AH Digital FX Studios

AH Digital FX Studios Featured in River City Weekly

21 Apr 2008 22:40:35 GMT

Recently AH Digital FX Studios was featured in River City Weekly's article about businesses in Idaho that have succeeded on the web. (Full Article (535 K pdf) )

Kevin Keefe remembers answering the phone in Idaho Falls late one night, and on the other end was a voice with a unique accent. “Hi, I’m calling from Liverpool, and I want to buy a ski hat.” That’s just one of the stories he has to tell after retailing his custommade ski hats since 2001 on the Internet from his Web site www.getaKLU.com.

Keefe’s business, KLU Mountain Outerwear, is just one of many locally owned businesses that have taken advantage of the Internet. Some are custom-designed, some are variations of a ready-made site, but all bring customers easy access to their information and products.

Keefe and his wife sew the hats after customers place their orders online with their own head measurements and choices of colors and patterns. It only takes about a day to sew it up before they ship them out to all parts of the world.

“We don’t do any advertising,” said Keefe. “It’s all about search engines. The person who figures out how to get number one in search engines makes a million bucks.” Keefe for several years had a Web site that simply told about their products but didn’t have a way to order. He did a redesign of his site in 2001, then started taking credit cards as a form of payment and put in metatags so that his site was the first one found if someone searched for the key words “ski hats.”

“Our business went up five-fold,” he said. Last year was their best year ever, grossing about $12,000 in sales. In December he took two weeks off of his day job at the site; KLU mountain outerwear took 176 orders that month and each Monday shipped out about 32 orders.

“That’s our busy season. We don’t take vacations or visit family in the winter. By about March it slows down, and we have summers off, which is what we want,” Keefe said. “I thought about adding a summer line, but I’d rather go rock climbing and kayaking.”

Kent Frecker never really advertised his custom saddle-making business in its 18-year span. But when Frecker Saddlery went online (www.freckersaddlery. com), he doubled his business and hired two more employees.

“We did it for convenience,” Frecker said. “Our goal wasn’t to expand any; it’s easier to refer people to that Web site than keep making copies of pictures or try to make a catalog. Then we got bombarded with phone calls and more people wanting saddles. Now and then we’d put extra saddles on the Web site, and they would sell. Then those customers would come back and have orders lined up. It kind of surprised us. Now we get phone calls from all across the country.”

The Web site is essentially Frecker’s store, which allows added flexibility. “We don’t have a storefront per se. The shop is here at my house and we don’t keep business hours. If I want to go for a horse ride today I can close the shop, let the answering machine answer the phone or let the emails come in. It gives us a lot of freedom,” he said.

Convenience was the main reason for Melissa and Jim Barnard of Rigby to put Landmark Development and Silver Creek Construction online (www. landmarkdevelopment.org and www.silvercreekconstruction. com). It’s easy to list lots for sale and house plan descriptions online.

“It’s convenient for customers. They go to the site at their leisure and don’t feel sales pressure. It’s technology that everybody uses. It’s a way to find us and for the Web site the more information the better,” Melissa said. “We have protective covenants listed and any plots or house amenities. If I had to send out a mass mailing it would be very expensive, and I’d probably miss my market. Online it’s specific. They’re the customer you want because they’re looking.”

Adam Hayes started his Web design business in 2002. He does everything from the initial concept, design and branding to the coding, back-end administration and search engine optimization.

With several local and national clients, including Keefe, Frecker and Barnard, he has a few tips for those thinking of starting out on the Web.

He has helped individuals develop a small side business and helped large companies get noticed online.

“The most important thing that anyone can do when starting a Web-based business is understand their customer. You’ve got seven seconds when they find your site for them to decide this is where they want to be. Otherwise they’ll click ‘back’ and never come back to your site. You have to know what they want so they can say ‘yes, I finally found where I want to be,’” Hayes said. Hayes’ clients come mostly from referrals. He was recommended to Keefe by his father-in-law and was recommended to Barnard by a satisfied client. You can find his site at www.ahfx.net.

Fix Your Dell 3100cn Streaking Issue

09 Feb 2008 23:21:36 GMT

Well after owning my Dell 3100cn for a very very very long time, I've finally found out how to get rid of streaks that were running down the middle of the page on color prints.

Well today, I found an answer that immediately fixed the problem within about 2 minutes. I found a great article that shows that the culprit is bad design of the imaging drum inside the 3100cn. Here are the instructions on how to fix it: (This will void your warranty with Dell so DON'T DO THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT YOUR WARRANTY VOIDED. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT OCCURS FROM THESE STEPS:)

Remove the drum unit from your 3100cn.
Set the drum unit on a clean level surface and avoid touching the drum or the transfer belt (the decal with 4 arrows points to the transfer belt).
Remove the 6 screws from the top cover (the cover has the blue handle attached). Two screws are on top at both ends of the blue handle. The next 2 screws are on the sides and line up with the decal with 4 arrows. The last 2 screws are also on the sides and at the lower corners of the big decal that shows how to remove the drum unit from the 3100cn.
Carefully lift the cover from the drum unit and cover the drum unit with clean paper to protect the transfer belt from bright light. You can carefully reinstall the drum unit without the top cover and run some color prints. If the lines are gone then continue with step 5.
Look at the ribbed side of the top cover. Some may show some toner build-up. Some of the rib intersections are too high and are dragging in the toner that is applied to the transfer belt. The ribs are there to add stiffness to the cover and to keep it from bowing.
Place the cover handle side down on a clean towel.
Using a palm sander with 320 grit sandpaper and light pressure (the weight of the palm sander) sand until the ribs going both directions are showing signs of being sanded. You will be able to see the difference as unsanded areas will be glossy and sanded areas will have a dull finish.
Switch to 600 grit paper and do a light sanding.
Wash the cover under cool water. Don't use hot water since that could cause the cover to bend.
Dry completely. I used compressed air.
Reinstall the cover to the drum unit. Tighten the 4 side screws first and then the 2 top screws last.
Put the drum unit back into the 3100cn and try a color print.
Please post if you have any questions about the procedure.
If your next drum unit has the same problem you can swap top covers.

Well I am now very happy that my Dell 3100cn prints without any streaks. A little background will help you figure out why I'm so happy.

I got a Dell 3100cn printer a couple of years ago. I had a friend that had one and I loved the way it printed and everything about it, so I decided to get one of my own. After setting it up, I printed a few sheets and all of the color prints had streaks or lines that ran down the middle of the page at extremely regular intervals on every print. I called Dell and they shipped me a new printer drum. It didn't fix the problem. They had me ship the printer back and they sent me a used printer. (I was upset because I figured I'd get a new printer... but that is a different story.) This one wouldn't even fire up. It kept giving an error about temperature. They sent out a tech and he replaced some controller. It didn't fix the problem with the error message. So I sent that printer back to Dell.

Finally they sent me another printer that streaked again. I was fed up by then and found that if I printed enough pages the printer would "warm up" and the streaks would go away. So any time we wanted to print anything in color, we'd just print about 150 black and white pages of whatever and then print our color pages.

Adobe Stock Photo Royalty-Free Image Service Discontinued

05 Feb 2008 19:12:27 GMT

Adobe is ending its Stock Photography Service.

I received the following email from Adobe just the other day:

As of April 1, 2008, the Adobe(R) Stock Photos royalty-free image
service will be discontinued. We made this decision in order to focus our efforts in other areas, and we want to share this news with you and let you know how it affects you.

Over the next few months we will be making changes to Adobe Stock
Photos. On March 4, 2008, search functionality will be disabled. You will be able to purchase images through our service until March
31, 2008.

To finalize your transactions with us, please follow these steps:
1. Complete your image searches by March 4, 2008.
2. Make final image purchases by March 31, 2008.
3. If necessary, re-download past purchases and print your
purchase history by March 31, 2008.
4. When you're ready, uninstall Adobe Stock Photos from Adobe(R)
Bridge in your Creative Suite(R) applications.

For a long time I really wondered why Adobe would offer a stock photography service. It just seemed like a big hassle for them to get information from the big stock photography sites, organize it, etc. I really doubt that they were making very much off of each purchase. Now it looks like I was correct because they are shutting down the service.

So from now on you'll have to go search for your images the good ol' fashioned way. At least this way everyone that uses the Adobe suite won't be presented exactly the same images any more.

Search Engine Usage for 2007

09 Jan 2008 16:51:15 GMT

Nielson/Net Ratings has released new search engine statistics for Nov 2007. Google has really increased market share over the Feb 2006 search engine results we posted last year. Google jumped from 48.5 to 57.7 for a 9.2% increase in market share. Google captured just over 4.2 billion searches in Nov alone. There were over 7.1 billion searches performed in November.

Search Engine	Share of Searches
Google	57.7%
Yahoo	17.9%
MSN	12.0%
AOL	4.5%

With that many searches happening in a month, I hope you understand the importance of good Search Engine Optimization.

2007 Website Browser Stats Review

04 Jan 2008 18:14:37 GMT

2007 Website Statistics from multiple websites show that the top three website browsers are still IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox.

Here are some browser statistics for 2007.

Browser	Site 1	Site 2	Site 3	Site 4	Site 5	Site 6	Site 7	Averages
MSIE 7.0	43.52%	18.32%	37.59%	35.54%	35.55%	36.97%	38.89%	37.31%
MSIE 6.0	30.88%	24.62%	46.60%	41.05%	47.73%	51.08%	42.45%	38.66%
MSIE 5.5	0.51%	0.16%	0.39%	0.17%	0.17%	0.17%	0.23%	0.34%
MSIE 5.0	2.37%	0.20%	0.39%	0.60%	0.31%	0.13%	0.46%	1.04%
Firefox	18.86%	48.07%	10.29%	17.04%	13.16%	8.91%	12.80%	18.03%
Safari	1.12%	6.22%	3.88%	4.83%	2.59%	2.01%	4.47%	3.03%
Netscape	0.42%	0.23%	0.71%	0.42%	0.22%	0.64%	0.45%	0.46%
Opera	2.32%	2.18%	0.15%	0.35%	0.26%	0.09%	0.25%	1.13%

It looks like more and more people are installing IE 7 although more people are still using IE 6. Firefox is still a bit hit in the tech sector as seen from Site 2. Overall it looks like Firefox lost a little ground to the IE 7 movement compared to last years browser statistics .

Fresh Content Will Bring Spiders and People Back For More

16 Nov 2007 19:37:22 GMT

Fresh content will bring spiders (and people) back to your site more often.

How often you update your website is extremely critical to your success on the web. First and foremost, search engines loves fresh content. Let's take two sites that cover the same topic. Site A who updates their site every month and Site B who hasn't updated their site since they created it. The search engines only have "so much time" to index sites.

If the spider comes back and finds that information has changed, it will normally decrease the time between now and its next indexing (to see if there were even more updates that have happened between crawlings.) If the content hasn't changed it might increase the time between its last crawl and its next crawl (assuming that if it wasn't updated lately it probably won't be updated next time either). Regularly updated content will bring spiders back more often which leads to faster indexing.

Now, what if both sites decide to run Christmas specials and both update their sites. Which Christmas special will be seen sooner and thus have a better chance of being effective?

Besides being great for search engines, fresh content is great for real life humans. People love getting the latest information about everything. Updated content also builds trust in the information you provide. If you haven't updated, people might think that you have gone out of business, or don't care about keeping your customers updated, or don't carry the latest product that the competition has on their site.

Another benefit of new, fresh content is that it builds authority into your site. As you add new pages about your products, services, or frequently asked questions, you further strengthen your authority of that subject. You show that you really know your stuff. More people will be willing to link to you because you have the answers that they are searching for. It also creates extra miniwebs or natural doorways into your website which will help your clients find you from even more keywords.

With the popularity of blogs and other mechanisms for publishing content quickly on the web, the importance of updating your site has increased exponentially.

What Every Website Owner Should Know about Headlines

01 Aug 2007 23:47:47 GMT

Writing great, compelling headlines is one of the most important skills of a copywriter.

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of the headline, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece.

While many of us want to create headlines that grab people's attention, most do not know how to write great headlines. After reading a couple of articles from A List Apart and CopyBlogger , we've gathered some simple, "premade" headlines for your use. We gave you a number of "ready to use" headline keywords , but here are some sample phrases and concepts that will get your creative juices flowing:

Who Else Wants ...
The Secret of ...
Here is a Method that is helping ... to ...
Little Known Ways to ...
Get Rid of ... Once and for All
Here's a Quick Way to ...
Now You Can Have ...
What Everybody Should Know about ...
Give Me ... and I'll Give You ...
Do You Recognize the ... Early Warning Signs of ...

Once you are past the need for "premade" headings, use some of these concepts to get people to read more than just your headline.

Reveal Facts
Use a Quote
Give a Direct Command
Focus on Your Unique Selling Position
Announce Something New
Be Controversial
Break Expectations

Using these types of headlines can help ensure that your story gets scanned if not read.

Website Credibility in 10 Easy Steps

16 Jun 2007 17:53:07 GMT

Credibility is difficult to build and extremely easy to lose. These 10 steps will help you maintain your credibility.

Stanford released the following 10 points for increasing credibility after a 3-year, 4,500 person study .

Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site. - The web makes it extremely easy to link to other sites that back up your material. No need to create a 3 page bibliography. Simply link to the material inline. Those that want additional information will be able to review your information and see that you have done your homework on the subject.
Show that there's a real organization behind your site. - Web sites make it easy for smaller companies to look just as big (or bigger) than larger organizations. While this can be both good and bad for either group, showing that your company has more of a presence than a P.O box will help increase your credibility.
Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide. - Besides stating your "qualifications", it is always better to show off your expertise by writing articles that clearly shows your understanding and your authority on the subject.
Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site. If you provide a simple bio of the people in the organization, you can highlight your expertise and show that your people can be trusted. Testimonials are a great way to help build credibility.
Make it easy to contact you. - This is one of the three essential purposes of a website . Show your contact info on every single page.
Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose). - Your website should look like your business. Templates will never do that for your business. Make sure that your design is built around your customers and can communicate directly with their needs.
Make your site easy to use -- and useful. - Make sure you use good navigation and make it simple for people to "progress" through your website to the information they are searching for.
Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently). - Whether you are using a CMS or have a company blog, make sure that you are providing up-to-date, pertinent, information that will answer your customers current questions. Your industry isn't stagnant. Your website shouldn't be either.
Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers). - Your customers didn't come to your site to see advertisements. They came looking for specific information. Make sure people can clearly tell what are ads and what aren't.
Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem. - No one loses credibility faster than those that have broken links, bad grammar, or pages that don't display correctly. Take a second to review your site.

These are simple concepts. However, making them a part of your everyday operations is more difficult, but the benefit will be well worth the effort.

Simple Ways to Increase Web Site Conversions

08 Jun 2007 05:22:13 GMT

Three simple and quick ways to increase your conversion rates.

I recently read a nice little list of ways to increase conversions . While this list is nothing compared to reading "Call to Action ", this is a nice concise list. I'm only going to share a few that I felt are most important.

Remove Website Clutter - Every page should have a distinct, clear, call to action. Anything that draws people's attention away from the call to action should be removed. This includes poorly worded copy, distracting ads, and images that don't add value to the page.
Resolve Concerns at the Points of Action - Pair your Points of Action (POA) with appropriate statements that address your customer's concerns. These could include testimonials from previous customers, reviews from experts, reliability indicators (such as associations and memberships), and statements about your privacy policy.
Remove Checkout Roadblocks - Make it as simple as possible to checkout. Why do you think that Amazon has their own "One Click Ordering ". People are extreme impulse buyers. The checkout stand of your local grocery store is proof of this. Don't make people jump through hoops to purchase.

While these are fairly simple concepts to understand, implementation is a different story. Don't become overwhelmed. Just make one change a week. Compare your conversion rates week to week to make sure that you are moving in the right direction. Increasing your conversion rates is one of the simplest ways to get more money out of your existing web viewers.

Does Your Web Developer Have These Essential Traits?

19 May 2007 22:04:53 GMT

Here are some essential traits that all web developers should have.

I recently read an article at seomoz that discussed the traits that most good web developers have (although I've modified the order a bit to fit my tastes).

Are as accurate as possible. As we mentioned before, good programmers can see and understand the "whole picture ". If you don't understand the project, the required inputs and outputs, and deliverables, you will not succeed.
Think ahead. Nearly every single website created will at some point in the future be modified, updated, and more than likely grown. If you do not plan for future changes you have planned to fail (or at least planned to spend a lot more on the project than you should have.) You must have thought about, if not understood, the direction the site will go and the possible roadblocks you might encounter if you design the site for the current specifications and not the "next set" of specs.
Have improved their skill set lately. The technology sector is an area where if you don't keep studying, you will be left behind. Just think of all the programming languages that have come and gone in the past 10 years. You must stay informed of where the industry is going, what the latest and greatest is, and what is now obsolete and ineffective.
Build for 20 instead of 1. If you program like you were going to use this same code on the next 20 sites you design, your code will be much better than if you build for 1 and adapt for 20. This will make it easier on yourself and the guy that has to maintain your code. However, don't get caught in the trap of building a Ferrari for a doorstop. Keep your code succinct but versatile enough to scale easily.
Always look for ways they could have made their last project better. After every project you should determine what worked and what you could have done better to make the project easier to maintain, easier to scale, and easier to update. This will help you create even better code down the road.

If you concentrate on improving these simple traits, your coding will become better and your clients will love you.

The Importance of Microformats in Web 2.0

19 May 2007 20:45:58 GMT

Microformats are quickly becoming a THE way to share information between different applications. 2007 should be named the year of the microformats.

As more and more people try to share similar data between extremely diverse applications, they are quickly realizing the importance of having standards for exchanging information. The Web 2.0 craze has driven a number of microformats, or miniature standards, for a number of types of information.

hCard - People and Organizations
hCalendar - Calendars and Events
hReview - Opinions, Ratings, and Reviews
rel-tag - Tags, Keywords, and Categories

Mostly, microformats are a way of adding semantics to programming. If you are a blog reader and have seen "Tags" or "Categories" for specific posts, you have probably seen microformats in action.

Now while there are still many people trying to decide if microformats are going to really take off (we already know how poorly people have followed so-called "standards" on the web), there are a number of people that truly believe these mini standards will help increase the efficiency of transferring information between applications .

Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online. This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc.

The faster that people can embrace these types of standards the sooner the web will truly become and interactive source of information. It will also help relieve some of the stress of programmers that have to deal with trying to get all of the different proprietary data structures to talk to one another. (Just go try to get Outlook Express, Outlook, and Thunderbird to talk nice and you'll know what I'm talking about.)

For more information about specific microformat structures, visit microformats.org.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Installation

12 May 2007 04:27:38 GMT

Well we just installed Feisty Fawn on one of the laptops here in the office. Everything seems to be running smoothly. I'm going to be posting some basic "reminders" for myself for the next time I do an install, so these might help someone, or they might not.

Make sure you get the latest aptitude (apt-get) stuff...

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade

Add a script to startup

Write the script in the /etc/init.d/ directory
update-rc.d filename defaults
chmod +x filename

Turn on the wireless led for an Acer CL56 (might put this in a startup script

sudo modprobe acerhk
echo 1 > /proc/driver/acerhk/wirelessled

Install Alien

sudo aptitude install alien

Install Automatix

That should at least cover the basic install stuff. Please do NOT ask any Ubuntu related questions in the comments section. They will not be posted. If you have questions, go to the Ubuntu forum.

Accurate Backlink Counter for Google and Yahoo

04 Apr 2007 22:34:41 GMT

Easy way to get accurate backlink counts from Google and Yahoo.

If you are a regular Google user and website owner, you know that the link: modifier doesn't give accurate results for the number of backlinks pointing at a site. In the good old days we'd go to alltheweb.com and do a search with link:www.ahfx.net to get an approximation of the number of backlinks because they didn't dummy down the number of backlinks like Google does. However, now we've got better tools. To get a more accurate backlink count you have a couple of options.

Sign up for a Google account and go the the webmaster tools. You will first need to verify you own the account. Then you can access a number of important items like web crawl errors, statistics, and links. Just use the link tab to see a much more detailed view of backlinks.
You can use Yahoo's Site Explorer. Yahoo's site explorer is a great little tool to figure out just who is linking to someone without going through the hoops of signing up with Google and verifying you own a domain.

It seems that Google is a little nervous about letting "everyone" know how many backlinks their competitors have. However, since they've added "links" to the webmaster tools, maybe they'll start increasing the accuracy of the link: operator. After the great success of Yahoo's Site Explorer, maybe they'll have to. Only time will tell.

Solving Difficult Questions with Simple Answers

12 Mar 2007 19:38:06 GMT

The ability to solve increasingly difficult problems through simple means is a trait that all web developers should cultivate.

I absolutely love creative people, those that have an ability to think outside the box. Those who can take an extremely difficult problem and solve it with a very simple answer.

I saw this image and had to post it, because it portrays this idea perfectly.

Now I'm not advocating the destruction of United States currency. I am advocating the use of common sense. I have a friend, Jared, that is absolutely amazing when it comes to common sense. I worked with him for a while when I lived in Korea.

There were countless times where I would come up with what seemed to be an extremely difficult problem, but every time he would say, "Well why don't we do [simple answer to terribly difficult question] then." I would just look at him and think to myself, wow... that would work. (just like drilling a hole through the penny).

Unfortunately there isn't a school for common sense. You either have it or you don't. The same can be said of good programmers. Good programmers can see and understand the "whole picture". You can't be told how to "understand" a project, you just have to have cultivate the ability to take a complex problem and break it down into its simple components. Working with and studying the methods of people that have this ability to "understand" can help you learn little by little how to do what they do instinctively. Study other people's code. See what they do well and what you would change to make it better. Always keep learning.

So the next time you come across a problem that leaves you scratching your head, see if there is a simple answer that you simply overlooked.

All Business Owners Should Know these 10 Things Before Building a Website

16 Feb 2007 01:45:17 GMT

10 things all business owners should know before they have a website built.

I loved the article "10 things businesses should know before building a website" over at 456 Berea Street . Here are their top 10 with my comments added:

Understand what you want. Too many businesses really don't know what they want from their website . Have you researched who your online customers are? Do you know what keywords they search for? Do you know what sites they visit? Do you know why they are looking for your site? If you don't, they you don't know what you want. You want happy customers. That's what you want (and hopefully more income as a result).
It costs more and takes longer than you think. I can't count the number of times I've been asked how long a website takes, but every time they are shocked at the average development time. However, nearly every time we have "wait time" with a website, it has been caused by the clients' inaction (not sending in copy, not sending pictures, not signing off on part of the project, etc.) You can eliminate most of the wait time by having content, pictures, etc. ready for your developer to dump into the design.
A web site has several pieces; don't cut corners. You should keep in mind the following aspects: Design - Does it look and act like my client expects?, Content - Does the site provide the information my clients are looking for?, SEO - Will clients be able to find my site once we make it live?, Future Additions - Have I adequately planned ahead so that I don't have to waste time interfacing the new features with existing ones.
Balance glitz and guts. A good website mainly provides the information that people are looking for and does it in a pleasing way, but content wins out every time .
If you build it, they won't necessarily come. If you don't have a unique value proposition you will not get any sales except from nice old Grandma Elna who bought something just to be nice. Something about your business must attract the more savvy online customers of today.
Avoid bit decay; the site needs maintenance. Technology is ever changing and hopefully your business is keeping up. You need a plan to update, maintain, and improve your website on a monthly, if not weekly basis. Ask yourself, "How is my target audience changing, and how can I quickly adapt to their needs?"
Treat the web team as professionals. You and the designer both have specific roles you must fill for your website to succeed.
Most people in the web industry are clueless. Just because your daughter's friend's brother built a website when he was in 4th grade, that does not qualify him as a web designer. Just because your daughter's friend's brother is a graphic designer, that does not qualify him as a web designer. Just because your daughter's friend's brother owns a pirated version of Frontpage, that does not qualify him as a web designer.
You get what you pay for. I think we covered your daughter's friend's brother well enough above.
Don't start your project by buying a CMS. A content management system is not the way to start. Ask your web designer, they probably have a better and more customized answer for your needs.

Now these are not an "all inclusive" list by any means. However, these will help you start off on the right foot. If I were to add a #11 to the list it would be Have your site built with the customer in mind. If people can't find your site because of poor SEO, or if people can't use your site because or poor navigation, or if you don't provide information that people want, your site will fail. Fail to understand your customers and you might was well give your website money away to charity where it would do some good.

Top 10 Key Search Factors in 2007

07 Feb 2007 05:00:54 GMT

There is a great discussion going on over at SearchEngineWatch about the "Top 10 Key Search Factors in 2007."

The initial proposed list looks like this (with my comments after the topic):

Content - As we've mentioned before Content is King. However, with so many social networks (digg, reddit, etc) you have got to be on your toes to provide "new and interesting" topics.
Key Word Selection - If you don't know what keywords your users are looking for, then you will not be found. Simple as that.
Site Architecture - If they can't find your content (or find it again once they come to your site, you've just lost a potential customer.)
Rich Media - With the explosion of video mashups and YouTube, this one might take off. However, I'm still not confident that it will drive sales compared to just wasting people's time.
Web 2.0 -Getting more people involved in any given project has a couple of effects. First you can quickly build a following and interest in any given topic. Second, with more "open architecture" you can cross sell your product into other existing technologies and gain notoriety even faster than ever.
Accessibility - This has been a topic for a number of years now, but still hasn't really seen the attention that it needs to really succeed as of yet.
Inbound Links - Linking is Queen. What can I say, PageRank rules.
Relevancy - I clarify this by saying specialization. More and more people are using specific websites for specific searches. Associate with a group that has like desires, customers, and is mutually beneficial and become the "know-it-alls" about that topic.
Popularity - I hate to say that this one will necessarily fade until social sites create a better way so people don't game the system. (Remember the issues Digg had with so called popularity)?
Constant Improvement - Refine, repair, review, repeat.

Things that I see as being influential in 2007 as far as search goes are the following:

RSS - With IE 7 supporting RSS, I see RSS feeds becoming an even larger part of keeping people and search engines up to date with new information. This also gives the users the opportunity to chose the way they want content displayed (larger fonts, easier to read color schemes, less noise, etc)
Micro-formats - This one might just jump into the ring. As more and more sites support these simple standards information will flow more freely between diverse applications. If the search engines started backing these different micro-formats (like they did with sitemaps) more and more applications would be built to track and share the information.
Tagging - Tagging has the possibility to become as large as linking. People telling people what something is about and liking it enough to go out of their way to say so.

I would add that I think that more and more "in-page rich media" browsing (courteousy of the mainstreaming of AJAX) will happen as people realize the benefits and as the search engines find better ways to index AJAX content.

Preorder Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

01 Feb 2007 16:06:09 GMT

Warning: This post is very "off topic".

The long awaited book 7 in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in now available to preorder from Amazon.

We preordered book 6 from Amazon last time and we received it on the release day without having to stand in lines to get it. The 7th and final book in the series has been available to order from Amazon in the UK for about a month or so already, so it is nice of Amazon to do the same for us in North America.

I'm going to make some predictions for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, just because everyone does (and of course I think I'm correct).

Snape is not bad
Draco Malfoy will help Harry kill Voldemort
Harry will live
Harry will become the new Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher.

There you go. My predictions for Book 7. Now, I just need to get my copy and we'll see if I was correct.

January 2007 Gets a Double Dose of PageRank

27 Jan 2007 02:01:19 GMT

PageRank updates for the second time in January 2007.

Well, Google is at it again. After a PageRank update just over 2 weeks ago, PageRank has again changed. While there is debate as to whether this is a "new update" or just old PageRank still lingering around in the toolbar, one thing is for sure, the little green bar is on the move. Over at Search Engine Roundtable they had this to say:

On January 9th we reported the last Google PageRank update. It seems too soon for an other PageRank update to be happening, but anything is possible.

This is either a new PageRank push to the Toolbar or it is still some data fluctuations of the old PageRank push.

From my point of view it looks like "old data" resurfacing. However, it could be due to the attempt to eliminate Google Bombing. Matt Cutts takes up the "help you understand" position again when he explains the scope of eliminating the Googlebomb.

Technically that example is not a Googlebomb, because the site in question "wants" to show up for the query. A Googlebomb happens when someone pushes "someone else’s" site up for a query. Another example is [french military victories]. That’s not a Googlebomb, because the #1 site wants to rank at #1. That’s just straight-out SEO. This change only targets Googlebombs.

Who knows if the two are related. However, normally any algorithm change can directly impact PageRank (however this normally wouldn't be visible for another 3 mornths or so), but I'm rather skeptical that they would release new PageRank information just for this. More than likely they had a bad batch of PageRank get released and had to re-release more accurate information.

SEO World Championship SEO Contest Begins

16 Jan 2007 17:52:45 GMT

Well there is another SEO contest going on, so we'll see how much SPAM comments start accumulating on discussion boards and blogs all over the world. This contest is for the keywords "globalwarming awareness2007 ". Those that rank highest on the big three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) will win (if there is a tie then of course the highest Google rank wins).

Official Rules

Site must include either a SEO World Championship text link or a banner . (The banner may be linked or not linked)
Valid contact information must be found on the site, E-mail is preferred.
Your official domain must be registered the same day or after January the 15th 2007.(All domains registered before the 15th of January 2007 will not qualify for the competition, no record of the domain is allowed. See archive.org)
Website will not use SEO methods which are clearly not approved by Search Engine Guidelines for example: doorway pages, etc. See Google webmaster Guidelines. (Any participant ignoring the Google webmaster guidelines will not qualify for a prize)

It is good that they get rid of "old domains" to help level the playing field. However, with an end date of May 1st, people will be hard pressed to get in and rank in such a short amount of time. I am also impressed that they chose a topic that people can benefit from instead of some random garbage word that no one will ever use after the contest is done.

Well good luck and we'll see you in May.

Questions to Ask Your Web Developer

16 Jan 2007 00:33:45 GMT

Questions to ask before hiring a web developer.

SEOmoz recently posted some questions that they would ask when interviewing web developers. Figured I'd have a go at the questions and let you know where I stand:

What Industry sites and blogs do you read regularly? I consistently read Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zawodny , Jim Boykin , and Brue Clay . I also have some other favorites like Shoemoney , 9-rules (Design) , Aaron Wall , SEOmoz , Devlounge , and Stuntdubl .
Do you prefer to work alone or on a team? Alone, unless I can find a competent team. I've known too many "experts" that couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
How comfortable are you with writing HTML entirely by hand? What, you mean people don't normally do that? We do everything by hand because of the control it gives over the code.
What is the w3c? World Wide Web Consortium. They are the group that is trying to bring standards to the web (although there are way too many that don't listen.)
Can you write table-less XHTML? Do you validate your code? Yes. and Yes to a point. If we don't put an alt tag on every image, we are still good people.
What are a few of your favorite development tools and why? I like Textpad for coding, Photoshop for image editing, and HeidiSQL for database interaction.
Describe/demonstrate your level of competence in a *nix shell environment. (not really necessary in my opinion, SQL knowledge would be a bigger requirement)
% If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many ('s.
What skills and technologies are you the most interested in improving upon or learning? Right now I'm looking more at DOM scripting. With AJAX going mainstream and more and more UI's expecting more dynamic interaction, I expect to learn even more about javascript (DOM) and CSS interaction.
Show me your portfolio. OK. Take a look at my portfolio .
What size websites have you worked on in the past? Everything from one pagers to 100% user defined dynamic websites with hundreds of pages.
Show me your code. OK. Right click, view source.
What are a few sites you admire and why? 2Advanced. They have amazing flash design. 9rules. Great community. Good Organization. Nice clean straightforward look.
Fix this code, please. Haven't I already told you about all the "expert web developers" I've interacted with (or that my previous clients had interacted with before they found me.) Been there, fixed that.
I just pulled up a website you built and the browser is displaying a blank page. Walk me through the steps you'd take to troubleshoot the problem.

Did you type the URL correctly?
Do other pages from the same site show up?
Are other site that are on the same machine available?
Does it show up in a different browser?
Can you view the source?

What is your favorite development language and why? PHP. Open source. Simple, yet powerful. Good documentation.
Do you find any particular languages or technologies intimidating? I never really cared for C (I liked C++ much better). I'm quite interested in what the "up and coming" technology is. I just find there isn't as much time to explore all of them to figure out which one is going to be beneficial.
HTML, CSS, WYSIWYG? Hyper Text Markup Language. Cascading Style Sheet, What you see is what you get (plus normally a lot more code than you wanted)
What web browser do you use? Firefox 2.0 for normal browsing. IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox for most testing.
What are a few personal web projects you've got going on? Constantly updating, tweaking, and improving the websites I oversee.

Wow.... that was quite the list.