Note: These suggestions are specific to their website and not necessarily a generic top four website suggestions.

IMPORTANT MUST-DOS

• Photos on site should be jpgs, not gifs. Gifs should be limited to graphics that are just a few colors. Just one photo (gif) on “Bowling Lessons” page is almost a meg. All images should aim to be 50k or less.
• All images should have relevant alt tags for accessibility purposes. Headers across site should be clickable back to home.
• All external links should have target=”_blank” to open up external links in new page so as to not take the users out of the site.
• Put Google Analytics on the site so you can see what people are clicking on, what kind of browsers they’re using, what kind of connection they have, where people are being referred from, what keywords they’re using in google to get to the site and so on.

I am now once again in the market for a job so I turned to you, my good old friend careerbuilder. I uploaded a new resume. I created a new job search with my particular job wants. Not that any of that matters though, because since the moment my profile has been reanimated on your site, I have been inundated with emails from companies wanting me to do things I am either not qualified for, expressly do not want to do and/or in locations I am not willing to work.

Basically, your site has turned into an email farm for recruiting companies. I have gotten emails about being a financial advisor. What? Financial Advisor? The words “financial” and “advisor” are not found anywhere on my resume. How is this not spam? I go to your site to review your policy and apparently you embrace these emails and take a sort of “if you don’t like it, then you can get the hell out” kind of attitude. The exact words from the Career Builder Customer Support are, “As per our terms and conditions, when a job seeker is signed up with Careerbuilder, they have agreed to receive solicited emails pertaining to job offers, even if those jobs are not related to their profession.” Apparently, the focus of your website has turned from being about finding people jobs to selling email addresses to recruiting companies so they can spam their way to commissions. Throw enough at the wall and see what sticks, I guess.

Well, to each their own. And to my own, ex-pal careerbuilder, I will be taking my business to the actually relevant, helpful and not-yet-corrupted indeed.com.

xxoo Michelle

1. do what i want you to do #2: more like spammates
2. dear godaddy,

You want:

Clean, up-to-date code. Clean code means that when another web designer looks at the code your web designer wrote, it should be really easy to follow. It should be neatly indented to show the hierarchy. It should be hand-coded with no marks from WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver. The CSS should be in an external style sheet not in-line all over the page. And the biggest red alert of them all is if you see the page coded in tables. Tables are basically a sign of somebody who hasn’t learned anything new in web design since 2004. You don’t want that person.

Good usability. Usability is essentially the ease as to which users can navigate and interact with your site. Ask your web designer for some examples of good usability in sites they have designed. They might talk to you about navigation or page layout. The key is that they talk to you about something. If they don’t/can’t, that is a red flag.

SEO. You want your site optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so it comes up on search engines when people type in relevant keywords which, in turn, will drive traffic to your site which, in turn, is almost the whole point of having a website. Ask your web designer how they will implement good SEO on your site. They should talk about things like keywords, linkbacks and relevant content. If they say these things, at least they’re in the ballpark and not idiots. It also wouldn’t be a bad idea to look through a book on SEO just so you have an idea of what it’s all about too.

References. Ask for references. Be sure to specify that you want non-relatives. Call the references. Ask them how they found the designer. Ask them if the designer was good at communicating during the project. Ask them if they ended up paying more than how much was originally estimated, how much more and why. Ask them if they had any problems at all with the designer. And after you ask that last question, pause after they answer just to see if they add a little more juicy stuff. That’s an old interview trick.

All the control. Make sure you clarify that when your designer is done and paid for, you want all the logins and passwords to the FTP, to the WordPress Admin, to the whatever. This way if you ever want to go with somebody else to continue maintaining your site or to do any sort of redesign, you don’t have to go back to the original designer. That can be awkward.

This is not an exhaustive list. It’s for you to know the other things you should be thinking about when you want a website beyond how it looks. It’s also something for you to arm yourself with so you don’t go in there thinking that this person has all the power and knowledge. And it will also let them know that you are not an idiot to be taken advantage of. Because you’re not.

1. client is a four letter word (plus two more)

I run my RSS feed through Google’s Feedburner (for analytics) so first thing’s first, I went there to begin detectiving. Their troubleshooting was giving me the error that my feed was over 512k which is too big for their britches. This was no surprise to me as I had just realized the photos getting put up on the site by my creative half weren’t compressed enough. So I grabbed the most recent ten photos on the site, compressed them to about a fifth of their size and uploaded them to replace their bloated brethren. Back to Feedburner… My feed was now no longer throwing a size error but it was throwing a non-descript “null” error. Arghhh!

In what could probably be filed under things I didn’t really need to do, I deleted the feed off of Feedburner. I was at a loss and part of me thought perhaps there was some sort of weird caching thing Feedburner was doing that was preventing the feed from showing up fixed even though it was. Then, I tried to reburn my feed with Feedburner and got an error saying my feed was broken. On the error page, they provided a link to a feed validator which also said my feed was broken and provided the explanation, “server timed out.” Double arghhhh!

I then compared this feed to the feeds from my other WordPress blogs. These other feeds were validating just fine so the validator wasn’t broken (that was a thought at one point). And I could see no difference in the XML between the working feeds and the non-working one. Arghhhh arghhhhh ARGHHHH!

Now, begins the Google searches. I googled my problem with every wording possible. Lots of people seemed to have had this problem or problems similar to this. One possible cause was errant characters in a blog post. This is usually caused by copying and pasting from Microsoft Word right into WordPress. I went through the most recent ten posts and changed every apostrophe and quotation mark I saw. This was to no avail. I went so far as to change the settings so my feed only includes one post, then I added a dummy post with just the word “test” and no images or anything. Still no good.

I continued my Google searching on the problem and I stumbled across a forum thread where somebody suggested that the cause could be a WordPress plug-in conflict. To confirm this, you have to deactivate all of your plug-ins to see if the problem is fixed and then reactivate the plug-ins one by one to see which one is the culprit. So, I did that. And guess what? This was the goll-darned issue.

It ended up being this plug-in,Sexy Bookmarks, I use to share my links i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. I had checked a box that included it at the end of posts in the feed and that was what did it. So, I unchecked that box. Then I was successfully able to burn that feed back on Feedburner. The problem has been officially troubleshot and solved. Sigh of relief.

To note, this whole process took at least eight hours over three days to solve. So even though this was all mind-numbingly frustrating, I was able to figure it out and fix it. I am not a genius and since neither are you, I trust that you have the abilities to troubleshoot your problems to a solution too.

I’ve had over 16 years to become this capable awesome and I still don’t know anything close to everything. I just know what I know and I try to keep learning new things as much as I can. And quite often, I come across somebody that seems to know so much more than I do. However, before I get intimidated, I just remind myself that they don’t know everything either.

I was going to do a website for a friend of mine who started a consulting company. She was about to just make it herself using iWeb. To save her from that, I told her that I would just do it. I helped her get a domain and hosting, set her up a site using WordPress, and sent her instructions on how to update things herself. She responded by sending me a link to a Flash site she liked and asked me if I could just do something like that. We parted ways. She now has a site that she built in iWeb.

I occasionally help out another friend of mine with her website. Something that drives me nuts is that she has a “blog” tab that links to a blogspot blog. She won’t let me seamlessly integrate WordPress on her site for her to blog there. First off, let me just say, if you have a business and want to be taken seriously, don’t put stuff on a blogspot-branded blog. It looks shoddy. You are also missing the boat on some serious SEO. Putting relevant content on your website really improves your chances of your site showing up in search engine results on related topics. It is hard to explain that to somebody who likes how pretty her blogspot site is. My response to that is basically, “If you love it, so much then why don’t you marry it?” I have not totally lost this battle. Her husband agrees with me apparently. I’m going to give it a few months and revisit the topic.

My friend and I started a photoblog site, “America: Wear It Or Leave It.” She wanted there to be an eagle in the header and when you roll over it, it would screech. I had to explain to her that no matter what the tone of our website is, people would be irritated by it. And they might leave. Or perhaps they are at work and their volume is turned up, and they screech at the whole office. And they get fired. And their life is ruined because you wanted something dumb to happen. I did win that battle but mostly because that site was half mine to begin with. Debates like this are more difficult to win when somebody is paying you.

Which is why I hate to freelance.

1. how to get the best website for your buck
2. unblech your blog

xxoo Michelle

cc: District Attorney

(Editor’s note: Don’t tell me to just update my Adobe Reader. That doesn’t work either. I have uninstalled Adobe Reader because it is so irritating only to have to install it again to get my browser to read all PDFs correctly.)

I usually do my domain purchasing at godaddy.com. I know I complain about them but at this point, I have so much of stuff there that it’s easier to just keep using them. And if you have a choice on things, always go for a dot com. It’s classier. It’s also usually a bit more expensive, but I think worth it. Also, if you’re buying a domain name for a business you might want to start up, it never hurts to buy domain names for the misspelled names of that business as well and you can just redirect them to the correct url. Most big websites do that.

Oh, and this rule doesn’t apply in Vienna where I tried to buy wiegehtswien.at with the idea that I was going to mirror my whatupvienna.com blog in german. They wanted like $60/year for it. Nein danke, jerks.

Don’t put your nav on the left side. Users more often than not scan left to right. You want to put the content in front of their faces immediately not throw a mess of links at them.

Do put your navs on the top, right side, bottom or all of the above. Top is good for the main sections of your site, the right side is good for some more specialized links like most recent posts, most recent comments, twitter follow, facebook fan, etc. And the bottom is good for a text version of the main nav.

Don’t have a huge graphical header at the top of your blog that takes up half the screen when users arrive at your site. Why do people need to see that self-indulgent waste of space every time they go to your site? They want content. They don’t want to see your pretty picture.

Do have a minimally-graphic, non-garish font having, easy-to-read, not-too-height-greedy header. The header, ideally, should stand out but not overwhelm. And note that I am not advocating just html system fonting your header. You just gotta find that balance. The header should brand your site but it shouldn’t divert focus from the content of the site.

Don’t have more than two columns. You with your text ads, blogrolls, badges, tag clouds, facebook, twitter, newsletter, rss, affiliates, skyscrapers, translation tools, and on and on. It looks like craigslist up in there with some most people’s blogs. It is distracting.

Do try and stick to two columns. Have your main body with the content and then another column for all your stuffs. Put the things you want people to take action on towards the top (twitter follow, facebook, newsletter, etc) and the farther you go down, the less important things get. Also, try not to make the content in the right-hand nav longer than the content on the page. Always design erring on the side of the full page of content being longer than the nav.

Like everything, there are exceptions to these rules. It’s just a general guideline for those people venturing out into the blogging world to get going in a good less-irritating direction. And by all means, leave some more good do’s and don’ts in the comments.

1. link it all
2. client is a four letter word (plus two more)

I have worked for many content-based websites and one thing that is driven in your head is clicks, clicks, clicks to get page views, page views, page views. So if you are linking to some sort of piece of content from the front page of your site, let’s say, apart from a conspicuous “Read More” like link, everything else should be inconspicuously linked. Inconspicuous meaning try and avoid doing anything fancy on hover that might make your index pages look like the Vegas strip when dragging a mouse around. You want to be prepared for an idiot internet user to click on any thing in that general area of that content to take them to another page to see more of that specific content. So that means, for example, the accompanying image and headline should always be linked. And don’t forget “border=0″ people. This isn’t 1995.

1. how to get the best website for your buck
2. do what i want you to to do #1: fix your box
3. unblech your blog