 | | |
| | |
|
Spaces home  My Web Design SourcePhotosProfileFriendsMore |  Tools   |
My Web Design SourceWeb Design, Web Designing, Website Design
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
There are no photo albums.
Thanks for visiting!
June 10 Remember to Tip Your Server... And Your SEO It's been an interesting trip. And a huge change. Working in a
restaurant with prep cooks threatening to beat me up in the parking
lot. Exploding ovens, missing eyebrows. Old women yelling at me, "How
hard is your job?!" Sliced off fingers (saved on ice). Dumping grease. Restaurants are never a bad gig. It's mostly good money, and an excellent jumping off point for kids. But I don't really feel like asking if you'd like a refill on your ice tea forever. I also didn't dig myself into student debt to make kiddie cocktails for children who are just going to throw their mac-n-cheeze on the floor anyway. SEO and web marketing in any aspect is a brand new concept for me. I had no idea men and women of an entire company work to position websites through keywords and relevant linking. And those were the same folks behind a vast majority of websites that are returned when I search for movie theaters or hair spray potato cannons. The concept, new to me remember, is both horribly obvious and incredibly ingenious. Thanks SEO for letting me find the Potato Pulverizer at the top of my SERP! Yet search engine optimization isn't too different than waiting
tables, cooking food, or folding and packing cardboard boxes at a
cucumber factory for ten hours a day at 5.25/hr (my first job, I was
14, the only one who spoke English, I lasted 5 days). Resources for June 03 Do you want a Web presence for your business?Even if people shop at real stores, they use the Web first to research products, find service providers or stores and get directions. Without a Web site, you miss out on this traffic. But finding someone to design your Web site can be a challenge — especially when bids on the same specifications can range from $500 to $15,000 (and some of the worst sites cost the most to create). Before thinking Web, think results. An online store isn't separate from your "real" business, it's your cyber storefront, and it's open for business all the time. Just as you wouldn't expect a great store on a back road to generate much business if you never mentioned it or visited it, you can't expect automatic sales just because you've opened an outlet on the Web. The fundamentals of online and offline marketing are the same. You still need a plan, good products, great service and the ability to communicate all this to potential customers. Remember those e-commerce sites you've visited only to abandon your cart without buying anything? Or the marketing agency whose site was so creative you couldn't find out what they did or how to call them? You don't want to make the same mistakes.
Know your customers. Don't assume one size fits all. If you're
marketing to women, don't assume that all women like pink and have
children. Online marketing must be just as focused as offline
marketing. In fact, the Web allows you to fine-tune your focus for a
market that's much larger than the community where you're based. If you
want to sell feather boas for dogs, the Web lets you do it.
Get a little technical. Rather than abdicate responsibility for your
online-marketing success to a Web techie, make sure the site designer
includes a content-management system so you can manage your own
content, including images and document uploads. If you can type and use
Word, you can manage the content of your Web site. And the more you
learn about Web technology, the more empowered you are in negotiations
with Web designers, because you'll know what you're paying for and why. Resources for June 01 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Your Website, Susan Nefzger explains One of the most important aspects of web page design is to make your
page easy to navigate by the search engines. Search engines heavily
favor text over graphics, and HTML over other editing formats.
Resources for My Web Design Source May 22 Affordable Website Designer in TorranceGoogle questioned over privacy practicesThe top Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee asked Google chief executive Eric Schmidt on Wednesday to detail the search engine's privacy practices since it acquired rival DoubleClick. "It is critical that Google's and DoubleClick's policies and procedures for handling this information be transparent, and that every effort is made to protect consumers' data," Texas Rep. Joe Barton wrote in a letter to the company dated May 21. In the letter, Barton asked if and how data collected by Google and DoubleClick about computer users would be merged and how the data would be used, and if Google planned to continue allowing users to opt out of ad-serving cookies. Privacy advocates have expressed concern that a wave of consolidation in online advertising would lead to a concentration of personal information in the hands of a few powerful companies. Resources for May 21 Los Angeles website designGetting Started with SilverlightDespite all the wonderful things you can say about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I think most people doing a lot of web-based development would agree that they form a pretty poor environment for developing modern sites and applications. If you care about your content working on most web browsers (or even just Internet Explorer and Firefox), accommodating their differences can be maddening. Many techniques and JavaScript libraries have been developed and shared over the years that can reduce this frustration, but none of them are silver bullets. In addition to browser differences, the graphical capabilities of HTML are too limiting for many user experiences that people want to create. Drawing a simple line, incorporating video, and a number of other things are extremely difficult or impossible with HTML alone. It's not that these technologies were poorly designed, but simply that they were designed for hyperlinked documents rather than the extremely rich presentations that most people want to create on the Web these days. Considering these issues, it's no wonder that Adobe Flash has been so successful. Whether someone wants to create a professionally designed website, an online game (or any number of other applications), or even a simple advertisement, Flash has been a natural choice for escaping the limitations of HTML. If you doubt the pervasiveness of Flash, try this experiment: Think of a brand of food you eat, and then navigate to the brand's website. Chances are you'll find Flash content at your destination. (I just tried pepsi.com, doritos.com, and oscarmayer.com, and all three are using Flash at the time of writing.) The Flash development experience leaves much to be desired, however. Flash (the runtime environment, as well as the tool) suffers from the same basic problem as HTML: Many people are trying to use it for creating rich applications, but it was originally designed for something else (in this case, simple animations). This is why the introduction of Silverlight is so exciting. A promising alternative to Flash, Silverlight enables the creation of rich web content and applications using a lightweight add-on that is friendly to both designers and developers. Yes, the first version of Silverlight is primitive in areas, but it's a true development platform based on concepts and APIs introduced with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in 2006 and in development for many years prior. And, unlike just about any software that has come out of Microsoft, Silverlight is a small download! Version 1.0 is less than 1.5MB, so users who don't have it can get it pretty quickly when browsing to Silverlight content. (By default, Silverlight also automatically updates to later versions when they are available.) Silverlight might just be the silver bullet many designers and developers have been waiting for. Silverlight 1.0 applications are created with a mixture of XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language), HTML, and JavaScript, so they are easy to integrate into existing web content and compatible with popular Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) libraries and techniques. XAML is an XML-based declarative language described in depth in the next chapter. In typical Silverlight applications, a XAML file contains a hierarchy of visual elements that must be rendered on the screen. Silverlight parses the XAML content on initialization, and then renders the content as appropriate. Digging DeeperA Note for Those Afraid of JavaScriptA few readers might be excited at the idea of using JavaScript to create Silverlight content or applications. If you're like most developers I know, however, you're disappointed to be "forced" to use it in version 1.0. However, programming in JavaScript isn't the worst thing in the world. JavaScript is a very powerful dynamic language, and you can even use it in an object-oriented way if you follow clever patterns that people have devised over the years. (Note that JavaScript really has nothing to do with Java.) In addition, now that Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is all the rage, there are a number of useful tools and libraries to help you be productive with JavaScript, and they keep getting better. Visual Studio 2008 boasts a number of improvements for JavaScript develop-ment, especially related to debugging and IntelliSense. The pain of programming in JavaScript (when used as part of a website) is often not because of the language itself but rather differences in the HTML Document Object Model (DOM) provided by various web browsers. Fortunately, writing JavaScript that interacts solely with Silverlight objects doesn't have this issue because the Silverlight object model remains the same regardless of the host browser. Most Silverlight applications still require JavaScript that interacts with the HTML DOM, but your exposure to the DOM can be much more limited. And for those cases, ASP. NET AJAX (or other popular AJAX libraries) is a good fit for hiding browser differences. Resources for
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Invite as friend
