There are a few font's that I almost alway find myself using when it comes to WordPress themes, graphics or marketing materials. I tend to use them because they are clean, flexible, easy to read and alway enhance the end result. In no particular order they are: Open Sans Archive Bariol Blanch Nexa Print Clearly Manteka Open Sans ... Open Sans is a great font, it looks great in pretty much all media formats and comes in a range of different weights. I tend use it primarily for large blocks of text rather than...
When I first started playing around with websites in the late nineties (wow, I feel old now) there wasn't much in the way of choice for development IDE's, there was really only Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver. Being honest they weren't great, Dreamweaver's big claim to fame was that it generated cleaner html than FrontPage. Both where poor by today's standards, this was mainly because they where WYSIWYG editors, allowing even novices to create simple pages. When I went...
When designing the architecture and navigational structure of a web site, a sitemap can be extremely helpful. A sitemap can keep the navigation links organized by category, predict how any dynamic links will function, and keep the framework under control. Web developers are not the only parties involved in the process who can benefit from a well-structured sitemap. Many search engines, including Googlebot, can crawl through an XML file that contains the sitemap data to crawl and index the site's...
Speed. It’s an important factor in the recent Olympics, the Paralympics and even our day to day lives. Speed is also an important factor when it comes to Google. Their ethos concerns the provision of accurate, relevant search results delivered as quickly as possible to the user. To quote their Webmaster Guidelines: “Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Google's goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction...
With hundreds of millions of users entering hundreds of billions of queries into major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, the importance of designing a site to be search-engine friendly cannot be underestimated. However, even the most experienced designers and developers can make simple mistakes that can cost their site thousands of views and (potentially) uncounted revenues. HTML Issues ... Sometimes, the “old-fashioned” methods are still the most effective. While many SEO...
In part one of Baking a New Site With a Sprinkle of SEO, we covered some of the more important things a developer can do to help their sites find their way into the top positions of the search engines. This week, we look at more advanced steps you can take to really help catapult them up to the top. Advanced: canonical tags ... You may have heard about Google’s recent algorithm updates such as Panda and Penguin. Well, one of things Panda concerned its self about was not how much sugar cane it was getting,...
It doesn’t matter whether you’re an SEO, a developer, designer, information architect or any other myriad of digital based roles, we all want the same outcome; to do the best we possibly can for our websites. As an SEO myself, I’m interested in growing the performance of my client’s website in organic search. This is not something that I (or any other SEO for that matter!) can do single handed. We also rely on the skill of the web developer to implement and carry out our recommendations and technical...
In previous years, many of the major search engines were not fully equipped to read anything on a page aside from the text within the tags. Most of the “spiders” that “crawled” through web pages only viewed information at the most basic level. As technologies such as Javascript took over the web site design field, the search engine programmers found that their creepy-crawlies had to evolve in order to extract the most pertinent information from the sites they visited. Here are some DO's and...