Most bloggers stick to paragraphs and an image or two when writing new posts. This is fine for some however you may want to broaden your horizons and learn more about the potential WordPress and its HTML counterparts have to offer.

The purpose of this post is to educate my clients and readers on some of the best practices concerning HTML in their WordPress posts and pages. Sure you can just write blocks of text and hope the content is compelling enough to stick but knowing a little HTML can go a long way in making your posts easier to read.

Learn Basic HTML

Paragraphs and Line Breaks:

The WordPress editor automatically removes <br> and <p> tags that don’t have any attributes and  replaces them when your WordPress theme displays your content. This causes a lot of confusion when people who already know some HTML start trying to use the WordPress HTML editor and their paragraph tags keep disappearing. WordPress interprets a single line break as <br> and a double line break as <p>.

Headers:

Headers are a great way to tell your readers (and search engines) what the next block of text is about. Us humans have become accustomed to scanning posts rather than reading every little word. For this reason headers are a great way to help a reader find exactly what they’re looking for within your post.

<h1>Most Important Header</h1>
<h2>Second Most Important Header</h2>
<h3>Third Most Important Header</h3>
...
<h6>Least Important Header</h6>

I usually try to pick up where my theme left off. So if my post title is using <h2> tags I will use <h3> tags to punctuate my main points in my post.

Images:

I personally think images are the most important part of a post next to its content. You are best off using the Upload/Insert functionality in your post editor. If your theme supports featured images you should most definitely be using them.

One of my WordPress image pet peeves is when people don’t use the built in CSS classes to align their images to the content.  These are classes that the WordPress post editor uses by default and most quality themes will support.

A basic left aligned image in WordPress would look like:

<img src="example.jpg" class="alignleft" />

And there you have it. I’ll talk about the importance of additional tags like Alt and Title in a bit. For now let’s move on.

Lists:

Lists are a very important part of making your post scannable. I try and use them whenever I want to highlight key points because I know the reader is more likely to read them. There are two types of lists; ordered and unordered.

Ordered lists are exactly what they sound like:

1. First
2. Second
3. Third

And alternatively, an unordered list looks as follows:

• Something
• Something Else
• And More

Your sidebar and navigation menus are most likely already making use of lists because of their ability to efficiently organize information. The basic syntax of a list is pretty straightforward.

First you need to declare what type of list you are using

• <ol> – Ordered List
• <ul> – Unordered List

And then you need to wrap your list items with the <li> tag.

A completed unordered list could look like this:

<ul>
<li>Something</li>
<li>Something Else</li>
<li>And More</li>
</ul>

Formatting:

You’ve got your main points highlighted with headers, lists and images to draw your readers eye. Now you can run though your post and do any additional needed styling to accentuate any remaining key ideas.

<strong> – Makes your content bold. Use instead of <b> to help search engines give extra weight.
<em> – Makes your content italic. Use instead of <i> to help search engines give extra weight.
<a href=""> – The anchor tag can be used to link to other websites or within your site. The href attribute specifies the destination of a link.
<blockquote> – Most themes will indent and emphasize blockquote text so this is a great way to emphasize chunks of text and quotes.
<pre> – By default, this tag maintains a text format. Good for bits of text where you want to preserve line breaks and spaces.
<code> – This tag distinguishes text that is computer code from normal language
<del> –  This tag is useful for chunks of text you want to delete after a post has been published. Most browsers will render it as the original text with a line through it.
<ins> –  This tag is useful for chunks of text you may want to add to your post after it has been published. Most browsers will render it as the original text with a line under it.

Accessibility

Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities via Wikipedia. WordPress recommends that you use Alt and Title tags on images as well as Title tags on links.

Example:

<a href="example.html" title="Example"><img src="example.jpg" alt="Example" title="Example" /></a>

Using The HTML Editor (Video)

Conclusion

This is only a small sampling of the HTML tags you can use based on the ones I thought were most important. All of these HTML tags are either built into the WordPress editor or supported by popular WordPress themes. Of course focus more on the quality of your posts than using as many HTML tags as possible. Look at some of your favorite blogs to get an idea of how you might want to structure your posts. With a better understanding of whats possible you can create a more personal style.

Further Reading

Here are some sites and posts worth checking out to learn more about HTML and blogging on WordPress.

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts
• http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
• http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/20/basic-in-post-html/
• http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/quicktags/

- Image by cdsessums

Many people have started communities on the popular network creation site Ning since its inception. On April 15th they announced they would no longer offer their free services. Realize this isn’t the end of Ning as they point out

The tens of thousands of you who already use our paid service represent over 75% of our traffic

So I imagine most of the popular networks you belong to on Ning will remain in place.

However, for the other 25% that might navigate elsewhere you have several options. I’ve yet to see a good breakdown of some of the better free Ning alternatives out there so I thought I would give it a shot. I found most of these sites in the comments and blog posts of other despaired Ning network creators. I’ve also tried to track down these other networks reactions to Ning’s announcement. Hopefully this will help you with your own transition.

Hosted Solutions

Spruz

Spruz seems to be the network of choice for most ex-ningers. I’ve read several reports of great up time and quality service. Spruz seems to have everything Ning has and a few extras that make it somewhat unique. I’ve seen users specifically boast about its file sharing capabilities.

[Post from Spruz welcoming Ning users]

Webs

Webs gets 30 times the traffic of Spruz and any other network on this list falling short only to Ning at two-thirds its traffic. Webs promises to always be free and shares several of the main features that made Ning popular including forums, member profiles and blogs.

[Post from Webs welcoming Ning users]

WackWall

I guess being in beta it wouldn’t be fair to compare their traffic to some of the other sites on the list. However, WackWall looks very promising. They are backed by a software company and don’t rely on investments which is why, they say, they will always remain free.

[Post from WackWall welcoming Ning users]

Grou.ps

Grou.ps is another great choice based on open source software. It seems to have everything Ning has and a very reasonable pricing plan to help scale your network. They also prefer to be called a social operating system. Looks very powerful.

[Post from Grou.ps welcoming Ning users]

Grouply

Grouply looks a lot like Ning on the front end and already has FAQs on importing members from other services. Matter of fact I’ve mistaken grouply groups for Ning groups a few times. One does have to wonder why their traffic has been dropping only to be revived by Ning’s latest news.

[Post from grouply welcoming Ning users]

BigTent

BigTent may be one of the babies of the bunch but it provides all of the same services in an “integrated” approach. Users claim the support is tremendous making it worth their switch. BigTent looks like a very simple solution, maybe a little too simple for some.

[Post from BigTent welcoming Ning users]

Zerista

Still trying to wrap my brain around this one but it looks VERY cool. Imagine FourSquare meets Ning and has little mobile babies. With tons of cool features to integrate the social experience, maybe its about time you take your network to the next level and go mobile?

[Post from Zerista welcoming Ning users]

Groupsite

Groupsite (formerly known as CollectiveX) looks like an awesome network solution with some excellent features. It does seem like they find ways to lure you into buying their premium services, like limiting subgroups to 5 but overall another good solution on the free side.

SocialGo

SocialGo, like the rest has a very impressive feature list and is just as popular as Spruz traffic-wise. The site seems to have a pretty satisfied user-base as I’ve seen several people recommend the site across different blogs and networks. Definitely worth putting on the list.

Open Source Solutions

Maybe the phasing out of Ning’s free service is what it takes to get you to take ownership of your community and move to a self hosted solution. The following are all free and trusted solutions in the industry. I personally would go with BuddyPress but to each his own.

BuddyPress – [Message from Buddypress]

Elgg - [Message from Elgg]

Pligg

Dolphin

LovdByLess

Insoshi

Astrospaces

Conclusion

I wan’t to hear your thoughts. If you know of any other free hosted social network creation services, please share them in the comments. Also feel free to give feedback on any of the networks listed if you are currently a user or have used one in the past.

- Photo by Samuel Stroube

So you have an XHTML valid website template and you would like to put it on top of WordPress. Whether you are starting from scratch or moving your existing website to WordPress as a CMS, this guide will help you get the conversion done.

Keep in mind that these are the basics and this is not a guide on how to develop themes for public release.

What You Will Need

• An XHTML web template
• A WordPress install
• A text editor (Like Dreamweaver or Notepad++)
• An FTP client (Like Filezilla)

Getting Started

First, let’s set up our theme files.

Prepare your files

For this tutorial we are going to use the minimum number of theme files needed to create a functional WordPress theme. Your existing template files should include the following:

• An HTML Template File
• A CSS Stylesheet
• An images folder

You should rename your HTML Template File to ‘index.php’ and your CSS Stylesheet to ‘style.css’. This is important and is how WordPress knows which files are which.

This is an example of what your theme folder should look like

Add WordPress Theme Info (video)

This is where your WordPress Theme gets your theme name, description, author link, etc. All you need to do is create a commented out area at the top of your stylesheet as follows:

/*
Theme Name: Rose
Theme URI: the-theme’s-homepage
Description: a-brief-description
Author: your-name
Author URI: your-URI
Template: use-this-to-define-a-parent-theme–optional
Version: a-number–optional
.
General comments/License Statement if any.
.
*/
CSS Goes here…

Adding Template Tags To Your Theme

Template Tags are bits of code that WordPress uses to populate your website with content. Different tags display different bits of information from the WordPress database. These are the main tags needed to make your WordPress theme work.

Page Title – (video)

Change whatever is within your <title></title> tags to:

<?PHP wp_title(”); ?>

Stylesheet – (video)

We are going to need to swap out the call to our stylesheet with:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?PHP bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’); ?>” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

Plugin Hooks – (video)

Next you will need to add Action Hook Template Tags so WordPress plugins can access your theme. All you need to do is add:

<?PHP wp_head(); ?>

to your header (Usually write above the closing </head> tag).

Then you should add:

<?PHP wp_footer(); ?>

to your footer (Usually write above your </body> tag).

Media and Script Paths – (video)

By default, your paths will most likely reference your site root. You will need to point all of your multimedia, scripts and stylesheets to your new theme folder within the WordPress file structure using:

<?PHP bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>

The easiest way to do this is to do a search and replace for ‘src=’ and add the appropriate template tags. This is not fool proof as not all template structures are created equal but it will work a majority of the time.

Search and Replace to change paths to WordPress theme paths

Adding The WordPress Loop

The WordPress loop is what handles all of your websites content. Its main components are:

• A header
• A permalink
• Some Content

First you will need to identify where your content starts/repeats (if it repeats). The easiest way to do this is to look for your content’s header and begin The Loop there. The Loop will usually end immediately after your content unless you are displaying extra information below your entries. You will also need to identify where your content begins and ends. Scroll to the end of this section to view some example code.

The Loop Code – (video)

Beginning:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

End:

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Template Tags Within The Loop – (video)

The Title:

<?php the_title(); ?>

The Permalink

<?php the_permalink() ?>

The Content

<?php the_content(‘<p>Read more</p>’); ?>

Example Code

So this becomes this.

Navigation – (video)

Most themes will have the navigation within an unordered list. This makes things easy for you. All you need to do is replace the list elements (everything between the <ul></ul> tags) with the following:

<?PHP wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&depth=1&sort_column=menu_order&exclude=’); ?>

This is the most basic of menus and wont display child pages. You can exclude pages by simply adding the page ids separated by comas after “exclude=”. Learn more about wp_list_pages().

Upload and Activate Your Theme

Now all you have to do is upload your theme folder which should now consist of:

• An index.php file with custom code
• A CSS file with header information about the theme
• An images folder with all of your images

If all goes accordingly you should have a functional WordPress theme that allows you to add new pages and posts as well as use most popular WordPress plugins. It is important to note that you will not be able to add widgets to your sidebar and people will not be able to comment on posts. There may also be some other limitations due to the themes simplicity.

Feel free to contact me if you would like to learn how to bring your theme to the next level with a sidebar, comments and other interactive elements.

More Resources

• Theme Development
• Stepping Into Templates
• WordPress Theme generator

A couple years ago I would have said it depends. Now it is a necessity.

It doesn’t matter how big your business is or how much money you bring in. If you exist, I want proof of it on Google. I can bring up a business listing and even get reviews within minutes right from my cell phone anytime, anywhere.

We live in an on demand world where everything is a click, flick or a button press away.

But I Can’t Afford a Thousand Dollar Website!

Well me neither.

Luckily I make them for a living. For those not as fortunate feel free to learn more about how I can get you up and running with a customizable website for very short cash. The truth of the matter is, you really don’t need a thousand dollar website. There are tons of free content management systems and thousands of open source plugins on top of that creating endless possibilities for a completely unique, dynamic, out of the box website for your business. It’s not always about the glitz and the glam but about easily providing the information your audience needs.

Your Online Identity Freebies

User moderated reviews and online discussions have become the corner stone of a business’s online identity. These sites dominate the search engines and our mobile phones when searching for information about businesses and therefor should not be overlooked. You should check these sites to see if your business is already listed and add/modify as needed.

• Yelp
• Google Maps
• ZoomInfo

These sites require more attention on your part if you decide to participate. They take time to develop interested audiences but can be well worth it in the long run.

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Don’t Be A Sucker

That basically just means don’t spend thousands of dollars on a crazy flashy website for your corner store boutique. Web developers are a dime a dozen – you can find them at your local college campus, all over Twitter and dominating craigslist. Be careful any way you go about it though. If you think you are getting ripped off, you probably are. Get a couple quotes for the same project and learn the lingo. Don’t go overboard with Internet marketing techniques like social media marketing and SEO. Get yourself a functional up to date website that provides your audience with what they want.

- Photo by Curious Expeditions

Rather than reinvent the wheel here I’m going to share some articles I both agree with and have found helpful in the past. WordPress is extremely powerful in it’s simplicity but is made more powerful by it’s loyal users. The future of this platform is very exciting as we stretch the possibilities of traditional websites.

First off, we have an excellent article by Devlounge which poses some great questions:

• Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS

Next we have a series of articles from Noupe convering some excellent WordPress as a CMS plugins, techniques and unique uses:

• 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress
• 40 Exceptional “CMS Enabling” WordPress Plugins
• 25 Unique uses of WordPress as CMS

Now WordPress isn’t the perfect CMS solution right out of the box, so NoScope.com discusses it’s shortcomings and some possible improvements:

• 10 Changes To WordPress That Would Make It A Killer CMS

It would also be nice if you took the time to keep your WordPress CMS somewhat user friendly so we’ll turn to Stylizedweb for that:

• 10 Steps to a Client Friendly WordPress CMS

And finally, a few lists of plugins that can help you successfully turn your WordPress blog into a fully functional content management system:

• 31 WordPress CMS Plugins via Jon Bishop (me)
• The Autopsy Of WordPress As CMS With 25 Great WP Plugins & Designs via Onextrapixel
• Use WordPress As a CMS: Plugins, The Bare Minimum via Themeshaper
• Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins via Blueprint Design Studio

Part of keeping up to date with industry trends is knowing where to look for good quality web resources. Some sites stick out in this category more than others. I thought it would be nice to share a list of the sites I frequent the most often when in need of inspiration or web design help. I found most of these sites through Digg and Twitter over the years and continue to find new excellent resources from friends and followers.

I visit some sites more often than others because of the frequency and quality of the posts they provide. Specifically Smashing Magazine and Fuel Your Creativity have continuously stuck out.

Please share some of your favorite blogs that provide resourceful posts about web design in the comments.

(Note: This code is meant to be put in your WordPress Template. However, it should be easy to modify it for other uses.)

Awhile back, I tweeted about how I wasn’t a huge fan of the AddThis button and I felt the need for more actionable social sharing buttons. That led to a few conversations with an AddThis representative about how I could still use their JavaScript to help track my custom buttons usage.

So now, with this code, you can use any custom social bookmarklet you like, and still track the button usage.

So first and foremost you will need an AddThis account.

Then you need to add the AddThis javascript to your HTML. I like to put it in the footer so all of my content can load first.

Next, you will need to add the following javascript, substituting the “YOUR-ACCOUNT-ID” with your AddThis username. I usually put this right above the first link that will be using the AddThis code.

Finally you will need to add the ‘onclick’ javascript to the anchor tag like I do in the example below. The key here is to put the name of the service you wish the button to link to where I have inserted ‘stumbleupon’ below. A full list of services can be found on the AddThis custom services page.

So that is how I am able to track my sharing button usage on my site through AddThis without using the AddThis button.

I’ve made this mistake in the past and it may have cost me a few readers. People get trigger happy with their plugins and readers can’t get to the content.

You need to remember that the content is the main reason someone might be reading your blog at any one point in time. If your blog takes 5 minutes to load there is a good chance they are going to bail.

I’ve set up a development blog for the purpose of testing my blogs speed when adding and updating plugins. The goal is to keep the load time down to seconds. This way I know my blog can handle the load when getting a rush of new readers from a social bookmarking site or high profile twitterer.

My basic rule of thumb is if the plugin isn’t beneficial to the reader I don’t use it. I have since removed all back links to blog directories and any traffic boosting programs. I even got rid of sociable because it added a half a second load time to the page.

There’s nothing I need to put in my sidebar I can’t create a new page for and its not worth the hassle.

So please use plugins that direct me to your best content and focus on helping me, the reader.

- Photo by Editor B

I’ve talked about variable video and personalized video a little in the past. Now let’s look at some more examples and break down some of their components.

Here are some examples:

• Inspiring Escapes
• Dexter
• Haunted house
• Walts wisdom
• Carmen has a crush on you
• News3Online
• Disney World – New
• I Love You – New

There are 4 main effects that can be achieved in a variable video:

• Variable text – example: holding up a card with the persons name
• Variable image – example: holding up a picture of the person
• Variable audio – example: saying the persons name with actors face covered
• Variable video scenes – example: saying the persons name without actors face covered

If you wanted to create a variable video campaign, there are multiple ways to go about it. All of the above effects can be recreated using Adobe Flash. If you only plan on doing variable text and/or imaging in the video you may not need 3rd party software. If you do wish to integrate your variable video campaign with other software, XMPie recently announced video integration capabilities with their system.

Another important aspect of variable video is the story. To properly recreate any of the videos shown in this post you would need actors, sets, equipment, scripts, etc. But, one great thing about variable video is it’s surprise factor. You could get away with crappy quality video as long as the personalization tied in seamlessly.

The most important part of any variable video campaign is it’s final conversion screen. This is where you encourage personalizing the video for someone else. Someone the user believes will find the video entertaining. People love seeing their name in lights and now everyone can be part of the internet video phenomenon.

Contact Me to learn more about variable video.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had the privilege of working on a cross media marketing campaign for Canon Europe. In true ‘I can do anything’ fashion, we at Magicomm decided to throw everything we had into it. The campaign is going to be showcased in the Canon booth at Drupa.

I’m not only excited about this campaign because of the client, but what we did in the campaign itself. It’s basically your standard PURL, kinda like the one we did for Magicomm, however we’ve simplified and viralized the whole microsite. I’ve been talking alot about interactive video in the past couple weeks and the potential it has as a marketing medium. Now I finally get to put my theory to the test as the last page of the PURL features its very own interactive/personalized video.

The PURL will go live in Drupa mid next week and we’ll have it live for the public a couple days after that. Be sure to check back to see how the campaign is doing as well as learn a little more about how effective it actually was.

I talked awhile back about personalized video and how it could be (is) the next big marketing medium. The benefits of personalized video are obvious, you’ll get better quality personal information and it is very viral.

The key here is personalization and interactivity. The internet took a turn a few years back with the rise of social and interactive networks. From that point on, the user was given control, and thats the way it going to be from now on. I showed in my previous post how successful personalized video is and now, I want to show you how easy it is to pull off.

Here are two videos i made when first experimenting with how flash could be used to manipulate video:

The best part is that i made each of those videos in under 15 minutes.

All you need to do it upload your video in flash:

1) File -> Import -> Import Video

(Note: I had to rerecord my video as a wmv because i could not get avi to work properly)

2) Then choose:

“Embed video in SWF and play in timeline” is what allows you to manipulate movieclips on top of your video. Now what you could do with this is map certain items to sync with the video and possibly even change those items at run time. You could insert personalized images, text, etc.

This is a little trick I’ve pulled on some family members in the past and most recently on my boss for April Fools. All you need for this is a working version of Adobe Flash.

If you cant see whats happening, basically the effect is that the desktop looks like its moving back and forth. 

So all I am doing here is tweening 2 instances of the desktop (which i Print Screened) over a static instance. Then all you do is full screen the SWF on your targets desktop. You can do a lot with this little gag including; hiding the users mouse, popping up text and moving icons at will.

Back when GMail did their YouTube contest, i used this gag to simulate the envelope moving across multiple screens.

A few things to remember when doing this are:
Make sure your stage width and height are the same as the target monitor
I use PNG’s of the desktop so there is no quality loss
Make sure you do View -> Full Screen and not just maximize the SWF

* Update: Here are the source files of an example

There’s a small back story to this entry. Ive been working with an open source content management system for my company Magicomm and it eventually came time when we decided we were going to start our own blog. My goal was to use the preexisting framework of the CMS to smoothly integrate the blogging software into the back end of the system. It turns out this was the easy part….

So now the goal of this entry. When it came time to output the data into your common blog format I found that their were some small things that helped my blog get indexed by popular blog directories as well as other assorted social media aggregations.

So ultimately I’m assuming you understand the general format and benefits of a blog. You’ve got your title, author, timestamp, and a post of some sort. Other optional features include keywords, permalinks, comments, and an RSS feed.
Now I want to go into a little more detail about the code side of this and show you where some simple HTML syntax separates the blog from the..um… not-blog.

Rel-tag

First I’ll talk a little about my favorite blogging feature, the ‘rel-tag‘. Rel-tag is basically a keyword that physically sits on your screen as apposed to META keywords which hide in your page’s header. Now when you’re displaying ‘rel-tag’ that relate to a specific post you use the relationship attribute of the anchor tag to define the hypertext as a ‘tag’.

As you can see it it pretty simple to establish a tag. Basically rel-tag is a MicroFormat and what you are doing is declaring that this link is an author-designated keyword for this post. Also note that in the URL of the link I’ve separated the two words with a + sign instead of a space (You could also use %20). You want to try and be sure that your tags relate and are appropriate for your post. Alot of social media aggregators use this information along with specific information in your RSS feed to categorize your post and you can often see your tags displayed on sites such as technorati.com and mybloglog.com.

Permalinks

The second thing I would like to talk about are permalinks which are also often called bookmarks. Permalinks are basically links back to a specific entry that will never change. This makes them ideal for bookmarking which is why it comes as no surprise that the following helps you establish a permalink/bookmark.

As you can see we once again use the relationship tag to define the Permalink. This is not always necessary however Ive found that certain social media sites use the bookmark relationship to determine if this link is a permalink or not.

RSS

Now last but not least there is the RSS feed. I could go on forever about the different formats and everything you can stuff into a solid feed, but i wont. The only thing i want to mention here is how to make your feed available to social media sites (seems to be the theme here). Basically what you do is use a combination of rel=”alternate” and type=”application/rss+xml” to define a META link to an RSS file.

Thats pretty much it. I hope that between the 3 things I’ve showed you and some of the resources ive presented you should have a social media friendly blog thats ready for the masses.

Here’s another effect using AS3 to make fog with source files below.

View: http://bishport.com/fog.html

Source: zip

This is my first attempt at creating a realistic flame effect in Actionscript 3.0 so be gentle.

View: http://bishport.com/flame3.html

Source: zip

So its no news that a personalized landing page as a response portal to any kind of direct marketing campaign can increase response rates dramatically, but where’s the next step up?

Well it seems as if there are multiple cross-media technologies emerging from the web to help engage, interact and even entertain the user, therefor increasing conversions. People have seen XMPie and other related products do cool things with people’s names and putting them in the picture. But what if the user could change their name at runtime. Furthermore what if the users name wasn’t in a picture, but in a short movie. This is the future of PURLs as a response portal and will be a hit in the social media world. Already I was pointed to a website for a TV Show on FX and I was amazed at what they had done. Here is a PURL someone made for me. I like everything about it, from the page looking like a blog to my name being inserted into the movie.

Now here’s something my own company put together. Basically I wanted the user to be able to interact with the flash movie in real time from outside of the movie itself via the web-form. Using javascript, I was able to insert the users name into the newspaper at runtime and its had an amazing response. People need a break from their every day activities and these fun side trackers give them this opportunity, so both the user and the company win.

So I’ll say it now and say it loud. Get Interactive, Engage your Audience and become successful.

Can search engines read flash? A lot of people think that because flash is a program running on a website, it cannot be read by search engines. This is true to some extant however that does not mean there aren’t methods to make your flash movies Search Engine friendly. In fact Google CAN index your flash movies. In “Google Can Now Index . . . Flash!An Interview with Michael Marshall by Robin Nobles” (here), they discuss how Google indexes your flash movie and different things the author can do to help the process.

There are also other methods you can use if you want to be sure all search engines are indexing your flash movie. I use SWFobject. Here’s a brief explanation of how it can be used with some examples.

So first thing you need to do is upload swfobject.js to your website and link it in your header somewhere:

View Live Tutorial

And your done! So here's the result:

And here's what you see if you don't have javascript or Flash Player:

And here's what the search engines see:

Not too shabby.

The cool thing about all of this is the code is valid HTML and XHTML 1.0. There are also a bunch of other cool features with swfobject so explore their website and have some fun.

Now there has been some discussion on whether or not the content in the div tag that is being overwritten might be looked at as spam by Google at some point. So far it hasn't been a problem and as long as developers don't abuse this we should be good well into the future.

So go off and have fun with flash. Make many websites and flash intros to your hearts content (if your into that sorta thing). The future of flash looks brighter every day.

These are just a few ideas to get you started. Any true SEO expert will tell you there is a lot more that goes into it including but not limited to incoming link monitoring and maintenance, following Google’s new search engine patents, optimizing for keywords, etc.

So there are 3 main things to remember when optimizing your website:

1) Choose appropriate keywords:
This includes making sure you have those keywords in 3 different places; your site content, your Meta content, and your incoming links. Also don’t use your keywords too much, this is known as “stuffing”, but too little and Google won’t index your site properly.

2) Friendly URLs:
The following is BAD:
      mysite.com/index.php?car=jeep&type=wrangler

This is GOOD:
      mysite.com/jeep/wrangler

The difference is easy to see, one is easier to read for both humans and search engines. Also it is a good thing to be specific, so use your keywords in your URL where you can.

To accomplish this most people use Mod-Rewrite (Google it). Another alternative is to use a Content Management System for your website that will automatically create friendly URLs for you. I use PHPwcms but other good ones are Drupal and Mambo but I found mine at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/.

3) QUALITY incoming links to your site
This is the most important in my opinion and usually the hardest to pull off.

Basically the idea is Google will boost your site up on the rankings if you have alot of incoming links from sites similar to yours. This does not include link compilation sites and Google might penalize you for this. Usually the best thing to do is contact the administrators of similar sites and request an affiliate link in exchange for a service or a back link. Another good strategy is to put out press releases with your sites link in it.

Extra Knowledge:
So if you can’t tell, Google is the most popular search engine out there getting roughly 91 million searches per day. That’s a little less than half of all searches done daily. So it’s usually best practice to optimize your site for Google. If you want more information just contact me through facebook and I can give you some extra pointers.

So i wanted to add the little icon next to my URL in the address bar so i went on a hunt for the easiest solution (kinda counter-productive as i could have just downloaded a program however I so love to find new SAAS apps online). So i finally ran across this site. This was pretty much exactly what i was looking for and it was very easy to use. I went on and created 7 icons:

I ended up using the first one i made for my site, but they still all look kinda cool.

So I’ve been working on this site on the side for a couple of weeks now. Ive mostly just been waiting around for content for the site. This was a different kind of site for me to create because I needed to find a way to make it easy to update for someone who has little or no knowledge about the web.

First thing I did was use photoshop to automate the thumbnail creation process. This turned out to be more useful than i thought as it also let me create medium size pictures for viewing within the site as well as very customizable watermark options. This was all part of the “Web Photo Gallery” option which basically created a little mini site on the fly. This is nice and all however if the photographer ever wanted to edit the site or add more pictures all he would know how to do is create new sites on top of the old one. This could work, however i wanted a more logical solution.

Now that I have two folders (thumbnails and images) All the client would have to do is drag the contents of the folders into their respective folders on an easily accessible ftp account I’ve made for them.

Next, I wrote a pretty basic PHP script that reads the contents of the folder, how many files are in it, and displays them in a 4 x 3 table with a POST variable controlling the pages. This was my first attempt at this kind of organization tool but it worked on the first try.

My next step is to generate Titles for the pics using the pics built in meta data. This is so the client can add titles and photo information from within Photoshop, making the process that much easier. Making this site has been a wonderful learning experience. Go and check it out.