, video, etc. This is when someone uses code in their web page that links directly to your image on your server. Not only is this stealing your image, it is also stealing your bandwidth. I have decided I will not show examples of any of these image stealing ways as it could encourage someone to take the example and use it. Just know that your web host, control panel, or designer that is hosting your site should be able to tell you if anything on your site is being hotlinked to.
In order to prevent hotlinking, you need to add or update your .htaccess file. If you do not know how to create an .htaccess file you can do a search on Google and find out more. Here is code to add to your .htaccess file to prevent hotlinking to your image files:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]In the code above just change yourdomain.com to your domain name.
Flash
In my mind, flash is the way to go to prevent image theft. This is not a full blown prevention tool, but it is a better way to prevent the common visitor from deciding to take your image. In order to use flash to manage your images you will need Adobe Flash program to create the flash file to store your image(s). If you do not have this program you can search around the internet for pre-made templates that you can integrate into your website. Using flash will prevent hotlinking to a specific image, stop someone from saving the image to their computer, and can help in the display of your image.
Watermark
Watermarks are tough to go against when it comes to the protection of a photograph on the internet. There are 2 sides of the coin though. One side is that it helps in the protection of the photo and the other side is that it takes away from the beauty of the photo. That is not what we are going to discuss right now. We are going to talk about how to watermark if you decide to take this approach.
There are 2 ways to watermark a photo. The first way is to do it manually to each photo you add to the internet. This is not difficult to do if you have a small collection of photo’s to put on the net. Simply use any image editing program to add a layer on top of the photo somewhere that will copyright the photo so that anyone who see it will know who it belongs to. Depending on your editing program and your skills in using it will depend on how fancy the watermark is. If you are a photoshop user you can create an action that will add this easily to any photo you desire.
The second way is to have a program that adds a watermark to any photo you put on the internet. Some programs can watermark and photo in a particular folder, some watermark any photo you add through a control panel that is set up on your server. If this is something you have an interest in you can contact me and discuss what you are wanting to accomplish and we will see if we can work together to get it done.
Transparent Image
This little trick is a good one that really makes the work hard for the thief. Again, if someone wants your image they will find a way to get it. But this trick just adds extra time to the process to the beginner thief.
What you do is create a table or div that is the same size as your image. With the use of CSS you can make the image the background. To make it harder for the thief, put the CSS file as an external file so they have to go searching further. Then inside the table or div you can add a transparent gif and give it the same size as your image. Not giving it the same size will prevent the full image from showing. By doing this, when somone goes to download the picture to their computer, they will be confused when they go to open it up and they see a blank image.
Not a full proof trick, as none of them are, but this makes the work harder for anyone trying to take your image.
Encrypt Source Code
I am adding this because I mentioned I would show some ways to prevent stealing of images. This is the least of the ways when it comes to security. It is the least because it is very easy to get around this trick. Just thought I would add it so that you could search for more information if you find it to be a way you want to try.
Summary
If it is your goal that nobody, I mean nobody, takes your image/photo online, the best method for this is not to put it on the internet. Right now there is not a full proof way of preventing this. You can hire a programmer who can try to eliminate some of the ways someone can take your rights, but make sure you do not put to much into this project when it comes to money because it still will not help.
The above mentioned ways of prevention can help to decrease the possibility of a image being jacked from you. If one of them turns on a light bulb in your head, research it more and find out if it is the right way for you. If not, go searching around for image theft prevention tools. Google is a great resource that will broaden your mind.
Hope this is of some help to you today in your internet education.
Rob
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]]>Horse Farm Home Page
The home page of a horse farm website should have certain qualities that are displayed. In all pages, not matter what type of layout structure is used, there needs to be a header, main body, and footer. The header should be used to display your farm name so that a visitor is knowing what farm they are looking at. In the header you can use images or flash to display your logo. I say flash can be used, if it is used correctly. If fash is used without having an alternate image to display if the visitor does not have flash installed can lead you to not showing a logo at all.
The main body of the home page should be a short opener that lets the visitor get to know who you are and what you do. This gets a visitor comfortable with you and knows that they are at the right place. For example, if you are a Quarter Horse farm and you do not make this known to a visitor who is looking for a Morgan horse, this will cause to confusion on the part of the visitor at your site.
The footer of the home page can have a copyright and some contact information. By having some sort of contact information available on the home page will allow someone to learn how to get in touch with you right away. If someone is in a rush visiting websites, they might not have time to find out how to get in touch with you.
Some good layout tips for a home page would be that you have the whole page displayed on a screen, you have your meta headers set and that you make sure technology is used that is cross browser. In regards to the display, most people do not like having to scroll far down a page, so having the page displayed in the browser will help from annoying your visitor. If you have a good amount of information you need to add to your home page, think about using some cross browser code to hide and show content.
In regards to cross browser technology, I am talking about not having your site set up to only satisfy a certain browser type. You should always keep in mind ALL of your visitors and make sure that every person that comes to your website will see the exact same as everyone else.
When I say meta headers, this refers to your web page title, keywords, and description. Having all of these set is important to search engines and how people find your site. If you do not have a description set, a search engine will pick up the first words it can find to use as your description. This might not be the description you want for people who find you on a search engine search. Keywords will help search engines in indexing you in the correct places so that your site will come up in relevant search phrases. I see some websites built in the Arabian horse world where the sites have no keywords or description. The company says they are the leader in online marketing, yet they do not do the simple things for online marketing for their clients.
One final note on the home page, stay away from splash pages. A splash page is a page that has some sort of flash on it that is fancy and not useful. The worst of those are the ones that do not even have a link for you to skip the flash presentation. Do not let someone bother wasting your time and money building a splash page. In this day and age nobody has time watching an intro splash page.
Navigation
The navigational system for your website is VERY important. Just as we have signs on highways to lead us in the right direction, so we have a navigational menu on our website. There are various ways to implement a menu and it all depends on how your design is set up. You see above we have condensed the menu to a drop down menu that puts proper pages under proper headings. This is helpful in leading a visitor to your website in the right direction. The two most common displays of a menu is horizontal and vertical. The horizontal menu is above or right below your header. The vertical menu is on the right or left of your body content. If your page scrolls down off of the screen, it is wise to have menu links in your footer. This is optional but sometimes courtesy to your visitors.
Sub Pages
Here are some idea pages for your horse farm website. Each farm will very on their sub pages depending on their needs and what they have to offer. These are only for you to get ideas with.
Farm Information
It is important that you have a farm information page, often called “About Us”. Visitors often have a sense of needing to know who they are dealing with, especially if you are trying to sell horses online. With the farm information page, you can tell more about yourself, your farm philosphy, farm mission, farm background, and more. This is a great way to warm your visitor up to you and your horse farm.
News & Events
Horse farms love to tell people about their successes and what they have going on. A News & Events page is great for this. You can tell people about your horse show success, new foals born, etc.. You can also tell about what you have coming up in the future. Open houses, horse shows, and more can be added to this section.
Sale Horses
Having a list of your sale horses is a great way for people to see the horses you offer for sale. There are various tools you can use to get your visitors to promote your sale horses for you. Examples of this would be a Tell A Friend feature that allows a visitor to send a page of your certain sale horse to a friend by email. You could have the option of someone downloading a PDF brochure or a PDF pedigree, both having information about the horse and your contact information. Another could be a printable pedigree that when someone goes to print could have additional information on the printable page then what is on the web page. With technology any of these can be added to each sale horse page to save you on the costs of marketing possibly. Having a video available for someone to watch is also helpful. The more information available will be helpful in the pursuit of selling a horse.
Horse Page
Presenting your horses is a great way for visitors to know more about your interests, ideas, and more. This givrs you an outlet to tell visitors about your mares, stallions, show horses, broodmares, etc..
Photo Gallery
Everybody loves pictures, and most people, lots of them. Having a photo gallery that gives you the ability to add albums and as many pictures as you like in each album, right from your own computer, is fun and helpful. Pictures/Photographs can help give a visitor more information about you, lets you show off your horses and your farm, as well as anything else you want to add. Having the ability to do this at your convenience can be fun for you.
Contact Page
The web is an easy way to get your information out to people. Having a contact page will lead someone to the place to find this information. On a contact page you can have your mailing address, phone number, fax number, email address, and anything else that can be used to contact you. To help your visitor with an easy way to contact you, a form that they can fill out on your website that goes to your email is very helpful. This is for ease of use and can help you in time management, in that you can reply at your earliest convenience. Some sites I see that are created by “Horse Marketing Companies” that only take the time to put down your regular information and do not bother to give you the online form. If someone is not able, or willing, to offer you an online form, rethink them doing the work for you. Just my opinion.
Summary
Having a well built horse farm website can work for you in many different ways. Having a badly built horse farm website can do you major harm, maybe your reputation. When working on your own, be sure that you look at your work and your farm without blinders on. Be open to your good and your bad, your positives and your negatives, your strengths and your weaknesses. If you are having someone build your website, make sure you keep these tips and ideas in mind when they offer you a proposal to build your site. There is a fine line these days between graphics and programming on the internet. They are getting closer and closer tied together day in and day out. Do not let someone build you a beautiful website that cannot perform for you. Do not let someone build you a website that can perform for you but is down right ugly.
Try to keep these ideas in mind and my best wishes to you on the success of you and your horse farm on the internet.
Rob
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The most important difference I see in this is that the use of the <div> tag has reduced the amount of coding that is needed. When using the table to set up web pages I was seeing the code getting longer and longer as I tried to create a website with some graphical pizazz. This really got on my nerves when it came time to make changes, whether it was with the page or with the style sheet. Since I have used the <div> tag I have found it much easier for me to find what I need in the code and in the style sheet.
The page load time is much quicker. This is helpful for many reasons. The most significant is that this allows me to use cleaner images. When I had to worry about the code I found myself making the images smaller and smaller in size. Now with the <div> tag being used I can keep my images cleaner. The reason for this is that the page does not have to work through as much code.
The search engines seem to like the cleaner code as well. They like to go through the site and find what they are looking for. They have no use for tables, especially when it is table after table.
In summary, I have become a fan of the <div> tag, even though it has been a headache understanding the way the site should be laid out and what needs to be done with the stylesheet to get it to work correctly.
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