Web Publishing: The Dark Side of SEO
Here’s a GREAT article about SEO. There are a lot of things to look out for, so educate yourself so that you dont waste a ton of money or get black listed by a search engine for bad practices.

Adobe has come out with a beta version of it’s latest Flash program. (Woo Hoo!)

Apparently they are making some pretty great tools availible to those of us wishing to put video on the web. Read More…

Web Services Policy Primer and Guidelines for Authors: Working Drafts
2007-08-10: The Web Services Policy Working Group released two updated Working Drafts. The Primer introduces the policy language and policy attachment mechanisms. The Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors provide best practices for creating policy assertions. Both are companions to the Web Services Policy 1.5 Framework and Attachment specifications.

This is the pilot post of World Wide Web Consortium updates.

The W3C makes the rules and standards that all good little web designers adhere to as best they can. I will be posting articles and links about news at the W3C weekly for you here to keep you up-to-date.

Here is the process to their structural implementations:

• A recommendation is made for standardizing some new technology that is becoming popular on the Web.
• Workshops begin to work on how to standardize the technology, and they come out with reports when they get close to a final set of rules about that technology and how, where, and what about it can be implemented into web pages. If you want to stay very up-to-date about the standards of HTML, SML, Mobile Web, Programs on the Web, and anything else that can have a standard structure that we all adhere to you need to follow what these people are up to.
• Once they are done they submit the final document of rules and standards to a vote.  three answers are permitted; Yes, Yes with revisions, and NO.
• Once the vote is Yes or Yes with revisions the document becomes public and you and I can go look at it and try our best to implement the things they recommend in our own web pages or those we create for others.

So, for the first post I will give you all the URL to the validation program on their web site:  http://validator.w3c.org/

This is a tool used to scan your web pages to see if they comply with HTML 4.01 standards. They have just recently come out with a new version which will actually help you correct or clean up your HTML to make it comply and point out other errors in your markup.

Why do we want to do this? Because the search engines work together with the W3C to help standardize all technologies on the web, and it is part of good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to comply with the rules as the search engines are forced to adhere to these same rules. Also, it promotes cross-browser compatibility for your site as browser companies such as Internet Explorer and FireFox are also forced to adhere to these rules as well.

• Here’s a great forum and educational website for developers and designers.
  http://www.webdeveloper.com/
• Vista users learn how to create a workgroup in the new Windows Meeting Space
  http://www.developer.com/net/net/article.php/3690051
• Meri Williams Talks about the importance and technique of time/project management for web “Geeks”
  http://www.sitepoint.com/article/project-management-web-geeks

Remember when Google had a Gold and Silver Search option that you could brand and use on your own site(s)?  It’s been gone for a few years now, and you could only get the search with Google ads on it.  Now you can buy Google Custom Search Business Edition and customize the search box to have your branding and get rid of those pesky Google Ads!

For a fee ($100 per year for 500 pages, and $500 for up to 50,000 pages) you can have your own search box for your website just by adding some scripting to your site.

The customers who had used the Gold and Silver Site Searches in the past have actually been transfered to this new product.

Follow the link below to read more about it on Google:

http://www.google.com/enterprise/csbe/#utm_source=cse_home

Website Design & Review
I came across a great tool for website designers today while surfing. This is a community website where you can post a site and have it peer reviewed. They have tips and tricks as well as a few tutorials. You, of course can review other sites as well, so you get to see what the competition is up to. This is a very active forum with lots going on. Looks like you could get some decent feedback in a short time here. There are guidelines for posting and for reviewing, and they have a proceedure for website designers who want to promote their services as well. I think with those things in place this community should be a really great resource for anyone designing a website, professional or otherwise.  http://www.graphic-design.com/Web/index.html

Thirteen years ago, in 1994, Yahoo! had just launched. Can you imagine the internet now without a major search engine like Yahoo! or Google to help? There is so much more content, so many more sites, and so much more stuff in general on the internet that we cannot get by without these tools now.

Most websites back then were text based, with no Flash, and virtually no plug-ins. They were an exchange of educational information only. Now you can see and buy almost anything on the web. With the advent of sites such as YouTube, MySpace, EBay, and Amazon the sky is the limit. Now we are no longer concerned with just text and FTP, we have a whole myriad of plug-ins to integrate to make a site truly great. So, while design standards such as clean lines, clear flow, and consistency have stayed the same, the back end has changed considerably. Chat rooms, Shopping Carts, Email Databases, games, videos, television and basically anything a good programmer can think up can go into the making of a site that users will feel happy using and returning to time and again. That’s a lot to think about!

So, good luck to all you surfers out there! There’s a lot of crap to wade through, but a ton of fun new and innovative things happening all the time.

[Some ideas in this article were taken from an article on BBC News. A Decade of Good Website Design by Mark Ward, Tuesday, 7 December 2004, with usability guru Dr. Jakob Nielsen for the BBC World Service Programme. To read more visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4061093.stm]

PC Media has just put the finishing touches on a project for Natural Slim. Natural Slim is a Spanish-language dietary weight loss website based in Puerto Rico. They are starting a television campaign in Puerto Rico to run a contest related to their service. PC Media was contracted to set up the form for contest entries as well as set up a database backend to hold all the entries and allow easy export to programs such as Excel. We built the system using PHP with a MySQL database backend. The form uses AJAX form validation.

Frank Suarez, the founder of Natural Slim, is a repeat customer of PC Media.

We have begun work on a new system for HardwareSecrets.com. The new system will be launched in the coming days on that website. I am keeping the details of what we are doing private at this time so as not to potentially step on anybody. It is, however, a customized library built into Miraserver. HardwareSecrets.com uses Miraserver as their content management system.

The project is fairly straight-forward and won’t take long.