Website Design
No Ethics for Web Designers and Developers!
I recently decided to put a code of ethics on my business website. Calling it “Our Pledge”, I thought it would be a quick task that involved a few Google and Yahoo! searches. I was very wrong.
You would think a code of ethics would be a simple matter. In 2008, I fully expected to find dozens of examples from which to emulate or follow. I could hardly find any, and the few I found were paltry and even laughable.
Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites
The following is Part One of a book review. You might want wonder why I’d break up something as seemingly trivial as a book review into two parts. Well, wonder no more. The reason is that I haven’t finished the book, but I already have enough to say for now. I’ll post part two of the review when I’m done. If you’re one of those “must know everything before buying a book” types, you might want to wait until part two. But my recommendation as of now is “buy, buy, buy”. This is an overview plus an in-depth review of Chapters 1 through 7.
Article Series - Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Small Businesses
- Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites
Ruby on Rails books for Sale
I’m no longer going to be pursuing the Ruby on Rails world. There are many reasons why and I’m not sure I want to elaborate here on all of them. At least not now. Not yet.
But you can profit from my loss. I’ve put up eight Ruby on Rails books for sale on eBay today. So, if you’ve been wanting to learn Ruby on Rails, this is your chance to do it for a very reasonable price. Starting bid is only 99 cents and there are nearly $300 of books (over 3,000 pages of material), so it’s going to be a great bargain for someone.
Google Analytics Script does not Validate in XHTML 1.0 Strict
Photo by .dan.Call me a standards fanatic, but I try (!) to keep a few of my websites pure and clean. Clean from bad code, that is. Being a web developer, it seems not only important for outward purposes (just in case anybody be spying on me code!), but I also learn a lot by holding myself to a higher standard.
“Blog” not in Dreamweaver CS3
The word “blog” is considered a misspelled word in Dreamweaver CS3. That is pretty stunning. Someone at Adobe needs to take a look into that little mishap. What year is this again?
Sticky Notes Finally Good for Something
I’ve always hated sticky notes. Scratch that. I think the real issue is that I dislike it when people use a lot of sticky notes. A sure sign of a disorganized person. Sticking out of magazines, plastered all over the monitor like some Victorian collar for LCD’s, and found on furniture. Ugh.
However, I have found one decent use for a sticky note. Finally. When you develop software, you are constantly wondering what version of a language or architecture you have installed in your machine. Do I have MySQL 5.0.37 or 5.0.36? I can never remember because like many web developers, something changes every month on my machine.
New Blog Design Coming
After having this design up for almost two years, I’m more than ready for a new design for this blog. And I’m hoping you’ll help me. With the amount of traffic I get, I feel I owe it to you just as much as I do myself.
For me, design isn’t just about a cool new look. I need to put some more function into this site as well. Let me share a bit about what I’m thinking.
The Design Wishlist
What makes a successful website?
I have conversations every day with people about what makes a successful website or blog? Often, these conversations are about potential websites that someone might want to build that are unrelated to an existing business. By this I mean that I’m not referring here to a website for an existing business, but a website for an “idea”.
And I consistently remind these idea-fiends that Content is King, as you hear quite often on the internet. But the “build it and they will come” mentality still exists out there. People are convinced that a good idea alone is somehow worth something. Maybe in 1998 it was. Or even in 2002. Not anymore.
phpBB.com Down for a Week and Counting…
No one in the blogosphere seems to have commented, that I’ve been able to find, about the mysterious shutdown of phpbb.com, which hosts the support forums for the popular open source software phpBB, a bulletin board server program (or forum software, as some call it).
Their website says the following:
Ouch! RAID array failure…
We’re sad to announce that during the switch of a failed harddisk to the hot-spare and the planned 2 hours required for the array to re-sync, we’ve been hit by an extremely unexpected double-disk failure which leaves us with a dead array.
Speeding up the Website
There are lots of things you can do to speed up a website. But that is a whole article in and of itself. For now, to make my blog more comfortable for my many new visitors, I removed some of my badges and third-party content on my sidebar. For now, this includes my Traineo badge that details how much weight I’m losing, my Amazon Wishlist, and my music listening profile on Last FM. They aren’t gone forever - you can still see them on my “About Lawrence” page.
Top 10 Reasons Small Businesses Need a Website
Wrote an article for another site of mine that I thought I’d share here. Sometimes a small business owner will think, even in 2006, that he or she does not need a website - at all. Here are ten very good reasons why that is never the case - assuming the goal of the business is to prosper and succeed.
“Nowadays a company without a Web site is in loser territory-out of touch.” - John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine columnist, June 5, 2006.
DiscussMarriage.com
For a thousand reasons that I’ll never be able to explain here, I started a forum called discussmarriage.com. I happen to know that there is going to be some interesting discussion going on, but some folks needed a forum, so I created one. There’s probably some other websites on the internet about marriage, dating, and divorce, but I don’t really know where they are - so I just made my own. Plus, mine will be hopefully, a little deeper than those other sites. But as I find them, I’ll link to them on discussmarriage.com so as they say, “All’s fair in love and war”. I have no idea what that means.
Dell sues Paul Dell for Dellwebsites.com
I read Michael Dell’s book when it came out. Mike is no slacker. But as it goes, I doubt he understands the irony of what he is doing to Paul Dell who is being sued by Dell Corporation for his domain name, dellwebsites.com. Paul has agreed to accept financial support from folks who don’t like the idea of what Michael Dell is doing. If another Dell, let’s say “Ahmed Dell” for fun, had a big company making websites 20 years ago, when Michael was in college tinkering with computers in his dorm room, and Michael started “Dell Computers” on the net and registered dellcomputers.com and dell.com, wouldn’t he have been just a little annoyed to have Ahmed come sue him? I would think that Michael, an entrepreneur at heart, wouldn’t be so quick to buy into the feudal system of corporate America.
