General
June 21, 2006
I have to tell you, that this blog spamming is really getting out of hand – I even get dozens of Chinese spam clogging my blog every day. In total, I must get 200 / day!
Besides being annoying, blog and message-board spamming are next to useless, in terms of promoting websites …
Will they ever learn?
Answer: No.
There must be a way to fight back as we did against email spam. But how can we mount a counter-spam-attack on the spammers?
Geocities Jerks
One common tactic for spammers is to set up Geocities websites and then try to get people to visit them … Geocities has to come up with some better policing of their system.
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April 20, 2006
These days people are really interested in web traffic – big web traffic. But one thing that many web designers don’t consider, is the quality of traffic.
NOTE: SEO is the acronym for: ‘search engine optimization’. This is the process of making your web pages more search engine ‘friendly’ by tweaking code and content.
NOT ALL WEB TRAFFIC IS CREATED EQUAL
People love counting page-views and unique visits but from my perspective, if the traffic sucks, who cares if you get 100 000 visits a day!
HOW TO DETERMINE THE QUALITY OF WEB TRAFFIC
- How long people stay your website
- Your conversion rate – if you sell stuff.
- How many bookmark/’add-to-favorite’ your website.
- How many people visit your website by directly typing in your web address.
You know your traffic (probably*) sucks if are people leave right away, don’t buy anything, never bookmark your site etc ..
You can determine what the numbers are for the above points, with a good stats program.
* People could also be leaving because your website sucks – bad usability etc.
THE MORE SPECIFIC THE SEARCH TERM/PRASE – THE BETTER
Let’s say you sell Irish Setters and you have good rating for the key word: ‘dogs’. And since lots of people search using the ‘dogs’ key word, you get lots of ‘dog’ traffic.
I called it ‘dog’ traffic because what you find, is that the vast majority of your audience is NOT looking for Irish Setters, most are looking for information about (all the) other types of dogs in the world …. and that’s if your lucky!
Who knows, maybe they are looking for information on bad stocks (a la stock market,) or maybe on not so attractive women … it’s hard to say with such a loose/broad search term.
OK, LET’S GET BETTER TRAFFIC
With this understanding, you now decide to target ‘Irish Setters’, and with work and luck, you get good position in the search engines. But now, you’ve lost your top ‘dog’ position … dog dangit!
But is it really bad news? Well no, because you now find yourself getting people who are actually interested in what you are offering (Irish Setters) and as such, sales go up AND you get more return traffic.
WHY GOOGLE TRAFFIC IS BETTER FOR BUSINESS
To the point: people who reach you from other websites are typically ‘browsers’. These people are not ready to ‘pull the trigger’ on anything specific, they are simply snooping about not ready to commit … that’s why search engine traffic CAN BE much better.
HOW WEBSITE CAN DELIVER GREAT TRAFFIC
That said, some websites can deliver great traffic, if they are designed to filter/clean up traffic properly.
For example: if my website has a link to your Irish Setter selling website, and the link text reads:
‘Buy superb Irish Setters’
Chances are that people who click through from my website to yours, will be more likely to want to buy an Irish Setter from you. If on the other hand, my link text read: ‘free Irish Setter Information’, the quality of the traffic will decrease – you’ll be getting a bunch of free-loaders!
CONCLUSION
Don’t waste your time chasing sucky traffic … go for the ‘killer’ traffic.
Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)
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April 17, 2006
A LIST OF FREE IMAGE EDITORS AND CONVERTERS
PowerBatch 2.7 – 1.6MB
– Batch renaming, resizing, converting, printing, rotating, colour adjustment, cropping.
– Crop with aspect ratio confinement.
– Built-in FTP client!
– All program files are contained in a single folder.
– Converts JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BITMAP and JPEG2000.
– Supports animated GIF and multipage TIFF.
– Contact sheets.
– Image effects.
– Add text.
Paint.net – 4.9MB
– In development.
– Clean GUI.
– Developed with help from Microsoft.
– Requires 24MB .NET Framework 1.1 to run.
– Limited layers support (cannot be moved on canvas).
Pixia 3.1 – 3.6MB
– Not much known about this one yet.
Photofiltre – 1.6MB
– Multiple images open at once.
– Many plugins.
– More than 100 filters.
– Feature packed.
FastStone Image Viewer – 2.4MB
– Convert major formats (inc. PSD).
– Lossless JPEG rotation.
– Magnifier viewing.
– EXIF support.
– Resizing, flipping, rotating, cropping, colour adjusting tools.
– Crop with aspect ratio confinement.
– Compare images side by side.
– Batch image converter/resizer.
– Supports animated GIF and multipage TIFF
Xnview – 2.1MB
– Utility for viewing and converting graphic files.
– Imports 400 graphic file formats.
– Exports 50 graphic file formats.
– EXIF.
– Copy, cut and crop.
– Brightness and contrast adjust.
– Modify number of colours.
– Filters and effects.
– Windows print (Contact Sheet) and TWAIN support.
– Supports animated GIF and multipage TIFF.
GIMP – 7.3MB (Windows version)
– Probably the best open source contender to Photoshop.
– Requires GTK+ 2 runtime environment – 3.5MB.
– Layers support.
– Difficult to get used to GUI layout (or so I’ve read).
Thanks to Tim
Stefan Mischook
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February 28, 2006
‘CSS Mastery’ covers the most sought after CSS concepts, tips and techniques. It’s a must-have book for any intermediate level web designer because of the way it covers the material: it is concise, clear and pragmatic.
Just when you’re finished learning one great CSS technique, you turn the page and bing-bang, there’s another juicy one to jump into! A nice change from the zealot batherings I’ve had to endure in other books on the subject!
Like all the books from this publisher, it is also well put together physically:
- Good layout
- Good choice of paper
- Easy to read font
- Not too thick or thin
- Good use of graphics/diagrams
The publisher (Friends of Ed,) have done a great job with their web design books lately; ‘CSS Mastery’ along with Dan Cederholm’s book (Web Standards Solutions) are the best out there today.
I have yet to read ‘Web Designer’s Reference’ by Cederholm, but I hear it’s good too.
Stefan Mischook (Web Design Heretic)
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February 28, 2006
Welcome to the world of modern web design!
This is a very good book on blogs. OK, so why should web designers want to read a book on installing and customizing popular blogs?
The anwer: web designers today, NEED to learn how to work with blogs. Blog implementation (installing, customizing, skinning) is a growing part of the web design business these days and is now an essential tool in the web designers toolbox.
Blog Design Solutions gives you a to-the-point tour of several important blogging engines:
- Moveable Type
- TextPattern
- ExpressionEngine
- WordPress
The is a multi-author book where each blog is given its due by one or more authors – as such, you know that each blog is covered by people who know what they’re doing.
Along the way, you will also pick up tips about Flikr integration, blog syndication and other things that this old time web designer may have not been ‘up to snuff’ on.
I use WordPress, and so I immediately jumped to that chapter; I found the writing to be clear, and the author covered topics that I wanted to read about. I am not a user of the other blog engines, but I’m glad that the book covers them for sake of comparison – it’s always good to know about competing products.
Beyond covering the blogs, the last chapter actually takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a blog from scratch using PHP. I went through the code, and enjoyed the way the author runs through the process – you’ll might also pick up a few PHP ideas along the way.
I recommend this book to any web designer who has the intention of earning a living in web design.
Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)
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February 28, 2006
One of the key components of running a successful web design business (any business really,) is to manage your money effectively.
Most businesses go out of business, simply because they don’t follow some basic money management rules. The following are my ‘Killer Money Management Rules’.
Top 6 Killer Money Management Rules
1. Credit cards are for transactions only – not for carrying debt. Pay off your entire balance every month!
2. If you can’t buy something cash, don’t buy it.
3. If your bank account is not increasing every month, it’s time to go into crisis mode.
4. You should have a stash of ‘fcuk-you’ cash … one years worth. So, if you spend $2000/month to live, you should have $24 000 in the stash. The stash should be held in a no risk, immediate access account like an ING account.
5. Never touch your emergency stash unless it’s an emergency. Having this stash makes you sleep well at night. I call it ‘fcuk-you cash’ because when you know you will be fine for a year, you can tell idiot clients to … you get the idea.
6. Create a separate retirement account/investments that you pay into regularly and first – this is a ‘never touch’ account.
Lots of business owners pile all their funds in one place (as I did) and then end up broke at 55. Fortunately for me, I learned these lessons young.
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February 25, 2006
In this podcast, I discuss the 3 reasons why learning to hand code your web pages makes sense … and dollars too!
Podcast running time: 7:30
Download MP3 link: 3 Reasons to hand code
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
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February 23, 2006
Pillars of Professional Web Design – The Podcast
Podcast running time: 11:41
So what are the ‘Pillars of Professional Web Design’?
In a nutshell, it is a list of the core skills that a web designer should have today. The web has changed in a big way the last few years, and so has the role and skills of a web designer.
Download MP3 link: web design
Thanks for listening.
Stefan Mischook
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February 23, 2006
As some of you may know, I have been against using CSS hacks for a long while.
Now that IE7 is coming out very soon and we know that many CSS hacks will break in IE7, we need to come up with another viable solution to make CSS based layouts work in IE6, and the other more capable browsers …
That’s where IE conditional comments come in. This IE specific code/tool is safe and solves all our problems when creating cross browser pure CSS layouts.
Check out the video: IE Conditional Comments
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February 20, 2006
I got an email recently asking about Ruby On Rails:
"Somebody just told me about this software program called: Ruby on Rails. It’s a very strange name to me, and I never heard of it until this evening. I was wondering if you know anything about it and if so, what is your opinion on it’s merits for creating a web page ?? "
My answer:
ROR (Ruby on Rails) is basically a web application framework built using the Ruby language. It is like ASP, JSP, PHP etc … in terms of what you can do with it – essentially, connect web pages to databases like MySQL.
ROR has a bit of buzz in the JAVA community because some big name Java geeks have played with it and found it to be much more productive than the typical Java way of doing things.
Sounds good at first, except for the fact that the Java’s way of doing things reminds me of a large government organization: lots of red tape and it takes forever to get anything done – even going to the bathroom requires you fill out forms in triplicate! If you need to go to the bathroom really bad, you don’t want to be using Java.
That said, ROR does have some neat things about it, and the language itself (Ruby,) has some interesting constructs in it that make it appealing to the Java community.
Rails allows you to create a web application very quickly because it automatically creates database connections and conversations (inserts, updates and deletes) between the web application and the database.
But ROR is not proven, may have performance issues, has a small community and a small API (not too many options) compared to Java or PHP and finally, ROR hosting is rare.
I would go with PHP because it is proven, fast, has a huge community and hosting is ubiquitous.
Stefan Mischook (Web design heretic)
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