Posts Tagged ‘Rants’
Combatting misinformation in web design
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
I received an email from a client recently, informing me that they have hired someone to redevelop their entire website in php, as they have been informed by their SEO company that ColdFusion is ‘bad for search engines’.
Frankly, I think it’s astounding that any SEO company could make such an assertion, anyone in the industry would immediately understand just how ridiculous this statement is – but unfortunaty our clients are not experts and can only make their decisions based on the advice they receive from the people who claim to be. My clients in this case have made an informed choice, based on patently false information…
So I’d like to state definitively: ColdFusion has nothing whatsoever to do with SEO… Neither does php, asp, ruby, python, perl, or in fact any back end language at all…
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Tags: ColdFusion, Rants, SEO
Posted in ColdFusion, General, SEO, Website Development | 6 Comments »
Pixels vs. Ems – my proverbial 2 cents
Friday, June 19th, 2009
A wise man once said: “A moving target is not so easy to hit”.
At least, I think that’s what he said. He was running past me rather quickly at the time.
As a conscientious web developer, I aim to create clean & accessible code, using currently accepted best practices. Unfortunately no-one can seem to agree on what those best practices might be and in any case they keep changing, so it’s difficult to keep up.
Tags: best practice, css, Rants, website
Posted in General, Website Development | Comments Off on Pixels vs. Ems – my proverbial 2 cents
Where do they find the time?!
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
I love working in the web industry. As a relatively new technology, only really gaining worldwide popularity in the last decade, the web is an industry that’s literally inventing itself on a daily basis. There are some astoundingly smart people out there, developing the web, shaping its future and working tirelessly to improve and innovate. What you know today could be outdated tomorrow… it’s nothing short of thrilling.
It’s not hard to see which people are at the forefront, making a difference and shaping the industry. Flick through any web magazine and the same names pop up again and again. These same people are to be found speaking at conferences, advising on panels, writing thought provoking articles on their own blogs and, in a great many cases, writing books to share their expertise with the world.
My question is this: Where do they find the time?!
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Tags: Rants
Posted in General | 2 Comments »
The uncomfortable truth about SEO
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
Let me preface this by saying that I’m not an SEO professional. I don’t work for an SEO company and I don’t charge for SEO in any way. But I have been developing websites for a long time, and in that time I’ve been involved in a lot of SEO projects. I’ve had sites at the top of Google, and I’ve had sites blacklisted. I’ve been shafted by black-hat SEO companies, and I’ve employed black-hat techniques myself. I’ve witnessed the rise of CPC advertising, I saw the demise of ‘Top-Pile’, and I’ve voted for the ‘president of the internet‘… In short, I’ve learned a few things…
Having just had a conversation with yet another ‘SEO consultancy’, I’m simply amazed that there are still people out there disseminating these crackpot ideas of what SEO is. That clients of mine, unsuspecting business owners with little or no knowledge of the intricacies of SEO, are still parting with inordinate, over-inflated lumps of cash to these cowboy companies for a service they don’t understand, and are therefore unable to accurately gauge the effectiveness of, simply angers me.
So here, in an attempt to enlighten as well as entertain, is my compendium of uncomfortable truths about the world of SEO in 2009.
Tags: Rants, SEO
Posted in SEO, Website Development | 4 Comments »