As I’ve been off ill for couple of weeks I’ve been trying, mostly unsuccesfully to stay away from my PC. I did vow not to blog whilst at home - something I managed far too well for my own good I’m sure.
So I’ve came back from being sick and MSN has rebranded, almost every client is experiencing growth in sales volume and value from keywords which two months ago were generating little and I’ve rediscovered my love of cup noodle snacks from the Orient (not pot noodles which are stinking) - Nissin noodles are the way to go.
So hurrah and all I have to do now is answer the myriad of emails I’ve been receiving about Bing.com (what a stupid name for a search engine) promise to answer all my emails by the end of tomorrow - or maybe the day after. As I’m currently moving all my affiliate programs over to DGM.
And to round it off the Terminator - sorry Kate - didn’t win the apprentice so hurrah to the other one who did.
April 17, 2009 – 11:39 am
Just to make my week back at work atfer my week on holiday so much better we get the fire alarm going off. Its freezing and my nice new laptop had to be left inside incase it was a real fire. If I find the eedjit who ran the fire alarm test and forgot tot tell anyone (including the fire brigade who arrived in a couple of minutes which was far faster than I’d expected).
Fire Engine that just turned up
Thought as i was in a good mood I’d post a link to a talk, that I missed, by James over @ Equator. Last week he did a talk about website design audits - and I wanted to use those keywords in that order for a quick bit of testing - so seemed like a good match. From what I read looked quite interesting - even has a pic of Dexy in a bowler hat - I’ve linked to his blog which he hasn’t updated in ages in the vain attempt of blagging a trackback ,damn nofollow is on :p.
Have fun.
Ok Probably not but Noah Stokes portfolio site is damn funny!
Cheers to Jamie for the link.
March 25, 2009 – 12:00 pm
It’s such a simple thing but designers are not per se website designers - in the same way that SEO people are not website designers. I can’t use photoshop to save myself but its important that all designers understand the basics of a webpage and having a good contrast between text and background is hugely important.
Why is the contrast between text and background important?
- Makes text easier to read - remember visitors scan content
- Your text sells your products to visitors
- Helps with accessibility
- SEO guys won’t complain about possibility of hidden text
Read More »
I am literally about to invoke the insurance policy pertaining to my iPhone - I am going to throw it througha window onto the road hope it gets ran over by a car and then jump on it repeatedly just to make sure that the thing is dead. And all this just to get away from that pratts @ 0808 000 0133. Every time I answer I get a dead line!
As you can tell I am really angry - thank God that the iPhone is such a high quality piece of kit you can do really clever things with it. Unfotunately blocking phone numbers is not within its scope - I can see Google Earth, find a Persian reataurant in almost any conurbation, do a blog post on ScotRail but I cant block these idiots.
Apparently this number is a VodaPhone thing - which is a bit strange as I’ve never been with VodaPhone. I’m concerned that what happened is that they’ve taken my number, without my permission, when I partially filled in a form about a free netbook with mobile Internet (I would have signed up to had I not eventually noticed that the Inspiron Mini 9 they offered only had an 8 Gig hard drive - my phone has more than that),
Over at NakedSushi the chatted is to add the number to a contact called ‘Blocked’ and stick it on silent when they call. Its a fix - not a fix I like but may be the best I can find - anyone got any brighter ideas from smashing my phone. Am willing to hire a bus or drive a section of like minded people down to meet these sods.
March 20, 2009 – 11:21 am
Every day you go to Google they seem to have a new logo. Its getting to be a bit dull now - it was fun to see a changed logo every so often but now its just silly. I cant remember the last time I actually saw the good old fashioned Google Logo.
That said todays logo made me chuckle:
Reminded me of the whole ‘miserable failure‘ link bomb stuff as a result of the link between the Hungry Caterpillar and Dubya.
One of the cool things in CSS is the ability to add styles to elements with certain attribute values - so you can style based upon the context of an HTML element. During website testing a useful thing to do is to test and make sure that images, where appropriate, have an alt attribute.
Having a good alt attribute is not going to change your SEO performance on its own - it will going help make your website more accessible and user friendly. Good alt attributes are part of SEO housekeeping - should be done but no one really likes doing it. So before you launch a site check your pages with the following style in the sheet to place a red border round all images that have no alt attribute specified:
img[alt=””] {border:10px solid red;}
See how easy that was. One quick check and you can find the problems almost instantly - on a test site it only takes a short time to check your pages.
Tomorrow I’ll be presenting to a selection of Scottish Developers about my favourite subject Search Engine Optimization. It’s up in Dundee and you can find details about it @ eventbrite.
In essence I’ll be talking about the affect that server side issues and how HTML can be used to improve SEO performance of websites. HTTP headers to canonical meta tags to Hx tags and maybe some stuff about utilising website link juice. Should be fun.
I’m going to pull, what’s left, of my hair out if I have to deal with yet another one of my clients having an web development/design agency launch a website with no account for the affect upon either the clients sales or natural search.
Getting a new website should be a fun journey for clients - the oohing and aahing over new designs, improvements in usability to help conversion, a chance to attack all those niggling little issue that SEO guys have etc. We should all be happy. But with almost every website launch it goes wrong!
So for the next couple of weeks I’m going to be blogging every day (or two - I’m really busy just now so bear (sp?) with me) about the fundamental issues as I’ve encountered them.
This is my first real series of blog posts for a while and when I’m done I’ll compile them all into one post and send out my nice new excel sheet for developer/marketing sign off sheet.
So stay tuned - and if you have experienced any particular problems from a process level with launching a website let me know - I’ll try to help wherever I can - just bung ‘em in the comments.
