Tips & Tricks

Where to start

sitemap_websiteCreate a Sitemap
So where do you start when your Smartbox is setup? We advise you to grab a paper and pen and make a list of the pages you would like your website to contain. You can take a look on the internet to see how other similliar website to yours have on their site. Then start thinking about how to split the pages into sections.

Your Smartbox is structured into sections that contain a subnavigation where the pages can be choosen. There are different ways you can organize your content but when you visit a lot of sites you'll see that there are common patters in how the websites are structured. Then write down in keywords and small sentences the contence of the pages. If you have taken your time and have the complete overview you'r halfway there.

Now you can start building the sections and pages and filling them with content.


Search Engines


searchengine_curacaoGoogle, Yahoo, MSN and many more

When you have your website ready you would want people to visit your website. In this page we will explain how to promote your website. Site promotion is really not that difficult. It just takes a little bit of effort, a little bit of thought, and a fair amount of patience. The first thing you do is submit your website to as many search engines like google, yahoo, startpagina or ilse as you can .. for free. Google adwords is also a effective way to increase the number of visitors to your site.

It is crucial to understand that site promotion is a long-term, low-intensity effort. It can take weeks or months to get into the search engines, and years to develop a site that gets top rankings. So don't rush yourself, you don't have to do all of this overnight. Take your time, slow down, read the articles, think about how they apply to your website, and then proceed. The internet is full of usefull resources that can help you attract more visitors. Just start by searching in google with keywords like "tutorial, tips, marketing, website, promotion, submit, submission or ranking". Don't use more than 3 words at once. In these articles you'll find much more keywords you can use.

Don't start off by paying to have your link, site information or banner displayed on websites. Also be carefull to trust web marketeers with promoting your site. And if you do keep track of the increase of visitors by analysis your site statistics (in your cPanel). Another way to increase your popularity with search engines is by exchanging links with other websites, called reciprocal links. For this end we can install a link page on your website (comes standard with your Smartbox package).

Here's a list:
Google.com (direct link to submit here)
Bing.com (direct link to submit here)
Yahoo.com (direct link to submit here)
Yandex.com (direct link to submit here)

Tip:
Be sure that you have entered the correct title, description and keywords for your website (See "Settings"). The keywords you use are of great influence on how search engines rank your website. It is also important to use your keywords in the texts in your pages, especially your homepage.


Placing images

Take pictures yourself or search for them on the internet

The extensions for pictures you can upload with your Smartbox account are .jpg, .png and .gif. Be sure to convert your image files to one of these standards before you upload.

The internet is full of websites that offer pictures for your website. From some websites, you can download them for free or buy them for a few dollars. If you however have a good eye for photography we would advise you to take pictures for your website yourself. This makes your site much more personal. You can also ask a friend who has photography as a hobby to help you.

Make sure that when you load up the pictures they are resized so they can ea-sally be transported to your database in Smartbox. Our program does re-size the pictures when they are uploaded to the right dimensions but the program and server can't handle sizes above 3 mb well. Modern (8 megabit) cameras take pictures above 2500 x 1700 pixels at 72 dpi. Your website uses pictures about 1000 x 800 pixels in dimension. So all dimensions above 1000 x 800 pixels are relatively big and take more time to upload and resize. If you are handy with editing software you can best upload the pictures with your own compression (jpeg) setting with dimensions 1000 x 800 pixels (72 dpi). If you no nothing about digital picture files and sizes .. just upload the image. We install a plugin that automatically lowers the resolution of your images to the right size.

If you don't have software that can resize your images google "Resize image software free" or visit this website.

Embedding a Youtube Video

How to embed a YouTube video into your website?

If you want a video that is on YouTube to show on a page you must first have to visit the YouTube website and search for the video you want on your page. You can upload your own video to Youtube anytime. When you have found the video you want to show on a page of your website click the "Share" button below the video. You then copy the entire code (string) from the field that's labeled onder "Embed".

Then paste that code anywhere on your page (via text-editor). You can now adjust the dimensions of the video by changing the width and height values in the code you've just embedded.

TIP: If you want your video to be aligned in the center of your page, place the embed code between <div align="center"> and </div> tags.
If you want to know more about uploading your videos to YouTube, watch this video! On YouTube, you can find a lot more handy tutorials about how best to upload your videos. www.youtube.com

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