Designmudd Ramblings on mostly Web Design & Development - Print too.

So thought i’d stop in. I’ve been on a different kick lately - being on the computer has been feeling like “work”. So I’ve been off it, keeping myself busy with anything & everything else. I’m on a woodworker kick - I’m about to tackle a coffee table from scratch. I’ve been a mechanic - just yesterday actually I gave back my Wrangler lease. Sad day indeed, i took pics before bringing back, i should post those here. Ah, the wrangler - i felt one with the road. Now i’m in my crappy ‘94 Jetta - but crappy in a cool way. I do like it, I especially like the small bill. So ‘94 Jetta = Mechanic. I’m gonna tackle the spark plugs and timing belt this weekend.

That’s about it - work’s been good. We moved into the new space, it’s still a bit messy. The move is good, let’s me not think about work once i leave it. Before I was just too close to the office. Work/play, it all blended in too much. Got good separation right now.

Hopefully i’ll be posting pics of my new coffee table soon. Until then.

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You’ve heard it before and I’ll say it again, when you submit your site to search engines, you should shy away from auto submission companies that promise you top listing on all the major engines. In fact, it’s the major engines that you want to submit manually. Free Web Submission’s homepage provides a list of the top engines as rated by alexa. When subitting your website you wanna basically hand submit those top 5 engines… Yahoo, MSN, Google, About and Open Directory which refers to DMOZ. The rest of those engines are not nearly as important at those top 5, however it can never hurt to have more incoming links to your site. So you might consider auto-submission to cover those and only those, but what you need to be careful about it that you have control over the list of engines to whom your sending. I say this because you don’t want to re-submit to those top 5 engines as they’ll tag you with spamming the engine and penalize your site. Personally I stick to that form on the bottom of that same Free Web Submission Site and I make sure to uncheck Google and Alexa. Alexa is also one that I hand submit btw. Beyond those, I find that my sites make they’re way just fine into all the other little engines out there once I get listed into some of the bigger ones. So my submittion routing is Yahoo, MSN, Google, About, DMOZ, Alexa, and the list on Web Site Submission minus Google and Alexa. Enjoy!

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I’m on Firefox (mac) and have had some trouble installing the toolbar - but wait, there is a solution… right click this link and “save link as”. Save it to your desktop. Once you’ve got the file, all you’ve gotta do is physically drag the file on an open firefox window. Viola, you’ve got Google Toolbar.

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Simple Viewer is a pretty awesome photo gallery. I’m building a couple sites that feature a gallery like this… I was basically pulling my hair out trying to find good tutorials or ready-made movie clips that I could tailor into my site (because I’m not as good at flash as I’d like to be). Hopefully I’ll get their eventually, but no better way than to look at good files and deconstruct them. In the Meanwhile, I bought the sourcecode for this simpleviewer MC and that definately speeds up the process of what needs to be accomplished. It was only $50, not too shabby. And there’s a free non-sourcecode version as well. Enjoy!

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SELF SEO has a tool very simliar to Overture Tool, but better. It’s faster, breaks you down to searches per day, and also gives you worktracker results in addition to overture results. Give it a try.

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Last night I bumped into Andre Chaperon’s Marketing Newsletter. Some Great info there and I’ll begin visiting often. Of note was his most recent entry Google Sitemaps Tutorial for WordPress - Get GoogleBot To Visit Your Site In Under 60 Seconds!.

As Andre says, THIS IS HUGE. I did this google sitemaps stuff on 2 of my sites last night and as advertised, those googlebots are their visiting your site within seconds. At first, I went straight to the google sitemaps site and was a bit overwhelmed by all that I had to do, BUT, if you watch the little video that Andre prepared, it’s very very simple. There’s actually a Google Sitemap Generator for Wordpress (V2) which makes this process honestly just a few clicks. Check out the article, drive more traffic, and enjoy.

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Firefox is a great browser for lots of reason. I especially like all the extensions for it such as web developer, add bookmark here & PRGoogleBar. Careful with some of these, i’m on mac OSX and if your on a PC (Windows) i’m not so sure those extensions will jive, dig? The Firefox Browser is loaded with features, extensions and themes - It’s light on it’s feet and it’s great with CSS.

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Yup, i got rejected - how lovely. What am I talking about you ask? DMOZ is an open directory project. As it’s “open” it’s run and moderated by tons and tons of voluteers. Not exactly easy to land a volunteer position however as you can see by going through the forum. I volunteered to edit a very small category because I’m a Giant nut (Bigblueblogger is mine). Now when I applied to edit/moderate that subcategory, I thought my biggest obstacle was the fact that I have a site in that same category. Many virtual internet people advise not to choose such a category as it diminishes your chances (because they don’t want you signing up for the wrong reasons). That was never my intention at all, but that’s also not why I got rejected. I got rejected because I didn’t submit ALL my web sites on the application which asked for my web sites. My list goes pretty deep and I surely didn’t think they needed ALL of them… I think that’s nutty.

Why do I want to be a part of that? I don’t know, I think just to work a little on the backend of a directory like DMOZ would be pretty cool. It would without a doubt allow me to focus on writing good, clean, keywork heavy content as I would have to basically re-write (or simply approve) all the sites that get submitted. This is something I’m obviously taking in interest in lately, working with search engines, SEO, and just writing good keyword rich content.

So What next? Well, I’ll put together my list, actually i’ve already started, and i’ll apply again. I think lots of people apply over and over and eventually fix up their application enough to get it - it’s like a driving test. Like I said, the e-mail sent to me only indicated that I was rejected because I didn’t supply all my websites. So i’ll do that and the poor guy on the other end will have alot of clicking to do.

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This is what 1,700 people searched for in a month according to Overture Tool. Directory, DMOZ, google, msn, yahoo… I see the connection. But what the hell is that “movie” doing there?

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I picked up this hot tip on SEO Chat.

Typically you’d go to yahoo’s submit page, type in your url, hit the button and just wait for weeks, maybe months - but there is a faster way. Check this out…

If your site has an RSS feed, good. If it doesn’t, make one. Then find the URL for your RSS feed. The RSS feed for this site (this blog I mean) can be found by simply clicking that link that says “RSS” in the top of my nav column. Once you hit it, the feed URL is simply the URL in the browsers address bar.

After you’ve found your RSS’s URL, go to yahoo.com and click “My Yahoo”. If you have an account, cool. If not, make one. Once you get into “My Yahoo”, you’re gonna “add content”, then instead of searching something in the search bar, your gonna click the teeny tiny link next to it that says “Add RSS by URL”. Once you get in there, add your RSS link. Yahoo will instantly send some spiders to your site and from what i’ve seen so far, they’ve been coming back daily. Your site will be indexed in typically 3 days. I’ll say it again… 3 DAYS! Can’t beat that.

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These are the keywords i’m curretly optimizing the current Talle Creative site for. The site will be changed eventually when things slow down a bit, but for now I’d just like to get a head start on raising rankings. We’re already #16 on MSN for “web design new jersey” and #8 for “new jersey web development”. Not bad for a weeks worth of work. Hopefully the other engines will follow. So, this entry is my plug to get a few “web design” keywords connected to the site, shameless… i know. I added a link towards the bottom of the talle creative clients page (I so need to update that). That link connects to this blog. It doesn’t belong at all, but I wanted to find a way to make this site connect to that site as it will make both more relevant to one another. Stupid, but driving traffic is important and every little bit helps. So… Web Design < -shameless :) We're in New Jersey Fun stuff, i’m digging it.

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Ah nothing, just needed a change. I’m a fool for simple so this one’s close enough for now and i’ll tweak dem stylesheets with time. Enjoy.

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UPDATE - I signed up for an account here but was very disappointed with the service. It’s nothing more than linkfarming which does very little for your site in terms of both ranking and relative content. My advice on this topic is to simply stay away.
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For the past few days i’ve found myself entirely caught up in SEO, Link Trading, and hooking in RSS Feeds into my sites. Basically I’m caught up in generating traffic. I have a good handle on optimizing sites to be search engine ready through use of Clean Document Structure, CSS, Meta-tags, Alt-tags, Title Tags, keyword rich content and so on. I also understand that a constantly growing document library is what makes sites big search engine players - the sites need to be constantly changing and constantly added too. What I didn’t realize to this point is that there are places (sites) where companies, people, organizations actually trade links at a very high volume. For instance, I’ve stumbled this site called Link Market. I signed up and all I can say is “Why the hell haven’t I known about this”. Well, I shouldn’t say that I didn’t know about link trading, but what I didn’t know was there was such a great place to do it and i’m sure there are more. We’ve got some big players in here, I think that’s the biggest surprise. There are sites in there with Alexa Rating of 200, 1300, 33,000 < - that's just a few that I saw, but point being they're high and they'll raise my rankings. So why am I so excited about this? Because this is the part i've failed to realize about SEO. See, I think I understand SEO just fine, I prepare the site and it's optimized and ready, but that's not enough. Engines Raise your rank based on your popularity - reciprical links. Of course content is very important too, but if you've got lots of good high ranking sites connected to yours, it will raise you. I think i'm definately seeing the light here and I'm thinking this is another one of those services to throw into the mix... Websites that actually bring in visitors. Christian was talking the other day about how he's studying and getting a grasp on building dynamic websites and how he's had more firepower with that, another tool, something that set's him apart from the rest - And I agree 100%, Dynamic is in Demand and that's where the money's at -> not to mention is just more interesting in general. But this is no different, we figure this out (this SEO business) and we’ve got ourselves jackpot… Dynamic Sites that actually pull in clients. Shopping carts that’s actually bring in Clients. Sky’s the limit and i’m feeling stupid about not knowing this already.

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Exciting news… I know.

First book sold was “Real World InDesign 2″ by Olav Martin and David Blatner. It was an OK book, but I had already known everything in it. Typically the “Real World” books are setup for the more advanced user, this one wasn’t so much… kind of started at square one. Well i’m psyched, all into ebay now. I’m Selling More! for anybody who’s interested. I’m gonna start selling everything!

None of my picture books though - you can’t have those.

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Step 3 on this site is wrong. The command to start Xampp for OSX is…

/usr/local/xampp/mampp start

If your using the restart, stop, or any other command, just use that path. Don’t mention it.

** Strike this post - In the newer version the installation has been changed to accomodate the command line. Nothing said above is a problem anymore.

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This is sweet! If you develop websites and have Firefox, get this - it’s a must have. I want to explain it, but there’s too many things, just get it and try it. Enjoy!

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I thought this was way cool when I found it. Safari Theme for Firefox Here’s what my Firefox looks like now…

Sure, the fact that there a gay peecee toolbar on top sucks… but firefox is a solid browser, definately better than Safari, which I love, but I hate - This safari theme makes me feel much more comfortable and at home in Firefox.

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It’s out - There seems to be lots of reasons to upgrade, I only wish I had the money to spend on it (New Digital Rebel is first priority). Good to see them finally put a decent trace tool within illustrator. Hopefully you can now arrow up and down the fonts in Illy like you can in ps and id. That is seriously my biggest gripe with illustrator.

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Good new for my Mac based web developing friends… Apache Friends has released it’s newest member of the XAMPP family. If XAMPP is something new to you, let me give you a summary… basically, it’s Apache, PHP, MYSQL, PHPMyadmin, Webalizer, and a bunch of others all wrapped up into one (1) neat little package all pre-configured and ready to go. You’re not a host? So what… this is your testing server. I personally have a linux box setup with an Old Version of XAMPP that mimicks all the software versions of my production environment. But it’s great to know that Apach Friends has added support for the mac platform. I’m sure it’ll come in handy for me sooner or later.

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