Articles by Gerald Hanks

Gerald Hanks has been involved in web development applications since 1996. He has designed applications with JavaScript, ASP.NET and PHP, as well as building databases in MS SQL Server and MySQL. He lives in Houston, Texas.

SEO and Web Development: Pros and Cons of Sitemap.xml

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...

SEO and Web Development: 5 HTML5 Tags for SEO

The advent of HTML5 has created a new set of opportunities for web developers and site architects. The new system has also forced those unfamiliar with its origins to reassess how they view their site design, especially when it comes to questions of search engine optimization. How will HTML5 interact with the current search engine spiders, such as Googlebot and Bing, and how will those crawlers evolve in this dynamic environment? New Content Tags ... One of the biggest new features in HTML5 is the new...
SEO

Along Came a Spider: SEO and Links

Most of the popular web search engines prioritize the sites that they index by two major criteria: content and links. The indexable content (i.e. content viewable in the source code) gives the search engine spiders material which they can store in their databases and sort according to relevance. The links within a site guide the spiders throughout the site's architecture. In many instances, web developers ignore the importance of links in creating a site that will bring them search engine results...

SEO, HTML and Web Site Architecture

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...

SEO and Javascript: DO’s and DON’Ts

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...

PHP Error Checking

“Just when you think you've made something foolproof, God makes a better brand of fool.” This maxim of manufacturing also applies to software development, especially on a highly accessible technology like web applications. As much as programmers attempt to anticipate every possible action or combination of actions that a user can take when encountering a web application, no one can foresee them all. When the user takes an unanticipated course of action and “breaks” the application, the...

Common PHP File Upload Restrictions

From family photos to business documents, file uploads power many of the major web applications. A typical HTML form that allows the user to upload a file may look like this: <html> <body> <form action="upload_file.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> File Name: <input type="file" name="file" id="file" />  <br /> <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" /> </form> </body> </html> In this case, the...
PHP

5 PHP Security Measures

For many years, PHP has been a stable, inexpensive platform on which to operate web-based applications. Like most web-based platforms, PHP is vulnerable to external attacks. Developers, database architects and system administrators should take precautions before deploying PHP applications to a live server. Most of these techniques can be accomplished with a few lines of code or a slight adjustment to the application settings. #5: Manage Setup Scripts ... If the developer has installed a set...
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