First things first: thank you for Akismet!

… I just wanted to offer my sincere appreciation for the Wordpress anti-spam plugin: ‘Askimet’.

This nifty plugin has saved me countless hours (and possibly days) of work by filtering out hundreds of spam post each and every day!

I can easily say that for me, Askimet has proven to be the most important plugin for Wordpress.

… Just in the time it took me to write this post, Askimet has caught 7 spam comments!

If you see a spammer, smack him!

It is clear that blog spammers are among the worst of Web citizens. They are the hyena’s of the Web, trying to steal traffic they don’t deserve.

Blog spam protection tips

Being a high value spam target (the juicier the traffic …), I can offer the following advice:

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There is one major problem though: Alexa is not accurate at all.

Alexa gets a lot of it’s traffic data from its’ Alexa toolbar and other nebulous source they don’t identify. So that leads me to think that they still get most of their data from the toolbar.

Sounds OK, except for one glaring problem - who uses the Alexa toolbar?

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“… how can you budget the amount of time it will take to build a website?”

This can be a tricky thing because there are so many factors involved:

• How fast do you work?
• Is your client going to be really picky and ask for many revisions?
• Are you likely to come across time consuming bugs?

Ultimately, you will have to learn how fast it takes YOU … to build a website.

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When I was working on the redesign of the killersites.com, I found (as a starting point) that the templates that ship with Dreamweaver CS3 useful.

Dreamweaver CS3 starter templates

Dreamweaver has a nice collection of bare-bones web templates. One thing I found cool about these templates, is that they contain a lot of notes that describe why they (the web-nerds at Adobe) have certain things in place - like the specific code they used to deal with a given CSS layout issue.

… This is another good way to learn more about CSS.

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… This means that it now makes more sense for web developers to learn Flash technology. I go over some of the details below.

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In a nutshell: css code should be divided up into at least 4 separate pages:

1. page-structure.css
2. text-styles.css
3. misc.css
4. ie-styles.css

How about we call this the ‘killer’ css structure.

Before I go into the details of what each css file contains (if it’s not already obvious), I want to quickly cover WHY you might want to use this basic css structure for all your websites.

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I’ve been a busy little bee lately.

This past week, I finally got around to re-skinning killersites.com. Yes, after about 5 years of using the same basic layout, I finally decided that an update was needed.

I think when someone said:

“… killersites.com kinda looks … 2000 ish.”

… I was pushed over the edge and began the design work. You can see the new layout on the home page now:

www.killersites.com

Later on, I will be rolling this out throughout the rest of the web site and on other sites as well:

- killerphp.com
- how-to-build-websites.com

etc …

To build this new look I spent about 50 hrs and about 15 public revisions. As I went along I released early drafts of the new look for people to comment on in the forums. You can read the thread and see the progress of the redesign here:

killersites redesign discussion

Now that I’ve got this in place, I can go back to creating new videos.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Stupid Spammers

Yea, the porn and pill spammers have really done a lot of harm to newsletters. These days, if you send out a newsletter, you will have to deal with a few things that just get in the way:

1. Email filters – gone wild.
2. Angry (crazy) recipients.

These days, email filters are really fined tuned to catch just about any type of spam. Unfortunately, they tend to trash real email from time to time. So when writing my newsletter, I have to be careful to avoid certain keywords that might get my newsletter blocked.

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I just released more of my Dreamweaver MX video tutorials.

Thought Dreamweaver MX was released in 2004, not much in Dreamweaver has changed since that time … especially when it comes to the basics.

Anyway, for those new to Dreamweaver, these videos should be useful.

PS: I also have Dreamweaver CS3 videos for those who need the cutting edge stuff.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Floating around the universe, are certain universal principles that transcend disciplines. I would like to explore a few of them here, and talk about how they can be applied to web design.

The Three Master Principles

#1 Simplicity

This is such an important principle, that it can easily be made into the top three web design principles, just as location is to real estate:

- location
- location
- location

… we could say the same thing about simplicity in web design:

- simplicity
- simplicity
- simplicity

The important thing to take to heart, is that your web sites should be designed to be as simple as possible. You want to keep it simple for two main reasons:

1. To make it easy for you to update.
2. To make it easy for visitors to navigate the web site.

The simplicity principle applies to design, structure and the code.

What do I mean by ’structure’ of the web site?

I am simply referring to the URL structure. So we are talking about directory structures, page names etc. I’ve detailed this in my article on intelligent paths in websites.

I think the other two (design and code) are self evident.

… Now let’s look at principle number two:

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