Next up is the admin functions for the core functions, things like blog, pages and user management with configuration settings. Trying to rework the framework to handle Ajax as well.

Resumes are excuses for potential employers to pass over you. Don't give them that chance! Think about it from an employer's point of view and you may find you need to make a few changes.

5. Keep it succint

If you are applying for a position that is specialized, like say an IT position, an employer won't want to know that you managed a pizza hut and had 12 employees and handled the gas for the vehicles and made dough in the mornings all over 7 years ago. If your resume needs information and you feel you should include pizza hut only include items about the job that are relevant and would help you prove your point.

If your resume is more than a couple of pages, trim it down! Anything over 1.5 to 2 pages is most likely too long. They don't need your entire work history, if they do they will ask for it, don't assume you need to give it right away.

4. Bullet Points

Paragraphs are wordy, like this article. People don't read resumes, and they aren't looking for a good article to sit down on the toilet with. If your resume reads like a book it's most likely going to be passed over. Keep your work experiences to a few points and keep your resume flowing.

3. Skills vs Education

Ok, many people have debated this time and again. Which is more important? Where do they go? From a resume position, unless you're applying for something that emphasizes education in the description, you're better off placing your skills at the top above your work experience and your education as a footer. Companies today are looking to get the most out of you as an employee. They don't want to see what you have learned from Academia, they want to see what you can do.

Put your skills at the top in a bulleted list and the amount of experience at the end of each skill, let them check things off. That's what they are looking for...do you fit the description. If you give it to them quickly they're likely to keep you on the pile.

2. Centered Headers are for grade school

Don't put your personal information in the middle of the page at the top, it breaks the flow of the resume and looks childish. Keep it subdued but still ready to read, they don't care what your contact information is until they feel you fit. Don't give them an excuse.

1. Don't, and I mean DON'T use a word template

Templates look cheap. Everyone uses them. If you have a resume that looks the same as everyone elses why would you stick out? Why would they feel they need to stop at your resume and give it a look?

Bottom line is make your resume your own, don't use someone else's cookie cutter template. Take some time to curtail your resume to the job you're applying for and you'll find you get in the door a lot more! Good luck hunting!

Bing announced a new beta yesterday to leverage their declaration of being a decision engine and not just another search engine. Bing Visual Search was launched as a way to kick start your searches by identifying with well known images.

I took a moment to check it out, it's impressive to start with. I'm sure with some refining of the information within the search and working on a few more improved UI ability, things like searches in visual search should return visual results and not just act like the regular search engines, they could really have a winner here.

It's worth a look, if they can improve it a bit more I think they will really have a friendly search improvement for sure.

http://www.domainnamenews.com/featured/criminal-prosecution-domain-theft-underway/5675

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-seo-into-development-process 

Design Agnostic Deveopment Kit

The PageProLive system has been revamped to enable anyone from the every day designer who wants to simply enable their designs with content easily managed, to the more complicated and intricate developer who needs to streamline the management of their content on a page.

The principle is simple, manage your content in a page without managing the structure of the page. The implementation is straight forward and can easily be used as a simple copy paste script implementation or a more complicated integral part of a developed page.

The great thing about PageProLive is that it's Design Agnostic. Simply put, it outputs compliant unstyled HTML. This allows the output to take upon itself the style of any page it's being put into, allowing a true integrated look of your site. There are no templates!

If you have an existing Content Management System you can even use the PageProLive system in it's current setup. You can use it however you see fit, it's a Content Magement Kit.

DotComOnomics is looking for a select few Designers interested in utilizing PageProLive to enable your designs quickly and easily. This is a controlled release and will only be open to a few individuals. If you are a web designer and have designs that would look great on a site but you need to enable easy management of content, then we're looking for you!

Contact Us Today and let us know you are interested!

Knowing the basics will help the business to keep its mind aware of what some decisions can do to impact the standings of their site on the web. Even down to the developers, yes, that's right peoples even the developers.

Why would a developer need to know SEO? If you step back and think about it for a minute that person is the one who will ultimately place code out on the internet to be seen by all the search engines. Would it make sense to give the keys to the driver of a bus without verifying he/she knows how to drive first? And so it is with SEO.

By taking the time to work with everyone involved in a project to make sure they understand SEO it will help to reduce time it takes to get the job done and in the end you won't be reviewing your code over and over to tweek it and make sure it looks right. It's good for everyone!

So the next time you hear someone saying SEO is good and SEO is great, take some time to listen to the basics, get a good understanding, get in control, it will only help you in the long run!

Stay tuned!

A Special Place

You need a special place on your website to hold your images. This is important because it makes it easier to manage your website...and let's face it: we all need to make it as simple as possible, right? Create a folder in your website's directory to hold your images. I usually name the folder something sophisticated like "images". Once you have a place to put those great pictures, we can get them ready for the web!

Preparing Your Photos

The most significant mistake new web workers make with pictures is to just upload them as-is. The dimensions are huge, the filesize is huge, and the photos don't look as nice as they could. That's a huge problem for every visitor, but especially those still using dial-up connections.

Crop the Pictures

Before you do anything else, crop the photo so that the focus of the image is the part that communicates. If the whole photo is good, don't crop it...but most photos have more impact when the center of attention is larger and isolated.

Resize the Pictures

There are two ways to make your picture display at the dimensions you want: to make the photo the exact size, or to put the dimensions in your HTML. You should never do it with HTML for the following reasons:

• Any mistakes will make the image display improperly. Squishing or stretching the image in only one direction gives the viewer a jarring sensation without knowing exactly why. Nobody wants people to feel that way on their website.
• If your photo is larger than needed, you're making visitors download unnecessary data. That increases the load time for your page, reducing the impact of your website.
• If your photo is smaller than needed, streching it can lead to blocky, pixelated parts of your image known as 'artifacts'. If the point of an image is to convey information or invoke an emotion, make the most of what you have.

Resize the image on your computer before putting it on your website. This ensures that you're putting your best foot forward.

Optimize the Pictures

This part is the most foreign to the average web worker. Let me simplify it: the human eye is capable of seeing much, much more in a picture than a computer monitor can display. If you're going to print a picture on photo paper, you want the highest quality possible because the human eye will be viewing it directly. When you view an image on a computer monitor, you want the image to be the lowest quality possible without looking bad. The process of shrinking an image this way is called optimization. Done properly, optimization reduces the filesize of the image without reducing the quality. Most image-editing programs can optimize a photo for you.

We've all been to websites with pictures that took 5 minutes (or more) to finish loading. This is generally because an unoptimized photo can be hundreds of times bigger than an optimized one. Unless you want your visitors leaving your site before the pictures finish loading, spend some time learning how to optimize them.

Upload the Pictures

When you've cropped, resized, and optimized the photos, they're web-ready. Now you need to upload them to that special folder you created for them. If you're a PageProLive subscriber, you can do this when you're editing the page or blog post that you're working on. If you're not a PageProLive user you'll need an FTP program. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and simply means 'a way to move files from your computer to a web server'.

Link to the Pictures

When the photos are online, you'll need to add them to your page or post. PageProLive users can simply use the built-in image picker to put the pictures right where they want them. If you're editing your own HTML, you'll need to create code like this:

<img src="images/photo.jpg" alt="Description" />

Here's what the parts do:

IMG: this simply says "here's an image".

SRC: this means "source".

IMAGES/PHOTO.JPG: this is the actual location of the photo (in that special folder you created) and the filename (what you called the photo before you uploaded it). This part will be different for everyone, depending on the actual location of the photo. If you make a mistake here, your visitors will see a red X or a blue diamond or a question mark instead of your photo, so be careful.

ALT: this means "alternate text". This is what displays if, for some reason, your photo doesn't load properly. It's very important.

DESCRIPTION: you can put two kinds of information here. First, you can describe the contents of the photo. This is best, as alternate text conveys the photo's message when it can't be seen. Blind internet users rely on good descriptions to understand your website, so make it good. You can put whole sentences in there, so make it work. Second, you can add a few keywords for improved search engine visibility. This is only recommended for images that don't normally convey information, like decorative borders. Do not use search engine tactics in place of real descriptions. In fact, most of the time, your best bet for BOTH types of descriptions is to simply describe the photo. If you've chosen a photo that conveys information or evokes emotion, a good description will serve both functions.

Summary

There you have it. Those are the basics for adding photos to your website. It might seem complicated at first, but it quickly becomes second nature when you do it a dozen times or more. Choose great photos, prepare them properly, and describe them well...and your website will have the kind of impact you're looking for!

Since we started DotComOnomics back a couple of years ago, Tony and I have been working hard to provide solutions that we wouldn't be ashamed of recommending or even using through out our endeavours online. We have always had an idea to be able to easily implement a system that would enable and not hinder the web design process.

The holy grail here was to make a system that would be easily included and called at any time throughout the code and insert the output with minimal impact on the design of any site. In essence a Design Agnostic Development solution that would enable us to work with any site, any look, any feel without the problem of spending precious time on "integrating."

What we wanted just simply didn't exist. Too many systems require you to work your design into their rigid file structure and setup. What we needed was a system that integrated INTO your site and not the other way around.

Our solution:

PagePro Live was our answer to the conundrum we faced. Built with the idea of integrating into any design look and feel, it made updating information quick and easy for any user and presented ourselves with a solution that worked with any template setup.

Well the next generation of our system is coming, a system that takes that integration idea to the next level. A system that enables the designer AND the developer to easily create a design AND develop solutions extensibly and quickly. A system that will allow the end result to look perfect and without the time it takes to update and integrate. As the solution gets closer look to the blog for information on how to use it, how it works and how you can take advantage of PagePro Live.