Portali - Websites enabling your Customers, Suppliers and Employees

In this article we will take a look at how you can create an effective robots.txt file for your site, why you need one and at some tools that can help with the job.

What on Earth is a robots.txt File?

A robots.txt is a file placed on your server to tell the various search engine spiders not to crawl or index certain sections or pages of your site. You can use it to prevent indexing totally, prevent certain areas of your site from being indexes or to issue individual indexing instructions to specific search engines.

The file itself is a simple text file, which can be created in Notepad. It need to be saved to the root directory of your site, that is the directory where your home page or index page is.

13 Ways To Destroy Your Website

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With all the talk of how to make a great website and ways to keep visitors, it is important to also understand the other side of designing an Internet business.

Every day, thousands of websites are finding unique ways to turn away visitors and potential customers. Although many webmasters know about the obvious "turn-offs", there are many little details that "tick-off" visitors and make them leave.

In fact, I have found that there are 13 "small" items that can make or break a website. To avoid having your visitors "click-away" from your site make sure that you include the following things:

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If you haven't heard of CSS, it's short for Cascading Style Sheets. I'm not going to go through what it is. There are many free articles and resources about CSS out there in the wild wild web.

Instead, I'm going to share with you why I decided to switch to a CSS based design.

Five Common Web Design Mistakes

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Mistake #1

Web page size. If your website takes longer than 10-15 seconds to load you should consider optimizing it for the web. This is one of the biggest mistakes a web designer can make. You may have cable and love to fill your website with graphics, but if your visitors don't have cable or a fast connection at all your chances of getting them to wait that 10 to 15 seconds for your page to load is very slim

Wording Up Your Website

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Are you losing business because of your website? More and more customers are logging on to the Web to decide where to spend their money because it is quick and convenient, and they can jump from site to site instead of walking from store to store.

Web savvy customers don't need to be patient, studies have shown that you need to engage a potential customer very quickly by giving them easy, fast access to the information they need. Otherwise they will simply move on to the next site.

Appealing design and speedy functionality are important but they don't ensure that your site is well structured (intuitive) or well written (clear).

Your "About Me" Page

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Most of the major auction sites such as eBay, Yahoo!, etc. have an "About Me" or similar page that can be created to tell the viewer who the seller is. This is possibly the only thing more important than having your own website when you are selling through auctions online. This page can make or break some sales and will promote return customers as well.
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