The following links are extremely valuable for all webmasters
Website skills are essential in today's Internet-dependent world. But many times you can find someone who specializes in this field to do the work for you.
If you are an artist or anyone presenting some tangible thing to the world, you need to develop your Photograpy and Photoshop skills - or have someone do it for you. Top quality images are critically important.
Note: this is a 2-5 year plan. You can't master all this material at once.
Adobe Dreamweaver - a great webmaster tool, generates perfect W3C compliant code, as well as slide shows, drop-down menus, etc. Many, many tutorials on-line to help you. Best when used with Fireworks or Photoshop. CS5 is about $200 for the upgrade. I love Dreamweaver, but the word is that it is fast becoming obsolete. Dreamweaver represents the static-website, Web 1.0 world.
Wordpress.org - this is the free program that is the basis of Web 2.0. Many people use WordPress for their blogs, but it is also good for all websites. Using PHP and My SQL databases, you create dynamic websites with lots of widgets. After you've rebuilt a 100-page Dreamweaver website a few times, you will love this approach.
Adobe Photoshop - if you are doing any image processing at all, you need this incredible tool. It's almost too vast. You could get a 4-year degree in Photoshop. But you don't have to learn everything, just a little bit at a time. And many tutorials are on-line and on You-Tube. CS5 is about $200 for the upgrade.
High Dynamic Range Photography - sometimes this is the only way to get the detail you want, in both highlights and shadows. Easy to use - I do this every time I have a tripod with me. Alternately, I do three bracketed photos, then stack them in layers in Photoshop, then adjust the opacity-transparency. Sometimes this is the only way to make metal art appear accurately.
Adobe Student Premium Edition - for less than $400, you can buy Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and many more! On the other hand, it will take you years to learn all these programs. Maybe you don't really need them all right now.
Wacom Tablet - some of the Photoshop techniques are very hard to do with a mouse - you just have to have a Wacom Intuos Tablet. If you can afford a Cintiq, then go for that.
Planet Ocean - all the basics of Search Engine Optimization. Why have a great-looking site that Google doesn't understand and can't index? I know a lot of you don't want to spend $10/month to learn something new. But SEO is worth thousands a month for you in potential sales.
Text-Browser - most people don't realize that Google and Yahoo can't see any of their beautiful images and design work. This is all they can see - your text, ALT tags and meta tags. So you really have to design two websites at once. One is for the humans, and the other is for the search engines. The art is to make them both effective simultaneously.
Google Keywords Picker - you really need to get a clear idea of what your best keywords are, and what the competition for them is.
Google Analytics - you have to know who is finding you and how. Must-have and also free. And you will find which keywords people are actually using to find you.
Google Webmaster Tools - you have to learn your way around this tool. Learn what Google wants, then give it to them. It's for your own benefit.
Google Site Tool - type in site:yoursite.com and find out if Google is indexing you at all. Are there pages that they are indexing that you wish they wouldn't? You can deal with that, once you have this information.
XML Site Generator tool - Google prefers your site map in an .XML format. This site generates it for you quickly and for free.
Yahoo links tool - type in links:yoursite.com. See what comes up. Then do link:yoursite.com. You get a different list. Play with the drop-down menus. Very valuable information. You need to have a lot of in-pointing links. You can find the Google links tool as part of their Webmaster Tool Kit.
Mike's Marketing Tools - want to see if you are ranking in the top 50 on any of the major search engines? This is the tool for you. Plus, it's free. Very valuable. If you aren't in the top 20, you have work to do.
.htaccess file - what the heck is that? It's an important file and this valuable site explains what to do with it.
robots.txt - what the ??? - Another important file and more free information.
Custom Error Pages - especially the 404-Not-Found page. Love Smashing Magazine. They have tons of valuable material to offer.
Page Rank - More Smashing Magazine. Is Page Rank important? Probably not. You can get ranked very high in Google and still have a low page rank. Disregard Smashing Magazine's downplaying of Title and Description meta tags. Those two are super-important.
Meta-Tags - YOU HAVE TO HAVE A KEYWORD RICH TITLE! And then the Description must be readable by humans, but also be keyword rich. And then the keywords have to be echoed in your text and the ALT and Title tags that go with each image.
W3C.org - HTML School, CSS School and much more. You have to learn this stuff eventually. Print out every page, then file it where you can find it.
101 Five-Minute Fixes to Improve Your Website - well, many of them will take a lot longer than that, but a very valuable list.
More SEO Tools - valuable extra credit series here. I'm working on this list a little bit at a time.
How to hide your email address from the spiders bots - and here's another approach.
Slideshows - this You Tube video shows you how to do one in Dreamweaver. People are lazy. A slideshow is a great way to show them your portfolio quickly without having them do a lot of clicking through your website.
Simpleviewer - free, and a great utility. Not quite a slideshow, but similar.
Image Coding - be sure and use the alt tag - this is now required. Also, if you use the title tag (title="title here") in your code, you can add some keywords to your page and get higher ranking in Google Images. With the title tag, words will appear when you float your mouse over the image.
Be sure to personalize your website. Show a photo of yourself on the first page. Talk about yourself. That will help people to feel like they know you and trust you.
This is a lot to learn. If you can afford to, you can pay someone else to do this for you. Look for a website designer that also understands the critical importance of SEO, or you may have to prompt/guide them in this area.
Did I mention how important keywords are? Use keywords to name the pages in your site. That's a great way to get some extra mileage out of them.
Use keywords to name your images, e.g. favorite-key-word.jpeg
Use your favorite three keywords to set up a sub-domain on your site.
If this information is useful to you, please add a link from your site to mine. Thanks!
