iWeb to WordPress version 1.2 has been released. This small update fixes an issue with post dates and comment dates not being imported correctly.
This update is free for all registered users.
iWeb to WordPress will import your entire iWeb blog posts and comments to a WordPress site. Since Apple is discontinuing MobileMe, blog comments will no longer work with iWeb based sites. Switching to WordPress will provide a much more powerful, and easy to use, blogging system for your website.
iWeb to WordPress is currently being offered for free with a one year or more subscription for our web hosting services. We support both iWeb and WordPress sites, which can be used together with our web hosting. We also offer one-click installation of WordPress for easy set up.
We are happy to announce that MailShoot 2.3 is now available.
You can now send e-mails to parts of your mailing list using MailShoot, our newsletter and email list manager.
Let’s say you only want to send a newsletter to users on your list who are interested in ‘widgets’. You can set a filter to only send e-mails to users who match certain criteria of your choosing. The video below will demonstrate what segmenting is, and how to do it with MailShoot.
You can create an unlimited number of filters for each contact list. MailShoot also lets you verify who will receive your email before sending.
Video Transcript:
Using the filters feature in MailShoot is a great way to segment users on your mailing list. For example, let’s say I want to send a newsletter to my users who are interested in Fairway woods and not users who are interested in anything else. Here is my list for Jeremy’s Golf Shop. This list has 7 e-mail subscribers, all interested in different products. Using the filters feature in MailShoot, I will be able to send an e-mail only to these people, as the e-mail is going to talk about fairway woods.
On the Send Mail tab, I am going to select Filters & Limits. Next to where it says No Filter Selected, I am going to click on New to create a new filter.
The first thing I will do is name my filter so that I can refer back to it later. I will then filter out the e-mails so that I can send an e-mail only to users interested in fairway woods. I do this by selecting Products from the first drop down menu, and typing in Fairway Woods in the text field.
When I press the OK button, I will be taken back to the Send Mail tab, and I will see that 3 of 7 contacts match this filter. That is, 3 of the 7 users on my list are interested in Fairway Woods. I can now press the Preview and Send Mail button and send out my newsletter to these individuals.
Since MobileMe is being discontinued, and the fate of iWeb is still up in the air, iWeb users have begun looking for alternatives for building their websites. There is no reason to panic, as long as you have iWeb on your Mac, you will still be able to edit your website.
iWeb users who publish their site to MobileMe may need to start looking for an alternative iWeb hosting company. As well, users who use iWeb’s blogging feature with comments enabled, might be out of luck with MobileMe’s departure.
Enter RAGE Software. We have developed a new tool, which we call “iWeb To WordPress”. With this new tool, you will be able to easily convert your iWeb blog posts, along with comments, to a WordPress blog. This means you will be able to continue blogging (more conveniently for that matter) and not have to worry about losing your comments.
To visualize how this tool works, and the simple steps involved, watch the video tutorial below.
We also offer iWeb and WordPress web hosting. Nobody supports iWeb like we do. We can get you all set up in just minutes for one low price and we have many free video tutorials to help you make the switch.
Video Transcript:
With Apple’s recent announcement of the discontinuation of MobileMe, iWeb users who rely on publishing their website to MobileMe with blog comments enabled will no longer be able to have those comments using iWeb’s blogging feature.
To combat this issue, we are introducing a new tool that will allow you to transfer your iWeb blog posts along with your users’ comments to WordPress. This means that you will be able to continue using iWeb as you normally do, and you will still be able to have your users make comments on your blog.
The first thing we have to do is export our website by publishing to a local folder in iWeb. Make sure your MobileMe URL has been entered in the URL field here. To make things easy, I am publishing the folder to my desktop. You can do the same if you’d like.
Now that the folder has been published, I am going to drag and drop it onto the iWeb To WordPress tool. When the Ready For Export message appears, click on the Export button and save the blog-feed. I am also going to save this to my desktop.
The next part of the tutorial is importing this file to WordPress. This part of the tutorial assumes you already have WordPress installed. Of course this might not be true for some of you watching this video for the first time. If that is the case, there is an instructional video showing you how to setup a WordPress blog on your RAGE Web Hosting account. That tutorial can be found at ragesw.com/webhosting.php . If you do not have a RAGE Web Hosting account, and want to get one, you can register for one at that same address.
So let’s import our blog and comments. In your WordPress Dashboard, click on Tools and then Import, followed by WordPress. If this Install Importer popup appears, click on Install Now. Then click on Activate Plugin & Run Importer. Then press the Choose File button, and locate your blog feed. Then press the Upload File and Import button. You might notice that it says Failed to import author. Don’t worry about that, this is normal. Press the Submit button, and you’re all set. You can now view your blog posts by visiting your website.
One last tip I want to give you, is to make sure you link to your blog on your website. A simple text link will allow your users to easily find your blog and continue reading. Linking back from your blog to your website is also a great idea.
The meta description tag is a place where you can give a quick description of what is on your webpage. This isn’t a place to just pack in some keywords, but it is a great spot for you to write one or two sentences that really describe your page. It can also be thought of as a way of selling users on coming to your site. The reason for this is that sometimes, your description will show up in search engine results, right below the title tag here. So as you can see, this little blurb here reads “At Lefties Only, left handed golf clubs are our speciality.” If I were to click to go to this site, and then view the source code, we can see that that blurb actually came straight from the meta description. This isn’t always the case, but you have seen first hand how important it is to have a great description.
Again, it’s very easy to include your meta description in Sandvox. The box right below where we typed in our title tag is where we will type in our Meta description. You’ll want to try and limit the description to about 150 characters.
Google has gone on record to state that the accuracy of your meta description will not affect your rankings. The main purpose of the meta description is to try and improve click-through rates. Google also highly recommends that you avoid using identical, or very similar descriptions on every page of your site.
The title tag is one of the most important SEO elements, and it’s been that way for a while. The title tag consists of the keywords and phrases found at the top of your web browser when you are visiting a site. In search engine results, the title tag shows up as the clickable link to take you to that webpage. This means that you’ll want to try and include phrases that are catchy so that you inspire clicks.
Conveniently for Sandvox users, editing title tags is extremely easy to do. To edit a title tag, highlight the page that you want to edit, and bring your mouse over to the text box that says Window Title at the bottom of the application. Here is where you will type in your Title Tag.
When typing in your title tag, I want you to keep a few things in mind. First, make sure that the title tag relates to the content on the page. You should also be including some of the phrases you had written down when you did your keyword research. Lastly, include your most important words and phrases at the beginning of your title. This is because search engines such as Google, begin cutting off the title tag in search results at around 70 characters. You’ll notice as you type in your title tag in Sandvox, there is a number in the top right corner that tells you how many characters you are at. After 65 characters, the number will turn red, which will indicate to you that your title tag is getting too long. Ideally, you should create a unique title for every page on your website.
What’s really great about Sandvox, is that if you were to leave the title tag box blank, an auto-generated title tag will be created using a combination of your page name, and your site name.
We are extremely happy to announce the release of iWeb SEO Tool 2.0. iWeb SEO Tool is our popular SEO tool that allows iWeb users to easily add SEO elements to their websites such as title tags, alternative text, header tags and more.
After many of you sent in some of your suggestions, we have decided to release this version with a very popular request. Users can now easily add a favicon to their websites with a simple click of a button.
To learn how to add your favicon using iWeb SEO Tool 2.0 (and what a favicon is for that matter) you can view this video tutorial.
We recently ran a contest with users on our mailing list (don’t forget to sign up if you haven’t already – don’t miss the next one). We asked our customers to tell us about their experience using our software, tutorials, and hosting. We were overwhelmed with the responses, and were so happy to hear of all the great things people had to say about us.
It is very satisfying for us to hear about how successful so many of your websites are after having used our software. It makes us excited to improve our software and tutorials as we have continued to do so over the years. Since 1999, we have been providing entrepreneurs and business owners alike with quality software and educational tutorials. After all the thanks we have received from you, our customers, it is now time for us to say thank you to you.
Congratulations to our contest winners:
…I am happy (beyond happy really) with the results the site has achieved in such a short amount of time…
Michelle, California
…WebDesign really helps me keep my Websites By Cook business humming…
…So without a moment’s thought I purchased and downloaded the Sitemap Automator. Once again, incredibly streamlined and user-friendly, just like Webcrusher…
Our winners receive a copy of our latest SEO software, SEIntelligence. SEIntelligence is a great SEO tool to compare your competitors websites and see what they are all doing correctly, and how you can optimize your site to begin competing with them.
In HTML, header tags are used by webmasters to display the headings on their pages. There are six types of header tags that can be used. What Sandvox users to need to know regarding header tags, is that there are 2 headers placed on each page. The first header is an h1, and is generally used for the title of the website. This header tag will remain constant from page to page on your website.
Another header tag, which is an h2 tag, is used as the title of the page and is located where the main part of the page begins. This is a great place for you to include a keyphrase that really illustrates what this particular page is about.
So for example, instead of having a header that reads something generic such as News, or Site Updates, take advantage of the header and give it a good keyword rich descriptive name. If this particular page is about Left Handed Golf Clubs, that is a phrase that might make a good header.
On a side note, an H3 tag is used when you are indexing content, so for example, the page title of a blog post, or photo page will show up with an H3 tag, so be sure to make keyword rich titles for those items.
In our social networking world, having a Facebook page for your business can be extremely important. In this video, we’re going to show you how you can add a Facebook ‘like’ button to your site in iWeb.
To add a Facebook Like, button to your iWeb website, first go to the Facebook Developers Like Button page. You can pause the video here and type in this URL, or you can do a search for the phrase Facebook Like Button and click on the result for the Facebook Developers Like Button page.
In the Step 1 – Get Like Button Code form, first enter the URL for your Facebook page. If you are unsure of what this URL is, you can visit your Facebook page, and copy and paste the URL into this field.
If you would like to include this Send button, you can leave this box checked, otherwise, you can remove it.
For Layout Style, go through each option and choose the one that you like best.
You can leave the width at 450, or you can change it if you’d like.
You can also choose to show the faces of people who have liked your page. That option looks like this on a webpage.
And lastly, you can pick your font and colour scheme that you would like to use.
When you are done, press the Get Code button, and highlight the code that pops up in the window.
Now let’s open up iWeb, and drag an HTML snippet onto our page. Paste the code that we just copied into this HTML Snippet. You should be able to see your Facebook Like or Recommend button, and you can resize it and move it to a location on your site that fits best.
And that is how you add a Facebook Like button to an iWeb website. Be sure to check out our other helpful iWeb tips and tricks videos which are located in the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial or our iWeb SEO blog
Alternative image text, also known as alt tags or alt text, is an HTML attribute that is used to describe images. This attribute exists because an image may not always load in a browser, so in its place, the alt text will appear, letting the user know what should have shown up.
This attribute also gives us a good way of describing pictures to search engines, so that they can properly place them in image searches. In Sandvox, any image you place will automatically be given alternative text identical to the image file name. This is a great feature because it can save you a lot of time if you publish a lot of pictures and don’t feel like giving them all alt tags.
If you do, however, wish to make your alt text differ from the file name, click on the image and then press the Inspector button. Then press the Media tab which is the last tab all the way on the right. Here you can see the name of the image, which is something we spoke about in the Image Names video, and you can also see the field that says Alternate Text. Here is where you will type in your few words that describe the photo. You don’t need to worry about separating your words with dashes for this feature.
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