Do you enjoy reading mission statements?
How about “welcome to our website” headlines? Photos of jigsaw puzzles and handshakes?
No?
That’s weird, because according to the vast majority of small business websites out there, this stuff is the friggin cat’s pajamas. Why would anybody publish pages this way, if nobody likes it?
Because they failed, that’s why. And if you don’t want to fail too, here are ten things you probably shouldn’t do on your website.
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I used to write the worst code in the world.
It was sloppy, bloated and choked search engine crawlers like a boney chicken sandwich.
Then I learned the right way to use CSS. I learned it from Andy Budd, Simon Collison and Cameron Moll in a phenomenal book called CSS Mastery that should be on every front-end developer’s bookshelf.
That’s my copy looking well-worn from years of use.
Here’s the thing: search engines love clean code. When you give it to them your websites tend to rank better.
But if you learned how to build websites with tables and <font> tags chances are your code isn’t clean. Your pages are probably overloaded with extraneous crap that search crawlers don’t need or want.
Using CSS properly gets all of your presentational code out of the way so search crawlers can focus on what they want: your content. It’s also from an SEO standpoint in various other ways.
Here are seven ways you can use CSS to improve your search rankings.
The problems Flash creates for SEO are well-documented. I covered the topic in April.
Less-often discussed are the numerous reasons, other than SEO, that building a website with Flash is the lame sauce.
Web development projects can get expensive. There’s a lot at work behind a website. Hamsters on wheels, gnomes keeping the coal fires burning, which create steam, which turn the turbines…you get the idea.
But if you arm yourself with the right information, and take the right approach, you could stand to trim your costs down significantly.
Before you pick a developer and sign on the dotted line (right beneath the small print about your first born and burning in the fires of hell and all that) you’ll want to consider the factors that will contribute to the overall cost of your project and beyond.
There’s more to consider than the up-front price you’ve been quoted. Here are 7 ways to save:
I started as a Flash designer in high school (circa 1998). I thought Flash was possibly the coolest thing in the world (and at the time it just might have been).
I would show people websites like www.GaboCorp.com and www.Eye4U.com any chance I got – and they blew people away. They’re still pretty impressive. My own stuff? Well, let’s just say I soon realized that my strengths lie in other areas.
When it’s done well Flash can be jaw-dropping. It also powers many of the sites we use every day (YouTube.com, Hulu.com, Mint.com, etc). Without Flash the web wouldn’t be nearly as great as it is.
But Flash can create some real problems for your website’s search engine visibility. If you’re considering having your business website built in Flash there are a few things you need to know.