Mr Site community

You might like to hear from other Mr Site users that have become branding experts, so here's some more handy tips from Robin Riddell www.robinriddell.com.

"Branding a business successfully is very important in order to capture your target market. A good brand needs to be complementary and clearly identify to your potential customers what your core service or product area actually is – for example it would be no good using Caterpillar-style branding to sell women's cosmetics!

"A brand is not just about visual identity; it's also about your verbal identity, the people involved, perception, reputation and more...however it helps to start with a good look. It is essential to develop an identity that is honest and true to your business, but that also intrigues and attracts your viewer. This might include creating a strap-line that becomes synonymous with your service or product."

"You may only have a few seconds to make an impression on a visitor when they first enter your site, so you need to make it count."

	Create a strong, simple and recognisable logo. Ensure it is used at a reasonable size, in a well placed position on the page.
	Decide on a simple colour palette and stick to it.
	Choose your font families wisely and sparingly (using only two or possibly three) and use them to differentiate your titles from your main body of text etc. Try utilising different weights or italics within the same families. A good font can make a design piece, but a bad font can ruin it – make sure they suit the tone.
	A good brand is consistent with the placement and scale of their logo and the colour they chose etc.

Remember: keep it simple, keep it attractive & make it bold & you should have a good visual start to a brand that people will remember.

Flash animation, video and images cannot be read or indexed by search engines as there is no text for them to pick up. Code inside JavaScript is also harder to read. Pages containing only images are likely to get either a low or no listing at all. It’s best to avoid images on their own or otherwise balance them with a reasonable amount of text describing each image.

Create a sitemap which will encourage search engines to revisit more and give your site higher results page listing. If this sounds confusing remember that Takeaway Website Pro has an easy-to-use Sitemap tool. It analyses all the pages on your website and does all the complicated and confusing work for you by automatically creating your own Google-friendly Sitemap at the click of a button.

To find out more click here.

Try to build each page around one or two keywords or phrases. On the homepage, situate the most important content at the top of the page. Takeaway Website Pro’s SiteBoost tools have a fantastic built-in Keyword Boost kit which does an in-depth analysis of every page on your website for you, suggesting which keywords and phrases are most fitting for you and how best to use them. To find out more click here. Remember to include your keywords or phrases in the page titles, meta-tags, image ALT-tags and filenames. If this all sounds a bit too tricky, remember that Takeaway Website Pro provides you with the tools to do all the above quickly and easily with no technical knowledge required.

To find out more click here.

Don’t ever try to cheat search engines, e.g. white text on a white background or repeating the same words over and over again. Most search engines now have strict policies about this and you’ll find your site penalised and slipping down the results pages.

If you create a header, you can turn it into a H1 or H2 tag. H1 and H2 tags can help to optimise your website and boost your website's position on search engines like Google. H1 tags should be main headers (i.e. the page topic) and H2 tags should be sub headers. Many search engines will use the information from H1 and H2 tags, and give this information more weight over normal page text. Search Engines will allow terms found in these tags to boost your keyword relevance which in turn can boost your website's position on them.

To add H1 or H2 tags, click on "Change Content" in the Main Options menu, select 'Creative Mode' and go to the Paint Box (which represents the main section of your webpage). Highlight the text which you wish to be your H1 or H2 text and select your header size from the drop down list.

The system for creating and editing your online shop within Mr Site has now been streamlined, looks cleaner and is more easy to use than ever.

All shop items within the Mr Site system have now been minimised for ease of use. This way, you can quickly browse all of your items and choose which one to edit. Each minimised shop item displays a small image with the shop item title next to it. To edit or view a shop item, simply click on it.

To use this feature click on "Extras" in the Main Menu, then click on "Add Features" then "Add/ Edit a Shop".

You can insert a little Widget into your website that will show your latest posts on Twitter. You can select 1 – 10 posts. Make sure you sign up to Twitter first at www.twitter.com! To add this Widget to your website, go to "Extras" in the Main Options page, then click on "Add a Widget" and select "Twitter" from the drop down Widget lists.

Favicon' combines the words "favorites" and "icon." You can now create a Favicon for your website to give it that professional edge! A 'Favicon' is an icon (which could be, for example, your company logo) associated with a webpage or website that appears next to the http: address in the URL window of a browser. Your Favicon will also be displayed in the open tabs in tab-enabled browsers, and will also appear next to bookmarked links.

All you have to do to create a Favicon is go to the "Extras" section in the Main Options Menu, then click on "Personalise" and then on "Create a Favicon". Next, select an image from your computer and let Mr Site do the rest.

The system for creating and editing your Gallery within Mr Site has now been streamlined, looks cleaner and is now more easy to use than ever.

All images in your Gallery within the Mr Site system have now been minimised for ease of use. Simply click on the minimised image to reveal and edit it's settings.

The "Photo Gallery Settings" tab will show you your other Gallery settings, allowing you to choose a Slideshow option, a Flash Animated Slideshow or the Default Pop Up Gallery option. You can also resize your images to suit and add different borders with a preview option to show you exactly what your images will look like.

To use this system click on "Extras" in the Main Menu, then click on "Add Features", then "Add/ Edit a Gallery".

Following your feedback, we have introduced a 'Preview Website' feature so you can now view changes you make to your website before publishing them to the world wide web. You can see a preview of your website when you select your website design template and change your content in 'Creative Mode'.

This new improved tool will allow you to change and update your website's menu with a preview option to see what you are doing. There are so many options to play with, so have fun and enjoy! To do this click on "Extras" in the Main Menu, then click on "Personalise your site" and "Font Styles"

This new improved tool will allow you to change and update the style of the writing on your website (i.e. your fonts) with a preview option to see what you are doing. Again, there are so many options to choose from so you can get really creative! To do this click on "Extras" in the Main Menu, then click on "Personalise your site" and "Font Styles".

You can now insert a Widget into the side bars of your website that will display your latest Gallery images. When a visitor to your website clicks on an image in your Widget, a lightbox will pop up displaying the image.

Did you know that the most commonly asked support questions have video tutorials in Youtube? Check them out! Follow the links below:

Configuring Outlook Express
Using Webmail
Creating a New Mailbox
The New Mr Site Image Editor
Using FTP
Adding a Link to a Webpage
Creating an Image Gallery
Creating a Sub Menu
Adding an Online Shop
Inserting a Movie onto your Website

Mr Site recommends using Firefox as your browser on a PC or Mac. It can be downloaded for free from www.getfirefox.com. If you are using Internet Explorer, however, try to keep up to date with the latest IE releases. Internet Explorer 7 is the most current version and can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/ie

Every website looks a little bit different in each web browser. This is why, when a web designer finishes creating a site, they normally check to see how it looks in the most popular browsers: IE7, IE6, Firefox and Safari. As your site visitors can potentially come from anywhere in the world using any browser, Mr Site recommends you also do this. This is simply good web practice as you are effectively swapping places with your potential visitors/buyers and will be seeing your website as they will.

The browser on your computer doesn't always store the most up-to-date versions of your website. It can store (cache) previous versions, so sometimes any amendments that you make to your website will be live on the internet, but may not show immediately on your computer. If this happens, once you have published your site, there are two things you can do:

If you are not the copyright holder of an image, as a rule, you should not use that image unless you have the express permission of said holder. You should never, ever presume that just because an image is on the internet that it is yours for the taking, especially if this image belongs to Getty Images. If you do, a letter from their lawyers is bound to come your way.

Some Mr Siters have been billed thousands of pounds (GBP) for copyright infringement for doing this. To ensure this doesn't happen to you use one of the online royalty-free sites such as www.istockphoto.com or www.sxc.hu. You can get professional, high quality beautiful images to help make your website gorgeous for next-to-no money. That is surely preferable to being fined thousands!

If you want to make it easier for overseas visitors to find you, monitor your online marketing with Pro's Advanced Statistics. You can monitor success in just a few clicks so you can see which countries visitors come from, what key words they used to find your site, which search engines they used, whether they're Mac or PC Customers. Take Adrian Firth, www.adrianfirth.com -- Adrian is one of our artist customers. Adrian was recently featured in an online newsletter and as a result, attracted many new visitors to his website. When Adrian logged in to his Pro Stats (Option 5 'Extras', then click on Option 6 'Site Boost Tools', then click F for Pro Stats) he was surprised to learn these visitors came from as far away as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Japan and Canada!

There are many professional photographers using Mr Site for their websites. If that's you, stop reading now! For everyone else, if you aren't a photographer and happen to be selling via your shopping carts, there are some simple steps you can take in order to get the most from your images and shopping cart...

• Avoid clutter and fussy backgrounds. Your image should just be of the item you're selling, nothing else. The background should be a plain and solid colour (ideally white or perhaps light-coloured floorboards.) If you have a patterned background, you'll just be risking distracting your potential buyers;
  • If you're selling glass, a solid black background also works well.
• Lighting. A well-lit item will always photograph well;
  • Consider making your own lightbox before you start. This is like a mini-photographic studio you can create yourself. Click here for more info http://photodoto.com/create-your-own-light-box/
• Photograph up close and at an angle.
• If your item is very detailed, make sure you get all the detail in your image.
• If you're selling vintage or second-hand items, be honest about marks and photograph them. An unhappy customer will mean no repeat business and possible damage to your reputation.
• Don't use a flash if your item has glass or reflective surfaces.
• If you're photographing with a digital camera, remember to set the resolution to medium. For web viewing on sites such as Mr Site or Ebay, you really don't need to have high resolution images which are more suitable for printing.
• Don't forget about Mr Site's image editor! You can crop, chop, resize and adjust colour, brightness and contrast.