Meet the author: Jill Olkoski
Jill has a MA in Clinical Psychology, a BS in Computer Science, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering.
She currently owns Aldebaran Web Design in Edmonds (near Seattle WA) and enjoys educating her clients on topics related to small business website design.
In Jill's previous life, she spent 17 years in the engineering and quality organizations of a Fortune 100 tech company.
Yesterday the blogging community lost, what in my opinion, is one of the finest examples of what blogging can accomplish: Leroy Sievers, author of the NPR My Cancer blog, passed away. I’ve been reading his blog for around 6 months, following his heroic battle against colon cancer that had spread to his brain, lungs, back, hip - pretty much all over his body. His outlook and conversation style reminded me of a good friend I had when I used to live in Florida - so I felt like I “knew” him, even though I didn’t. In many ways, he introduced me to blogging and is an inspiring example of what good can come of authentic, honest, and brave online writing. If you’ve never read Leroy’s blog, take a look, and maybe leave a comment for his wife Laurie, who was his caretaker.
I’ll miss reading your blog Leroy. 🙁
If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill
Posted in Blogs | Comments Off on Tribute to Leroy - the NPR My Cancer Blogger
This is topic covers one of the things that annoys me the most when I’m shopping online. I recently had a particularly frustrating purchasing experience with Ticketmaster that I wanted to share. This example will help explain why I’m so against forcing online shoppers to create a login account before they can purchase something from your online store.
We all hate spam. If you own a WordPress blog, and you have comments enabled (which is recommended), you will get spam in your comments. But there’s good news…there are several easy steps you can take to prevent spam comments in your blog.
If you’ve ever used the Google keyword selection tool, you’ve seen those little green bars that represent how many other folks are searching for specific terms. And maybe like me, you’ve wondered, what the heck do these bars represent in terms of the number of searches? Till now, it was anyone’s guess. But now you can see exactly real numbers!
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.
If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill
Posted in SEO and PPC | Comments Off on Google Improves Indexing of Flash Websites
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.
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.
If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill
Posted in SEO and PPC | Comments Off on SEO Basics from Google’s Matt Cutts
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.
Static vs Dynamic website pages explained: 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!
As you’re reading this, it’s probably June 23rd or a bit later.