Web 2.0 allowing web designers to create blogs, wikis, podcasts, rss feeds, and allows web sites to interact with their visitors more.
Web designers who take the time to learn the WordPress API will prevail in the long run.
Allowing web sites to interact with their visitors is key to increasing online sales and traffic.
What do you think?
According to various web development forums, Web Designers around the world are still adhering to HTML tables for multicolumn layouts on web sites. As it is battled on more and more messageboards, the issues are between cross browser rendering and how Firefox, in most cases, does not render the CSS correctly, although some designers happy with Firefox complain that it is MS Explorer which causes the problem.
Until both browsers make it easy to render tableless CSS, designers promoting its benefits are not going to win the battle and tabled web sites will still prevail.
Some practice can be handled on CSS dominant web sites like CSSZenGarden.com and CSSBeauty.com.
The best advice I give to my web design readers is to practice on both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
MooTools is rising as one of the top competitors for compact Object-Oriented JavaScript framework fans. It allows you to write powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent API.
If you are a web designerlooking for more interactivity on your web site without the need to learn tricky cross browser Ajax, you may want to give MooTools a try.
At the moment, Mootools works well with Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher as well as Firefox 2.0 and similar Mozilla browsers.
I tried Moo Tools and was impressed their plugins which included:
Moo Tools works with DHTML, CSS, and HTML forms for advanced interactivity of your web site visitors.
Give Moo Tools a try at mootools.net.
Visit most web sites and find that almost half of them are still all Flash and no HTML. This web design practice poses a serious problem with search engines lke Google and Yahoo.
It is true that most web designers love Flash and Flash makes a great looking web site with smooth animated graphics and interactivity, but it is still bad for search engine ranking positioning.
Most web sites are now turning to a simple HTML look like Craigs List, Google, and other plain text web sites. Although these web sites do not look as professional as all-Flash web sites, they gain higher Google and Yahoo rankings. This is the tradeoff.
So, what I do in this case it create an all Flash site with a similar all-HTML site and this is what you need to do if you have all Flash site. If you have a very high traffic web site from offline marketing, then this is fine, but most web sites do not have this content.
With the release of Google Gadgets, Google’s application development suite similar to the Facebook application development API, web designers were able to add usable applications for use by iGoogle members. Using a simple IFRAME setup, web designers can design database driven widgets that would be hosted on their web sites. Google makes them available to its users.
With the long awaited Google Themes development suite, web designers and graphic designers alike can now create banner-like headings for iGoogle members. A simple design down with Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro allows developers to add to Google’s headings.
All is takes is a background, (which is tiled) and a center image. Then, the design is done. It is all packaged in simple XML file and sent to Google.
What does this mean for web designers? Since most web designers can design simple graphics, they can submit their Google and then add a little heading for their company.
I suggest all web designers take advantage of this as it can bring them design business. Experimenting with this, I ceated a Safari design, a Disney princess design (featuring Cinderella, Arial, and Snow White), and Brick Wall Google theme. I designed the Disney princess theme for my daughter and I use it privately, since I am sure I would violate a Disney copyright if I submitted it. There is nothing wrong using these themes privately for yourself.
For more information, go to Google and search for Design Google Themes.
I was recently into the using cryptic GET querystrings to access back end database information with dynamic web pages. Using PHP and classic ASP as well as .NET are perfect languages for the typical users.php?user=YOURusername. Of course, in PHP, you can use the typical $_GET['user'] code to access this value. However, what if you are using ID numbers? A typical autonumber field with a primary key works wonders for accessing database records with numerical primary keys, but it does nothing for the search engines or your search engine rankings. In walks the mod rewrites.
I talk to web designers who still have no idea what this method is, but learning how to master it will do wonders for your search engine rankings, because you can add all sorts of relevant keywords to your URLs and have spiders index them. Of course, for regular search engine optimization, you can use meta tags, ALT tags, HTML titles, and <H1> to H6 tags with keywords, but don’t forget about your URL.
Using mod rewrites, you can instruct the web server to use a “fake” or rewritten URL to substitute for the real URL:
For example:
Real URL: http://store.hotwebideas.com/?id=342 can be rewritten as http://store.hotwebideas.com/articles/modrewrites
What do you think a search engine likes better?
To do this using PHP, you need to modify or start a new.HTACCESS file on your web server’s root directory. A good knowledge of regular expressions is essential for your success at this as well.
In the .HTACCESS file, try something like this:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^articles/(.*)/(.*) /articles.php?id=$1&c=$2
Save your file. This says that any URL with articles/(.*)/(.*) will be rewritten as articles.php?id=$1&c=$2.
So, for example, a URL of articles/webdesign/html
will be rewritten as articles.php?id=302&c=23
From here, you will need to do interpret the $_GET variables as normal.
The ^articles/(.*)/(.*) is broken down to ^ meaning the beginning of the string in PHP (and other languages) regular expressions. The (.*) means as many random characters as possible in the regular express language. It does get more complicated than that, but this is all you need to learn to get good results.
You can throw as many keywords as you want into the URL in order for this work.
Try it! You’ll like it. Let me know if you have successfully done mod-rewrites. Post some comments with examples of your web site here. I am looking forward to your mod rewrites.
CAPTCHA, that notoriously annoying combination of numbers and letters, is getting harder and more annoying. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a necessary evil, but the lesser of two evils, for any web site owner that has some kind of HTML form on their web site, where HTML form data is saved to a database, flat file, or sent via email. The bigger evil I am talking about is receiving spambot data from these forms. So, Captcha seems like a good alternative, even though your visitors don’t like filling them out.
A lot of my web site visitors ask me to remove these images, and I professionally decline explaining why. Here’s the real prevalent problem: While we web developers and graphic designers attempt to make it harder for spambots to read these things, we seem to make it just a bit more difficult for human beings to read them as well, which defeats the entire purpose of having any HTML form at all. So, the spambots win and we constantly seem to lose. Unfortunately, as long as we have spabots filling out forms, we must have CAPTCHA until a better trend comes along.
In this podcast, I will tell you about some of the cool tricks web designers are using to make CAPTCHA easier or better yet, alternatives to deter the spambots. We will also talk about the security exploits of CAPTCHA no matter what web development language (I use PHP and ASP.NET/C#/VB.NET on my sites) you are using. We also talk about some technologies that may help CAPTCHA development like AJAX.
Sorry about not podcasting this. My microphone is in another office. Once I retrieve it, I will surely start the podcasts again, but for now, you can read my blog posts.
So, the question is: Should you web designers REST on the job? I think so, but I am not talking about the type of REST where you sleep.
REST (Representational State Transfer) is a very cool and easy to use technology and is used on Amazon’s affiliate program.
I was waiting for something like this, because in the old days, Amazon’s affiliate program was very clunky and full of flaws, but thanks to REST, the program has come a long way. When you added a book, you had to get all the garbage that came with it, all designed by Amazon. Each link resulted in an HTML <IFRAME> tag. Can you imagine little IFrames on a web page for each book? That is just ludicrous! That’s not at all what I wanted in an affiliate program. Plus, you had to add each one. That’s not good for SEO either.
Now, with REST, you simply throw over an URL, loaded with some GET name/value pairs and Amazon gives you back an XML file. This XML file contains all types of cool information about the books including cover images, reviews, retail price, and more. What you do with that XML is totally up to you.
I use PHP’s DOM methods at the Web Design Store to parse the XML, but you can use any language that you want. PHP has a cool function called GET_FILE_CONTENTS that will retrieve XML data from a URL.
Another REST application is Twitter’s API, You can visit my Twitter page at http://twitter.com/podcastwhoswho - With the Twitter API, you can send them a simple URL of the Twitter ID and they will send you back your comments…of course in XML, but hey, a little PHP or ASP or even XSLT can go a long way combined with SAX or DOM technologies.
Amazon’s web page has a great explanation of how to work with their REST API and they give you PHP examples as well. As a side note, if you are a SOAP whiz, then Amazon works with SOAP as well.
See you guys next time!
Bruce
Well, some of us web designers don’t want to face it, but the days of HTML table tags are going away, or at least a good part of the web design community would like it to.
This latest podcast explains why you should get into CSS layout without HTML table tags
http://media.switchpod.com//users/podcasterwhoswho/tablesscss1025.mp3
Google has launched the successful iGoogle and with it, Google Gadgets. They are pretty easy to develop if you have basic knowledge of HTML, XML, and Javascript.
Developing Google Gadgets as a marketing tool is a perfect use for them.
