Hungerford Web Design Blog

It’s officially one month since this blog started. So far we have:

• Displayed over 3.5 thousand pages to nearly 900 unique visitors.
• Recieved an average of 30-50 unique visitors per day
• Written over 30 unique posts (roughly 1 per day) within 16 categories
• Deleted 46 spam comments
• Had 92 pages listed in google
• Had 22 Articles submitted to Digg with a total of 44 diggs (Although I must say that these figures are fudged as I tend to submit my own articles to make it easier to digg them).

It may sound a bit stupid but I am really proud of these achievements that have happened in just one month. Lets hope the trend of 0-900 visitors increases the same every month Although I’ll be the first to admit that I know they wont.

As always, if there is anything you would like to see me write about or any tool you would like to see developed then please drop me a line.

here’s to many happy months of blogging

The scenario is that you have a group of files within a folder that you want to password protect. You want to keep them secure from prying eyes.

I did write huge tutorial on this using the shell but then a)wordpress decided to have a fit and lose the work (que: Anger) and then I thought b) a lot of people may not have shell access and c) a lot of people probably don’t care so here is the short version using our .htpasswd creator tool.

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If you are new to apache and/or webservers, here are a couple of things in addition to our .htaccess tutorial which you may find of use. As always, please feel free to ask if anything is not clear or you would like any help.

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Want to add a map to your website? Show people where you are located or how to find your company?

The first thing you need to do is create the javascript. It is easier to keep it in a separate file, so create a file called “mygooglemap.js”. Then use the following javascript as a rough guide:
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Simple CSS tabs:

It started with the mac (let’s not get into that debate) but a lot of people are now used to using tabs and they are increasingly used to seperate content on websites.

My personal view is that they can actually clutter up a navigation system but some people like them so here you go…..

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You may have noticed that some sites you visit show an icon in the browser header bar, address bar and/or favorites when added. It’s a simple thing to do but suprisingly many people are not aware of how to achieve this.

If you want to see one in action you can go to www.hungerfordwebdesign.com homepage to see it in action (our icon is our branded “eye”).

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I got a nicely written (for a change) email today from Rich McIver from Designvitality.com.

Very unassuming and simply pointing me at a recent post of his providing a number of tools to aid people in new development of sites. I must be honest and say that some of the  the templates I personally wouldn’t promote but then I haven’t been new to development for a good decade so it may be me being miserable

Here is his link :Design Vitality - Open web design toolbox
Although this blog is for me to post a lot of my code/ideas/work we are doing in the company, I am happy to provide good quality links with a post in the hope that our general message is propagated.

Feel free to comment

Incoming (Inbound) links are our ‘bread and butter’. A popular and well regarded site which links to yours will do wonders for your listings.

Quality as well as quantity here. It’s no good having either 1 good link or 400 bad links from disreputable sites. As such I would advise staying away from anywhere which promises you hundreds of links from multiple sites the majority will probably not serve you well. It is something I have only just started to consider properly and so I will try to chart the methods and successes (or otherwise) I have.

Regular Content Updates

Google (and others) like websites which are regularly updated. It shows that your site has not simply been forgotten and left on the internet. It also shows that you are about your site. Update your site weekly (or more). This is where an integrated blog or news section can be really useful. Adding regular updates will see google coming back more and more to check out the changes you have made. SEO is partly about the number of pages you have listed (good quality pages that is) and so a blog can be a really useful addition to your site.

Keep an eye on the statistics for your site. They should tell you whether or not your changes are having an affect. Be patient though, changes can take days or even weeks to filter through to search engines. A number of tools which can be useful to you are linkeed to from this site.

Blogs/Blogging

A Blog (Weblog/Web Log) is a great communication tool. Visitors can be attracted through rich and informative content (you have arrived here haven’t you?). By linking to your site from your blog and visa versa, your traffic can be increased. This does rely on you and can be a hefty time investment if you want to do really well at it but the rewards can be great. If you creat a blog, consider registering with a number of the blog communities and rating sites such as digg, delicious and more.

RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a method of ordering and displaying articles. In SEO terms they are useful for retaining visitors (if 25% of your visitors subscribe to your blog RSS feed they will know as soon as you have added new content). Search engines and users alike will always have information on your latest post(s).