Craig Grannell from Net Magazine, UK, asked designers and developers if it’s finally time to take IE6 behind the shed and shoot it in the article Calling time on IE6 :

Many argue that IE6 hinders development, due to the number of hacks required to get sites working in it. Opera web evangelist Bruce Lawson goes further, squarely blaming IE6 for “hindering the development of the web”, due to its lack of support for advanced CSS and XHTML. Many in the industry tell such tales: horror stories of a third of a site’s development time taken up by dealing with IE6; major display issues requiring a partial site rebuild, despite everything looking fine in all other browsers; elements randomly disappearing entirely due to the ‘hasLayout’ bug. “If anything, things will get worse, since we’re now battling three versions: 6, 7 and the beta of 8,” says Tom Muller of Kleber. “They all display content slightly differently and we regularly work up a site in Firefox or Safari, only to spend a day figuring out why our valid, semantic code doesn’t render correctly in Internet Explorer.”

Read on.

1. Title Tag

A page title is the first thing a search engine will look at when determining just what the particular page is about. It is also the first thing potential visitors will see when looking at your search engine listing.

It’s important to include a keyword or two in the title tag — but don’t go overboard - you don’t want to do what’s known as “keyword stuffing” which does nothing but make your web site look like spam. Most people will include either the company name, or title of the particular page here, as well.

2. Meta Tags

There are two primary meta tags in terms of SEO — the description and the keyword tag. It’s debatable whether the search engines use the description tag as far as ranking your results. However it is one of the more important tags because it is listed in your search result — it is what users read when your link comes up and what makes them decide whether or not to click on your link.

3. Proper Use of Heading Tags

This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. Use of heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your copy are.

4. Alt Attributes on Images

Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings.

5. Title Attributes on Links

Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good web site will have. That’s the little “tool tip” that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links.

6. XML Sitemap

This list of ALL pages / posts / etc. of your site also includes information such as the date the page was last modified, as well as a priority number of what you feel the most important pages of your sites are. All elements that help the search engines properly find and link to all content of your site.

7. Relevant Content

Having content relevant to your main page or site topic is perhaps the most important SEO aspect of a page. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags and alt image tags, etc — but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt.

8. Link Building

We’ve probably all heard of Google Page Rank — it seems to be every web site owner’s dream to have as high a page rank as possible. While the algorithm for determining page rank encompasses many elements, and is constantly changing, one item is the number of links pointing to your web site.

9. Social Media

Although technically not SEO, Social Media is such a growing factor in getting your web site noticed, that it’s an important element to include in your plan.

10. A Few SEO Don’ts — Flash and Splash

Along with any list of Do’s come the Don’ts. As far as SEO is concerned, two of these items are splash pages (often consisting of a flash animation) and all flash web sites.

Yes, flash is pretty! Full flash web sites can actually be amazing to look at — their own bit of interactive artwork. But unfortunately the search engines don’t get along well with Flash. Although there is talk of possible advancement in this area, for the most part the search engines cannot read Flash.

A good alternative to both issues is to make use of a flash header. There’s no problem to include a flash animation at the top of your main site, or as a feature within the content area, etc. Because this is an addition to your web site, as opposed to a full separate element.

To read more detailed description of every technique, check out Freelancefolder.com

• Ordered service:
• Detailed information:
• Name of the site:
• Url of current site:
• Company background:
• Tag line for website:
• Target audience:
• Main competitors:
• Colors you like:
• How many pages your site will need:
• Examples of the sites you like:
• Which style would you prefer? (for example: clean corporate/highly creative/urban/simple elegant/minimalistic)
• Do you need a new logo?:
• Do you need promotional banners?
• Additional info:

Jacob Cass provides a more elaborate description to most of the main questions a designer should ask/a client has to answer. Here are some extracts from Jacob’s post:

A design brief should primarily focus on the results and outcomes of the design and the business objectives of the design project. It should not attempt to deal with the aesthetics of design… That is the responsibility of the designer.

The design brief also allows you (the client) to focus on exactly what you want to achieve before any work starts on the project.

A good design brief will ensure that you get a high quality design that meets your needs, providing you have chosen the right designer.

What does your business do?

Tip: Never assume that the designer will know anything about your company. Be clear and concise and avoid jargon when replying.

• What does your company / organisation do?
• What is your company’s history?

What are the goals? Why?

• What is the overall goal of the new design project?
• What are you trying to communicate and why?
• Are you trying to sell more products or get awareness of your product / service?
• How do you differ from your competitors?
• Do you want to completely reinvent yourself or are you simply updating your promotional material?

Who is the target market?

• What are your target market’s demographics & phychographics? ie. the age, gender, income, tastes, views, attitudes, employment, geography, lifestyle of those you want to reach.

Tip: If you have multiple audiences, rank them in terms of importance.

What copy (text) and pictures are needed?

Tip: The copy and pictures used in a design are as crucial as the design itself and you should clearly state who is going to be providing the copy and pictures if needed. You may need to look into getting a professional copywriter / photographer - ask your designer for some recommendations.

• What copy needs to be included in the design? Who is providing the copy?
• What pictures / photographs / diagrams etc need to be used? Who is providing these?

What are the specifications?

• What size is the design going to be?
• Where is it going to be printed / used? The web, business cards, stationery, on your car?
• What other information should the designer know in regards to specifications?

Have you got a benchmark in mind?

• You should provide the designer with some examples of what you consider to be effective or relevant design even if it is from your main competitors. This will set a benchmark for your designer.
• Provide the designer with things not to do, and styles that you do not like or wish to see in your design. This will give the designer an idea of what to avoid and will avoid disappointment on your behalf.

What Is Your Budget?

• Providing a budget prevents designers wasting valuable time and resources when trying to maximise your budget.
• Providing the budget upfront also allows designers to know if the project is going to be worthwhile to complete. Make sure you are worth their time.

What is the time scale / deadline?

• Give the designer a detailed schedule of the project and set a realistic deadline for the completion of the work. You should take into account the various stages of the design project such as consultation, concept development, production and delivery.

Tip: Rushing design jobs helps no one and mistakes can be made if a complex job is pushed through without time to review, however, there are times when a rush job is needed, and in these cases you should be honest and upfront about it.

To read more about how to write a design brief, go to JustCreativeDesign blog 

• Part 1 - A Basic Overview Of The 3 Types Of Traffic That Come To Your Site
• Part 2 - Google, Wordpress And Joomla Tools To Help You Track Traffic On Your Website
• Part 3 - How To Create Campaigns To Drive Direct Traffic To Your Site And Measure Your Success
• Part 4 -How To Get Organic Traffic To Your Site And Measure Your Success
• Part 5 - How To Get Referral Traffic To Your Site And How To Measure It

It’s a must-read for all who wants to be successful in their online business!

AjaxPresents - Presentation software portion of the Ajax13 office suite. Works with Firefox 1.5 and higher, free, and can import & export from PowerPoint and OpenOffice.

BrinkPad.com - A Java based presentation tool that allows you to create online and then download to your system to save it.

Empressr.com - A tool for creating media rich presentations online with Flash and Ajax. You can share them with the public and allow them to be voted on.

Google Documents - Google made their intentions to take on Microsoft Office fairly obvious when they finally added an online presentation tool to take on PowerPoint.

Preezo.com - Uses an Ajax-based interface for quick editing. Allows collaboration and easy sharing with clients and colleagues.

PresentationEngine.com - Focused more on larger corporate customers with a monthly budget for little bit higher-end needs. Provides templates for speedy creation.

PreZentit.com - Is a completely free presentation editor that generates the slides as web pages so they can even be edited in an HTML editor if you choose. They allow 250 MB of storage, but no limit to the size or duration of a presentation. Also offers unlimited online collaboration.

SlideRocket.com - Currently in private beta, SlideRocket is trying to fulfill all of the features of desktop apps and adding more online features. They are accepting emails to sign up for the beta at this time.

Spresent.com - A Flash presentation generator that can be used online or in their desktop editor. Results can be published or embedded.

ThinkFree.com - ThinkFree Show is part of the ThinkFree office suite which offers a free online alternative to Office. The service is free and offers 1 GB of online storage.

Thumbstacks.com - A free presentation builder that allows you to build your work right in te browser and then share it with anyone by just sending them a link.

Vcasmo.com - An online presentation editor that allows for work with numerous file formats, video, audio, photos and more. Online embedding and sharing is easy when you’re done, and they expect to launch a Facebook app sometime in the second quarter of 2008.

Zoho Show - Zoho’s answer for presentation software offers all of their usual services such as collaboration, but you also get the chance to embed your shows in blogs or present long distance to a client.

Writing articles that are search engine friendly is very easy to do if you know the right ingredients to use. We are going to examine some of the techniques you should employ in your articles to make optimize them for search engines and to help them index well. Instead of giving you my usual long article about who, what, where and why, I’m going to give you a nice little list that you can print out and go through.

I’m going to make a few assumptions. First, I’m going to assume that you already have search engine friendly urls set up for your article. You will notice, if you clicked on the title to this article, that the title of the article is also the url of the article. This is easy to replicate if you are using WordPress, Joomla or many of the other available blogging platforms. I’m also going to assume that your article is about something related to what your blog is about. If your blog is about making money blogging, then I’m going to assume that your article content is about the same thing. Now that we have my basic assumptions out of the way, let’s get on with it.

DECIDE ON THE KEYWORDS YOU ARE GOING TO USE IN YOUR ARTICLE

If you are really into trying to get organic traffic, you need to be sure that all of your articles contain the same keywords. This type of repetitive use of keywords helps your articles to rank well when they are searched for. This helps you drive organic traffic to your site. For more information on how to drive organic or search engine traffic to your site, visit PureBlogic’s article on how to drive search engine traffic. That article is part of a series of articles that may prove helpful to you when you are trying to decide what to do to drive traffic.

CREATE KEYWORD AND PHRASE LINKS TO YOUR PRIOR ARTICLES INSIDE OF YOUR CURRENT ARTICLE

When you write an article, you need to make sure that you create a keyword or phrase link back to your prior articles. For instance, in the prior paragraph I have linked to an article that I wrote about generating search engine traffic. That article links to several additional articles. Those articles link to several other articles. Each article is tied to the other articles with keywords and anchor phrases. This is done for an important reason. You can often get multiple pages ranked at the same time. As the search engine bots crawl your site and follow the links, your keywords and phrases will be indexed along with the actual article you submitted. Make sure that your keywords and link phrases all contain your keywords.

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Moo.rd is an extension library to MooTools that brings you more effects, and helpers for tables, lists, and lightboxes.

You can see examples of the new extensions including:

• Custom Alert
• Custom Confirm
• Smooth Scrolling

The new Custom.Alert and Custom.Confirm classes are modal, fixed, and can be draggable, like the standards. But they are “Custom”, so we can give them our personal style, choose an overlay (made by the new Overlay Utility Class) with a custom light, make them appears/disappears with a fade transition and many more.

I want to have the Apple style plus the Windows Style plus my personal style in the page: mission impossible? custom Alerts and custom Confirms, go, make it possible!

The SmoothScrolling class is now for “all smooth needs”. Extending Fx.Scroll, it take advantage of its options, like wheelStops. In addiction, we can choose which anchors must be affected and the Fx parameters of the “effects”.

Source : Ajaxian

Christmas is often a time of gluttony for many. From a traditional roast through to too much alcohol, many will be suffering long Christmas hangovers, particularly those not fortunate enough to live in a country with a gazetted post Christmas recovery public holiday (Boxing Day on Wikipedia here).

Even if you do have December 26 off, with January 1 around the corner it’s time for resolutions about getting fit and healthy. Here’s a few sites we’ve reviewed that will help you along the way.

Fat Secret
(review: April 2007)

Fat Secret is designed to help overweight people leverage a network of friends and online resources to lose weight by building a support network around you to monitor your progress.

Users first state their current and goal weights, and are urged to report in daily with their updated weight. This data builds a graph that is included on their profile page showing progress over time. Each user is also provided with a blog/journal and can add other Fatsecret users as friends.

DietTV
(previously Diet Television: review November 2006)

The site is a directory of diet plans that combines user ratings and professional nutritionist analysis of various factors like ease of implementation, speed of weight loss and allowable alcohol consumption. The company says it is based on two ideas: that dieting is hard and that community is one of the biggest factors in successful weight loss. There was information available on 47 different diets when we first reviewed the site. To search for a diet, users move 12 sliders to indicate which diet and food factors are most important to them. The site recommends which ones could best fit their needs. Users can also contribute off-site links related to any diet.
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These are the six things that will help people get over the hump.

Box Model

At the very core of it, is an understanding of the box model within CSS. Sure, you may know your margin and padding but what happens when elements start to interact with each other. Suddenly things that look good in one browser go all to hell in the other. Consistently in working with the box model comes from understanding the difference between quirks mode and strict mode. It’s also a good idea to know how to hack it up for older browsers.
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