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Pixels and Waves
Adventures in Digital Art |
November 2006 - Vol 1, Issue 3
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In This Issue |
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Quick Links |
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Dear Ignatius Makarevich, |
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 Greetings and warm wishes for a Thanksgiving full of
joy and wonder to you and your family. A wish too
that the joy and wonder just keep right on going.
The almost
magical infusion of huge dollops of good cheer and
warmth that blooms during the holiday season is
special and makes life... and even hard times... so
much more enjoyable.
If you are one of good folk to be receiving Pixels
and Waves for the first time, welcome to our growing
list of active subscribers! Issue number 2 was quite
well received and I was most pleasantly surprised at
the quantity and quality of genuinely positive
feedback. I will endeavor to maintain and hopefully
exceed your expectations. One thing folks asked for
was more educational content... makes sense to me.
And do send feedback, I do value the education that
feedback affords me... and while we're on the
subject of your input, why not consider sending in
an article, I should think that would be fabulous! |
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Search Engine Optimization?
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It's probably the hottest buzz word around these
days, internet-wise... and for good reason. Without
it, you're pretty well sunk as far as potential
readers finding you in the hunt for information.
What is it? To generalize, it entails everything
that is needed to be in place in order for the
spiders... not the ones from Mars, rather the small
applications used by my pals at Google and their
competitors to scour every web site out there to see
what it's about and if it is relevant to what it
claims to be.
One thing you should know is that web design doesn't
really have all that much to do with search engine
optimization.
This might sound odd to some of you, since web
design is what I do about half of the time, but it
is nonetheless true. This is not to say it won't
help you in the
quest... it certanly can and does. Modern websites
need to be lean and clean as far as how they are
constructed code-wise. The old method of designing
with tables and tables within tables, creates tons
of unseen code that the spiders have to slog through
to get to what they are looking for. And actually,
if there is enough code "in the way," they'll just
pack up and move on to the next site. Heartless,
perhaps, but they have billions of pages to view.
The spiders
are smart enough to examine the navigational ease of
your page as well, so good design can help there, as
well. What exactly are they
looking for?
They are looking for words. For content. In the form
of text to be specific. Even though spiders have
eight eyes, they don't care for pictures, unless the
images have an alternate text label, that is. Most
importantly, they like relevant content. Preferably
a lot of
it, text on the order of 300 to 500 words makes their
eight little eyes twinkle. Firstly, though is the
text you don't see, the so called metatags, the
keywords and description, and one metatag you do
see, the page title. The keywords and the brief
description tell
the spider what your site is supposed to be about.
The title is compared to that and added to the stew.
The title, by the way, which appears at the very top
of the
browser window in the blue bar, should contain at
least one or even a few keyword phrases.
These little crawlie guys are pretty good English
professors, too. They know if your page content is
relevant to what it's supposed to be...
there's that word relevant, again... and they know
how to spell and all about grammar, too, even moreso
than Microsoft Word does. They know about over-using
keywords and use amazingly sophisticated algorithms
to sort all this out... it's not artificial
intelligence, but it seems like it sometimes. They
also know if you have hidden text, which means
keyword loaded text that is the same color as the
page so as to appear invisible in an attempt to
"fool" the spider. I assure you... you can not fool
the spider. Attempt it, and the spider (we speak of
all of them - Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, etc.) will
report back to their masters and you will soon find your
entire
domain banned, yes, banned... forever.
It's not as daunting a task as my stylizations are
possibly making it appear, all you have to do is
write nice, properly structured and authoritative
articles that describe your products or services and
the benefits they'll provide to your readers. I'd
suggest writing it in Word, WordPerfect or a similar
program because of the spelling and grammar checkers
they have built in. Try to be as
brief and as concise as possible, because people
make desicions on a web page within seconds as our
lifestyles constrain the time we have available to
find what we need. Doing all this
will bring you the attention and good will of the
spiders... but more importantly, it will bring you
the good will and attention of your
readers! Your readers are no doubt intelligent and
rather savvy, especially around our neck of the
woods. Write for them, for your site's demographic,
and all will be well, just keep the spiders in mind
and make sure they're well-fed. Links are valuable
as well, text links, that is, but the main key is
the content.
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Automotive friends and memories.
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Many years ago, I used to indulge my love of driving
as an active participant in the activities of a
local car club that focused on my marque of choice.
Although I never had the budget to get as much
horsepower as the fellow in the picture, the result
of this was not only hundreds of hours of high speed
pleasure on racetracks from Watkins Glen to Sebring
to our "home base" at Lime Rock and others in
between, but a geniune camaraderie with many of my
fellow members. Years later, when my interests
changed a bit and saw me drift away from active
participation in club events, the fondness remained
intact, and I decided to take the opportunity to pay
them all back, in a way, by way of offering my
services to repair their ailing web presence. Soon
after they became my first professional client. The
relationship continues... and I look forward to many
more years of service. The following is a commentary
on the state of the situation from Bob Morin, the
club's president.
I’m the president of a local Chapter that is part of
a much larger Club (75,000+ members). Our Chapter
has approximately 2200 members and we were looking
for a way to get information out to our membership
in a more timely fashion. We have a newsletter that
goes out through the U.S. Postal Service, but there
are times when the information is pretty old by the
time our membership receives it.
Our board realized that a website could accomplish
getting last minute notices out there, while also
allowing us to expand on the number of photos we
published from past events. We could use it so that
our membership could check up quickly on the latest
Chapter news and get the forms they needed for
certain events. It’s a great reference when looking
for information about our calendar of events and it
also allowed non-Chapter members to see what we were
all about.
Our first attempt was a nice site, but the board was
not happy with certain aspects of the site,
especially with the timeliness of changes that
needed to be made. Since changing to IFM
Productions, we have been very pleased. We are
receiving many positive comments from our
membership, items are posted quickly, changes are
made in a timely manner and many new, useful
features have been added from our previous effort.
There are times when we need to make a change or
post a last-minute notice and we have been extremely
happy with Iggy’s ability to accomplish this almost
immediately. The site now truly provides the service
to our membership we were hoping to achieve.
— Bob Morin, President
Connecticut Valley Chapter
BMW Car Club of America
www.ctvalley.org
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CSS, your path to the future... |
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CSS. Another buzzword. It stands for Cascading Style
Sheet. Composed of text and symbols in a moderately
cryptic form the style sheet is an instruction set
that tells your web browser how to display a web
page so that it appears to the reader in the way it
was designed. It deals with fonts and font styles,
colors, borders, layers and the positioning of
objects among other things. It's all about the look,
the presentation, the design. Its function in a
basic sense is to separate the presentation of the
look from the structure or skeleton of the page,
which is the job of HTML. CSS allows us to overcome
many of the limitations of HTML, which was never
intended as a graphical interface.
The cascading bit is what is really so special about
it. The instruction set, the style sheet, is a
distinct entity that the HTML page merely links to,
thereby keeping both small and therefore fast. The
fact that it is a linked set of instructions means
that many pages can link to a sheet, making them all
have the same look. Changes to the style sheet, a
font face for example or a background color, then
instantly apply to all of the pages that are linked
to it. Presto change-o! It affords not only high
precision control of the elements of a page and how
they appear, its global quality affords the
time to experiment with different looks.
So why is it the path to the future? Ah, this is the
good part... A web page can have multiple style
sheets attached to it, sheets designed to tailor the
appearance for different purposes. One might have a
sheet for display on Internet Explorer and a
different one for Firefox. One could have another
style sheet that would be used for printing the
page. Another style sheet could be applied if the
page is to be viewed on a cell phone browser, which
is a burgeoning area of interest, indeed. The HTML
can be set to detect what the reader's setup is and
it will then apply the proper style sheet. The
ability to multipurpose a web page can open up many
new paths for organizations to explore in broadening
the reach of their message.
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Thank you for reading Pixels and Waves, I hope you
found it entertaining. Do send me your thoughts and
suggestions... and perhaps an article for inclusion
in a future edition. Have a healthy and happy
Holiday season. Be seeing you!
Iggy F Makarevich
phone: 203.253.8391 cell or 203.661.9326
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IFM Productions LLC | 67 Valley Road | Cos Cob | CT | 06807 |
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