Work Stuff
Ruby on Rails will Save Web Development
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | Code, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Web Development, Work Stuff | No Comments
I’m investing time to learn Ruby on Rails and guess what? I’m becoming happier by the page.
Ruby on Rails is built on, emphasizes and aides developers in working according to the principles of the Agile Manifesto. I’ve never read anything more inspiring than those 12 principles. Rails has made it possible to skip functional specs, comprehensive documents and all the other garbage that stops us from delivering working software to our customers that gives them a competitive advantage.
Rails allows you to respond to change rather than try to avoid it. Face it: clients change their minds. They forget to tell you some detail until the last week of development. They decide they don’t like their original ideas and want to try something new. In order for them to remain competitive, we need to be able to adapt and respond to those changes. So if you can’t control clients and stop this from happening, why would you continue to beat the dead horse? You write pages and pages of functional specs, scope docs and project plans. But I’ve never seen a single project completed without a change to any of those. It just doesn’t happen. Rails makes it easy to work with change, rather than constantly trying to figure out how to avoid it (you can’t).
Rails makes it possible to work and grow in a dynamic and competitive world. As I learn more, I’ll post more. Until then, I suggest you try Rails and see for yourself how much better your work can be.
SEO for Enliven has been Successful
Monday, October 6th, 2008 | Improving Code, Programming, SEO, Semantic XHTML, Web Development, Websites, Work Stuff, XHTML | 1 Comment
Bunmi told me recently that our sister company, Enliven Software, has been getting regular business and sales through online visitors who did a search on Google.
I’m proud of this, because I wrote the XHTML that’s been helpful in optimizing enlivensoftware.com for robots like googlebot to understand the site and return it high in the rankings for search results lists.
How did I do it?
Header tags, Title attributes and Cross-linking, oh my!
Use the proper hierarchy of Header tags in your code. On the home page, H1 belongs to your logo and company name. H2 belongs to the main headline of the page and maybe your company’s motto if you have one. H3 and H4 can be headers of sections, like News or Events.
On your subpages, make your logo/company name a regular anchor tag linking back to the home page. Now H1 goes to your page name and H2 becomes a sub-header for dividing content. H3 and H4 can still designate page sections. It helps if your H1 matches your Page Title
Then you should put titles on those tags and on your navigation menu links. Hell, you can even put titles on divs! These titles should differ from the text in the tag itself. For example, you could have a link named “Events” and its corresponding title could be “Calendar of Events at Company ABC”. This is cross-linking and keyword density rolled into one swift move without overloading the user with too much fluff in the words they see.
Also, a good friend of yours can be the ABBR tag. It’s the tag you use to define abbreviations. In a real-world example, here’s the code I used for the logo for the new MHSAA web site we’re working on:
<h1 id=”logo” title=”Michigan High School Athletic Association”><abbr title=”Michigan High School Athletic Association”>MHSAA</abbr></h1>
Now Google and other robots will know what MHSAA means. That should help in future searches. It also helps that their domain is mhsaa.com.< You can submit your sitemap to google and use webmaster tools and google analytics, as well.
So these are simple ways you as a programmer can help your company and clients succeed in SEO. Don’t forget that you should start with a kick-ass writer, too.
DotNetNuke Default.CSS: Seriously??
Monday, June 2nd, 2008 | Artemis Solutions Group, CSS, DotNetNuke, Improving Code, Programming, Ranting, Skinning, Venting, Web Development, Work Stuff | 16 Comments
Here’s another one of the myriad of reasons that I am displeased with DotNetNuke as a web development platform:
The “default.css” included with all installs of DNN has this (and more CSS for other stuff like it) in it:
H1
{
font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica;
font-size: 20px;
font-weight: normal;
color: #666644;
}
H2
{
font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica;
font-size: 20px;
...
(I think you get the point)
Excuse me, DotNetNuke core team, but isn’t stuff like this up to the Designers and Developers? Why are you including a default stylesheet with definitions for HTML elements that would be used by Web developers? I can’t tell you how many times default.css has left me absolutely baffled about the smallest details not being quite right according to our design specs because it has these random “defaults” in it. It’s not up to DNN Core team to define my font families, sizes, and colors. And seriously, stop using pixel font sizing.
It’s becoming clearer to me almost on a daily basis, that DNN is not the right CMS for a professional Web shop to be using. They probably have this default.css for people who don’t make skins or know anything about Web development. And if you remove default.css, it completely hoses all the Admin pages and Control Panel. It takes way too much time and effort to figure out what’s removable and what’s not, and you always end up surprised when some random element isn’t positioned or styled correctly later on down the road.
It’s time for us to move on to a CMS that gives the developer full control over the theme, and not put a bunch of defaults in it that you can’t get rid of.
CFD Smile Goes Live!
Monday, November 12th, 2007 | CSS, Clients, Code, Custom Development, Design, Portfolio, Portfolio - Freelance, Programming, Projects, SEO, Semantic XHTML, Skinning, Web Development, Websites, Work Stuff, XHTML | No Comments
Well, my first side project has finally gone live! After months of hard work, I now unveil www.cfdsmile.com to you. We wanted to bring out the services right up front for best emphasis, and lots of heavy stock photo usage for high impact.
We also worked with a professional web content writer to make the content more effective and search-engine optimized. This, coupled with semantic HTML, CSS, and google web master tools, will help this site rank high in keywords for Texas Dental Services.
So, please visit the site if you get a chance, and enjoy!
Three Scripts I wrote for DotNetNuke Skins
Thursday, September 13th, 2007 | DotNetNuke, Open Source, Programming, Usability, Web Development, Websites, Work Stuff, asp.net, vb.net | 3 Comments
I’ve been in email communication with the new Skinning Team Lead at DotNetNuke. I’m really interested in joining the DotNetNuke skinning team. I bring a pretty unique contribution to the scene, and I’d like to share it in the most appropriate outlet. So I’m talking to Timo to see if I can be useful on his team.
Until then, I’m going to share some scripts I wrote for DotNetNuke skins, which I also sent Timo in email.
City of Southfield voted Best Web Site of 2007 by MEDA
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 | Design, Praise, Projects, Teamwork, Web Development, Websites, Work Stuff | No Comments
From internal Artemis Email:
Just released, the Michigan Economic Development Association?s (MEDA) 2nd Annual Marketing Materials Competition has announced The City of Southfield web site as ?Best Web Site? for the population below 100,000 residents category.
Semantic XHTML – More than Table-less layouts
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 | CSS, Improving Code, Life, Programming, Semantic XHTML, Web Development, Work Stuff, XHTML | No Comments
OK so I have a confession to make. I didn’t know that semantic XHTML is different from standards-compliant XHTML.
I formally apologize to the entire web development community. My terrible practice over the last seven years has finally caught up with me and put me in my place!
I am deeply ashamed and will be making every effort to step up my game and read all about the wonderful world of semantic web development.
Modifying DotNetNuke Search and Improving the Results
Saturday, July 14th, 2007 | Artemis Solutions Group, Custom Development, DotNetNuke, Improving Code, Open Source, SEO, Search Engines, Search Modules, Search Results, Stored Procedure Improvement, Usability, Web Development, Websites, Work Stuff | 8 Comments
Recently, I modified the Stored Procedure named “GetSearchResults” to improve the results pages in DotNetNuke web sites. Here is my explanation from the DNN forums.
RetroDC gets included in LogoLounge!
Sunday, May 27th, 2007 | Artemis Solutions Group, Design, Praise, Web Development, Work Stuff | No Comments
Congratulations to Steve Jencks of RetroDC and Artemis Solutions Group for the inclusion of his original logo into LogoLounge, an group that publishes an international book for designers around the world to get inspiration for their logo design.
Page Title SEO
Friday, May 18th, 2007 | Artemis Solutions Group, Programming, Projects, SEO, Teamwork, Usability, Web Development, Websites, Work Stuff, XHTML | 1 Comment
I’ve recently sent out an email at work explaining Page Titles and their importance with SEO. I thought I’d share it on my blog. You may or may not have noticed that my Post titles and page titles come before my blog title in my page titles. I did this specifically because of SEO.
PAGE TITLE: – the text that shows up at the TOP OF THE BROWSER and in GOOGLE / YAHOO / MSN et al SEARCH RESULTS
Why is the page title important? It is what the casual searching web user will see when searching for content / services offered by YOUR CLIENT. So the page titles MUST INCLUDE keywords relevant to the pageâ??s content. The page title should be formatted well and DEFINITELY BE MORE THAN JUST A COPY OF THE PAGE NAME. The client name should be included.
If you donâ??t know how to do a very quick keyword-density page title, then AT THE VERY LEAST, format your page titles like this:
PAGE NAME | CLIENT / WEB SITE NAME
So if your client is Artemis Solutions Group and the page is Web Design
You can AT LEAST type this much:
Web Design | Artemis Solutions Group
But if you want to be keyword-savvy (just do a quick search and read on SEO Page Titles and Keywords for quick reference)
You could format it like this:
Web Design & Development | Lansing, MI | Professional Web site Design | Artemis Solutions Group
Itâ??s worth a LOT to the client for us as developers to think about their web marketing strategy and how their content and custom features affect that strategy. A little bit of Usability goes a long way, and is very easy to do.
Proper page titles take minimal effort, and add superb value to the client.
Search
Tweetin'
- No public Twitter messages.