March 7 Random Tech/Web Area galin
My friend, Jon Krane, and I are business partners in making entertainment sites. These sites have nothing to do with the customer work I do except that they showcase my customization abilities. He manages the sites that I design. Here is a cool one we just put up for animal lovers.
Funny Pet & Animal Video Website
This site showcases:
- Custom PHP and Javascript design through the Random Video Player.
- Ability to work with someone with minimal web design/computer knowledge and build a professional website as a team.
- Ability to take a request/idea and finish it.
- Ability to build the framework for a simple but professional email service.
- Will think uniquely about design if need be (draggable menu, unique HTML ideas, etc.).
Enjoy!
March 4 Web Reflections galin
Every year there is a new version of an apple product. That may not be a fact I am citing, but it might as well be. Currently, look at the iPhone, iPad, iTouch, iBook… even the operating systems are new every year for their computers.
This is Apples business plan. It is pretty obvious. The iPad 2 was announced early this week. In comparison to the iPad 1 it sounds epic, mainly because of just one feature: The front and rear cameras. This is perfect for Face Time. Video Conferencing will take off even more. I am planning on purchasing one just for that convience. That and being able to demo sites well to my customers at out of office meetings (which the iPad 1 accomplished).
That being said, do you know what is going to be better than the iPad 2? The iPad 3. Do you know what will be better than the iPhone 4 (that seems like it just came out)? The iPhone 5. Apple succeeds in using this business strategy because they are so far ahead of the competition when it comes to developing these devices. The Kindle and Android based readers all sound lame now that we know about the iPad 2 and its one of a kind features.
Basic economic principles tell Apple stockholders to beware since in the long run competition tends to catch up to the leader of the pack. Also, beware since their marketing strategy revolves around a person (Steve Jobs), who will eventually be dead since everyone dies. Well I guess by that logic Disney should be doing terrible.
Anyways, this should indicate to never buy a first generation Apple product. It is always lightyears behind the second generation product. I have an iPhone 3G in my pocket. It is terrible. This is because I have friends with iPhone 4s to play with. I notice how the battery actually works, the speed is quick, and it has a beautiful resolution, always making me feel terrible about my phone. My advice: Wait a year before purchasing anything from Apple, it will always get better.
March 4 Random Tech/Web Area galin
WordPress offers a lot of plugins. Most of them useful. One that I install on customer sites that works fine does not work 100% across the board on all of the websites I make.
WP-Super Cache is a very useful caching plugin that has worked for me for every customer site I have made. It involves a little bit of tinkering, but even a computer novice could get it functioning in some manner. These caching plugins are very useful because they increase the speed of your site by caching the page. Web browsers cache as well, but this plugin is very useful for the first time visitor who does not have any history saved of your site yet.
The one problem I have had is with an entertainment site I made, PetVideoParty.com. I recently designed this site using the random video player design that my friend and I have been brainstorming and constantly redesigning. The problem is when installing the caching plugin it caches the entire video player, taking the randomness away. So for now, we have nothing installed. The plugin creators indicate there are ways around this by saying there are ways to not cache specific parts of the page. So far, all of the suggestions show no results.
It seems these caching plugins need some work before acheiving perfection. For sites that revolve around constantly changing content and delivering a unique experience to each new user upon each visit, they fall short.
For the customer this should not be an issue. When installing WP-Super Cache, I always make sure to go through and do a thorough check of the site to make sure nothing is misbehaving from caching. Unless if a customer is looking for a random video player (or other random content delivering mechanism), I see the issues discussed never becoming an issue for a customer. After all, we want your site to be as fast and useful as possible, so caching add-ons will never go away.
March 2 Development Techniques galin
Adding links through HTML is pretty straightforward. It is the simplest, useful HTML ‘coding’ out there.
To link specific text you use an anchor tag. These look like ‘<a>’, but also must include a couple specific parameters defined in it. To tell it what URL or web address to send the link to, you must define a parameter inside the ancor tag called ‘href’. For example, linking to this website would look like
‘<a href=”http://gpmwebsolutions.com”>’.
That is how you link something, but how do you make text appear? This is simple. To make text appear you must place what text you want after the anchor tag. After the text you must then include a ‘</a>’ in order to indicate the end of the link. For example, a full link to this website would look like
‘<a href=”http://gpmwebsolutions.com”>Great Web Solutions</a>’. This would display the words ‘Great Web Solutions’ and link to the address indicated in the ‘href’ parameter.
Here is a link to w3schools information about making anchor tags/links: W3Schools anchor tag information. Other useful parameters to define in the anchor tag are listed on that site. Below are the ones I find the most important.
Important Anchor Tag Parameters
- ‘target’ – This tells the link where to open. Defining this to ‘target=”blank”‘ tells the link to open in a new window. This keeps people on your site still if you are linking to another site.
- ‘rel’ – This is useful for telling search engines not to leave your site while crawling. If you define it to ‘rel=”nofollow”‘, then it will tell the search engine crawling bots to not leave your site when finding a link. This is important for helping your page rank. At the same time, when getting people to link to your site, it is important to make sure they don’t define this attribute (when doing a link exchange).
February 28 Customer Website Tips galin
I have been getting questions from customers about Google’s recent algorithm change and how it will affect their SEO. Last week, they made a drastic change to the way they gather search results, affecting 12% of Google’s results. (CNN’s article on Googles Algorithm Change)
How does this affect you if you are a potential or current customer?
According to everything about this big change, it is to make search results fair and to hurt websites known as “content farms”. The definition of a content farm website according to Macmillan Dictionary is “a website that publishes huge volumes of low-quality content”. (Macmillan Dictionary Definition of Content Farm)
The way I advise SEO is contrary to content farming. We attack SEO with two methods. One being on site keywords that we handle. The second being to blog frequently or occasionaly, depending on what the customer sees fit. The first insures we do nothing to hurt search results. The latter is for getting Google and other search engines to notice that it is not a static site and is constantly changing, increasing the crawls to your site. We have other ideas on SEO, like generating more links to your site, that take extra time and effort to do effectively.
So for you, the customer, this change should not affect you. According to Google’s purpose, it should actually help you. This is because your site will have rich content and not be flagged as a content farm in any way. When it comes to SEO, it is a game, but the search engines always make changes to make it a fair game. Our advice is to do what Google tells you to do and play fair. Google has all the control and realizing this is an important step to doing SEO in an effecient manner.
