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Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

Checking Your Website in Other Browsers

Monday, April 5th, 2010

As a web designer I’ve long struggled with having to test websites in a variety of different browsers.  Technology is a rapidly changing field, and the ways to go about doing things is rapidly evolving as well.  Just a couple of years ago, I bought a Mac so I could test websites.  I had to keep my PC computers though so that I could test the websites on Internet Explorer.  You could only have one installation of Internet Explorer and so I essentially needed two PC computers to test for Internet Explorer 6 and 7.  What a headache it was!  Internet Explorer 6 was long a headache for me, but I no longer support it (nor does Google) so that headache is gone.  I got around that problem on my Mac with Paralells, a Virtual Machine software that allowed you to have multiple operating systems on one machine.  That was great, but each Virtual Machine (or operating system installation) took 10 GB of space.  I could go on and on with my troubles and how I have solved them with various solutions, but only other designers would be able to relate to this painstaking proceedure.

Enter the Future!

Here are two online tools that will allow you to test your website on various internet browsers.  Yes, you can have Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8 all in one place!

Adobe Labs
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/browserlab/

Spoon.net

http://spoon.net/browsers/

Making the Fixes

Internet Explorer: I find using Internet Explorer 8’s Developer Tools to be useful in trouble shooting IE errors (found by pressing F12).

All Other Browsers: Get yourself two firefox plug-ins to make your life a whole lot easier.  The first is Firebug, and the second is Web Developer.  If your site works in Firefox, it will work fine in most other browsers.

Notice a trend here?  All other browsers vs. Internet Explorer.  Yes, it’s been that way for some time now.  IE is a thorn in most web developers sides.

Validate Your Code

Another great starting place for figuring out how to check for errors is by validating your HTML code.  The W3C has a great online validation tool (http://validator.w3.org/)

Hope this helps! Happy troubleshooting!

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The Power of CSS

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Jason did a guest blogger appearance at redheadwriting.com this week. Read his article titled “The Power of CSS” and find out what CSS can do for you.  It’s written so a designer or average Joe will understand.  Erika has many other interesting and informative articles on the redheadwriting.com site.

Here’s the link one more time for you!

“The Power of CSS”

Read it, tweet it, then sign up to become a fan on Facebook.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization, What's new with Visual Adventures, WordPress | No Comments »

I have a website, now what?

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

So you finally decided it’s time for your business to have a website!  You have a look and feel decided upon, purchased your URL, spent hours writing content and found the perfect designer to make it all happen.  Once your site is built and online you’re done, right?  Wrong!
Unfortunately, this is only the first step in having a successful website.  People need to be able to find you, easily.  Your job now is to manage your website and continually market it on the internet, which is a constantly changing environment.  The good news is, now there are all kinds of tools/programs to help you with this.  Google Analytics, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Facebook as well as great internet resources and blogs. I ran across a great one, DoshDosh.  It’s chocked full of useful information on how to use the above social networking sites as well as other ways to market your business on the internet.  We also use a great SEO copywriter, Erika Napoletano at Red Head Writing.  She can write you copy so it’s spot on for keywords, helping you get organic results.
So spend a little time each day monitoring the traffic on your site and getting your URL out there.  Your time spent learning about this environment will not be wasted!

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SEO and Links

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the talk of the town these days. SEO essentially consists of a few attributes applied to building websites.  Here are a few things that should be considered when building a site:

  • Page titles using keywords (this goes in the HTML title tag)
  • Meta Tags for keywords and descriptions should be included in the <head> tags of your HTML page.
  • Heading tags (h1, h2, etc.. HTML tags) should be used and should have relevant keywords included in the headings.
  • A navigation system that search engines can follow.  The days of fancy navigation buttons that hop, skip, and jump are long gone.  These days, a bulleted list is the way to go.  You can then use CSS to style the navigation and make it appear lots of different ways, including drop down or fly out menu’s.
  • Linking text within your page content to other pages on your site is also helpful.
  • Your page content should also be keyword rich, yet be legible and useful to your readers.
  • Web pages should be coded with HTML (or XHTML) and CSS coding techniques should be used to style the page.  Previously, tables were used to organize content and images. Tables are much harder for search engines to follow and they are also much more difficult to make edits to.     You can check this on your web page by going “View Souce” or “View Page Source” (in Internet Explorer and Firefox you can right click on the mouse for this option) and then looking in the HTML code.  If you see a bunch of code below the <body> tag that looks like <div>, </div>, <div class=”header”> then it’s likely you site was created this way.  If you see a bunch of tags like <table>, <tr>, <td> then you are looking at code for tables.
  • Include alt text descriptions for your images.
  • Linking to other sites that have helpful and relevant content is a good thing.
  • Having other sites link to you is even more useful.  That tells the search engines that you have useful content on your web site.  Search engines also put importance on link/site popularity.
  • Creating a Robots.txt file to hide coding and pages you don’t want to have the search engines seeing is a good step to take.
  • Creating a sitemap.xml file to show search engines what pages are on your site.

Search Engine Optimization is just the begining of getting your site indexed and on top of the search results.  This is however, an important first step in getting there.

Here is an article about this topic for further reading.
The New SEO – Let’s Get Real

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To Blog or Not to Blog

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Six Reason Every Small Business Should Blog

This is a convincing article about why to blog. At Visual Adventures, we have been building almost all of our sites lately as custom designed WordPress blog sites. For about the same amount of time it takes to create a regular website, you can have one with a content management system, a blog, photo galleries you can manage, and lots of other options available for this popular software.

In case you haven’t noticed lately, the search engines love blog articles. The majority of search results I end up on these days are blog articles. That is a huge reason alone, why you might want to consider a blog. Read the article to find out more!

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