CityBlogz Design Studio / Blog

Here are a few well known and some not so known pointers in getting better search engine rankings for your web site.
1.        The keywords meta tag is extremely important.
2.        Use plural keywords i.e. blogs instead of blog
3.        Secondly, the description meta tag is also important.
4.        Make sure the title tage is descriptive. Keywords in your title is very important with Yahoo! Search.
5.        Use your keywords in the HTML Heading tags.  
6.        Leave keywords in comment tags.
7.        Tell the search engine spider when to come back using the revisit-after meta tag.
8.        Tell the search engine spider to also index all pages linked on your page using the name=”robots” content=”index, follow” meta tag.
9.        To subtly boost the number of keywords on a page, set the text color to one similar to your background. Insert a sentence, containing your top 6 keywords, at the bottom of your main page.
10.        Know your audience.
11.        Get recommendations.
12.        Use promotions and cross-promotions to attract visitors.
13.        Easy submission to all major search engines using AddMe.com or DMOZ.org
14.        Use Google Adwords
15.        Use Google to find out how many websites are linking to yours. i.e. link:yoursite.com
16.        Finally check out the Search Engine Marketing Kit.

If some of you are about to go through this part of your job hunting phase, these are some of the toughest questions that you’ll need to answer.  

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. What makes you unique?  
3. What interests you the most about this position? What interests you the least?  
4. What did you like most about your last job? What did you like least?  
5. Why did you leave (or are you leaving) your last job?  
6. Why do you want this job? or Why do you want to work for us?  
7. What would you do if your boss asked you to do something you felt was unethical?  
8. What are your salary expectations?

Read more about the 8 toughest interview questions.

• Make it clear that the views expressed in the blog do not necessarily represent the views of the employer.  
• Respect the company’s confidentiality and proprietary information.  
• Ask your manager if you have any questions about what is appropriate to include in the blog.  
• Be respectful to the company, employees, customers, partners, and competitors. Criticise but be balanced, give opportunity for feedback, and be justifiable.  
• Observe company requests that topics not be discussed for confidentiality or legal compliance reasons.  
• Ensure that your blogging activity does not interfere with your work commitments or employee relations.  
• Tell the truth and write with balance and accuracy. Acknowledge and correct mistakes promptly. Acknowledge conflicts of interest.  
• Keep records of original posts and indicate where a message has been edited or summarized.  
• Be prepared to delete inappropriate posts and spam or off-topic material.  
• Reply to e-mails and comments promptly and be prepared to explain how complaints are being dealt with.  
• Don’t steal copyright material. Link to online references and original source materials directly.  
• Keep private issues private and don’t jeopardise the company’s working relationships.
• Source: Nick Lockett, DL Legal

I have been doing some reading to educate myself in the realm of web design and I came across an interesting site called UseIt.com by Jakob Nielsen. It has some very good content on website usability. I have already bookmarked the site. One of the more interesting pieces that I came across was an article about form checkboxes and radio buttons. It was quite interesting to read that many of us web developers still make the mistakes that his article outlines. Hopefully, I can learn a lot more from Jakob Nielsen. I am looking forward to his next article.

Here’s a summary of what I believe are the most common problems in the software development process:

• Miscommunication:  If developers don’t know what’s needed or customer’s have false expectations, problems are guaranteed.
• Poor requirements:  If requirements are unclear, incomplete, too general, and not testable, there will be problems.
• Unrealistic schedule:  If too much work is crammed in too little time, problems are inevitable.
• Featuritis (Feature creep):  Requests to pile on new features after development is underway; extremely common.
• Inadequate testing:  Applications may or may not work correctly until the customer complains or systems crash.

The fieldset tag is a very useful tag to make a complex and lengthy form more organized and visually appealing. This technique draws a thin border around a group of form elements so the end user knows they are somehow related. This breaks up a large form into smaller sections that are easy to understand. The legend tag is used to define what text you want to appear in the upper left corner of the selected form elements. For example, if you had a form that collected information about the user, such as their name and address, you could wrap those form elements with a fieldset tag to convey to the user that those form elements are related.

The result on your browser should look like:

Reference: http://www.lynda.com/newsletters/