Welcome to Friday Fun. If it’s not Friday where you live then please do not start legal proceedings.

I’ve seen and used many ways to measure the SEO clout of a website/page over the years that I’ve been involved in SEO. From the old classic of checking the Pagerank of a page to the more sophisticated method of checking anchor text in backlinks across website themes, all of these methods simply cannot show the marketing ‘clout’ of your website. I propose a universal way of measuring how effective a site is in the search engines:

Take the SEO Clout Challenge

Step 1: Make A Vacancy

That’s right, add a fictitious job (web-page) to your site, linked to from at least one page from within your site. Preferably with a relevant job title and a location. For example:

Web Design Vacancy in Nottingham

Bonus marks if you use similar text in your h1 and title tags. Create some copy to describe the position. Doesn’t need to be much.

Step 2: Wait

Go on, enjoy the weekend. You deserve it. Seriously though, this time is being used for the search engines to hoover up your new page.

Step 3: Speak to Recruitment Consultant

Fast forward to Monday morning. The aim is to have a recruitment consultant contact you before end of office hours. If they do, you have SEO clout. Well done.

Scoring

Tally up your scores at the end of play on Monday:

For every consultant that calls you by the end of lunch, you get 10 points.

For every consultant that calls you between the end of lunch and home time, you get 5 points.

For every consultant that emails you between Friday and end of Monday, you get 2 points.

I await your scores on Monday evening/Tuesday. Go on, give it a go. ; )

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For me, one of the most challenging parts of web development is the discovery phase, or more specifically, getting the content out of my clients. With four out of five of them it’s like pulling teeth. Sometimes I have to wait for five or six months before they eventually give it to me.

I always tell them that the content is the first thing I will need from them, and that the design phases (architecture, navigation, graphics) all depend on the content. I also explain that the content is the most important part of their site: it’s the thing their visitors are looking for.

To assist them I refer them to an article I wrote that briefly explains how to write using appropriate headings, keywords, bulleted lists, simple sentences, first-person active voice, etcetera. I also suggest that they list all the general categories of site visitors they anticipate, then list the general information each type of visitor will be looking for, and then, using the lists, write out the information needed. Lastly, I try to convince them that it doesn’t need to be perfect and it’s not going to be chiseled in stone.

Nonetheless, this is the part of web development I find the most difficult. It’s beginning to occur to me that many adults are simply unable to write a few coherent pages of text. I’m beginning to think I should just interview them and write the content myself, but I want to be a web builder, not a writer.

I’m curious and looking for helpful ideas. Is this a common problem, and how do other developers handle it?

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Hello, I’m back. Hurrah, I here you cry.

I see things resumed as normal round here while I was away so I’d like to thank Matt Davies for fadsitting (and for a great Apple redesign post.) Without him, you’d probably be staring at a gazillion comments about Viagra.

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Last year over 350 WordPressers of all ages and experience levels gathered in San Francisco to share a day together. We’re now halfway through 2007, and there is a new WordCamp happening on July 21 and 22 that I hope many of you can make it to.

This year we’re expanding the conference to two days instead of one with the first focusing on user and blog-facing topics, like search engine optimization and podcasting, and the second day will focus on more development topics, such as usability, iterative design, and the future of publishing. Speakers this year include several WordPress developers, Matt Cutts, John Dvorak, Robert Hoekman Jr., Dan Kuykendall, Om Malik, Rashmi Sinha, Lorelle Vanfossen, and Dave Winer. Check out the entire schedule.

Just like last year there will be free lunch (with the legendary BBQ on Sunday) and t-shirts for everybody, and a party on Saturday night. Unlike last year we’re asking for $25 to help cover costs, but if that’s a problem there are scholarships available. Registration will be closing July 9th and there will not be tickets at the door, so get yours soon.

WordPress 2.2.1 is now available. 2.2.1 is a bug fix release for the 2.2 series. Since 2.2 was released a month ago, the WordPress community has been improving fit-and-finish by identifying and fixing those little bugs that can be so annoying and by fine-tuning some small details. The result is a nicely polished 2.2.1 release. The full list of bugs fixed in 2.2.1 is available here. Here are some highlights.

• Atom feed validation fixes (#4274, #4307, #4381, #4382)
• XML-RPC fixes (#4314, #4329, #4315, #4469)
• Widget backward compatibility fixes (#4275)
• Widget layout fixes for IE7 (#4264, #4268)
• Page and Text Widget improvements (#4302, #4259)

Unfortunately, 2.2.1 is not just a bug fix release. Some security issues came to light during 2.2.1 development, making 2.2.1 a required upgrade. 2.2.1 addresses the following vulnerabilities:

• Remote shell injection in PHPMailer
• Remote SQL injection in XML-RPC Discovered by Alexander Concha.
• Unescaped attribute in default theme

Special thanks to Alexander Concha for his continued assistance in making WordPress more secure. Special thanks also to Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software for his improvements to our XML-RPC implementation.

The New Website

Apple have redesigned their website and what a superb example of a good redesign it is. In this post we would like to take a little look at the new design and what has been done to move it on. Here is an example of the new design:

The Old Website

Also at this stage, before we go into details it might be worth us reminding ourselves of the old site. Here is an example of that:

1. Aesthetics & Usability / Building On The Good

There was a lot right about apples previous website. When you consider the trend setting “glassy” look and the simplistic messaging and colours you have to admit that it was industry inspiring. The previous design had clear priorities; the home page was the shop window, there was a large area promoting the latest product and then smaller areas promoting different areas of the site. Imagery was key and the simplicity of the layout promoted ease of use. When you got in further the site changed from being a marketing tool to being an information giving site, showing the user what they wanted to see when they wanted it.

This strategy is spot on: On the home page of a site you give the user what YOU want them to see. On the inner pages your give the user what THEY want to see.

With this in mind a redesign was always going to be tough, but apple is not a company to put off moving with the times. As their competitors have just updated all their software and design styles to counter Apples super trend setting image, Apple is off again, and what a good job they’ve done of it.

In the redesign they have not only kept the successful strategy of the previous site, they have enhanced it. The shop window area has been made larger. The simplicity of the design elements has been increased. The glassy areas have been slightly toned down but subtle wet floor effects and light bevels have been introduced. The whole thing is slick and builds upon the success of the last site both in regards to aesthetics and in regards to usability.

2. Destroying The Bad / Out With The Old

What was bad about the old design? Not much. However the success of the old design was its downfall. The glassy looking navigation tabs was starting to look dated as everyone replicated it. The tabs are gone and in their place a swish looking nav (more below).

Also the ability to view this site on mobile devices is a lot easier I understand. This is probably due to the new launch of the iPhone. So out goes the bad code, in comes the new…

3. Navigation / Simple Simple Simple

For such a complex site I think Apple’s simple navigation does them credit. 6 items in the primary nav filter you down into main sections of the site. These main sections act as mini home pages which filter you down again into the inner pages with side navigation. Yes indeed they have followed the ‘three click rule’.

Also you will discover more graphic lead navigation in the top areas of some of the main pages. Visual aids are so useful to users and so what better way to utilise this and help filter people to their desired product.

Conclusion

So Apple have done it again. A nice looking redesign to aid their new product launches. Its slick and so very Apple.

What do you think about it reader? Is this another trend setter? Comments most welcome…

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Those who wants to create his own photo gallery or photo gallery for his client can use Highslide JS. It is a very nice javascript thumbnail viewer by Torstein Honsi.

I created a gallery for my client fairapparels.

What you have to do is simply call the highslide.js in the head section of your html. There are some Style Sheet which u can put in the style section or cal call from external CSS file. Then Write the code like below (as for example)

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Você que costuma mexer com o Photoshop ja deve ter ouvido sobre o Adobe Criative Suite 3, onde podemos encontrar a versão 10.0 do Photoshop.

Logo de cara, como eu, você deve ter percebido que a interface gráfica foi totalmente remodelada, proporcionando ao usuário final uma melhor manipulação e edição de seus trabalhos. E mais: caso não esteja satisfeita da interface padrão bastar personaliza-la a gosto.

Mas enfim, onde estão os novos recursos? Às vezes acabamos nos esquecendo dos detalhes mais importantes ou até mesmo não sabemos onde encontra-los. E é por esse motivo que venho até vocês para repassar um link com demonstrações rápidas de alguns recursos novos do Photoshop CS3 (link do próprio site da Adobe).

Me chamou a atenção: Além da interface está muito melhor e totalmente customizavel um outro destaque foi o fato de poder aplicar os filtros em subcamadas pois me proporcionara um melhor resultado final dentre tantas vantagens que o recurso oferece.
Não me atraiu a idéia demorar um pouco para instalar, porém no final das contas parece ter valido a pena. Tomara que não venha a ter problemas em relação ao desempenho em aplicações maiores.

Agora é a sua vez. Caso queira ver pequenas demonstrações dos novos recursos, basta entrar no site do Photoshop CS3, na Adobe.
Para experimentar o Photoshop CS3 Extended, basta ter uma conta no site da Adobe.
Recomendo também que façam buscas no Google, onde acredito que sejam encontradas boas matérias.

Atenciosamente,
Breno S. Barboza - 17:48

20 FireFox Extensions That Every Web Designer Should Know About

I have had very little to discuss the past while. So here is a rather unexciting update...