Web Design Blogger

Pura Web Design Gets a Redesign!

Rich Powell — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:19:31 +0000

I’ve redesigned Pura Web Design to be more vibrant and graphical while maintaining the professional touch.

Check it out.

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htaccess mod_rewrite Force Non-www to www

Rich Powell — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:41:07 +0000

Here’s some great code to make sure your site does not get duplicate indexes for non-www and www pages.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

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Google Analytics is a Godsend

Rich Powell — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:02:52 +0000

Although I’ve never really been interested in tracking my stats, but more focused on structure, design, and content, I’ve now come to realise what an important asset maintaining good knowledge of your sites statistics actually is.

There’s a whole host of features to Google Analytics which can be used to monitor what your visitors like, what brings them back, and what external forces bring them to your site.

I’ve added referrer tracking code to the Steve Irwin Memorial before, but it got to be a pain in the rear and wasn’t all that sophisticated. Blame my quick-job coding you may but that excludes the point! :p With Analytics you can track exactly what people are typing into the Search Engines (whether it be Yahoo, MSN, Google, Lycos, it recognises them) and through this you’ll be able to build upon what drives your traffic. You can also track who is linking to your site and how many referrals they’ve made.

There are endless features I could rant on about, but I advise you; if you are not already using Google Analytics, go give it a try and you’ll be pleasently surprised!

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Firefox: Tibetan Government Website is an Attack Site

Rich Powell — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:52:58 +0000

I was just browsing some news articles and, as I do, I clicked on a link to the Tibetan Government in Exile.

However, it appears the website has been marked as an unsafe “Attack Site” on Firefox’s unsafe content filter.

I guess we can only speculate who did this one

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Running Through Floats

Rich Powell — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:42:13 +0000

I had a problem with my

tag running through an object that was floated to the right in the same container and this particular

had a border. No matter what I did to the float, certain objects never physically recognised it and ran through it or dropped down.

The solution I have found for this problem is simply add overflow: auto to the offending tag.

For example:

Header

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Reflection Effect Photoshop Tutorial

Rich Powell — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:05:23 +0000

Here we start off with some text.

Now duplicate the layer by right clicking the layer in the Layers window and selecting Duplicate Layer…

Flip the newly duplicated layer vertically.

Add a vector mask.

Select a gradient that is black to transparent.

Making sure the vector mask in the layer is selected, drag the gradient to whatever length you want the reflection.

Done! You can tweak the opacity to perfect your reflection.

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Website Promotional Methods

Rich Powell — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 15:10:27 +0000

Google AdWords - Advertise on Google and throughout the worldwide web and appear next to (or even above) popular sites that your site is related to.

Search Engine Optimization - Make your site visible in the search engines. Let them breathe on your website. More indexed pages = more search terms you will appear for.

Submit to Directories - Even though alot of directories are just pawns for webmasters seo ranking desires, sometimes you’ll get the occasional interested user browsing through and, besides, it goes towards your Page Rank!

Word of Mouth - Yes, this is most powerful in some cases. Tell your friends, interest them by telling them how THEY’D be interested in it individually.

Toplists - Toplists (or topsites) are lists where websites compete for top positions through votes. If you have found a legitimate toplist that has no vote spammers, these sites can be goldmines.

Link Exchanges - Link exchanges are sometimes effective, especially if they are calculated on a unique visitor basis. I believe theres quite a few link exchange systems out there.

Social Bookmarking - Believe it or not, there are quite a few people using sites like Digg. Add social bookmarking icons to your site to enable your visitors to bookmark your site. ‘Digg’ your own pages on social bookmark sites just to get it started off and you may find other people will ‘digg’ you from the social bookmarking site and will start driving traffic to your site.

Social Networks - Make a MySpace or Facebook for your site. Advertise through the bulletin system, PM’s, and comments, but don’t go OTT and lose your account. Let your sites visitors add you and also promote you. At the end of the day, people browsing through the social network site may come across your sites profile and take interest!

Participate in Forums - Just by using forums, they can be very powerful promotional tools as well. Link to your sites in your signature. If you make 200 posts, that’s 200 pages linking to your site. Write relevant articles or be helpful in your field of expertise and the topic of your site and you may find interested readers click your link.

Proxy Sites - When I Say this, no I don’t mean the proxies you use at work/school to bypass the firewall.
Buy domains that are keyworded to the topic of your site and put some relevant and UNIQUE content on it and it will draw visitors from Google. Make sure you put your links in keywords on these ’sub sites’ because that’s another purpose for them, SEO ranking, but the main purpose is to catch visitors by broadening the arms of your main site.

AdBoards - There are two types of AdBoards:
1) Small boards you can post your ad on (like a classifieds list) and stuff in some keywords.
2) Forum AdBoards where you can post your link. Basically a SPAM-ALLOWED forum that some person has setup. There’s actually quite a few.

Steal your competitors visitors - So your website is cooler and simply better than your competitor and you’re positive that your site would be the most popular choice of the two if interested visitors were given the choice. Well, simply hit your competitor where it hurts. Find out where they advertise and shoot your advert right next to them. Do they have a PM system? PM them and tell their visitors what a “cool site” you’ve found (the cool site being your own) [wow, I'm quite dirty aren't I]

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Georgian Government Website Hacked!

Rich Powell — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:01:08 +0000

I was just browsing the BBC News website and come across the news of Russian forces engaging Georgian forces in South Ossetia. I then proceed to click on the Georgian Foreign Ministry website link (http://www.mfa.gov.ge/) and this lovely work of art appears:

Georgian Government's website hacked with pictures of Hitler.

Oh dear! I wonder who could have done this.

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PHP nl2p Function

Rich Powell — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 13:25:02 +0000

Forget nl2br! With this nl2p function your content will be better formatted and code better presented.

function nl2p($string)
{
	$string = "" . $string . "
";
	$string = preg_replace("/\r\n\r\n/", "
\n\n", $string);
	$string = preg_replace("/\r\n/", "
", $string);
	return $string;
}

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Web Design Blogger

Pura Web Design Gets a Redesign!

htaccess mod_rewrite Force Non-www to www

Google Analytics is a Godsend

Firefox: Tibetan Government Website is an Attack Site

Running Through Floats

tag running through an object that was floated to the right in the same container and this particular

had a border. No matter what I did to the float, certain objects never physically recognised it and ran through it or dropped down. The solution I have found for this problem is simply add overflow: auto to the offending tag. For example:

Header

Reflection Effect Photoshop Tutorial

Website Promotional Methods

Georgian Government Website Hacked!

PHP nl2p Function

had a border. No matter what I did to the float, certain objects never physically recognised it and ran through it or dropped down.

The solution I have found for this problem is simply add overflow: auto to the offending tag.

For example: