Chicago Web Developer

In the middle of the week, my good friend Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney, blogged that SEO has no future. He believes that personalized data will be more important, especially from the toolbar, user history, and analytics data. Social voting is becoming more important, and he explains that his sitelinks are the most trafficked pages on his site. Well, the SEO community did not really want to hear that, so there have been at least three individual posts on Sphinn about it. Marketing Pilgrim writer Greg Howlett says that search engines are getting too smart and that search engines won’t want to reward companies for playing SEO games. In one rebuttal, Ian Lurie talks about how SEO really does have a future. Smart SEO makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site. It helps create a long term content strategy. It keeps good businesses out of trouble. It ensures the discoverability of content on your site. SEO isn’t about looking for loopholes but for keeping search engines happy. In another response, Michael Gray also says that SEO has a future. SEO will have to clean up the mess of visual elements, especially flash and other technologies that are not search-engine friendly. SEOs have to explain viral marketing, content creation, and more. SEO is here to stay, he says, and there’s nothing that anyone can say to stop that. In a third response, Taylor Pratt says that SEO will exist as long as search engines exist. He says that while search engines are smart, SEOs are smart too and can work alongside search engines. On one hand, forum members think that this is a great thing to start saying because then there will be less competition as newbie SEOs don’t actually participate in SEO. Others say that SEO is not going to die but become more important, especially as big companies start partnering up with SEO firms and consultants for work.
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Any person familiar with the internet and using it in day today life is aware of the effects of search engine optimization to an extent. The companies that are serious in marketing a product or service online can not neglect the importance of Search Engine Optimization or SEO services. As the world is shrinking and is becoming a small place to live in, the consumers have an option to use products and services offered by the manufactures of other country. This has led to a situation where more number of consumers looks for the product and services on the internet. More and more companies are using search engine optimization, as it is among the most effective tool online that can help them to boost their sales to higher extent. The common opinion of experts states that SEO will soon become a matter of survival for every company if practiced in the right manner. SEO is an effective process by which superior amount traffic to your website can be generated by the way of improving your company’s ranking on the various search engines. The accurate return on investment of the SEO services is actually incalculable because SEO is very time-dependent. The methods of SEO are countless and SEO experts have the depth knowledge on the methods that would improve the search engine ranking as each website requires different work to receive triumphant ranking. These experts are able to help you to receive a superior sum of target web traffic at your site.

Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS teaches web development from scratch, without assuming any previous knowledge of HTML, CSS or web development techniques. This book introduces you to HTML and CSS as you follow along with the author, step-by-step, to build a fully functional web site from the ground up. However, unlike countless other “learn web design” books, this title concentrates on modern, best-practice techniques from the very beginning, which means you’ll get it right the first time. The web sites you’ll build will: Look good on a PC, Mac or Linux computer  Render correctly whether your visitors are using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, or Safari Use web standards so your sites will be fast loading and easy to maintain you’ll be equipped with enough knowledge to set out on your first projects as a professional web developer, or you can simply use the knowledge you’ve gained to create attractive, functional, usable and accessible sites for personal use.

Browsing through the list of ISP’s on the hellkom website looking for something specific, I found at least 20% broken / blocked / “access denied” links, and a further 30% super-pathetic websites! Have you seen how many sites are there with crap website. I mean, who in their right minds put a PDF on the internet and think it’s a website? Or put all their products & services in a PDF document? Even worse are those sites which look like some kinder garden websites, but they try and sell professional services? And my favourate of all time, a bank who wants to sell ISP services??? FNB is now officially an ISP as well, selling broadband services. Common people, stick to what you do best, and keep your info on topic.  And please DELETE the funky javascript effects, irretating music, and funky flash animations. You waste internet bandwidth, and loose customers. TEST your websites in ALL 5 popular web browsers, Internet Explorer (YES, it is a web browser), Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Netscape.  P.S. If you recentyl discover Microsoft Frontpage Homesite, or even Microsoft Publisher on a CD, then you should switch off your PC right now, and toss it in the bin. Frontpage, Homesite, MS Publisher (especially) and such programs are NOT good web development programs. Nor is Word or Powerpoint.

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Nobody’s perfect, not even the best designers out there can claim perfection even as we fawn over their immaculate and beautiful design and code. Even for the design elite there’s always those few things we wish we could do better. So, what’s your flaw? What do you think you need to work on? What elements in your design/code process do you wish you could do just a little bit better? And once you’ve defined that problem, how do you think you can make it better? For each side of the web development process I want to improve one thing. From the design side, I want to broaden my “color imagination” and on the coding side I want to improve the readability of my source code for myself and other users.

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A few years ago if you wanted to develop a web application all you could do was build a classic synchronous web application using plain old ASP.NET, JSP or PHP depending on which camp you were in. Then along came Ajax and Web 2.0 and changed the landscape. In my last post, I touched on some of technologies that make today such an exciting time to be an Internet developer. On the software-side, AJAX has so far been the primary reason for this, but Silverlight and Adobe AIR are blurring the lines even further. On the infrastructure-side, broadband and faster hardware have been the main catalysts, but access to cheap and reliable server-side computing resources such as Amazon’s S3 and EC2 are giving application developers unprecedented ability to scale elegantly. Throw in to the mix innovative web services from the likes of Google and Flickr and we have a wondefully-rich array of tools and technologies to build web applications with. Now, I’d like to list some types of interesting options for types of applications and tools in this new landscape and point out some interesting developments and trends along the way. If you’re a developer or entrepreneur looking for ideas for your next project (like I am), perhaps this will give you some options you may not have considered.
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The Internet is the biggest source of online trade and commerce that has revolutionized business activities across the globe. It helps in easy transactions which enables direct access to both service providers and clients for effective exchange of goods and services. The Internet is a great virtual medium that helps both buyers and sellers in interacting with each other. Therefore, it is very important to create a website that helps a company in showcasing its products and services properly. A well made site will help an organization in providing crucial information to its clients in an easy manner. So, web development becomes an important part of web site design. It is only through this medium that an efficient and informative website is made. In order to make good websites, it becomes very important at the part of web site developer that it is created and designed professionally with accurate details. In order to improve your business, it is very important to hire professional ecommerce web development experts as they will be deft at their work. Currently, the web development industry is a burgeoning one and is growing at fast pace. With the dot-com revolution, this phenomenon has turned into a popular mass media tool.

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I ran across this downloadable and printable SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet today, and I’d suggest you make yourself a copy and keep it somewhere close by. The cheat sheet covers many of the important rules and best practices for SEO web development, which includes:

* Important SEO HTML Tags
* Search Engine Indexing Limits
* Recommended Title Tag Syntax
* Common Canonical Homepage Issues
* 301 Redirects for Apache
* Important Search Engine Robots
* Robots Meta Tag
* Common Robot Traps
* Robots.txt Syntax
* Sitemap Syntax

If you hire someone to do web development for you, you may want to pass this list on to them. Making sure your site is built properly can make a night and day difference in your search engine rankings, so do what you can to make sure things are built right in the first place.

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There have always been do-it-yourselfers succeeding at web promotion and search engine optimization. In fact, many of the established businesses offering web services today came from humble beginnings, perhaps nothing more than a college student with a laptop, an internet connection, and too much free time. The Web evolves as the result of the innovation and experimentation of individuals. The sharing of knowledge. The do-it-yourself attitude. As text link brokers and mass link networking decrease in value and use in social media increases, it becomes more important for companies to have an internal approach and awareness of search engine marketing. Don’t get me wrong; outsourcing to SEO firms is still a smart option. That said, making the most out of Web 2.0 usually requires some level of cooperation between SEO firm and site owner. You don’t need to be an expert to know the basics of good SEO practices, and that added knowledge will be a great advantage whether you’re working along side an SEO team, or promoting your own site in your spare time. So if you’re on a “need to know” basis with SEO, the following points should illustrate what an overall plan should include:
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Even if most people will tell you “it’s an oversaturated business, don’t bother anymore”, let’s try for a second to plan such business. Even if there are so many web hosting firms around and so many services to chose from, why not try it? It’s a tough niche, but with some work and dedication you might make it really work. I have thought about this possible business too and, even if I just sell hosting to my web design clients and not work on this as a standalone business, there were some ideas that crossed my mind. I won’t be a hosting provider only because it’s not my dream niche, but allow me to offer some advice and maybe some hints I have thought about all these months.

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