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BOOMER eZINE
The Online Entrepreneur Magazine |
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Volume
1 Issue 25 For those who would like
to read this in HTML format, this issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer
eZine website at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I25_093006.htm
and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com. Please pass Boomer eZine on to a friend. They will thank you for it. Table of Contents for this issue..... 1.
Authors Comments 2.
Producing Videos 3.
Effective Navigation on Your
Website 4.
Using Bookmarks for Site
Navigation Author's Comments Linda
and I drove to Click
to see a picture of John and Justin at the party. http://www.boomer-ezine.com/images/Justin30_John.JPG Producing Videos In
many of our past articles on Boomer eZine, we have verbally described how to
accomplish a particular job on the Internet, but trying to draw a word picture
is challenging and I am certain that sometimes it is difficult for you to
understand, no matter how hard we try to make it plain and simple. We
have decided to learn how to create videos to show what is happening on the
screen as we explain it so we can use these to help online entrepreneurs learn
helpful information about the Net. If
you will remember back to the article in http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I22_090806.htm,
we discussed how to set up a customized Google search on your website.
We decided that this would be a good topic to use for our first video. When
we started creating this issue, John thought that he could finish the video by
the weekend, but according to Murphy’s law “everything takes longer than you
expect” so it is not ready to release yet.
In order to work on his day job and get some sleep, the video will be
finished next week. So
far, we are very impressed with what we have learned about making videos.
We think this has great potential for Boomer eZine. The
software that we are using is Camtasia Studio by TechSmith.
The website for it is http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp.
This is a very powerful piece of software for about $300.
The good news is that you can download it and use it free for 30 days.
There are no limitations on what you produce during the trial period.
The videos are fully functional and do not have any watermarks (small
transparent symbol or logo) on them to show that they were produced during the
trial. If
you want to experiment with Camtasia, I recommend that you download it and try
it. Videos are becoming very popular
on the Internet, and “how to” videos are selling well on eBay. Camtasia
is a fairly complex program. It has some extensive help support in it to assist
you. However, John, who will be the
“Camtasia wizard”, decided to learn it in a compressed time frame so we
purchased a tutorial package, “Mastering Camtasia Studio”, by Chris Austin,
a Camtasia expert. Chris’
course is broken down into very logical steps and if you follow it through, you
will understand all the features of Camtasia in no time at all.
You will learn more than you really need to know to produce a standard
video, but as with so many software packages, if you plow through it yourself,
you will miss some of the tricks that make it much easier to use.
If you teach yourself, a few months from now, you will discover a key
short cut to a function within Camtasia and kick yourself for not discovering it
sooner. Check
out how Chris can help you at http://www.masteringcamtasia.com/cmd.php?af=490492.
He offers a free five day mini course that I took before we purchased
“Mastering Camtasia”. This free
class is very helpful in orienting you on Camtasia. It will help you decide if
Camtasia is what you need to enhance your products and sales effort. We
highly recommend that you consider using video in your future plans if you are
going to sell on the Internet. Camtasia
is for producing videos that show the screen of your computer.
There are many other editing programs for editing video from a Camcorder.
We will leave this topic for a future article. Effective Navigation on Your Website Site Navigation is a very
important consideration of your website. Your
site should be designed so that the newest newbie can thread through your site
without getting lost. It is the road map of your site so that your reader knows
how to effectively navigate through it. We had a good laugh the
other day while researching this topic. We
read that you need to design your navigation so even your grandmother or
grandfather can find their way through it. The
laugh is that we Boomers are those grandmothers and grandfathers so the site
must be REALLY easy to navigate. What caused us to focus
on this subject came from working with the Retirement Jobs Online website.
When we started the site and it was only a few pages, we designed the
navigation so the reader was lead on the course that we wanted them to follow.
However, as the site grew, we realized that some readers would be more
focused in one area than in another. The
reader might not want to follow the dictated course so we needed to make it easy
for her/him to pick and choose. The original page
navigation pattern was a circular pattern where the reader would follow the
links from one page to the next until he/she arrived back at the starting page.
This works as long as there is never a break, but we all know that
somewhere in your surfing, you have to get up and tend to something or you go
off on a tangent to another page. When
want to you return, it is sometimes hard to determine exactly where you were.
If the reader has to follow several page links back to the continuation
point, frustration sets in and the reader is gone. The basic tool for site
navigation is having a navigation bar (“nav bar”) on the site. Navigation
bars are usually some form of java script. They
are text, buttons, or boxes usually placed on the top or left side of every
page. This allows the reader to
quickly link to the main pages of the site.
A feature that is usually incorporated in the nav bar is the nav bar
entry for the current page is indicated by a change of color or look to indicate
where you are currently located in the site. Some HTML editors will
build your navigation bar nav bar for you. When
you build a page, you specify if you want the page included on the nav bar and
if you want a nav bar on the page. Site Build It builds your
nav bar for you. On the form where
you build your page, there are options where you specify if you want an entry in
the nav bar for that page and if so, what the text on the nav bar entry should
say. As an aside … if you
have a landing page on your site where you want the reader to take only one
action (click to buy or click to subscribe) you do not put any external links or
a nav bar on that page. You do not
want to give the reader a means of escape except to close the window. If you include the nav
bar on each page, it gives the reader a uniform way to get from the current page
to any other main page with one click which is desirable.
There is a theory in site navigation that a person should be no more than
two clicks from any other page. There are three basic concepts of site navigation, Hierarchical, Global, Local. We will not dig any deeper into this subject in this article. I recommend that you read the following articles for more info on the subject. http://www.efuse.com/Design/navigation.html#SiteNavRoadmap. http://www.smartisans.com/articles/web_navigation.aspx We converted the
navigation in the Retirement Jobs Online site to hierarchical navigation.
This is like a tree where there is a main line of navigation like the
trunk of the tree. The reader can
branch out to various topics, but returns to the main trunk to move to the next
topic. Since Retirement Jobs
Online is an educational site, we achieved the control of navigation by creating
a Study Guide page. This page
explains to the reader how to use the study guide.
It then provides the reader summary information about each topic and
provides a link to detailed information so the reader can drill deeper if he/she
has interest in the topic. To back
track from the detailed info back to the Study Guide, the reader is told to use
the BACK button on the browser. An
icon is located on each page at the point where the reader is to employ the BACK
button. Author’ note:
Our research showed that there is not a way to create a text link back to
the previous page that will work 100% of the time in all browsers.
The BACK button on the browser is the foolproof method of backtracking. In summary, always consider how your reader will navigate your site. If navigation is easy, your reader will dig deeper and deeper into your site. If navigation is confusing or difficult, your reader will click away from your site and will not return. Work to make that navigation easy. Using
Bookmarks for Site Navigation Navigation within a large
page can be accomplished by specifying bookmarks on the page.
These are locations to which you will link. Front Page (my HTML
editor) has the tools on the tool bar that make it easy to set a bookmark.
Let’s say we have a large page and down in the middle of the page, you
have a heading called “Infopreneur”. You
want to jump to it with a link. You
can do so with some simple HTML code shown in the following example. Set the title
“Infopreneur” as a bookmark with HTML: <xmp>
<a name="#Bookmark name">Infopreneur</a>
</xmp> Authors note: The xmp
and /xmp tags tell the browser to accept what it between the tags as text and do
not execute it as HTML. The HTML “< a
name” identifies this as an anchor for a link.
This is the same as the link target.
The bookmark name is preceded by the “#”.
The word “Infopreneur” is what actually shows on the web page.
This is very simple to do if you want to insert a bookmark into your page
using HTML. If you do a link to “#Infopreneut”,
the browser will shift the page so the title “Infopreneur” is at the top of
the monitor. This is also used for
creating links in a table of contents so the reader can link directly to the
topic without having to scroll down and find it. One last tip on
bookmarks… You can link to another
page and go directly to the bookmarked topic without having to go to the top of
the page and make the reader search down for the topic.
Here is a link to Volume 1 Issue 18 of Boomer eZine.
It specifically links to the topic, “Author’s Comments” which is
set up as the anchor for the link: http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I18_081106.htm#Author's%20Comments. Note: the “%20”
indicates a space. The reason for
this is URL’s cannot have spaces in them so the browser replaces the space
with “%20” to keep you from having an invalid link.
The browser knows that when it gets to the page, it is looking for the
bookmark, “Author’s Comments”, with a space between the words. That wraps up our issue
for this week. Get excited about
producing video! Many entrepreneurs
are making a good living producing and selling video on the Net. Until next week, stay
tuned. John and Linda Howe Administrative Details …………….
If you are changing email addresses in the future, put a note on your calendar to send us a blank email after you have changed your address. Send the blank email to: boomerezine001@aweber.com. We want you to remain a subscriber to our newsletter! It is OK to go ahead and join our
subscriber list with more than one email address. You never know when an
email will be blocked these days. The SPAM filters are getting tighter and
tighter and are blocking many legitimate emails. Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc.
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Copyright 2008 John Howe, Inc. Please visit the other Boomer sites
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