Website Designers and Webmasters

My wanderings on the Internet brought me to Veerle’s Blog, where you can find an excellent method of creating and saving grunge brushes in PhotoShop.

(It’s also a well designed blog.)

-Ashton Sanders

Search Engine Optimization is fairly easy to understand. All you need to do is put your self in a Search Engines Shoes.

Let’s start with Google’s Mission:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

-http://www.google.com/corporate/

Nice and Simple. But it gives you a good understanding of what you are working with and helps us to realize some very basic truths about Search Engines.

Search Engines Truth:

Search Engines want to find useful, informative sites for every search term.

Duh… And they do that by using robots (or bots) that are programmed to “index” websites and decide how useful/informative they are. So our job as Search Engine Optimizers is to make it obvious to search engines that your site is useful and informative. Here are some basics to Search Engine Optimization:

Use Valid Code: The search engine bots don’t have eyes, so they can’t see your website, but they can read the code that makes your website, and they do know how to read valid HTML. But if your code isn’t valid, the bot can get confused and ignore parts of your site.

Content is King: Anyone can make a site that says, “Hello World!” Search engines don’t value sites that don’t have any content. You need to have relevant content on your website. If your site is about fixing Race Cars, but you never say race cars on your site, don’t be surprised when you never find your site under the search term “race cars.”

Don’t Hide Text: An old search engine “cheat” was to have white text on a white background. This would allow you to have lots of keyword heavy content on your site without actually having to bug your visitors with the large amount of text. This will damage your rankings much more than it will help.

Basic Principles: Google recommends that you don’t do anything solely for search engines, which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t get your site search engine optimized, but rather, don’t waste time and money trying to develop tricks to deceive the search engines. Just make a good, quality site that people will find informative and useful.

Links:If someone likes your site enough, they’ll link to it. Duh. So if your site is extremely useful, and a lot of people like it, you’ll have a lot of links to it. The number of links you have to your site is one of the biggest things that the search engines will judge your site on.

That’s a nice overview of how search engines think, and the basics of search engine optimization.

-Use it wisely
-Ashton Sanders

I was in the process of converting a website template (in image form) into an HTML/CSS Document with DreamWeaver 8. As I was getting close to finishing, both documents looked very similar. I spaced out and clicked “Ctrl =” as I do when I want to zoom in using PhotoShop or Fireworks, and I couldn’t believe it: DreamWeaver 8 Zoomed in! WHAT!?

It’s not the most useful thing in the world as I almost never use the design view, but it’s a sweet piece of functionality.

Ctrl =     Zoom In
Ctrl –     Zoom Out

(Note: I always remember Zoom In as “Ctrl +” because “+” is on the same key as “=”.)

-Ashton Sanders

About a year ago, I ran into a fatal error with my PhotoShop 7.0, and I could not figure out how to fix it.

Whenever I opened my Photoshop, I got this error:

“Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error. Sorry but this error is unrecoverable.”

And the program would just shut down. I couldn’t even open it. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out the problem. Finally, after almost a year of checking for solutions, I found a solution!

The problem is that PhotoShop 7.0 can’t handle more that about 1000 Fonts! Why that would cause the entire program to crash and burn… who knows. I hope they fixed up the newer versions so I don’t have to worry about that. (I have over 5000 fonts.) So because of this stupid Error: “Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error. Sorry but this error is unrecoverable.” I had to delete 4000 fonts off of my machine. (Of course I have a back up, but still…)

Now that I have my PhotoShop Operational again, I’m going to be spending a lot of time learning all the tricks of this “awesome” program. Any designer I talk to says that PhotoShop is the best, period. But from what I’ve seen so far, it’s got a lot of annoyances that Fireworks has already streamlined. (Yes, I realize that my PhotoShop is five years old, and I’m taking that into consideration.) But I should be putting together a Product Comparison between Adobe PhotoShop and Macromedia FireWorks. That will probably end up being 3 or 4 posts.

-”Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error. Sorry but this error is unrecoverable.”
-Ashton Sanders

I have an extremely complex SQL database system set up for an email newsletter broadcaster. This piece of code for SQL is what I’ve been looking for for the last week. Here you go:

AND emailaddr NOT IN(SELECT item FROM table WHERE patindex(’%@%’,emailaddr) > 0 )

That’s all I’m going to say about it right now, look for more SQL Tutorials coming soon.

-Ashton Sanders