Website Designers and Webmasters

Ah ha! I have finally won something! Last month, Dell had a silly crossword-type game where once a day you can get entered into a drawing for some large prizes, and every time you enter, you also get a chance to win instant prizes. I’ve never won anything and didn’t think I would win something, but there’s always a small chance.

And Voila! I won a computer mouse! Yea, I know, it’s just a mouse, and I thought it was going to end up being one of those crappy, corded dell mouses (mice?) that you get when you buy a desktop from them.

Then today, I got a suspiciously marked package…

It took me a couple seconds to find the “Dell” and then figure out it was my long awaited prize!

Logitech has always been a big favorite of mine, ever since my Logitech mouse died after 2 years, and they replaced it for free. And this mouse is just as awesome as I’d expect from Logitech!

Here’s a picture of the mouse:

This is a compact wireless laser mouse. As you can see it’s red, but the coolest part about it is that small little black/silver thing in the plastic. That is a USB wireless adapter to connect a computer to the mouse wirelessly. The reason that is so cool is because the USB plug is 3 times as large as the actual adapter.

I gave this sweet mouse to my wife as a late Valentines Day Present, she plugged the USB adapter into her computer, turned on her mouse and it worked perfectly. Plug-n-Play for the win!

If only Logitech had an affiliate program, I’d never stop raving about them
-Ashton Sanders

I’m a big music buff, and I almost always have music playing on my computer. I really need an iPod… I know, I’m kind of ashamed for not having one yet, but I’m always on my computer so I haven’t really needed an iPod.

I’ve recently run across a number of advertisements for iPod Docking stations that have an HD Radio. This brought me to this Jensen JiMS 525i HD Radio iPod Docking Port. It’s a little expensive for my tastes, but it looks cool. The image they have on that page has a iPhone in the iPod port, so I’m assuming that the docking station will accept either iPods or iPhones. I didn’t realize there were so many HD digital radio stations out there, but you can find all of the digital radio stations in your area by going to new music stations.

Probably the coolest thing I’ve seen is the iTunes Tagging. It looks like what happens is while you’re listening to music on a HD radio station (on this receiver) if you happen upon a song you want to download, keep or get the info for, you can click the “tag” button on the receiver and it will save the song’s information in a play list on your iPod. The next time you connect your iPod to your computer (iTunes), you’ll be able to download all of the songs you tagged.

Of course you’ll have to pay for them.
-Ashton

Well it has been a year since my first post here on Website Design in a Flash, and this will be my 104th post!

This was my first blog that really got me started in the world of blogging, and I have learned a lot. I hope that I can continue to provide useful information for people working to tame the Internet. My posting frequency has slowed down over the last couple months, but I will try to pick it up again.

Here’s to another year of Website Design Tips and Tricks!
-Ashton Sanders

NOTE: This post is over 2 years old and is no longer totally correct.

I know that a blog can really help to increase your website content. A blog shows the Search Engines that there is actually someone behind this website, and they actually care about their website.

When I started this blog at the beginning of this year, I was trying to research whether it was better to have two medium-content heavy sites that link to each other, or one site with all of the content.

The Setup

My main Website Design Website is Websites in a Flash. This site has 20-30 pages of content, and got approximately 400 unique visitors a month. (This is primarily from Search Engines.)

I knew that this blog would have many pages of website-terms, so I decided to host it on my Ashton Sanders website as a subdomain. The purpose of this was to see if two medium sized sites linking to each other would create an increase in unique visitors for both my Main Website and my Blog.

Results

Obviously, my Blog had an increase in visitors (because it didn’t have any before). Surprisingly, it has totally surpassed my normal website, although I guess it shouldn’t be surprising.

My Websites in a Flash website increased to about 650 Unique visitors. It also finally got back to PR4, but I’m not satisfied with that product. So, I’ve moved my blog to my Websites in a Flash Site, 301 redirects and all. I will now be testing my statistics/results on this new server, and will give you another update after 4 or 5 more months.

My findings, so far, from this test lead me to believe that it is best to have your blog on the same domain as your main website, but a final verdict will come in early 2008.

Note: After this Search Engine Optimization test, the only thing I have to test for myself if whether a blog on your website is better as a subfolder or subdomain.

-Testing the Bounds of the Internet
-Ashton Sanders

On the subject of how to get things done as quickly as possible, here is the first Speed Tip.

Increase Speed while copying text

The web is full of tedious work, from having to manually input eight thousand products into a database to converting a site into a new format. Yes, it is totally impossible to work on the Internet and not end up having to do some extremely tedious work at one time or another.

Take today for an example: I had 70 straight HTML pages that I was converting into a PHP-included layout where the page’s title, meta description and meta keywords were all variables. So I had to go to the page source, copy the title, go to my new page, and paste the title… go to the page source, copy the meta tag… etc., etc., etc.

While selecting text (the “<title>” for example), you normally have to go the start the line (right after “<title>”), drag to the end of the line (right before “</title>” and then copy.

Heres the Speed Trick
If you double click on the first word, it will automatically select that entire word. If you hold down that second click, you can drag to the last word, and select each word at a time (; not each letter at a time). This way you only need to go to the first word and drag to the last word to make your selection.

“Whoa.. big whoop… save twenty pixels of mouse movement….” No, it’s better than that, you don’t have to waste time trying to get right to the front of the word. It gives you a much larger target, and thus it takes less time to “aim.”

-Ashton Sanders