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Wish I had said that...

Joe G. refers to Nielsen today in a casual post as "a usability fundamentalist and can only play one tune".

An interesting method for getting visitors to your site. I just received an email that looks like this

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

If you would like to discontinue receiving this
type of message, simply click the link 
below
http://www.you-click.net/Change-Remove/a15584a92...

The inclination is to click. Who wants to recieve all "xxxxxxxx" in a email. Since this email is from eBCA:e-Business Community I am about to click it just out of curiosity. Was this a planned method to get us to visit? Oops, it might be disquised as a reputable business and is instead a virus? Deciding not to click. Delete.
hmmm
Web Logs for Professional Web Sites

Kill the Pop-up Ads

Popup Ads are annoying to everyone. You visit a site and there are five popups! You never visit that site again. That site might be innocent. Another site may have installed spyware on your system that covertly collects information about you and the sites you visit. You may have even answered OK when it asked if you wanted to use the Browser Help Object (BHO). For example, someone said OK on this PC to Comet Cursor. We addressed how to manually Kill the Gator and those instructions will work for other BHOs such as the Comet Cursor. Or, PC magazine offers a download to help you kill the pop-ups. Try it on for size. BHO Cop - Put an End to Adware It's a bit too big for us but might fit you just right.

Steal These Style Sheets

Webmonkey says that the New York Public Library Style Guide is like a Miss Manners for those of you building your pages with XHTML and/or Stylesheets. So we visited and were pleasantly surprised to find the Steal These Style Sheets section. It's a gentle introduction to style sheets. Much better than stealing our style sheets which are more complicated than necessary.

Search Engines

Getting Listed

How do you get ranked high in search engines? Have you read about all the misery and money spent on getting ranked higher? It seems that if the effort is put into building a good site then the rest will just fall into place. No, not if you have yet another site selling herbs or other snake oils. You have to have a place that has an audience waiting for you.

Step 1 Submit your site URL to the major search engines. Yahoo is a good place to start. Here are some links to the simple forms that you can use to submit your URL.

Google - add url page
HotBot - add url page
AltaVista - add url page
Excite - add url page.

Step 2 After you get listed start checking your rankings by adding some links to your site like this web design sacramento Today we are #17 in the Yahoo list.

web design west sacramento Today we are #1 in Yahoo. Actually we are the only site listed in this small town. Logo Design California We are #12 for Logo Design California. But hey, being #12 in the 7th largest economy in the world in any category isn't anything to whine about. We are doing fine. No paid site promotion needed. We aren't here for the big hits.

HotBot

Logo design sacramento #22, another engine where we are indexed under logo design Step 3

Google

mandarin Page 2 (top 20) in the generic search for the word Mandarin We don't know what category we are in at Google.

AskJeeves.com

mandarin web design #6 when searching for mandarin web design Again, we are not sure how we are indexed. mandarin web help #2

Lycos

web help coldfusion #7

Tracking your ranking

Keep monitoring the links you created and then decide if you need to do something new with your site.

How to track your rankings?

How did you do that?

Example using Lycos
1. Go to Lycos and search for your site using the relevant key words.
2. On the page where you are listed copy the URL that got you there.

     Yahoo, Lycos, or any other search engine  will have 
     created a URL that looks something like this
     http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=web+design+sacramento
    

3. Paste the URL as a link like we did above.

Now when you are really bored you can use your links to check your ranking.

This blog is not working well in Netscape. Removing the JavaScript code that was automagically inserted.

WINCFG and IPCONFIG

We have talked before about how to get your IP address and other pertinent information using WINCFG in Windows IPCONFIG in Windows NT If you want more information then click on Start then >> Run to execute WINCFG /ALL or IPCONFIG /ALL (you may have to execute this command from DOS). The results show your host name, DNS servers, Physical address, DHCP Enabled, IP Address, Subnet Mask, Default Gateway, and more.

Webinar

Webinar is the new term for today.A Web-related seminar is referred to as a Webinar by ebusiness.org. Like we didn't already have enough words that are not in the spellchecker.

The Color of Money

A customer last week took great delight in the main form.

It's so soothing, so calm, so peaceful. It's the color of money and everyone likes the color of money!

It's the color of money? He pulled a dollar bill from his pocket and held the front of the bill it to the printed form to show me. See? Hmmm, a perfect match. Too bad the screen print of the prototyped form was distorted by the color printer. The page is actually the lightest hexidecimal yellow and silver gray. Back to the color board now. The color of money.
We are starting to realize that many of you do not know the basics of where to start in getting your own Web Page. So, we are beginning to write step-by-step instructions for the entire process. Hopefully it will be easy to use. For now, here are the main steps -

• You need your own HTML. There are easy ways to do this part.
• Next you need your own Web space (a hosting service)
• Think time...what do you want to say? Who will visit you?
• Create a simple HTML document
• Add an image
• Add a link
• Take a look at your new creation in your browser
• Put it on the Web!

This is my first test at www.blogger.com

It says that we can enter text or html in the form field and then hit the post button in the upper right. Yep, it's easy to see. It's a push-pin.

• Hit the Publish Buttonto save it to my server
• Editing All posts that we have permission to edit will appear with an edit link

Okay, so far this looks easy. Question: How does it post to my server? Answer: It has me logon with my username and password. Cool. That was easy. Now I go in to make it look like my site and hmmm, the HTML pops up for editing. Guess it can all go in here. This says I can use this with ColdFusion. A powerful tool. No wonder everyone is blogging.