Heh, just see a link on digg to a footwear company running a competition where you link to them, and fill in a form on their web site for chance to win 1 pair of Nike trainers each year for the next 10 years.

Hmm, sounds like paid links to me.  Effectively anyway.  They actually suggest you put the link code at the bottom or your site (i.e. the footer) and even give you the link code and text to use!

Now companies are always using competitions for things like data collection etc…  But this seems straight out of the SEO dept.

I wonder if you would be excluded from the competition if you stuck a no follow on it

I’ve been wondering recently about how to describe coding styles when talking about (X)HTML/CSS.
By styles, I mean seperating out those who still have a heavy reliance on table heavy code as opposed to those who on the most part avoid tables for layout, and have a good udnerstanding of CSS for positioning etc…

The problem being that I’m not going to take a black and white approach of, if it has tables it’s rubbish, or, it’s only good if it vaidates.

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OK, 2nd attempt at this post, I tried it a week or so ago, and Wordpress completely ballsed up my <>’s and I lost the post, so, here we go again…

A question I’ve seen asked more than a few times over the last few years relates to how best to write and structure a pages/sites title tags. Often it’s looked at from the SEO point of view, and trying to make the most of the importance Search Engines give it.
There is a bit more to it that I would add, yes you want to optimise it for good ranking, but it’s also a highly visible piece of content when people do see it listed in the results pages.

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A comment ALL web site owners should think about in relation to their web site, as part of a discussion at Cre8asite in Persuasion Architecture and the Art of Agreement for Website Success

Historically site design (and content) decisions have been made to satisfy the marketer’s view of how they should present themselves. Recently some people have decided to make decisions to please the Algo’s above all else. I think WFYCTB challenges us to make these decisions as if we’re trying to please only the visitor - which we should be!

If you try and force people to interact with you in the way you decide only, then you could be missing out on a great deal of business. Different people do thing differently, some of them don’t care for your marketing speak, or your branding. They just want a good service they can use and which enables them to achieve their goals. Which may mean they need it to work differently to the way you force them to use it.

In the years I’ve been learning and practising web design, I’ve always thought about making a site ‘effective’.

Over time, I think my idea on what constitutes an effective site has changed and been refined, so I thought I’d document the kinds of things that make a site ‘good’.

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I heard a bit about the Google Press day the other day, and I have Matt Cutts blog posting marked to read over, as well Search Engine Watch’s coverage and links to browse across when I have time.

As I was scanning them though, I spotted a link to news.com’s coverage. Now it seems, unfortunately, that Google’s wireless network had problems on the day. However, Elinor Mills seems to think that was a particularly important part of the day, and felt the need to gripe about it. So, she spent the day at Google, and the most interesting thing she could thihnk to write about for her readers was about the wireless network being down?!

The Recent posts section doesn’t suggest she’s written anything more about the day. So well done Elinor, either you have a badly designed blog and I’m missing your other posts on the day, or you’ve spent a whole day at Google and come away with it with a moany story about their wireless being down (which from my point of view, with a tech support history is pretty typical).

Was that the best she could find to moan about? Or was Google’s press day really that bad?
From my previous experiences with cnet journalism, I’m guessing they just completely missed the real value of the day and completely mis-reported it….

Andy Clarke has left a nice reminder for people to think when they [URL=http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/semantics_and_design.html]seperate too much into the CSS[/url].
He talks about code semantics, and being careful of removing meaning from code, in order to use CSS to style it instead.

His main example of often styling the first paragraph of a section to highlight it is good. If you want to highlight content like that, it should be highlighted whether the CSS is rendered or not. There should be some integral part of the markup saying “this content is a bit more important”.

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Trick is perhaps a strong word for it, but I picked up on a nice technique recently that has helped a great deal in the positioning of certain elements. I can’t remember exactly where I read it, it may have been A List Apart, but if anyone can remind me, I’ll happily update this post

Now, the technique, basically it involved using position:absolute, but being able to have a bit more control of it inside a page.

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I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with a ‘CMS’ recently. I struggle to call it a CMS, because it’s actually more than that, it’s also a full development platform, the idea being, that people should be able to create sites in it, and update them without a huge amount of technicial ability.

The problem is, it seems to me, that it’d be as quick to learn HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL and build you’re own, as it would to learn the systems quirks and how to actually develop in it.

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