Personal victory - I rank #1 for my own name!
Posted on | March 16, 2009 | 4 Comments
Not long ago I posted that I wasn’t ranking #1 for my own name. This was mainly due to a site with the domain williamgardner.co.uk being established for a few years, and Google has the tendancy to rank sites with the keyword as it’s domain very well.
I just checked today and I wgardner.co.uk now ranks number one for the keyword ‘william gardner‘. Not that this is that important for me, or the site, but I am pleased since this was my own little personal SEO goal.
Rounded CSS/JS corners without images
Posted on | February 24, 2009 | 1 Comment
CSS3 is looking great - lots of new features including rounded corners, but Internet Explorer is not supporting CSS3 so it’s pretty tricky to think were it will be useful right now.
Anyway, I came across an awesome JS resource that allows for CSS rounded corners on the fly with or without borders.
http://www.atblabs.com/jquery.corners.html
Good stuff
Making the change to Wordpress 2.7
Posted on | January 4, 2009 | No Comments
The latest version of Wordpress (2.7) is out and ready to be installed, something that I will be doing very soon. I have used the new version on other blogs and I must say I am very impressed so far, there are some awesome new features that will help you spend more time writing posts rather than organising them.
In the meantime, check out this excellent article from Nettuts on some of the new features of Wordpress 2.7.
http://nettuts.com/tutorials/wordpress/5-new-wordpress-27-features/
Tips for excellent typography and web text styling
Posted on | November 25, 2008 | No Comments
It’s quite likely that text will be the most frequently appearing element on a website, so it’s important that you think carefully about the design of it. When designing a website, a common habit is to choose a familiar font and styling and concentrate more on the elements around the text, such as placeholders and attractive images. However it is worth spending time on your text design as this is fundamental to good design and overall aesthetic feel.
Here are a few text guidelines you should consider when styling text on a website.
Text choice – Different fonts communicate messages in different ways, and it only takes a few seconds to give website visitors the right message, so make sure your font does what is should. Different fonts can look modern, retro, corporate, clean, dirty, humours, familiar, warm, cold etc. You should never pick a font just because it’s quirky or fun, as it’s quite likely someone else will just find it irritating or hard to read – try to stay objective.
Text sizes - With different web design trends come different font size trends. A few years back small text was seen to be a good design staple, and with recent Web 2.0 trends we are increasingly seeing larger sizes. Whatever you do remember that the most important thing is to keep your font size proportional, readable, and to ensure that your headings are sized according to desired importance.
Text spacing – Good spacing between text lines allows for your text to ‘breathe’, as well as making it easier to read for your visitors. Having all your text bunched up and small is like reading fine-print on a legal document – hard, irritating, and easy to give up on. If your text flows well for the human eye, then there is more chance that your reader is going to read it all.
Text line length — The key rule here is to not make your lines too long, it’s actually hard work for the eye to scroll a long line of text, and will eventually make your reader skip the text. Follow the technique of newspaper style columns – compact, easy to read and re-find your place.
Text colour – This is dependent on your website colour scheme, but generally you should be looking to have high contrast colours that stand out over your background colour. If you are using a dark background then you should be careful that your text is bright enough to be read, but not glaring. As a rule, you can’t go wrong with bold colours on pastel backgrounds, or simply - black on white.
Free Google Adwords £30 Voucher
Posted on | November 13, 2008 | No Comments
Free Google Adwords Voucher
Google are currently giving away Adwords vouchers worth £30 for use with a new Adwords account. Using Google Adwords is a Pay Per Click (PPC) scheme that allows you to advertise your website on Google search results or on other keyword related websites, and you only pay for each advert when they are clicked.
If you have a new website or business then using PPC is a great way to get a boost in initial traffic to the site, and will help spread awareness of your new website. Even if you have a long standing website or business, then using this free £30 Adwords voucher will be useful to experiment with a PPC campaign.
Sign up for the Free £30 Adwords Voucher today as it may not be around for long.
The worst PPC ad ever
Posted on | November 7, 2008 | No Comments
Who ever came up with this PPC advert clearly did not actually think about their market… Sad.
Before you put you site live checklist (Part-one)
Posted on | October 21, 2008 | No Comments
When building a website it is easy to get caught up in the coding and styling side and forget the basics that make a good website work well. Here I give you part one of my checklist to follow before you put a site live.
- Common sense page names - For good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and usability practise you should be naming you page files according to what content they hold, for example - a page which contains Mexican recipes should be called mexican-recipes.html etc. It is better to use hyphens rather than underscores when separating words.
- Unique meta data on every page - For each page, you should have a unique title, meta description, and set of meta keywords. Adding unique titles and meta tags is beneficial for SEO as search engines will be able to identify what page is what, as well being benefit for usability as users will easily be able to keep track of what page they are viewing from the title of the page. The worst thing you can do is leave any page titled as ‘untitled document’!
- Make sure your pages validate to W3C standards - Ensuring that the HTML and CSS every page on your site is valid will minimise any browser compatibility issues, help search engine spiders index your code quickly, and allow other web developers to see that you hold high standards when building websites.
- Fill out all your image alt tags - Having images well labeled with alt tags will help your site from SEO, usability, and accessibility perspectives. Don’t spam your alt tags with keywords or text that you think will help you with search engine rankings, keep them accurate, describing exactly what the image is.
- Check your spelling - Make sure you run your page content through a decent spellchecker before putting anything live. If you have spelling mistakes on your site it makes people think the site is unprofessional and are less likely to trust it. When was the last time you saw a spelling mistake on the BBC website?
Part two coming this week - let me know if you have any yourself which I may add to the article of which you will get a linked-credit for.
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