What Businesses Should Know Before Building a Website

456 Berea Street’s “10 Things Businesses Should Know Before Building a Website” is extremely helpful when considering how to build a website for a business. It begins by understanding that most businesses don’t understand the web, and then is complicated by the fact that most web designers today don’t understand the web. It’s perfectly understandable […]

New Social Networking Site for Age 50 Plus Americans

Yahoo News reports on a new social networking service aimed at the over-50 crowd, one of the richest and most powerful group of online players and payers. A social networking Web site for Americans aged 50-plus went live on Monday — complete with an online obituary database that sends out alerts when someone you may […]

Using WordPress to Publish a Magazine or News Site

Max Limpag of Cybercafe Experiments explains how to use WordPress to run a magazine and/or news website. Once in a while, I see blogs that seem better off presented as online magazines or news websites rather than as blogs. WordPress, however, is an extensible website content management system that can be used to run magazine-type […]

When The Blog Breaks: Site Monitoring

A few months ago, it seemed like every two or three hours, my main site, Taking Your Camera on the Road, would go down. Eventually, with the help of my fabulous WordPress friends, we discovered that my host server changed their database monitoring security method to prevent abuse by putting a limit on the number […]

Site Under Construction: Things Left Undone

In the early days of web design, working with Taking Your Camera on the Road, I kept frequent “Under Construction” signs on many areas of my site as I poked and prodded its development. The Under Construction signs were to indicate that I was changing the look or feel of the web page’s design, or […]

Site Referral from Email Accounts

I’m getting a lot of site referrals in the last two days from Gmail and Yahoo Email and Chat accounts as well as others. The referral links look something like this: http://us.f353.mail.yahoo.com/dc/launch?action=welco… http://by113w.bay113.mail.live.com/mail/ApplicationMain_11.00… http://us.f372.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter?MsgId=9992_… http://mail.multimedian.co.uk/rmail.395… http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=page&name=gp&ver=34… If this was random and I’d only had one or two hits from these referrers, then I wouldn’t bring […]

See What Search Engines See When They Visit Your Website

As part of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts, take time to run your website or blog through a few tests to see how a search engine sees your website or blog when they visit. It’s a good learning experience. Things to look for are: What is seen first, second, and third. When the “meat” […]

Link Referrals – Linking to Site Search Tags

I received notice of an interesting referrer link the other day. Conversations’ Get Started Blogging workshop post, “Whistle Stops”, included a link to Lorelle on WordPress – wordpressdotcom tagged posts. Interesting. Instead of linking to a single post, or even a category, or just to my site in general, he linked to a site search […]

The Growing Trends in Content Theft: Image Theft, Feed Scraping, and Website Hijacking

Stealing content directly off your site or blog and posting it on another blog, or even in magazine, is the most common method of content theft. With the increase in technology, other methods of content theft are growing, and are, unfortunately, easy to do. These include image theft, RSS/feed content theft and website hijacking. Image […]

Best Websites for Writers from Writer’s Digest

Writer’s Digest released their “Best Websites for Writers” which is a great resource for the serious writer or person who wants to learn more about writing and writing skills. Here are a few highlighted websites from their list. Absolute Write – Freeland Work and Guidelines Author Mania – Fiction craft building Bartleby – Quotes and […]

Search Engine Site Submission Secrets

I write a lot about website development and how to make your site or blog as search engine friendly as possible. I wanted to share a few search engine site submission secrets I’ve learned over the many years. Be Prepared – You Never Know When a Search Engine Will Visit Remember, a search engine’s work […]

Website Accessibility is Now Getting Serious in the USA

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web As a long time advocate of website accessibility and meeting web standards for accessibility, I was amused by the San Fransisco Chronicle News story about […]

Help Visitors Navigate Your Site: Make a Site Index

This lands in the brain as “why didn’t I think of that”. A long time writer both of non-fiction and technical writing, on paper and computer, I adore indexes. I’ve created many of them within my word processor and think of them whenever I’m doing a book. Why didn’t I think of doing one on […]

Websites Pushing WordPress Beyond Its Limits

I spent a LOT of time totally pushing WordPress to its limits to create my main site, so I can really respect the efforts of others to push, pull,and tweak WordPress to new limits to develop their own sites. 9Rules’ Building 9Rules post explains what they did to create their innovative membership blog. …So, at […]

Extreme Site Optimization For Speed Loading

While I don’t agree with everything said, Brave New Word’s article, “Web Developers, Speed Up Your Web Pages”, does offer some excellent tips on optimizing for web pages for speed. Excellent points for everyone to follow include cleaning out unnecessary spaces, tabs, and code; using medium to high compression and small file sizes on images; […]