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When Valuing Your Web Business, Don't Forget the Domain Name

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:42:13 +0000

Domain names are an important part of a web business. They are an asset to your company and you should be aware of how much they are worth. And if your business is looking for a new domain name it can often be more effective to purchase a domain that is live. But to do that, you should know how to value the domain.

Read the full article: How to Value a Domain Name

More Help with Domain Names

Do Your Search Engine Results Show You as the Author?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:24:38 +0000

Google and other search engines are starting to use authorship information with the rel=author attribute to provide more information about the articles that are linked to. These fancier search results can include the author's photo, links to related articles by the same author, and more. Ultimately, results with this extended information are more memorable and more likely to get clicks. Learn how to tell Google who authored your articles.

Read the full article: Tell Google About Your Writing

More About Authorship and Microformats

Backups are Critical

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:24:24 +0000

Last week was a challenging week for me. Last Sunday, I tried to turn on my computer, and, well, it didn't. I spent most of the morning that I had planned to use to get ahead during the week, trying to troubleshoot what was wrong. I finally gave up and called Apple support and proceeded to go through all those same steps again with Cristophor on the phone. His conclusion? The hard drive was dead. Luckily, I have Apple Care for that computer, so Cristophor set up an appointment with the local Apple store, and I took it in. There the Genius (I forget his name, sorry) hooked up a cable to the computer and after a few minutes confirmed that the hard drive was dead and the optical drive was failing. He took my computer and said they would be replacing the hard drive and optical drive over the next 1–3 days.

I didn't get the computer back until Thursday. Then I started the restore process from my Time Machine backup. Of course, what I didn't notice was that the backup I was using was from my first Time Machine drive, not my current one. When the machine restarted, it was restored back to July 2011. Oops! So Thursday night I started the restore process again, this time using the right backup!

Friday morning I got up and saw that there was an update to Lion, 10.7.3, so I ran that and then started doing some work, writing some articles, and so on. I noticed that there were some glitches, but nothing too bad, and I thought they would be cured by a restart. So when I was done working I shut down for the day, as usual.

Saturday I turned on the computer to check some mail, and noticed the glitches were worse. In fact, I couldn't open some of my critical programs like Solitaire :-) and more importantly, no web browsers would open, nor would Finder. After some research using my iPad I discovered that the update to Lion 10.7.3 was screwing up a lot of systems. It sounds like my situation was a bit more serious than most, because I couldn't even get Finder to work. And ultimately, I had to restore from my Time Machine backup a third time. This time I restored to right before I updated to 10.7.3.

Backups Saved Me

I was saved both by Time Machine, which was able to restore my system back to Friday morning, but also by my secondary backups of data on Dropbox. Time Machine brought my computer back to the living, and Dropbox made sure that all the work I'd done on Friday was not lost.

If you don't have both your personal machine and your website backed up on a regular basis, you will eventually live to regret that. I know. This week was challenging, as I had to do work on my iPad or not at all, but if I hadn't had backups I would have been starting from scratch. Before I had regular backups I once deleted my entire home directory on my web server. I much prefer this method. Restoring from backups takes time, but it's a lot faster and easier than trying to rebuild a site from memory.

HTML Design Gallery - Dojo Bread

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:54:02 +0000

This site is very tasty looking. As with any food site, the focus needs to be on the food itself, and this site does a great job. I love how the site’s colors mimic the colors of the breads. Note: this site is built in XHTML Transitional, not HTML5.

Have you built an HTML5 site? Or do you know of one that does a great job with HTML5? Submit HTML5 site designs to be featured on this site.

January in Review

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:16:17 +0000

In honor of the new year, I focused a lot on new technologies in January. Microdata, microformats, CSS3 and HTML5 all are gaining better and better support among browsers. And the many articles I published this month can help you get started learning these so you're ready when your customers are. Did you miss any of these new articles? Here's a recap:

Previously in January

January 2011

January 2010

January 2009

January 2008

Even further back:

It's Not Flashy, But It's Very Useful�The History API

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 04:55:24 +0000

Controlling the browser history is not something that many designers think about. It's boring and behind the scenes and when done right customers won't even know it's there. But when you build a dynamic web application, the History API is incredibly useful. It helps your readers bookmark specific states within an application, not just the front page. It also gives them clues as to where they are in the application. Learn about the HTML5 History API and how it can help your web applications.

Read the full article: What is the History API

Other HTML5 APIs

Add Microformats without Adding Invalid HTML

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:11:57 +0000

One of the criticisms of microdata is that it requires you add new attributes to HTML elements. This is both more to learn, and risks causing problems for people who need to write valid HTML. Microformats are a way to add this data to your web pages using the existing tags and attributes that you already know.

Read the full article: What are Microformats?

All parts of design are important�no, I�m not kidding

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:24:43 +0000

A reader calling himself “areyoukiddingme” writes about color symbolism:

Why are you making such a big deal out of what color your page uses? You should be more focused on the content on your website, the drop down menus, the organization, homepage outline, etc. Color is the last thing you should worry about. Personally, though, I would go with black letters and a white background. The only color that should be different is your logo. By the way, links should always be blue.

Do you agree? While I agree with him that text should be black on white (or very dark on very light) for good contrast and readability. But it seems extreme to say that ’[the] only color that should be different is your logo.” And I think that even if you agree completely with him, color symbolism is important. For example, if your logo incorporates a hat of some type, and it's colored green, you may be sending the completely wrong message to Chinese customers. In China, green hats are used as a term for a cuckold. Just because of the color, you have made your site logo at best funny to potential Chinese customers.

I'd love to hear what you think. Please post in the comments or give your opinion about the importance of color symbolism on web pages.

Poll: How important is elearning to the web?

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:25:40 +0000

With the release of iTunes U and other ways to get more access to elearning, it seems to me like this is an area that is growing both in importance and popularity on the web. But elearning is more than just posting web content online and letting people learn from it. Good online education includes assessment, exercises, and interaction to help the students really learn what is being taught. Of course, this all used to be done with packages like Authorware, but these days, you can build great elearning solutions right in Dreamweaver. What do you think? Is elearning an important part of the web or is it out of date?

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HTML5 Design Gallery - RDWonline v8.0: The Quasareclipse

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 04:19:11 +0000

This is a fun example of a site that is essentially one page—although you still click through to inner pages. Ronald uses great interactive CSS3 features to make the page more interactive. I’d love to see him use the History API to get the URL to change, so it’s easier to navigate. And there are some issues with formatting in my browser. But overall it's a great example.