SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

To celebrate my newfound freelance status, I created a new splash animation for my site. It’s my attempt to bring back the old-school ‘Skip Intro’ era . It’s an ‘After Effects’ style text animation using papervision, combined with some tweens and flash 8 filters. It’s semi-random, so each time you watch it, it’s slightly different. Only 24k (not including the music). Music is by Funkstörung .

Improve the quality of your paid search ads. Find out how the recent update in the Google AdWords Quality Score algorithm might affect your campaigns.

I can take you step-by-step through the design and uploading of a website for a home-based business. There will be no templates requiring outside tech support. You will be the Webmaster and therefore the ultimate expert for your website and all on a ShoeString.

10 things all business owners should know before they have a website built.

I loved the article "10 things businesses should know before building a website" over at 456 Berea Street . Here are their top 10 with my comments added:

1. Understand what you want. Too many businesses really don't know what they want from their website . Have you researched who your online customers are? Do you know what keywords they search for? Do you know what sites they visit? Do you know why they are looking for your site? If you don't, they you don't know what you want. You want happy customers. That's what you want (and hopefully more income as a result).
2. It costs more and takes longer than you think. I can't count the number of times I've been asked how long a website takes, but every time they are shocked at the average development time. However, nearly every time we have "wait time" with a website, it has been caused by the clients' inaction (not sending in copy, not sending pictures, not signing off on part of the project, etc.) You can eliminate most of the wait time by having content, pictures, etc. ready for your developer to dump into the design.
3. A web site has several pieces; don't cut corners. You should keep in mind the following aspects: Design - Does it look and act like my client expects?, Content - Does the site provide the information my clients are looking for?, SEO - Will clients be able to find my site once we make it live?, Future Additions - Have I adequately planned ahead so that I don't have to waste time interfacing the new features with existing ones.
4. Balance glitz and guts. A good website mainly provides the information that people are looking for and does it in a pleasing way, but content wins out every time .
   
5. If you build it, they won't necessarily come. If you don't have a unique value proposition you will not get any sales except from nice old Grandma Elna who bought something just to be nice. Something about your business must attract the more savvy online customers of today.
6. Avoid bit decay; the site needs maintenance. Technology is ever changing and hopefully your business is keeping up. You need a plan to update, maintain, and improve your website on a monthly, if not weekly basis. Ask yourself, "How is my target audience changing, and how can I quickly adapt to their needs?"
7. Treat the web team as professionals. You and the designer both have specific roles you must fill for your website to succeed.
8. Most people in the web industry are clueless. Just because your daughter's friend's brother built a website when he was in 4th grade, that does not qualify him as a web designer. Just because your daughter's friend's brother is a graphic designer, that does not qualify him as a web designer. Just because your daughter's friend's brother owns a pirated version of Frontpage, that does not qualify him as a web designer.
9. You get what you pay for. I think we covered your daughter's friend's brother well enough above.
   
10. Don't start your project by buying a CMS. A content management system is not the way to start. Ask your web designer, they probably have a better and more customized answer for your needs.

Now these are not an "all inclusive" list by any means. However, these will help you start off on the right foot. If I were to add a #11 to the list it would be Have your site built with the customer in mind. If people can't find your site because of poor SEO, or if people can't use your site because or poor navigation, or if you don't provide information that people want, your site will fail. Fail to understand your customers and you might was well give your website money away to charity where it would do some good.

The cascade, inheritance, contextual selectors. As someone who has been using Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS ) in the real world for a while it’s sometimes easy to forget it can be tricky to get started. Beginning CSS Web Development, written by Simon Collison, aims to get you on the road to creating usable, compact, good looking, well structured, and easy to maintain websites.

Anyone familiar with Simon from his long running blog, collylogic.com (now found at colly.com), can expect the same easy reading tone and witty repartee. Colly’s long-running obsession with music proves useful too; with the obligatory case study and examples feeling more real world than in most web design books. Although on second thoughts a band featuring Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix and Simon himself may be too good to be true…

The book progresses through using CSS to style all the basic HTML elements, concentrating on the sorts of things that real world designers get up to most of the time; there’s an entire chapter on lists for example. A few excepts stood out as particularly well placed; a good discussion of typography on the web with some practical alternatives to the oft used web safe fonts, details of the most common image formats and when to use them and a particularly clear explanation of the complexity of floats.

Coming from someone like Simon it should go without saying that the book is up to date. Fixed vs liquid vs elastic vs variable fixed width layouts, faux column and large footers, accessibility and even IE7 are all mentioned at some point. Links are provided where relevant to helpful sites which should help minimize the inevitable impact of print going out of date.

As well as practical examples the book provides a useful compendium of the state of the art when it comes to CSS ; coding styles, Douglas Bowman’s flags, commenting, indenting, modular style sheets, ideas for organizing style sheets. This information is available online, but would require wading through scattered blog posts from the last several years or reading the css-discuss archives from end to end. In short if you’re just starting out then Beginning CSS Web Development will save you time.

The only problem I have with Beginning CSS Web Development stems from the title, specifically the CSS part. Web design and development is a multi-tiered discipline, and CSS often stands or falls on the strength of the underlying markup. The book assumes the reader has a good understanding of modern, semantic, markup practices and as such is not ideally suited for everyone. It also doesn’t provide that much material for the experienced designer or developer that they probably haven’t seen before.

In short the book is a sign of a maturing industry. It is ideally suited for use in teaching, either students or other professional developers, the joys of CSS . It probably won’t be your first web design book, and neither should it be your last but it will provide a constant companion and reference for those starting on the road to becoming the next web design rock star.

Book Name: Beginning Web Development
Publisher: Apress
Author: Simon Collison
URL: http://csswebdevelopment.com/
Price: $34.99
Rating out of 5: 4

The cascade, inheritance, contextual selectors. As someone who has been using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in the real world for a while it's sometimes easy to forget it can be tricky to get started. Beginning CSS Web Development, written by Simon Collison, aims to get you on the road to creating usable, compact, good looking, well structured, and easy to maintain websites.

Anyone familiar with Simon from his long running blog, collylogic.com (now found at colly.com), can expect the same easy reading tone and witty repartee. Colly's long-running obsession with music proves useful too; with the obligatory case study and examples feeling more real world than in most web design books. Although on second thoughts a band featuring Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix and Simon himself may be too good to be true...

The book progresses through using CSS to style all the basic HTML elements, concentrating on the sorts of things that real world designers get up to most of the time; there's an entire chapter on lists for example. A few excepts stood out as particularly well placed; a good discussion of typography on the web with some practical alternatives to the oft used web safe fonts, details of the most common image formats and when to use them and a particularly clear explanation of the complexity of floats.

Coming from someone like Simon it should go without saying that the book is up to date. Fixed vs liquid vs elastic vs variable fixed width layouts, faux column and large footers, accessibility and even IE7 are all mentioned at some point. Links are provided where relevant to helpful sites which should help minimize the inevitable impact of print going out of date.

As well as practical examples the book provides a useful compendium of the state of the art when it comes to CSS; coding styles, Douglas Bowman's flags, commenting, indenting, modular style sheets, ideas for organizing style sheets. This information is available online, but would require wading through scattered blog posts from the last several years or reading the css-discuss archives from end to end. In short if you're just starting out then Beginning CSS Web Development will save you time.

The only problem I have with Beginning CSS Web Development stems from the title, specifically the CSS part. Web design and development is a multi-tiered discipline, and CSS often stands or falls on the strength of the underlying markup. The book assumes the reader has a good understanding of modern, semantic, markup practices and as such is not ideally suited for everyone. It also doesn't provide that much material for the experienced designer or developer that they probably haven't seen before.

In short the book is a sign of a maturing industry. It is ideally suited for use in teaching, either students or other professional developers, the joys of CSS. It probably won't be your first web design book, and neither should it be your last but it will provide a constant companion and reference for those starting on the road to becoming the next web design rock star.

Book Name: Beginning Web Development
Publisher: Apress
Author: Simon Collison
URL: http://csswebdevelopment.com/
Price: $34.99
Rating out of 5: 4

Subject: Make money with your tutorial videos Author: Manuel Lemos Age in days: 43 Summary: This posts lets you know how to keep track of the latest tutorial videos published in the PHPClasses site. Now the site users can rate class packages and show their appreciation about the tutorial videos provided by package authors. It is also explained how class package authors and users can make money producing tutorial videos, and present them in the PHPClasses site. Now the site can also present tutorial videos hosted in sites that share revenue with video producers, like from Revver, for instance.

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