CSS3 and html5

tools & resources for web professionals

the best site for understanding and creating online code of css3.

http://westciv.com/tools/gradients/

http://westciv.com/

what you can do by using cc3. http://www.everydayworks.com/css_typography/HTMLCSSrotation.html

i like it. alot. :D

http://creatingsexystylesheets.com/

Top Strategies and Intelligence...

Google Buzz - How Will it Affect Local SEO?

Everyone's buzzing about the new launch from Google dubbed "Google Buzz." While millions of people are checking out the great new features it brings and new worlds of communication it has literally just opened up, all of us in the search engine optimization profession are asking, "How Will it Affect Local SEO?" Let me first point out a few all but obvious strategic advantages Google Buzz has over its competition.

How to Optimize PDF Documents for SEO
http://tinyurl.com/yeuds4b

On page optimization and link building are the most basic techniques of optimizing a website. Apart from web pages, many sites contain assets in the form of documents (.doc, .pdf), spreadsheets (.xls), presentations and videos (.avi etc). Optimizing these assets is beneficial as they get indexed faster and rank well in the top search engines.

INSTANT Google Traffic - You Choose the Keywords
http://tinyurl.com/ylrahcd

Can't afford to wait for SEO to start working? Get targeted Google traffic in just days. Premium sponsored exposure on all your important keywords. There's no quicker way to boost your website results!
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Marketing Tips: The Internet Marketing Secret That Stops Small Business Owners in Their Tracks

All of my clients are exceptional at the service they provide for their clients. However, many of them have a hard time filling their practices and finding clients. Almost without fail, they tell me that this is a marketing problem. It is a marketing problem, but not the type they think it is. The same problem is the Internet marketing secret that stops small service business owners in their tracks, every time.


http://www.site-referencenewsletter.com/link.php?M=760352&N=250&L=1585&F=H

6 Places that Flash Does Not Belong

It's recently occurred to me that I've been doing Flash sites now for 10 years and have seen it come a long way since Flash 4, where I first cut my teeth on Actionscript, tweening, and pixel fonts. Over the years, I've seen and done many projects, some of which utilized Flash in very useful ways, while others had no business using it. Sometimes, a Flash implementation hurt the company, detracted from the site's purpose, and had poor results (all the while costing them more to build the site in the frst place). So in a world where too many companies want Flash websites and too few designers use Flash very well, here is a brief list of places that Flash currently does not belong (with very few exceptions):

1. Website Intros
Let's get the obvious out of the way. Websites exist for their visitors, not the other way around. I see almost no use ever for a Flash intro (or really, any website intro), unless your website strategy includes annoying visitors and wasting other people's time. This isn't to say that you shouldn't have a decent preloader or a smooth transition into your site, but anything more than a second or two of Flash before the actual site is a bad idea.

2. Sites with SEO Objectives
Although it's possible to get semi-decent SEO rankings in certain situations for a Flash site, you're just not going to achieve the kind of SEO success for a Flash site that you can for an HTML equivalent. Granted, SEO isn't an easy game to play even if you don't use Flash (see our SEO tutorial), but if your website strategy has any SEO expectations, stay away from it.

3. Menus/Navigation on an HTML Site
Menus have a singular and key function on every website -- to get visitors quickly to the content they want. The words "pretty," "cool," or "smooth" should never be in the same league as "accessible" when it comes to navigation. A Flash menu runs the risk of leaving many users stranded (not everyone has Flash, including an increasing user base that surfs with mobile devices). Furthermore, search engines won't get around too well on a website that lacks true links for its menus. And if you really can't live without the "cool" menus, there are more than enough DHTML/Javascript based menus that can transform simple list tags into great looking navigation systems.

4. Informational/Content Sites
A couple years ago, I did a website for a large church organization that had dozens of menu items and many pages of content per menu item. They insisted on a Flash site where you never had to use the browser scroll, and at the same time, it should look just like an HTML site (which of course, begs the question, "Why are we using Flash?"). Needless to say, they ended up with a very cumbersome website that costs much more than an HTML site, both to build and maintain. Furthermore, visitors complained about the site usability, preferring even a simple text-only site where they could actually get the information they wanted. In general, you'd be surprised how often a visitor will take information accessibility over a great-looking Flash one. If your website's primary purpose is delivering informational content, avoid Flash.

5. E-Commerce
Anyone who has followed the development of the Flash platform will concede that it has come a long way in terms of functionality and programmatic flexibility. With the advent of Flex, Flash is more equipped for application-type usage than ever before. There are even some really great-looking examples of stores built on Flex. However, I think Flash for e-commerce should still be avoided for two primary reasons:

a) Flash stores can still be pretty complex. Your typical HTML e-commerce site is straight-forward with a catalogue, account, and checkout system, all of which can be edited and modified independently with relative ease. Although a Flash store will have the same basic components, you're still dealing with a platform with more integrative complexity and less room for error. In the last few months, I've come across two websites that have attempted to implement a Flash e-commerce solution. On both, I managed to somehow find a weird functionality bug, and having lost confidence in the site, went elsewhere for my purchase. So unless you have a great Flash developer and a solid understanding of consumer UI, stick to non-Flash e-commerce for now.

b) E-commerce conventions are very powerful. For the last decade, online shoppers have become accustomed to how e-commerce sites work. Any great derivation from what they're used to will often result in lower ROI. Although some Flash carts look really snazzy and have more functionality than their HTML counterparts, the proof is always in the customer conversion rate. And having worked on and seen sites that have attempted both types of carts, even "ugly" HTML e-commerce sites will often outperform Flash carts. Online consumers are used to clicking on items, not dragging items to a "cart section." They want to click "Add to Cart" and "Checkout" and go from page to page. Sure, this may change in the coming years, and yes, innovation is a good thing, but e-commerce conventions still hold too strong a sway to go with Flash e-commerce just yet.

6. Sites Requiring Heavy Management
Although Flash has a few solid options for content management, if you or your client will be constantly editing a website, Flash can easily become more of a hurdle in keeping it updated. This is mainly because clients always end up wanting to edit more than you tell them is possible. And there are few things worse in a freelancing business than maintaining parts a Flash site for years. If you know a client has high maintenance needs, make sure you address such future issues before even starting the site.

Of course, there are some websites where Flash can be a good choice or at least a "possible" choice. Some such sites include portfolios, promotional sites (movies, product "exploration" sites, etc.), sites with videos or games, and small boutique sites for creative agencies or possibly high-end design products (and even then, it's never a bad idea to have either an intermediary HTML portion or a full-fledged HTML version). Just don't ever forget that every website has a primary purpose, and if Flash doesn't contribute to that, it's probably a detriment and a liability.

HOW TO: Integrate Facebook, Twitter, and Buzz into Your Gmail

With over 10 million posts and comments in two days, Google Buzz has stormed the web like a swarm of locusts. An array of strong features, integration with Gmail, and lots of press have turned Buzz into an overnight phenomenon.

If you’re like a lot of us, you’ve suddenly found yourself using your Gmail () even more than you already were. Spending so much time in Gmail and Buzz though inevitably takes away from your Facebook () and Twitter (), and who wants to sacrifice their tweeting and facebooking?

Luckily if you’re a Gmail user, you don’t have to sacrifice either, even while you’re browsing your email or your buzz.

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Gadget Integration Is Your Friend

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Yesterday we caught a Buzz post by Ari Milner where he described how he turned his Gmail into his personal “social command center.” How did he do it? In his words:

“The key was using Gmail Labs feature at the bottom of the list called ‘Add () any gadget by URL’. This allowed me to add these 3 features to my Gmail sidebar.”

By utilizing third-party gadgets, he transformed his Gmail into a place where he could access his Twitter, Buzz, and Facebook straight from his Gmail. Here’s how:

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Step By Step: Integrating Your Social Media into Buzz

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1. Activate “Add any gadget by URL” in Gmail Labs — you’ll find it near the bottom of the list.

2. Now go to Settings –> Gadgets. Here you’ll find a place to add Gadget URLs.

3. Add the TwitterGadget App. Any iGoogle gadget will do actually, but the best one in our opinion is TwitterGadget, a fully-functional Twitter service for iGoogle and Gmail. This lets tweet from the sidebar or open up your Twitter with all of your tabs intact. It even supports multiple accounts.

To add it, copy and paste this URL into Gmail’s Gadget settings: “https://twittergadget.appspot.com/gadget-gmail.xml”

4. Add the Facebook Gadget. In the same way you added TwitterGadget, you can add Facebook to your Gmail. While Google has an official Facebook gadget, it doesn’t play nicely with Gmail, so we suggest using the app Ari Milner users: Facebook Gadget by iBruno. It will expand into the rest of your Gmail for easy Facebook management.

To add it, copy and paste this URL into Gmail’s Gadget settings: “http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/104971404861070329537/facebook.xml”

5. That’s it! Google Buzz (), Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail are now all wrapped up into one. Pretty nifty, no?

benn Parr

Is Bill Gates China's stooge in the internet censorship row?

By Peter Foster

Bill Gates, the world’s richest man now re-cast as a global philanthropist, has pronounced his verdict on the Chinese internet row, telling the ABC television network’s Good Morning America that web censorship in China is ‘very limited’.

“The Chinese efforts to censor the internet have been very limited,” he said, “It’s easy to go around it, and so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is very important.”

There are many things to be said about the extent and nature of web censorship in China, but “very limited” is not one them.

As Preston Gall at Computer World put’s it.

“He’s wrong. The Great Firewall of China is not ‘very limited;’ if it were limited the Chinese government would not bother to spend the amount of time and money it does enforcing Internet censorship.”

While it is true that “scaling the wall” using a Virtual Proxy Network (VPN) is relatively simple, the truth is that most people in China don’t know how to do it.

It is also true that most people in China can’t be bothered to do it – which is part of the subtle effectiveness of the system. The Great Firewall is far enough back from ordinary life that most of China’s chatters and gamers are not inconvenienced by it, but that doesn’t mean censorship is limited.

On the contrary, it is omnipresent, hanging over the Chinese internet (and society) like a brooding cloud, shaping the actions and habits of its users even when it is not overt.

When Chinese netizens do “hit the wall” – if protesting over shoddily-built schools flattened in the Sichuan Earthquake or attempts to stop the craze for World of Warcraft gaming – they are quick to vent their anger and frustration, and have all sorts of inventive puns and euphemisms for doing so.

(Check out this brilliant satirical video by Chinese Warcraft gamers for some light relief on this front).

The point is that China’s government isn’t interested in open debate when it comes to matters of its own authority – whether on the internet or in print and TV – and does everything in its power to smother that debate. Including locking people up.

That is not an invention of the Western media, it’s a fact, as Liu Xioabo discovered this Christmas when he was given 11 years in jail for circulating his Charter 08 call for greater democracy.

The coverage of the Google row is a perfect example of where the Chinese government has worked tirelessly to muzzle real debate (which was evident in the early stages as I reported in an earlier post) resorting to name-calling about America’s ‘information imperialism’.

Gates implies that the need to ‘keep the internet thriving in China’ is more important than worrying about censorship. Google made that calculation in 2006 when it decided to enter the Chinese market, but now rejects that decision. Why?

Don’t be fooled by talk that Google was a ‘failure’ in China. It wasn’t. How many other foreign companies that set up in China four years ago can claim market share over 35 per cent? None.

If internet censorship in China is really so ‘limited’, Mr Gates should ask himself why Google arrived at that decision, and why his own Government has risked souring relations with its largest trading partner over the issue?

Of course, the mandarins in Beijing will be thrilled by Mr Gates’s comments which could have been written for him by a Xinhua leader-writer and perhaps, as Douglas A McIntyre observes at 24/7 Wall Street, that’s precisely the point.

He sees Gates’s comments as a shameless attempt to curry favour with Beijing at a time when Microsoft’s Bing search engine is eyeing up Google’s probably soon-to-be vacated share of the Chinese search market.

“Gates understands as well as anyone that if Google leaves China it will be an extraordinary opportunity for Microsoft’s Bing search engine to gain market share in the world’s largest internet market,” writes McIntyre, “He is taking the public opportunity to tell the Chinese that he is their ally and that Google is not.”

I was thinking that this was really too cynical, but then I read Gates comments to the New York Times “bits” blog in which Gates said he was unimpressed and perplexed by Google’s so-called ‘stand’ over censorship.

“They’ve done nothing and gotten a lot of credit for it,” was Gate’s observation. That sounds dangerously like sour grapes to me.

Even if he doesn’t mean to, Gates is presenting himself as a China stooge and a shameless opportunist. My betting is that this will backfire horribly – for him and Microsoft – on both sides of the Great Firewall.

SEO Step Four of Ten: Content Optimization

Welcome to part four in this ten part SEO series. The ten parts of the SEO process we will be covering are:

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

Content Is King

Content is king. More than a truism, the phrase is a mantra. Content is the stuff people are looking for on a website. A commitment to developing and deploying great page, document and site content is a commitment to good SEO.

Comprised of the most common site elements, content is the most effective tool SEOs have to work with. Loosely defined as All Things On-Page, the term “content” would include titles, tags, text, in-site links and out-bound links. In some SEO practices, the acronym ATOP is used to refer to the hands-on work environment. (ATOP, i.e.: Mark sends the keyword targets to Jade whose staff works ATOP in the overall SEO effort) Content optimization is where creative art gets mixed into the webmaster science of SEO.

In the SEO process, content optimization describes most of the hands-on work done to make unique documents place well in search engine rankings. For the purposes of search engine optimization; content either exists, has to be created, or both.

Sometimes optimization of existing site content only requires the SEO to perform minor textual tweaks. Sometimes content does not exist and has to be written by the SEO. Frequently, SEOs come across pre-existing page content that needs to be totally rewritten or redeveloped.

The object is two-fold. The first goal is to feed data to search engine spiders, the second to serve information to human visitors.

Writing for Robots

By basic definition, the goal of search engine optimization is to achieve high search engine rankings. That means writing for robotic consumption. The first rule of writing for robots is, keep it simple.

For all their silicon guts and algorithmic abilities the robots are not that bright. They cope best with one concept at a time. Though a page might rank well for any number of keywords or phrases, the best site copy is written to focus on one topic per page. Addressing multiple topics per page dilutes the overall effectiveness of a site-wide SEO effort and the ranking potential of individual pages.

Limiting your focus to one topic per page makes it far easier to work keyword targets into each of the basic on-site content elements; titles, meta descriptions, body text and links. When optimizing site content, each of these elements needs to be worked on one-by-one and then examined in relation to each other. In practice, I prefer to work from the top to the bottom of a page before spending the bulk of my time messing around in the middle.

Titles are important

The first page element search engine spiders and most human visitors see is the page title. If you found this article on a search engine or through an RSS feed, chances are the title of the page was used to make the reference link you clicked on to get here. Passing primary topical information to bots and to search engine users, the title of a web document is used by SEOs to address specific keyword targets and to convince human visitors to select the page.

A lot of webmasters overlook the title when designing and maintaining their websites. To make the point, think of the countless number of websites with index pages sporting the title “Home”.

Look at the very top of your screen. See the words beside the Firefox or Internet Explorer symbol? That’s the title of this page. Being published in WebProNews, the title of the original page this piece was published on reads, “SEO Step Four of Ten: Content Optimization | WebProNews”.

Each page in a website should have a unique title. As pages in the website gets more specific, so to should the titles of those pages. Since SEO is about getting good placements under a variety of keywords or phrases, including “long-tail” placements, topically relevant keywords should be worked into the title of each page.

Here are a few examples of optimized page titles in a general page-tree order:

1. Eco-Friendly Products for Healing Healthy Hippies :: Green Wingnuts (INDEX page)
2. Ecological Alternatives :: Healing Healthy Hippies :: About Green Wingnuts (About page)
3. Magic Healing Balms, Tinctures and Lotions :: Health Products for Hippies :: Green Wingnuts (Product Stock Page)
4. Organic Yellow Blue Algae Lotion :: Nutritious Health and Healing Products :: Green Wingnuts (Specific Product Page)

Search engines use titles to gauge the topical intent of individual pages in a website. So do human search engine users. It makes sense to give both the information they need to make the decisions you want them to.

Meta Descriptions Make a Difference

There are dozens of meta tags that have been used in the history of search engine optimization. The only extremely important one is the meta DESCRIPTION tag. Though found in the source-code and not part of the visible website, the meta description tag can have a decisive impact on rankings and selection.

Search engines use the meta description to help confirm the topical intent of web pages. They also use them for a much more practical purpose. The description is often used to phrase the short paragraphs found under the Title in search engine results. When a search engine users is making a decision which link to click, a well written meta description might make the difference. Don’t ignore this tag, each page should have a unique one.

<meta name="description" content="Green Wingnuts makes healing products for healthy hippies. Ecological alternative health products for a better planet” />

Visible Elements, Text, Images and Links

When approaching a fresh optimization project, SEOs takes stock of what they have to work with. SEOs often think like doctors when assessing a website with the understanding that they could do quite a bit of harm if they are not extremely careful. More often than not, changes made to titles and meta descriptions are beneficial to clients. As they are frequently overlooked or under-utilized, augmenting the titles and descriptions of pages usually helps a site achieve better rankings. Changes to the text that appears on a page, on the other hand, might unleash a host of unintended consequences. Aside from the chance a SEO might mistakenly change the message the client is trying to convey, messing around with body-text might also damage current search engine rankings. Keep that in mind as we move into making content optimization decisions.

The first task in content optimization is analysis. Having a full understanding of where a clients’ web pages rank, under which keyword phrases and the degree of success current placements enjoy is critically important for making decisions about what to work on. Analysis requires data and data requires information.

In an earlier part of this series, Dave Davies addressed Keyword Research and Selection and the making of a list of several keyword phrase targets. Content optimization analysis is about figuring out which pages are most relevant to keyword phrase targets on the list.

Almost any page in a URL has a good chance to achieve strong search engine placement under a limited number of keyword phrase. In deciding which phrases to apply to which pages, I start by dividing items on the keyword selection list into categories ranging from general to specific.

On the INDEX page of the Green Wingnuts site, the phrase “Green Wingnuts” would be the most general phrase as it is the business name of the client. The target market is deemed to be health conscious hippies, hence the slightly more specific variations on “healthy hippies”. Ecology is an important interest for most health conscious hippies, thus the use of “Eco-Friendly Products”. In this example, the index page is primed to rank for three unique keyword phrases and is easily associated with variations on each.

At first mention, content optimization might be thought to be about writing primarily for search engine spiders. It’s not. Well optimized website content should be created for live-human visitors and deployed in a way that that draws the reader towards a decision. Anyone can talk to a bot. Compelling website visitors to commit to an action and achieve a conversion is a bit more difficult.

As noted earlier, a good working rule is to stick to one topic per page and to consider the overall website as a document tree. The top of the tree is the INDEX page. Below the INDEX are the second or upper-level pages that tend to describe the company, its mission, goals, general services, and contact information. Pages found on subsequent levels of the website tend to feature more specific information the deeper a document is found on the tree. In the Green Wingnuts example, you can see in the titles how content gets more specific as we descend down the document tree.

Writing for a web-based readers and search engine spiders is much like writing for newspaper readers. Because the web is a dynamic environment, readers have notoriously short attention spans. Important points and keyword phrases need to be mentioned early in the copy and, by the end of the third short paragraph; the reader should know what they are supposed to do next. Subsequent paragraphs are used to support the story told by the first three. The goal is to hold their interest long enough to confidently direct them to the next step.

For instance, when writing copy for a real estate website, I want to ensure the readers are A) getting the information they need to assess the local area and decide they want to live there, B) understanding that the realtor is there to provide whatever they need to make a decision, and C) confident enough know how to move to the listings of properties for sale.

When applying text to a page, content optimizers need to think about its placement against other elements present on the page. How headlines or “strong” text looks beside an image is as important as the slight algorithmic bump that emphasized text brings. More important to the goal of improving the page is making it accessible to all users. Adding descriptive Alt-tags to images helps visitors who use screen readers and gives SEOs opportunity to insert relevant keywords into the alt tags. While I still use <h1> and <h2> tags, I tend not to worry as much about SEO considerations as I do page layout considerations. As long as the target keyword phrases are prominent in the titles, meta description, body text and judiciously used as anchor text, I trust the search spiders to find them.

I am far more concerned about where the pages I work on are being found. An emerging consideration in content creation asks the question, “What if it plays better in Pittsburg than it does in Cleveland?” Search engines are getting far better at delivering the right information to the right person. Knowing that there are fewer common standards in search engine results, content optimizers have to think about the regionalization of search.

Finding your regional audience

One piece of SEO software I really like that is called Enquisite. Designed to tell users how pages within their websites rank from the points of view of search engine users in regional markets around the world, Enquisite provides extraordinary information about what ranks well where. Having used Enquisite for over a year, Metamend finds it an indispensable tool.

When we develop new content or think about making changes to existing page content, we check how that site is performing in regional search markets using Enquisite. Because search engines have become extremely good at targeting where a search engine user is located they are able to serve regionally relevant information to different users in different places. While the overall object is high rankings for search queries everywhere, the advent of personalized, localized and “universal” search results make us consider create regionally specific content for the strongest markets indicated by Enquisite.

Link-seeding

Helping site visitors move from their point of entry to an essential action or a conversion is an important part of content optimization which will be fully addressed in the ninth essay in this series. To touch on it briefly, if the overall site optimization effort goes according to plan, search engine users will be able to find specific product pages on the first page of search results. That’s an optimal visitor but a content creator has to think about directing visitors who find their way to a page from a link on another site.

Internal links are important enough to obsess on. Designing a practical and elegant navigation path through a website is essential to gaining and retaining converting visitors. A big part of an elegant navigation path is how internal links are written and phrased; a process that also has an effect on a search engine’s impression of the site.

Internal links should be short and, whenever possible, be phrased with the most relevant keyword targets to the page the link leads to. A link leading to “Health Products” is far more compelling than one leading to “Green Wingnuts Products” and gets another mention of a target keyword phrase in an area that associates it with the page the link leads to. A similar approach should be taken to phrasing links in a sitemap file.

Content optimization comprises the bulk of the work SEOs do when working on a website but that work doesn’t stop when the initial optimization process ends. Content optimization also includes the regular creation of new pages and periodic changes of existing content. These topics will be covered in future essays in this series, most likely in the ninth and tenth articles, Conversion Optimization and Keeping it Up.

By Jim Hedger

Google

Google History

GDrive One Step Closer to Reality

Ah, GDrive, the mythical, all-encompassing online storage solution that will practically render most of your hardware obsolete. At least that’s what the legend says; my bet is that it will be another free online storage service, just with more storage and less crap: just like Gmail was (compared to the competition) when it first came to be.

We’ll see who was right soon enough, because GDrive is now moving from “rumor” stage to “somewhat founded rumor” stage. A blogger found out references to something called GDrive in a piece of Google’s code.

The code snippet in question looks like this (important parts highlighted by me):

// Localized product category of GDrive
_CI_messages.CI_GDRIVE_CATEGORY = ‘Online file backup and storage‘;
// Localized short description of GDrive (1st
// of 2 description lines)
_CI_messages.CI_GDRIVE_DESCRIPTION_1 = ‘GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents’;
// Localized short description of GDrive (2nd
// of 2 description lines)
_CI_messages.CI_GDRIVE_DESCRIPTION_2 = ‘GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device - be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone‘;

by Stan Schroeder