Stefan Mischook
April 25, 2006
As you may know, one of the hardest things about getting your websites to appear in the search engines, is actually getting noticed by the search engines in the first place! If they don’t know you even exist …
To solve this problem, the best thing to do, is to get your site listed on a website that already is visited by Google or Yahoo etc …
A COUPLE OF OPTIONS
One way to do this is with link exchanges. Another is by submitting your website to a directory. The problem is that good directories (that get visited a lot,) usually take their time to list new websites, or you have to pay.
For example: Yahoo! cost about $295 just for them to consider your site – there is no guarantee they will even accept you!
…
To make a long story short, killersites.com has a brand (spanking) new web designers directory. If you have a website and you are looking for web design contracts and exposure to the search engines, now is the time to get your website listed since it is FREE … for now.
Web Design Firms Directory
I will at some point, stop accepting free listings because each entry has to be validated by human eyes … that takes time! To be clear, if you list your site now, it’s free. It will also always be free, for that level, for you guys and gals.
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I have an article comparing AJAX (the hot new name for a type of JavaScript programming,) and FLASH. There is some collision between the two, and it is an interesting read to see how these technologies compare.
This will be out within the next few days.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
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April 20, 2006
These days people are really interested in web traffic – big web traffic. But one thing that many web designers don’t consider, is the quality of traffic.
NOTE: SEO is the acronym for: ‘search engine optimization’. This is the process of making your web pages more search engine ‘friendly’ by tweaking code and content.
NOT ALL WEB TRAFFIC IS CREATED EQUAL
People love counting page-views and unique visits but from my perspective, if the traffic sucks, who cares if you get 100 000 visits a day!
HOW TO DETERMINE THE QUALITY OF WEB TRAFFIC
- How long people stay your website
- Your conversion rate – if you sell stuff.
- How many bookmark/’add-to-favorite’ your website.
- How many people visit your website by directly typing in your web address.
You know your traffic (probably*) sucks if are people leave right away, don’t buy anything, never bookmark your site etc ..
You can determine what the numbers are for the above points, with a good stats program.
* People could also be leaving because your website sucks – bad usability etc.
THE MORE SPECIFIC THE SEARCH TERM/PRASE – THE BETTER
Let’s say you sell Irish Setters and you have good rating for the key word: ‘dogs’. And since lots of people search using the ‘dogs’ key word, you get lots of ‘dog’ traffic.
I called it ‘dog’ traffic because what you find, is that the vast majority of your audience is NOT looking for Irish Setters, most are looking for information about (all the) other types of dogs in the world …. and that’s if your lucky!
Who knows, maybe they are looking for information on bad stocks (a la stock market,) or maybe on not so attractive women … it’s hard to say with such a loose/broad search term.
OK, LET’S GET BETTER TRAFFIC
With this understanding, you now decide to target ‘Irish Setters’, and with work and luck, you get good position in the search engines. But now, you’ve lost your top ‘dog’ position … dog dangit!
But is it really bad news? Well no, because you now find yourself getting people who are actually interested in what you are offering (Irish Setters) and as such, sales go up AND you get more return traffic.
WHY GOOGLE TRAFFIC IS BETTER FOR BUSINESS
To the point: people who reach you from other websites are typically ‘browsers’. These people are not ready to ‘pull the trigger’ on anything specific, they are simply snooping about not ready to commit … that’s why search engine traffic CAN BE much better.
HOW WEBSITE CAN DELIVER GREAT TRAFFIC
That said, some websites can deliver great traffic, if they are designed to filter/clean up traffic properly.
For example: if my website has a link to your Irish Setter selling website, and the link text reads:
‘Buy superb Irish Setters’
Chances are that people who click through from my website to yours, will be more likely to want to buy an Irish Setter from you. If on the other hand, my link text read: ‘free Irish Setter Information’, the quality of the traffic will decrease – you’ll be getting a bunch of free-loaders!
CONCLUSION
Don’t waste your time chasing sucky traffic … go for the ‘killer’ traffic.
Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)
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April 17, 2006
A LIST OF FREE IMAGE EDITORS AND CONVERTERS
PowerBatch 2.7 – 1.6MB
– Batch renaming, resizing, converting, printing, rotating, colour adjustment, cropping.
– Crop with aspect ratio confinement.
– Built-in FTP client!
– All program files are contained in a single folder.
– Converts JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BITMAP and JPEG2000.
– Supports animated GIF and multipage TIFF.
– Contact sheets.
– Image effects.
– Add text.
Paint.net – 4.9MB
– In development.
– Clean GUI.
– Developed with help from Microsoft.
– Requires 24MB .NET Framework 1.1 to run.
– Limited layers support (cannot be moved on canvas).
Pixia 3.1 – 3.6MB
– Not much known about this one yet.
Photofiltre – 1.6MB
– Multiple images open at once.
– Many plugins.
– More than 100 filters.
– Feature packed.
FastStone Image Viewer – 2.4MB
– Convert major formats (inc. PSD).
– Lossless JPEG rotation.
– Magnifier viewing.
– EXIF support.
– Resizing, flipping, rotating, cropping, colour adjusting tools.
– Crop with aspect ratio confinement.
– Compare images side by side.
– Batch image converter/resizer.
– Supports animated GIF and multipage TIFF
Xnview – 2.1MB
– Utility for viewing and converting graphic files.
– Imports 400 graphic file formats.
– Exports 50 graphic file formats.
– EXIF.
– Copy, cut and crop.
– Brightness and contrast adjust.
– Modify number of colours.
– Filters and effects.
– Windows print (Contact Sheet) and TWAIN support.
– Supports animated GIF and multipage TIFF.
GIMP – 7.3MB (Windows version)
– Probably the best open source contender to Photoshop.
– Requires GTK+ 2 runtime environment – 3.5MB.
– Layers support.
– Difficult to get used to GUI layout (or so I’ve read).
Thanks to Tim
Stefan Mischook
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April 5, 2006
When people think of Java, they think of some mighty indestructible language/environment that never goes down – well at least less than other platforms like PHP or .NET.
REALITY CHECK
After running my own servers for 6 years (IIS with Resin) with few troubles, I moved hosting to outside sources. I had to go through several hosting companies before I found one that could even run my simple POJO based applications!
Now after a year has passed, my experience with shared Java hosting can be summarized:
- Tomcat seems to go down at least once every 7-14 days.
- Contrast this to PHP – never goes down.
FINAL COMMENTS
The Java community tends to dismiss PHP as some scrappy scripting language that can’t be counted on … I must confess, I used to think that too.
Now after a year of using both Java based and PHP based applications, I have personally found PHP to be much more stable and reliable. I am actually nervous that my Java applications (and Tomcat) will fail regularly and am moving to migrate everything to PHP.
I have no axe to grind, just speaking the truth based on my experience.
Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)
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April 5, 2006
PHP Hacks is essentially a collection of ‘bite-size’ PHP scripts that you can easily drop into your websites.
Besides being able to use the hacks straight away in your projects, the PHP code/hacks are clearly explained making them good tutorials for learning how you might do something in PHP.
SOME TOPICS/HACKS THAT STAND OUT:
- Creating a shopping cart.
- Using AJAX with JSON – a php library that makes working with AJAX easy.
- PEAR hacks like Net-Geo to find out state and city locations of people.
- A good examination of PHP design patterns.
Not exactly for beginners, but if you have an understanding of basic PHP you will be OK and you will learn a lot. This book is also good for programmers (from other languages) who want to get a good idea of what tools, libraries are available in the PHP world.
Another good book from O’reilly.
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March 31, 2006
This concise book (149 pages) uses Ruby to teach basic programming; a good book for total green-horns to programming. But keep in mind this book is not titled: ‘Learn to Program Ruby’.
What I mean by that, is that the book targets new programmers, not programmers new to Ruby. So it may be a little slow for some people (experienced programmers) when the author (for example,) explains what an array is …
WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK INTERESTING
The book is well written and the flows well, but what I find interesting about it is:
- It uses Ruby to teach programming.
- It teaches some interesting concepts that you might not read in say, a PHP book.
Ruby is the hot new language in the geek world, but it has yet to show itself substantially in commercial application. That said, it is an interesting language choice for this kind of book: Ruby is a terse and easy to use language, and I think this allowed for the author to jump into concepts like recursion and procs – I like this.
CONCLUSION
A good book that is not so pragmatic, in that you don’t see the typical how to build a shopping cart project at the end.
Instead, the author concentrates on basic programming concepts and leaves it to another book to expose the reader to real-life application.
I would use this book in a programming 101 type of class.
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February 28, 2006
‘CSS Mastery’ covers the most sought after CSS concepts, tips and techniques. It’s a must-have book for any intermediate level web designer because of the way it covers the material: it is concise, clear and pragmatic.
Just when you’re finished learning one great CSS technique, you turn the page and bing-bang, there’s another juicy one to jump into! A nice change from the zealot batherings I’ve had to endure in other books on the subject!
Like all the books from this publisher, it is also well put together physically:
- Good layout
- Good choice of paper
- Easy to read font
- Not too thick or thin
- Good use of graphics/diagrams
The publisher (Friends of Ed,) have done a great job with their web design books lately; ‘CSS Mastery’ along with Dan Cederholm’s book (Web Standards Solutions) are the best out there today.
I have yet to read ‘Web Designer’s Reference’ by Cederholm, but I hear it’s good too.
Stefan Mischook (Web Design Heretic)
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February 28, 2006
Welcome to the world of modern web design!
This is a very good book on blogs. OK, so why should web designers want to read a book on installing and customizing popular blogs?
The anwer: web designers today, NEED to learn how to work with blogs. Blog implementation (installing, customizing, skinning) is a growing part of the web design business these days and is now an essential tool in the web designers toolbox.
Blog Design Solutions gives you a to-the-point tour of several important blogging engines:
- Moveable Type
- TextPattern
- ExpressionEngine
- WordPress
The is a multi-author book where each blog is given its due by one or more authors – as such, you know that each blog is covered by people who know what they’re doing.
Along the way, you will also pick up tips about Flikr integration, blog syndication and other things that this old time web designer may have not been ‘up to snuff’ on.
I use WordPress, and so I immediately jumped to that chapter; I found the writing to be clear, and the author covered topics that I wanted to read about. I am not a user of the other blog engines, but I’m glad that the book covers them for sake of comparison – it’s always good to know about competing products.
Beyond covering the blogs, the last chapter actually takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a blog from scratch using PHP. I went through the code, and enjoyed the way the author runs through the process – you’ll might also pick up a few PHP ideas along the way.
I recommend this book to any web designer who has the intention of earning a living in web design.
Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)
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February 28, 2006
One of the key components of running a successful web design business (any business really,) is to manage your money effectively.
Most businesses go out of business, simply because they don’t follow some basic money management rules. The following are my ‘Killer Money Management Rules’.
Top 6 Killer Money Management Rules
1. Credit cards are for transactions only – not for carrying debt. Pay off your entire balance every month!
2. If you can’t buy something cash, don’t buy it.
3. If your bank account is not increasing every month, it’s time to go into crisis mode.
4. You should have a stash of ‘fcuk-you’ cash … one years worth. So, if you spend $2000/month to live, you should have $24 000 in the stash. The stash should be held in a no risk, immediate access account like an ING account.
5. Never touch your emergency stash unless it’s an emergency. Having this stash makes you sleep well at night. I call it ‘fcuk-you cash’ because when you know you will be fine for a year, you can tell idiot clients to … you get the idea.
6. Create a separate retirement account/investments that you pay into regularly and first – this is a ‘never touch’ account.
Lots of business owners pile all their funds in one place (as I did) and then end up broke at 55. Fortunately for me, I learned these lessons young.
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February 25, 2006
In this podcast, I discuss the 3 reasons why learning to hand code your web pages makes sense … and dollars too!
Podcast running time: 7:30
Download MP3 link: 3 Reasons to hand code
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
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