March 13th, 2008 by Jenna Gruhala
We came across a great article on the do’s and don’ts of Google search engine optimization (SEO). The beef of the article is included below.
DO
- Have other quality, relevant sites link to yours
- Submit a site map using your Google Webmaster Tools account
- Submit your site to quality, high authority directories in the appropriate category
- Make a site with text links and a clear hierarchy, and make sure every page is reachable by at least one static text link
- Create useful, unique and clearly written content
- Make sure your title tags and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate
- Maintain clean HTML code
- Keep the outgoing links on a page under 100
- Make it easy for search bots to crawl your site without error
- Make use of the robots.txt file to limit crawling on pages that aren’t useful to visitors
- Make pages for users, not search engines
DON’T
- Don’t include broken links on your site
- Don’t use hidden text or links
- Don’t cloak or use sneaky redirects
- Don’t load pages with keywords or phrases a.k.a spam
- Don’t send automated queries to Google
- Don’t create duplicate content
- Don’t create pages that install Trojans, viruses, etc.
- If you participate in an affiliate program, don’t provide duplicate, run-of-the-mill content
- Don’t participate in linking schemes – bloggers are watching you!
Source: seonoobs.com
Posted in SEO, Workflow having 1 comment »
March 6th, 2008 by Jack Keller
You have a client, they have money, a goal begins to emerge. Before long you are headlong into a design project. What are the steps to take, how do you get from point “Okay, we have a deal” to point “Here’s the finalized results now pay up”?
A project can start on a few different levels, either taking an existing design and creating a reality, or creating the concept from scratch, and then taking the concept into a reality. This here will only deal wiht the former as it’s all about how to get the look from Photoshop* and putting it successfully to Firefox, IE, Safari, etc.
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February 22nd, 2008 by Jenna Gruhala
Agility Recovery Solutions, a Snackbox PR client, offers great information regarding business interruption planning. Read on to learn more.
Paul Sullivan has seen it all. A 25-year veteran of disaster recovery and business continuity management, Sullivan witnessed the growth of continuity planning among the Fortune 1000 in the 1980s. He watched, first hand, the successes and failures of business continuity plans following the events of September 11, 2001 and in 2005 throughout the most active hurricane season in recorded history. Today, Sullivan is helping small and medium-sized companies plan for and recover after significant business interruptions.
“Continuity planning has always been associated with big business,” said Sullivan, Vice President and General Manager, Agility Recovery Solutions. “We’re using the same knowledge, strategies and tactics we developed with the Fortune 1000 and implementing them among small and medium-sized businesses across North America.”
Agility Recovery Solutions, a former division of General Electric, focuses planning and recovery efforts on small and medium-sized businesses, though the company continues to do work with giants such as IBM and HP.
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February 16th, 2008 by Jack Keller
Information flow. It’s a problem we experience every day, and all too often in this line of work. When information flow is halted, it is as if you’ve jumbled your index cards before a big presentation and now you don’t know exactly what you have to focus on to keep things moving. The path to an efficient workflow and timely completion has experienced a slight disconnect. In this case, you have to fumble through your information and possibly come off looking poorly to your client, which nobody ever wants to do.
So how can you manage information better? As a project begins, the information flow is reasonable; you ask questions and get answers to help you develop the project scope. Email is a great resource because you are given a digital paper trail; however, a lot of time can be spent on the phone gathering information. How do you keep that portion straight? This is where I used to jot notes on scraps of paper and text files, but ended up getting the information jumbled at some point, which usually left me with egg on my face.
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February 13th, 2008 by Jack Keller
So often you may want to show a little gallery of photos on your blog or website, you have a few choices out there. Choice one would be to just do a down and dirty bit of html, <img src=" etc etc or you could go with a program that creates galleries. Those usually don't integrate with a site too well, and often are overkill for showing the world your new car, puppy or dinner entrees.
Luckily if you have your FTP program and a few pics handy you can just traverse your directories and spit out the files in code. This can be handy for swapping the files around and even adding more down the road, it will dynamically expand the gallery.
PHP:
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$path = "/home/user/public/foldername/"; //path from root
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$dir_handle = @
opendir($path) or
die("Unable to open $path");
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if($file == "." || $file == ".." || $file == "index.php" )
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continue;
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echo '<img src="$file" /><br />';
//formatting this is up to you
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}
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If you want to be slick, make thumbnails with the same name, but tag like tn_ before the image name and put them in another folder, this will allow you to call something like this:
PHP:
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echo '<a href="$file"><img src="otherfolder/tn_$file" /></a><br />';
Note: This will also work for files, you can add options to filter only images if you'd like.
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