Website Designers and Webmasters

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

Regardless of your profession, your speed and ability to get things done quickly will make or break you. This is especially the case in the field of website design and development where almost everyone has a story of working with a “really slow” website designer, web master, etc.

At Websites in a Flash, I always am working on improving my speed no matter what the project.

“But you get paid by the hour. Who cares how long you take?” – Lazy

An sloppy and unethical business man will have this opinion, but a website designer who’s goal is to create high-quality, professional websites on or before the targeted completion date won’t care.

I feel that speed is one of the most important factor (seconded only by quality). That is why I call my business Websites in a Flash!

-Keep it moving
-Ashton Sanders

What is a FavIcon?

A FavIcon is the image that appears in the left side of your address bar for certain sites. For example, here are the FavIcons for Websitesinaflash.com, Blogger.com and Google.com:

It is actually a very simple process thanks to HTMLkit.com. All you need to do is make a square image that you would like to become your FavIcon, and upload it to this site. They’ll give you a zip file with the FavIcon in it, and you can upload it to the root of your site. WALA! Here’s the site:

http://www.htmlkit.com/services/favicon/

-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

There is a very common problem when trying to upgrade sites made by “newbie” website developers or when you realize that html isn’t the only language on the internet, and you need to upgrade your site.

Problem:

You have a site where every page has a *.html or *.htm extension, and you want to add a dynamic, server-side programming language like PHP.

Solution #1:

Go through your entire site, and change every file name to a *.php extension. Then go through every page and correct all of the hyper links. Then do testing on your entire site to ensure that you haven’t missed any links. Also, if you know anything about search engine optimization and websites, you’ll know you need to create 301 redirects from your old pages to your new so that you don’t lose any Rankings you may have gained. Then you have more testing to do to make sure all of your 301 redirects work….

Solution #2

Add this one line of Code into your .htaccess:

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php .htm .html

That’s all it takes to add PHP to my html files?

Yep, that’s it. That little line of code has saved me hundreds of hours of work, and I’m sure it’s not as commonly known as it should be.

-Spread the Wealth
-Ashton Sanders