ALL the blogs I run, and those I've helped others with, use the blogging service of TypePad as I've found it simple to set up, reliable and pretty flexible.
One of the features I really like is the Pages option, which lets you create standalone web pages free of elements such as comment forms, dates and permalinks.
With it you can produce very neat and tidy, static websites that are attractive to search engines and easy to update if required.
An example of one I've recently created is Pansion Stephen, which is a holiday home in Medjugorje, in the south of Bosnia Herzegovina.
Working with the people who owned the property I asked them to put together a few pages about the facilities on offer as well as a little about Medjugorje and the surrounding region.
I also asked for a selection of photographs I could plug into the site and from there dived in to TypePad to set up the site.
First off I mapped the domain name so that the site had its own website address, I use GoDaddy to register domains and they are cheap and can be easily hooked up to TyepPad accounts.
I say easily but I must admit it only becomes a quick operation after undertaking this task a couple of times, if TypePad was able to make this an automatic operation many people would find this a great help.
But if you are over this hurdle, go to the admin page of your site and click on New Page.
Think of this as your home page and so have an overview of your services here, post a picture or two to this page using the tool bar and give the page a simple title that will be clear to people when they arrive on the page.
If this page is to be your home page then after saving everything, click on Configure and then Preferences and here you can choose to display this page on the front of your site.
You can still dive in and make any changes you require so don't worry if something doesn't look right.
Then to put together the rest of your site create as many new pages as required, give each subject it's own section, you've plenty of room within a TypePad account so don't worry about having to stick to a handful of pages.
Give each page a title, which will be clear to site visitors, but have an eye on the search engines as well - think how you phrase your own search phrases and incorporate these into your page titles.
So you might have something like guide to Medjugorje and so when others do a similar search your site has a good chance of being found.
But the best plan is to provide a page with plenty of useful information on, a couple of paragraphs won't really cut it, so take your time over the words on the page and read up about the subject you are covering.
By default TypePad uses the page title as the name within the HTML address, but you can change this to again help with searches.
You will see at the foot of an individual New Page a box that says Filename, in here is where you can edit the default address to again have more relevance, but often your page title will suffice.
As you build up pages you then need to be able to link to them from every other page on the site.
The first is to use the built-in sidebar module provided by TypePad that lets you order pages by title or time they were created, but you could also set up a Links TypeList and copy and paste the address of each page and this would allow you to easily pick and choose the order of links.
Another option would be to use a Notes style TypeList, for this you would need to place a little section of HTML code pointing to the pages, at the foot of it you could also include your address and code for a stat counter.
Use this as an example:
Using this method lets you tweak and change pages as required, but keep other HTML code elements all in one place - use something like Notepad to edit the code, not Word, as you can see it much easier on the page and it won't add any strange code.
Once you are happy with your site start swapping links with other related sites, and if you are really getting comfortable with all things TypePad you can attach a blog to your static site which will use the same design and allow people to contact you from an ever growing number of pages.
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