Entries from a recent art contest at the Hirshorn Gallery in Washington, D.C. Absolutely incredible what these artists can do with nothing but a sheet of paper. (Note: Click on image in next page to enlarge).
Ok, I only left the test theme that I’m working on up here for 3 days, but I got what I needed out of it. I really didn’t want to keep it up for too long as I’m planning a major launch for that thing and don’t want to let the cat entirely out of the bag too early. I’m going to launch that theme, along with a couple plugins I’m working on, and a new site, all together as part of a major promotion. I’ll keep you updated on how everything goes.
New design, right? Well, I’m testing out this Wordpress theme as I’m going to be releasing it publicly in a week or so and I wanted to play around with it. I’ve designed several other Wordpress themes, this being my second public release, and I’ve found that I can’t quite get a good feeling for what I like and don’t like about a theme until I’ve used it…there’s really no better usability test than actually using it.
Anyway, that’s what’s up with the new design, it’ll only be up for a week or so while I put some finishing touches on it.
Google Gadgets is something that I think is really going to be looked back on as a missed opportunity by a lot of people, including me if I don’t get moving on it. I think it’s an incredible opportunity for advertising and something both me and my clients can benefit tremendously from, especially if we get in early.
I’m going to be testing the waters a bit here over the next few weeks and I’ll keep you posted as to the progress.
Update 4/25: Forgot to mention, you’re welcome to follow me on Twitter - my screen name is WordpressHacker.
Twitter’s becoming more and more popular these days as marketers flood to the online mini-blog at the behest of people like Jeremy Shoemaker. It’s an interesting concept that I, admittedly, didn’t see a benefit in until recently.
A lot of marketing a website, whether it be your small business site or a personal one that you’d like to grow, involves convincing a prospect to give you permission to contact him or her. Sure, you can buy email marketing lists, and you may have some success with them, but that’s not a long-term strategy. Long-term, you need to build a list of prospects who have chosen to give you their permission to contact them with offers. Before I go on, you should think about the importance of this; people are putting enough trust in you and what you have to offer that they’re freely giving you their email addresses, phone numbers, whatever, and requesting that you keep them updated. In a world bombarded by spam, permission marketing is a powerful thing.
Additionally, when it comes to marketing through relationship building, just getting your company’s name out there is important; you can’t exactly sell a product or service if nobody knows you exist. The first place to start is with people in your own industry.
Now maybe I couldn’t see it at first, but Twitter offers just that. “Social media” is growing in popularity and doesn’t show any sign of slowing, but for those who don’t want to hassle of maintaining a blog, it’s been tough to really take advantage of it…until now.
Twitter has been around for a while now, at least long enough that I should have been on there a while ago. Anyway, the best way to describe it is a blog with a limit of 160 characters per post. 160 characters is not a lot; it’s so small in fact that it’s hard to compress your thoughts into such a small space. But the benefit it brings is that it allows you to get your ideas out there and talk to people without spending hours writing blog articles everyday. People can choose to “follow” you, or keep track of what you’re writing about, so it’s permission marketing at it’s best. Twitter’s been running like a freight train lately, and if it keeps up, it could become a powerful way to market yourself and get your name out there.
That said, make a choice to either get started on Twitter now, or not at all because, like I’ve said a million times, by the time everyone’s talking about a marketing strategy, it’s already past it’s prime. It’s such a small commitment in both money (free) and time (160 characters = about 20 seconds) that there’s little reason not to give it a shot.
If you run Windows and have quicktime installed, you may or may not have noticed, during your last automatic update, that there was an extra line in the Quicktime update queue this time around…it was Safari, Apple’s flagship web browser, formerly only found on the Mac.
Apple released Safari for Windows, beta, back on June 11, 2007, and has since brought it out of beta testing and decided, why not sneak it onto your computer? Hell, you don’t have a clue what goes on your own computer and most computer users won’t even notice, right? Well, that’s what Apple’s betting on whether they admit it or not.
To be honest, I’m sure it’s effective…the users who do notice won’t think a whole lot of it because it’s so normal these days (although less so than in the past) for software companies to sneak software onto your machine and it’s just another company pulling one over on computer users. The users who don’t notice, well, won’t notice; at least not until they happen to stumble upon the browser and think, “Hmm, what’s this?” Maybe they’ll even click to find out and Apple’s betting on them liking the slick interface (although as a web designer, can someone please tell me why Safari renders font bolder than any bold I’ve ever seen?).
The interesting thing about this is what I alluded to in the section above. The people who do notice this sneaky trick are so familiar with companies doing this it they won’t raise any fuss…hell, it’s nothing new, right? And the people who don’t notice surely won’t complain about something they don’t even know happened right under their noses. And who knows, maybe they’ll stumble upon Safari lying dormant on their cluttered desktop one day, click, and fall madly in love with it. The interesting thing about this type of marketing/promotion is that, under different circumstances it would be considered totally dishonest and sleezy, but Apple’s a big name company, and these kind of underhanded tactics are almost expected these days by computer users, so the trick quietly retreats without much more than a whisper raised in objection, and suddenly Apple snags so many million new Safari users, practically overnight…all the while nobody has any idea about the enormous leap forward in market share the company made.
It reminds me of Aaron Wall’s post yesterday over at SEOBook.com about Google’s dominance of everything they touch simply because they have access to all the statistics they need, and can shift things about to promote their own growth and prevent the growth of competitors. The whole time, the average Google user has no idea about the power Google holds at it’s fingertips…they just think Google’s finds what they’re looking for most of the time.
No, that’s not a typo in the title, that’s the name of the relatively new search engine company that is getting whispers all over the web about being a potential real competitor to Google (pronounced “Cool”). Aside from the name of the company gushing with that Web 2.0-style weird naming convention, they claim to have something pretty serious up their sleeves…the ability to index websites at 1/10 the cost of Google.
Based out of Menlo Park, California, and, according to Michael Arrington, they were originally funded with a $5 million dollar chunk of money out of the owner’s pockets. According to the company’s website, they’ve also received one $8 million dollar investment from Tugboat Ventures and another, more recent, $25 million dollar venture capital investment from Madrone Capital Partners (although the wording is unclear, it appears that Madrone isn’t putting up all $25 million, but the largest chunk of that among several other investors).
The company’s staff, again, according to Michael Arrington, is comprised of a husband and wife team, formerly of Google, Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. The two were joined by Russell Power, formerly of Xift and IBM, and creator of the Xift search engine and the WebFountain Prototype from IBM. Apparently they’ve got somewhere in the realm of 10-15 employees now at their Menlo Park office.
In case you’re wondering if Cuill is crawling your site, check your stats for “Twiceler,” the name of their experimental crawler. In case anyone’s interested, their site says the it crawls from the following IP addresses:
38.99.13.121 38.99.44.101 64.1.215.166 208.36.144.6 38.99.13.122 38.99.44.102 64.1.215.162 208.36.144.7 38.99.13.123 38.99.44.103 64.1.215.163 208.36.144.8 38.99.13.124 38.99.44.104 64.1.215.164 208.36.144.9 38.99.13.125 38.99.44.105 64.1.215.165 208.36.144.10 38.99.13.126 38.99.44.106
So, the big question is, do they stand a chance against the force that seems to be taking over the digital universe right now? Well, who knows, but Google’s power isn’t all wrapped up in its search engine. The reason Google is so huge is because it’s effectively expanded into lateral markets and they have quite a foothold at this point, so it’s going to be tough for a competitor to take over. It could happen, but certainly not for a while. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Google has been on a mission lately to devalue any paid links it can find. What does this mean? Well, all those website directories that were once a great place to buy a PageRank 5 link for $10 to help get your site ranked higher are no longer effective, and they’ll become less effective as time goes on. In fact, over the past year or so Google has literally been penalizing websites that it thinks are selling links or exchanging links just for the sake of getting higher rankings. Case in point, JohnChow.Com, a popular online marketing blog was penalized last year by Google, the PageRank on his site was dropped from a 6, which is very good, to a 3, which is something most sites can build in less than a year…all because he was selling (or rather renting) links.
It’s incredibly difficult to build links these days without just giving up and purchasing them. With all the penalties going on, that’s not a viable strategy if you’re looking to build a website that’s going to have any staying power.
If you have a website, you’ve probably heard of a link exchange at some point. To make it short, Joe Website Owner posts a page of links on his website, hopefully that page has a high PageRank so it can pass some link weight onto those sites listed. You email Joe Website Owner or submit his contact form and asked to be placed on his links page. He says, “Sure, just put my link on one of your pages and we’ll both benefit.” So, in the past, you would do this…it worked. But, in an effort to prevent what they see as “Gaming the search engines,” Google has devalued reciprocal links; in other words, if you have a link to Joe Website Owner and he has a link to you, that link to you is worth far less in Google’s eyes than if Joe Website Owner had linked to you because you had high quality content that he liked and you didn’t have to link back. We call these one-way links, and they are vital to your search engine position.
To add to this, Google is also penalizing websites for linking to, what it calls, “Bad Neighborhoods” as well as Excessive Linking.
Bad Neighborhoods are any website Google considers to be engaging in what Google considers to be “gaming” of the search engines. That means that your sweet old grandmother who has her own blog talking about knitting could be deemed a “Bad Neighborhood” by Google if she has one of these link exchanges setup or any number of other seemingly innocent things like that.
Excessive linking means that those link exchanges are worthless because of the way PageRank is passed. If you don’t know what pagerank is, it’s a measure of a website’s value according to Google and, in large part, is determined by the number of other websites linking to your website. Hence all the attempts to rent and exchange links in the past. For each additional link on a given page, the PageRank that is passed onto the linked sites is diluted. If you have a page with 100 links on it, the PageRank of that page is being split among 100 other sites before it’s passed on. That means a link on a PageRank 1 (very low) site, could be better, if yours is the only link on that site, than a link from the “Links Page” on a PageRank 5 site that is also linking to 200 other websites.
Well, you still need to build links to get high rankings, but how can you do that now that Google’s seemed to devalue every method that used to work?
By creating high quality content AND promoting it correctly and to the right people. Notice that you not only have to create very high quality content, but you also have to promote it correctly and to the right people. Succeeding online is similar to other businesses in that who you know can sometimes help you more than what you know.
Much of what we do all day is figure out really interesting and insightful things to add to the web, and then we promote those things, as if they were their own product launches, in extremely powerful and effective ways. We can do this for your website, building many extremely high quality links to your site that will never be penalized by Google. Why?
While devaluing many of the old tactics in an effort to improve search rankings, we had to figure out ways to market websites while still playing by Google’s new rules. The problem is, it’s tough to build links to a website the natural way, and there are so many millions of sites out there it can take years before most people even find your website to link to it in the first place.
When people find extremely high quality information and/or tools on the internet, they will link to them…the problem for most sites is two fold…
1)What are people going to find extremely high quality enough to link to?
And 2)How are you going to get that information/tool/resource in front of enough people and the right people so that they even have the opportunity to link to you in the first place?
That’s what we specialize in. Building high quality, one-way links that will never be devalued by Google because they are exactly what Google has always wanted to see. The smarter Google gets, and the more they improve their search engines, the more value will be placed on the types of links we’re building everyday.
Quality Internet marketing is a relatively new discipline even for website owners, so I don’t expect anyone to pay me $1,000 a month for some service that they may never see a return from.
Instead, we charge by the link. We have a pricing structure that is dramatically lower than you could even buy links for, but these links aren’t bought…I mean, sure you pay for them, but they’re built naturally and because of that, are incredibly powerful. Quality, not quantity is the name of the game for building links these days.
So, now that I’ve practically written a book here, shoot me an email and we can discuss some options that are within your budget either via email, over the phone, or in person. I’m happy to provide references upon request, but realistically, you only pay for results, so there’s nothing to lose.
Thanks for your time.
John Crenshaw
john {at} johncrenshaw [dot] net
Another quick bug fix for you. Another little quirk about Internet Explorer is the way in renders the
First of all, if a width is not specified for the given element, IE will treat it like
In order to fix this you need to create a stylesheet just for IE (That’s explained in the last half of this article if you don’t know how to do that). Once you’ve done that, add the following styles to the IE-only stylesheet, where “.element” is the class of the element you’re working with:
.element { overflow-y: auto; overflow-x: visible; width: 450px; }
IE understands
Once you do this, you’ll notice this problem:
Ok, IE, you’ve really outdone yourself on stupidity this time. It looks like IE is not taking the scrollbar into account in the height of the element. So, now we need to fix that by adding padding-bottom: 20px; to the IE-only stylesheet, and here’s what we get:
.element { overflow-y: auto; overflow-x: visible; width: 450px; padding-bottom: 20px; }
Voila! Problem solved. Keep in mind, this isn’t a perfect solution…the problem with this is that IE will add that 20px padding at the bottom of the element even if there isn’t a scrollbar, leaving you with some extra space on the bottom of your element in this case. It’s usually not a big deal, but if anyone knows of an easy fix for this I’m all ears.
As a web designer you learn something new everyday about the intricacies of Internet Explorer’s faulty rendering of certain elements on a screen. While I’m not always a proponent of using a Strict Doctype, it does help solve some of those issues…then again, it also requires a bit more work and time is money, right? Well, one of the problems I’ve had with internet explorer in the past is the way it renders lists, unordered and ordered lists, especially IE6. Even with a Strict DOCTYPE declaration, internet explorer has a nasty little habit of adding margin between list items when you’ve specifically written into the CSS that it shouldn’t behave this way. I have to admit, I do this everyday and it took me a while to figure this out, so hopefully this will help someone else having margin problems with list items in IE 6 or any other version of internet explorer.
So what is the problem exactly? Here’s a snapshot of the sidebar of a site I’m working on in Firefox:
Incidentally, this is also how it appears in IE 7. Now, the snapshot of how that same unordered list appears in IE 6:
Whoa! Where’d all that extra margin come from? Well, it certainly didn’t come from the CSS because every single other browser tested displays fine and all the margins are set to 0px, as well as padding. So what’s the problem here?
The problem rears its ugly head, in this situation, because I have the display property of those list items set to block in the stylesheet. Internet Explorer, but especially version 6, just freak out when trying to display lists when the links within those lists are styled display: block. So, how do we fix it? We need to trick internet explorer (because it’s bugginess also allows us to trick it into behaving the way we want) into thinking that the display property is set to inline, after we’ve done that we can essentially tell it we’ve changed our mind and we want the display property set to block. This will make IE really throw a temper tantrum, but it’s exactly the temper tantrum we want it to throw.
To solve this we need to add a conditional comment in our header section, preferably near our other stylesheet declarations. This conditional comment is something only IE will read because, you guessed it, it’s psychotic:
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”http://yourdomain.com/styles/ie.css” />
<![endif]–>
Now you need to create a new stylesheet for Internet Explorer only and call it ie.css.
Once you’ve done that add these two lines to the stylesheet:
#sidebar li a{display:inline-block !important;}
#sidebar li a {display:block !important;}
The “#sidebar” part is part of my stylesheet because the sidebars on that particular site are wrapped in a
#sidebar ul li a{display: block; }
IE may try to ignore the hack above in the ie.css file. Why? Because this second declaration is more specific. The !important declaration prevents that.
So, now that we’ve added those two lines to ie.css, what does IE 6 show us?
Ahhh, beautiful ain’t it?
