5:30 Design Tip

There are two ways that you can tell a search engine not to crawl your site.

The first is a meta tag on your homepage.

The second is a robots.txt file.

The meta tag is simple. As you are writing your page just add the tag:

<meta name="robots” content="none">

This tells bots not to follow links or index your site.

In the content attribute you can use follow or nofollow and index or noindex. The follow or nofollow tells the bots what to do with the links. The index or noindex tells the bots if they should remember the page.

You should also utilize a robots.txt file. Not all bots will pay attention to the meta tag. Google, for instance, does not. This file needs to go in the root directory of your Web site. You should find it if you go to http://www.mysite.com/robots.txt or http://www.myprovider.com/~mysite/robots.txt.

The file can be created in any text editor and contain the lines:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

Make sure that the filename is all lowercase.

These two methods combined should keep all bots from crawling and indexing your site. Now, it will stay a little more private for those family pictures you don’t want the world to know about.

Angie

There are several ways to publish a Web site. Most hosting companies will provide you with a Control Panel these days in order to upload files to your site. Many will also grant you FTP or SCP access to the site. So, what is the difference and why do you care?

FTP and SCP are pretty much the same thing. The major difference to you, is that SCP is encrypted. What that means is that it is harder for a third party to intercept your username, password, or other information. There is a rather well known and free SCP client called WinSCP. You can download it at http://www.winscp.com/.

If you have the choice, go with SCP over FTP.

Many people don’t realize that a major source of spammers getting an email address is from the Web. It is helpful to be able to put an email address on your site for users to email you. How do you do it in such a way that spammers have to do more work in order to get it?

Nechtan Design has made available the method that we use to encode our client’s email addresses for their Web pages. This method is not foolproof but it does help. The page is available for anyone who wants to use it.

This is a simple method used by many different people. It utilizes javascript to encrypt the string. When the page is interpreted the javascript causes the string to be printed as part of the document.

Copy the code exactly from the Final HTML section and put it exactly where you want your mailto link to appear in your page.

Hopefully this will help you to receive less spam.

Angie