Friday, June 4, 2010

Flex 4

Flex 4 is a sexy framework that lets you write code that feels more like coding a desktop application—except it runs inside the Flash Player. Because it targets the Flash Player, you can build new rich Internet applications (RIAs) without worrying about browser compatibility nonsense, JavaScript, CSS, and so on. Because Flex 4 targets one platform (Flash 10),you don’t have to worry about platform compatibility issues. The write once, run anywhere (WORA) dream that client-side Java programmers had—before it turned into write once, debug everywhere—can finally be realized, but with Flex. Flex achieves what previous technologies such as Java applets failed miserably in attempting: applications that feel like desktop applications but that run inside any modern web browser on Windows and Mac.

Now that you’re excited about Flex 4, let’s take a deep breath and get an overview of the platform.

In Flex 4, we write code in MXML (XML files with an .mxml extension; M for Macromedia, the company that created Flex and that was acquired in 2005 by Adobe) and ActionScript (text files with an .as extension) files and compile them into an SWF file (that is, a Flash movie), which runs in the Flash Player.This SWF is usually referenced by an HTML file, so that when a user with a modern web browser loads the HTML file, it plays the Flash movie (prompting the user to download Flash 10 if it’s not present). The SWF contained in the web page can interact with the web page it’s contained in and with the server it was sent from.

Even if you’ve never created a Flash movie in your life, don’t consider yourself a designer, and wouldn’t recognize the Timeline if you tripped over it, you can use Flex to create attractive applications that run in the Flash Player. Flex development is easily learned by any intermediate level developer with either web (HTML and JavaScript) or desktop UI (such as Windows Forms or Java Swing) programming experience. A Flex 4 application is just a Flash movie (SWF), which lives inside a web page loaded by a web browser that has Flash 10 installed.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Right Ways to Web Designing

In web development, the design of the website is considered a very important element for its success. One reason why it became important is because the design of the website is what build's a website's credibility as well as its trustworthiness in providing their services to customers. The design of the website doesn't only involve the use of colors, shapes, images, and simple animations, it also makes use of basic human understanding on how they would interact with your website and find the information they are looking for. The true purpose of web designs is to allow our visitors to quickly and conveniently find their goal in our website.

Colors  Clashes
The use of colors is integral to the success in conveying credible services to prospective clients. According to Web design experts, this involves the right use of colors such as light against dark or dark against light.

Images and Animations
According to Web design  experts, putting images is also very important in the design of a website. It puts more life in a web page other than the use of colors and shapes. Although putting images can add to a website's credibility, too much of it could cause the website to load too slow which could also cause for visitors to leave the website.

Animations in websites are usually used in banners or in logos. However, many websites today have come to use the technology of Adobe Flash to create a full Flash website which is both entertaining and artistic. Although entertaining, the use of heavy Flash could also slow down its loading which could cause visitors to leave. Although there is the use of preloaders, the fact that it takes too long increases the chances of visitors on leaving the website.

Font 
Another is the use of font. Fonts used in a website should be readable and understandable. Many websites have come to use the font comic sans to make their websites more inviting. However, according to Web design  experts, using fonts such as comic sans and other "stylish" fonts may reduce a website's credibility, particularly when if its a corporate website.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Achieve Higher PageRank With SEO - Tips

One of the most innovate technologies that Google had developed is the PageRank. This is a special algorithm that changes every day and according to it the all of the pages that are indexed by Google are displayed. The algorithm is a secret so nobody except the person who has created it knows what it does exactly. There are some ways using search engine optimization to make your PageRank higher, which will lead to displaying your website on higher positions in the Google index.

One of the most important things you must do is to include all of the words that the users of Google had used to reach your website. Make sure that you include all of them in the text content of your website, but have in mind that you must not overuse them. If you do so the Google will think of your website as irrelevant and you will not get the results you wanted. The words that users have sued are accessible in the traffic reports of your website, there you can also see from where most of the people are accessing your website and try to improve the relationships with that website. 

Another thing that will improve your rank in Google is when you write new articles to post in your website, make sure that they will be published each one of them on a separate page. This will allow both visitors and search engine spiders to easily access your website and also it will allow you to make an archive of all of the articles you have published. Make sure also that each article will be published with its description and keywords in the Meta tags of the particular webpage, because this will help the visitors to find all of the content of your website easier. The main advantage of this feature that you may include in your website is the fact that all of the visitors will find your content well organized, unique and useful and they will be returning to your website in the future, so it will allow you to maintain stable traffic statistics. Also on the other hand the spiders of the search engines will return to your website, where they will find fresh and unique contentto index and this will guarantee you higher ranking positions in Google.


Improving your PageRank is crucial when you want to get your website positioned on the top places by Google. I have mentioned some tips for improving your Google statistics and I will introduce you to the last peace of advice. The last thing you must do is to make a page on your website where you provide links to your website that are accessible for others to use. Having this done will help you to maximize the number of the back links that you have to your website. A good idea is to provide some useful banners as long as text links that are free for use. Also you may ask websites that you are linked to put some links to your website. One of the main advantages of this system is that you make your website popular among all of the websites that have similar content and this is an opportunity to advertise your website for free, also many of the visitors will have the impression that your website is quite important, because of the affiliate links that you provide. Only you must be aware that you avoid linking with pages that have lower PageRank than your own, because this may actually reduce the popularity of your website in stead of improving it

Monday, May 10, 2010

Web Design Myths debunked.........

Flash is required to make a site attractive
If you plan on using  Flash, be sure to use it efficiently and sparingly.Keep in mind that not every person is surfing with a high speed connection.Some people may still be crawling at 56 or even 28K, so this means the animation may take some time to load.This feature should enhance the visit, not hinder it.  You don't want people to become impatient and hit the back button before they even see your key message.

Additionally, people may not have the Flash plug-in installed on their PC so before they can view your site, they must wait for it to download. 


The more colors you use the better
If your visitor's eyes hurt from reading your pages, Make your website visually pleasing as possible.Your site should consist of 2 to 3 colors max and remember that it's easier to read dark text on a light background.Also remember to make sure your hyperlinks are the same color on every page.As long as they contrast from the background and are consistent throughout your site.the color of the hyperlink shouldn't matter.

Adding too much graphics is helpful
It is true that graphics will make communication easier, but over use of graphics may make it difficult.One very important thing to keep in mind about images is that they can make your pages load very slowly.  If your page doesn't load within 10 seconds, you are in danger of losing many visitors.The page carrying heavy graphics takes lot of time to load. Web design which is spun around simple and easily loading graphics is always loved by the visitor. ensure that all of your images are saved in the correct format. Photos should be saved in .jpg format (more colors), while web images, clip art, etc. should be saved in .gif format (fewer colors).

Site will always look the same in all browsers
This is a common mistake made by many webmasters. Just because your site looks fine on your PC, don't assume it looks that good everywhere.Remember In reality different website browser perceive HTML pages in different manner.  So website Designer should always make it sure that the website is optimised with web standards adopted by different browsers.

If you are using tables,The width of the tables should be set in percentage rather than in pixels. If the website designer decides to use pixels in any of the website design then it becomes difficult for the viewer to scroll left and right to view the website properly.That is a huge annoyance.

Remember to design for the masses!!!

Friday, May 7, 2010

blackhat SEO - the bad guy SEO, Avoid it and get benefited for a long time

what is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat is like breaking into a bank’s system and getting out all you can – it definitely works. But then, obviously, it is not legal. And more importantly, you get caught. Black Hat is the trick that makes search engines believe that your site is genuine and you deserve high page रंक्स

Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN take black hat SEO very seriously and penalize people and sites involved in this. Black hat SEO is not limited to certain tricks, but yup, there are certain ill tricks that the search engines take seriously.

The below points should be avoided and must not be done at any cost.


Cloaking
Fooling search engines is known as cloaking. It means showing something to your visitors while showing something else to the search engines is known as cloaking. This is not that much difficult to cheat the search engines, all you need is certain programming languages. Few people even use redirected pages for this. But remember that people come to a site for some specific information, and if you cheat them for your ill benefits, then search engines won’t leave you.  This is the sure shot SEO trick to get banned from search engines.

Duplicate Contents
Few sites make duplicate contents all over their site. This means they post same contents on more than one page. They follow this SEO trick just to improve their alexa rank. But remember, search engines ban these sites. Never ever post or use same contents twice.On the other hand, posting the same content in more than one page does not add extra value to your site.

Adding Metas not Related to  Content

Meta Keywords are like the address of your home. It tells the search engines what is your post about. And hence meta words play a very vital role in search engine indexing. Few people use the same keyword many times thinking that search engines will put more importance into it. But the search engines don’t think in the way you do. Never use  same keyword more than once. Don’t use those keywords which are having no relation with your contents.

Fake Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are the entrance pages to your site. Fake doorway page is like you show someone the entrance to the bedroom, but once he opens the door, he lands in the kitchen. This is freaking. In this way people get annoyed and leave your site. And search engines treat this in that same way. Search engine Bots will come once, will fall in your trick, will ban you and will never get back to your site for indexing. So, it’s better to be genuine.

Script Generated Content
Never ever use scripts or softwares to write for you. This is even worse than having duplicate contents. There are few scripts and softwares available that can rewrite the copied contents. They make few changes here and there and make them look like a new one. But search engines are pretty smart in pointing them. Once they figure you out, they will ban your site forever. Write your own blog contents, they are fresh and unique, search engines will love them.

stuffing or font matching
Never ever hide your keywords. This can be done by making the text and background colour same. In SEO term it’s called keyword stuffing or font matching. Few people also make small fonts which can’t be read and put their keywords there. But search engine robots are scripted well to find them. once they catch you, you are banned.

Automated Inquiries
Search engines recommend people not to use robots for sending automated queries. There are few scripted robots available there and those are used for sending automated search queries. They also use such scripts for auto link submissions. Remember one thing here, search engines are made for humans, they hate robots.

Title Stacking

Be specific. Do not use more than one title per page. Few people use more than one titles per page to get higher ranking in search results. But this is the most stupid idea ever. If you are not familiar with this thing, then title is the the line that reads your page.Do not cheat search engines in this way, they are far more superior than you to track and ban you

Distribute Viruses and other malicious scripts
If you are really dying to get banned, then distribute viruses, trojans, malwares or antispyawares on your site. This is the worst step that you can take to get banned. In this way search engines will remove your site entirely from their databse for people’s good. Checkout the softwares yourself that you are distributing on your site. Use secure hosting, so that spammers can’t distribute those things without your knowledge. You can also appeal to search engines later, if your site has been removed from their indexes because of this reason.



Black Hat SEO can benefit you for a short period of time but will kill your growth in the long run. Avoid such sites who claim to take you to the top in a month or so. Learn proper SEO Tips and get benefited for a long time.





 

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Top CSS Tutorial Sites

CSS has become one of the many popular languages in web designing and layout. Today, several websites have been put up to provide people who wanted to learn a simple step by step on how CSS works or advanced CSS styles.Here are some of the most popular websites built to provide the necessary information, knowledge, and know-how's to creating CSS websites.

CSSBasics.com 
W3School.com 
HTMLDog.com
Csstutorial.net/
AListAPart.com 

please let me know if you came across any better css tutorial sites than mentioned above

SEO Trends And Mistakes One Must Avoid

Search Engine Optimization or simply known as SEO is one of the most popular type of Internet marketing used in the market today.Search Engine Optimization, or SEO can get us massive amounts of traffic to our websites. But when used wrongly, it has the ability to draw traffic away from our websites instead.This article summarizes SEO trends and mistakes you should avoid from practicing

They key to understanding which Search Engine Optimization mistakes to avoid lies in understanding what big search engines like Google likes and does not like.

Image headers and extensive image use. 
Google spiders cannot read images like text. Therefore, your header cannot be quantified by Google's search engine and as we all know headers are extremely important for SEO. Therefore, use a text header with the "[h1]" tag instead. If you must use images, include keywords in the alt text. 

Excessive keywords 
If the keyword density of your site is over 5%, your site will come across as spam and that will have negative effects on SEO. Instead, use stemmed keywords. (key phrases related to your targeted keyword)

E.g. internet marketing tips and online marketing advice.  

Profanity or Bad Language
Google hates profanity and bad language. Therefore, stay away from it, unless you are running an adult website.

Splash pages 
Probably the biggest mistake anyone can make is by having a splash page. The first thing Google reads is your main page and if your main page is one big hunk of flash videos, you will be losing out on tons of potential free traffic.

Black hat SEO 
Black hat SEO techniques,  involves the use of deception. Black hat SEO is also known in industry as spamdexing. One popular example spamdexing or black hat SEO is hidding text behind images or colored similar to its background. According to many professionals, black hat SEO can give faster results compared to that of white hat. However, these results are usually temporary, and that if caught, websites would be penalized or banned from a search engine.  

Google search engine is always upgrading their algorithm to prevent from SEO abusers and thus, it is always good to stay on top of the SEO trends so that your site will not lose traffic. 

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Web Design Best Practices :Rules Of Smart And Successful Web-Designing

 "Design Best Practices :Rules Of Smart And Successful Web-Designing"is my personal pick of the main ideas and concepts, which might improve the quality and popularity of your web-sites and provide a good foundation for successful development in the future.

Page Layout
  •  Appealing to target audience
  •  Consistent site header/logo
  •  Consistent navigation area
  •   Informative page title that includes the company/organization/site name
  •  Page footer area — copyright, last update, contact e-mail address
  •  Good use of basic design principles: repetition, contrast, proximity, and alignment
  •  Displays without horizontal scrolling at 1024x768 and higher resolutions
  •  Balance of text/graphics/white space on page
  •  Good contrast between text and background
  • Home page has compelling, interesting information above the fold (before scrolling down) at 1024x768
  • Home page downloads within 10 seconds on dial-up connection
 Navigation
  • Main navigation links are clearly and consistently labeled
  • Navigation is easy to use for target audience
  • All navigation hyperlinks "work" — are not broken
  • Navigation is structured in an unordered list (accessibility)
  • Navigation aids, such as site map, skip navigation link, or breadcrumbs are used (accessibility)
Color, Graphics and Multimedia
  • Use of different colors in page backgrounds/text is limited to a maximum of three or four colors plus neutrals 
  • Color is used consistently
  •  Graphics are optimized and do not significantly slow download
  • Each graphic used serves a clear purpose
  • Image tags use the alt attribute to configure alternate text to display if the browser or user agent does not support images (accessibility)
  • Animated images do not distract from the site and either do not repeat or only repeat a few times
  •  Each audio/video/Flash file used serves a clear purpose
  •  Download times for audio or video files are indicated
  • Links to downloads for media plug-ins are provided
  • Captions are provided for each audio or video file used (accessibility)
Content
  • Common fonts such as Arial or Times New Roman are used
  • Avoids the use of "Click here" when writing text for hyperlinks
  • If standard link colors are not used, hyperlinks use a consistent set of colors to indicate visited/nonvisited status
  • If graphics and/or media is used to convey meaning, the alternate text equivalent of the content is provided (accessibility)
  • Information is easy to find (minimal clicks)
  • Timeliness: The date of the last revision and/or copyright date is accurate
  • Content does not include outdated material
  • Content is free of typographical and grammatical errors
  • Content provides links to other useful sites
Functionality
  • All internal and external hyperlinks work
  • All forms function as expected
  • No JavaScript errors are generated
Browser Compatibility
  • Displays on popular versions Internet Explorer(IE), Firefox, Opera,. Chrome

Saturday, April 24, 2010

SEO: Directory Submission & Link Building Tips

There are two very pertinent reason why we submit to directories, first, to get more targeted traffic to your site and secondly, to build link popularity in hopes of a better page rank. Acquiring links from other websites may obtain the same results, providing they are qualified links meaning the website you want to exchange links with pertains to your business.


The search engines (SEs) have evolved over the years and will continue to evolve in the years to come. Google is by far the furthest along the evolutionary path.

Submitting your website to quality Directories is perhaps one of the best ways to acquire valuable inbound links. Directories, DMOZ and Yahoo hold significant weight. Google draws its directory results from DMOZ and Yahoo draws its directory results from its own Yahoo Directory.

Keep in mind that Directories have human editors they gather all the listings in that directory, getting listed in key directories means that it is seen by many people, therefore you are more apt to get your website's links recognized by the crawler based search engines.

 If your site is in a competitive search field then you really have no choice. Without a large number of links to your site, you have very little chance of achieving high search engine rankings.

The following are some suggestions on how to build effective SEO links while minimizing the risk of having your hand slapped by the search engines.

 There are many important tips to follow when submitting your web site to a directory.

What to look for
  • Here are some of the most important criteria's to take into consideration when submitting to directories:
  • Are your listings going to be posted on Static pages
  • Are you going to gain any Page Rank benefit
  • Are you able to add descriptive title to your link
  • Are you able to specify your own keywords
  • Are you able to submit multiple links under one listing
  • Is the directory listed in DMOZ or Yahoo
  • Are there more than 50 links on a category page
  • Can you enhance your listing by purchasing category sponsorship
  • If you are looking for additional traffic, does the target directory's Alexa rank justify the submission costs
Before You Submit
  • Make sure your site does not look like it is under construction and is not full of broken links.
  • Verify your site is not already listed in the directory. If you have a new site it is not likely that it exists within any directories.
  • Read the overall directory submission guidelines.
  • Choose the correct directory category: this is what adds value to the directories (organization).
Vary your link title text
The search engines look for evidence of unnatural behavior. In a perfect world, the SEs would like to see all links gained naturally. Since it would be highly unlikely for a large number of individuals to link to your site using the same link text you should vary your own link text.

Vary your link descriptions
Google is likely getting better at analyzing the text surrounding a link. Again it would be unnatural to always have the exact same text. The same descriptions could also trip duplicate content filters.

Seek links from related sites
It is widely believed that a link from a website in the same field is much more valuable than an unrelated link (most applicable for Google and Yahoo). Perhaps too many unrelated links can even get you a penalty.

Mix homepage and internal links
You should have some of your links pointing to internal pages of your websites, rather than have all you links pointing to your home page. Again, naturally attained links will seldom all point to your homepage. Having links pointing to your internal pages will also help your SE results.

Seek links from authority sites.

Links from authority sites will provide much more weight than non-authority sites. We can only guess at what sites might be considered authorities. Google seems to favor .gov and .edu sites.

Seek links on the upper half of the page
It is believed that the higher a link is on the page the more weight it will provide.

Seek links within page content
Links located within content will provide more weight than links in the margins or footers of a site.

Seek non-reciprocal links

Do reciprocal links provide less weight. I don't know if the proof is conclusive on this issue. If not, algos that handle this could be around the corner. It is feasible that sites with too many reciprocal links incur a penalty.

Seek links from older sites
Links from older, more established sites will provide more weight (applicable to Google) 

Friday, April 23, 2010

Subdomains or Subdirectories? From SEO point of view

 First, let’s define what we are talking about: “blog.domain.com” is a subdomain while “domain.com/blog” is a sub directory or a folder within a domain.

A sub directory is used as a folder within one domain to organize smaller pieces of content, like a category of several pages. For most people they will only ever need subdirectories.

A sub domain creates more separation than just a folder, basically creating a stand alone site that could easily be it’s own domain. However, you may want to piggyback on the main domain name. For example, google.com is the main site. Gmail actually lives at mail.google.com. Google Maps lives at maps.google.com, and Google Documents at docs.google.com. These are each stand alone sites and could be their own domains but they make more sense under the google umbrella.

How do sub domains effect SEO?

sub domains used to help with SEO because there was a chance domain.com AND blog.domain.com would show up in results while there was (and is) a limit on two pages per domain in a search engine results page (SERP).

One strategy that could make sense would be to create a subdomain for a section of your business or site that could really be a standalone site. If you are a department store, you may have “mystore.com” and use “electronics.mystore.com” to create a site with great SEO specific to electronics, since the searches will see it essentially a stand alone site about electronics. Then use “food.mystore.com” to target searches specific to food. If you had those things combined (along with ten others – shoes, jewelry, etc. ) the content is not as specific and may be confusing as to what the site is about. Meanwhile, they all still help pump up the image of the main domain “mysite.com”. You have created several specific relevant sites all benefitting from the main brand of “mystore.com”.

Which one should I use?

For most situations and for the average website, the easiest solution is a new subdirectory. If you are setting up a new blog, you can create a folder called “blog” install wordpress and you have your blog at “mydomain.com/blog”. There is no reason to use a whole subdomain for that. I like the simple idea that if you could almost justify starting an entirely new (but related) site, then use a subdomain. If you are simply adding a new category of pages with similar content, then just use a subdirectory. Save the subdomain for something that is big enough and clearly separate enough that it needs to be its own site.

If you can afford the time an money required to develop out each subdomain and if your main domain would be too convoluted by having too much on it, I’d say yes. If not, save yourself the heartache and extra work. Just make your site easy to navigate, use folders and you should do just fine.

Drawbacks to using sub domains

Each sub domain would be looked at by search engines as a new site, which means you will need to do everything you would normally do for a new site.In short, creating back-links, battling the sandbox, and all other problems associated with domain development are still present. If this sounds like too much trouble, you may want to consider creating sub folders within the domain.This would look like www.mydomain.com/folder.

Benefits to using a sub domain

Let’s say you had a site that had many categories in it. If you were to submit to directories you could submit each sub domain as it’s own individual category and not get penalized. The links from the subdomains to the main domain would be looked upon as one way links from another domain.

If a sub,domain becomes banned will it effect the main domain?

The answer is yes. It may get the main domain banned if they are linked to each other. There has been proof of main domains being banned, yet i have heard of many instances where they have not.The main domain may not get banned under certain circumstances. The question shouldn’t be whether the main domain can get banned because of a sub domain, but instead, why would your sub domain get banned in the first place.If you want to experiment with untested or controversial methods, do so on a new domain.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

15 Important Web Design Tips You Might Have Overlooked.

Here are 15 important website design tips that you might not be aware of or have overlooked. Consider taking advantage of them if you haven't already done so...

1. Custom 404 Pages

Create a custom 404 web page, so that any time your website visitor mistypes or misspells a URL on your site, they will still be provided with navigation options for your site (instead of getting nothing but a "Page Not Found" error message, which is neither friendly or helpful).

2. Redirect Non-www. To www.

Website visitors will often leave out the "www." portion when they type a URL or link to your website. Set the website up so that it automatically redirects any non-www version of your domain urls (http://yourdomain.com) to the www version (http://www.yourdomain.com) of your website.

3. Properly Sized Graphics

Size and define all graphics and images on your web pages properly and correctly. Web pages will load quicker if the graphics contained on each page are properly defined so they don't require the web browser to re-size them. Properly sized and defined images can reduce the web browser workload and speed up the page loading time.

4. Favicon

Add a Favicon (favorite icon) to your website, so that your company or product logo appears in the URL box. This icon will also show up in a bookmark list, and gives the web site an added level of professionalism.

5. Include RSS Auto-Discovery

If you offer an RSS feed for any content on your website, be sure to include auto-discovery code in the header of your website. This will allow many browsers and RSS readers to automatically detect the presence of an RSS feed and alert the visitor that it is available.

6. Alternate Domains

Domain names are relatively inexpensive, so you should register multiple domain versions and extensions in order to protect your brand. The varied domains can be parked on the main website, simply to prevent others from obtaining them. Registering alternate domain versions will help protect your brand.

7. Consistent Navigation

Navigation should remain consistent on a website. As a website visitor moves through the website, the navigation bar should remain in the same place on each page. This will make it easier for visitors to navigate your website, and become more comfortable as they move through your site.

8. Home Goes Home

The main graphic, company logo, or "header" at the top of the site should be included on every page in the site, and should always return the visitor to the home page of the website. This has become a web standard, and most visitors now expect to return to the main page of the site simply by clicking on the main top graphic from any page within the site.

9. Copyright Notice

Include a copyright notice on the bottom of each page contained on the website, and keep it current! It may seem trivial, but an out-of-date copyright notice can send a message to your visitors that the website and its content may be out-of-date as well.

10. Meaningful File Names

Use meaningful file names for any files, graphics, or web pages. Many search engines look at file names as part of their search algorithm, and using keywords in file names may help to improve search engine rankings.

11. Hyphens vs Underscores

When naming files and webpages, use hyphens (i.e. web-page.html) rather than underscores (i.e. web_page.html) for the file names. It is much easier for search engines to separate and index the keywords when hyphens are used.

12. Alt Tags

Use ALT tags to describe what images represent on web pages. ALT tags not only assist visually-impaired visitors in knowing what the images are, but they also help with search engine ranking.

13. Spell Check

Use a spell-check feature on the text of all web pages in a website. A website that contains mistyped or misspelled words just shouts "unprofessional". Take the extra few minutes necessary to check the spelling of text on each page of your website.

14. Test

After making changes to a website, test it! Many times, a webmaster will upload changes, confident in their abilities, only to later discover that in their attempt to fix one thing, they have "broken" something somewhere else. Make testing a habit after making even the most minor changes!

15. Keep It Simple

Simple is good. Remove unnecessary clutter and distractions from a website and navigation menu.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Importance Of Correct And Valid Html

HTML is the foundation of the web! HTML defines the structure and presentation of the website. Therefore, it needs to be clean, correct and validated.

It is not uncommon to make mistakes while writing code. To ensure that the code is written correctly and to fix any undue errors, HTML validators are used. There are a number of free online HTML validators available on the internet that are up-to-date and efficient. In fact, the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C has its very own W3C HTML Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org The W3C is a standard body that offers specifications and guidelines to enhance the accessibility of website and define standard HTML specifications.

It is very easy to use the W3C HTML Validation Service. You just need to enter the address of the online web page , upload the HTML file or documents. After you have done this, the service will automatically display a list of all the potential problems in the HTML. You can correct all the mistakes and resubmit it to confirm the consistency of the document.

However, in order to sort the problem, you would need to know what the problem is and how it can be sorted. This is something that bothers a lot of young web designers and developers who are fairly new to the intricacies of HTML. Fortunately, some of the most common HTML errors are in fact common. Here are some popular errors and ways to fix them.

Absence of DOCTYPE

The HTML document should start with a DOCTYPE declaration. In fact, it should be the first line of your document. If you do not start the HTML document with a DOCTYPE declaration, HTML validators wont be able to perform their job.

Absence of Closing Tags

One of the most common mistakes that happen in HTML coding is unclosed tags. Especially, I you have the habit of copying and pasting codes among documents, there may be several instances where you start a tag but forget to close it. This can wreck havoc on the layout of the web page.

Improper Nesting of HTML Tags

This is the case when you forget to close HTML tags in the reverse of the order in which you opened them. This further leads to discrepancies in the overall code. However, once you spot them, it is extremely easy to fix them. All you need to do is to arrange them accordingly.

Absence of Quotation Marks

Often in case of hyperlinks, people tend to start quotation marks but forget to close them. This results in the link not being created at all. It it important to go through the text carefully and close the quotation marks.

Absence of ALT Attributes

Alt tags are necessary in tag in order to display the alternate text that describes the image used on the web pages. Without the Alt tag, the image will be on its own supplying no information to search engines and thus hampering the accessibility of the website.

Once, you have corrected all the errors in your HTML codes, resubmit the document to the validator in order to ensure that the code is clean and free of all inconsistencies.

Web Design for the Web 2.0 Age

A well crafted website is vital to the success of any new business these days. Launch parties have replaced ribbon cuttings and websites often precede the opening of store doors. Giving your business a well developed and targeted “face” or website is the first step to getting customers to sign up and buy your product or service.

Web 2.0

Internet users have changed their expectations when it comes to visiting company websites. A new evolution of website expectations has been greeted with creative designs and developments. Whereas websites used to exist as a billboard, they are now a conversation starter and continuer, so to speak. This evolution has marked the change from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. A company’s website must not only provide information, but also draw people to their site with various strategies like blogs, social media and other user generated content providers.

Web 2.0 web design has opened up a whole gamut of ideas and creative solutions for business problems. By initiating their own conversation and integrating sales goals, websites can provide their target audiences with a place to voice their onions, but also a place to build brand loyalty.

Brand Loyalty – Everyone Has a Voice

When customers feel that your company cares about their thoughts and ideas, a relationship is born. This goes a long way to handling customer service issues as well as gaining long-term customers.

SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid !!!!!!

The key to understanding which SEO mistakes to avoid lies in understanding what big search engines like Google likes and does not like. In other words, the key to SEO traffic is to make your site more "likeable" to Google. Here are 6 mistakes which gives a negative effect on your SEO efforts.

1) Image headers and extensive image use.

Google spiders cannot read images like text. Therefore, your header cannot be quantified by Google's search engine and as we all know headers are extremely important for SEO. Therefore, use a text header with the "[h1]" tag instead. If you must use images, include keywords in the alt text.

2) Splash pages

Probably the biggest mistake anyone can make is by having a splash page. The first thing Google reads is your main page and if your main page is one big hunk of flash videos, you will be losing out on tons of potential free traffic. Besides, nobody is interested in your flash video, they are just interested in the content.

3) Too many keywords

If the keyword density of your site is over 5%, your site will come across as spam and that will have negative effects on SEO. Instead, use stemmed keywords. (key phrases related to your targeted keyword)

E.g. internet marketing tips and online marketing advice.

4) Too many backlinks from low quality sites

Getting too many link exchanges from low quality sites or link farms can have a serious negative effect on your website. Not only will you lose credibility among Google and your readers, your site will come off as a link farm or spam site. They solution: Get links from authority sites in the related niche. In other words, use google toolbar to check for pages with high ranking in your niche and try to get links from them.

5) Bad language or profanity

Did your mother used to wash your mouth with soap whenever you said bad words? Google hates profanity and bad language. Therefore, stay away from it, unless you are running an adult website.

6) Black hat SEO

This is something that came about a few years back by internet marketers who understood Google too well and tried to exploit their search engine mechanisms. What they did was use software which produced 1000 mini blogs filled with keywords and linked to one another. This is a huge no-no. Google's brilliant engineers have found ways to overcome these practices and have banned all sorts of black hat SEO sites.

Google search engine is always upgrading their algorithm to prevent from SEO abusers and thus, it is always good to stay on top of the SEO trends so that your site will not lose traffic.

Basic 10 SEO Tips to Start with! :)

People want to have expertise on it, so they will make money (because of most of blogger that study SEO because want to make money online). SEO is a drug. Therefore, there is out of date or invalid SEO advice getting around, not to mention the information that could also make our pages being banned.

I hope this tips are not boring you but could assist assist my readers in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines. 

Here We Go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


This post only highlights about Google and Yahoo!, the two will bring a fat traffic and a fat traffic means money!


1. Put the descriptive keyword within title tag, this will make search engine robots recognize your page quickly and know what the content is all about. Title tag is located on head tags, therefore insert descriptive keyword or key phrase that describe on your pages, this way your chances to gain targeted traffic will be a lot bigger.

Not to forget, be sure the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. Because they will be appeared in a search result page (s).

2. When you make an anchor text to link your page from different page or different blogs, make sure the anchor text is the same with text of your title tag. This is very useful if you have many pages or linked by many others blogs.

3. Another recommended way is the text you put within the title tag must also be put within the body of the page. It will be weird if text of title page are not found in the body of the page.

By this every reader that clicks on your page that appears in SERP will be ensured that they clicked on the accurate link and landed at the page where they seek to visit. Robots love this because of there's relevance between the title of the page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Make sure you Do not utilize the same title tag on every page on your website. This way, your pages will be likely not get indexed or crawled because of SE Robots will think that all of the pages are the same.

I often use the headline of my pages as my title tag, this is meant to assist the robots knows quicker and exactly what my page is all about. The most good place to add the headline is in the h1 tag to make it the same as the title tag tex.

5. I said it before and will say it again now, DO NOT SPAM the description or meta tag keyword by stuffing meaningless keywords. All SEO experts are in one voice that this kind of technique is no longer effective.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. DO not use doorway pages. Since search engines like to crawl visitor friendly homepage/subpage that contains relevant content to the keywords searched in SE, therefore DO not use doorway pages, because they are designed only for robots, not for visitors.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Use the alt tag to gives description of our images. Alt tag will assist robots that crawl your images to find specific pages in your site and consequently help SE user who use text only while Googling.

10. Build one-way link at the proper amount to help your page/homepage position in Search Engine.