Tropical Blogging

I voted. Had to hold my nose on some of my choices, but I did it. This would have been a good year to have NOTA as a choice. Unbeknownst to me, my precinct moved since the last time I voted. I went to where I used to vote, but there was nothing there. Then I drove around aimlessly for a bit until I spotted the blue “Precinct 30″ sign. Here in Punta Gorda, we use old-fashioned pieces of paper and have to color in little ovals with a pen. I hate that — I never could color inside the lines. Also, I officially have middle-aged eyes, and I forgot to bring my reading glasses with me, so I had to squint painfully at the printing on the ballot to read it. The election workers were, as always, pleasant and helpful. Around here, they’re always old, too. When I get old maybe I’ll have time to work elections.

So I have a client I’m developing a website for. The client has been great to work with, and we’ve made good progress on the new site. But there was a problem: The client kept complaining that he couldn’t reach his site — he was getting “not found” error messages. He told me that he could, at one point, get to the site without the “www” — which was particularly strange because one of the first things I do on a new site is implement a 301 permanent redirect from the non-www to the www version of the URL. (more…)

I recently had 2 diametrically opposite experiences with phishing. In the world of the Internet, “phishing” is when some entity (a scammer) — typically, a website or e-mail sender — pretends to be some organization that a user has a relationship with, and attempts to entice the user into providing personal and confidential information (such as passwords, bank account numbers, PIN numbers, etc.) to the scammer. eBay, PayPal, banks, and other similar sites are popular phishing targets. (more…)

So I got a gentle tweak from Zack Katkin at Unique ID Web Design because I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been busy working on projects for clients, but I know that’s no excuse. I’m breaking the Golden Rule of Blogging, which I drill into my clients when they want to start a blog, to wit: You must blog regularly! Thanks, Zack, for the nudge. Okay, enough of that. Today I’m going to talk about crawlability and web design. I got to browsing the Unique ID blog and read Zack’s post “Straight From Google, The Four Biggest Search Rank Factors,” in which “crawlability” is listed as the very top, highest priority, most important search engine ranking ractor for a web site. This week I’ve also been following a discussion at the High Rankings forums about whether web designers have any SEO responsibility when designing a web site. (more…)

Many of my clients already have an existing web site when they contact me. Often they’re unhappy with their site’s visual design, or its functionality, or its performance in the search engines. I hate — I really hate — telling a potential client that their site needs to be completely re-developed from the ground up in order achieve the level of performance they’re looking for. Yes, I can charge more for a complete redevelopment, and I like that part, but it always feels sort of “snake oil salesman” to me. I’d rather tell the client, “Yes, we can work with your existing site. We can make these changes, and add this functionality, and we can do this, that and the other thing.” But sometimes that’s simply not possible. Particularly when the potential client is looking for improved search engine performance or better usability. (more…)

Difficult as it may be to believe, but by January of 2007, Google is still unable to recognize when URLs that obviously lead to the same page are in fact the same page. So what’s a URL, and what’s the problem here? (more…)

Yesterday I sniped at Google with my No NoFollow post, but today I’m here to praise Google. The technology that powers Google Maps is so very cool, and the very best thing about it, in my opinion, is that Google lets us use that technology right on our very own web sites! (more…)

For about the umpteenth time, this morning I responded to a question on a newsgroup by some poor soul who didn’t understand why the images weren’t showing up on his web page. The links were correct. The images were uploaded to the correct directory. But when he viewed his page in his browser, the images were just …. not there. As if they had never existed. (more…)

What do web site development, search engine optimization and Hippocrates have in common? A line from the Hippocratic Oath comes to mind: First, do no harm. In a previous post, I touched on how the technological factors underlying a web site are important to the site’s search engine optimization. These factors aren’t important so much for their ability to rank a site highly, as they are for avoiding problems that can harm a site’s ranking. (more…)

I use a fairly wide variety of software programs in my work, on both the Mac and PC platforms (primarily Mac, of course). Some programs stand head and shoulders above the others, because they provide so much value, and/or make my work (and my life) easier. (more…)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often referred to as if it is some single monolithic task. It’s not. SEO includes everything from the technical configuration of the server hosting a web site, to the site’s coding and structure, to the visible content on the pages, to the development of incoming links to the site from other sites. (more…)

I’m building some photo gallery pages for a client. Apparently the client will be regularly adding new photo galleries, and some of them will include a fairly significant number of photos. Sure, I can batch process the images in Photoshop to create the thumbnails and larger images, but the tools available to create the actual galleries leave something to be desired with respect to the time required and the code generated. (more…)