This link was given to me from a fellow friend and web developer.
It is a group of videos and presentations regarding web development from speeding up JavaScript to completely changing the architecture of big web applications to run them more efficiently. This is taken from smashing magazine with an interesting video from the co-founder of reddit.
Seven Must See Videos and Presentations for Web App Developers
Just a quick post on anyone who is trying to learn asp.net at the moment.
the asp.net website offers video tutorials on how to implement a website using the asp.net framework. As you know at the moment I am learning asp.net to help me progress further in my career. I hope this helps anyone who is trying to learn the framework using either visualbasic.net or c#.
Although version 4.0 is out now there are new and improved way of doing things, even though some videos are quite old it will give you a better understanding on how it works.
Everyone knows that websites tend to display contact details, whether it is on a contact page or displayed at the top of the screen in a header.
These contact details normally contain an email address highlighted as a link. A custom made script, maybe a spider would crawl these sites and gather emails to sell to people at a price. Thus making money from your details.
Don’t you just hate it it when your website has a contact form and all you receive is email after email of advertising, porn web links and Viagra? Well I do anyway. While there are ways for your email client to filter the spam, there are ways to help dramatically reduce the spam sent through your contact form.
The problem is that automated scripts / users fill out forms advertising information which is considered garbage. While to us we do not take any notice but for them a link helps improve their site in search results or make money and even some cases spread viruses. It is a major problem that is not going away anytime soon.
The standard solution
Server side validation using a regular expression or validation routine checks for valid emails and to apply strict rules in the inquiry area. For example not allowing emails, web addresses. This depends on what information you are gathering from the form. This can be programmed in such languages such as ASP and PHP. This is basic practice but in conjunction with other methods this can be improved.
The client side
Probably the poorest form of validation is client side. This is mainly for the user using the form. Based on JavaScript this can easy be turned off by the user and automated scripts can easy bypass this method. This should be used in conjunction with server side validation and never use this on its own.
One of the issues which is greatly overlooked is SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Think of when it comes to releasing a product, you have your research, your production and your marketing. Think of SEO as the marketing side of your service / product.
So how do you optimise your already built product in this case your website? WordPress / 3rd parties offering tools / plug-ins which allows you to configure your website to allow optimisation on your website. This blog uses plug ins that allow pages to become SEO friendly to help boost SEO ranking performance.
It is important you also have a google webmasters account and any sort of analytics program, for this website I use google analytics to monitor my traffic. I also use it for a lot of sites I build. It is slightly more advanced than the typical stats type package but once you used it a few weeks you can get the hang of it.
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Alot is going around now that Google are now taking into consideration the speed of the website. While this has come to no surprise. While I agree that the speed of the website is important I do disagree that blaming the website is not always the case.
Looking into considerations I have made a list what could cause slowdown on the site.
With every web developer we tend to concentrate on one specific area especially when it comes to server side programming. But when first starting out we like to pick a language which is not to complex, easy to build upon and flexible.
Most new web developers tend to start with PHP, its easy to learn, it is free to host and a pretty reliable programming language which is getting slightly bloated now because of the constant changes. In this article I will be giving my options on two of the most popular server side languages open source PHP and Microsoft’s ASP.NET
Website structure is important for SEO. I find out a lot of people including myself is guily for not correctly structuring websites schematically. For SEO websites should contain h1, h2, p , strong and other elements to scructure a document. I am sure alot of people are guilty for this, including me applying h* tags to make text bigger.
I noticed an issue about one of our website rankings were dropping, we included lots of key text phrases, everything we thought had been done right and could not think of a way why our ranking were doing below average.
I looked at the structure, what was behind the scenes within the HTML language. As I found that the admin was using his updatable website to present all his text in h1 format. Thus givng priority over h2. So when google comes to check for keywords within the title tags it was seeing paragraphs of text with random works instead of just a few words which tells google the purpose of page.
While our site was great from a user point of view, schematically, it was very bad. I have found alot of people having this problem but it is easy to get sidetracked. Another issue is using strong tags on text for styling rather than emphasising. font-weight: bold and <strong> are very different regarding to structure.
There is one word to describe Google apps and that is Google Mail for your domain. Not onlyits a powerful source for managing your emails but it is also free (standard edition). While it is a little overkill for a one man band but when a small / medium business wants an email which can do almost everything, this is a service which is invaluable service.
I advise any small company to check out Google Apps as their primary email resource.
When it comes to designing everyone knows that not all designs convert to the web. I have experienced in the past where clients who are good designers like to create there own design for us to build. This helps reduce cost on their side because they already have a design in hand. But in a worse case scenario that is not always the case. On average a design from a client can take up to double the time to construct and here’s why……