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

Did you know that a search engine will look at what you have in the alt attribute of an image tag?

Some people will not put captions on photos with a person’s name in it. Instead they will just put something like “Baby and Nana together at Christmas.” However, then in the alt attribute to the image tag they will put “Little Johnny Someone and Nana Someone.” A search engine will find that as part of your page.

You should always use the alt attribute to describe what is in a picture, just be as vague there as you are in the captions.

Tomorrow, the two ways to tell a search engine not to index your site.

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.

Sometimes you know what kind of a Web site you would like to publish. When you do I highly suggest visiting other sites of the same genre. This will help to motivate you. Not only can it give you ideas, it can also show you what not to do. Once you have visited plenty of sites, draw out what you want to see. Then visit a few more sites. By doing this type of research and preparation you are going to ensure that you have a well thought out site when you are finished.

Be sure to include in your sketch all of your menu options. And don’t forget the freebie sites that you want to utilize like YouTube, Blogger and MySpace. Make it fun, simple and unique and people will visit time and time again!

Well, from writing that is. You may have noticed. A little over a week had gone by before my post yesterday. Why do I bring this up in a blog about tips on how to write your own Web site? To point out that it is going to happen. It happens to everyone: you, me and everyone else.

When you are working on anything there are always other circumstances. Things happen to make it so you run out of time to work on your site.

What happens when you take a week off from writing your site? When you pick it back up do you remember where you left off and what you were going to do next? If the answer is no then you may not have your site documented well enough.

You should always start out with a sketch of what you want your site to look like. This can be as complex as a picture done in Photoshop or it can be as simple as a piece of paper and crayons. For those of you writing a site to post pictures of the grandkids for their grandparents, the crayons may be easier to find. With a sketch you will always have a picture to look back on to remind you what your goal is.

Then the next three steps:
1. comment
2. comment
3. comment

A comment in HTML is simple. You start with:

&lt!–

then you put the information you want to remember and then end with

–>

Your actual comment might look something like:
<!– my new picture goes here –>

That way, when you need to take a week off for whatever reason, you remember what you were doing and can jump right back into creating your home on the Web.

Angie

In I.E. you will notice that sometimes it acts funny.

For instance if you use this code:

<div style="border-top: solid think black; border-bottom: solid thin black>
<img src="mypic.jpg">
</div>

in Firefox or almost any other browser you will notice that you get two very nice borders that go across the top and the bottom of the image.

However, if you look at the same code in I.E. you get extra whitespace at the bottom of the picture before the border!

This is a rather annoying problem because it will make cohesive layouts not look right. There used to be a documented bug in I.E. that somewhat related to this and you had to utilize a precise DOCTYPE to get it to go away.

That, however, is not the cause of what is happening now. In order to make the extra whitespace disappear in I.E. you must write the code like this:

<div style="border-top: solid think black; border-bottom: solid thin black>
<img src="mypic.jpg"></div>

Notice how the closing div tag is right next to the image tag. I have never seen this extra white space written up as a bug in I.E. but I would call it such. My understanding of the standards is that white space within the HTML text is to be mostly ignored with the exception of the actual space character. Otherwise a new line would not need a <br> at the end, a simple newline within the HTML would do it.

I say bug, they say interpretation differences. Either way, the above code gets rid of the annoying extra line.

Angie