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Webmaster Certification Newsletter October 2004
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Welcome
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Hello, and welcome to the October issue of the WebmasterCertification
Online Newsletter. Fall has finally started to make its presence known
here in Florida. We here at WebYoda survived the hurricanes that visited
our state over the past couple of months, and we are all hoping the rest
of the hurricane season will be quiet and uneventful for everyone.
Given our summer vacation from the newsletters, this month's issue
brings you some remedial work to get you back up to snuff on the basics,
information on browsers, an exciting announcement, Webmaster Resources,
and FAQs to help you find answers to your questions. We hope you find
something useful here.
In This Issue
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What's New
Webmaster Tip of the Month - Browsers
Remedial Web Design
FAQs
Webmaster Resources
Feedback
Spread the Word
Unsubscribe Instructions
What's New!
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WebmasterCertification.com is merging with WOW Academy to provide more
consistent Webmaster training. What this means to the students is more
support options directly from WOW and an easier WOW ACADEMY Web site to
use to find your classes and resources. On October 15, 2004
wowacademy.com and webmastercertification.com will look exactly the
same. If you want a preview, go to wowacademy.com and try it out. All of
your account information is in place at both locations, so you can use
which ever site you prefer.
With this merger we have also added a new discount level for purchasing
courses. You can now save 40% off your course purchases if you purchase
9 or more courses at once. If you have already purchased 6 or more
courses and would like to purchase others at 40% off, simply contact us
toll free at 1-877-web-yoda, and mention you saw this offer in the
newsletter.
Please give us your feedback on the new site, it is very important to us.
Webmaster Tip of the Month - Browsers
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As many of you heard about, or suffered from, more and more
vulnerabilities have been identified in Internet Explorer, and Microsoft
has not always gotten the patches out as quickly as security-minded
users would prefer. I read of one scheme this summer in which your
browser can be hijacked and you won't even realize it because part of
the hijacking involves putting up a graphic that overlays your address
bar. So unless you are very careful, and very observant, you don't even
realize that the site you are visiting is not in fact the site that
shows in the address bar because the address bar is only a graphic. Many
people have grown weary of the never-ending security issues and the
constant patches that are needed. Many people have begun to realize that
any type of mono-culture, like the monopoly of Internet Explorer, leaves us
terribly vulnerable because everyone is using the same software so everyone has
the same weaknesses. Some of the clients with whom I work, including
major universities, have opted to abandon Internet Explorer and utilize
alternative browsers. At the top of their list is Firefox, followed
closely by Mozilla.
You can read about both browsers at the web site:
http://www.mozilla.org/ They have recently
released version 1.7. Both Firefox and Mozilla are an open source browsers. This
does not mean they are not vulnerable to attacks and people trying to do
unpleasant things, what it does mean, however, is that if a vulnerability is found
there is an entire community of open source programmers
who can (and do) jump on the problem and get to fixing it right away.
That community also includes a number of people who make it their
business to try and find any vulnerabilities and get them taken care of
before they are found by someone who would wish to do damage.
I use Firefox and Mozilla almost exclusively and only use Internet
Explorer to check pages for look and functioning. They have become my
browser of choice for nearly everything I do online. They allow you to
quickly and easily set security settings for each specific site, allow
or disallow popups on a site-specific basis (very convenient if, for
example, your bank uses popups in the functioning
of their site), has tabbed windows so you can have several different
windows open at one time but there will only be one icon down in the
task bar, you can select from different looks and color schemes for the
interface, and they are both free. I have also just recently begun to
transition to the Mozilla email client - Thunderbird. To say I love it
would be an understatement.
Whether you download them to have another browser in which to check your
pages, to provide yourself a more secure and safe browser for your own
use, or just out of curiosity, I strongly recommend you download and
install either Firefox or Mozilla (or both). You may find that, like me,
you'll never want to go back to Internet Explorer.
Remedial Web Design
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Given the summer break from newsletters, I thought it might be
worthwhile to go over some basic information that you may have
forgotten, or perhaps just need to be reminded of to keep yourself
sharp. So here are some general points of interest, information, and
reminders for you to tuck away.
Did you know that all of the newsletters are available on the current
Webmaster Certification Online web site? There is a button on the left
that says Newsletters. Just click that and you will be presented with a
list of all of the newsletters back to the very first issue. You can
find all of the tips, articles, resources, questions, and everything
else. Bear in mind that some of the resources URLs may have changed
since the newsletter itself was published, so you may need to use a
search engine to locate the item or find if it is still available on the
ever-changing Internet.
When you design a site, make sure you use web safe colors. I am always
astonished when I take over a site that was originally designed by an ad
agency how often they use colors that are not web safe. They seem to
think in terms of print media rather than online media, and the color
palettes are definitely not the same. So often the client has never seen
the colors the ad agency originally intended because his browser didn't
display them properly. There are many resources for seeing the web safe
color palette, including the Student Resource Disk that you created in
many of the certification courses.
Make sure you always define your images height, width, and give it an
alt tag. The height and width attributes will allow the page to fill in
around the hole that is left for the image, and the alt tag provides
people using a screen reader with a way to know what the image shows.
Some of the editors will provide an alt tag that is nothing more than
the name of the image, which really isn't helpful - handclasp.jpg
doesn't convey much about what the image shows and if that is all that
is in the alt tag, that is all the screen reader will provide the visitor.
If you need a thumbnail version of an image as well as a larger sized
version, go ahead and create a smaller image rather than forcing the
large version into a small space. The image will be smaller in size,
load more quickly, and is overall cleaner and more efficient.
View your pages in a variety of different browsers and, very
importantly, in a variety of different screen resolutions. If you design
on a huge monitor you may not realize that people who utilize a smaller
resolution are not seeing things the same way you are. Test your pages
in different browsers as well; some browsers are more forgiving of
scripting errors than others.
Anyone who has ever maintained a site knows that dealing with linkrot is
a never-ending job. And there are few things more frustrating than
trying to use a site that is filled with broken links, be they internal
or external. So check your links often, either by hand if you only have
a handful, or by utilizing a software program that will automate the
process for you. You can go to previous newsletters to find suggestions
for link checking software.
Submit your site to search engines on a regular basis, but don't stop
there. Search for your own site and follow the link to your site. Find
other sites that would be willing to have a link exchange, but don't
bother with the link farms - sites that are nothing but links to sites,
they don't carry much weight with the search engines. Contact specific,
related, well-targeted sites to exchanges links with you.
Avoid spam by obscuring your email address. You can provide it as a
graphic without a mailto, effective, but not very user friendly to those
with screen readers. You can write it out in a format that the crawlers
don't recognize (at least for now) like myemail at mydomain dot com. Or
you can avoid putting the email address on the site at all and only
provide a contact form that will automatically generate an email to the
appropriate recipient. These days anything you can do to cut down on the
spam is worthwhile.
Contact your client on a regular basis and ask if there are things on
the site that need to be updated. You can create your own file of dated
material, like calendar events or job announcements that close on a
specific date, and automatically remove those items - you'll want to
clear this with the client first so they will know you are doing this
and won't be upset that you are changing the site without their
authorization.
Use good contrasting colors between the font color and the background
color. Reading on a computer screen is tiring on the eyes under the best
of circumstances, so keep the contrast high to ease the strain on the
eye and keep the font a reasonable size so it is easy to read.
Include comments in your code, you will thank yourself later. If you
need to come back to a page months after you created it, the comments
will be invaluable for reminding you where things are and what they do
on the page. Likewise, if you stop maintaining a site and it is passed
on to another webmaster, it will be a boon to them to find comments to
help them as they learn the site. If you have ever taken over a site
that was nothing short of a total mess, you will easily see the value of
including comments in your code.
Create a text file for yourself in which you record any graphic recipes
you used to create buttons, logos, or anything you may need to recreate
later. It is almost impossible to remember precisely the font face,
size, leading, kerning, color, special effects, etc. of a text graphic
when you created a year ago. But if the client decides to add a new
button and you have to create a matching one, you will save yourself
hours of time and lots of headaches by maintaining a test file that
tells you precisely how you created them the first time around - just
follow the recipe to create the new one.
This field changes constantly - from HTML to XHTML to CSS to XML to
programming languages like ColdFusion and PHP there is always something
new to learn. Keep your skills up, keep on learning, and take pleasure
in the creative process that the field provides you. Never forget the
basics, they are the foundation on which everything else is built. If
you have a good, solid foundation, there is no limit to what you can
build. Happy coding!
FAQ's
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Q: Do you have an affiliate program I can join?
A: Yes, go to
userhelp-affiliate.cfm and you can
read all about it.
Q: Can I join the affiliate program even if I don't have a web site yet?
A: When you became a member you were automatically assigned a promocode,
you can give that code to people until you have a site that is approved
for the affiliate program.
Q: I don't know what my promocode is, where can I find it?
A: Once you have logged in to your account on our site, go to
q30.cfm and you will see your
promocode. If you aren't logged in, the promocode will not display, so
make sure you log in first.
Q: I checked and I have money coming to me from the affiliate program,
how soon will I get a check?
A: We pay all affiliates after 45 days after the end of the month in
which the sale was made. This allows for any refunds, cancellations, or
rejected charges to be processed before the check is cut. This can also
explain why you may see your affiliate payment change from time to time,
if someone buys a course using your affiliate code, then cancels the
purchase and gets their money back, you will not receive an affiliate
payment for that sale since it was cancelled.
Webmaster Resources
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Looking for a way to learn CSS, but with a twist in teaching style?
Check out http://www.csszengarden.com.
It is a visually pleasing, and very informative site.
We've all seen all those sponsored links on most of the search engine
results - sites that have paid money for their sites to be featured that
way. Well it appears that some search engines are opting to move away
from sponsored links. "Microsoft and Ask Jeeves have thrown paid
inclusion links out of their search engines in recent moves that could
bring new pressure on Yahoo to reconsider its fee-based indexing
policies." Read the full article here:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64092,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1.
Now that you have your popup blocker, how do you know it is working?
Happily, there is a page on the 'Net from Pop-Up Dummy for testing the
popup blocker they put out, but it can be used to test other popup
blockers as well. It offers a page that throws up different types of
popups and you can see which ones it blocks and which ones get through.
Check it out at: http://www.dummysoftware.com/popupdummy_testpage.html.
Do you use Adobe Reader a lot? Are you weary of how long the program
takes to load? There is now a free utility you can download and install
that claims to cut Adobe Reader's load time by 60%. It is called
Speed-Up and is put out by TNK-BootBlock and you can read about it and
download it from their site at:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/adobespeedup.html.
Basically it says it
disables a bunch of rarely-needed plug-ins that slow the load time, and
it says you can re-enable any plug-in you might need, or completely
reverse the entire process if you wish and put the Reader back to how it
was before. If you use a lot of PDF files, it might end up saving you an
amazing amount of time. I have not tried it myself, so I can't make any
personal recommendations.
Looking for a Java tutorial? This one is free, says it is fine for
people with no prior programming experience, and you can go through all
of the lessons one by one or just brush up on specific areas - whatever
meets your needs. You can find out more at:
http://java.about.com/library/tutorials/java/bl_overview.htm.
Do you have a resource you would like to share? Let us know about it so it can be included here.
Do you have a resource you would like to share? Let us know about it so it can
be included here.
Reader Feedback
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At WebYoda, we constantly strive to improve our service. Please drop us a
line and let us know what you like, what you dislike, what you would like
to see added, what you would like to see removed, if you have an article
suggestion, or a question you would like to have answered. You can email
us at editor@webyoda.com.
Spread The Word
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If you enjoy reading our newsletter, please tell a friend or colleague
about it. Anyone can sign up to receive our newsletter at no cost at:
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Unsubscribe Instructions
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newsletter because you came to www.WebmasterCertification.com and, when you
became a member, you indicated you wanted to receive information from us.
To be REMOVED from the mailing list, return to
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receive the newsletter" option.
Robin Preston Wright
editor@webyoda.com
Team Web Yoda
http://www.webyoda.com
http://www.webmastercertification.com
Phone: 850-524-9632
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