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Archive for March, 2008

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Are we Building the Right Product?

Monday, March 31st, 2008

As we work on developing a resource, we often sit back and ask ourselves, “Are we building the product right?”. This is extremely important to do as often as possible to ensure that we are consistently meeting our requirements.

However, at one point in the development process, we also need to take a moment to ask, “Are we Building the Right Product?”. Sometimes, even our users don’t exactly know what the right product is, so although we may be building the product right according to the requirements, we may still be building the wrong product!

So how do we avoid this problem? Keep on interacting with your users throughout the development process to get continuous feedback. Have your users test what you have done thus far and help them better discover their needs. Remember, you want them to use the product once it is finished.

Sure, you can always build exactly what they initially asked for, hand it to them, take your pay check and run… But wouldn’t you rather they recommend you to others or potentially hire you again in the future? And if you are developing internal software instead? Do you really want your boss to tell you that you need to start over or possibly even fire you? Probably not!

You are responsible for your software, take pride in developing it!

Posted in Design, Web Development | No Comments »

Using Personas During Development

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

Customer personas

A few days ago I mentioned personas and promised to go into more details on a future date. Today, I am happy to announce that we have finally reached that future date! The image above is from Occam’s Razaor by Avinash Kaushik. You can click the image to read the article it is from for even more in depth information about personas.

So what are personas exactly you ask? Well, persona’s are basically fictional characters. Now before you go ahead and think I am crazy, let me explain how these fictional characters can help you with any kind of development! Developing a web site or application can be a lot of fun, but sometimes we can get carried away and lose sight of our real goals. Our ultimate goal is to satisfy the needs of our users, so its important to remember who they are while we develop.

Unfortunately, we often forget about our users while developing because we rarely get a chance to interact with them. In some cases, we develop a web site or a blog without even thinking about who will read it. We just sort of hope these users will show up once we are done! That is definitely a mistake. You need to know your audience ahead of time. Even when we do know our audience, we still often run into problems because we generalize them all into a single category. With persona’s, we help ourselves remember our users by giving them more personality.

A persona is therefore a fictional character who represents a group of users who will be using the website or application you are developing. Already, rather than just having “users”, we force ourselves to break these down into groups of similar users. Now, so we don’t forget these groups of users, we give them names, lives, and personalities, so that we keep them in mind while developing!

If you’d like to know more about personas and are interested in using them, visit Usability.gov. This website is definitely a great resource and will get you started creating your own personas quickly. There is even and example allowing you to meet Matthew Johnson!

Posted in Design, Web Development | 1 Comment »

How to insert CSS on your Website

Friday, March 28th, 2008

There are three different ways you can include CSS on your website.

  1. Link to a .CSS file
  2. Write the CSS between the head elements of your web page
  3. Mix the CSS with the HTML by using the style attribute of the HTML tags

1 - Link to a .CSS file

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
   href="cssFileName.css" />
</head>

2 - Write the CSS between the head elements of your web page

<head>
<style type="text/css">
   body {background-color: blue}
   h1 {color:white; font-size:12pt}
   p {margin-left: 10px}
</style>
</head>

3 - Mix the CSS with the HTML by using the style attribute of the HTML tags

<p style="margin-left: 10px">
   This paragraph will have a 10 pixel margin on the left!
</p>

Always test the results of changes to your CSS in as many browsers as you can! I find I get the least frustrated when I get the CSS working as desired in Firefox first, then test to see if it works in Internet Exlporer. Often it will! However, when I get my CSS to work with Internet Explorer first, it rarely works in Firefox upon testing!

Posted in CSS | 1 Comment »

Web Developers Working with SSH

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

If you are a web developer, chances are you’ve had the fun experience of using SSH in order to manage the server that is hosting your website. In fact, for most web servers, Linux is still the operating system of choice and SSH is the management tool used to interact with the operating system remotely. This often means learning a whole slew of old-school commands in order to get the system to do what you want.

Using SSH can be quite a daunting task for people who have grown up in the Windows era and who are not used to controlling a system via text-commands! In fact, many web developers will at first simply stick to using FTP for uploading/downloading files. However, if you go deeper into web development, you will want more control of your server and need to use SSH.

Certified for Windows Vista

But… what if you are managing your own web server and want to set it up to allow SSH connections? What if you are running your website off of a Windows server because you are using .NET to create ASP pages? Is it still possible to connect remotely using SSH? It is indeed possible using Pragma Systems SSH Telnet Server. Using their software you can easily remotely control your system and it’s applications. Best of all, it works on Windows Vista as well as XP and other Windows operating systems.

Pragma Systems SSH technology is used in the majority of Fortune 500 companies in the United States and in over 2100 companies world-wide. Their software is secure, fast and reliable. Their SSH server supports up to 1000 simultaneous connections which is more than enough for almost any company. Also, their technology is significantly easier to use than standard text only SSH tools as they have a much easier to use and navigate interface which can be seen via the screenshots on this page.

This post brought to you by Pragma Systems. You can find more information about Pragma Systems and their products at Pragmasys.com. For more information about web servers, check out the Web Dev Notes web server section!

Posted in General | No Comments »

Validate your Website for Better SEO

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

World Wide Web Consortium

The first step to Search Engine Optimization is making sure all the creepy crawlers can actually find their way around your website. Lets say I plan to take a trip to China to crawl (ie: visit) a certain part of the country. When I show up I’ll need directions, but unfortunately, even if I find a kind fellow happy to assist me, if he speaks to me in Mandarin, I won’t understand anything and I’ll be lost!

You can do all the optimization you like, but if you confuse poor Googlebot, he’ll turn around and go visit someone else! You need to welcome Googlebot and friends with open arms and feed them all the instructions they need to easily find all the destinations on your site. Sitemaps are great, but we’ll talk about those another day. Flash websites for example can be beautiful, but crawlers hit Flash like a bird into a freshly cleaned patio door. While they’ll stop at your site knocked out for a moment, they’ll quickly realize they can’t go forward, turn around a fly away!

Knocking out Googlebot is a bad idea if you want to increase traffic to your website. While crawlers can handle indexing poorly coded websites, the best thing you can do is validate your site “just in case”. Validating your website will help you find errors in your HTML or CSS that you likely don’t know are there and which are usually very easy fixes. Fix these up and make your site more inviting to the crawlers!

Also, definitely find broken links and fix them ASAP! Don’t upset those poor crawlers by sending them looking for pages that don’t exist! That’s just cruel don’t you think? :)

Posted in General, Marketing, SEO | No Comments »

Get Published using AuthorHouse

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

AuthorHouse

Have you ever thought of publishing your own book? Selling millions of copies of your very own book is probably just as exciting as the thought of getting Stumbled and experiencing a huge traffic surge to your website. In fact, it’s probably even a better feeling! Besides, who is more qualified to have their very own book than an experienced blogger who knows his/her niche well and who has plenty of worthy advice to share!

AuthorHouse Book Publishing is a self-publishing service that could help you get your very first book published. By using AuthorHouse, you’ll be working with professionals who are serious about both writing and publishing and who will be able to help you with all aspects of the process.

What does AuthorHouse do exactly?

AuthorHouse unfortunately will not write your book for you, but that’s about the only step you will have to take care of all on your own. Once done writing your book, AuthorHouse can have an editor review your content or you can take advantage of their illustrations package and have their artists find artwork for your book.

When it comes to actually publishing your book, AuthorHouse will have tons of options available to you such as the format, size and cover for your book. You can also choose to have a hardcover or paperback, color or black and white, etc… Basically, anything you would expect a publishing company to do, you will have the power to do while working with AuthorHouse.

Lastly, you will also have the additional option to select a promotional or book selling service in order to help increase sales of your book. This is an option that may or may not be useful to you depending on your personal goals and reasons for publishing a book.

All in all, if you are interested in getting published, self-publishing is a more and more popular way to do so. Definitely check out AuthorHouse and the services they have to offer to see if they are providing just what you are looking for!

This Post Brought to you by AuthorHouse! If you are interested in self-publishing but are not sure if AuthorHouse is for you, compare them with one of their biggest competitors Lulu.com! You’ll then be able to decide which service is best for your particular needs.

Posted in General, Make Money | No Comments »

Plant the Seeds for Success Early

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Do you want your blog to be a success or a failure? In order to be successful you MUST have quality content. Forget about quantity of posts and focus on quality. Plant the seeds for success early.

128296973507657500iizplantinbu.jpg

In order for your blog to take-off, you need some very high quality posts you can use as your foundation. Take the time to write these posts and then link to them often in the future. Help use them to propel you forward.

Of course, while those old cornerstone posts will help get your blog rolling and will be excellent at grabbing the attention of first time visitors, you won’t be able to grow unless you also hang on to your returning visitors. Even if you plant the seeds for success, your plant won’t grow unless you water it and put it somewhere where it can get sun.

Speaking about getting sun, don’t expect your blog to magically grow on its own! Your plant doesn’t have legs… If you leave it in the shade, it won’t get up and walk over to the sun. Your blog won’t get up and show itself on peoples screens either. You’ll need to get out there and market your content in order to attract some attention. Post comments on blogs with similar topics and hope that other authors and bloggers start sending you some links! If you have great content, the links will come!

For more tips about marketing and advertising your blog, check out the Web Dev Notes Marketing Section.

Looking for Web Development Software or Books? Visit my Web Development Software and Books Store!

Want to Increase your Websites Page Rank and Incoming Traffic? Submit your Articles to WriterDatabase.com. It’s Free!

Posted in Blogging Tips, Marketing, WebDev LOL | No Comments »

How to Increase Links to your Website

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

WriterDatabase.com

The more links you have to your website, the more visitors you get! That’s a pretty simple concept to understand. Every link to your site on the web is another chance that someone will find your website. Even more important is the fact that the number of links to your website also helps your site gain a higher ranking in search engine results. Since most people use search engines to find anything online, the better you rank, the more traffic you will get! Search engines are an excellent form of free advertising for your website so it is crucial that you do not upset them if you wish to give yourself a competitive advantage over websites similar to your own.

There are many ways to build links. If you’re blogging, the best way is simply to interact with other websites by posting comments on theirs.

Another excellent way to build links to your website is through article submission. If you have a good website, you will already have tons of articles sitting around in your archives. Every now and then, submit one of these articles to an article directory like Writer Database.The reason for doing this is because at the bottom of your article, you can place a resource box which will link to your website as the source of the article. Therefore, if your article is approved, you will suddenly have generated a new link to your site. You can read more about the Writer Database website here.

Don’t just submit to a single directory. If you have time, try submitting to multiple directories to further increase the amount of links to your web site. The more you have, the better!

What about the Google penalty for duplicate content? If you submit an article identical to the one on your website, will the penalty outweigh the benefits? I’ve seen many discussions on the matter and the fact remains that nobody really knows the algorithms Google uses to rank pages. Many people believe that the duplicate content penalty will only affect duplicate content on the same domain. I have in fact seen this happen on my BattleCity Classic website which uses the Joomla Content management system. Due to the way the system is set-up, several different links could allow me to reach the exact same page. For this reason, my main landing page had a low page-rank of 1 for a long-time, until I fixed this problem. A few months later, after the next page rank update, my landing page jumped to a page rank of 4. During this time, I’ve seen the page rank of most article directories remain stable or even increase and so it would seem that the duplicate content penalty is meant to protect against a single website spamming Google’s index.

If you are however worried about duplicate content penalties, then take the time to write new articles ONLY for article directories. Do not place this content on your website, but instead use it in as many article directories as you can in order to advertise your site via the quality of the writing and of course through the generation of incoming links!

Posted in Blogging Tips, Web Development | No Comments »

The Pesticide Paradox

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Pesticide

We have all heard of insect resistance to pesticides at one point or another. When pesticides are used to kill insects, those that are the most resistant to the pesticide are those which manage to survive, at least long enough to reproduce. This means, that the next generation of insects are more likely to be resistant to pesticides because they will have inherited resistance from their parents. Over time, the most resistant insects will continually survive and reproduce until eventually the entire population will be resistant.

Similarly with software development, a system will tend to build resistance against a particular testing technique.

What the heck am I talking about? Bugs of course! If you are the manager of a team of developers, and these developers know the testing techniques that will be used to find bugs in the code they develop, then these programmers will quickly learn to avoid creating such bugs to avoid being the one responsible for faults in the system.

While this may seem like a good thing, it could be problematic because testing will now suddenly stop finding bugs! If those working on the software forget that testing cannot prove the absence of bugs, they may then believe that their system is of higher quality than it really is.

Human error is inevitable, and if the programmers know the testing technique because it is always the same one used, what will happen is that the code will be written in a different way such that the bugs are displaced to different areas, but not eliminated. This of course it not intentional, but while focusing on eliminating one type of bug that they know will be found, other bugs will be created.

Most developers know, we rarely fix one bug without creating a few others to replace it! In large systems, bugs can often be difficult to detect, so change your testing technique from time to time to ensure that you release higher quality software.

Posted in Design, Web Development | No Comments »

Stand Out From the Crowd

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

Remember when I said, “If You Clone You Will End Up Alone“? I wasn’t kidding! All too often I see new bloggers trying to copy another successful blogger in order to fast-track themselves to success! This is the worst thing you could ever do of all the horrible things you could ever imagine yourself doing!!! Why on earth would anyone ever read your new website if it sounds exactly like an existing well established site? They won’t!

It would be nice if humans were little lemmings who would march around the blogosphere and just magically show up by the thousands every day! Unfortunately there are no lemmings coming! Ok, thats a lie, you are the lemming and you are about to walk your website right off a cliff if you copy someone else or even worse steal content!

If you want visitors to take your website seriously, you need to stand out from the rest of the crowd!

iz will takes the ring

How do you do that? The best way you can make sure you stand out is by NOT TRYING TO DO SO! Stop trying so hard to make your website an instant success. Accept the fact that there are no shortcuts and quality content is the key to prosperity! What about the standing out part? Just be yourself! Don’t try to be someone you aren’t. Every single person on this planet is unique so as long as you are yourself, you are bound to stand out.

A great example is Brandon from GamingMMO.com. The first thing you will notice is that he is passionate about his subject as well as knowledgeable. Once you have those two ingredients, all you have to do is let the fingers do the typing!

Posted in Blogging Tips | No Comments »

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