Don’t Overlook Hosting
Mark,on the topic of  Business, Marketing, Project Management, Tools, Usability, Web Development
12.02.2011   |   1comment

I have seen the overlooking hosting problem over and over as the years have gone by, but was recently reminded of this. The first time I saw this problem was when we worked on a project with a local marketing firm for a company that has a fairly large National brand that sells their product heavily during the holiday season. The marketing firm we were working with recommended a $5/month “unlimited” hosting solution to the client, despite our arguments against it, after they had just paid top dollar for a premium website.

Here’s what happened. Every Saturday morning for a month the site shut down. When we called the hosting company, we were put on hold to talk with someone, like that credit card commercial where the man says “This is Peggy.” We were told there was an out of control script running. After multiple weekends we finally got them to tell us what the script was. It was the index.php file which is their homepage. So apparently the hosting company promised unlimited hosting, but had a cap on CPU usage and when people came in droves to the site on the weekend to get information on their product, it shut the site down. We’ve seen this over and over with only slight variations to the story. continue reading “Don’t Overlook Hosting”

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SEO – Know Your Competition
Master Sensei,on the topic of  Business, Marketing, Tools, Web Development
03.12.2010   |   0comment

Editors Note: Quintin Smith is the Business Development Manger at White Label SEO and has been kind enough to write a post for Code Greene on his specialty – SEO.

SEO is an interesting process. We here at White Label SEO would like to talk about how important SEO is to your overall success of your website. We would like to thank Code Greene for this opportunity to post a message about SEO to their blog. Thanks Code Greene! One quick word on Code Greene. We have dealt with numerous web developing firms and Code Greene is one of the best. Thanks guys!

So how do you work on optimizing your site. There are a lot of things that need to be done. How is your content? Is your content keyword rich? Are you putting links in the proper places of your site etc? All of this is important, but when it comes to starting a successful campaign you need to know YOUR COMPETITION! At White Label SEO we evaluate your competitors. Why is this? Well, for a few reasons. First, your competition might be large. You may have a lot of competitors that have been doing SEO for awhile so it is important to know who it is and what kind of traffic they are receiving and what keywords they are using. This is all important information to know when it comes to keyword selection and the success of your website. Research your competitors. Once you understand what your competition is doing you can start to build your keyword list that you otherwise may not have chosen if you haven’t looked at your competitors.

Search Engine Optimization is not like PPC. The results are not instant. It takes time and work to get in the top SERP of the engines. Knowing your competitors will help you gauge your success and help you determine your goals. The greatest way to turn an ROI on your site is through organic SEO. So you need to expect to spend a good amount of investment on your own developing your site and creating a web page that people want to link to. This is just a quick start for people that need to gain some insight on SEO. Know who you are up against and build your site and SEO campaign based off that knowledge. We wish you the best of luck in your efforts of climbing to the top of the search engines.

Quintin Smith – White Label SEO
For SEO Services, please contact Quintin and quintin@whitelabelseo.com

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Sharpening the Blades: Styling Forms, Problem with Passwords and HTML5 in IE9
Master Sensei,on the topic of  Browsers, Business, jQuery, Marketing, Tools, Usability, Web Development
03.05.2010   |   1comment

This edition of Sharpening the Blades features an article from Mike about using jQuery, CSS and image sprites to create stylish forms, an article from Benjam about Passwords on the web and Mark chimes in with an article about the possibility of HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9.

Mike, Get your form on with Uniformuniform
We’ve all been there. You finish an amazing design using some sweet custom form elements that perfectly match the theme of your design. Then after a few frustrating attempts, you realize that some form elements just can’t be styled. Or if they can, not consistently. So you throw on a border, maybe a background image, and hope for the best as dreams of your custom UI vanish into nothingness. But fear not! Using the clever jQuery script Uniform and some CSS sprites, your form designs can once more be glorious! Works beautifully in all major browsers (degrades gracefully in IE6).

Benjam, The Problem with Passwordspasswords
Being in the Web Development industry for a while now, and having had a few third-party scripts that were on my site hacked, I have become more and more interested in web security.  Passwords are on the front lines to that.  Being a user of Web technologies, I’m also interested in usability and choice, and when it comes to showing or hiding passwords (what? you can do that?) I’m in the boat of give the user the choice.  This article nicely explains a few examples that offer people the choice to show or hide their passwords, both of which are very useful.

Mark, Microsoft to Double Down on HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9internetexplorer
Doubling down seems like the wrong approach to me. If I were the CEO at Microsoft I would instead of thinking of trying to put their foot down harder, they should instead learn to bend in the winds of the market and work on compliance with the other browsers. Though I hate to say it even forced upgrades like Firefox does would be good, to keep people current and reduce the amount of cross browsers compatibility problems Microsoft gives developers. I don’t think Microsoft realizes that by making developers lives bad by trying to be different they are actually building up a mass market of developers who hate them because it is so difficult to make cross compatibility easy and affordable.

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Sharpening the Blades: Tricking out WordPress, Designers who can’t code and Content Management
Master Sensei,on the topic of  Business, Marketing, News, Tools, Usability, Web Development, WordPress
02.19.2010   |   0comment

This weeks edition features an article about customizing WordPress for beginners, designers who can’t code their own designs and the best way to handle content management systems for sites that matter.

Chad, The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blogtrickingoutwordpress
I liked this post/entry about WP because it was built and geared for the beginner. Once you installed it now what. I find these type of articles interesting because sometimes they are just so simple that I don’t even think of them. And it helps me to explain or think of other things that I feel our clients may want or need.

Mike, Web Designer’s Who Can’t Codedesignerswhocantcode
Twitter exploded in a debate this week when Elliot Jay Stocks boldly tweeted:

“Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.”

The world is full of talented designers trained in a wide array of media, but just like other mediums, the web offers its own constraints and limitations. Knowing how to code definitely gives you an edge, even if you don’t code the site yourself. Image resolution, measurements, typography, and browser discrepancies all play a role in what is possible, and help determine the collective best practices of the web. So does a good architect need to know how to dry wall? Maybe not. What about a fundamental understanding of construction and engineering? Absolutely. How much does a good web designer need to know about their craft in order to build a successful website? What do you think?

Mac, Content Management for Sites that Mattercontentmanagementforsitesthatmatter
I liked this article because it gets right at the core of the cost/benefit trade-off that many people don’t think enough about when building their web site. Either there’s a significant value to the work you’re doing on your site, which justifies spending some money on it and getting it done right, or there isn’t a significant value to your site, so why bother? I don’t 100% agree with them about the WYSIWIG comments, but I’ve never tried to tell a client to assume it would look identical in TinyMCE and on the public site. We’ve generally had to train them to be very careful to keep it simple. Use bold if you want, make some lists, paragraphs, links, and stuff like that, but don’t try and do anything funky or you’ll end up disappointed. Another annoying thing about TinyMCE is that even when you tweak the HTML manually in their HTML view, it often wants to “automatically fix” some of the things you did. I was trying to leave a <br /> or two between a couple of separate lists if I remember right, and it kept either taking it completely out, or turning into a paragraph, constantly leaving too much or too little whitespace, even though the HTML I manually entered would display exactly how I intended.

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