The "At Home CAP Plan"

The CAP (or Content Assistance Plan) is a service brought to you by WebMedley that involves "dressing up" your Web site and giving it a professional look.  Fortunately, if you follow a few key ideas, and keep to a couple of standards when building your site, you can give your Web site a very professional look...and (for you do-it-yourselfers out there) the satisfaction of giving your Web site the "At Home CAP plan".

Keep your Text the same
You should follow a standard with all the text on your Web site.  This means all the different categories of text (body, headlines) should have the same font, size and color from page to page.  This creates uniformity throughout your Web site and allows people to notice what the headline is, and what the body is.  This is the biggest contributor to making your site look very professional, easy to read, and attractive.

Break apart large pages  
Most Web surfers would rather get a root canal than scroll to see all the information on a page.  Obviously some, or all, of your pages will require some amount of scrolling.  The best answer to this is to break apart that topic or idea into more than one page.  A good standard would be to break apart a page if it is longer than 3 screens long.  This puts less information on one page, and there isn't as much scrolling needed to read the page.

Detach unused or unfinished pages
If you have some pages you haven't finished, haven't started, or just don't want to be made public yet, detach them.  By selecting "detach from hierarchy" in the document parent pull down box (located in the advanced features for your page) you can "hide" the page because there will not be a link created for that page in your dynamic navigation.  This keeps people from seeing your works-in-progress, or prevents empty pages from being visited.  Learn more about this on our Detaching Tips page.

Give your pages a filename
Giving your Web pages a filename is not absolutely necessary, but it will improve the look of the address of that page and make it easier to remember when creating a link to it.  The URL for any page on your Web site is your domain name (Ex: www.yourchurch.com) followed by a "/" and then the filename of the page.  All pages have a default filename, but giving your pages a better filename will improve the look and make it easier to create links.  For example: instead of the address for the music page being www.yourchurch.com/yourti85493.html, change the filename to "music.html", making the address www.yourchurch.com/music.html.

Keep your site current
Finally, keeping your site up to date will actually improve the look, and make people want to come back.  No matter how good your site looks, if you visit the site in June and read about the previous Holiday celebration from December, you will probably not be returning.  Keeping the content of your site current will make your Web site interesting and keep people coming back for more.  One of the easiest ways to keep your site updated without any effort is to subscribe to content distribution.  Read more about that feature here.