Hungerford Web Design Blog

Page Titles

The title of your webpage(s) is absolutely critical in your goal for good Search Engine listings. The page title you choose is what you should expect to see in a search engine. Consider your page content and how the title best describes that content. Ensure you check the spelling of those titles and keep themshort to avoid truncation.

Avoid repeating titles

Something we are considering at the moment is the fact that page titles should not be the same across a site. We use includes a lot on our main site and I am currently writing a way of dynamically generating the page title from the navigation structure.

Titles exisiting in content

Ensure that the words within your page titles exist as keywords within your content. Think of your page like a book. If the title was “war” and the book was about cookery then you would probably feel that the title of the book was misleading. The same principles apply here.

Technorati Tags: Keywords, Navigation Structure, Page Content, Page Titles, Search Engine Listings, SEO, Spelling

Site Mapping

A map of your site (site map/sitemap) is crucial for both Search Engines and your users. It is basically a repository of your links which in one file can show everything you have to offer (again, for both engines and users).

We wrote a script to automatically create a visual sitemap for our users as well as an XML sitemap for google. You can do this manually though and it really isn’t a lot of work for most small to medium sized sites. For visual sitemaps simply consider your layout and check all of your links. For an XML sitemap, search “Google sitemaps” for the syntax.

We will post up our code in a day or two so you can steal it if you wish.

Technorati Tags: Google, Lot, Map Site, Repository, Search Engines, Search Google, SEO, Site Map, Sitemap Search, Sitemaps, Syntax, Visual Sitemap, Xml Sitemap

Everybody has to start somewhere. I remember trying to optimise my first site for search engines. It was a site I had written about 6 months before and I was pretty yound and very uninformed. I had written this site in one of the worst WYSIWYG site design programs ever (you can probably guess which) and even now I can remember just how difficult it was. Here are a few tips to start you on a journey considering Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization to those on the other side of the Atlantic).

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Technorati Tags: Google, Javascript Frames, Journey, Key Point, Optimization, Pita, Reason, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Robots, Search Engines, SEO, Single File, Source Code, Two Ways, Visual Component, Visually Impaired, Wysiwyg

Standards Compliance

This is a wider issue than just SEO. Writing compliant code can make sure that your site is accessible to those with impairment(s), your site is visible in a large number of browsers (including text browsers) and shows a level of commitment to quality for starters.

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Technorati Tags: Compliance, Correctness, Development Tools, Grammar, H3, Heading Tags, Incorrect Key, Laptop, Long Time, Markup, Paragraphs, Robots, Search Engines, SEO, Starters, Syntax Checker, Text Browsers, Typo, Validation Standards, Variations

An interesting concept….

An ebay-like online auction has been set up to enable security researchers (/hackers/coders/testers) to auction the defects they find to the highest bidder. By providing an incentive to the researchers the providers hope to prevent bugs getting into the wrong hands (russian crime syndicates and the like).

There is a proven market for vulnerabilites as shown by the Russian hackers selling the Windows WMF vulnerability for $3-5000 a pop. It was closed by Microsoft shortly after it was revealed that the details were being sold. The auction house is called WabiSabiLabi . They state that “Our intention is that the marketplace facility on WSLabi will enable researchers to get a fair price for their findings and ensure that they will no longer be forced to give them away for free or sell them to cyber-criminals”

I have to say (and this is only my opinion), I struggle to see this as being a method of responsible disclosure. To sell to the highest bidder shows no morality or true desire to be helping the vendors. It looks like a pretty good way for blackhats to make a few bucks and for the criminals to have an easy and reliable source of exploit.

An interesting concept and one which plenty of security professionals will probably be keeping an eye on one way or another.

Technorati Tags: Auction House, Blackhats, Bugs, Cyber Criminals, Disclosure, Ebay, Ebay Auction, Ebay Online, Highest Bidder, Intention, Morality, Online Auction, Russian Crime Syndicates, Russian Hackers, Security Professionals, Security Researchers, True Desire, Vulnerabilities, Vulnerability, Wrong Hands

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. In it’s simplest form, it allows you to seperate content from style. That is to say that all of your text “Welcome to my site” etc is totally seperate from the fonts, colours, sizes and heading tags.

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Technorati Tags: Benefit, Cascading Style Sheet, Colour Changes, Css File, Css Href, External Css, Fonts, Heading Tags, Link Rel, Lt, Mce, Personal Preference, Server Side, Simplest Form, Style Type, Stylesheet, Two Ways, Web Content, Welcome To My Site, Xhtml

Many people are now using either dedicated boxes or virtual dedicated hosting. Knowing your way around the filesystem and how to manipulate it is key to running a good, stable, secure service. It also makes takes as a website owner much easier and quicker.

Here is a list of common Linux and/or UNIX commands which may come in handy:

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Technorati Tags: Bz2, Cd Home, Change Directory, Cp Copy, Empty Directory, Files And Folders, Filesystem, Handy Files, Home Directory, How To Do Anything, Linux Unix, Mv, New Folder, Rf, Secure Service, Tar Gz, Tar Xvf, Tar Zxvf, Unix Commands, Website Owner

How do you begin your foray into web design? It’s a common question and one which (for me) is impossible. I started so young that I can’t recall it at all.

There are a number of programs you could use (and would use) but to start with, I would like to show the principles and for this you can use notepad/vi/pico/whatever you like.

Create a text file called mypage.html
Within that, typethe following:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<title>My First Page</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”my, first, xhtml,web, page, webpage” />
<meta name=”description” content=”This is my first XHTML page” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />
<meta name=”author” content=”MyName” />
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”en” />
</head>
<body>
<!–This is a comment and comments
do not show up in the browser –>
Here is my first XHTML page
</body>
</html>
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Technorati Tags: Author Content, Code Lt, Content Language, Content Type, Doctype, Foray, Head Tag, Html Xmlns, Information Tags, Iso 8859, Javascript Code, Language Content, Meta Tag, Notepad, Page Layout, Page Webpage, Search Engines, Text Html, W3c, Web Standard