One of my clients recently received the following email: It’s clearly designed to panic the recipient into clicking the link by making them think their email will be cut off. I’m not sure what will happen if one clicks that link, but I’m quite sure it will not be good. This is either a spam […]
...Keep reading »Didjoo Vote?
I voted. Had to hold my nose on some of my choices, but I did it. This would have been a good year to have NOTA as a choice. Unbeknownst to me, my precinct moved since the last time I voted. I went to where I used to vote, but there was nothing there. Then […]
...Keep reading »Search vs. Direct Navigation
So I have a client I’m developing a website for. The client has been great to work with, and we’ve made good progress on the new site. But there was a problem: The client kept complaining that he couldn’t reach his site — he was getting “not found” error messages. He told me that he […]
...Keep reading »Phishing and Phishing Detection
I recently had 2 diametrically opposite experiences with phishing. In the world of the Internet, “phishing” is when some entity (a scammer) — typically, a website or e-mail sender — pretends to be some organization that a user has a relationship with, and attempts to entice the user into providing personal and confidential information (such […]
...Keep reading »“Crawlability,” Web Design, and SEO
So I got a gentle tweak from Zack Katkin at Unique ID Web Design because I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been busy working on projects for clients, but I know that’s no excuse. I’m breaking the Golden Rule of Blogging, which I drill into my clients when they want to start a blog, […]
...Keep reading »Can your site be tweaked?
Many of my clients already have an existing web site when they contact me. Often they’re unhappy with their site’s visual design, or its functionality, or its performance in the search engines. I hate — I really hate — telling a potential client that their site needs to be completely re-developed from the ground up […]
...Keep reading »The Infamous Canonical URL Issue
Difficult as it may be to believe, but by January of 2007, Google is still unable to recognize when URLs that obviously lead to the same page are in fact the same page. So what’s a URL, and what’s the problem here?
...Keep reading »Google Maps
Yesterday I sniped at Google with my No NoFollow post, but today I’m here to praise Google. The technology that powers Google Maps is so very cool, and the very best thing about it, in my opinion, is that Google lets us use that technology right on our very own web sites!
...Keep reading »Missing images
For about the umpteenth time, this morning I responded to a question on a newsgroup by some poor soul who didn’t understand why the images weren’t showing up on his web page. The links were correct. The images were uploaded to the correct directory. But when he viewed his page in his browser, the images […]
...Keep reading »Web site development, SEO, and Hippocrates
What do web site development, search engine optimization and Hippocrates have in common? A line from the Hippocratic Oath comes to mind: First, do no harm. In a previous post, I touched on how the technological factors underlying a web site are important to the site’s search engine optimization. These factors aren’t important so much […]
...Keep reading »Saves Time! Less bloat!
I use a fairly wide variety of software programs in my work, on both the Mac and PC platforms (primarily Mac, of course). Some programs stand head and shoulders above the others, because they provide so much value, and/or make my work (and my life) easier.
Adobe’s 800-lb. gorilla, Photoshop, is of course the mother of all graphics programs. Vector graphics, raster images, photos, scanning, touching up, resizing, cropping, retouching, batch processing. Every version of Photoshop is better than the last.
But everyone knows about Photoshop, whether they use it or not. What about all those little programs and utilities that not everyone knows about?
...Keep reading »The Many and Varied Components of SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often referred to as if it is some single monolithic task. It’s not. SEO includes everything from the technical configuration of the server hosting a web site, to the site’s coding and structure, to the visible content on the pages, to the development of incoming links to the site from […]
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