Site Design Tips

Designing a Website is an important aspect of any Internet venture and approaching it correctly can make all the difference in how visitors - and search engines - view your website.

As commercial news publishers, we'll share with you some of the same design tips we've used. A large part of that encompasses using some of the high-quality content made available here on News Sticky.

Below are links to some helpful resources and tools. If you know of any tools or resources you would like to see added to News Sticky, please tell us.

Eyetracking: Studies reveal that people look at webpages differently than a print page. Here is an interesting article by Laura Ruel and Nora Paul with the Online Journalism Review on an in-depth look into how people scan webpages by usability expert, Jakob Nielson, who conducts eyetracking research, titled "Eyetracking Points the way to effective news article design - March 13, 2007."

Construction Tools:

Tips for Writing for the Web - A great basic resource provided by University of Florida educator Mindy McAdams.

Template Monster. A variety of website templates available for sale. (We've used it ourselves. 5-Star Recommendation.)

Temple Tuning. Get help with templates you buy from Template Monster - this is a custom solution. (Recommended!)

OnlineSiteBuilder. This is from the folks at Site2You and it's an easy way to build a website online yourself. (Highly Recommended!)

Advanced Form Handler. All websites have forms today from Contact Us to signing up for services. This is a great tool for both beginner and experienced web developers. (We use this form handler ourselves. 5-Star Recommendation!)

Site Development Tools - meta, keywords, optimization, etc.

Free meta tag generator from promotionworld.com. (We're not familiar with this tool)

Keyword Discovery Tool from Trellian. Displays the number of searches across multiple search engines, not just one. (We highly recommend this tool)

Keyword Tool from Google Adwords. This page will show you two bar charts; search volume and advertiser competition. It will give you some idea on how to budget your text link advertising. But you might consider other options.

Keyword Selector Tool. This is from Overture, which is now owned by Yahoo!

WC3 Feed Validation Service. This tool is good for validating your RSS feed.

Alexa Traffic Details. Check your own site's rank here.

SEO Tools. Variety of SEO tools from the folks at seochat.com.

XHTML Character Reference. Like, what is the symbol for copyright.

RSS to Javascript Converter. Convert RSS feeds to Javascript to add to your website - but we caution you not to convert anyone's feed without their consent!

WhoIs. Look up detailed info on a domain from the folks at DomainTools. (We gave it 4-Stars, and use it as our primary whois source.)

Google Rankings. Check a web page's ranking on Google against other sites based on keyword comparisons. Interesting tool.

Link Popularity. Check your site's link popularity across multiple engines. We recommend this free tool offered by Marketleap.