You are here: Home / Archives for Featured

WhiteHouse.gov has 44 Validation Errors

January 18, 2013 By

Wow. I was just filling out a survey that was sent to me by the White House webmaster. So I took a look at the White House website and got hit with a mighty blow. When the White House website is run through the “validator” to check how well the code is written they have a whopping 44 ERRORS and 9 WARNINGS. They’ve unfortunately disregarded professional standards when it comes to web design.

White House website validation errors

White House website validation errors

My site Web Design WorkPlace has an experimental HTML 5 slider running on top of a world class StudioPress Genesis framework – which runs on HTML 4 still. So I have a hand full of validation errors due to the Ken Burns slider being a newer language of the HTML website language. But my site is not representing the entire population of the United States. And I can replace my slider or wait until Genesis is upgraded to HTML 5.

When you have a showcase production website like the White House, it has to be bullet-proof. One way to ensure that it’s bullet-proof is to clear all those validation errors one by one after you build the site.

The White House developer is too lax – not on their toes – and it’s a tad bit embarrassing. It’s sloppy. It’s not professional. It might be an indication that the White House website does not display properly across all current browsers. In any case it should be remedied immediately.

White House website

White House website

When I was at the Smith Barney World HQ in Manhattan, if a consultant did sloppy work that was found out, they were escorted to the front door right then and that was it. On Wall Street it was purely performance based. No one cared what you looked like or where you came from as long as you did the job right. In the US Navy they had ways of “developing character” in the submarine service. Like washing dishes for 18 hours a day until you were ready for game time and professional level work. I’m not sure how they enhance the level of professionalism at the White House but I’d suggest they figure it out fast. For the staff at the White House to represent the people of the United States with shoddy work in front of the whole world is not up to our level of our expectations.

 

Filed Under: Featured, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: ,

Changing Nameservers

December 31, 2012 By

I’ve got a new 5 minute Youtube video that I made to walk you through changing nameservers. I used Godaddy.com and HostGator.com but you can use any registrar and any hosting company. Check with your company to see the specifics you need to know about changing your nameservers.

 

Filed Under: Featured, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: , ,

Can You Afford 90% Off For a Custom Website?

July 4, 2010 By

Some of the “Big Box” web design places charge between $10,000 and $32,000 for a custom website. Web Design Workplace charges $1,000 for a 10 page professional website that outperforms the Big Box site in many ways.

  • Our designs are very attractive.
  • Sine we use WordPress, our sites rank quickly on on major Search Engines.
  • It is easy to add new pages to our sites – many of our customers do this themselves.
  • You can transfer your website to another host for a fee of $100 – we can email you the database and files the same day you need them so they are up to the minute fresh.
  • The 90% lower cost of ownership is REAL. Some people don’t believe it. Call Mal at 201-696-5375 and find out.

So back to the question, can you afford 90% Off For a Custom Website? The answer might be: Can you afford NOT to buy a website from Web Design Workplace?

What if you need a 50 page website?

We charge $50 per page after the first 10. Now we will negotiate any situation you may have. If you add the pages yourself we will give you a flat fee for fixing your menu system or whatever particular situation you may have. But if you compare our regular fee for a 50 page website… which is $3,000, that is a 90% savings over a Big Box 30 page site which costs $32,000.Do your comparisons first and stop here to save your firm almost $30,000. That’s exactly what I said… stop by here to save your firm Thirty Thousand Dollars.

Filed Under: Featured, Promotions Tagged With: ,

What’s a favicon?

August 23, 2009 By

How do I make a favicon or just get one for free?

A favicon is the tiny 16px by 16 px image that appears on the left most side of your browser’s address bar. It was originally named for the phrase “favorite icon” when bookmarking became the rage. Now it’s part of the standard practices for a webmaster or webmistress to create a unique favicon for each website.

When an image is so small, it requires a special creativity to make something that users are going to be able to instantly recognize. Take a look at these examples:

Google.com
Yahoo.com
Facebook.com
IBM.com
HP.com

In each case the favicon is easy to recognize and surfers can identify the site… actually identify the branding instantly.

Now, if you’re like me and you have limited natural artistic abilities, but you being a kick butt webmaster and designer can adapt anything you ever saw in your life using PhotoShop or FireWorks or Corel, lets make some favicons !!! If you can’t jack any drawing you ever saw using PhotoShop there is still hope, there are collections of free favicons all over the internet. More on that soon.

Start with the Easiest

The easiest favicons to make consist of a background and a single big letter. I start by making an image that is 100px by 100px, convert it to a .jpg, and save it with an under 30 KB filesize.

Search on Google for the phrase “free favicon generator” and my 2 favorites show up:

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
and
http://www.favicon.co.uk/

Follow the instructions and your result is a file that is always called favicon.ico

You can place these anywhere in your websites hierarchy, but this meta tag will help your browser and keep you from having to drop these all over the place like Johnny Appleseed the way some webmasters used to do it:

OK, where are the free ones? Search on Google for “free favicons” and my favorite is:

http://www.freefavicon.com/freefavicons/objects/

If you want to get more advanced I’ve seen animated favicons that looked cool… check these folks out at:

http://www.animatedfavicon.com/

Filed Under: Featured, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: , ,

The Best WordPress Designs I’ve Ever Seen

August 2, 2009 By

I’ve personally built over 350 websites and I got hooked on WordPress in 2008. I had seen blogs or weblogs since they were invented, but in 2008 I stumbled on a site that was designed by Brian Gardner and it changed my game. There are a number of reasons why I do 4 out of 5 websites now on top of WordPress blogs:

  • The WP framework is simply perfect for SEO.
  • I can build a basic website in an hour and then “skin it” with a custom WP Theme and then go to town building out pages and categories.
  • Whenever I needed to add a web page I can add a blog post instead. It’s much faster and I can do it from anywhere without using Dreamweaver. I can make a website that’s 10 pages or 20, 50 or 100 pages just by adding blog posts. The more unique content, the more SE’s show their love.
  • No hassles with tables, css, and cross browser compatibility which leads to instant web building gratification. All that is taken care of by the WordPress developers – thank you !!
  • Finally, many of the things I wanted to do with the site programming wise are already done for me in the form of open source free “WP Plugins”.

I’ve looked at thousands of WP Designs over the last 2 years and I gathered a short list of the best designs I’ve discovered. This is the criteria I used to make the list:

  • The site has to be visually stunning.
  • The header and top part of the background have to wrap around and display below the top menu bar and the text area of the blog.
  • The footers and bottom part of the background have to wrap up around the bottom text area of the blog.
  • Any artistic deviation from standard menu bars and headings is greatly appreciated.
  • I give extra credit for moving images above the fold.

This is Matt Mullenweg‘s personal site. For anyone who does NOT know this is guy, he’s the founder and driving force behind WordPress.

This is one of Toronto designer Nick La‘s sites. Nick is one of the best Adobe Illustrator designers in the world today, and he has tons of over the top CSS tricks on the site, many of which I’ve been fortunate enough to adapt.

The Lifecruiser blog was designed by Leanne Wildermuth and it’s like looking at a painting with the functionality of a blog.

Tribal is a WP Theme by Carlos Aguaron at Gorilla Themes. It features a very artistic no scroll background and integrated MP3 player. Another nice feature… the area between content blocks is opaque and transparent. Very cool.

I don’t know who the designer was that made these but I’ll try and find out. If you’re looking for something in a WP Theme that’s super artistic and FREE, this place is like hitting the jackpot.

This is a Studio Press Theme done by KickStartMedia.org.  I think the owner is a super talented designer named John Flynn… and at one time he was on the StudioPress.com team with Brian Gardner. Anyway, his professional site is very cool and there’s a beautiful showcase to stroll through for ideas with some wow factor.

This is another Studio Press Theme. Not sure who did this one but it’s part of Brain Gardner’s showcase on Studio Press and its very creative.

The 3rd Studio Press example I put in my favorites list. This was created by Jeff Milone who is one of the moderators on the Studio Press support forum and an outstanding designer. This site was one of the sites that got me to switch to WordPress as my website framework of choice. The other was Brian Gardner’s original “Revolution” Theme.

This site is on almost every “Best WordPress Designs” list and it was done by Miguel Ripoll. When I look at the site I’m immediately hit by the artistic nature of the work. I’ve been using Photoshop professionally for 15 years but I’m more of a mechanic with style. This site was designed by an artist.

Filed Under: Featured, Learn About WordPress Tagged With: ,

Another New Portfolio Site

July 27, 2009 By

I just did a new online web portfolio based on a Flash template that I paid for, and I had a full range of comments from:

  • “that’s the best portfolio site I’ve ever seen” [from a professional SEO]
  • no comment on how professional it looked but got an “you’re an excellent photographer” [from a lead web designer]
  • “it looks like an amateur job all the way down to your color selection, I’d expect this from a grade school kid” [from a world class sports artist]
  • “nice – can you hook me up with one of those” [from another web designer / SEO who makes 3 new websites a week]

That’s about as widely distributed a set of comments I’ve had on anything I’ve done creatively in a while. I think it’s a stunning portfolio design to look at and the pictures are some of the best I’ve ever seen of NYC, but the message it’s trying to convey is lacking. I’m opting to nuke it and go with the recommendations of the sports artist. With all the years he’s been cranking out high end professional sites – 7 as a full timer.. I’ve got to go with his “look up while I giveyou this gut punch” analysis.  I can take it. You never learn unless you can crumble your design up and start over every once in a while.

I’m always looking at portfolio sites on the internet to get ideas. Here are a handful I’ve been to lately that were especially attractive:

  1. http://www.portfoliodesign.org/portfolio.html
  2. http://www.fuelyourcreativity.com/23-kick-ass-portfolio-designs/
  3. http://designm.ag/inspiration/101-awesome-portfolio-sites/
  4. http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/galleries/best-photographer-websites/
  5. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/26/50-beautiful-and-creative-portfolio-designs/
  6. http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2008/12/10-characteristics-of-excellent-portfolio-sites/
  7. http://www.sachagreif.com/16-great-portfolio/
  8. http://wphacks.com/50-best-free-wordpress-themes-gallery/

Filed Under: Featured, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: ,

SEO Big Game

July 26, 2009 By

I recently spent 30 hours designing and building a site for a client who was in a business genre that was ripe for SEO domination. None of the other top sites in the entire genre were optimized. There wasn’t a single decent SEO working any of the top 10 sites. This was like stumbling into a hidden valley – lost in time – where SEO Big Game was there waiting for me to just take it. My site went to # 1 for it’s primary keyword phrase on Google and Yahoo in 2 weeks flat using all white hat techniques and only a handful of backlinks with PR.

But the client I made this for had done millions of dollars in business a year just based on word of mouth, and despite my telling him over and over again about how much business this could generate, he was unimpressed. He just didn’t get it. He tried to low ball me twice on the price. Overnight I was taking the lion’s share of 6,000 potential hits a month on Google. Figuring my development time at the same rate my company bills me out at ($150 per hour), this speculative deal cost me $4,500 bucks in my time, and $200 bucks in images from Dreamstime. I fired him and took the loss while it was still below nightmare levels. Being liable to a client like that for anything could kill your SEO business. He’s a typical “mom and pop” who in this case happened to be leasing a warehouse you could fit a Home Depot in.

Lesson learned from this story: there are thousands of business genres out there that are prime targets for a good SEO to stroll in and take over. But after you’ve been at it for a while and you’ve been burnt by too many clients with a “mom and pop mentality”, don’t go near them. Drop them like a hot rock (as politely as you can) before you get burned.

Filed Under: Featured, Learn About SEO Tagged With:

The Mighty AllInTitle Google Advanced Operator

July 26, 2009 By

One way SEO’s gauge the competition for a particular keyword phrase is to use the Google advanced operator allintitle. I called this post “The Mighty AllInTitle” because in our SEO bag of tricks and tools, this is one of my favorite power tools. AllInTitle tells us how many pages that Google is aware of that use the keyword phrase you specify in the title of a web page. That’s a real good indicator of what you are competing against to get a Top 10 ranking.  Here’s an example:

This shows us that for the phrase:

NJ Diner

Google is telling us it is aware of 78,000 web pages that have those words in the title. They could be in any order and there could be more words but for sure at least those words are present in the meta title tag.  78,000 is a huge amount of competition.

When we look ar the SERP for

NJ Diner

we see Google report that it is aware of almost 27 million results for that phrase that are relevant in some way, more or less. Actually in this case, the 27 million answers are mostly hardly relevant. Many researchers looking at a results page will look at that “results” number and they assume it gives an indication of the competition for that page. It really does not give an indication of competition. That “result” number is an indication of:

  1. how frequently the Google main index has either one or more of the words in the database
  2. how many similar words Google sees in it’s database to one or more of the words in your search
  3. how many links or references Google sees in it’s database for one or more of the words.

When you add all those up it makes a number of debatable importance. I use the “results” number to get a ballpark estimate of popularity, but only if the number is near zero. If it’s near zero the chances are that you will also have nearly zero competition for the phrase revealed when you look at the allintitle.  SEO Maverick Corey Eulas told a crowd of search professionals during a New Jersey presentation in June, 2009 that he never uses that number for anything and it has no relevance to any optimization formulas.The main point he stresses is to make sure you don’t think that “result” number has any correlation to competition for the phrase you just searched.

Filed Under: Featured, Learn About SEO Tagged With: , ,

Can SEO Help Your Business?

July 4, 2009 By

In most cases the answer is a game winning cheer – YES !! Search Engine Optimization can get pages on your website ranking on the First Page of Google, Yahoo and Bing results. When you have a web page on “Page One” – or in other words – in the “Top 10″ search results for a particular phrase, prospects WILL click on your site and take a look.

I’ll do a case study on the Century Cafe and Bakery in NYC later but just for today let’s take a look at:

What was I facing trying to help this particular business with a custom web integrated with SEO?

This is a Chinese bakery in the center of Chinatown in New York City and the competition is fierce (in a friendly way). There are over 2 dozen Chinese Bakeries in the main Chinatown area, and most serve it up fresh, tasty, and cheap. Chinese Bakeries are actually one of New York’s hidden treasures… I was lucky to check out one in 1993 when a friend of mine from Hong Kong told me the best egg and ham sandwich on a fresh baked bun with a coffee in NY was under a dollar and only available in Chinatown. So the biggest Chinese Bakery was just like all the smaller ones in that it was  just a brick and mortar business with print advertising in local Chinese and English news papers. They survived on storefront and word of mouth advertising mostly so it was a level playing field fighting for new business from the biggest bakery to the tiniest one. I knew the family that operated the business after a while and I offered to build them an optimized website for free. Actually this was a classic “I’ll work for food project”. So back when I was not on a low carb diet and I could eat anything in the place, my kids and I tried about half of the items on their menu of 200 freshly made baked goods a day in exchange for 80 hours of work building and optimizing a website.

What measurements indicated SEO success for this medium sized business?

I used a lot of SEO techniques, all 100 % pure white hat legitimate and standard techniques, and I got them to rank #5 on Google for the phrase:

Manhattan bakery

Ranking is a solid indicator for SEO’s that their campaign is doing well or not doing well. Century Cafe was locked in at # 5 for the phrase in the Google main index for the first 7 months of 2009, and I never spent a single dime in internet marketing to get it there. By the way, there are 5,400 other webpages that Google reports that have the words “Manhattan Bakery” in their title. So Century Cafe got Google Page One, in the Top 10 rankings, in the # 5 position against a massive field of internet competitors for that lucrative and highly competitive phrase. And the rankings in themselves are great, but the real indicator to the business is the number of sales they make – compared against their investment to make those sales.

So did SEO actually help their business, did it help their bottom line?

In this case, SEO definitely increased the number of clients that walk in through the front door and made a purchase. The business owners know this because lots of new customers mentioned to them that they had a beautiful website and that was the reason they were able to find the place. It increased the number of phone orders where the client told them “I’m looking at a cake on your website and I’d like to order one with this message on it…”. And it got them more positive advertising exposure by getting them listed automatically in a lot of the popular food guides and food directories. So the rankings are great but the real end game for SEO is more sales for my client, and the Century Cafe scored big.

I work with 30 full time SEO’s and my boss is probably one of the top 100 SEO’s in the world today. Every single SEO and designer in my place told me the photo work and the photoshop work I did for that site was the best food imagery they had ever seen on the internet. My photograph of the “chocolate strawberry cake” is one of the most popular such photos in the world right now on Google images. And my “cloud building” is the most popular on Google images in that category as well. The site does about 4 GigaBytes in bandwidth traffic a month now, and most of it is actually people looking at those cake pictures that they can click on 3 times to make cherries take up the entire screen in high resolution. So I never made a dime directly on the project, but it was a great subject to cut my teeth on as a demo site for what SEO can do for a business with zero dollars in investment toward the internet marketing effort. If the operators of the bakery wanted to go higher in the rankings, there are a lot more things I would be able to do for them in terms of their SEO campaign if I had some funding. We will get into that in a later post.

Cheers -

Filed Under: Featured, Learn About SEO Tagged With: ,

Is Microsoft’s Bing.com Search Engine Significant?

June 9, 2009 By

My answer to that is some No and also some Yes!

Bing.com, for those who are not as up to the minute with technology as they might be… is the new front end interface for doing internet search using Microsoft instead of using Google or Yahoo. It’s brand new, it looks great, and it’s got a ton of options that look like a Hong Kong knock off version of Google. Although Matt Cutt’s may have uncovered some search results on Bing that were incredibly un-relevant, I’ve found it to yield pretty good search results so far… much better than Yahoo and not as good as Google I’d say. So YES… Bing is truly significant !!! I thought immediately when I hear about Bing that MS failed in their aggressive bid to buy Yahoo, so they put 800 programmers to work and build a better SE to prove to the world they weren’t loosers.

That being said, the bottom line is that only about 5% of the world’s Search Engine searches are done with Microsoft and about 85% are done with Google so the other answer is: NO, Bing is NOT significant in terms of it’s impact to the world’s internet search demands.Even so, this SE has a real chance of doubling the numebr of searches the world trusts it to in the future.

I’ve always loved big high resolution photos weaved nicely into a web design and I have to admit, the photos that change frequently on Bing are incorporated beautifully into the front end and some are particularly stunning.

Filed Under: Featured, Learn About SEO
«Older Posts