Working with a web professional is a tricky proposition. If you’re not skilled in HTML and web site management, you’re probably going to use the services of a web designer or webmaster at some point.

There are two main challenges involved in using a web professional.

1. Who controls your web site
2. The fact that most designers don’t like maintaining a site

First of all, control of your web site really comes down to one issue: who has the username and password for the web server. If you signed on with a web professional who uses a server that can host more than one domain, then they’re going to be unwilling to give you access because more than just your web site is at risk. Control of that username and password, though, is crucial to your ability to access and update the site. If you are about to sign on with a web professional, then you need to insist on a web server that you can access. It needs to be YOUR name on the administrative account, your credit card for billing, and the emails need to come to you first.

Secondly, most web professionals who construct web sites like doing it because they like the design and creativity. I certainly did when I was working on sites for other people. Maintaining a site after that is not as interesting; a tweak here, a page there — it’s routine by comparison. Most web professionals also have more than just you for a client. You’ve got to get into their rotating schedule if you want to make updates.

For entrepreneurs and small business owners, the best scenario is one where you have a web professional who creates the site for you (if you’re not skilled or don’t have time) and you maintain it after that. If you have the time and the desire to maintain your own site, you’re going to save yourself thousands of dollars because you’re not spending $75 to $125 an hour for your web professional to handle the small changes.

Webinar Date: March 26, 2008

In today’s webinar, we covered Cascading Style Sheets and how they replace hand-editing of text on a web site. We discussed the use of simple formatting tags like bold, italic, and underline. We also look at the now little-used FONT tag and talked about the problems associated with using it because of poor implementations in the browser.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) give us the opportunity to group text characteristics together into a single text file that we can link to on every page. We can specify that all paragraph tags use Verdana as the font, 12 pixels as the size, and blue as the color. Instead of applying those characteristics to every paragraph by hand, we specify it once inside the CSS file and all the pages respond accordingly.

The beauty of using CSS in our web pages is that if we decide to change the paragraph font color from blue to black, we can make that change in one file, and all the web pages update automatically.

CSS is also used for positioning text on web pages, but that’s an advanced activity that the average user usually leaves to their web designer. CSS can also be used to make pages more accessible to those of limited vision or dexterity.

Downloadable example files for this webinar can be found at http://www.pcpowertips.com/webinar/20080319/index.html.

Webinar Date: March 19, 2008