(Friday, February 27th, 2009)
Under the name of “Canonical Link Element” is hidden the common creation of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo: A way to reduce the duplicate contents as seen by search engines, to help them understand that www.example.com or example.com or www.example.com/index.html are actually the same page under different names.
To know more, I invite you to listen to Google’s Matt Cutts video presentation.
(Thursday, February 26th, 2009)
Nearly all web browsers and many RSS readers use the favicon to help identify your web site and make it stand out. So, prepare a small version of your logo or -even better- adapt it to ultra-small size. This is micro-marketing at its best.
Instructions on how to install a favicon on your web site:
You will get the green favicon in your visitors address bar:
(Monday, February 23rd, 2009)
Yahoo! Answers is a very nice place for the web site designer to hang out. You should try it immediately and you should use it regularly. This is a kind of super-forum where an astonishing number of subjects are handled thanks to the size of the following of Yahoo!
There you will find people asking questions, all kinds of questions and this is nearly without limits. You will encounter an incredible number of actual experts willling to answer those questions (and yours).
I consider that this is more than enough to require that you spend some time there. The advantages I see to it:
rel=nofollow which will not produce direct results for Google and such), some visitors will be attracted by the quality of your answers.(Thursday, February 19th, 2009)
How to design a website layout in Photoshop is a complete tutorial showing you how to create your web site layout in Photoshop.
(Thursday, February 19th, 2009)
In the past it was sometimes difficult to ensure that all the pages were consistent on a web site. It was a lot of work to ensure it, and visitors had to deal with plenty of little differences which made it hard knowing where you were and how to go elsewhere.
Today, the general use of templates (either in a site engine like WordPress or in a site development tool like Dreamweaver) makes it more natural for a site designer. But don’t miss the opportunity and decide now that some pages must be different from the others. While the home page may have some differences, you should strive for -at least- navigation and menu consistency.
(Saturday, February 14th, 2009)
You may be thinking that only one or two little things are needed to be a blogger. This is only partly right. You can start small, but I believe that you need more than that to be an efficient blogger or a good blogger. So, I decided to disclose my perfect list of tools. It took me several weeks to assemble it but it’s worth it: You’ll find both free tools and a few more expensive things (but some good they’re worth their price).
(Thursday, February 12th, 2009)
People have plenty of reasons to contact you:
You don’t want to miss any of these opportunities, but don’t put your email address on the site (it would only invite spam in your mailbox). Create a contact form.
(Monday, February 9th, 2009)
When you create a web site which is not in the web’s lingua franca, English, you had better show it clearly in the HTML code of the web site. With the arrival of more and more web browsers using this information (at least since Firefox 1.0, Mozilla 1.7.2, Netscape 8.0 & Opera 8.0.2), the sites which are not correctly set up from this point of view become more and more difficult to use by their visitors.
It’s easy to correct your own web site. For a French-speaking web site, you just have to enter the following code:
The language code to be used comes from the ISO 639 standard. But the RFC 1766 also authorizes the use of a sub-code like in:
This leads to an extended version of much better quality also indicating the direction of writing :
From this point, to use this information as best as you can, au mieux, you can check the following article from W3C titled “Styling using the lang attribute“.
(Thursday, February 5th, 2009)
It’s cleaner (myname.com is better than myname.wordpress.com or myname.blogspot.com). It’s easier on your visitors (less typing). It’s cheap (between 10 and 15 USD per year, or even less). And it’s a central part of a minimalist branding strategy: Making sure that you get actual recognition on your site name.
First, take 10 minutes to start checking a few possible domain names. Then, use the export-import feature of your original blog to transfer 99% of the exiting contents.
Optional recommendation: Use Gandi.net. This French service provider is among the least expensive. Visibly very apt technically, too. And this is free support I give them: I won’t earn anything out of it; But they manage all the domain names I create.
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