So out comes the video camera, white board and my cool red t-shirt!

Make sure that once you’ve watched the video, give me your comments below.

HTML is one of those weird things that people either get or don’t get… The general comments I get from people I help with HTML is that I am some kind of genius, a man with a magic wand. You probably think I am some techie nerd sat behind the computer screen, developing a beautiful thoracic curve to rival the hunchback of notre dame.

Actually I thinking coding in general is something you either understand or is a bit like Swahili to you.

However there is some many good reasons why you should know some HTML as a fitness professional. Not knowing will probably leave you behind in getting your site found by google, getting screwed by some dodgy web developer, and missing out on some easy business development.

You could outsource EVERYTHING to do with HTML, however there are some things that are simply not worth outsourcing, or even possible to outsource.

So here is my little list of why you MUST learn some HTML.

1. Getting screwed by some lazy ass developer(LAD)… I was the only time I flipped big time about a month ago when a good friend had a site “built”, but couldn’t figure out why google was not finding the site… Upon investigation, by looking at the code I saw what the LAD had done. They had created a website by taking a screen print of the word document my friend had used to demo what they wanted to appear, then just created the site just from the images.

This meant the site had no content (in the eyes of google) and would never had been found.

Avoid the LAD’s by understanding some of the nasty things they get up to.

2. When commenting in a forum, it is good practice to follow up you comments with a “hyperlink”(one of this links embedded in to the text) back to your website. To do this requires a little knowledge of HTML. Thankfully many communities and forums will now automatically insert the links with a little tool, but some do require a little bit of coding.

Each time you do this you create a back link to your site, helping to elevate your site up the google rankings.

3. Editing the meta tags on your site: The META tags are the “hidden” text in your site for making sure your site is properly indexed on Google. So for example the title, description and keyword tags are essential for search engine optimisation. Knowing a little HTML will allow you to make these simple changes without needed to “trust” a LAD with the SEO aspects of your site.

I have heard people be charged in excess of 1000 USD for SEO stuff on their site… it is a 5 minute job that ANYONE can do.

4. Making minor textual changes to your site without needing a LAD. If you don’t need to change the layout of your site, but you do want to change the text content, then if you understand a little HTML you can do this without the need to hire a developer.

Most textual changes take minutes, not days or weeks, an don’t require the services of a LAD

5. Inserting video and audio in to your site: understanding a little HTML will mean you can add the clever little script text in to a web page or BLOG posting to include a YouTube video or an audio hosted by a company such as Audio Generator.

Once again simple little changes that with a tiny amount of HTML knowledge are really easy.

Over the next few weeks I am going to do some really simple HTML tutorials, so let me know EXACTLY what things you would like to know about HTML so I can cover the most popular things.

The solutions your “friendly” web developer will suggest will often be their excellent in house content management system (or CMS). Having been exposed to some of these in my time, exactly NONE of them have been particularly useful for all the things suggested in the first paragraph!

If your developer suggests their CMS, politely decline!

The only one I have come across that is any good is WordPress. Having already discussed wordpress in previous posts you’ll get the idea that I do like this software.

I like it a lot!

Not only do we get some cool wordpress themes, some top class wordpress plugins, but also the best CMS you’ll ever find.

The wordpress CMS has gone through many iterations and is now considered a “mature” software, meaning it is relatively bug free, extremely user friendly and has a really easy learning curve.

The fact that there are literally thousands of add ons and themes for this software tells you it is really well liked by the “geeks” of the world too and is certainly here to stay for at least the next few years, which is more than you can say for the CMS from your developer!

I’ve set up quite a few BLOGs now for my own business and other peoples businesses, and the CMS back end is easily adopted by my clients, which makes my life really simple too!

One other thing with WordPress, it is not restricted to just BLOGs, you can set up actual websites with it too! Whilst a little cumbersome for a simple website, more complex sites can happily thrive on a WordPress back end, making updating and managing you web site an absolute doddle!

So the next time you are wanting to get a BLOG or a website built, consider using WordPress, or asking your developer to build it using wordpress, so that you have much more control over the management of the site.

“I don’t know where to start”

“I don’t know any HTML”

“I can’t afford a web developer”

To be honest and blunt with you, if you haven’t got a site and a simple opt-in box on your website, you ain’t really got a business… you are actually invisible.

So it is time to hustle and get a site built! I believe I can get a website built with an opt in box and a BLOG in Ten minutes. In fact I am going to put my neck on the line and do it live, in front of an audience, next weekend in Nottingham UK. I will get it filmed and I will place the video on YouTube for all to see.

The thing with building websites is not necessarily knowing technical stuff like HTML (although it can and does help). If you can follow a simple process and instructions on screen it can be ridiculously simple.

Watch this space for more details of my challenge later next week.

Thanks for making your comments and bookmarking my posts, I really appreciate it.

One of the things I am going to try is going back to some more traditional “direct-marketing” principles. You know using real postage and send sales letters to my list.

I think, no scrub that, I know that our prospects perception of email is that of apprehension and it takes a lot of effort to build trust and rapport with our prospects. At least with mailing the level of trust ( in my opinion ) is higher.

Problem is the only names and addresses I have are from current and previous clients. So I have spent 20 minutes or so this afternoon creating a web form to collect name and addresse, the client gets sent to this form after filling out the email auto-responder box.

There is just some simple files that are needed to be uploaded to your server and a simple form added to a web page.  A seasoned web developer should be able to do this for 10 dollars…

Stop hiding behind your email autoresponder and start really communicating with your prospects.

Everyone’s first website is complete and utter rubbish!

That includes me!

At the time of building it I wanted it to be perfect and spent  hours and hours coding and checking and sorting the graphics and pictures etc. I had a banner up on the front page of the site

“Website under construction”

Someone then saw my site, and said something that changed my perception of web development for ever.

“ALL websites are ALWAYS under construction”

What he was trying to say to me was, get the site up and working for you as soon as possible even if it looks really messy. If you wait until it is perfect before launching then it will never go live!

You can see this even today in some of the sites I have built, I get an idea, create a really basic site, with the copy I want on it and put it live. No fancy graphics, no images… just the raw site.

This has the effect of getting you moving more quickly to get the site looking much better, hiring a graphic designer and/or developer to tidy things up for you.

So the take away point here is take action, get a really messy site built and then work towards perfection as you go along.

Drop me a note on twitter or on the Personal Trainer Success NING site to tell me your messy site is up.

Regards
Tim

PS. You know I must have wasted hours, if not days trying to get my site perfect, when all along it was always going to be a big pile of C-RAP. Hopefully this has inspired you to take some action and get it up.

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