27 April 2009

3G vs LTE-Advanced

Does it make any sense to you? It didn't make any sense to me either a few years ago. But this little snippet from Wikipedia makes it all very clear:

LTE provides up to 326.4 Mbit/s for downlink and 86.4 Mbit/s for uplink. LTE-Advanced, in development as a minor update to LTE networks, supports maximum download rates of over 1 Gbit/s.
Basically, I want LTE-Advanced now. Interesting that it's only a "minor update" to existing LTE networks. Apparently there's only one of these planned and in production at the moment... in Oslo. I'm moving to Norway, b'bye!

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21 April 2009

Overcoming Professional Prejudice

I've just been on the phone with a potential client. From our brief chat it's clear that they have experienced problems with "web" people before now. This has affected their view of our services at FlipStorm, even though they know nothing about us.


So, how do you overcome that kind of prejudice? You could turn to the salesman's pitch... tell them all the guff they either already know or don't want to know and spin it to make it sound like you're the best. If they buy in, they've got to spend some more money and they might just get lucky.

If they are smart though (and your client is always smart, no matter how stupid they are!), they won't go for any of that. So you need to toss them a bone. Prove to them that you are prepared to go that extra mile. Give them something for nothing... a favour!

Some of you may see this as flaring up the spec work debate, but before I start a urinating competition, I'd like to mention that there are absolutely no limits on how far you take this; it's entirely up to you, if you think it will achieve the desired result without costing you too much. If you make it clear to the client that this is a gimme and that any work as follow-up from that will be payable then you're in no danger of giving false impressions or cheapening your services.

Quite the opposite, in fact; it adds value to your services. It could be a deal-maker and something so simple to you that it takes you all of 10 minutes. Those 10 minutes are definitely worth a new customer!

Ah but, I hear you say, will that be a quality client? That depends largely on how strict you are with your freebies. Too much and clients get used to it, expect and eventually demand it.

We will have to wait and see if it pays off in this case, but I have found it to be genuinely worthwhile.

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18 April 2009

7 Steps to Reach the G-Spot

By G-Spot I mean the first page of search engine results in Google. A couple of months ago I sent out this email to a friend of mine who asked me to analyse his website (Damian Brown Photography).


It's quite a specific analysis of his site, but it can be used as a basic framework for most sites out there:
First off, page titles (as i call it, the <title> tag):
This is pretty key. Most search engines use this as the heading for the search result listing, the link that you click to go to the desired site after performing a search. This is one of the primary places a search engine will look for keywords. However, it shouldn't be too long as it will get clipped/truncated and it should make some sort of sense. I know this may seem obvious, but there should only be one <title></title> tag on the page and it should always be inside the <head></head> section of the page.

META tags:
Right, to cut through all of the confusion, the only ones you really really really need are the description and the content-type ones. The description should be different for each page and should be no more than one intelligible paragraph about the contents of that page and if possible not just a paragraph that is already written on the page.

<meta name="description" content="Birmingham's best freelance wedding and portrait photographer, Damian Brown, shows off his portfolio and writes about his work" />

The content-type is a little more confusing, but suffice to say as long as it looks like this on every page of yoursite, you're ok.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Of course, on other sites, this needs to be considered carefully. Web browsers use a number of methods for determining the correct content-type of the document and if they're mismatched, you may end up with the wrong one and certain characters will come out with extra glyphs, especially if you don't use ANSII code for special characters (e.g. &123;).
The rest of the META tags aren't overly used and in the case of the keywords one, ignored altogether. Any META tags should appear inside the <head> [in here] </head> tags.

Valid HTML:
This is extremely important to search engines. Clean code means it's easier for them to read your site and suggests that it will render well in the browser, which you'll score brownie points for. Code that isn't where it should be will confuse the search engine algorithms and they may even give up indexing your site completely until it's sorted.

This is a difficult one to achieve as there's a lot that goes into this. It comes down to having a good basic design and sticking to it. One thing I will say: make sure there is no code or content floating around in between the closing </head> tag and the opening <body> tag or after the closing </body> tag (except for the closing </html> tag).

Headings <h1></h1> through <h6></h6>:
Headings are also really important. If you think about the basics of print for a minute (this is where all this comes from anyway): When you open a book it has an index giving you a quick glance at all of the chapter headings. If you go to a chapter, you see its title in large, bold text at the top of the page. Then the content relevant to that subject is placed underneath and is generally organised by subheadings and paragraphs. This is so we can follow the train of thought without getting lost and easily pick up where we were if we do.

If we apply this principal to the web, it becomes very natural, but also meets some requirements of the search engines. So having a main heading on each page (the <h1></h1> tag, there should only be one of these per page) that re-iterates the title of the page and then structuring any text into paragraphs of single thoughts, just like you learned in English lessons, will go a long way to improving not only the ease of reading from a visitors point of view, but also the search engines.

Flash:
For the most part search engines can't read Flash content. A search engine basically sees what you would see if you did a "View Source" in your web browser. They use the text they see to determine what the page is about, how relevant and up to date it is etc etc. If that text is in Flash it won't see it. If there's any major bulk of text in a Flash file that plays on your site, it needs to come out and sit on the page somehow.

I don't think you've got this problem as most of the flash you're using seems to be image galleries, which is fine for the most part. There are alternatives to Flash which could improve your site in this regard, but it's not essential.

Links:
Firstly navigational links on your site should be clear and steady. By this I mean that as you move from one page to the next, they should stay in the same place. They can also serve as a visual cue as to what page the visitor is on, so links that disappear when you're on that page can be a little confusing.

Visitors should be able to get to almost any page from any page. So rather than having to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, they can simply see where they were when they read that really interesting part/saw that really good photo.

Secondly, links from other websites. Getting other sites linking to your website is another key from a search engines point of view. But rather than getting hundreds or thousands of links from websites all over, it's better to have even just a few that are more relevant to your field of expertise. And the more natural the link looks on the other persons/company's website, the greater the chance that it will improve your ranking. E.g.

<a href="http://www.damianbrownphotography.co.uk/">Click Here!</a> is not quite as useful to Google as <a href="http://www.damianbrownphotography.co.uk/">Birmingham photgrapher portfolio</a> or something similar. Can you see why?

If you can encourage people to link to your site or write an article about you or something like that, chances are it will be more natural.

Others:
Some search engines use a simple datafile to help identify pages on your site. It's called a sitemap XML file. This is a bit complicated and techie, but setting one of these up can complement a well-delivered website and make sure that you tick all the boxes from the search engine's point of view.

Also content freshness is an area to consider. Although I have found that this doesn't have to be too dramatic, some changes every now and then help to keep your site on the map so to speak.
The points here are pretty obvious if you've been doing SEO for a while. But they need to be monitored to make sure you continue to comply.

Of course, if you're site is built on a well-written CMS or other standards-compliant platform/framework/application - such as EDDy™, FlipStorm's web application development platform - it will tackle most of these steps for you, enforce some others, and encourage you to respect the rest.

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04 March 2009

Dipping My Toes In The Deep End

Since the beginning of February I have been working long hours and putting in extra time to configure two servers (one virtual, one real) to function as the testing and live environments for FlipStorm's client projects.


This has involved setting up a VPN, opening all manner of ports on the firewall, learning how to do cron jobs, writing linux shell scripts, going back to command line interfaces, editing conf files, generating RSA keys... the list really does go on.

However, my crowning achievement is the 4-hour marathon that it's been for me to get a backup cron job to run from the live server (a VPS). My goal was to create a single tarball that held that day's changes to databases and files in the www root (aka Everything). Then to FTP that to the testing server automatically. Well, to cut a long story short, I managed it. All sorts of exciting things had to happen, but it was worth it. And more importantly I didn't screw anything up in the process! Bonus!

Safari 4
In case you haven't heard/hate Apple products, they released Safari 4 a couple of weeks ago. I've been using it... and then not using it. I'm back on Firefox for proper again.

While I like the "let's copy Google" stance, it's still not quite as good as Chrome. And thank heavens I'm not using Safari 4 on Windows... yuck! Can't wait for Chrome on the Mac. That aside, there are some definite, noticeable improvements.

Still, it's broken Gmail so that's minus-a-million from me... that's a deal-breaker. It's probably not Apple's responsibility, but until Google sorts it out I have to use Firefox for Gmail now.

UPDATE 18/04:
Found out that GMail wasn't working because I had set up Gears Offline functionality in my GMail accounts and Gears hasn't been updated to work with Safari 4 yet as it still in beta.

And I've moved the tabs back to where I am used to them being in Safari. So I have been using Safari 4 more regularly again.

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22 February 2009

Finally something worth waking up for!

Well well well... it is a funny old life. I got made redundant last month. Yes that's right, it's taken me a month to write about it! Basically I couldn't be bothered: big news everyone, another hard-working Joe gets punted. Shame.


Also (and slightly more importantly) I have been extremely busy. Finding a new job? No! Starting up my own business. You see, my previous employment taught me many things, and the parting words of my old boss gave me the needed incentive. I can do this.

The point of this post though is completely different to that. I just wanted to throw it in there as I think it needs to be said. These are interesting times, hewing out new opportunities. Hopefully I will have a lot to say for myself when I'm done.

So without further babbling, I wanted to point out that I am now available for all sorts of web work, software development and would welcome a challenge. If you think you can make use of my humble services, check out my new venture: FlipStorm

We're going to be offering a wide range of services, but the focus is on high-performance web apps that are completely managed by "the team" (a.k.a. moi) for meeting any and all business needs. Starting a new business that needs a web site? Got some interesting ideas for web app but don't have the needed skills to do make it a reality? Come to FlipStorm and see what could be done.

--

Zend Server

Zend Server Public Beta was released recently. I took it upon myself to find out what road Zend are going down with this new product. It appears that they have managed to licence an Apache/PHP stack that will run on Windows/Mac/Linux with the latest builds of all products, tuned to a fine major key, in two flavours - one for the enterprise and one for the community (with pricing accordingly, i.e. free for the community sans some whistles).

So it seems they are creating a halfway house between Zend Core and Zend Platform, probably with the intention to merge the product lines and consolidate their offerings, thus making for easier upgrades and slightly less training.

It's also given them a chance to rethink the web management console interface (something that was in need of much attention). Managing the loaded modules in PHP on the various platforms is now easier than ever. It seems likely that upgrading will be much simpler too.

This is really great news for all PHP developers, but I find it particularly useful for me on my Macbook. You see there has been fewer and fewer decent stable builds of the latest released versions of PHP floating around, so I'm having to "make do" with 5.2.6 (the Apple-adjusted version). It's not bad, but there's no clear upgrade route and I like to try latest and greatest... especially in anticipation of a stable release of PHP 5.3!

So it looks like I may be retiring the built-in Apache/PHP stack and moving over to Zend Server as soon as it reaches a stable release. Goodness all round!

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