Web marketing & development company

I recently used ExpressionEngine to develop a web site for a client of ours. Here is what I thought of EE and what I discovered about its strengths and weaknesses.

Customization

ExpressionEngine's strength is in its flexibility. It can handle simple things like pages and blogs and you can also create custom content types to handle things like product cataglogues and business directories.

With this flexibility you lose a lot of automation that is found in other content management systems. Many simple things aren't automatic such as pagination and RSS. When things finally get working it is a beautiful moment, but be warned that there is a big learning curve.

Documentation

There is a very good documentation library on ExpressionEngine. There is a fairly large community following EE, and there are plenty of people working on plugins and add-ons. Devot-EE is a good website for EE plugins. In comparison to Joomla, EE lacks the depth and number of plugins and add-ons.

I was recently asked to help someone find a good place to learn HTML code and Photoshop slicing. They asked:

"Hey Joseph, need some advice! Thinking of doing a short course in HTML formatting and basic web design. The type where you can make illustrations on Photoshop and make blog templates…thus the need to learn html formatting. Any suggestions on what type of course I should look for...and what the name of such a course would be?"

If you want a way to watch some free videos on the process of Photoshop slicing to HTML you can always sign up for a free Lynda.com account. With a trial account you cannot download the lesson files, but if you are smart you can just follow along with the video. You also do not have access to all the videos either. If you are going to spend money (more advisable) then I would still go with Lynda.com. I believe you can get a monthly account for around $25. If one is diligent and hard working one could go through all the HTML and Photoshop slicing videos in one month.

The next and most important thing for working with HTML is validation. When you have your site online copy the web address and go to http://validator.w3.org/, then paste the address in the address box and click on "Check". This will tell you if your code is valid for modern web standards per w3c.

Designers Block

When designing you often run into times when you cannot access your creativity. This is commonly called designers block, which is an adaptation of writers block. You are looking at your screen, rubbing your eyes at the glob of pixels you have been sculpting. It just does not look right, you cannot come up with anything good. Your design sucks. Fear not! There are many things you can do to tackle this issue.

Solutions

Look at other designs. When you look at other designs it inspires you. Here is a link to an article called 16 Best Web Design Galleries for Inspiration. This article has many great examples to get those gears cranking.

I was recently asked about inserting the badge from 20SomethingBloggers into a WordPress blog page.

"u know why "twenty something bloggers" badge not coming on my blog as it shud have??"

The badge for twenty something bloggers will give you some code that looks like this…

<embed wmode="opaque" src="http://static.ning.com/socialnetworkmain/widgets/index/swf/badge.swf?v=4.0.9:20487" FlashVars="backgroundColor=0x000000&textColor=0x69523B&config=http://20somethings.ning.com/main/badge/showPlayerConfig?&size=medium&username=25m4sfd60fx4k" width="206" height="174" bgColor="#000000" scale="noscale" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"> </embed><br /><small><a href="http://20somethings.ning.com">Visit <em>Twenty Something Bloggers</em></a></small><br />

The problem is that this badge uses embedded flash which WordPress does not like. There are two ways to get around this. One is cheating and the other is manipulation of code.

I recently got an Email about how to use HTML for blogs. It read:

"I'd thought I'd take you up on your offer about HTML. I'm new to blogging and getting super frustrated when it says my blog can't post due to HTML. I never know what the problem is. Any idea what that means? Do you have any key pointers to a new blogger about HTML?? Thanks so much! Any help is much appreciated!"

This person blogs on Blogger.com so I will use that site as an example.

Remember on your Blog that the title of your blog will become your H1 tag as well as your page title tag. So make sure the title of your blog is something very relevant and important to your topic. This is very important on searches for your blog. If you blog is about pug dogs then you might name it "Jane Doe's Cute Pug Dogs". This will help you get searched better for your name as well as the main subject of the blog "Cute Pug Dogs". You are blogging to share your ideas with others so imagine what others will be searching for to find your valuable information.

Here is a quick list of to-dos for img tags:

• name the picture something relevant to it's content, preferably keyword rich
• include the "title" attribute and make it keyword rich
• include the "alt" attribute and make this similar to the filename (which should already be descriptive)
• include the height and width either inline or with css
• Name the folders holding the images on the server with keywords

Proper coding

<img src="/images/stories/pug-dogs/pug-dogs-mascot.jpg" height="140px" width="200px" title="Pug dog mascot" alt="Pug dogs mascot laying down." />

Hyper link no-nos

Link stuffing is shoving tons of links into a page that have no real use other than to take advantage of search algorithms. This is unethical and deteriorates the quality of the Internet. Users need to feel confident that links point to relevant information.

Before 2003 black-hat developers would create several websites, also known as link farms, and fill them with tons of links to their sites. This triggered Google to implement the "Florida Update", a change in the Google search algorithm. The Florida Update changed how a site was ranked, spotting nepotistic links and devaluing them.

People started abusing links inside legitimate sites which caused Google to develop the "nofollow" attribute. The "nofollow" attribute was developed by Google in 2005 to prevent search engines from recognizing links. It is commonly used on forums, wikis, and other user generated content sites to prevent people from link stuffing.

In the beginning Google used "trust" to judge and rank a page. This trust was emphasized by the age of a link or site. Older, more trusted links and sites were ranked higher. This helped combat against new sites spamming links to improve site rankings. The major problem was that this system did not address new content. New pages that were legit were at a severe disadvantage in that they did not have trust built up with the Google algorithm. So users who sought new data about a subject might be bombarded with old irrelevant data. This issue came to its zenith when Google finance was launched and it did not rank for its own name. Enter QDF...

QDF stands for Query Deserves Freshness and is a new model Google added to reward activity with a certain topic. Freshness is used to describe how many recently created or changed pages are included in a search. This is the center of a huge search debate. Is it better to rank fresh information or a time tested page? In the past Google gave precedence to older pages.

QDF revolves around determining if a topic is "hot". If blogs and news sites are publishing lots of new content about a specific topic QDF will determine if this topic is what users want to view. QDF is basically a measure of global enthusiasm for a topic. The QDF model takes a number of factors into account:

• search volume
• news coverage
• blog coverage
• toolbar data (maybe)

Google has a patent on the QDF methods. It gathers data including a sampling technique that allows them to gather statistically accurate data without having to trawl through all the logs for a particular query.

I learned how to make neat half-tone patterns in Photoshop this week. Here is a step by step guide on how to create neat halftone textures. I will assume you already know how to open Photoshop and make simple operations within Photoshop.

Step 1: Open Photoshop and make a new document about 600x600 pixels. Create a new blank layer.

Step 2: Select the Brush Tool and make one dot in the center size 100 with 50% hardness.

A big part of SEO is balancing your site to meet the needs of both machines and humans. Using web standards compliant code will make your site truly optimized for both users.

For the most part sites has two main visitors. First, there are machines or robots that scan your site and index your code. These "bots" are used to rank your site on search engine result pages. If code is not written to follow web standards it can confuse robots and hurt your search ranking. Second, there are human visitors that expect to see meaningful well organized content. Websites must be designed for both of these unique users.

It is best to avoid creating a "hostile" environment for human visitors. Create useful and nice looking pages so human visitors return. Avoid spamming links or having content that looks "spammy". Write sentences that make sense and organize your information in a meaningful and logical structure. This means making the main idea of a page in H1 and the sub ideas in H2s and H3s. Place all regular text inside P tags. To improve on this it is important to include B tags around keywords, but remember to not bold too many words. If too many words are bold then your page is not human friendly.

Including meaningful lists also improves ranking using ULs and LIs in your HTML. The bots prioritize the information on these list higher than normal text inside P tags. Here too, you will have to balance for the human visitors. If a site has spam lists with 25 bullet items, human visitors to the site will be quick to hit the back button. Make lists short, keyword rich, and meaningful to your content and visitors.