Intro and Splash Pages
The worst thing you could do is to have a Flash splash page and inside the flash object there is the enter link. This mean, the each engine spiders can not access the enter link inside the flash object. Therefore, your splash page with the flash object will be the only page the search engine spiders will index and not the other pages.

It is okay if you don’t care about search engines indexing your content, but for the rest of us this is the biggest mistake anyone can do with SEO. Your homepage is likely the highest ranking page of the entire site. Why put any splash page there? There is no use for splash pages, unless you want the users to have the options to select which language they prefer, but other than that I don’t see any good use of a splash page.

According to a recent poll, 12 000 web designers were asked “Do you think web designers required SEO?” 84% voted YES, 7% voted NO, and 9% don’t know anything about SEO. If you are among the 9% of the web designers that don’t know what SEO is, then this article will try to explain some of the basic things about SEO. This article will explain the do and don’t about SEO. Also the common mistakes made by many web designers and web developers.

Why you need to know about SEO?
1. SEO is not only for online web marketers. Web designers or the front-end web developers are responsible for SEO and how to setup web pages for SEO.

2. You probably lose a lot of traffic and visitors if your site is not search engines friendly. Keep in mind most people use search engines to search the internet, if your site is not search engines friendly, which mean you’re not listed on search engines high enough for people to find your site.

3. Also having SEO knowledge is a very valuable asset. You can sell your SEO knowledge to your clients.

Drop shadows are a great and easy way to add some depth on your images. Especially you can add drop shadows with css, which you don’t have to spend time adding any drop shadows using Photoshop and export them out as .jpg. If you don’t like your drop shadows or for some reason want to remove them, you can easily use css to remove the drop shadows or modify it to your liking with only one css file.

Ok, usually it is pretty straight forward if you just have a regular anchor link like this one.

1. The link code:

<a href=”#myLink”>Link</a>

<a name=”myLink”>Anchor</a>

But what if you have your link as an input form and you want to add the anchor link like this one below.

<input type=”submit” onmouseover=”this.style.cursor=’pointer’” id=”write-review” value=”My Button” />

<a name=”reviewhere” id=”reviewhere”></a>

Then add onclick=”location.href=’#reviewhere’”

<input type=”submit” onmouseover=”this.style.cursor=’pointer’” id=”write-review” value=”My Button” onclick=”location.href=’#reviewhere’”; />

I was wondering the other day why my search button doesn’t have a mouse over effect. It should change the pointer into a hand when you hover over my search box. It is showing only for IE but not in FireFox.

This is what I have before and you can see when the cursor is right over the html input search button and it doesn’t change the cursor.

<input type=”submit” onmouseover=”this.style.cursor=’hand’” id=”searchsubmit” value=”Search” />

Here is the solution html code below. You need to change hand to pointer (as per W3C standard). It work both on IE and FireFox.

<input type=”submit” onmouseover=”this.style.cursor=’pointer’” id=”searchsubmit” value=”Search” />

This is how it look now.

The demand for good web design is increasing, revealed a recent Webcopyplus online poll. Almost 25% of web users indicated “poor visual presentation” as the number one element that drives them away from websites. Only 6.6% of web users who participated in a similar 2007 online poll indicated “poor visual presentation” as the main reason to abandon a website. That equates to a 267% increase during the two-year period.

Our web content specialists believe the increased desire for quality design comes from the fact that Internet users have become increasingly sophisticated. Consequently, more of today’s Internet users understand that a well designed website makes it possible to achieve more, with less time and effort. A total of 318 web users were asked what’s most likely to drive them away from a website.

I’m not going to each step by step, I am assuming you know the basics. If you don’t understand any of the steps, write a question below and I’ll try to answer to you asap.

Before you proceed, I am using phpmyadmin, and a ftp software. Ask your web host provider if you need help finding them.

Also, I am currently using HostGator.com as a reference. If you want a good performance, reliable and affordable web host. Go with HostGator.com I have used many web host companies in the past and HostGator.com is the best. I had been with them for over 2 years now. If you are considering switching web host provider please help me out by clicking on the link and sign up with HostGator.com you can’t go wrong. They have everything you need and more. It will be your last web host you will ever have to move to. ( it is for me )

Ok, enough of the promo lets get going.

1. First, you will need to backup your database by using phpmyadmin to export your database. If you don’t know how to use phpmyadmin, then check out this post I made Backup your wordpress database and follow the link in that post.

2. Once you have backup your database the next step is to backup all your other files for the front end. Files like the php, css, html, gif, jpg, video files, pretty much all the files you see on your ftp.

3. When you have the database and all the front end files backup in your hard drive. It’s time to upload them to your new web host.

4. Go to your domain registration web site and change the domain DNS to match your new web host provider DNS. If you don’t know this, ask your new web hosting provider.

5. Now you will need to add your domain to the new web host so you can use their ftp to upload all your files to the correct folder. You will also need to create a new database on the new web host and import your Wordpress database to it. Again you will need to use the phpmyadim on your new web host to import back the database.

6. When you have all the files upload to your new web host and the database imported to your database using phpmyadmin. You will have to change this file “wp-config.php” by using your ftp. It should be on your root folder. You will need to match your database name, database user name and the database password.

I hope that make sense… if not leave me a comment below..

Well, I got my hard drive back today and I need to partition it. I tried installing PartitionMagic 8 but I am using Vista 64 bit and I was getting some errors. There is another way to go about partitioning the hard drive without any third party software if you have Vista Ultimate 64 bit. Not sure if they have this on other versions, but you can try and post a comment here to tell us if other vista is working for you.

Here is how I partition my hard drive with Vista 64 bit. Follow the steps below:

Start>Settings>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management(Local)

Look for the drive you want to partition and right click on it. There should be a list of stuff you can do.

You can also change the drive’s letter by right clicking on the drive and go to “change drive letter and path”

The Cascading Style Sheets are made up of 2 parts, the selector and the declaration.

The selector comes first and it describes the element on the page that is going to be control through this rule.

In the image below you will see the selector which will control all the h1 in the current document.

Next to the selector you will see the declaration. The declaration are contain in between these curly brackets { } which tells the browsers that all properties inside { } should be apply to the element identify as the selector (in this example h1 selector)

Inside the declaration we have the property and values. Notice they are separated by : and ends with ; this tell the browsers to move to the next property if there are any available.

In this example, our rule will take all the h1 and make them all Arial with the font size at 1.4em and the color will be white.

You can use Dreamweaver to do this for you, or if you want and you have memorialize all the selector and declaration you can always hand code them.

Find more info on Cascading Style Sheets Structure and Rules with the text links below.

CSS stand for Cascading Style Sheets. A CSS style is a collection of formatting attribute that is use to style an element on a page. A style sheet is a collection of these styles that can either apply on a single page on a site, or multiple pages on a site or the entire site.

Understanding some of the basic rules of CSS can make you write more efficient styles and help you manage more efficiently with your website.

If you already know the style in word or Indesign you already know about how style work. If you want the header to look a certain way and have a certain color, you will only need to change the style of that header and it will change that header style in the entire site. No need to change each header one by one. Modifying that one style of the header will change all the headings of the site.

You can easily modify the look and feel of an entire site with one file. By having your CSS in one file and linking all your pages to this single CSS file. You an easily modify the look and feel of your entire site with one file.

There are 3 ways to place the styles. You can either place the style on a external file and linking all your pages to that single file. Or you can go ahead and embed those styles on the page itself. Lastly, you can place an inline style on the element..inline style are not recommended but sometime it is use.

As a general rule, inline style with overwrite embed style, and embed style which will overwrite external style.

I would recommend all of your pages linking to a single external style and you can easily open that one file to change the look and feel of the entire website.

Find more info on “Understand Style Sheets” click on the text links below.