I recently had this question put to me:

Hi Stefan,

I found your article while doing a search about sitemaps, so I figured I’d see what your take on it is.

I work at an agency that does small business websites, some as small as 5 or 6 pages, like an online brochure. I know sitemaps are useful, and help with SEO, but it’s part of our standard design to put text links to each page in the footer of each page. I think a sitemap page with 5 links on it is kind of silly, and a waste of space. Should we continue with the sitemaps or do the footer links suffice in those cases?

Thanks a ton!

I agree. Sitemaps are really useful when there is a lot of content in a web site – if you have a really simple site, it is probably overkill.

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Hi,

In the following video I answer this question and more importantly, I go into the broader issue of the importance of learning the code behind the web pages – HTML and CSS:

Trying to build websites without a good understanding of HTML and CSS is like petting your cat’s fur the wrong way … it’s a recipe for disaster!

LEARN HTML AND CSS THE EASY WAY

If you need help understanding HTML and CSS, then my Web Design 1 video course will do the trick.

BTW, Golive has been effectively dead since 2008 when Adobe replaced it with Dreamweaver.

Thanks for stopping by.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Hi,

This is part 2 of my video tutorial on how to use Youtube to deploy videos in web pages. You can may want to also watch part 1 of my Youtube video embed tutorial.

Some final notes:

Video Processing Notes:

Dimensions: 1280 x 720
h.264 (MP4)
5000 kbits/sec

Dimensions: 640 x 480 / 640 x 360
h.264 (MP4)
3000 kbits/sec

Nerd’s Choice: I find 640 x 360 works well for live action videos.

As always, thanks for dropping by.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Hi Guys,

This is interesting news for web designers as it seems Safari is even getting traction in the Windows world:

Apple said Friday that more than 11 million copies of its new Safari 4 web browser have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads by users of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.

Some interesting points about the new Safari 4:

- It uses the Nitro JavaScript engine that executes Javascript code several times faster than IE 8 or Firefox 3.

- Safari (according to Apple) renders HTML three times faster than Firefox 3 or IE 8.

And for Mac users, this is an interesting point:

With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard this September, Safari will run as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent, Apple claims.

Besides the speed improvements, Safari 4 has some really cool features like the Topsites feature that basically gives you a large thumbnail preview of recently viewed web pages.

You can read the full article here:

Apple 11 million downloads …

You can check out Safari’s 150 features here:

Safari’s cool features.

Thanks for reading,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Hi,

I just released a video where I go into step-by-step detail on how to use Youtube to embed videos in your web pages. This is part one of two.

The video:

Notes from the Video

I assume you have a Youtube account.

There are pro’s and con’s to using Youtube as your means of adding video to your web site:

Pro’s:

- Easy to do, since Youtube provides all the tools you need to embed the video.
- You don’t have to pay for the video bandwidth.

Con’s:

- Videos are public – if you want to embed.
- Youtube branding on your videos.

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