You may have read my article on artists versus engineers and how poorly Flash websites perform in search engines. Well, Google has been working hard to improve it’s ability to read and index Flash websites and recently published an article in the Official Google Webmaster Central blog called “Improved Flash Indexing“.
If you have a Flash website, the article is worth reading. It appears that Google is improving it’s ability to discern text and follow links, but is still unable to “read” images. So if your website designer is using Flash, make sure they know the difference between text and images, and build your Flash website in the most search engine friendly fashion possible.
Or, you could simply avoid Flash altogether or use with great caution. I’ve chosen the former and some other internet marketing experts like Ian Lurie advise the latter . For most of my clientele, Flash is good for movies, but regular HTML, Javascript and a bit of PHP work just fine for everything else.
I wrote a post in February 2008 about a badly behaving bot (Limelight Networks in Tempe and Kavam in San Jose). This morning, I’ve received a comment on that post about a potential new badly behaving bot. Here’s the information:
I’m not seeing this bot yet on my web stats - but if any of you are seeing it, please leave a comment. I found some information on Wikipedia about the Savvis Communications Corporation, not very flattering stuff.
UPDATE:
After writing this article, I noticed a visit from the Savvis Communications Corporation in my own website statistics - to this very post - but unfortuately, they didn’t leave a comment. Maybe they’ll return.
WordPress 2.6 was just released and they’ve made a lovely little video, which I’ve embedded below to give you an overview of the new features. As always, it’s really important to keep your WordPress version up-to-date to make sure you have the latest and greatest hacking prevention prevention.
Here’s the video:
And if you’re lucky enough to have your blog hosted at DreamHost, you can even do this upgrade all by yourself by following the instructions in my article “How To Upgrade WordPress“. It doesn’t cost you a thing and is super easy to do.
Of course, if you’re a current client of mine and you want me to upgrade your blog, I’m happy to do it as well.
I received a phone call from a very frustrated prospective client the other day that I’d like to share with other people who might be thinking of starting their own website design businesses or shopping for a website designer. Here’s a tip: Hey all you web designers! Take care of your clients AFTER you finish their website design. Sound simple? Apparently not.
I had a client recently forward unsolicited emails she had recently received that claimed to offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. I wanted to share these emails with you and to give you my comments on their legitimacy, or lack thereof. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a very short video on the basics of Search Engine Optimization from Matt Cutts, a very famous Google Engineer. Matt gives an brief overview of what’s important, and what’s not important. For those of you who know about SEO already, this won’t be new news, but for those of you who don’t know anything about SEO, it’s a nice introduction.
I’ve had a few clients ask me this question, so I’m posting the answer here - because it wasn’t super easy to find on the internet. When you get to the end of a line and hit “return” on your keyboard - what do you want to happen? Sometimes you want a new paragraph. Sometimes you might just want a line break. This short tutorial shows you how to accomplish this. It works for WebYep and WordPress…and probably for many other text editors that might use TinyMCE or FCKEditor or others.
I’ve found myself explaining this to my clients, with varying degrees of success, so I thought a really well-written blog article might help. This article will attempt to explain the difference between static web pages and dynamic web pages, and why your particular website might have one or the other or even both.
As you’re reading this, it’s probably June 23rd or a bit later.
As I’m writing this, it’s May 11th.
Have I invented a time machine?
Nope! I’m just taking advantage of WordPress’s Scheduling feature, and I’m really loving it.
If you’re like me, you like writing blog articles. But you don’t always have ideas all the time. I keep a little note pad with ideas for future articles. But I don’t always feel like writing, and the bloggers out there say you should blog on a regular basis, like once a week, etc. The scheduling feature of WordPress comes to the rescue!
This article is written for those of you who are in the process of looking for a website designer. One of the good things to do when you’re shopping, is to look through the web designer’s portfolio. Most folks looking through a portfolio of websites will notice the obvious, like what the websites look like. This article was written to hopefully help you notice something a big less obvious: whether the web designer is using “real” domains, creating “sub-domains”, or “directories” for his website clients.
If you’re like me, you do quite of a bit online activities that utilize secure websites. Shopping on online stores, banking, and investing all require a secure connection between your browser and the website you are sending your private information to.
But how often do you notice whether the little padlock in the upper right hand corner of your browser is actually there? This article serves as a reminder to always, always, always check.
A client of mine recently hired a bookkeeper to do her state and local taxes and was surprised to find out that she should be collecting sales tax on shipping and handling.
I wanted to write this article to provide help for other online retailers who may be asking the same question, because the answer was a bit hard to find.
Website hosting, like many other things in life, is not guaranteed to have 100% uptime. There may be times when your website is down, or loading slowly. If you are using DreamHost as your website hosting company, it’s a simple matter to submit a support ticket to find out what’s up and get whatever may be causing the issue resolved. This article assumes you are using DreamHost.com for your website hosting company.
This is an article about something that really bugs me. It’s known as “scraping” and it means that people out there who are too lazy or too dumb to write their own content for their websites, decide to steal it from your blog. From what I understand, it’s not a matter of if it will happen, but when it will happen.
I’ve been finding a few example of my own blog articles appearing in other people’s blogs, and thought I’d share them with you so you can see what this practice looks like.
One of the most wonderful things about having your WordPress blog hosted on DreamHost, is the ease of keeping your WordPress blog up-to-date. This is a quick tutorial on how to use the DreamHost one-click-installation feature to keep your blog version current. This article assumes you used the DreamHost one-click-installation to install your WordPress blog using the Advanced Mode.
If you’re changing from one website designer to another, it’s important to know how to reset your FTP information in your website hosting account. This article assumes that you have DreamHost as your website hosting company.
Many of my website clients, after watching their website traffic statistics, are dismayed to see many people coming to their website leaving after only visiting one page (this is called the “bounce rate“).
They also often see visitors who may look around at several pages and then decide to leave without purchasing anything.
They even see people who were very close to a purchase. Visitors who after adding items to a shopping cart and starting the check out process, left before completing the purchase ( this is called “shopping cart abandonment“). While all of these visitor activities are normal and expected, what’s often surprising to my client is how often they happen.
If you’re a Washington state business and you ship/deliver goods within Washington state, you need to collect sales tax based on the destination starting in July 2008. This is very different from the current way we do it, which is based on whether the business is based in Washington. It’s quite confusing, and I don’t have it all sorted out, but will be updating this article as I learn more.
I had a client recently ask me to add some logos from other companies to his website. The logos were from news organizations, and his intention was to use the logos as links to articles that those organizations had on their websites. This raised a question about proper use of trademarked symbols and so, like I usually do when I learn something new, I wrote this article about what I learned. Disclaimer, I’m not an attorney and this isn’t legal advice. It’s just a blog article.
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As you’re reading this, it’s probably June 23rd or a bit later.
If you’re like me, you do quite of a bit online activities that utilize secure websites. Shopping on online stores, banking, and investing all require a secure connection between your browser and the website you are sending your private information to.
A client of mine recently hired a bookkeeper to do her state and local taxes and was surprised to find out that she should be collecting sales tax on shipping and handling.
This is an article about something that really bugs me. It’s known as “scraping” and it means that people out there who are too lazy or too dumb to write their own content for their websites, decide to steal it from your blog. From what I understand, it’s not a matter of if it will happen, but when it will happen.
Loves 
I had a client recently ask me to add some logos from other companies to his website. The logos were from news organizations, and his intention was to use the logos as links to articles that those organizations had on their websites. This raised a question about proper use of trademarked symbols and so, like I usually do when I learn something new, I wrote this article about what I learned. Disclaimer, I’m not an attorney and this isn’t legal advice. It’s just a blog article. 
