Creating a website - The Bear and Badger

Mod74

Aha, that's more like it. Cheers.

Mod74

http://lifehacker.com/how-can-i-use-an-ipad-for-web-development-and-programmi-1356404036

AJ

Have I ever mentioned how easy I reckon it'd be to make a decent touch/GUI thing for coding? Really should prototype it or something. But then I really should prototype a lot of stuff.

Also, BOW TO MY SUPERIOR SEARCH SKILLS!

Mod74

I've got one for Win8 but as I don't have a touch PC I've not used it much (at all beyond opening and a quick mooch)

http://www.actiprosoftware.com/products/apps/codewriter

Also,

AJ

Haha.

That Code Writer thing's miles from what I envision. Most current devs would probably hate it, but I reckon it'd be a real boon to getting people to code who're scared of the walls of "nonsense" text.

If you've ever seen Scratch, that's a lot closer.

monkey

Mod74 wrote:

Foundation is awesome.

Mod74 wrote:

If you're a half assed lazy son of a bitch like me.

That's me. I've got to learn either Foundation or Bootstrap. Any special reason why Foundation is the one to go for?

Mod74

Six and two three's really. I prefer the way the grid works in Foundation but Bootstrap has much more trinkets. I also prefer the out of the box look of Foundation.

I think Bootstrap is the more popular of the two though.

Note: I'm by no means an expert. Just a user.

GooberTheHat

I barely understand a thing you guys are talking about in here. I remember when I thought I was clever doing mouse over script in notepad for my geocities website when I was about 13.

Facewon

I'm still waiting for my IT help to get some logos up on longhornsbasketball.com.au. Which is probably good, as I'm waaaaay behind in actually writing the content.

Getting there slowly though.

It's so gonna look like a blog to start with, methinks.

Amongst all the craziness though, I did have an idea for something that's quite deliberately not a website.

JobsboardMEL on Flickr
Jobsboard MEL on FB
On twitter
On tumblr

All photos taken in instagram, with the #jobsboard sending them to all of the above, plus some co-workers emails, and dropbox.

Between the various sites APIs and IFTTT, there's a delicate web woven. (Which broke last night when a different # went to my JBmel FB. Damn.)

The idea is that anyone in Melbourne (well, technically the world, but you know, just don't) can see a job ad in the window of a shop and post it to the site. I've already got some of my clients at the brotherhood following it.

Simple for people to help create the content (and I'm about to start hitting up businesses and the brotherhood comms team to really push it), and simple to follow on whatever social media you like if you're looking for work. By the nature of the ads, it's largely retail and hospo, but that's ok.

Mod74

Right, how the fuck do you look at the change in your index position for a particular query over time using Google Analytics?

I'm sure it's there somewhere but this interface was designed by a sadist.

Please don't tell me you have to set up adwords/sense.

AJ

I'll check when I'm on my computer later, but I'm pretty sure that's in Webmaster Tools, not Analytics.

Mod74

That'd be cool. Right, another SEO question for the hive mind. Bear in mind I've not paid a huge amount of attention to SEO thinking it was something of a lost cause/uphill battle but recently with huge help from Rev I've got more interested in little wins. Must be the gamer in me. So I will have done some stuff that to the trained eye will seem highly stupid.

For most of this year I've used the term "website design newcastle" as the link back text on the sites I make. And as keywords/descriptions on my own site.

Recently I changed it to "web design newcastle" thinking this was a slightly more general term that might be picked up in more queries (ie. both web and website)

This morning I've discovered a couple of things:

1)
"website design newcastle" gets circa 260 searches per month
"web design newcastle" gets circa 1000 searches per month

2)
For the original "website design newcastle" query my average position had got as high as 16 but since the change has dropped to an average in the 40s.

For "Web design newcastle" I was about 180 pre change, I'm now about 140.

3)
Bing still thinks the sites that link to me use the link text "website design newcastle". Google won't tell me what text it thinks link to me. As previously noted.

So two questions really. Should I wait out the linking text and on site keywords to improve for the new term with 4x the queries.. Or go back to my original term that a) I'd managed to get to 16th with, and b) has a much smaller query volume.

My gut says getting higher up the more popular term is going to be much harder. And I should probably concentrate on being a higher result against 260 queries not a lower result against 1000.

Thoughts?

(and yes, what kind of idiot embarks on SEO without checking search popularity first. Durr)

b0r1s

Get the smaller term first you'll find that you've got more chance to rank, you can then expand out to the broader term, though at position 140 you won't be there for a while.

Regarding your keyword ranking tracking in GA you can track stuff like by linking WMT to your GA account, but I still take WMT with a huge bag of salt. You are better logging out of any accounts in your browser and manually checking and logging the results in a spreadsheet.

Even using Moz.com's keyword tracker I still manually verify results.

Mod74

Cheers Boris, as I said that's my gut feeling too. Go with your gut. I can come back for the tougher fight later.

Facewon

Facewon wrote:

I'm still waiting for my IT help to get some logos up on longhornsbasketball.com.au. Which is probably good, as I'm waaaaay behind in actually writing the content. Getting there slowly though. It's so gonna look like a blog to start with, methinks.

Or maybe not.

Just got sent through some of the early design work:

Sexy. Got that logo/typeface working with red and green and white too. Looks awesome.

Facewon

heh, just noticed I'm in both of those pics. Where's Face? game begins now.

AJ

@Mod

Boris is more your man for SEO, to be honest, but last I checked Google (so, I would imagine others) appreciates things that makes sense to people. I think what I'd do title the site with your company name, followed by a short tagline optimised for search terms and link to it somewhat like: "Website designed by Your Company, Newcastle". For aesthetic purposes, you may with to replace this with an image; I don't know how Google treats text replaced with images these days, but would imagine if the link has the replaced text as it's title, you should be fine.

If you fancy sending me the link to your site, I'll happily give a quick appraisal of how you're technically presenting yourself to the search engines, I started talking about other things then realised I could be spending ages going into detail about stuff you know.

Mod74

Google search seems unreliable (or I guess it's promoting/demoting stuff based on what it thinks it knows about me) about positions, but I think I'm now reliably on the bottom of page 2.

YEAH BITCHES.

Next stop page one. Then the secret page zero.

Not bad considering that before I did any SEO I was about page elevenhundredandtwelvety.

Facewon

Longhorns website is semi "live"
Well, it's there, but I have a shedload of content in google docs to add, and a bunch of photos and events to add, and a fixture, and etc etc. Instagram and Twitter to be linked also.

Fun times.

Mod74

Looks good Face.

It's partly because of how far it's travelling but some of your images are taking a good while to load

http://www.longhornsbasketball.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2013-07-07-15.30.27.jpg

and

http://www.longhornsbasketball.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2013-07-07-16.26.58.jpg

are circa 1.4MB each, you should probably zap them down to something smaller (pixels) before uploading and relying on WP to resize. It'll save you bandwidth if nothing else.

Mod74

So the code tag doesn't ignore images? durr.

dynamiteReady

Facewon wrote:

Longhorns website is semi "live" Well, it's there, but I have a shedload of content in google docs to add, and a bunch of photos and events to add, and a fixture, and etc etc. Instagram and Twitter to be linked also. Fun times.

Quite a quick turnaround, that (you only mentioned it about two weeks ago, right?). And it's a very nice site to boot... Quite impressed. : )

Facewon

Well, one of my oldest mates owns/runs this company, so he's doing the grunt work.

Pro bono, because he's a fucking champ.

Facewon

Which is also why the pics can be lush. space isn't an issue, he's slapped us in the "corner" of some retardedly massive bit of space he has that'll never get filled.

Mod74

It's not space it's speed but OK.

Facewon

True, I believe the theory is, we're using such massive pics, they have to be pretty hi res or they look gash on most devices these days.

I dunno, when Nate tells me something, I generally go ok, on this front.

AJ

Ooh, missed that. Nice site, Face, very slick.

Quick question for peeps: does anyone have opinions on the different JS-based WYSIWYG editors? Particularly TinyMCE or CKEditor, since there seem to be well regarded Symfony bundles on Packagist for them.

Mod74

I use TinyMCE. It looks nice and for my audience doesn't overwhelm them with buttons they don't need. Dunno if that helps. Can't say which performs best or does its job best sorry.

I have one site that still uses CKEditor because I haven't got round to changing it and find it a bit fussy sometimes, it doesn't seem to be able to handle tables properly for love nor money.

AJ

Dunno if the tables might be a Drupal issue, when I had a look at them with CKEditor they seemed fine.

At the moment, I'm leaning towards CKE, but MCE seems more popular so I worry I've missed something. Might be worth a post on Stack Overflow asking why CKE's dropping out of favour.

Mod74

From the list on https://drupal.org/project/WYSIWYG

Editors: CKEditor, FCKeditor, jWysiwyg, markItUp, NicEdit, openWYSIWYG, TinyMCE, Whizzywig, WYMeditor, YUI editor.

Dunno if any of those are worth looking into.

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories