websitewriters.co.za

Optimising your PHP code

Or, how to make your PHP scripts run faster.

If you’re running a site of any decent size, you know that one of the many concerns you have is that your site is fast and smooth to navigate. Below I’d like to detail a few tips on how to make your PHP scripts run faster.

Continue reading Optimising your PHP code…

The long-lost multi-column layout

Ok, it’s not “long-lost” but I had to think up a nice title, ok? And besides, it’s more in reference to the method of doing the multi-column layout. Although that’s not “long-lost” either…

Ever since I saw a guy do a presentation on usability of web sites, I’ve wanted to see a layout that was correct in it’s coding, took minimal hacks of code, and used as little code as possible (i.e. no unecessary DIVs). A few weeks back I found an article on A List Apart just like this. I immediately implemented it in the template for www.websitewriters.co.za.

Continue reading The long-lost multi-column layout…

Where your website is hosted and Google search results.

Many South African websites host their sites in the US or anywhere else bandwidth is cheaper than hosting in South Africa.

A great way to save on hosting costs but not so great when search results are filtered by location.

Would you rather pay less for hosting internationally but be removed from a localized Google search result? If your site is meant to target user by a specific location or area I have found that the cost of hositng your site in that area and being included in that location’s Google search results far outweighs hosting your site on cheaper, international, servers.

Example: The search term ‘mxit’ on Google South Africa returns 19,500 results when searching of the web. When filtering the same MXit search for South African pages only (593 results),the top 10 results change slightly. If your site is hosted outside of South Africa it would be removed from the South African Google Search Engine Result pages, no matter how relevant to South Africa your site is.

Any user wishing to find a South African website about the product or service your site offers will not find you on a local google search if your site is not hosted locally or does not have a .co.za (South African) domain name.
Something to consider before deciding on where to host your site and the use of a domain name.
Thank you Jason Bagley for your contribution.

Less Pronouns and more Synonyms

Q: What do pronouns and synonyms have to do with SEO?

A: Everything.

What are pronouns & synonyms? According to wikipedia…

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun phrase. The replaced phrase is normally the antecedent of the pronoun, but can also be precedent.

Synonyms (in ancient Greek syn ‘συν’ = plus and onoma ‘όνομα’ = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings and are interchangable.

To demonstrate:

Apples have long been considered healthy, as indicated by the proverb thats states that one of them a day keeps the keeps the doctor away. Research suggests that they may reduce the risk of colon cancer, prostate cancer and lung cancer. Like many fruits, these fruit contain Vitamin C as well as a host of other antioxidant compounds, which explains the reduced risk of cancer (with the free radical explanation of reduced cancer risk to due prevented DNA damage). The fibre in the fruit (while less than most other fruits) helps keep the bowels healthy, which may be a factor in the reduced risk of colon cancer. They may also help with heart disease, weight loss and controlling cholesterol, as they do not have any cholesterol, have fibre (which reduces cholesterol by preventing reabsorption), and are bulky for their caloric content like most fruits and vegetables.

Lets drop the pronouns and add a few synonyms.

Apples have long been considered healthy, as indicated by the proverb thats states that an apple a day keeps the keeps the doctor away. Research suggests that apples may reduce the risk of colon cancer, prostate cancer and lung cancer. Like many fruits, apples contain Vitamin C as well as a host of other antioxidant compounds, which explains the reduced risk of cancer (with the free radical explanation of reduced cancer risk to due prevented DNA damage). The fibre in apples (while less than most other fruits) helps keep the bowels healthy, which may be a factor in the reduced risk of colon cancer. They may also help with heart disease, weight loss and controlling cholesterol, as apples do not have any cholesterol, have fibre (which reduces cholesterol by preventing reabsorption), and are bulky for their caloric content like most fruits and vegetables.

I enjoy eating apples

We could have also added more synonyms to the text but in the case of apples there aren’t many. This simple, yet effective method might decrease the quality of the read but will increase your rank on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s).

Proof available here.

More Helpful Tools

An update on the previous Helpful Tools post. For SEO purposes the most helpful tool I’ve come accross is the Quirk SearchStatus Extension.

For every site you visit using Firefox or Mozilla, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN - all in one place. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy.

FTP from Firefox.

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Get SearchStatus here and FTP from Firefox with FireFTP here. My other personal favourites can be found on my blog here.

Helpful Tools

As my second article, I thought I would just quickly highlight some of the tools I use to create standards compliant web sites.

My editor of choice is Quanta+. It has all the features of a modern IDE, and really helps my productivity. It’s text editing capabilities alone (code completion, autocomplete, etc.) keep me hooked. However, if I’m in Windows, then I use my own editor, RingHTML 3.0, which I’m modeling on Quanta+.
Of course, the first additional tool I use is my browser, Mozilla Firefox. I write my sites too look perfect in Firefox, and then I adjust them for Internet Explorer. I’ve found this to be the most effective way of doing things. Generally (and this is a bit of a bit “generally”), if my sites work in Firefox, they work in Opera, Konqueror, and Safari as well.

Of course Firefox’s extension mechanism is ideal for extra tools right in the browser. Here are some of the extension I have installed, and which I use when developing site designs:

• Html Validator: Very handy, this extension validates your site without you needing to visit the validator at w3c.org.
• Aardvark: The Aardvark extension dynamically shows you all the elements, and their classes and id’s, when you hover over them.
• Web Developer Toolbar: Another absolute essential, you can do a multitude of things with this toolbar, including outlining of elements, viewing id’s and classes, etc.
• Fangs Screen Reader Emulator: This extension will pretend to be a screen reader, and will show you the output a screen reader would “say”. An almost must-have for accessibility.
• ColorZilla: Like that colour on a site you’ve seen? Grab it with ColorZilla.

Got any tools you use that you think are indispensible? Add your comment.

The "Right" way to use an image as your header title

You can use css (cascaded stylesheets) to make your site more accessible to everyone, including those with sight problems.

For instance:
Your site uses a nice large image as it’s title logo. While it’s cool for those who can see, what about those who can’t see? They use screen readers, which basically read out what’s on the screen. The only problem is that when a screen reader comes to an image, it just says “image”. Bummer… now where’s your web site title?

Here’s a little trick I thought of to overcome that particular problem, but one which could be used elsewhere.
create a div with a heading:

<div id="header">
  <h1>mp3taxi.com</h1>
</div>

Then, in your css file, you set your h1 to not display, and your div to show the image, like so:

#header
{
  background: url(../images/main_logo.png) no-repeat top left;
}

#header h1
{
  display: none;
}

So then what happens is that your image shows in css-enabled browsers, and in other browsers, you see the heading, “mp3taxi.com” in nice big letters.
Now, if you go to the site I’ve just been using as an example, you’ll see that there’s another background image that stretches across the whole of that header section, as well as the title header… I simply added a span in, and rearranged my css slightly… see below:

<div id="header">
  <h1><span>mp3taxi.com<span/></h1>
</div>

#header
{
  background: #ffff00 url(../images/headerbg.png) top left repeat-x;
  color: #000000;
  height: 88px;
}

#header h1
{
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  height: 88px;
  width: 281px;
  background: url(../images/main_logo.png) no-repeat top left;
  float: left;
  color: #000000;
}

#header h1 span
{
  display: none;
}

with css:

without css:

happy coding!

Get indexed in search engines before your site goes live.

Your sites SEO(Search Engine Optimization) does not have to start the day you ‘go live’, it can start days, weeks even months ahead with a nicely written page about what the site is going to be about.

In the case of siteb (site we’re currently building for a client) we built a simple page with the look and feel of the final product, some content, metatags & a contact page. A few days later it was Googled and what do you know. #5 for their specific product & number1 on Google South Africa. This makes life so much easier when you officialy launch the site, not having to worry and wait to get it indexed by the major search engines & I’m sure it will make your adwords budget bareable.

Things NOT to do before you launch a new website:

• An animated gif with an Under Construction sign, its not 1999.
• Coming soon as the title

Things you should do before you launch a new website:

• Ensure that visitors know what the site is going to be about.
• Content is King, Queen, Jack & Ace so at least a paragraph of valid copy with a few keywords are critical. The Search Engine Robots will love you for it. Don’t give everything away at first, but rather update it as often as you like giving your target audience a reason to return & the search engine spiders a little bit more to index every time.
• Make sure visitors are able to contact you with a contact form or telephone number, depending on what kind of site it is.

If you are planning to sell any product or service on the world wide web know that Google , or any search engine, will be responsible for the majority of your customers.