I am making a list of mistakes in web design. I know, there has been tons of these lists on other sites. But this list is different, it also takes into account newer technologies that have been used over the last few years. So here we go:

1. Write for web not print. In the text of your sites make short easy to read paragraphs. You are, most of the time, writing to explain a product or service, not write a novel. If the first thing a user comes up against is a wall of text, more than likely they will leave.

2. Write articles on the web on one page. This is a common complaint I have heard lately from people. I have never done it but have seen many people split articles into many pages for no real reason. Make pages contain information people are looking for without looking for a next button. They would rather continue scrolling than click to 5 different pages for the same article.

3.With the big hype of AJAX, don’t overdo it. Make sure you have a purpose for using it. Google maps have a valid reason for updating maps, but to go to a site filled with cheesy dropdowns and auto completes for no known reason is bad design.

4. Do not overuse animations such as Flash. These technologies serve specific purposes. Flash is great for interactive elements in a site such as video or animation, but search engines do not know what content is in a .swf file so cannot index it. Plus people do not like splash screens, they want the website.

5. Do not use popups on your site. With the huge push on internet security, users mostly view popups as spyware or annoying ads. If you must use popups, make your user aware by spelling it out on your site that you use them. This will make them more aware that you use them and that they should expect content from your site to be displayed using them.

6. When linking, do not use the target of _blank. Most users are still using non-tabbed browsers. Users can find this obtrusive and feel like your site is opening windows for them.

That is just a few tips on design, I’ll give you six more in a few days. Stay tuned.

Like most other software developers and web designers we have trouble with some clients. I really feel the problem to this is a client does not understand the work and effort that goes into a site or software package. If a client saw what was involved in the Software Development Life Cycle and designing a functional database or design they may think about things a little differently.

Clients should think of software or a site like a house. Once a foundation is down, any drastic changes are costly. With a house, if you decide to add a room half way through, you have to get plans re-approved for loads and building codes, drastic changes need done, and the extra labor in building the extra piece. The same is true with development. If you have a database and software halfway through being built, and a client requests a change in structure, there can be many effects in database integrity, other pages or forms affected, and the extra work to build.

This shows that even small changes to software can affect many aspects. Without fail, this also pushes out deadlines and increases costs as a lot of work needs to be done to make the so called “easy change”. Please keep these in mind when working with a developer or designer. They will be happy, it will cost you less, and the chance of the project getting done on time will increase.

Well I did it, just upgraded to Adobe Web Premium Edition. First I would like to say I love it. It is actually based on web standards and not IE6 which I am grateful for. But one thing I feel got “too easy”, that’s AJAX. I like the way Dreamweaver using Spry to build AJAX into your site, but there is one problem, one word JavaScript. Search Engines have been known to have problems with links and content generated by JavaScript. Don’t get me wrong, I love JavaScript, it’s a great client side scripting language, but with Spry I really feel it will be overused.

Now that it is easy to build these “widgets” what stops someone from building all their content onto one page fed by an xml file? Not much except ignorance by which search engines will index the content. I feel a lot of web designers clients are going to get hosed with regards to engine traffic once a very creative and non-technical designer get a hold of this tool. That’s ok, if everyone starts using this it will just get easier for others that understand SEO to rank well. This is like the Flash epidemic.

I remember going to school and learning Visual Basic. It is a very easy language, but it was fun to make little cheesy programs, and I wrote a lot of them. Then I started to have dreams in programming laguages. It seems like I loved development in my sleep.

Last weekend my wife caught me talking in my sleep. She said I said “NO, Firefox!” I don’t know what I was dreaming of, but maybe it was from all the browser testing I did the last few days.

Anyone else have interesting, weird development or technology dreams?

I have heard of a lot of even well known companies being plagued by what is called “Google Hell“. Google calls it the Supplemental Index. This index was create for weeding out spammers. It looks for pages that are keyword stuffed, or duplicate content from original source pages. They have very good intentions, but this has been harming a lot of legit sites. All it takes is for Google to think you copied you content from another site and BAM there you page is in the supplementals. When really your site the original content and the other sites are the copycats.

When this happens to a page, whatever search terms your page ranked for is gone. And the problem is that the supplemental index is spidered a lot less than regular indexed pages. This means your page could be there forever unless you do something about it. Here are a few tips on getting out of Google Purgatory:

1. Get relevant inbound links to the page you would like to get out. This does two things: A. Google will hit that page more when it follows the link to your page. B. Creates a since that the page is important and relevant, after all most spam pages don’t get a lot of people from relevant industries wanting to link to them right?

2. Change the content on the page. Look over the content on the page and see if in fact it looks like keywords are stuffed all over the page. Even if they are not, change the content anyway. This will help you bee seen as original and not to be stuffing your page with keywords.

3. Submit a sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools. This will help get your site crawled faster. Also put a modified date of a resent date in your XML sitemap.

Those are just a few tips on getting out of the supplemental index. I think with some work and strategy there is no reason for a page to be in the supplemental for 6 months or a year as I have heard other people talk about. Change the page, get links to it, and get Google to crawl it.

When I see a site like www.mysolitaire.com and they complain they have 99% of their pages in the supplemental index it makes me wonder who their SEO person is. I guess they complained so much they ended up on forbes.com. But if you actually go to the site it is stuffed with links all over the place with rings and earrings. There are hundreds of links containing the words he is targeting. Even when they list the products, if its rings, the text for every ring is “view ring” 16 times on the rings section. Google is dinging him for having too many links with the identical word in the link hundreds of times on a page.

After looking over the videos and information on the Adobe site the other day, a few things popped uot at me as great features in the new Dreamweaver CS3. Just to list my favorites here:

1. Spry ajax - This looks very cool. Instead of extensive hand coding JavaScript for very simple ajax functionality, this allows you to create almost a node/child-node ajax function with just selecting an XML file and setting the data source of a field. This looks easy to do and quick. I can already think of a few things I am going to try it out on.

2. Pre-Built CSS Layouts - Dreamweaver CS3 comes with an array of CSS templates. Not completed templates with text or anything, just CSS shells to start with. This should save a lot of time when starting pages.

3. WYSIWYG and W3C? Dreamweaver 8 use the Internet Explorer 6 plug-in for its design view, this was not the most standards compliant and created sloppy/bloated HTML. Now it is based on standards set by W3C. This should make browser compatibility much easier to deal with.

4. Integration with Photoshop - When Adobe acquired Macromedia; this was the first thing that popped into my head. I love Photoshop far better than Fireworks for image editing. More filters, better tools, just a better product. Fireworks has its uses for buttons and such, but to have Dreamweaver integrated with both will be very nice.

There it is, some of the things I am looking forward to when I get a copy of Dreamweaver CS3. I hope to get it at the beginning of May. Then I will make sure and post a review for everyone to see if it has lived up to the hype.

Being a PHP guy you need PHP to run locally on your computer for testing. If your not running Linux and are used to IIS, if you have just upgraded to Vista and tried installing PHP from the PHP installer you found out it just didn’t work so well. After tinkering and searching I have found a few tips on how to get it going, and I will lay it out step by step for you.

1. Intall IIS7 under the programs menu. When choosing components for intalling make sure and choose the PHP ISAPI component.

2. Download the .zip package of PHP 5.2.1 from here.

3. Unzip the files into c:php. Or you can unzip them into whatever folder you like to create.

4. Copy the c:phpphp.ini-dist file to c:windowsphp.ini. Make sure and change the extention.

5. Click Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

6. Under IIS go to Handler Mappings.

7. Click under actions click Add Script Map…

8. You should get a window like the following:

IIS7

9. Fill in the fields: (Request Path: *.php) (Executable: c:phpphp5isapi.dll) (Name: PHP)

10. Hit OK.

Thats it! If you are used to just using the auto installer with Windows XP, this seems a little more extensive but after you get used to the IIS7 interface it will become second nature.

After Adobe bought Macromedia there were a few questions out there. A few I had (as well of a few other designers and developers), were:

1. What would Adobe do with Fireworks?

2. How would future versions of Dreamweaver work with other image editors, especially Photoshop?

3. Would Adobe try to keep GoLive as a web editing tool? More importantly would they try to re-vamp Dreamweaver to keep the name and go for more of the GoLive interface? Or get rid of GoLive altogether?

I am still not sure of the first two questions, but for the latter I found the answer today looking around the Adobe site. If you look at the Products page you will notice there is not a CS3 version of GoLive. One, I guess, is left to assume it is going away.

I welcome this news as people got sucked in to going to GoLive and some sites are made exclusively with GoLive. Now I suspect people to start the requests to change their sites over to Dreamweaver. Also with searching around the Adobe site I looked at some of the new features with Dreamweaver CS3 and they look like they are on the ball. The WYSIWYG will be based on standards from the W3C and not based on IE6. Also CSS Advisor and the Spry ajax and widgets look like great tools. I look forward to developing with the new tools.

The last few days there has been some heated debate over an article written called SEO Workers.

Now it reminded me of a year ago when I found on a forum a company that claimed they provided SEO services. They would not touch HTML code at all. This just went to show you they did not understand onsite optimization. You see, engines look not only your incoming links, but also at your title, heading tags, and even ALT’s for your images to see how relevant it is to the search term. Of course there are a few rouge sites that show up for terms that don’t even appear on the site, and I think this is not common and they just are not competition. So if a SEO company will not change your content or site structure, stay away.

On the flip side if they believe all you need is onsite optimization, also stay away. Engines also look at your incoming links and the anchor text used in those links to also judge your ranking and relevance. If they are unwilling to do things such as directory submissions, article submissions, placing links on relevant sites, and blog/forum posts, Stay away.

These are the two extremes I have seen in the last year in the SEO world. And a company that goes out and blindly does some of these thing does not know what they are doing. They need to know what areas need work and focus on that, while keeping their client informed and analyzing results. In the article mentioned above Janeth mentioned a list of things a site should consider doing to be successful on the web. But here is a list of things an SEO company should be performing or willing to do if necessary.

1. Change your HTML.

2. Create internal links.

3. Analyze keywords, and see which ones are worth ranking for (conversions and traffic).

4. Aggressively seek for incoming links.

5. Research and test areas for improvement.

6. Keep the client updated.

I would like to share some thoughts on MS Access as a development environment… About 2 years ago I worked for a company that developing applications in Access was how things were done. Now don’t get me wrong, I think Access has its advantages. Come on we all need something to keep track of our CD/DVD collections right?

I went to that company with experience in vb.net and C++, and a degree in Software Applications and Programming, so I was not a newbie in the desktop application development world. But never the less, my boss thought Access could do everything. On one occasion we had someone come in and give us some project requirements. It had to be a suite of 3 applications that interact with each other with one database behind them. Also it would be common that the database would have 10-20 million records. Now I have designed some databases in Access and when you reach around 1 million records things get a bit slow. During the meeting I brought up the idea of developing in .NET with a SQL Server Backend. I felt I was about to be fired when he screamed back in disgust. Well the client decided to go with us anyway (I have no idea why). And I was told to get going on developing it in Access. Well when I left I was just about complete building the first of three applications and it was a huge mess. The thing was slow and clunky, yet my boss could not figure out how to speed it up.

In the end I worked 12 and 14 hour days trying to make Access do something it was not designed to do. When I took the job I just wanted something to get development lifecycle experience, but in the end found that there are people in the development world that hang onto tradition way to long and need to try something new.