edster

Hmm. Alright. Obviously misjudged something here! Well, I'll probably write it all up anyway for my own use, and upload the PDF or something when its done for anyone that's interested.

A few weeks ago, after years of procrastinating, I decided to finally bite the bullet and dive into trying to understand the world of SEO. Maybe it's because I'm a naturally a programmer-sort, but I've found the whole thing pretty difficult. Not the concepts... But just wading through all the misinformation, sales material, and downright crap to find some actual hard facts. And then harmonising them into something that makes sense. So, to save other people the same pain, I'm going to try writing up this all up into a series of posts. The idea is that this thread will be entirely no-nonsense. Everything I post will either be: Substantiated by decent empirical evidence. Confirmed by direct information from Google, Bing, Yahoo! or DuckDuckGo. Referenced in patents or other legal material filed by the above companies. By the end of it, I hope it will give new webmasters a rough - but actually clear and reliable - framework of all the things they need to bear in mind. **First post tomorrow, hopefully **

I've never done this. But... from what I know changing the hosting alone is unlikely to have any impact so long as a couple of things hold constant: Domain and URLs don't change. This should (I hope!) be obvious. The server is located in same region as the existing one. Google are one company that have made clear . So, for instance, if it's currently hosted in the UK, and the target market is the UK, then moving it to a US server would probably have some negative impact. The response time is not significantly affected. Again, Google are one company that use response time as a ranking factor. I can't think of any other likely ranking factors of the top off my head that are solely hosting specific. Hope that helps Alex

Thanks for the honest replies guys. Glad you all like the idea in itself I think you're right Tobes and Beno, as a paid-for model it'd probably work best (or only) if pitched at sites where errors / spammy links have a real monetary or reputational impact. For most people it's probably overkill and not worth paying for. Thanks for that sanity check. Hmmm. Maybe e-commerce sites alone is enough of a niche to make it worthwhile though... or at least a reasonable starting point. Trying so hard to do the sensible thing and do market research first. It's taking all my willpower not to jump to my editor and start working up a bayesian classifier and some machine-learning algos

Hi, Just hoping for a bit of advice / feedback from people here. I've been thinking about building a SaaS product for a while, and had the idea of setting up something along the following lines: Someone submits the websites they manage, and the service crawls them on a periodic basis (daily/weekly?) looking for problems with links. Looks for 404 and other errors on both internal and external links Looks for Holding page / For sale page / 'Relevant search' page / other spammyness (or outdated pageness...) on external links Any problems get automatically notified back to the person. I know some frameworks (Django for instance) have 404 notifications built in, and I've found a few sites that do one-off crawls looking for 404 errors. But nothing so far that does the dodgy-site checking or makes it easy to check multiple sites periodically. So, for anyone reading this who's a professional webmaster / maintains lots of sites, is this something you would theoretically use? Is it something you would part with your hard-earned cash for? Or am wasting my time thinking about this and barking up the wrong tree!? Any feedback, even (or especially!) if it's to tell me it's a stupid idea, would be really appreciated! Cheers

Not for anything... just practising with Photoshop a bit. Took bloody hours!

Hi, I like it overall. For me, the texture was nice but I thought a little too coarsely grained. Maybe try something a bit finer, like White Sand off of http://subtlepatterns.com/? I think the "I'm available to hire" could do with a bit more thought. It just feels a bit flat, and doesn't make me want to click it. But I can see why you've styled it that way to fit with the logo. I dunno. Maybe try moving it into the footer where you can do more with it, and splitting the nav into the one line floated right? Alex

I've just been making a pure CSS button for a practice project. Surprisingly, I think it turned out quite nicely so I thought I'd share! You can see it here. Anyhow, here's the code. Feel free to re-use it for whatever you like <a class="button">Reserve Tickets »</a> a.button { /* General styles */ font: bold 13px/20px 'arial', sans-serif; background-color: #a8d848; color: white; outline: 0; border: 0; padding: 10px 20px; text-decoration: none; /* And now the fun starts! */ text-shadow: 0 -1px 1px #999999; border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 5px; box-shadow: 1px 0px 2px #999999; -moz-box-shadow: 1px 0px 2px #999999; -webkit-box-shadow: 1px 0px 2px #999999; border-bottom: 1px solid #aaaaaa; background-image: linear-gradient(top, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2)); background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2)); background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2)); background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2))); transition: background-color 0.2s linear; -moz-transition: background-color 0.2s linear; -webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s linear; } a.button:hover { cursor: pointer; background-color: #90c32a; } a.button:active { position: relative; top: 1px; left: 1px; }

As a fledgling designer, I haven't yet settled into a workflow that I'm happy with, and I was curious about how other people manage theirs. So... How do you get from someone first approaching you, to mockups, to a published website? What tools do you use to do/help with the work? How do you you decide things like content, layout and colour scheme? How do you manage feedback and billing? That sort of thing! It's a pretty broad question, but looking forward to the responses. Hopefully we'll all learn some good stuff

Hi Josh, Here's my recommendations: PHP 101: PHP For the Absolute Beginner Covers functions, objects, database access, error handling and various other things. Good clear series of tutorials I think. PHP Manual Comprehensive guide to everything PHP. Not so great for learning, but very handy when you need to find out something specific. The user notes at the bottom of each page are sometimes more useful that the official documentation... PHP Security Guide Vital reading if you're planning to put your project out into the big bad world! PHP Frameworks Once you're familiar with the above and comfortable with vanilla PHP, you might want to look into using a framework to speed up development time. There's loads of frameworks, each with their pros and cons, and suited to different use cases. Personally, I found CodeIgniter's documentation great when I was starting out. Hope that helps!

I think it's horses for courses. Depends on your skills, and the nature of the work. Personally, my favorite thing is to sketch out rough ideas on paper, then jump straight into designing in the browser. My weapons of choice usually being Slim and original syntax Sass. There's lots of people who like to design this way, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. 37Signals are big advocates for instance. With CSS3 and Sass Mixins it's just as quick as using PS nowadays, and you end up with something 'real' and clickable at the end of it. No translating into HTML. On the other hand, if you are creating a site that has loads of detail, texturing or illustration, then there's no getting away from the fact that a graphics editor like PS or Gimp will be the more appropriate environment to start the the work in. It's probably worth getting familar with both approaches, then using whichever is the best fit from project to project. p.s If you've never tried Sass, give it a whirl. It's amazing

Hi, It's a bit tricky to answer without more information. Can you explain a little more - or even better - post up the code that you've already tried and isn't working?

If you've got very high standards and are looking for a top-notch designer, you'll probably have to put in quite a bit of legwork. I'd suggest looking through sites where lots of good designers post their work. Dribbble is one place that immediately springs to mind. Find some bits of work of work that have seem to have a style and level of quality which you think chimes with your needs. From there (or via a bit of Googling) you should be able to find the personal websites of the people who did the work (most will have one). Do they do freelance web design? If so, have a look through their portfolios, and then pick the two or three designers that you think would be the best match for you. Contact them, and see if their personalities are cool. If they are, you think you would be happy working with them, and they are interested in the project, sound them out about prices. Sure you can take it from there

What web server would you be using? If it's Apache, I think you should be able to use your .htaccess file to block anyone getting access to the config.xml. That would solve your 'BUT'. This is completely untested (I don't have Apache on my machine, sorry), but something like the following, slapped in the same directory as the config.xml, should be a start: <FilesMatch config.xml> Deny from all </FilesMatch> Links which might help: http://davidwalsh.name/htaccess-security-include-files http://www.garnetchaney.com/htaccess_tips_and_tricks.shtml

Cheers Kingy, glad you like it

Yes, the text should still appear on the right. Floating something (like an image in your case) does pretty much exactly as it sounds. Your image will float towards the left, whilst all the text wil flow around it to the right hand side. A List Apart had a nice tutorial on floats recently if you want to learn more: alistapart.com/articles/css-floats-101/

The simplest way to add your dividers is probably to save your nice fading border as an image, and then set this image as the background on each list item: #twitter_update_list li { padding: 5px 5px 5px 5px; list-style: none; background: url(/path/to/your/image.png) no-repeat bottom; }

The PHPSec guide is well worth a read too I think: phpsec.org/projects/guide/ If you want to play it safe, I'd recommend using a framework for any applications / pages you're making publically available. CodeIgniter, for example, takes care of a lot of the potential trouble spots like XSS, Session handling, and SQL injection for you.

jQuery Fundamentals by Rebecca Murphy is great. The full book is published online under Creative Commons (and the source is even on Github): jqfundamentals.com/book/index.html

That looks lovely The coloured, transparent tooltips are brilliant. I think the logo is nice. A couple of suggestions if they help: I felt strange to me to have the font colour changing on hover, but without it being a link. I wanted to click - but couldn't. Especially on the 1-2-3 section. Maybe just keep it black? I think that would look ok. The proposal form felt very overwhelming... maybe trim it to the bare essentials. You want it to be *easy* for people to contact you, especially in the first instance! You can always find out the rest of the important information later. Don't let people's first experience of working with you be a onerous one!

Hi, There are a couple of alternatives I think, and a lot of scope to streamline it. First use a CSS reset (meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/). This will remove the margins and padding on all page elements and make everything flush and easier to work with. Divs are block elements - to get one stacked on top of another (like your bannerh1 and bannerh2) there is no need to use relative positioning or z indexes to make this work (actually, you don't need divs at all - h1 and h2 are block elements too). Also, using tables for layout (like your nav bar) is generally frowned upon by designer sorts. An unordered list for your navigation bar might be better. Use the <p> tag for text paragraphs too. <html> ... <body> <h1>Mulgrew Enterprises</h1> <h2>For Everything IT at Home and at Work</h2> <ul class="nav"> <li>Shop</li> <li>Servicing</li> ... </ul> <p>Mulgrew Enterprises pride ourselves in our excellent service and great value.</p> <p>We are also now working on two pieces of software that will be released free of charge for private use</p> ... </body> </html> And CSS like this: **Include the CSS Reset here** body { background: url(/images/banner.gif) no-repeat } h1 { color: #0000FF; font: bold 420% "Rockwell", "Comic Sans MS", "Comic Sans"; text-shadow: black 4px 3px; height: 70px; } h2 { color: black; font: bold 180% "Rockwell", "Comic Sans MS", "Comic Sans"; text-shadow: grey 1px 1px, grey -1px -1px; height: 40px; } .nav { background-color: black; } .nav li { display: inline; margin-right: 10px; } .nav li a { color: silver; text-decoration: none; } p { border-bottom: solid 5px black; } That's completely untested, but should get you close to what you're looking for in a more sematically correct way. P.s. If possible, find an alternative to Comic Sans. Not a great look for a professional IT company! Hope that helps Alex

Sure you can. It should work just fine. <div> <p>This is my first div</p> <div> <p>This is a nested text only div</p> </div> <div> <p>This is a nested div with text and an image</p> <img src="/path/to/my/image.jpg" /> </div> </div>

Haha! That URL game was awesome! Thanks for sharing

I'm not familiar with Dreamweaver, so I don't know if there's a built in function or not. Typically though, you would do this using a JavaScript library like jQuery. Assuming you have images called furniture-red.jpg and furniture-blue.jpg, and HTML like this: <form> <input type="radio" class="picker" name="furniture-color" col="red" /> Red <input type="radio" class="picker" name="furniture-color" col="blue" /> Blue </form> <img src="" /> Then your jQuery would be: $(document).ready(function(){ $(".picker").click(function(){ var color = $(this).attr("col"); $("img").attr("src", "/path/to/images/furniture-" + color + ".jpg"); }); }); I've just given this a trial run, and it works a treat. If you're a bit confused by the above, I'd suggest taking a look at the jQuery beginner tutorials: docs.jquery.com/Tutorials Alex

Forget trends, focus on learning the basics first. 1. Make sure you have a solid understanding of HTML and CSS2. htmldog.com is a good place to start. Hand code, don't use Dreamweaver or suchlike. 2. Learn a bit about how the Internet works and commons protocols. The client-server model, HTTP, DNS, TCP/IP, URLs. Get comfortable using FTP. Google is your friend here. Keep reading and reading. 3. Learn basic programming. Forget web-specific stuff, focus on understanding variables, operators, types, arrays, controls structures, loops, classes, functions and inheritance. I'd suggest learning Ruby, Python, or if you must, PHP. 4. Learn SQL. Learn how to query databases from your chosen language. 5. Learn a web framework. Try CodeIgniter (PHP), Django (Python), or Sinatra or Rails (Ruby). All have fantastic documentation. 6. Understand common security issues and how to mitgate against them (or how your framework does): SQL injection, CRSF, XSS, Session fixation and Hijacking. 7. Learn and use a version control system for your work - Git and Mercurial are both great. By the time you get to this point, you should probably have learnt enough to start to get an understanding of what you don't know, and what is a good idea for you too learn next. Hope that helps Alex