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.

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

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 solution

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.

Advanced spam checks

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Why SEO?

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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Schematically correct Markup and SEO

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.

What is Google Apps?

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.

At work I tend to be technical support to a lot of clients (though it is not my job), one of the main jobs is handling DNS entries. DNS or the Domain Name System is the structure for naming conventions for computers.  Since everything is addressed through IP addresses for every computer location it is important that we humans have some sort of understandable form in which the normal user can understand.

Anyway during my work as a web developer I find it really important to understand the terminology on managing websites especially if you run your own server. This covers the importance of A records, MX records, sub domain structure and zones.

Wikipedia is an excellent source of information regarding the DNS structure. which I advise any freelancer to look up because client will always come to you regarding domain transfers, emails not working and in a lot of cases a domain name is registered with someone completely different to the hosting.

We all know that populating a dropdown box manually if a task we all love to hate.
If anyone knows server side scripting this makes the task much more simpler.
For example creating a drop down box for months of the year as a select option would take a good ten minutes thats without the corrections.

Here is my solution……

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Your file structure is important for maintaining a clean working system.
How the w3c standard always say that a website structure should be in 3 parts.

• Information (XML)
• Layout (HTML)
• Design (CSS)

For me it is important to keep this information seperate, though XML is a bit more complicated we focus more on keeping design and information away from each other.

My website file structure…

Folders:
images
javascript
css
scripts / codebase
includes

All styles are included within the css stylesheet and code if possible is kept seperate. This is important to maintain code and help reduce repeating code.

Improving SEO and bringing traffic to your website is a tough task. As google does not deal much with classic SEO such as keyword, name titles, it is all about kink exchange, content and friendly URLs. So when starting out how do you drive this traffic?

In comes google adwords. While used to sell a service or product it can help improve ranking to give your site that extra boost. It is almost like paid advertising but with a twist. This can be done short term and long term.

if you do consider using adwords for SEO remember these key rules.

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On a developers computer it is important that we should be running some sort of developer enviroment. The main types of web server software consists of either Apache which is an open-source and free web server and the Mircrosoft IIS Web server. If you are really hardcore you probably run both along with MySQL and SQL Server. (using the term lightly).

My typical developing enviroment consists of…

WampServer (MySQL + PHP + Apache)
IIS 6.0 SQL Server Express 2008
HeidiSQL (MySQL GUI)
MultipleIE (browser testing)
FileZilla Client
Photoshop + Dreamweaver

Having your own web server saves alot of time when it comes to testing without having to upload pages online. IIS runs through port 8080 and Apache runs through port 80 so they do not conflict.

What is your setup?