Web Standards & Best Practices

SEO Rules vs. SEO Concepts

Often times, web development blog posts recite easy to understand, step-by-step instructions on how to optimize XHTML code for SEO. Generally, I think this is good. The fact is, web users have low attention spans, and usually the best way to get a message across is to state it simply in point form. But in order for developers and internet marketers to enhance their abilities over the long haul, more is necessary, as we’ll discuss. With this article I’ll show how online writers and readers alike can become part of a long-term commitment to making the web a better place to surf.

Must-Use Methods to Spam-Proof Your Email Address

Working for a busy web development & hosting company exposes me to the sad fact that well over 90% of website owners today do virtually nothing to protect themselves from email spam. Spam filters are good, and they’ve come a long way, but they are not the perfect solution — far from it. Even with a close to perfect spam filtering system in place (which never happens), users will still be inclined to waste time sifting through junk mail just to ensure that nothing was incorrectly filtered.

In this post, I’ll describe a few solid methods to ensure that your email address will not be harvested by “bots” or other automated programs that harvest emails from naive website owners.

Do You Comment Your DIVs?

Since I started working for my current employer, I’ve built a number of sites from scratch using CSS layouts. I’ve also had to work on older web sites built using older HTML methods. The good thing is, many of these sites have CSS-based layouts. The annoying part is that some of them suffer from divitis (i.e. too many nested <div> tags, in the same style as table layouts). In my view, if developers are going to use this style of layout, then they might as well use tables.