# set variables for user agents and referers and ip addresses
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent ".*(user-agent-you-want-to-block|php/perl).*" BlockedAgent
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ".*(block-this-referrer|and-this-referrer|and-this-referrer).*" BlockedReferer
SetEnvIfNoCase REMOTE_ADDR ".*(666.666.66.0|22.22.22.222|999.999.99.999).*" BlockedAddress

# set variable for any class B network coming from a given netblock
SetEnvIfNoCase REMOTE_ADDR "66.154.*" BlockedAddress

# set variable for two class B networks 198.25.0.0 and 198.26.0.0
SetEnvIfNoCase REMOTE_ADDR "198.2(5|6)..*" BlockedAddress

# deny any matches from above and send a 403 denied
<Limit GET POST PUT>
order deny,allow
deny from env=BlockedAgent
deny from env=BlockedReferer
deny from env=BlockedAddress
allow from all
</Limit>

Liquor companies, for example, often hire bartenders as brand ambassadors. The bartenders / brand ambassadors then tell their customers about the company’s brand of gin, and train other bartenders in making signature cocktails with that gin.

Brand ambassadors provide companies and products with valuable credibility. Wouldn’t you trust a liquor recommendation that came from a bartender over one that came from a salesperson?

The downside is logistics. Creating a regional or national team of brand ambassadors requires big investments in recruitment, training and management.

With Drupal however, we can now create an online system that helps recruit, manage and monitor brand ambassadors with much less investment.

We can’t wait to dig into a project utilizing the ability – maybe it’s perfect for you!

Although it’s bold to pop open Adobe Photoshop and get right into designing, there are many steps which can enhance a website when taken into consideration. The planning process, although not seemingly too long, is an almost essential aspect of what it lends to the creative process. I hope to outline a few ideas here which can be applied towards designing fresh web interfaces.

Starting the Project

This is possibly the most anxious and driving time during project work. When you’ve got an entirely blank slate to work with, thoughts and ideas seem to pile on faster than you can grasp them. It’s important here to breathe and reflect on the project’s ideals. Perhaps take a step back to question a few simple aspects of the project.

What are you or your client looking for in a completed object? Are there any specific items you want to include no questions asked? These may be heading banners, differing navigation menus, a powerful color scheme, or even a simple page logo. Try sketching out a few prototypes before taking to the digital process.

For those amongst us who are less artistically gifted even a crude sketch can provide more inspiration than nothing at all. A prototype offers not only a guideline but a wireframe for which to base all your future pages off. This wireframe may change between differing page styles (ex. home, about us, blog posts) but will ultimately contain the same template.
Scrutinize Design Galleries

I have run into many designers who argue design galleries offer no value into the web. They are seemingly cheap ways to copy designers and rip on their ideas. And while I can respect this viewpoint, I simply cannot agree and actually think quite the opposite. Designers choose to submit their designs into these places and should feel honored that others may draw inspiration from their works.

Further there is nothing wrong with borrowing ideas! This is the beauty of creation as you take a mix of many differing artistic styles and blend them together in your own way. True web designers are able to master this skill and even begin to create their own interfaces simply from memory and inspiration!

CSS galleries and many of the showcases online today are perfect for the beginning designer. As you train the creative portions of your brain you begin to think outside comfort zones you’ve set up for yourself. This is one of the most difficult aspects in the career of web design, and more specifically during the creation process. But similar to many other things in life, this is one skill which becomes more developed with practice.

Give Your Interface a Test-Run

Before even coding your sketch or mockup design spend some time visualizing the browsing process. If possible (and this comes with practice) place yourself in the shoes of another user entering your website. Consider where they’d click and what they would find most interesting.

Once you get into this zone you may notice an accompanying change in mindset. This technique will help remove yourself from the position of “the designer” and see things from a larger perspective. I often recommend this step before coding to save yourself time in the long run.

In personal experience I frequently find myself updating page areas or colors mid-design. With enough time it’s simple to step out and envision how a user might interact with your page’s menu or links. This process can be difficult if you’ve been staring at the same design for 3 hours straight. Try taking a break to stretch and walk around – even 15 minutes can play a huge role in opening your perceptions.

Design Numerous Builds for Comparison

This step will take much more time but if you have the luxury I highly recommend pacing yourself. Once you’ve got a strong sketch going you may consider creating a few alternate designs to choose from. This can be done in Photoshop just as easily if you are not artistically gifted with paper and pencil, or simply feel more comfortable in software.

Some people find this step to be annoying and actually slow down the creative process. If you often second-guess yourself this method will save you loads of time during the final stages of production. I find 2-4 strong templates laid out in comparison can help push your indecisive nature towards picking a final stage product.
Keep the Space!

White space is crucial with any great design. This comes as an almost no-brainer and you may consider a few obvious reasons. When page elements are laid out properly you’ll find a natural symmetry in design. Web pages coded with grids and accessibility in mind tend to appear cleaner and much more user friendly.

Walking the same line as white space it’s key to remove any elements which may be taking up un-needed space. This will obviously hold true as a belief during any stage of design – but catching your dislikes or mistakes early on will save hours on project work. Ensure your page’s content – paragraphs, headings, images, and videos – have enough room to breathe and interact with your website’s visitors.

I find writing a small list of mandatory page elements is a great way of getting started. This will change based on what type of website you’re designing, which demonstrates just how fluid this system can become. Typical instances include search boxes, social media sharing buttons, shopping cart icons or links, featured blog posts, or even a small contact form!

Whenever entering the design process feel comfortable letting your mind roam free. It is within this void of space where ideas are born and genius inspiration may be ignited. Stay true to your heart when designing. Creating websites has never been an easy task, however quite fun and often very rewarding when you set aside time for building and learning.

content regenerated from webdesignledger.com

Of course, not all content is created equal. While over-optimizing content for search will make it less than user-friendly, focusing too much on usability can compromise its searchability.

So how can your content walk the line between SEO and usability? Well, there are 5 easy tips you can follow when trying to walk your content down that fine line between SEO and usability.

1. Length of On-Page Content

The ideal minimum length of page copy for SEO purposes is 250 words. So where your user experience permits, you should have 250 words (or more) of actual inline content – i.e. not headers, not sidebar content.

That being said, 250 words is just a minimum. As a general rule, the more content the better. In fact, I’ve personally noticed that when a page has 1,000+ plus, it has a much better chance of ranking for the keywords that it’s optimized for.

Of course, there are pages where it doesn’t really make sense to have so much content. In such cases, 250 words of content would disrupt the user-experience and push interactive features below the fold.

Some examples of this are a category pages on blogs or ecommerce sites. In these cases, you might want to optimize the categories for a certain niche/vertical of keywords, and added 250 words of text at the top of the page would help.

But from a usability standpoint, categories exist so that users can navigate/browse products or content within a category. So adding 250 word of text would disrupt the user-experience by pushing those product/article links below the fold.

A decent compromise in such cases is to insert a bit of static content at the top of main-content area of your category pages. Generally, 300 characters (about twice the length of your page’s meta-description) is enough to (1) get some descriptive keywords on the page, but (2) keep the category links/listings well above the fold.

2. Scanable Line Paragraphs

Knowing that you want at least 250 words on each page, how do you make that content as usable as possible? That is, how can you make it scanable so that users are not deterred from actually reading it?

As a rule, you should aim for 3-4 line paragraphs (2 sentences). Of course, in some circumstances, a paragraph warrants more than 2 sentences. But by keeping paragraphs within 3-4 lines (5 lines max), you can create a text-experience that users can easily scan, making them more likely to actually consume the content.

3. Headers

Now, what do you do if you have more than 250 words on a page? If you’re talking about more than one product or service? How do you keep the user engaged?

Well, you do that by structuring your content. Basically, you should section off your content using header tags (e.g. <h2> and <h3>). This will create a break in the content that (1) makes it seem easier (i.e. ‘not as long’) to read, and (2) provides visual cues to pull the user’s eye through the content.

From an SEO perspective, moreover, the keywords in headers help you clue search engines into what your content is about. For example, three headers might tell search engines that three different (but related) topics are being discussed on the page.

4. Keyword Density

Keyword density is how often a keyword appears on a page. Depending on who you ask, the ideal keyword density is anywhere from 2%-5%.

The only problem with this is that even at the low-end, this can make for unnatural prose. For instance, if a keyword makes up 3% of all words on a page, the user will probably notice that that keyword appears quite often. In fact, it will make your copy seem robotic, non-compelling, and generally spammy.

Where you can fit in these extra keywords, however, is in your header tags. Indeed, by using keyword variation to draw up optimized header tags, you can gain an extra 1% of keyword density without making the actual copy seem contrived and unnatural.

5. Bullet Lists

One of the biggest copy tradeoffs between usability and search is bullet lists. While bullet lists help make content more scanable, search engine regard them as “broken content” – meaning that they don’t quite count as much as other page copy when it comes to their keyword density. There are two ways to get around this.

First, you can use a bullet list at the top of the page to outline the page’s content. This will help cue the user into what they can expect as they read through the page, which will help them better navigate the content.

If you do go this route, however, make sure that (1) you have 2 sentences/3 lines preceding the bullet list, (2) you have another 2 sentences/3 lines following it, and (3) there is a minimum of 250 words of “unbroken” content on the page. This will not only put the bullet list in context for user, but it will help ensure that search engines properly index the page.

Alternatively, you can simply place a bullet list further down in the content, as part of the one of the subsections. If sufficient content precedes a bullet list, that bullet list is less likely to factor large into how that page is indexed.

A general rule to mitigating tradeoffs between search and usability is developing content for humans, not for search bots. After all, at the end of the day, search engines are out to provide users (real human beings) with the most relevant content available.

If you take every possible step to optimize your site for search, chances are you’ll produce some rather non-user-friendly content. And the paradox there is that the less user-friendly content is, the less engaging it is, and the less likely it will be to attract backlinks or go viral.

So you should always think of the user before you think of the search bots. But always keep in mind that there are some elements you can add to a page that both increase usability, and help optimize your page for SEO purposes.

content regenerated from webdesignledger.com

More mobile users than ever are surfing the internet via their handsets, If your site is not built for mobile use the average mobile user will leave it within 2 seconds. if however your site can “easily” be viewed on a mobile your competition will be at a huge disadvantage.

More and more people around you are using iPhones, Android and Blackberry phones in order to surf the web. The majority of the latest handsets have medium to large size viewing screens. The fact is smartphones are now within the reach of everyone, in the next year sales of these “next generation” handsets are predicted to explode. Why not ensure your business is an the best position to take advantage of this, if you don’t your competitors may just beat you to it.

Did you know that within a week your website could be mobile compliant?

All this “without”… interfering with your webmasters present design and website structure…

All businesses at some stage will need a mobile friendly website, there are some though that are particularly well suited to our mobile solutions

• Restaurants
• Hotels
• Business consultants
• Bed and breakfast businesses
• Taxi companies
• Breakdown services
• Accountants
• Doctors
• Vets
• Dentists
• Lawyers
• Plumbers
• Pubs
• Bars
• Locksmiths
• Museums
• Camping
• Tourist attractions

The above are just a few examples of businesses that will benefit from a mobile presence.

The big picture is that these are not e-commerce related businesses but rather “service specific”. There are exceptions of course, businesses that sell from a location are also ideally suited, you see mobile users are more likely to want instant contact or to get directions to your premises or business.

If your business has a mobile website and your competition doesn’t, who will get more customers?

Beautiful design layered on top of an intuitive user interface is the backbone of our websites. New and interesting widgets, or modules, are being built for use with these solutions every day.

We will tailor the wide range of features to fit your content needs. There are thousands of features; some of the commonly used ones include:

• Discussion forums
• Blogs
• Enhanced SEO
• Calendaring
• Parallel multilingual sites
• Multiple levels of permissions and access
• Ecommerce
• Social Networks
• Multi-contributers

Drupal and WordPress in particular have an avid community of users and developers, and we’re excited to be a part of that. We are passionate about the development of both and eager to keep stretching its limits. We often code our own modules and widgets from scratch for our clients particular needs.

We also offer complete design and development services for databases built on a wide range of technologies, including:

• MySQL
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft Access
• Oracle

Once your database is built, we’ll make sure your staff is well-trained on how to use it, and we’re always available for user support and maintenance.

For more on what we can do for you, contact us. We’d love to talk with you about your project.

It is predicted that by the year 2013 over 1.7 billion mobile users will be accessing the internet via their mobile phones or similar WAP technology devices, this is something that no business should ignore and for those that take notice the rewards will be plentiful. Websites that can be viewed on a mobile phone are completely different from those that we see on the internet, they are built in a different kind of language and have to be made so that they can easily be viewed on the smaller screens of mobile phones.

• Mobile websites have to adjust to the screen size of mobile phones or smartphones
• Mobile websites have fewer pages
• Mobile websites have fewer images
• The written content must be brief and to the point
• The pages must be easy to navigate

If you do not comply with this then your business is at a huge disadvantage.

In the next 5 years mobile websites are going to be by far one of the most obvious new additions to the internet and indeed the business world in general, mobile use is expanding so fast that literally millions of companies are being left in the dust. Those businesses that get a foot on the ladder first will be the ones who gain the most, those that do not will suffer dreadfully?

Why is it important to get a mobile compliant website now?

• Everyone is now using their mobile/cell phone to access the web
• Google and the major search engines are ramping up their mobile presence (” mobile only” search is going to explode )
• The older the domain, the better the search engine rank will be
• Those companies that register sites early will make “huge gains” when it comes to ranking
• Offering a mobile compliant site will show your customers you are an “up to date company”

Mobile compliant websites are built in a different way that “normal” websites, standard websites are built using html and mobile sites use xhtml and html5. This new code works on mobile phones, the old code does not. The old code will show a site as either “too small” or only show a small part of a page, our designs will show a mobile site perfectly on a phone browser.

What do your potential customers need from a mobile compatible website?

If you think about it the answer is actually very simple, most mobile internet users are searching for “basic” contact information and from website that displays that information with ease.

• Your business location – easy directions in as short a time as possible. Our mobile solution provides an easy to use “find us” function
• Your contact details – our technology can provide “click to call functions”, this means a mobile user can click a number on your site and it instantly pre-load into their mobile phone.

Imagine if you will that mobile sites are like hi-tech business cards, in addition they are a way to gain an added advantage over your competition.

Posted April 26, 2011 by Ryan Boren. Filed under Releases,Security.
WordPress 3.1.2 is now available and is a security release for all previous WordPress versions.
This release addresses a vulnerability that allowed Contributor-level users to improperly publish posts.
The issue was discovered by a member of our security team, WordPress developer Andrew Nacin, with Benjamin Balter.

We will be updating all of our WordPress clients to 3.1.2 promptly. this especially important if you allow users to register as contributors or if you have untrusted users. This release also fixes a few bugs that missed the boat for version 3.1.1.

For those of you who are only hosting with us, this update is likely not covered by your plan, but we are always at the ready to assist you in the update.