Archive

Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category
01.28.2010 Mark Wood No Comments

How do search engines work?

Continuing with our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) discussion, it’s necessary to understand just how search engines see our WordPress sites.  While the computation and algorithms are complicated and proprietary to each search engine, an understanding of the basics gives us the tools needed to optimize our sites.

A brief introduction to web crawlers

Hopefully, I’m not ruining any fantasies here, but there isn’t a room full of people at Google looking through web pages and indexing the contents of different sites.  That would require way too many people and cost way too much.  Instead, large search engines generally implement web crawlers, programs which quickly read web page data.  This process called crawling or spidering generally performs the following actions:

  1. Read the prominent* page data on the current page
  2. Read all hyper-links to other web pages and add them to a list of future pages to crawl
  3. Move on to the next web page

* What a particular crawler deems to be “prominent” data depends entirely on the purpose of the crawler Read more…

01.22.2010 Mark Wood No Comments

What is SEO and why do I need it?

Looking around at numerous other blogs I frequent, it becomes painfully clear just how little many people understand about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.  In this situation, ignorance is not bliss as these blogs are potentially sacrificing a large number of readers who can’t find the content contained within.

What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the process by which the author of a web page (or blog in our case) organizes and formats their content to make it more accessible to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.  This sounds relatively simple, right?  Well, let’s start off by making it clear that there is no such thing as a blog with perfect SEO simply because there is no 100% definition of exactly what “perfect SEO” really entails.  However, there are a few simple things that can go a long way to making sure that your blog is at least getting indexed by search engines. Read more…

01.5.2010 Mark Wood No Comments

Vector Art with Inkscape

Every time I visit other websites with cool vector graphics, I always mourn the fact that I have no idea how to go about creating such things.  I recognize that it’s not everyone’s preferred style, but I really feel that some tasteful vector based icons and graphics can really boost a websites wow factor.

Getting Started with Vector Graphics

While I know that Adobe Illustrator is the premier software for such artwork, the entrance fee of $535 for the Mac version and $577 for the Windows version is simply too steep for something that I’ll most likely just play around with for the time being.  And no, I really don’t know why the Windows version is more expensive.  However, in doing a little searching, I found that Inkscape is a free alternative.  That’s right!  Absolutely free!  And it’s available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Learning to Draw Vector Graphics

After downloading and installing the software, where do I start?  I was always daunted by this task — believing that it was much more difficult than it really is.  A little searching and I found a site with 35 Inkscape Tutorials some of them are step by step instructional articles, and some are even video tutorials so you can really get a feel for what is being done.

I chose to start with “Creating a Coffee Cup with Inkscape” as it looked like it was well written (it was) and at my skill level (also true).  It took about 30 minutes, and here is my result.  I realize that it’s slightly different than the picture, but I didn’t like the stripes or the handle so I simply omitted those steps.

Coffee cup vector art

Overall, I think it turned out quite nicely!  It’s inspired me to continue to mess around with these techniques — I wonder what else I can create?

12.16.2009 Mark Wood No Comments

Google Indexing – How Long?

In an effort to take on even more responsibility and have even less free time in my life, I decided to look into starting another blog. During this process, I’m trying to figure out how in the world I got this site indexed into Google. You see, I’ve really never had a problem getting this site’s articles indexed and showing up in Google. It may sound weird, but it all just kinda worked. Not so this time!
Read more…

08.6.2009 Mark Wood No Comments

Further ICC Profile Updates for Firefox 3.5

As discussed in the recent post Firefox 3.5 – ICC Profile Support, the latest Firefox supports ICC Color Profiles. However, there appeared to be problems in the implementation of this support — especially for the Windows platform.

Problems with Firefox 3.5

While the implementation of ICC Profile support released in Firefox 3.5 went a long way toward standardizing the way users see online images which utilize ICC Profiles, there were two major problems.

First, as mentioned by an astute commenter on my last post on this topic, the Firefox team decided to only implement Version 2 of the ICC Profile standard. While this is a huge step forward, version 4 of the ICC Standard has been around since 2005 (from what I could find). Therefore, there are many instances where support for Version 2 is simply insufficient.

To see an example of this, see the International Color Consortium (ICC) official page to test browsers for Version 4 compatibility here.

The second problem with Firefox 3.5 was that on many Windows machines, images containing a Version 2 profile were displayed incorrectly. In fact, they appeared much too dark.

One Problem Solved

Just released today was the latest update to Firefox 3.5, version 3.5.2. This update fixes the second problem discussed above. (See release notes – Bug 497363.) In theory, with this release, the images which displayed very dark under the old version now display correctly.

While I really didn’t know how much of a difference it would make, after installing the update on my Windows machine, the images on my last Firefox post appear much better.

Now, if only they could fix the support for Version 4 of the ICC Color Profiles…

Follow Digital Notions

Subscribe to my RSS Feed to get all updates

Or, receive updates via email:

Sponsors