Image ALT Tags

Easily avoid one of the most common mistakes in website accessibilty and SEO optimization by including an ALT tag on all images.

<img src="image.jpg" alt="I describe the image" />

Read more about ALT tags.

Notepad++ 5.6 Released

The newest version of Notepad++ has been released. Changes include:

Notepad++ v5.6 new features and fixed bugs (from v5.5.1) :

1. Add languages encoding – Chinese traditional (BIG5), Chinese Simplified (GB2312), Japanese (Shift JIS), Korean (EUC), Thai (TIS-620), Hebrew (iso-8859-8), Hebrew (1255), Central European (1250), Cyrillic (1251), Cyrillic (KOI8-U), Cyrillic (KOI8-R), Cyrillic (Mac), Western [...]

Embed Google Calendar on your website

Embedding Google Calendar onto your website is a great way to quickly setup an attractive and interactive events calendar. Watch this video on how to do it:

PHP 5.3 and MySQLi Prepared Statements

There seems to be an issue with PHP 5.3 and MySQLi Prepared Statements. The procedural code I wrote works fine in 5.2.x, but once I upgraded to 5.3, the results were bizzare. It would pull about 20-50 characters from the field, duplicate the last several characters over and over again (in and around the div [...]

Michigan State University Ranks Top 3 in Web Accessibilty

This is a huge honor as I was part of the committee responsible for drafting and implementing the latest Web Accessibility Standards for MSU, and was the lead developer for the Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities website.
Read the article here

Proximity Matters with Users

Build your site and write your copy with the focus of connecting to your users geographically. Whether you reinforce or create the illusion you operate nearby, the results can lead to more sales.
Source – JIAD: Does Place Matter When Shopping Online? Perceptions of Similarity and Familiarity as Indicators of Psychological Distance

Element Design Quick Tips

A new feature that will be immediately added to the blog are “Quick Tips”. These are short, several sentence articles that describe an important aspect of designing and developing a website. For a full listing of tips, click “Quick Tips” on the right navigation.

JIAD Case Study – Scalability & Speed

“The Journal of Interactive Advertising (JIAD) is a refereed online publication designed to promote our understanding of interactive advertising, marketing, and communication in a networked world.”

The original site was extremely difficult to maintain. Changing one word on the navigation meant changing that same word on well over 100 files. The only way to edit articles [...]

META Keywords do not matter

I briefly discussed keywords and how they do not effect rankings in my previous post, “The Truth about SEO”. Google has recently verified this in their blog, and has brought up some good points to consider.
First, watch this video on an explanation on why they have chosen to ignore keywords:

Is it even worth having META [...]

Top 10 User Experience Myths

While redesigning the user interface for a web application I’m developing, I ran into a great article that talked about the Top 10 UX Myths. It points out a lot of common mistakes developers should avoid making.