Everytime I get asked to make a website compliant for IE6, it gets me a little frustrated.

Now, I’ve given you all the reasons why as a web developer, I consider it important that people keep their browsers updated, but it’s important for the users.

With updated browsers, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox or any of the plethora of browers, you get improved security and improved features. Why wouldn’t you want to surf the internet with the most up to date technology? Why wouldn’t you want to do everything possible to keep your data as safe as possible?

Using a browser that is over 10 years old, and 3 versions behind is not going to give you the best experience on the web.

I no longer include compatibility for IE6 unless it is specifically requested. With the explosion of iPhones and iPads, I consider it far more important to ensure Safari compatibility – it is a growing market.

So, if you want to get the best out of the internet, make sure your chosen browser is the newest full version, and is up to date!

When writing your website content, it is important to understand there is a difference in writing for the written page and writing for a web page.

For a start, space on the website is technically unlimited.

Reading a monitor is generally harder work than reading a magazine page, so things should be spaced to make it easier to read, and in a font that is easy to read.

As for the content itself, it needs to be written in a way that engages your user.

If someone has purchased a magazine, they are more likely to read all of the content as they want to get value for money. The same is not true of websites.

It is important to understand that websites are free and you can navigate away from any page at the touch of a button. People have money invested in magazines and will continue to read even if it’s not wholly appropriate, as they have paid for it.

Web pages carrying news content or a just a lot of content in general, need to be laid out in bite sized chunks with images to illustrate points.

Many people will skim read a webpage and if it is perceived that there is too much content or waffle, users can be put off and navigate away from the page – possibly even the website.

Reduce that content into managable chunks and people are more likely to invest their time reading your content.

The nofollow tag seems to create a bit of confusion among developers, so I thought I would clarify my understanding of the tag and would welcome a discussion.

I have a very easy way of deciding these things for the company I work for – anything that comes through the advertising department should get nofollowed, and anything through the editorial department should be followed. I should point out that I am currently working for a magazine publisher.

The rule of thumb I work to is that if a link has been paid for, the nofollow tag should be applied. Any naturally occuring link within the website content should be left alone.

When the link metric was first introduced as a ranking factor it was seen that a link was a in essence a ‘vote’ for the recipient website. This was easy to manipulate by buying links.
Google combated this by penalising sites that were obviously selling links and followed that through to penalise the websites listed on them.

A natural website linking pattern would should links that are both followed and nofollowed.

There was a thinking that nofollowed links were useless as no ‘link juice’ was passed to the recipient website, but I have always subscribed to the theory that a good link is worth having regardless of the nofollow tag, and it seems I may finally have the proof!
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-signals-hiding-beneath-the-surface
Randfish, a well known and respected blogger in the SEO field has stated that he believes that nofollowed links from trusted sources will have an impact on your linking profile.

The bottom line is that as long as you are targetting good links, it doesn’t matter if they are nofollowed – a nofollowed link from a trusted website is a good thing to have!

I was asked to help out on a website which has dramatically lost rankings since changing from a non-www domain version to the www version – the same domain, I should stress.

The .htaccess file had been setup correctly but as the dramatic drop in traffic happened 2 days after the redirect happened, it had to be the culprit.

Something that stood out, in the Google listings was that the homepage of the domain was still being listed as the non-www version despite other pages now showing up as the www version.

After some careful analysis of the website it transpired that the CMS used absolute links for all internal linking and all of those links were using the non-www version of the domain.
This essentially would be a confusion for Google as the .htaccess file was telling it to use www links, while the website itself was using non-www – in essence, creating an infinite loop.

With this now fixed I am waiting to see how the big G reacts and if this simple yet essential attention to detail is going to get the traffic back to the site.

The moral of this is that you shouldn’t mess around with domains unless it is really necessary – and you know exactly what is required!

I am currently working on a site that uses Expression Engine, and as we all know, there is no thing as a perfect CMS.

I needed to be able to assign a member group id to a user according to the registration form that was completed. This is not something that is native to Expression Engine – all new registrations get assigned the standard member group id.

I therefore had to come up with another extension in order to get the job done.
Now, as the information on writing extensions is extremely thin on the ground, I had to scour the internet for an explanation on how the hooks within Expression Engine work.

Finally I found an explanation, and was able to write what turned into two relatively simple extensions using the native Expression Engine hooks. The first one adds the member group id to a temporary field in the member’s table upon registration.
The second extension updates the group id field with the value from the temporary database field when the user confirms their registration.

All in all, it is working well so far. I may even package this one up for distribution!

In my day job as Senior Web Developer for a large publishing company, I use the Expression Engine CMS.
Until I started in this position, Expression Engine was not a piece of software I had come across as I tend to go for open source software as I find the support and range of addons to be so much better.

I was not a fan of Expression Engine on the 1.6 version…but then I  have to be fair and explain I had a steep learning curve in order to produce complex websites with unfamiliar software.

However, I now have 2 sites under my belt that were constructed within Expression, and I am now on my third. For this site I am using the newly released version 2.1 – and I much prefer it.
Some of this can be attributed to the fact that I have learnt a lot about the software in the last 7 months and I generally feel more comfortable in what I am doing,  but I think the overhaul that the developers have given the software in the latest release have made it  a much nicer CMS to use. And although it’s not important, it looks a lot nicer.

Well after searching for an extension to make my life easier today, I discovered that the rating extension I needed hasn’t yet been upgraded to work with version 2 so out of necessity I looked into writing my own.
Looking over the documentation, this was quite a daunting thing. Whereas with opensource software there are usually hundreds of tutorials on how to make different types of addons, there are none readily available for Expression Engine.

With a lot of trial and error I finally got the extension working – and I am so very proud! Unfortunately, as it was created whilst at work, it’s not my extension to package up and sell…but hopefully it’s just the first of many!

Hosting is an important part of your website setup, so when your hosting company has some downtime, it is very frustrating!

So what separates a good web host from a bad one?

Well, firstly I think it is important to understand that there is no such thing as 100% uptime for a web host. Every host will (or should) update software for security flaws and as such, I believe the server should be taken down during that time. Please correct me if I am wrong!

We all make mistakes in our respective lines of work, and as such, there are likely to be mistakes made in web hosting – those mistakes being power-outages, software or hardware failure for example.
When these things happen, it can be very frustrating for a website owner. It can mean loss of revenue for an online shop, or loss of visitors which could affect advertising revenue.

It is therefore important to choose a host who has a good uptime record.

But while it is frustrating to experience downtime, I believe it can be offset by a good host providing information and making sure their customers understand what is going on.
There is nothing worse than encountering a problem and not knowing if your hosts even know about the problem, let alone have an estimated time for fixing the problem.
A good host will keep you informed of what is happening – even if they still can’t find the root of the problem. A status update of “still looking into the cause” instils a confidence that the support team haven’t just nipped down the pub!

I have always worked to this philosophy myself. People like to know what’s going on, even if you have nothing new to tell them. A quick phone call or email to confirm nothing’s changed but you are still working on the problem goes a long way to keeping your customer happy.

So next time your web host goes down, check and see if their own website provides a status update or way to contact them to find out what’s going on. It’s should be a standard feature of website hosting for website owners who are serious about their business.

We’ve all encountered that page…the annoying standard “The page you are looking for cannot be found…”, but you don’t want your visitors to find those pages on your site do you?

As hard as you might try, if you have a big website or have changed the url structure, or even removed content, can you be sure your visitors are not seeing that annoying, and frankly useless, page?

Why not create a custom 404 page? Style it in the same manner as your website, and quite often having a funny tagline on the page  amuses users, but most importantly, they have remained on your website despite not finding the content they wanted.
Now is your chance to re-engage those users by offering them the content you think they may have been looking for.

There is a second reason to customise your 404 pages – and that is for the friendly spiders that visit your website!
If a spider follow an internal link on your website and comes to a standard 404 page, it will end it’s crawl as there is nowhere for it to continue onto. Having a 404 page that has your site menu and/or links to different content will give the spider somewhere else to go!

Of course, you need to ensure that the page returns a 404 and not 200 status, and you should remember to noindex the page, or block it with your robots.txt file!

I read SEOmoz on a regular basis, and today read a post about getting links to your websites.

One resource they recommended really stood out as being useful for both the website looking for links, but also for writers looking to validate their content.

At Zemanta you can submit your RSS or Atom feed, then as bloggers write their own posts that have access to a list of media items and related articles they can reference in their own blog.
Obviously, there is a plugin for WordPress, but there are plugins and extensions for a variety of blogging platforms, included hosted wordpress blogs and blogger, as well as an API for blogs that don’t have their own plugin yet.

I can see it as a great resource for verifying your information and finding new resources for good information!

I really like the concept and am trying it out in this post. Let me know what you think!

Related articles by Zemanta

• 4 Valuable Link Building Services (Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, EightfoldLogic & Whitespark) (seomoz.org) – this was the blog post I originally saw and have been able to add this link at the click of a button!

This week, Google launched their instant search.
That is to say that Google starts showing results as soon as you start typing, and refines the results as you type more.

Organic Search
My fear for organic search is that if your site is not shown above the visible screen fold, people will continue to refine their search rather than scroll. In other words, people will prefer to click/type rather than scroll. It means that it’s going to get harder to get organic traffic.
This is going to take a little bit of research!

Paid Search
This is a clever ploy by Google as it will likely mean that there will be an increase in people using shorter tail phrases in their adwords accounts which will push the cost per click up. Hey presto, Google makes more money.
Google has also stated that an advert has to be shown for 3 seconds for that advert to be counted as an impression. At least Google has thought about that aspect.

At present, to my knowledge, instant search is only available on the actual Google search page. Typing your query directly into the url bar, or using a toolbar search box will act normally, until you get the results and refine the query on the results page.