What Makes CSS So Great?

If there's one thing that characterizes what's gone awry with the Web, it's the proliferation of presentation at the expense of structure and content. Note that I don't say presentation is bad: there's nothing wrong with having a document look nice. The problem is that current presentation is achieved by perverting the structure with single-pixel GIFs, convoluted tables within tables, and semantically null constructs like the FONT tag. What were we thinking?

We were thinking about our audience, that's what. After all, if you're going to put information out there, it may as well look good. We all take pride in our work and want it to look as good as we think it is. Since HTML gave us very little in the way of interesting presentational abilities, we forced it into the channels we wanted to travel. If we'd had good styling to begin with, the corruption of the Web's underpinnings wouldn't have been necessary.

That's why CSS is so important. Finally, not only do we have the ability to describe sophisticated presentation, we can do it in relation to well-structured, uncluttered documents. No more tortured markup! Just clean elements that are attractively rendered through CSS.

That's the most fundamental -- if you like, the most pure -- reason to embrace CSS. In reality, this road to minor nerdvana has been blocked by implementation disasters. The earliest browsers to support CSS did so very badly. They gave CSS support its start, admittedly, but the behavior was so unreliable that nobody relied on it. And well they shouldn't have. The next round of browsers did better, but not really enough to gain widespread support.

Only recently has CSS become a viable component of the designer's toolbox. With Opera 3.6 and Internet Explorer 5, we saw nearly complete CSS1 support. IE5 for the Macintosh, especially, fulfilled this goal, with complete and correct support for everything in CSS1 except for blinking text (no great loss) and a few minor bugs in the float code. Opera 4 appears to have continued the work of earlier versions into most of CSS2, and Mozilla's recent builds have contained very good CSS2 support.

So if you've been holding out on CSS adoption, it's time to come in from the cold. Thanks to some impressive efforts on the parts of the big three browser vendors, you can learn to bask in the warmth of CSS without getting burned.

Read the rest at the O'Reilly Web DevCenter

Don't Make Me Think!

Don't Make Me Think is a short and very easy-to-read book by Steve Krug about human computer interaction and web usability. The book has a very simple premise, exactly as its title says, that a good program or website should let users accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible. Krug points out that people are good at satisficing, that is taking the first available solution to their problem, so design should take advantage of this. He frequently cites Amazon.com as an example of a well-designed site that manages to allow high quality interaction even though the site gets bigger and more complex every day. Krug cites Amazon's intelligent use of file folder-like tabs.

The book in itself is supposed to be an example of concision and extremely well focused writing. The goal was to make a text that could be read by an executive on a one or two-hour flight.

I have spent years at RIT studying how to make applications and specifically websites easy to use. I would summarize this book to be a quick-start-guide to getting you heading in the right direction when it comes to what to put where on your website. It is critical that you have this book if you are determined to make a great website.

To further wet your appetite for usability, check out this episode from DevSource featuring Steve Krug talking about usability.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet Marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine results pages (SERPs) and has a proven ROI (Return on Investment). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, SEM methods include: Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion. Other sources, including the New York Times define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings, different from SEO which seeks to obtain better free search listings.

Market Structure

In 2006, North American advertisers spent US$9.4 billion on search engine marketing, a 62% increase over the prior year and a 750% increase over the 2002 year. The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising.

History

As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 90s, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly. Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs offered by Open Text in 1996 and then Goto.com in 1998. Goto.com later changed its name to Overture in 2001, and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, and now offers paid search opportunities for advertisers through Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google also began to offer advertisements on search results pages in 2000 through the Google AdWords program. By 2007 pay-per-click programs proved to be primary money-makers for search engines.

Search Engine Optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunites offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "Search Engine Marketing" was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001 to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals. In 2007 Search Engine Marketing is Stronger than ever with SEM Budgets up 750% as shown with stats dating back to 2002 vs 2006.

Ethical questions

Paid search advertising hasn't been without controversy, and issues around how many search engines present advertising on their pages of search result sets have been the target of a series of studies and reports by Consumer Reports WebWatch, from Consumers Union. The FTC also issued a letter in 2002 about the importance of disclosure of paid advertising on search engines, in response to a complaint from Commercial Alert, a consumer advocacy group with ties to Ralph Nader.

Yahoo to shut down photo service, push Flickr

Yahoo Inc is shutting down Yahoo Photos, its first-generation photo storage site, and asking users to move instead to Yahoo's Web 2.0 photo sharing site, Flickr, a Yahoo official said on Thursday.

In June, tens of milllions of registered users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of various options including upgrading to Yahoo's Flickr service or various outside-photo storage sites, according to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

Yahoo also will offer consumers the option of loading their photos on competing sites when users are notified next month.

These include PhotoBucket, the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp's MySpace or more conventional photo printing and storage site such as Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly Inc or Snapfish, he said.

"Flickr will get top-billing, of course," he said in an interview about the plan to give users mulitple alternatives.

The move follows the explosive surge in growth by PhotoBucket, an independent photo storage site based in Palo Alto, California, from a quarter of the market a year ago to around 40 per cent last month, according to Hitwise Inc data.

In the same period, Yahoo Photos' share has been cut two- to three times over to around 5.8 per cent of the US market. Flickr, meanwhile, has grown to 4.5 per cent, up from 3.7 per cent, according to Hitwise US Web audience data.

Yahoo continued to support both Photos and Flickr over the past two years, reflecting the different audiences of the two sites.

Yahoo Photos is a more conventional photo-finishing site, full of family snapshots, while Flickr has attracted a passionate fan base of amateur and professional photographers who use the site to share digital photos online, and for whom printing is largely an afterthought.

According to data from comScore supplied by Yahoo a year ago, Yahoo Photos counted 30 million registered users, who had uploaded 2 billion photos as of June 2006.

By contrast, PhotoBucket rose to 32 million users in 2006 from 12 million users in 2005. It is set to grow to around 62 million users by the end of 2007, PhotoBucket Chief Executive and co-founder Alex Welch said in a recent interview.

Butterfield and co-founder, Caterina Fake, his wife, sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005. Butterfield is now a director of product management at Yahoo.

Creating a Website: Getting Started

Here's information on how to create a website. This page will guide you through the first stages of creating a website, obtaining a domain name and finding a host provider. If you already have a website you can scroll to the bottom for links to other sections that might be more useful. There's a total of five section filled with useful tips on making your website better.

Start with the first link in each section, because favorite sites are listed first.

Creating a Website

• How to Get a Domain Name
• Finding a Host Provider
• Web Editing Software
• Planning Your Website
• Free Website Hosting

Creating a Website: Free Website Hosting

There are several places you can host your website at little or no cost to you. In most cases paid hosting is so inexpensive, you're just better off paying. Follow the link below to find hosting providers that do not charge.

Google Search: Free Web Hosting

There are many very valuable tools available to you that will cost you nothing and enhance your web project many time over. For example, 90% of www.mikelazik.com is hosted on www.blogger.com. It costs me nothing and provides a very robust format for posting and managing information. Additionally, a relatively new product offered through google--Google Apps--provides you an entire suite of applications including a word processor, email client, spreadsheet and more.

Before you invest any money into a solution, make sure you cannot achieve the same result with a free solution.

Creating a Website

• How to Get a Domain Name
• Finding a Host Provider
• Web Editing Software
• Planning Your Website
• Free Website Hosting

Creating a Website: Planning Your Website

It is always a good idea to plan your site before you start creating it. Surf the Internet and visit a lot of websites before starting work on your website. If you're an artist, visit other artist websites and art gallery websites for ideas. This is a good way to identify what works for you and what you might want on your website. Collect and add the websites to your "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" so you can easily get back to them once you start design.

• What's your objective in having a website?
• Who's your intended audience?
• What kind of site navigation are you planning?
• How will your artwork be displayed?
• Are you planning to create a gallery?
• How many images will you be showing?
• What do you like most about other websites?

Creating a Website

• How to Get a Domain Name
• Finding a Host Provider
• Web Editing Software
• Planning Your Website
• Free Website Hosting

Creating a Website: Web Editing Software

If you are planning to create a website, you should invest in a good web editing program. Below you'll find some of the best web editing applications. Since web technology is rapidly changing, always look for and purchase the most recent versions of the software. If you are using earlier versions, you should definitely think about upgrading your software at this time.

Novice

Microsoft FrontPage delivers the features, flexibility, and functionality to help you build superior Web sites. It includes the professional design, authoring, data and publishing tools you need to create dynamic and sophisticated sites. Build data-driven Web sites, enables by Windows SharePoint services Move files easily between local and remote locations, and publish in both directions

Intermediate - Expert

Design, develop, and maintain websites and web applications--from start to finish--with Adobe Dreamweaver software. Built for designers and developers, Dreamweaver offers both a visual layout interface and a streamlined coding environment. Intelligent integration with related Adobe software ensures an efficient workflow across your favorite tools.

Expert

Microsoft Visual Studio is a comprehensive, high productivity professional development environment for building high performance, multi-tier applications for Windows, Web, and common consumer mobile devices. Intended for individual developers software development teams to build departmental client/server Windows applications and Web sites, Visual Studio provides a wide range of tools that streamline and enhance development processes.

Creating a Website

• How to Get a Domain Name
• Finding a Host Provider
• Web Editing Software
• Planning Your Website
• Free Website Hosting

Creating a Website: Finding a Host Provider

The first step in locating a suitable host provider is to determine what you actually need. Don't get caught up in extras if they mean nothing to you. You're best bet is to determine what your website is going to require and then find the least expensive way to do it. There is so much competition you can get what you want for very little, just make sure the business isn't fly-by-night and will be around for a while. I've used GoDaddy for years and for the basics I've never had a problem, when you try to get fancy you get in to trouble. Take in to consideration when you're dealing with a large company such as GoDaddy you're dealing with a company that is not flexible, they have rules and that's that. If you find a mid-size or smaller hosting company they are often happy to do what it takes to keep your business.

Here's a few hosting providers I've worked with and would recommend:

Do yourselves a favor, sign up for auto-renewal and take advantage of quarterly or annual discounts. You've probably got better things to do than spend time each month paying a small bill when you could wrap it into one and get a discount.

Creating a Website

• How to Get a Domain Name
• Finding a Host Provider
• Web Editing Software
• Planning Your Website
• Free Website Hosting

Creating a Website: How to Get a Domain Name

If you are planning to have a business website, it is very important to have a registered domain name. Consider using your first and last name (.com) if available or the name of your company or business.

To find out if the name you want is available go to WhoIS.org. They're a free resource, they don't sell anything.

Here's a few domain name register I've worked with and would recommend, these folks are also hosting providers. Using the same company for both is not required but often will make your life a little easier.

Creating a Website

• How to Get a Domain Name
• Finding a Host Provider
• Web Editing Software
• Planning Your Website
• Free Website Hosting