Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Chrissie Brodigan’s Blog is about UX and excellent. Take a look.
Feel in need of a good giggle? Check out Laura Scott’s inspired post 7 Essential Elements to Create Amazing Top 7 Lists.
Nice infographic about WordPress, with a bit a advertising for the source – Copyblogger – thrown in. The Copyblogger steps aren’t essential to the process, helpful as that website can be to a blogger.
Like this infographic? Get more WordPress and hosting tips from Synthesis.
It’s strange that I get more hits on my blog on a day when I don’t publish than when I do. I entertain with silence. #bloggingtips
— Virginia DeBolt (@vdebolt) July 13, 2012
Recorded at Stanford University before Graduate School of Business alumnae. Lisa Stone is a co-founder of BlogHer and one of the most successful women in tech.
You don’t need to know anything technical to have a blog beyond how to get around on a website and follow instructions. It’s no more complicated than setting up an account on Amazon and ordering a book. But you could be a better and more effective blogger if you did take the time to learn some of the basics of how your website works.
Blogger by Virginia DeBolt via Flickr
Why would you be better and more effective, you ask? Here are a few reasons.
It’s worth a moment to explain the newbie mistakes item, and how it relates to the item about your website working better in all devices. The cleaner and simpler your HTML is, the better it’s going to work in all devices – from big old computer monitors to tiny smart phones. The biggest newbie mistake is forgetting that not everyone is looking at your website on your monitor, at your resolution, under your circumstances. Using those lovely tools above your text entry box on your blog dashboard to center text or images, to change the colors of text, to use several different fonts and text sizes, to add extra lines of space – all those things add complexity to your HTML. Adding complexity to something that works best when its simple and basic means that things may not work so well for someone who is not looking at your website on your monitor, at your resolution, under your circumstances.
If you want to start learning more about what goes on behind the scenes on your blog, here are the steps to take.
What I want to share with you in this post are pointers to places where you can get started with the basics of HTML, CSS, and programming. Just knowing the basics will be enough to make your blog more your own and more what you really want it to be.
HTML is used to format text. Text is marked as a paragraph or a heading or a link or a list. When the text stops being a paragraph or a heading or whatever, the formatting is turned off. This works with tags that open and close the formatting – or you might think of it as turning on and off a section of formatting. Here are a few places to learn some HTML:
CSS is used to control the appearance of everything you formatted in your HTML. It can set backgrounds, colors, fonts, positioning, whitespace, line height, widths and heights, how lists look, and much more. CSS doesn’t use tags, but it selects tags using a system of selectors. Once something is selected, a rule for how it will appear is written – and bingo bango, the way the selected item appears on your page is changed. CSS is more complicated than HTML, but you can start slowly with it until you get the hang of what you’re doing. Here are a few places to learn some CSS:
Programming languages abound, but the most common ones bloggers run up against are JavaScript and PHP. The programming behind your website does the heavy lifting of making in interactive, making it possible to receive comments, and sending in mail from your contact form. Programming is the most complicated thing you need to learn about in understanding how the web works. Get a grip on the HTML and CSS first, before you start learning about programming. Here are a few places to learn something about programming:
What are you waiting for? Go get started on being a better blog owner.
[Note: Cross-posted at BlogHer.]
There is nothing quite as annoying as crafting an About Me page for a blog or website. You would think that it would be easy describing yourself and your company or site. After all, you know all about both, right? So why then do so many end up being a two sentence rundown in the most boring tone ever?
Seriously, how often have you seen this:
“My name is Bob Bobberton and I run an SEO trick blog. I have worked in the industry for twelve years and have been employed at Every SEO Company Ever Inc.”
Informative? Sure, but is it interesting? Not in the slightest. I nearly fell asleep just typing that. The most amusing thing that can be said about it is that the man’s name is apparently “Bob Bobberton”.
What you need is something with a bit more jazz to keep the reader’s interest.
Start by thinking what it is you want to say. Do a little brainstorming exercise and include items like who you are, what you do, what you like, how you feel about what you do, and the most exciting or interesting way you could explain it.
If you have other people on your staff, consider doing the same for them or letting them draft their own. If you want to include everyone in a single about page without naming names, then do all of the above but with a group focus in mind.
Next, come up with a few ways that this can be handled creatively. Some popular options are:
This is the easy part. Your about page should always have the basic information that you would expect, but presented in an interesting way. Which means you should cover:
Next you have to worry about SEO. Your about page should always keep this in mind, as it is an important part of generating traffic. Since you are laying out who you are, it will be crucial that a search engine can properly utilize this information.
Here are a few tips to help you out:
An About Me page is important, even if you don’t think so. It is the cherry on the selling point, a way to express who you are as a site or company and hook in the customer.
It takes creativity and focus to do this. So pay attention to what you’re putting out there, and let your About Me page work for you. After all, if it isn’t making a difference then you probably aren’t doing it right.
Guest Author Jessy is the social media blogger for Quantum SEO Labs, the full-service Internet marketing company. We blog about SEO, blogging and online marketing. Follow us on Twitter!
Designing Accessible Apps is from Moms With Apps.
Mashable has a huge infographic about Mommy Bloggers. If you have scoffed at the importance of mommy bloggers, this will be an education for you.
Educators will no doubt be eager to take advantage of the newly announced Google+ Hangouts on Air. Here’s a post telling you how to get started using it from ReadWriteWeb. And a bit more about how it works from Mashable.
Everyone seems to argue the merits of social networking platforms these days. Everywhere you go, it is Twitter or Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Plus, whether or not to Tumblr. It has become the “Mac vs. PC” of the modern day.
But under the radar, a new war is brewing – the War of the Comment Formats. It might seem like a less interesting conflict, but if you think about your own use of commenting platforms, and how they have changed in just the last two years, it isn’t quite such a stretch to understand it.
To find a victor, we have to view the outcome of each comment style’s battle against their main competitor. Here is the breakdown:
WordPress is the primary blogging platform at this stage, given the free or low cost features it provides its users, and the ease of customization and updating. The comments are very basic, just posting as either a WP user or anonymously (based on the blog admin’s settings).
The downside is that is isn’t a format that works on other sites. So it is pretty much isolated to WP hosted sites, or those that have been activated to be compatible with the service. However, there are plenty of ways that it can be used, without additional and unnecessary frills.
Disqus, on the other hand, is like a multi-comment device. It lets you sign in to that single account, and then post on pretty much any major social media platform that has enabled it (which is most). This means Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr and many others.
Another great feature is it keeps a log of all comments on each platform you have synced and used through Disqus. You even get automatic email notifications of replies, though you have to put that against frequent server crashes and problems that seem to be slowly smoothing out.
In the end, I would have to say the winner here is Disqus.
IntenseDebate means well. Certainly, they have their share of loyal followers that swear it is the best open source comment system you can find. So far, they are integrated with Facebook, Twitter, OpenID and Gravatar. You can add it to WP, Blogger, Tumblr or Typepad.
Facebook Connect has dominated the scene, as it is generally already enabled on most commenting systems, along with their Like buttons and easy sharing syncing. Not a lot has to be said as there is every chance you have used Facebook for this purpose more than once.
The award between these two has to go to Facebook, for its multi-purpose and wide availability.
When it comes to these two, you have their usual pros that might make them seem fairly easily matched – especially if you find that you don’t want to connect all of your posts in one place like Disqus does, or if you do, like Facebook does not.
The bigger issue, however, is privacy, which can only be gained through one …
Unlike Facebook, you can still maintain some anonymity. It is all inclusive, easy to use and efficient. Between all commenting platforms, it is probably the best. Of course, this is a matter of opinion, but I feel confident in the proclamation.
Guest Author Tom Chu is the SEO manager at PsPrint, an company specializing in online printing. PsPrint offers an array of free tools, for example it lets you make your own business cards online.