by WebKeyDesign | Jan 31, 2006 | WebKeyDesign
I was browsing the web as usual this week, when I read that A List Apart is taking responses on what you love or hate about the web right now. Without a doubt, the most annoying trend on the world wide web, is the number of junk sites. At least an hour or two of my day is devoted to technical problems, and the web is my number one resource for technical solutions. Google and Yahoo are my default search tools but more and more searches are turning up sites that list partial RSS feeds for other sites. Each of these sites takes at least five minutes of my time to assess and see if they actually have anything of value, so the more sites I find coming up, the more time I waste. In some cases, I am completely given up, and tried other search terms to see if I can hit a real site instead. All this work reduces productivity and makes the web useless to me. In the past most scrapper sites would get their content the hard way, they would scrape other sites using Perl scripts. These sites were plentiful, but they never ranked very well on search engines, and so their existence did not really bother me. Eventually RSS came along and tons of blogs would syndicate their content. This made it easier for webmasters to put together a site made completely of RSS feeds from legitimate sites. The end result was a tide of splogs and scrapper sites that now rank very well in search engines and clog most search results.
Some would argue that the reason why all these splogs exist is that they are financed by online ads that make splogs a good business to be in, and I really cannot argue with that, but what matters to me is that like most other Internet related problems, no one party is responsible. The search engines are hesitant to not rank these sites well, which leads one to wonder if this conflicts with their own advertising business. Then there are the sploggers themselves that have taken it upon themselves to abuse the ideal of the blog. Their chief argument being that Google does something similar with Google News, why can’t they? All of this leads us to the current state of the web, namely RSS pollution has made internet searching a less effective resource for all of us.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 26, 2006 | Site Design
Most of the questions that I get from WebKeyDesign vistors have to do with upgrading or making modifications to current web sites. Perhaps you need to add a banner advertisement or image gallery, but in some instances the current site has been designed in WYSIWYG programs like Frontpage and Dreamweaver. These sites usually have a few things in common: they were designed back in 2001, look dated by today’s popular weblog sites, and do not rank very well on search engines.
Update Outdated HTML to XHTML
The best improvements for a typical site like this is to update the HTML code itself to XHTML. Transitional XHTML is a good target to aim for, but if you find that HTML 4 is still something you rather stick with, then the very least you can do is add a proper DOCTYPE and utilize CSS Stylesheets to clean up your HTML and make it easier for search engines to index your site.
To learn more about XHTML, I recommend Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards, which is a good introduction to what web standards are and how to begin to utilize XHTML.
Since the content does not need to be changed, just the code, make sure that for each page of content that you have proper meta tags filled out. The most important ones being the Title, Keywords, Description, and the Robots indexing meta tag. This will insure that the search engines have something to help them figure out what your content is about.
Web Site Marketing
Once your code is updated, the search engines will find it easier to index your site, but one of your other goals should be gaining a bigger audience of visitors. A short marketing campaign can help with the popularity issue. The first step is to advertise your site in three different ways. Sure you can advertise more, but you may not have the time to invest in a prolonged campaign.
The first thing to do is a word of mouth campaign. Just remind friends and people you meet that you have this cool web site and that they should visit it because such and such reasons. A good way of helping people remember your site is the old business card. Just have business cards with your web site address and slogan. Pass these cards out to your waiter, to your friends, to the guy waiting for his wife at the mall.
Small print publications are a great choice for web sites, if the publications fit your market. Try a couple of small advertisements and see if it draws anymore traffic than usual.
Next you need to market your site online. Consider buying an advertisement on another website, or possibly running a short term Adwords campaign.
As you market your site, make sure you monitor your stats. You want to have some way of monitoring your efforts to see what worked and what did not work. This will help you decide in the future what type of marketing is most appropiate to your site. You may find out that the most unlikely source of traffic may be free via search engines. Find out what is working and then add new content to your site based on what is driving traffic to your site. The important thing is that you need to keep monitoring your results and eventually you will have a more successful site without having to completely redo everything.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 23, 2006 | Web Site Basics
Over the weekend, I set out to buy a new domain name for a project that I thought about doing last year. By this time I should have written up the content, but I of course put it off, and so I figured I would buy the domain and that would force me to write up content and work on the new site. By now, buying any two word domain with the .com tld is nearly impossible, so you really have to look through the deleted domains and hope you can catch a unique domain name that someone let expire. I ended up having to choose between a new three word combination domain and an expired two word domain that seemed perfect for what the new site will be talking about. The three word domain sounded great, but the two word domain fit better with what search engines would look for, so I ended up choosing the expired domain.
Domains For Sale
I did find a lot of domain names that were taken and which were for sale by their owners, but most of these domains had scrapper content and did not really have any initial value. Not willing to pay for a domain with a pagerank of 2 or less and having to deal with the mess of transfering ownership, I headed for WhoIs.net and started searching through their deleted domains section. Luckily for me, I did find a domain of value in there and all I had to do was go to my own domain registrar and add that domain name to my account. At the end of the day I had a new domain name that costs me my regular price! Before you consider purchasing a domain name from someone, look through the deleted domain lists. All though some registrars have services that help you do this, or have auctions for domain names, looking through WhoIS.net’s free search tool may end up being better and cost you nothing more than the price of a new domain name.
Buyer Beware
Hopefully my new domain will rank well in the next search engine updates and I will have a successful site in a few weeks. However not all deleted domains or current domains are bargains. If you never bought a domain name before, read Choosing Your Domain Name and consider reading through some of the articles on SitePoint.com. If you still have questions, contact us, and we will try to help you.
My new project is MovieComment.com, which is going to be a new blog site for all kinds of movie reviews.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 20, 2006 | Firefox
In the last couple of weeks the reality of a portable Firefox browser became a reality. Not so much because there were not portable versions before, but that the idea seem to be catching on and the 1.5 release seems to now be available. So what exactly is a portable Firefox browser mean?
Today, we have access to more computers and while the idea of using a ASP (application service provider) seems appealing, right now most people just want to take their browser settings with them. For example, say you have access to a computer lab, but you do not want to leave your settings on a shared computer. The solution is an inexpensive flash drive and a customized version of Firefox which allows you to keep all your settings on the flash drive. This means you can take all your cookies, password logins, bookmarks, and even use all your favorite extensions. There are also portable versions of Thunderbird, the Mozilla email client, but in the case of email most people prefer HotMail or GMail to a portable application. Here are a few places to try in case you need a portable Firefox.
Portable Firefox at PortableApps
The recently launched PortableApps.com website has a full library of all kinds of portable apps you can use on your USB flash drive. The main ones are opensource related like OpenOffice and all the Mozilla apps, including Firefox, Thunderbird, and Nvu the web editor. Most apps can be started by clicking an icon that sets up the application to run without writing data to the main hard drive. The best thing of all is that all these apps work on any portable drive, or if you want use them on a local hard drive and then just copy them to a flash drive and you have all your settings with you. It really makes me wonder why Windows does not work this way to begin with!
U3 Firefox
Some brands of USB flash drives are U3 drives. These drives come with an application launcher and special software that runs U3 applications in a special environment, so that no data is written to the main computer’s hard drive at all. The difference between Portable Apps and U3 apps is that most U3 apps are not free. U3 is essentially a platform, and software vendors can make their apps U3 apps and then sell them just like regular Windows applications. Some apps though are free, like Firefox and Thunderbird. If you do not have a flash drive yet, you might consider a U3 drive since it makes application management easier. U3.com has a Software Central area which lists all applications that are available.
Portable Firefox Re-Loaded
You will find that plenty of people are revising John Haller’s Portable Firefox version to fit certain needs, like being able to have a portable version that runs on Mac OS X. The more interesting one is Cross-platform Portable Firefox, which claims to be able to run on Windows and Mac OS X at the same time. This is done by using a script for OS X to make the profile work correctly. Confused? Wait till Mac Firefox for Intel comes out, imagine how confusing that is going to be! But if you only want a straight OS X portable version, then you can try FreeSMUG.org’s Portable Firefox OS X version.
Recommendations
Personally if you are not a computer wizard, your best bet is to get a U3 drive and use one of the versions off of their site. Most likely by the time you read this, most U3 drives will come prepackaged with Firefox anyway. If you prefer an empty flash drive, then John Haller’s Portable Firefox seems to be the standard.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 19, 2006 | Networking
Recently I had to help a friend get his RDP working on his home computer. He has Qwest DSL and just one computer connected directly to an Actiontec 54 Mbps Wireless DSL modem. For some reason these modems have a confusing interface. To get the port forwarding to work, you need to setup your PC with a static IP address first and then configure the Actiontec to forward to this internal IP address.
In the Actiontec web interface, go through the Advanced Setup and then when you get to the Port Forwarding screen, click Advanced in the lower right corner. The screen that comes up will say Advanced Port Forwarding. On this screen, at the top section add your ports and your internal IP address and then click Add. This will keep the setting and you will have restart the modem. This is the only way I got the modem to keep the settings.
If you still have problems after this and you have confirmed that the Actiontec retained your port forwarding settings, check your computer to make sure that you do not have a software firewall blocking the ports.
You might also look at troubleshooting ports on DSL and DSL router forwarding ports problem for more tips.
