I was pretty impressed to reach the 200 blog post milestone, delighted to reach 300 blog posts and today celebrate our 400th post milestone.
It takes time, effort and dedication to write regularly but is worth the reward! What better way to start a Monday morning in St Louis.
2009 © St Louis Web Designer
Web design and web development are two completely different jobs required to produce a web site. To someone looking to hire a company to create their web site this can be confusing.
What does a web designer do?
Web design is an art. A web designer is responsible for creating the look and feel of a web site, creating an intuitive navigational tool, laying out the copy and images and producing an overall look which is appealing and engages the user. A web designer needs to understand how to create design elements to influence the user, whether to get them to fill out a form and share their information, or lead them effortlessly through the checkout process of an e commerce site. Typically a web designer will use Adobe Photoshop.
What does a web developer do?
Web development is technical. A web developer will take the file produced by the web designer and render it in a form that can be understood by web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari etc. They do this by coding it. Basic web sites require just HTML and CSS with maybe some snippets of PHP and java. More complicated sites, such as dynamically driven e commerce ones, require more advance coding languages.
The crossover
Many web designer are also web developers, which is the case here at Indigo Image. There are various level of web development from basic to advanced and we are capable of handling intermediate requirements. However for projects requiring advance development we collaborate with a local St Louis web development company.
2009 © St Louis Web Designer
I always try to go the extra mile for my clients and one one contacted me today asking if I knew anyone who would be interested in buyer his server I thought this blog would be a great place to advertise it. Here are the details.
Dell PowerEdge 840 Server w/RD 1000 Internal Back Up Device.
Technical Spec
Dual Core 3060 Processor, 4MB Cache, 2.4GHz, Xeon, 1066MHz FSB for PowerEdge 840
4GB DDR2, 667MHZ, 4x1G, Dual Ranked DIMMs
250GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive (Qty 2)
SAS 5IR internal RAID adapter PCI-Express
Hot Plug Add-in SAS5iR (SATA/SAS Controller) which supports 2 Hard Drives- RAID 1
Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 R2 with SP2 Standard Edition
CD-ROM, 680MB,48X, INTERNAL
RD1000 Internal SATA Back-Up Drive
Asking price: $1,350.
Contact me if you are interested and I will put you in touch with my client.
2009 © St Louis Web Designer
Here is the St Louis Web designer’s plug of the week.
Hotshots is currently collecting requested items to send to our boys and girls overseas.
Where: Any Hotshots Location, bulk donation taken at the Fenton location
What: Snacks & Entertainment items are always the #1 request. See the Hotshots web site for full list
2009 © St Louis Web Designer
Over the weekend I cleaned out some business paper work and came across a registered $1 bill I’d been meaning to register on www.WheresGeorge.com.
It will get spent today >> follow my dollar bill
On the whole I love the applications offered by Google but they have recently launched one that stops me in my tracks and makes me ask “why?”. I am talking about Google Sidewiki.
Google Sidewiki can be downloaded with Google tool bar and enables anyone with a Google profile (if you use gmail you have one) to write comments on any web page they visit. The results of anyone who has commented on the page show up in a sidebar which is layered above the page.
Google has essentially introduced a comments forum for every web site on the internet. You can gets comments on your site for the whole world to see whether you like it or not.
As the owner of a Google Validated site (which is achieved using Google Webmaster tools) you get the chance to have “first say” with a comment which will always feature as the first post. But as far as being able to control what visitors see in the Sidewiki, the buck stops there. As a webmaster there is no easy option to turn off the Sidewiki and no functionality to moderate the comments. If you get a spam or a detrimental comment there appears to be be very little you can do about it. Also there is no functionality to let webmasters know they have new comments. The only way to find out is to visit each and every page of your site. How useful is that?
I have put in a complaint to Google and hope that if they continue with Sidewiki they address these problems soon.
© 2009 St Louis Web Designer
I have been using Twitter on a regular basis for nearly 7 months now, the results of my experiment started back in April are ready to be published! In that time I have tweeted 315 times and amassed 343 followers and followed 442 tweeters. Not huge numbers but I belong to the quality vs quantity school of thought.
Here are the questions I asked myself at the start
All in all it has been a successful experiment and I will continue to use Twitter. Be warned though, if you tweet about the weather, what you are eating for lunch, or start tweeting philosophical quotes, I am very likely to “unfollow”. If you are interested in following me click stlwebdesign
Looking for an easy way to make some additional revenue from your web site? Try Google AdSense.
A small snippet of code placed on your web site will generate Goggle ads earning you revenue based on a cost per click or cost per impression basis. You can fine tune the look and feel of the ads to compliment your site, have control over the size and shape and even block competitors ads from appearing on your pages. It is completely FREE .
Is Adsense right for your website? Here are a few things to consider
I have a couple of personal site with pretty high traffic and excellent rankings on the search engines that are a perfect platform to display Google ads. The ads were configured to compliment their color schemes and feature prominently at the top of each site without being too intrusive. They provide a steady stream of revenue.
I recently wrote a post titled ” Has your website content been stolen” after a client discovered another website owner was using her copy. I did a quick check on Indigo Image, using the tools I described in my post, and found that not one but two two web design companies were using chunks of my copy.
I contacted both companies and pointed out my areas of concern asking them to change their copy. After two days I hadn’t heard back from either it seemed they were both taking the “lets bury my head in the sand approach and hope this goes away”. I contacted their hosting companies and made a copyright infringement complaint. Both companies, Bravenet and Bluehost, took my complaint very seriously. My issues were run through their legal departments. The end result, both offending web design companies have had their sites suspended.
©Indigo Image 2009 at the bottom of each page of the web site is there for a reason. Everything from the design and copy is copyrighted material and can’t be used in any form by someone else unless they have authorization to do so.
Have you checked your web site recently? Is your web site copy being used by someone else?
Last week a client contacted me with news that she had discovered a web site that was using her web copy. It was a site offering the same type of service and operating in the same geographic area. Not good news.
I suggested she contact the site owner to point out the obvious copyright issues. After an initial acknowledgment and a promise to fix things the site owner is now refusing to make any changes.
Turning to an attorney is the next step but I have also suggested contacting the hosting company of the offending web site and making a copyright infringement complaint. I took this approach many years ago when copy and images ( even code) from this web site were taken. The hosting company suspended the infringing site very quickly which paved the way for immediate discussions and a solution.
My customer’s experience has spurred me to to a little research on our own web site today and low and behold I have discovered a web design company who have stolen huge chunks of our copy. They have been contacted and ask to amend the site and I have put in a copyright infringement complaint with their hosting provider.
Here is a list of resources that can be useful in these sort of cases.
www.whois.net
Useful for details of the domain name registrar and hosting provider
www.copyscape.com
Search for copies of your page on the web. Has a premium service
www.plagiarismchecker.com
Free service to check for plagiarism, simple enter your URL
www.archive.org
The way back machine. Useful for establishing timelines
www.google.com/dmca.html
Notify Google of the infringement – must be done via snail mail or fax
