Q. What is site promotion?

A. Site promotion is a number of things, but basically it's doing anything you can do to improve the visibility of and increase traffic to your site. You can have a great site, but no one will see it if they don't know it's there.

Site promotion most commonly involves:

• Developing keywords and meta tags that will improve your ranking in search engines and internet directories.
• Writing a title for your site that includes your target keywords.
• Reviewing and optimizing your site content to emphasize your target keywords.
• Submitting your site to search engines, internet directories, and free-for-all sites.
• Consideration and/or implementation of a banner exchange program such as Link Exchange.

Getting other sites to add a link to your site from theirs is another, and one of the best, promotional tools you can use. An example of this would be if you could get a vendor to list you as a distributor on their website.

There are a number of other simple things that you can do as well, like making sure your URL (internet address) is on everything that you publish. i.e. e-mail, business cards, flyers, newspaper ads, phone book ads, etc.

Q. How do I know if my promotion efforts are working?

A. By regularly checking your site rankings in the search engines and directories, and reviewing your site statistics you will easily determine your web site's visibility as well as the traffic your site is generating.

Your site statistics are generally available through your web host. Look for a URL in your hosting documentation or visit your host provider's website to determine how you can view your statistics.

Your site's ranking can be found by typing key words into a search engine to see where your site ranks based on that search phrase. You can also use any number of free online tools such as www.rankthis.com to assist you. Of course, if your site is generating a good amount of sales, then that's a pretty good indication that your efforts are working too.

Q. Why is the artwork I designed on the computer printing out so small?

A. Most likely, you designed your graphic based on a width and height measured in pixels. It is very important to understand that your monitor displays 72 pixels per inch, but your printer will print 300, 600, or more pixels per inch. The pixels (ppi) in your graphic are converted to dots (dpi) when you print. This is not to say that ppi and dpi are the same thing, but that's a topic for another day.

Anyway, a 400x600 ppi graphic that looks huge on your screen will look like a tiny little thumbnail sketch when you print it out. To make a long story short, determine how you want to use your graphic before you scan or create it. If you plan on printing it, set your canvas or image print size to inches instead of pixels and keep your resolution somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 ppi. It's important to do this before you create your graphic as you can always reduce the size of an image, but increasing it's width and height or resolution afterwards will only degrade the quality of your work.

If your image appears too large to work with on your screen, simply reduce the view (not the actual graphic) to 50% or whatever percentage works best for you.

Q. What software do you use/recommend?

A. If it's got Adobe in the name, I recommend it (PhotoShop, Illustrator, PageMaker, etc.) Be warned though - the learning curve on these programs is huge and their prices are nothing to sneeze at either. For website design, I use Allaire's HomeSite and ColdFusion 4.0.

Q. I've designed a brochure that I want to have printed. My regular printing company says that my inkjet printer can't print high enough quality originals for them to use as artwork. What should I do?

A. The first thing that you should do is find out if your printing company has the same software that you used to design the piece. Assuming that they do or you can find someone to output the piece for you, you need to do a couple of things. First, copy the file to disk. Second, copy all of the fonts that you used to the same disk. Your fonts can generally be found in your Windows directory under Fonts. The filenames usually end in .ttf (true-type font). The last thing you need to do is copy any and all graphics that you used to the disk. If you used a piece of clipart or scanned image in your brochure, it is not good enough that you can see the clipart in the brochure file. You have to find the actual graphic file on your hard drive and include it on the disk. This will ensure that your graphics will look great when they are printed (assuming they were good to begin with) and all of the fonts you carefully chose for your piece will appear as you want them to.