ArcticSoft Blog

I must repent for not posting lately. I have been busy with development and site redesigns. Also I went to Alaska for vacation.
I have had an interest in affiliate sites for the last few years and its looking more appealing all the time. I have seen great success from others in this area and have about a half dozen idea floating in my mind for doing this. I will most likely try both sides as an affiliate and a host of a program for a few different sites. One site i will be offering a program for is Essential Medical. This will work similar to the distributor section just online. For every refering site that sales either a download or drive Essential Medical will pay $5.

Also on the other end of things, I am looking to be an affiliate for a few differnt sites and will be setting up specific blogs and sites just for this purpose. I will document my findings as I progress.

Here is the rest of the list.

1. Watch your load speeds. As a lot of people are on dial up, load speeds are an issue. No one wants to wait along time to have a page load. More and more are moving to faster connection speeds, but still a large percentage of people are still on slower speeds. While adding images or even thinking about video, remember load speeds.

2. Do not play music on your home page automatically. This has been mentioned by many books and design sites, yet still designers do it. For one most find it annoying when it starts, and two it can alienate people from your site because in various likes in music. I you must have music for example, a band site, give the user an option to turn it off, or have volume controls.

3. Easy to use navigation. This one is pretty important. Users want to know where they are and how to easily get to where they want to get. Make the site map of your site easy to read, and make the structure easy to follow. Also the navigation bar should be easy to read and consistent throughout your site or application.

4. Colors of text vs. background should be pleasing. There are always those sites that use red text over bright blue or something similar. Then you try to read the first line of text and go cross-eyed. Black texts on a white background is preferred, but if you need to use different colors, make sure the text is easily read, and does not strain the eyes.

5. Content. Write content for your site that is appropriate. Do not try to combine 3 businesses into one site as users will get confused as to what they are looking at. For example, if your site is about skiing in Aspen, do not try to run an online poker page from the same site. Domains and hosting is cheap enough to separate your business ventures.

6. Spelling goes a long way. Make sure you run your content through a spell-checker. I find even large corporate sites have very easy to fix spelling errors. Simple spelling errors put off users. If you can not spell right, it shows that a user cannot trust you with a product or service either.

I am making a list of mistakes in web design. I know, there has been tons of these lists on other sites. But this list is different, it also takes into account newer technologies that have been used over the last few years. So here we go:

1. Write for web not print. In the text of your sites make short easy to read paragraphs. You are, most of the time, writing to explain a product or service, not write a novel. If the first thing a user comes up against is a wall of text, more than likely they will leave.

2. Write articles on the web on one page. This is a common complaint I have heard lately from people. I have never done it but have seen many people split articles into many pages for no real reason. Make pages contain information people are looking for without looking for a next button. They would rather continue scrolling than click to 5 different pages for the same article.

3.With the big hype of AJAX, don’t overdo it. Make sure you have a purpose for using it. Google maps have a valid reason for updating maps, but to go to a site filled with cheesy dropdowns and auto completes for no known reason is bad design.

4. Do not overuse animations such as Flash. These technologies serve specific purposes. Flash is great for interactive elements in a site such as video or animation, but search engines do not know what content is in a .swf file so cannot index it. Plus people do not like splash screens, they want the website.

5. Do not use popups on your site. With the huge push on internet security, users mostly view popups as spyware or annoying ads. If you must use popups, make your user aware by spelling it out on your site that you use them. This will make them more aware that you use them and that they should expect content from your site to be displayed using them.

6. When linking, do not use the target of _blank. Most users are still using non-tabbed browsers. Users can find this obtrusive and feel like your site is opening windows for them.

That is just a few tips on design, I’ll give you six more in a few days. Stay tuned.

I never thought I would say this, but I am now a proud owner of a Mac computer. As Macs have been gaining more market share and the need to do testing on a mac is coming up shortly, I went out and purchased the mini.

Now I have used a mac a few times in the past, but not any of the new ones. When I got it setup in the office I was very surprised on how well it performed for such a small package.

I also loaded a bunch of photos into iPhoto, its is very easy to add photos and remove what you don’t want and enhance what you do.

Also the new iWeb is nice for layouts. I have yet to find the time to get PHP 5.2.X installed to do some development as well. Who knows, it might become a development machine.

Just a few drawbacks I have seen so far. 1. The mini has only one DVI port, so without headache, dual monitors is out of the question. and 2. iWeb’s gallerys require a .mac account. I have found plugins that allow your own hosting, but it is a pain to use. Plus for all the bashing Apple does on PC’s about being so creative, why cant I be creative on my own web space?

That’s just a quick review on a new mac user after having it for a day or two.

Like most other software developers and web designers we have trouble with some clients. I really feel the problem to this is a client does not understand the work and effort that goes into a site or software package. If a client saw what was involved in the Software Development Life Cycle and designing a functional database or design they may think about things a little differently. 

Clients should think of software or a site like a house (Read this for a good laugh). Once a foundation is down, any drastic changes are costly. With a house, if you decide to add a room half way through, you have to get plans re-approved for loads and building codes, drastic changed need done, and the extra labor in building the extra piece. The same is true with development. If you have a database and software halfway through being built, and a client requests a change in structure, there can be many effects in database integrity, other pages or forms affected, and the extra work to build.

This shows that even small changes to software can affect many aspects. Without fail, this also pushes out deadlines and increases costs as a lot of work needs to be done to make the so called “easy change”.   Please keep these in mind when working with a developer or designer. They will be happy, it will cost you less, and the chance of the project getting done on time will increase.

Well I did it, just upgraded to Adobe Web Premium Edition. First I would like to say I love it. It is actually based on web standards and not IE6 which I am grateful for. But one thing I feel got “too easy”, that’s AJAX. I like the way Dreamweaver using Spry to build AJAX into your site, but there is one problem, one word JavaScript. Search Engines have been known to have problems with links and content generated by JavaScript. Don’t get me wrong, I love JavaScript, it’s a great client side scripting language, but with Spry I really feel it will be overused. 

Now that it is easy to build these “widgets” what stops someone from building all their content onto one page fed by an xml file? Not much except ignorance by which search engines will index the content.  I feel a lot of web designers clients are going to get hosed with regards to engine traffic once a very creative and non-technical designer get a hold of this tool. That’s ok, if everyone starts using this it will just get easier for others that understand SEO to rank well. This is like the Flash epidemic. 

I remember going to school and learning Visual Basic. It is a very easy language, but it was fun to make little cheesy programs, and I wrote a lot of them. Then I started to have dreams in programming laguages. It seems like I loved development in my sleep.

Last weekend my wife caught me talking in my sleep. She said I said “NO, Firefox!” I don’t know what I was dreaming of, but maybe it was from all the browser testing I did the last few days.

Anyone else have interesting, weird development or technology dreams?

I have heard of a lot of even well known companies being plagued by what is called “Google Hell“. Google calls it the Supplemental Index. This index was create for weeding out spammers. It looks for pages that are keyword stuffed, or duplicate content from original source pages. They have very good intentions, but this has been harming a lot of legit sites. All it takes is for Google to think you copied you content from another site and BAM there you page is in the supplementals. When really your site the original content and the other sites are the copycats.

When this happens to a page, whatever search terms your page ranked for is gone. And the problem is that the supplemental index is spidered a lot less than regular indexed pages. This means your page could be there forever unless you do something about it. Here are a few tips on getting out of Google Purgatory:  (more…)

I was signing up for a forum the other day and ya know those verification codes now to prevent spam? This is the one I had to type in: 

I found it a little ironic. It was at a CNC metal cutting forum when I found it. Just an interesting code.

After looking over the videos and information on the Adobe site the other day, a few things popped uot at me as great features in the new Dreamweaver CS3. Just to list my favorites here: 

1. Spry ajax - This looks very cool. Instead of extensive hand coding JavaScript for very simple ajax functionality, this allows you to create almost a node/child-node ajax function with just selecting an XML file and setting the data source of a field. This looks easy to do and quick. I can already think of a few things I am going to try it out on. 

2. Pre-Built CSS Layouts - Dreamweaver CS3 comes with an array of CSS templates. Not completed templates with text or anything, just CSS shells to start with. This should save a lot of time when starting pages. 

3. WYSIWYG and W3C? Dreamweaver 8 use the Internet Explorer 6 plug-in for its design view, this was not the most standards compliant and created sloppy/bloated HTML. Now it is based on standards set by W3C. This should make browser compatibility much easier to deal with. 

4. Integration with Photoshop - When Adobe acquired Macromedia; this was the first thing that popped into my head. I love Photoshop far better than Fireworks for image editing. More filters, better tools, just a better product. Fireworks has its uses for buttons and such, but to have Dreamweaver integrated with both will be very nice. 

There it is, some of the things I am looking forward to when I get a copy of Dreamweaver CS3. I hope to get it at the beginning of May. Then I will make sure and post a review for everyone to see if it has lived up to the hype.