The art of constructive criticism is a talent that you don’t find on anybody’s resume, but this specific skill is very useful where design work is involved and specifically design work with a multitude of parties each having the correct solution to the problem. Maybe Constructive criticism is not quite the right fit, more a doctorate in Spin, were you need to explain to a client that there idea is like looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

If you pull this off and everyone agrees on a solution, say for example that you need 5 categories in your website architecture for a particular product and then create a website design around this new menu and then hold everything…wait… now after seeing it they decide they need 8 categories and another whole section, because that is what xyzproducts.com is doing, “I saw their site over the weekend.” So now you have to explain to them how wrong “mistaken” they are all over again, subtly of course…. Unless by some freak event you yourself are wrong on this one??!??

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”
Winston Churchill

Google has just launched (in Beta and made available to a limited number of site owners) Google Friend Connect.

This came out of Google’s Open Social Project, which is the idea of Spreading Social Applications over the web and ‘unlocked’ closed-wall Social network sites.

What Google Friend Connect does for you is allow you to easily add social features to your site — from comments, ratings and reviews, to photo uploaders, etc.

Normally adding this functionality is time consuming and difficult, and therefore expensive and beyond the reach of most. Plus, visitors would have to create a username and password just for your site.

With Google Friend Connect, you can add these types of community features, but the big payoff comes from leveraging visitors’ existing social ties. By simply copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript, visitors can connect their network of friends on Facebook, hi5, orkut, linkedin and other friends, directly onto your website.

Once a member of your site, there are two ways they can share your site with their friends:

• Invitations. Clicking on the invite link presents your visitors with all their contacts and friends from their social networks. Invitations are delivered to friends within their respective social networks.
• Activity feeds. Your visitors may also opt-in to publishing activities to their social networks. A post to your message board, for example, can instantly be visible to people in multiple social networks, along with links leading to your site.

This could be another huge shift in the Internet or maybe not. Only time will tell, but I think it is a definite game changer for small to medium business owners.

“I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.”
Winston Churchill

Even though it may sound like it, Silverlight is not a 1980s cartoon series but in fact a new website browser plugin from Microsoft.

Silver light is in direct competition with Adobe Flash. Like Flash, Silverlight is used to add animation and interactivity to web pages using its own vector graphics engine. It can also be used to integrate video into web pages and to develop rich Internet applications. A Key feature is that it supports playback of WMV, WMA, and MP3 media content across all supported browsers without requiring Windows Media Player, the Windows Media Player ActiveX control, or Windows Media browser plugins.

One advantage Silverlight claims over Flash is that Text content within it is more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash as it is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML).

Both Silverlight or Flash technologies require a plug-in to allow, and once installed, both are invisible to the user. Although that said, you have to embed flash a special way to avoid the “click to activate this plugin” message. I presume that in the future version of Microsoft Internet Explorer that it will come with Silverlight pre-installed, and while IE is the dominate browser this could be a advantage over Flash.

Could this be a real threat to Flash and Adobe and End their dominance in this field? We will have to wait and see, I think it is best put like this:

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Winston Churchill

Too many websites exist just for the point of existing, they look pretty and maybe have a contact form or a few PDFs to download, but the users or website owner seldom get as excited as the South American football (soccer) commentator I quoted in my post header.

Why?.. because with no clear Goal or objective it is next to impossible to gage how effective your website is. The very bottom line for a business website — when you pay for a website design your making an investment, and you should expect to get a return on that investment (ROI).

So you need to define a site Goal, there must be a point to you needing a website. This is normally an action, find what it is that you want a user to do at your site and then that action is your website Goal and becomes measurable. In this basic form of just defining one simple action you want your visitors to perform on the website, you will be able to create a website structure and content around it.

There are far too many parts to take into consideration for me to cover in a single post, but the main one is your Audience. You need to learn about users you needs:

* needs for information
* ways of thinking about, grouping, and organizing information
* expectations about your site
* levels of knowledge about the subject matter
* levels of experience with the Web and similar types of sites
* ways of working with information (how much they want to read)

By working with users, you can also find out about the technology they have available to them — whether they are on broadband or dial-up, what resolution they typically use, the physical environment in which they work, and so on.

To sum up:

You need a Goal to benchmark results against so you can figure out a ROI and not just a site that looks pretty.

Or put another way:

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
Winston Churchill

Fonts. Why did it have to be fonts. A quick recap of the my last post: Fonts need to be HTML so that search engines can see them, but web-safe fonts are very limited (to about 6) so designers cannot make things as pretty as they would like. That is until now. Introducing Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR).

As stated normally, HTML and CSS allow you to use any font but there is no guarantee that it will show up as intended because the user may not have the specified font installed in their system. sIFR on the other hand allows website headings, pull-quotes, and other elements to be styled in any font by enabling the designer to embed the font of their choice in a Flash element that displays the text.

As a result the font used does not have to be installed on the user’s machine…. but wait, if it is just flash then we’re back to the same problem of it being invisible to search engines. But No time to argue. “Throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip.” What happens it is uses some fancy Javascript magic, Essentially, any assigned headings (h1, h2, etc…) will be converted to Flash files with the embedded font when the website is loaded. However, any search engine spider coming through your site will still be able to read all of the page content.

sIFR requires JavaScript to be enabled and the Flash plugin installed in the reading browser. If either condition is not met, the reader’s browser will automatically display traditional CSS-based styling instead of the sIFR rendering.

sIFR is not designed for body copy text as rendering greater bodies of text with Flash place formidable demands on the computer.

Designers bless their little cotton socks, love to make web pages look cool, fashionable, and stylish and use their huge array of fonts and skills to create beautiful graphical headlines and titles for Websites.

Then the SEO team gets involved and sparks fly. The problem is that search engine spiders cannot see text in pictures. To define a picture, I mean a graphic on a web page that is a gif, jpg or png.

Therefore if you need a spider to see it, you have to use HTML fonts and this then limits designers to only six fonts that are classified as web-safe fonts. These are Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, and Trebuchet MS. What that means is that it is safe to assume that these fonts are installed on the website viewer’s computer.

When you are reading a webpage and that page is displaying text in Arial font, what it is in fact doing, is telling the user’s computer to display the text using Arial. The user’s computer then looks into its fonts directory, finds Arail and display the text correctly. If you were to tell it to use a font the user’s computer did not have, it would substitute it and the text would not display as the designer intended.

So is there some middle ground that will stop the war between the Website Designers wants and Search Engine Optimizers wishes?

Well…Yes this “Treaty of Ghent” style, both sides winning compromise does exist but just like the battle of New Orleans, they go on squabbling unbeknownst.
..and this holy grail hybrid of Design and Optimization is called……..

This post concludes tomorrow.

Here is a quick overview of PageRank.

PageRank is a system developed and created by the founders of Google to qualify the importance of a page on the Internet. The name PageRank is a trademark of Google. The PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999 ). The patent is not assigned to Google but to Stanford University.

Here is Google’s explaination of PageRank. Basically the more links that point to a page the better, and if those pages that point are important themselves then that’s better still. Each link is like a vote for that page and some page votes have more weight than others. Google uses this information in its formula to display results from search queries. The higher your page rank, the more change you have of that page coming up for a particular search.

The problem arose after Google released its toolbar that allowed people to see what the PageRank of their webpages were. Now you could clearly see how popular a page was and almost overnight created a black market for ‘PageRank.’ If a site with a high PageRank linked to your page, then you were going to see and increase in rankings on your search results, which is a most valuable thing. People were paying large amounts of money just to get links for these high PageRank sites. Google took exception to this kind of profiteering and decided to act on it, the main way was to punish websites that sold their PageRank power by simply decreasing that site’s PageRank, leaving them nothing to sell.

It is actually now part of the Google webmaster guidelines:

“However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

On top of that it seems that the Google has now slowed the updating of it’s PageRank bar, so that it is hard for you to gague the true page rank of your site and pages also damping the trade in PageRank as your never quite sure what your paying for.”

Search engines do not like duplicate content. Google is especially aggressive when it comes to weeding out unnecessary content from its listings. The simple way Google does this is to keep the first copy it finds and to ignore all duplicate versions after that.

There are several types of Duplicate content:

1. Content that is stolen, ether blatantly taken from a site or scrapped by bots to create content.
2. Added in two locations on the site to aid navigation. This content belongs in two places on a site but it is really the same content.
3. Accidentally duplicated content.
   1. This can be subtle. For example, if you have a gallery and each picture has its own page, if you keep the meta tags and head titles the same and the rest of the pages contain only minimal text, you may find only one of your gallery pages will be listed.
   2. Another example of this is what is known as boilerplate repetition, where too much content is the same on each page. For example, having a large copyright statement on all pages.
4. Printer friendly pages.
5. Syndicated content.

The good news is that Google will not ban your site for duplicate content. Unless it appears deceptive and intentional, it will just not list the duplicate pages.

The best ways to avoid any duplicate trouble are to manage your site with a good robots.txt file or better still, use Google Webmaster tools and a sitemap.xml document to label the content correctly for the spiders.

Oh and of course the number one way to avoid duplicate content is to hire good writers to create original compelling Search-Engine-friendly content. And look no further then DDA as we have the best writers in the whole world when it comes to such a task.

First off, you may be asking what is DNS, let alone why would I want this propagated. DNS stands for Domain Name System and is the way that Internet domain names (like zeroonezero.com) are located and then changed or more correctly translated into IP address (that’s these things ‘208.69.228.94′). We do this because humans like words, as they are easy to remember, but computers need addresses in numbers.

Each machine on the Internet has its own unique number, which is its IP address. So when you type in zeroonezero.com you’re really asking your browser to look for that information at this address ‘208.69.228.94′. The domain name system is really a giant database, probably the biggest and most used database in the world. No only does it handle billions of lookup requests but it is also changed each day by millions of different people. This is where the propagation part comes in.

If you kept and maintained a central list of all domain names and IP addresses, it would be monumentally impractical. Therefore, this list is distributed throughout the Internet in a hierarchy of authority. Your domain registrar, for example Go Daddy, points your domain name to a DNS server. This becomes the master authority of your domain. When a request is made to find a website, it goes to the registration database and finds out the DNS authority. Then it goes to that DNS server to find out what the IP Address is for your domain name.

The problem is, each Internet Server Provider (like Verizion or Comcast) caches their DNS records. This means making a local copy of the database and is done to speed up websurfing as you are able to lookup a domain faster. The downside to this is each company updates their local database with its own timeframe, which could be hours or could be days.

This updating of cache is called propagation and our website’s DNS information is now being propagated across all DNS servers on the web. So it can take anywhere from 12 to 72 hours for all computers to see the the correct location of a websites once it has been changed.

In the past six months we have noticed a distinct increase in website form spam — forms that are filled out with junk content in them and submitted.

What causes this problem are bots — small programs, like search engine spiders, that can read and traverse websites. Unlike Spiders, these programs have malicious intent, be it just to cause vandalism, to create links to websites, or worse still, attempt to hack an unsecure form-mail system. These predatory programs can submit hundreds of forms a minute and not only cause chaos to your inbox, but slow down your server and website at the same time.

The solution is to make the form unsubmittable by a bot, this is achieved by adding a “CAPTCHA” which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” You have probably seen these hundreds of times and not realized what they are for. The most common type is an image CAPTCHA, which looks like this:

You then type in what you see and therefore the form knows your not a bot and allows the form to be submitted. Here at DDA, we use these standard image versions but we have also introduced our own simple math equation version too.

As part of our website design standards, and thanks to our top notch programming team, all future forms for our clients with be built using some form of CAPTCHA system. But not resting on our laurels, as always, our team of expert website designers will keep a constant lookout for whatever future chaos spam artists try to throw at us next, and be sure we will be able to combat it just as effectively.