Hungerford Web Design Blog

Firstly I would like to make sure we are all singing from the same page. What is a breadcrumb?

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Breadcrumbs are a navigational trail. It shows users what category or section of your site they are in as well as an easy way to traverse your site.

The usefulness of breadcrumbs can vary. On a small site with 5 pages I would argue that they are not particularly useful. On a site with many sections or areas of information they can be invaluable.

Why are they useful?

From an SEO point of view they can be extremely useful for ensuring that your category areas are listed as well as the actual page. From the point of view of an accessible user with sight difficulties they can give context to your page where images are not available (likewise for users with text-only browsers). Additionally they are often preferred over static menu bars.

The simplest way to implement a breadcrumb system is from the ground up. All sections of your site are within their own directory. For a car sales site this would be similar to the following:

index.html
/carsales/
/carsales/index.html
/carsales/carsforsale.html
/carsales/carssold.html
/servicing/
/servicing/index.html
/servicing/prices.html
/servicing/booking.html

etc etc.

In this example our breadcrumb would look like this if we were on the servicing page:
Home > Servicing
If we then looked at the prices page it would look as follows::
Home > Servicing > Prices
If our user then wanted to navigate from the prices page back to the main serving page they would simply click the “servicing” link between Home and Prices.

Doing this manually can take some time……my next post will be a way of automating this so that the links are created dynamically. For a huge site, automating it can make a big difference. If your site is fairly small you may wish to just manually create the breadcrumb trail. To see an example of breadcrumbs you can view our main site: Hungerford Web Design

Technorati Tags: Blog, Breadcrumb Trail, Car Sales, Carsforsale, Category Areas, Firstly, Images, Point Of View, Sight Difficulties, Static Menu, Web Design

You may (for whatever reason) store particularly sensitive information in your webspace. Passwords, links, and anything else.

You may want to be able to access these files by FTP for example, but do not want someone stumbling across them and being able to read or use them. Here we will deny external access to those files using a .htaccess file.

You will require that your server has the mod_access module installed for these rules to work.

In our example, we have a password file stored in /home/username/www/passwords/my-passwords.psswd

We create a .htaccess file (that is “DOT”htaccess) and within it:

<Files ~ “\.psswd$”>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>

Save the file and upload it to the directory holding the files you wish to protect (in our case /home/username/www/passwords/ )

Simple

Technorati Tags: Access Files, Directory, Dot, Htaccess File, Lt, Password File, Passwords, Upload

Ever since folders and pages were concieved, people have asked which is best. Do I want http://www.hungerfordwebdesign.com/ or http://www.hungerfordwebdesign.com/index.php ?

Well, the truth is that it doesn’t really matter. What matters most is that anyone linking to you is using the same link all of the time. Therefore search engines which crawl these sites will always index your site in the same way and thereby increase your presence.

There are a number of ways of achieving this, you can use your htaccess as follows:

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Technorati Tags: Base Url, Consistency, Ditch, Folders, Header Location, Htaccess, Index Page, Index Php, Lt, Presence, Request Uri, Search Engines, Server Request, Truth, Url Header

A number of questions SHOULD be asked when attempting to produce a good SEO portfolio for your site. I have listed some of them here to help:

Q:Do I need a third party consultant/company?
A: This really is dependant on either your existing knowledge about SEO, your funds and how quickly you would like results. If you do decide that SEO really isn’t an area of expertise for you then it really is best to find a professional to complete the work. Make sure they really know what they are doing though or you will be wasting your money. Some of the other questions here should help you.

Q: What is pagerank and do I need to worry about it?
A: PageRank is an algorithm (mathematical equation) used by Google to represent the importance of a page and its content. Google uses this algorythm as a factor when deciding how to place your site within its index. A number of factors can affect your search engine ranking and pagerank is a significant one (but not the be all and end all).

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Technorati Tags: Algorithm, Algorythm, Concensus, Consultant Company, Google, High Quality, Keywords, Mathematical Equation, Meta Tags, Party Consultant, People, Portfolio, Questionable Content, Search Engine Positioning, Search Engine Ranking, SEO, Third Party, Time Effort, Wasting Your Money, What Is Pagerank

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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Technorati Tags: Anger, Creator Tool, Credentials, Directory Structure, Document Root, Documentroot, Fi, Htaccess File, Htaccess Htpasswd, Htpasswd Creator, New Location, Password Protect, Password Protected Directory, Passwords, Prying Eyes, Quotes, Server Path, Shell, Wordpress, Www Domain

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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Technorati Tags: Blank Image, Cdata, Coordinates, Div Id, Div Style, Google, Google Maps, Googlemap, Gpoint, Html Source, Http Www Google Com, Image Src, Img Src, Png, Rough Guide, Script Src, Script Type, Style Font, Text Javascript, Www Google

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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Technorati Tags: Background Color, Color Cccccc, Css File, Element, External Css, File Extensions, Li Class, Liking, Lt, Navigation System, Padding, Personal View, Php File, Style Sheet, Tabs, Text Decoration, Ul

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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Technorati Tags: Animated Versions, Bmp, Browser Address Bar, Favicon, Favorites Icon, Fireworks, Header Bar, Hosting Provider, Html Kit, Ico File, Image Editor, Image Package, Link Rel, Lt, Mspaint, Paintshop, Px, Quality Image, Shortcut Icon, Web Browser

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

Technorati Tags: Blog, Decade, Design Toolbox, Design Web, Mciver, Open Source Web, Open Source Web Development, Open Web, People Development, Templates, Tools, Vitality, Web Design

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.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Content Updates, Google, Search Engines, SEO, Statistics