JA Design Blog http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog Proud To Be American Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:19:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Couple Of Useful SEO Tips http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/design-seo-tips/couple-of-useful-seo-tips/ http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/design-seo-tips/couple-of-useful-seo-tips/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:19:13 +0000 Jeff http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/?p=27 You won’t know if your SEO efforts are working unless you monitor your search standings. MarketingVox suggests that you keep an eye on your page rank with tools like Alexa and the Google toolbar.

It’s also important to check your referrer log regularly to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they’re using to find your site, according to PC World.

]]> http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/design-seo-tips/couple-of-useful-seo-tips/feed/ 0 Top 10 Wordpress Themes http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/downloads/top-10-wordpress-themes/ http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/downloads/top-10-wordpress-themes/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:16:34 +0000 Jeff http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/?p=14 Today CMScritic.com unveiled their choice for Top 10 WordPress Themes for the first quarter of 2009. This will be one of many new features on this site.

There are so many themes put out daily that it was tough to weed through them all and find the ones we thought were the best.

Let us know your thoughts and feel free to contact us if you think your theme should be considered for the next Top 10.

http://www.cmscritic.com/critics-choice-top-10-wordpress-themes-for-first-quarter-2009/

]]> http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/downloads/top-10-wordpress-themes/feed/ 0 SEO Tips & Tricks http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/news/seo-tips-tricks-2/ http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/news/seo-tips-tricks-2/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:06:40 +0000 Jeff http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/?p=19 A client recently asked for a quick overview of good SEO practises, so I thought I’d share them with all of you at the same time. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but following these items will definitely make a difference to your site’s performance in major search engines. These are roughly in order of priority (the first items being the most important):

  • Landing Pages: It’s impossible to do a good job of optimizing your homepage for every possible term people might use to find your site. Think of it as a town fair full of criers who are all yelling their own messages: the end result is a din of roughly equal volume in which nothing stands out. Plan instead to add a page to your site for each search term, heavily optimized for that term using all the tips below, so that page becomes the top organic search result for the term and therefore the page that visitors land on when coming to your site. It’s important to make sure that these pages aren’t islands (i.e.: not linked from any of the site’s main content), because otherwise web crawlers may not find and index them.
  • Titles: Some of the most overlooked SEO real estate in the world is staring right at you from the top of this very window. The <title> tag, which sets the text displayed in the title bar of the browser window, is very highly rate by search engines as being indicative of the page’s content. The engines differ in how much of the <title> they index, but the general rule of thumb is that the first 60 or so characters are the most important. This dictates that the search term should come before things like a company name, so it would be better to have “8 SEO Tips and Tricks » JayGoldman.com” rather than “JayGoldman.com: 8 SEO Tips and Tricks”. Luckily, this also tends to be more useful to users when they view their browser history or bookmarks in a narrow window or menu that cuts off the text, since the name of the page they want is more likely to be visible. I use the WordPress SEO Title Tag Plugin to swap the order around on this blog.
  • Repetition: The search term should be repeated in an <h1> as close to the top of the <body> as possible. We saw a difference for some of Radiant Core’s clients between having text at the top of the HTML and moving it down for presentation using CSS and just putting it at the bottom (e.g.: the list of SEO links at the bottom of the TargetVacations site actually occurs at the top of the HTML and is moved down through a combination of CSS and JavaScript since the page’s length is variable). The term should be repeated again in a <p> following that <h1>, ideally surrounded by <strong> tags.
  • Font Replacement: A necessity if you’re particular to a specific font and want to make sure your text is rendered in it. Since HTML doesn’t yet support embedding fonts (though it’s coming in CSS3 as WebFonts), specifying a font in CSS will only work if the person viewing your site has that font installed on their computer (and could still look strange if they have a different font with the same name). There are two popular routes: image replacement and sIFR for Flash-based replacement. Image replacement is much more limiting in that it requires you to create an image for each piece of text, while sIFR can be really difficult to get working, requires Flash for display, and can really slow down page rendering. I use a mix of the two on the homepage of this blog, rendering the header using image replacement since it never changes and rendering blog titles in sIFR to get Futura without having to manually create images for each post’s title.
    • Doug Bowman of Stopdesign (and now the Visual Design Lead at Google) has a great overview of using background-image to replace text. My preferred method was originally outlined by Mike Rundle and has gone on to be the favourite used widely by web designers (and is even linked to by Doug): Accessible Image Replacement.
    • The concept behind sIFR is really elegant: create a very lightweight Flash movie that has the font embedded and then pull in the text it replaces and render it using that font. The accronym stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, named after Shaun Inman who came up with one of the original CSS-based image replacements. sIFR was originally created by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben but hasn’t been updated by them in a long time. There’s a sIFR Lite available from AllCrunchy.com, though it looks like it hasn’t been updated in a while either.
  • Domain  Names: Most of the things search engines look for center around trying to determine the content of a page based on the text it contains and the meta information that surrounds it. The more difficult it is to fake the meta data, the more stake placed in it. Some of the hardest to fake are the domain name and URL of a page, which makes them two of the more important tweaks you can make. It’s harder to optimize the domain name since you only have one for your whole site, but if you sell You Won’t Believe it’s Not Tuna you should grab a domain like tunareplacement.com rather than chickenofthesea.com. The age of your domain name does factor into the calculation, so it’s generally better to renovate a site and keep the old domain than it is to start entirely from scratch. It’s also worth noting that some search engines, particularly Google, treat subdomains as different sites, which means things like blog.jaygoldman.com and www.jaygoldman.com don’t necessarily share PageRank. Unless there’s a stronger-than-SEO reason to go with a subdomain, consider a directory instead (www.jaygoldman.com/blog). You should also consider that www.jaygoldman.com and jaygoldman.com (without the www) aren’t necessarily the same, so you should decide early on which you’re going to use and be consistent in promoting the site (I use jaygoldman.com). You can configure mod_rewite (see below) to remove the www if you choose to go that route.
  • URL: The search term should ideally be part of the URL, using -s for spaces (e.g.: www.tunareplacement.com/recipes/tuna-and-marshmellow-salad). This is much, much better than the default URL that your blog sofware or CMS probably produces (www.tunareplacement.com/recipe.aspx?id=23), so you should absolutely switch over if you have that control (WordPress users should take a look in the Permalinks section of the Settings in their WP-Admin). I’ve always prefered avoiding file extensions in URLs entirely (e.g.: .jsp, .php, .asp(x), etc.) since it exposes part of the site’s implementation into the URL and then into people’s bookmarks, web crawlers, and the like. You’ll break all of those if you later rebuild the site on a different technology, so it’s better to abstract to a higher level earlier and just change the rewrite destinations later. Human readable URLs also kick machine generated URLs butt when it comes to things like analytics or emailing links to friends. I much prefer using URL rewriting, which allows the clean and human readable /recipes/tuna-and-marshmellow-salad to get rewritten to /recipe.php?title=tuna-and-marshmellow-salad behind the scenes. If you’re running Apache and don’t mind some server config, take a look at mod_rewrite, but be warned that it’s like black magic, ninjas, and awesomeness mixed together in a very potent but incredibly tricky potion. If you’re running IIS, take a look at IASPI ReWrite, IIS Rewrite, or Mod Rewrite for IIS. I’ve got no experience with any of them so that’s about all I can say on that topic.
  • Sitemaps: Way back in the early days of the web, Site Maps were actually a page on your site that showed people where all the other pages were, usually in some sort of graphical flow chart fashion. Most sites have grown considerably beyond being representable on a map, but they’ve found a new lease on life thanks to web crawlers. Submitting a Sitemap XML file to the search engines helps them understand how to crawl and index all of the pages, including the frequency that they change. You really don’t want to have to do this manually since it has to be updated every time a new page is added, so take a look at automated tools that will do it and submit the update (I use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress for this blog). More info at Sitemaps.org.
  • Inbound Links: You want to encourage as many inbound links to your site as possible since they are factored into most search engine’s ranking algorithms as essentially counting as votes for the autoritativeness of your site. Almost all inbound links are positive, with the exception of ones from things like known link farms, but you really want to focus on getting other sites to link to your landing pages with the right link text. If we’re trying to optimize the Recipes page of our Tuna Replacement site for the search term “tuna recipes”, it’s much more valuable for outside sites to link to that page with <a href="http://www.tunareplacement.com/recipes">tuna recipes</a> as the link than it is for them to link with <a href="http://www.tunareplacement.com/recipes">recipes</a>. If you have the kind of site where people might want to feature your content elsewhere (with, say, a Tuna Recipes Widget of the Day), consider developing an embeddable form that includes links formatted to match your SEO priorities.
  • Meta Tags: These used to be all the rage in that you could define keywords for search engines to use in their indexing. That’s a pretty easy system to game (want to attract attention to your porn site? Try keywords like “free money”), so they’re no longer nearly as valuable as they used to be. There’s a lot of discussion in the SEO community about how valuable they actually are, but the general conclusion is that you can’t go wrong by adding the keyword and description meta fields to your pages, and that they may even be used to display some of the information in search results. I use the Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin to automatically add them to all of the pages and posts on this site.

Following all of those steps should make a considerable difference in the performance of your organic search engine results. I haven’t touched on the importance of selecting the right keywords and terms, which is a whole topic in and of itself, but these will make a noticeable difference if you’re fairly savvy in that regard.

]]> http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/news/seo-tips-tricks-2/feed/ 0 Top 10 Free Wordpress Themes http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/downloads/top-10-free-wordpress-themes/ http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/downloads/top-10-free-wordpress-themes/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:04:34 +0000 Jeff http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/?p=17 Top 10 Free Wordpress Themes

]]> http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/downloads/top-10-free-wordpress-themes/feed/ 0 SEO Tips & Tricks http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/news/seo-tips-tricks/ http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/news/seo-tips-tricks/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000 Jeff http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/?p=15 seo tips & tricks

]]> http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/news/seo-tips-tricks/feed/ 0 Design tips & tricks http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/design-seo-tips/design-tips-tricks/ http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/design-seo-tips/design-tips-tricks/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:58:45 +0000 Jeff http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/?p=12 Web design tips and tricks

Welcome to the web design tips and tricks section of this blog. In this section you’ll find several web design tips that will help you in creating an effective web site and providing a pleasant experience to visitors.

A web site display depends on several factors such as type of browser, the client platform, screen resolution etc. and you seldom have control over these variables. For details, please read the Variables in Web page design article under Web page design section.
The medium of the Internet is very different from the printed page or the television. It is highly interactive and dynamic and brings together several multimedia features such as pictures, sound, video and animation. It is thus of prime importance to understand the demographics of visitors to your web site and mould the site accordingly.

The web site vs. print and television media

A book, typical example of the print media, follows a linear structure from the first page to the last. Though readers can skip sections and go back and forth, the navigation aspect of the book is quite simple. The television on the other hand, does not provide the facility for the viewer to move between sections. A television program plays from the beginning to the end. Viewers have no control over the sequence of the program been shown on the screen (unless they use the remote to switch channels or shut of the T.V.).

Though web site can easily bring together the visual aspects of both the book and the television, it’s in navigational aspects that they differ primarily from print and T.V. media. Navigation on a web site is created using hyperlinks allowing the visitor to jump across pages and determine the information to be displayed. Thus, navigation is without doubts the most important aspect of a web site.

Web design tips – two tips briefly explained

Web design tip on navigation

Navigation on a web site plays a very important role in making the site user friendly. As a thumb rule, a web site should follow the “three click” model. This means that a visitor should be able to access any page on the site using three or lesser mouse clicks.

Web design tip on display

The display of the web page is governed mainly by the browser and client-side settings. Testing the web page on all browsers, color depths and screen sizes would be very tedious. It is better to guess the kind of visitors you expect, keep an account of their settings and browsers and design accordingly. For example, I can safely assume that the visitors to Webdevelopersnotes.com would be mainly people interested in web development. They would be using the latest browsers (versions 4 and above), their monitors would be set to a high color or true color and the monitor screen size would be 800 X 600 pixels or more.

You’ll find several web site tips and tricks in this and the Web page design sections helping you create good web pages and effective web sites so that they stand out from the ordinary so and thus, making you visitors stay for a longer time.

]]> http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/design-seo-tips/design-tips-tricks/feed/ 0 Jeffrey Addington Design Alexa rank of 6,199,373 http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/news/hello-world/ http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/news/hello-world/#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:43:48 +0000 Jeff http://www.jeffreyaddington.com/blog/?p=1 Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to Nielsen television show ratings. Jeffrey Addington Design has an Alexa rank of 6,199,373 which is in the top 19.935 % of all websites on the internet.

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