Fat Models

On the subject of penalistation for duplicate content. Google says ….

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

So there you go. If you want to read more about this subject check out the official blog post (that I have partly duplicated!) here … http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

Very nice article on how to improve the performance of custom routes in the Zend Framework.

If you use ‘em, read this…

http://blog.fedecarg.com/2008/07/15/improving-the-performance-of-zend_controller/

Userfocus

• who are the target audiences (not everyone, prioritise)
• expectations between client and agency (red wont work for our user because … problems not solutions)
• clients resposiblity to highlight issues and ours to provide solutions

Inormation Architecture

• ensure content is grouped for user not internal structures

Goals

• why does client have a website?
• what do you want it do do for you
• whats the business goals? (increase sales, sales leads, quality of lead is important – encourage high quality leads not just leads)
• measurement, success criteria, whats the best way to measure success – something to aim for, not a hard and fast rule. Outside indfluences can affect goals.

Previous versions

• what works on current site and why – is something popular distracting from the main goal
• what’s the top 3 issues
• ask what most important content is on the site can you get rid of anything?

Other Sites

• cover competitor sites, what do you like?
• focus on areas that differentiate sites, should client differentiate from others of use convention eg. marketing speak or plain english

USP’s

• why do people do stuff on this site
• calls to action
• strategic goals or changes in direction coming up (rebranding)?

General

• branding Corporate ID constraints,
• tech constraints, hosting, legacy systems may need to integrate with
• assets (content, images) who does what
• what is expected of client and when?
• timescales, milestones, project management
• contracts, payment terms
• support expectations

Just in case I forget…

proftpd

PassivePorts 49152 65534

iptables

-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp –dport 49152:65534 -j ACCEPT

restart both services

I recently had a meeting with a very interesting chap regarding SEO for a website I am working on. We talked about the general SEO stuff -h1’s, meta-descriptions, page titles and robot fodder, as well as link building strategies.

I must admint SEO is not my favourite subject but it is clearly a must for any website looking to make an impact on the web. I’ve known this for a long time and have always practised good SEO when coding websites – tableless design, separation of presentation and html code, semantic use of tags, etc. and had some good results. Localisation seems to be an easy win when choosing key phrases which has been fine for the smaller sites with local target audiences but it’s not going to work for the larger national/international companies.

Link building strategies seem to be the next step in gaining better ranking for a site in all the major search engines.

Link velocity is the relationship between the number of inbound links you have and the time it has taken for those links to appear. The way to achieve this is through mind numbing work, trawling through the relevant directories and adding links, finding overseas (non-competitive) competitors and linking with them and not forgetting the social bookmarking sites. Get yourself registered on them and add links to your site. If you can do this in a short period of time you will increase your link velocity and be picked up on Google’s radar.

Blogs are a really good way to increase your SERP’s too. You may have to invest time and money into creating great content but it will reward you. Either pay a journalist to create the content for you on a regular basis, maybe find a recent graduate with a grasp of the English language or even write the content yourself. The idea is that sites will want to link to your content. This is known as Link Baiting.

If you can do all of this and maintain it you will see a marked improvement in your rank.

Thanks to Cass for this valuable insight.

Great Presentation by Paul Boag about how to get design sign off. Some really useful insights as to how Headscape does it. Makes a lot of sense.

http://headscape.co.uk/head/

A superb collection of skateboard graphics complied by Chris Spooner.

http://vectortuts.com/designing/30-cool-vector-illustrated-skateboard-decks/

After searching for a long time I still couldn’t find any tutorials on how to set up my directories and code to enable a nice tidy logical folder structure that contains each module of a larger application.

The standard (non-modular) structure is as follows.

web_root/
    application/
        controllers/
        views/
            scripts/
        models/
    library/
    htdocs/

To use a modular structure is actually very simple.
Create a ‘modules’ directory under the ‘application’ directory.
You guessed it – place all your module directories here. In each module directory is a standard MVC structure that you would normally see below the ‘application’ dir.

For example say you had a public area and an admin area. This is how it might look.

web_root/
    application/
        modules/
            admin/
                controllers/
                views/
                    scripts/
                models/
            guest/
                controllers/
                views/
                    scripts/
                models/

    library/
    htdocs/

This can be extended for as many modules as you wish.

You now need to declare where the modules are located to your scripts. There are a few ways to achieve this, but by far the easiest is to add one line of code to the bootstrap file.

$front->addModuleDirectory('/web_root/application/modules');

Thats it, unless you are using Zend_Layout which I plan to cover in part two of this tutorial.
For more information look in the Zend Framework Manual.

If Cobain could have used photoshop…

http://psdtuts.com/tutorials-effects/50-dirty-filthy-grunge-photoshop-effects/

Useful little app that creates repeatable background patterns.
Change colour, image, canvas texture and view on the website before downloading.

http://www.bgpatterns.com/