WebDesign makes it extremely easy to create new websites using the built in templates. It offers both ready made templates to base your website on, or a set of blank page layouts. When you ?rst launch WebDesign, you will see the new website project window as shown.

You can either select one of the pre-made templates, open an existing website or create a new webpage using the Web Page wizard.

Scroll through the available templates which range from fully developed websites to blank templates. Once you have chosen a template, press the ?Select? button.

WebDesign?s Site Manager will open along with the Site Settings window. From this window you can select a prede?ned FTP account to publish your website to. At this time you can ignore this option if you do not yet have a web host set up. Your purchase of WebDesign comes with four free months of web hosting to get your started. Details on how to take advantage of this offer can be found in your order confirmation email.

Once you have entered your website settings, all of your website ?les will be listed for you in the Site Manager. The index.html ?le is the default page that will load when someone enters your domain name into their web browser. The rest of the pages are sub pages linked from the navigation menu of each page.

The Site Manager provides everything you need to manage your website in WebDesign. You can add new ?les by pressing the plus button underneath the ?le listing. If are using a template, the new pages will be based on your existing template ?le.

The file labeled index.html is your default page. We will double click the index.html to open it up in WebDesign?s editor.

As you can see below, WebDesign provides a text editor and a visual preview of your website which gets updated as you edit your page.

If you have used Apple?s “Pages” software you may notice the similarities between the two applications. WebDesign provides a sub toolbar at the top of the window that provides common tasks like changing fonts, font size, styles, colors, as well as inserting more advanced code such as lists, tables, links, and images.

Just like any word processing application, WebDesign lets you select a block of text and easily apply style changes such as making the text bold, italic or underlined. Just select a block of text and press the B button in the sub toolbar, or press command-B on your keyboard.

Likewise, many of the other styling options can be applied in a similar manner. In addition to what is provided in the sub toolbar, WebDesign also provides over 40 built in wizards which can be inserted into your webpage from the Tools window on the left hand side of your screen or the Insert menu in your menubar at the top of your screen.

With WebDesign you can quickly and easily drag and drop HTML wizards from the Tools window into your document.  Since only content placed within the body tags will be rendered in your browser, all wizards should be placed within these tags.

WebDesign makes it extremely easy to work with your HTML webpage ?les. All of your HTML tags are color coded so you can easily separate HTML markup with regular text content. Syntax coloring also allows you to easily spot basic coding errors in your HTML.

WebDesign also includes auto completion of HTML tags, attributes and attribute values.  As you type, a list of all available HTML tags and attributes will be provided. You can use your keyboard’s arrow keys to select one of the available options. Pressing the tab key on your keyboard will insert the currently selected autocomplete tag.

You will also notice that WebDesign provides HTML attribute suggestions and attribute value suggestions including a built in color picker to easily insert web safe colors into your document.

Lastly, WebDesign also includes an easy to use attribute editor. Open the Attribute editor by clicking the Attributes button in the toolbar. Now, when you click within an HTML Tag, the attributes editor will list all the attributes for the selected HTML tag to easily edit them. If an attribute requires a speci?c value, you can select it from the prede?ned list.

Most of your HTML needs can be handled by WebDesign?s sub toolbar, directly above WebDesign?s text editor. For example, the Font menu provides access to commonly used web safe fonts, while the Color button will let you specify the text color of the currently selected text.

When you are finished editing your website, you can go back to your Site Manager and use the Prepare Site button to check your site for coding errors and broken links. In addition, you can also apply various modifications to your entire site. You can convert your site to XHTML or CSS. You can optimize your HTML code so it loads faster for your visitors or change the case of your HTML tags.

Once we have applied any changes to our site we can Publish our website to our server by clicking the Publish Site button. WebDesign will only publish modified files. We will have to enter our server information, but once we have done this once, WebDesign will remember these details when publishing in the future.

In this video tutorial, I am going to show you how to use Sitemap Automator to help get your site listed in Google. Recently, Google has made a change to how you need to verify your site through its Webmaster Tools. Because of this change, Sitemap Automator has been updated and now makes it easier for people, especially iWeb users, to get their sites indexed by Google.

Just a quick note before I begin, for those of you who are using domain forwarding, you should make sure that your domain is not masked. You can email your host to find out if it is masked. A masked domain will always prevent your site from being fully indexed by search engines.

To create your sitemap, first click on the New Sitemap button, and then type in your website URL. Next, you’ll need to click on the Create Sitemap button. Depending on how big your website is, this scanning process can take up to a few minutes. I will fast forward through this process.

When your site has been fully scanned, you can now click the Generate Sitemap button to proceed to the next step. The next thing we have to do, is upload our sitemap. To do this, we have two options. We can upload it to our FTP, or we can upload it to our iDisk if we are an iWeb user using MobileMe.

If you are publishing to iDisk, you have two options for publishing. The first option is to publish to your root folder. The second option is to publish to a selected folder. This second option is for users who have more than one site on their MobileMe server.

If you are publishing to a selected folder, it is important to remember the name of this folder as you will need to use it later. I am going to remember the folder Photos_By_Matt. Pay attention to how I use it later on in the video.

After the sitemap has been published, we must then go to our Google Webmaster Tools account. If you do not have an account, you can create a free one by going to http://www.google.com/webmastertools.

To add a site, click on the Add a site button. Then type in your website URL. Here is where I will type in the Photos_By_Matt folder name. Remember, this is for iWeb users who do not publish to their root folder. Again, you only publish to your root folder if you have only one site on your MobileMe server.

After you’ve typed in your URL and clicked on the continue button, the next page will show us the verification method. The first thing you want to do, is select Upload an HTML file as your verification method. Then click on the download link to download the verification file. You must know where this file is being saved in order to use it in our next step.

After you have downloaded the file, back in Sitemap Automator, click on file in the menubar and select Publish Verification File. Then click on the Select Verification File and find the file that you just downloaded. The next step is to publish the file by either publishing to FTP or publishing to iDisk. Again, if you do publish to a selected folder, make sure that you select that folder when publishing the verification file.

Your next step is to head back to Google Webmaster Tools and click the verify button. Once verified, you must not tell Google Webmaster Tools where it can find your sitemap. Click on your site URL,  then click the plus sign next to Site Configuration. and then click on Sitemaps. Next, click the Submit a Sitemap button, and in the text box, type in sitemap.xml as you see here. Then click Submit Sitemap.

Finally, our last step, back in Sitemap Automator, click on the notify search engines button, and your sitemap will be submitted Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Bing.

And that is how you get your site listed in all major search engines. To see more Mac Software video tutorials, visit www.apptorial.com

In this video I’m going to show you how to use RAGE Software’s Sitemap Automator. I will also be showing iWeb and iDisk users how to avoid the scenario in which your sitemap does not get properly created because of domain forwarding.

So how do you know if you are using domain forwarding? The first thing you should do is go to your web browser and type in your URL. Pay attention to the address field. When I hit the enter key, you will notice that the URL changes. This is due to domain forwarding. If this happens to you, highlight the URL, and copy it.

Open up Sitemap Automator and click on the New Sitemap button. Then paste the URL that you just copied. Next, click on the Create Sitemap button. Depending on how many pages your site has, this could take a few minutes. After the sitemap is completed, you can click on the Generate Sitemap button.

The next thing we have to do, is publish our sitemap. You can do this within RAGE Sitemap Automator. The program has the option of publishing to FTP or Publishing to iDisk. If you are publishing to your iDisk, you will need to enter in your MobileMe username and password, as well as your Site Name. If you are unsure of what your sitename is, open up your site in iWeb, and your Site Name will be located above the rest of the files within your site. In this case, this site’s name is Photos By Matt.

After you’ve published your sitemap, clicking on the Notify Search Engines button will prompt you to verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools. If you do not already have a Google Webmaster Tools account, click on the create account button.

After you create your account and sign in, you will be taken to a page similar to this one. To add your site, click on the Add A Site button, and type in your URL and hit Continue. Next, you will be taken to a page that says that your site is Not Verified. It will give you two methods for verification. Uploading an HTML File is the easiest method so select that option. Then highlight the HTML file name, and then copy it.

Go back to Sitemap Automator and click on the File Menu and select Publish Verification File. In the box that appears, paste the file name that you just copied. Afterwards, you can publish the file to FTP or to iDisk. If you are publishing to FTP, you must have all of your FTP details inputted. After you publish, you can press the verify button in your web browser, and if you did everything correctly, your verification status should show as verified.

All that is left is then going back to Sitemap Automator, and selecting Notify Search Engines, and then click on Already Added to Account, and Sitemap Automator will submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.

In this video tutorial, I will be showing you how to use RAGE Software’s SERank. SERank is a simple tool, used to check the rankings of any website for any keyword. First, I will show you the simple way of using this software, and then I will go into greater details on other features in the program.

Before I begin, I just want to mention that in the version I am using, you may notice that there is an option to search MSN. You most likely will not see that in your version as MSN is now Bing and RAGE Software has update this program to reflect that change. I also have the option to use Bing in my version here.

The first thing I’m going to do is add a website. So I’m going to use apple.com.Then, I’ll want to add a keyword to search for, using this URL. I can put in as many keywords as I choose. Next, I’ll hit the Check Rankings button. I have Google, Yahoo, and Bing checked off. I’ll click the Check now button.

Within just a few seconds my results show up. So now we can see here where www.apple.com ranks for the keyword iWeb.

So that’s a simple way of using this program. Now I’m going to show you what else you can do with it. So I’m just gonna fast forward a bit here. Now I have bluenile.com under websites, and 4 different keywords related to the site. I’m going to check the rankings for all 4 of these keywords, and see where bluenile ranks for all 4 of them. Depending on your connection speed, how many keywords, and how many results you want the program to sift through, this could take up to a few minutes. I will fast forward again so that we can move on with this demonstration.

So here we are with the results, and now you can see that there are a lot more results than last time because this time we used 4 keywords instead of just one. A really cool feature of this program is that I can make a report based on these findings. So you can see here exactly what the report will look like. You can even export it as a PDF, so it is really a nice tool to have if you have clients that may be interested in knowing how their site is ranking on a month-to-month basis for example.

The next thing I want to show you is another feature for SERank. The program allows you to compare multiple websites to each other, so that you can see how you rank against your competitors.  So I’ve now added jamesallen.com and I have used the exact same keywords as I used with BlueNile. I have already obtained the rankings for each, so now all I have to do it press the Competitor Analysis button. Once this screen pops up, I will check off the keywords for the first site, and then check off the second site and the keywords for it as well. The placements for the keywords appear on this chart. If I want to change between search engines, I can just use the drop down menu at the bottom of the screen.

The last thing I want to show you is just a small adjustment that can be made within the preferences. If we go to RAGE SERank on the menu bar and then select preferences, we can choose how many results we want the program to check up to. So if we want it to search through the first 200 results, we can select that, and if we want it to search through the first 1000 results, we can also select that. If you choose not to touch this preference, the default number will be 50.

So that’s how you use SERank. If you want to view more video tutorials, visit www.apptorial.com

In this video, I’m going to show you how to integrate RAGE Software’s Button Design with Rapidweaver. First, I’m going to export my buttons, so I’m going to choose CSS button. Then I’m going to select a location to save my button to. And now I’ll click the save button. I’m done with Button Design, so I’ll hide it for now. Now I’ll open up the folder that I saved my buttons to in the finder. I’m going to open up the stylesheet.

The file path that points to the image has to be adjusted. So I’m gonna type in assets with a forward slash, so Rapidweaver will know where to look when its building my website.

Now I’m going to highlight all the code, and copy it. I’m going to close the document, and I don’t need to save it.

I’m going to open up Rapidweaver and add my webpage. Remember to add the HTML Code page because we’re going to be adding custom HTML. And then click on the Add button. Now I’ll click on the inspector button, and then the third tab in, and then click on the CSS tab, and then I’ll paste in the custom CSS code that I just copied.

The next thing I have to do is copy over the image file created with RAGE Button Design. I’ll locate that in the finder, and then switch back to Rapidweaver and the inspector window again. I’ll click on the Assets tab, and then drag the image into the Assets list, so it will now be available to Rapidweaver.

I’m done with the inspector so I can close that window. The last thing I have to do is open up my index.html file and find the HTML code to display the actual button. I’ll highlight the code, and then copy it. I’ll switch back to Rapidweaver, and place it into the HTML field right here. And then if I press the preview tab, I can see the button on my website.

In this video, I’m going to introduce you to RAGE Software’s Domainer, which is essentially a domain management tool.

It’s very easy to use. To add a domain, simple click on the plus sign, and then type in the URL. And now the program will gather up a bunch of information so that you do not have to go to five different sites to get them on your own.

The information that we are given are the creation and expiration dates, the page rank, Alexa rank, incoming links, and social bookmarking tags.

Next, if I scroll down, the program will show me the top 10 incoming links to this website.

If we add another URL, we can use this program to compare how two different sites are doing. Now we can see which site has the higher page rank, alexa rank and incoming links, and can use one of the sites as a benchmark if it is ranking higher in Google. So for example if a higher ranking site has a higher page rank and more incoming links, we can infer that page rank and incoming links is something we need to work on with our websites.

Download a free demo of  Domainer from RAGE Software’s website.