Your Home page is the most important page of your Web site, and not just because it’s by far the most visited. It’s where first impressions are formed (the oft-quoted “where am I and what can I do here?“). It must highlight your business goals, address customer needs, be interesting, have SEO content, and change regularly — all while seeming clean and simple. Hah — good luck with that.

Home pages take different forms, depending on the business and its needs. Recently, I needed to send some thoughts to a client about their Home page. I’ve generalized them here. It’s not complete, but it might get you thinking…

KEEP YOUR MAIN FOCUS: The old days of placing the boring-and-sterile Mission Statement on the Home page are (thankfully) gone. But site visitors still need to know where am I and what can I do here? It’s the absolute most important thing for your Home Page, and I can’t stress that importance enough. It’s easy to get too close to your own trees and forget that for many of your visitors, the Web site will be the first impression of your business. Clutter it up and watch them flee.

NEWS: One strategy for the Home Page is to use it for all news & promos — sort of like a news magazine. Whatever’s coming up that’s worth highlighting gets brought up front and center, with other news items (text and/or photos) placed below. So instead of on block of text, it’s a constantly-changing array of snippets… member news, promotions, events, etc. CMS products such as WordPress and Joomla make it much easier to keep the ever-changing information up to date, so a Home Page like this is no longer such a full-time job. It will require an editor’s touch, though.

If your Home page becomes like a newsletter, then you might need to rethink the newsletter a little. On the other hand, some people need their news pushed to them, which a newsletter is better at doing. Make these tools complementary, not duplicates.

PROMOS: Some sites install a promo “slider” – which animates through several promos in one space. There are several scripts out there, and they’re pretty easy to set up… but they need to be kept current with new items. I usually recommend pre-creating several general items to haul out whenever there aren’t time-sensitive items to promote. I also recommend setting a schedule in advance to be sure your promotions are posted in advance of the events.

COMMUNITY: More and more sites are integrating their various social media activities, such as using feeds to bring in their Tweets, Facebook posts, etc, or incorporating public comments and discussions.

The grand idea is to convert the site from a one-way information provider to a two-way communication platform, where all (members or visitors) have a voice. In this case, the official organization news lives alongside submitted content, and many people can be creators of the content on the site. In practice, of course, a few people will be very active, while others will not participate at all. Some care must be taken to be sure the quality of the communication is preserved in cases like this.

A big change in all this is a move from static to active. Instead of this is how our site looks, it’s this is how our site looks… right now. In a few minutes or days or a week, it’ll be different. To really make that transformation work, you have to start thinking of your site as a fluid thing.

Last night after hours I get a message from a client: “Hey, my domain name is expiring tomorrow. Can you take care of that for me? Thanks.”

Umm, thanks indeed. Thanks for missing the half-dozen or so messages that you’ve already received in the past month telling you that your domain is expiring soon. Thanks for waiting until the last minute, on a Friday, before getting off your duff on this issue. Thanks for assuming that I’d be happy to spend part of my Saturday saving your domain from oblivion. Thanks for all that.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve ranted about domain names. See http://www.brianwold.com/free/2008/01/16/dont-let-your-domain-name-expire/ and http://www.brianwold.com/free/2006/01/20/domain-ownership-woes-or-what-do-you-mean-i-dont-own-myself/. So I shouldn’t be surprised about things like this. And, of course, we got the problem solved. Perhaps that makes me an enabler.

So, rant over… now to the useful information: many domain registrars lock your domain in the weeks before it is due (for your protection, so they say…). If you want to switch your domain from one registrar to a different one, for example to consolidate several domains in one place, you can’t wait until the last minute.

Creating your first Web site is easy — get the hosting, create the site, test it… and when you’re ready, start promoting the site. (Hah! Easy…)

But once you have a Web site, how do you create a new one? People are (hopefully) visiting your current site — browsing pages, clicking on services, sending emails. You need the current site to be fully functional for regular visitors while you are working on the new one.

Problem is, since your home page is defined by the Web server as a particular file name (usually index.html or default.htm), you can’t just replace it, or your whole site will break. What to do? There are several common ways to solve this, but one way is better than the others.

Bad Option 1: Intermingling
I’ve seen developers create the new site in the midst of the old one, using different file names to keep things unique. The new Home Page becomes index-new.html and the new subpages are given unique names. New images and scripts are jumbled in with old ones. Once the new pages are tested, the old Home Page file is renamed to index-old.html (or just deleted) and the new Home Page file is renamed index.html. Since the new site doesn’t link to any of the old site pages, they are orphaned and can be deleted, or converted to redirects to the new pages, or (sadly, most often) just left there.

For very small sites, this can work, but it’s messy and can be disastrous.

• During and after development of the new site, it is not immediately clear which pages are associated with which site.
• Since at least one of the filenames must change (the Home Page), that means that all links to that page must also change… right at the moment of launching the site. Most HTML tools help manage the change (for example, Dreamweaver fixes the links automatically), but it’s still an extra task.
• If the old site pages are deleted from the server after launch, there’s a risk of accidentally deleting the wrong ones, thus breaking links. If these files are left, any bookmarks to the old site will still work… to the old site. (I’ve seen this!)

Bad Option 2: Subfoldering
To avoid some of the problems above, people sometimes create a new subfolder inside the current site (e.g. /newsite/) and put all the new site files there. Then, when it’s time to launch, they collect all the old site files into an archive folder (/oldsite/ — or just delete them), then move all the new site files out of the subfolder into the site root. Voila, c’est vrais?

Non. It’s better, but now all the files have to move. All your links might have to change, or links on certain scripted pages might have to change. Even with a program like Dreamweaver helping, I’ve launched sites like this and then spent the next few days (weeks!) finding old links that still include the /newsite/ folder.

The Better Way: Subdomains
Many Web hosts allow you to set up a “subdomain,” which uses your base domain name and adds a prefix instead of the www. It acts like a separate domain name, but you don’t have to register another name. You just need the Web server configured correctly, and most hosting control panels make it easy to do now.

So you set up a subdomain like test.yoursitename.com, then do all the development there. You can browse to it, test the links, run scripts, access databases, and so on. Once you’re happy, you still have to move all the files, but all relative links should not require any changes.

That’s the way I do it.

Today’s my birthday. Yippee!

Here’s the reason for the disclosure: in an increasingly social online world, business can no longer afford to be faceless. Facebook and Twitter facilitate connections between people that are often unexpectedly personal and intimate. For example, I’ve learned from Facebook of the death of an acquaintance’s mother; of the birth of a son to one of my closest friends (I knew the birth was imminent, but the actual news broke to me via Facebook); and I’ve reconnected with old acquaintances such as my high school choir teacher.

But I also represent a business (two of them, actually). And one of the things that I hear a lot is that people hire me for Web site consulting because they feel they know me. Sure they can look at my online portfolio, read my resume, browse the Web site and read about the services I offer… but mostly, when they talk to me, I end up hired. Social media allows that same kind of casual, person-to-person networking, but on a potentially global scale.

So for businesses getting into social media, here’s today’s tip (before I go stuff my face with chocolate cake): Be a real person. In social media, people follow you, not your business. They want to know about you — what you’re reading or watching on TV, what’s important in your life. Share real details about yourself, not just sales pitches.

On the other hand, maybe you should keep your cross-dressing fetish to yourself.

You’ve paid big bucks for your site — original artwork, professional photos, carefully written content. How do you keep someone else from stealing it?

You don’t. If someone wants to grab your Web site content, images or HTML, they can find a way. Best you can hope for is to let them know that they’re stealing, make it a little harder, and (if needed) prosecute.

Here’s the problem: In order for your Web page to display on someone’s computer, the HTML and all images must download to that computer. So it’s all in a temp directory somewhere, and the browsers even make it easy to right-click on an image or text and copy or save it.

Here’s the other problem: Most people look the other way when copyright is concerned. (“Everything’s free on the Internet, right?” or “I downloaded it from Google, so it’s okay, right?” or “They’ll never know.” I’ve heard all these, the last one more than once….)

I always recommend placing a copyright statement in the footer. (Not that it does much good, but at least they were warned.) You can try to protect your images by including JavaScript code that disables the right-click function, or overlaying a transparent DIV, but that won’t stop people for very long. You can use visible watermarks, but that ruins all your nice images. You can embed near-invisible security codes like Digimarc’s (included in Photoshop) into your JPGs, but that only helps if you’re going to go searching for violators… and then… prosecute? You can use Flash or PDF security to protect text or other site content, but these techniques are pretty limited and they can really reduce the usability of your site. There are other advanced protection techniques, but they are expensive and can also be cumbersome.

If you’re selling creative work, you probably need to concern yourself with these issues and take some or all of the above precautions. For the rest of us, it’s a lot of effort for little payoff. We hope people will ask for permission and give us credit… but we may never know.

Recently, I had success looking up an image using TinEye, a reverse image search engine. A client sent me an image asking about using it on their Web site. This is always a concern for me, since most better photos and images are under copyright, and I try to be careful.

But with a reverse search engine, you upload a photo, and the engine tries to identify it for you. In this case, we were able to determine where the image came from and how to get the needed copyright clearance. Not bad for a few minutes’ work.

One thing I always advise my clients is: if you’re going to put anything on a Web site, keep it up to date. Solid advice, and often overlooked.

A few years ago, I was doing background research for a client that had me reviewing Voss Water’s Web site. At the time, their News section was more than a six months out of date, and they had an Events category that was more than a year out of date. In my report to my client, I wondered if they had gone out of business. They haven’t. Don’t know what happened that caused their site to get completely out of date, but I’ve been using their story as an example ever since.

Then there’s this blog — my collection of free Web site advice items, which I’ve been posting to periodically since 2004. And it pains me to admit that the most recent post before this one is July 10, 2009 — more than five months ago! Ugh… I never intended to publish something every day, but a five month gap is ridiculous. Raises the same question as Voss Water: has Brian Wold Consulting gone out of business?

Nope. Thankfully, I’m still in business, and as it turns out the latter half of 2009 was filled with plenty of fodder for more posts to this free advice column — Web strategies implemented, CMS lessons learned, thoughts on the future of the Web, and more. But the gap still looks bad, and I feel compelled to explain. (I was busy!)

Bottom line is, if you’re going to have a News page, you had better keep the news coming. Your Calendar page shouldn’t say “no events” for months at a time. And — gulp — your blog of free Web site advice needs to be updated.

Resolution #1 for 2010…

You have to have been living under a rock to not realize that more and more of our life and work is happening online – online bill paying and banking, online socializing and networking, online radio and TV, online applications like Google docs. All within a Web browser, I can edit videos — my own or someone else’s, create and manage a database, find my buddies using GPS, store and share files, collaborate with a project team, manage my calendar, create fine art, do complex math functions, and make new friends or reconnect with old ones. (In fact, many of those items I can do with an iPhone or Android phone.) There’s even a new shopping site that’ll remind me when it’s time to reorder toity paper.

Earlier this week, Google announced a new operating system, Chrome OS, which will be available next year for netbooks and other smaller devices. I’m oversimplifying, but here’s the essence: since you use the browser for everything anyway, why not architect the browser as the central component of the OS and push other lesser-used things to the side?

I’m sure the news of Google’s OS foray is a blow to the good folks at gOS, whose Cloud browser for netbooks was announced last December. If you missed that announcement, so did I.

Of course, Microsoft tried this years ago, and they woulda got away with it too — if it weren’t for those meddling kids at the DOJ and the EU.

And let’s go back even further. In the mid-90s and early 2000s, I recall a bunch of discussions of how the Internet was going to kill the desktop. In early discussions, people applied terms they knew: it was first called terminal computing until people remembered the leftover stigma that term carried with it from the 80s; then later called cloud computing or software as a service (SAAS) or Application Service Providers (ASPs), and now commonly called Web apps.

Obviously, it’s a slow change process — dependent on Web browser technology, network speed, and the pace of human behavioral change. I think we’re (slowly) turning a corner here, and the things some of us have been discussing for a decade might be finally maturing.

Search is back in the news again. Long dominated by Google (and for now, still dominated by Google), some new tools are emerging. Microsoft is throwing a lot of ad dollars into Bing, which to me is Google with random header photos. Yawn. Meanwhile, Wolfram Alpha is fascinating, even to a mathematics noob like me.

Earlier today, with a few clicks, I learned that in 2008, one in every 414 babies was named Brian and that the name was most popular in the early 70s. (Thanks, Wolfie!)

It’s the next iteration of search — not just keywords, but keywords in context (or tasks combined with keywords to produce context). Instead of a search engine just returning someone else’s information, hopefully ranked in a way that puts the most useful stuff first, the new search guesses your intent and tries to provide what you need — answers, maps, formulas, analysis. The trick, of course, is that guessing my intent must be automated, and the programming for that is immense.

At the same time, I just started using a new (experimental) Firefox extension, Ubiquity. When invoked, it adds an overlay to Firefox that can be made to do tasks, like map an address, email a snippet of a page, check the weather, etc. You type a command or command shortcut and results appear as you type.

So, thanks to Ubiqiuty, I can say that the number of words in this post so far is: 239. And I could Twitter on it (if it weren’t so long). Or email it through a Gmail account. Or translate it to Russian.

There’s a lot of room for improvement in these tools, but I’m very interested in the direction all this is going.

A few weeks ago, a client Web site disappeared. It happens: in the past, other clients have occasionally lost their sites, for reasons ranging from hosting hard disk failures to various human errors. (In this client’s case, they hadn’t renewed the domain name, so the site was still there, but the URL pointing to it had disappeared.)

The problem is, you’re usually the last to know that your site is down. Maybe a client calls and asks if you’re still in business, or your accountant wonders why there were no sales last week.

An easy solution is to use an outside monitoring service. It’ll ping your site periodically, and if it gets no response, you’ll get an alert. I’ve started using mon.itor.us for a few Web sites. It has a lot of features, including a pay service for more advanced monitoring, but the basics are pretty easy and free.