Web Class Blog

Practice teaching has made me able to give presentations and speeches with ease. I could not do that two years ago - and now I can do it without even feeling nervous.

We attended a convention for a non-profit organization several hours from here. We were asked to present half of a session on Images. We did the web portion of it. The session had the highest attendance at the conference - of course, there is no way to know whether it was our part, or the other presenter’s part that drew them in, but we like to think we had a hand in it. The comments were overwhelmingly positive, and that felt good.

You can’t cover much in 20 minutes. This summer our Images classes will cover things in more depth. We’ll also give our students time to do some playing around with image software, so they can see some things in action. It is a fun topic… we hope you’ll join us!

Hands on learning is the key to learning some of the complex concepts of web development. But practice is the key to making them both efficient, and professional.

This is true of writing, coding, marketing, designing, page layout, and the other skills involved in creating a successful website.

I’ve noticed this mostly in writing. With practice, you can become so familiar with the writing process that you can sit down to the blank page, and channel your thoughts directly from your brain, through your fingers and onto the screen. Practice improves typing skills also, so both your writing skills, and the ability to record the thoughts, improve at the same time.

With practice, you begin to conceptualize very complex sites in your mind, in ways that help you build it more efficiently to start. Long term, you can pull many parts into a quick assessment and conceive of an entire project in a way that makes the process far faster.

These are things that I cannot share though - I mean, I can TELL you this, but some of it you don’t get until you DO it - until you see the results of your own practice.

Practice can help with any aspect of building a site - just doing it, more than once, helps you remember and grow in skill.

We remember what we do. We understand what we do repeatedly.

SEO is changing rapidly. For most microbusinesses, the largest portion of their search engine traffic comes from Google. And Google is changing the rules really fast. There are complex reasons for this, and some pretty strong implications. It means that businesses cannot rely on being able to get that traffic from Google.

When you choose a source of info to learn SEO, make sure they are up-to-date. Because some of the recent changes have changed not just a few strategies, like has happened in the past, but they have created some fundamental shifts in philosophy.

Content is still king - but site promotion, so that people can FIND that content, is getting trickier.

This summer’s blogging class will touch on some of these issues, as they relate to blogs. The fall Web Development series will cover it in more depth.

Some things happen best by doing.

Our daughter was in the third grade. She still could not read at a functional level. We knew this, and we kept complaining to her teacher. Her teacher’s response was, “Of course she can read. She does great on phonics!”

The teacher never had her read in class. The time spend on “reading” in class was spent dissecting reading, and learning ABOUT reading, not DOING it. The teacher had no idea that our daughter could not connect reading and phonics – they had no relation to one another in her mind. We sat her down and began reading with her every night. She became a competent reader within a few months.

Many people are like this. They learn best by doing. So taking a class on how to write HTML won’t help you build a website. Talking about building a website won’t help you build a website either. Only doing it helps you see the concepts in action, and to understand some of the abstract issues.

If you want to learn to build a website, or create a blog, or take a few lbs off your photo, you need to DO it. If you come to class with an idea of something you want to DO, then you’ll be more motivated to learn. If you get to actually build something in class, your learning is better retained. And you discover where the hard parts are, when there is still an instructor in the room to help you over the bumps!

We’ve had a lot of fun with image editing software. Most recently, our son played with some tie-dye, and took a picture of himself in a tie-dyed shirt and tie. We promptly loaded it into our image editing program, and put matching dye stains on his face and hands and emailed it back to him.

It was very simple to do – it took three tools to do it – one to select the spots to dye, one to change the color of them, and one to smooth the edges so they did not look choppy. Anyone could have done it, but knowing how to use the tools right, made it fast to do, and made the end result look more natural.

The real challenge in working with photos isn’t to tie-dye someone’s face. It is to create an effect that looks like it was real – and not something that was painted on or computer altered. When you get it right, it really looks like he dribbled the dye over himself along with the shirt!

You don’t learn to do this by practicing doing that exact thing, either. You learn it by learning what the tools are, and how to use them well.

Once you learn that, all kinds of possibilities are open for having fun with your family photos! You are limited only by your imagination.

If you are going to blog for business, there is a distinct difference between business blogging, and personal blogging. The principal difference is, business blogging has to have a financial benefit.

That means your concept, your methods, and your layout have to have a purpose in bringing an increase in sales or traffic. It can do that directly, or indirectly.

Some people put products on their blog, and link back to them. Some people put ads on the blog – either paid ads, or ads for their own products. Some people just link back to their business website, and write about business topics. Any method will do, but you just need to make sure that it does benefit your business in one of those ways, so that you can justify the time. Because it WILL take time!

You can’t just build it and throw it out there and expect it to benefit you. You have to think about what you want it to accomplish, who you want to attract, and what you’d like them to do after they finish reading. Then make it easy for them to do that.

Otherwise, you have another drain that doesn’t bring results.

Moderation of visitor input is the first step in protecting a site against spam. But what happens when that fails?

You must move up to installing something to stop it before it gets to the forms, or to filter input at the form. There are a number of options for this, depending on what the site is that you need to protect.

One of our favorites is Bad Behavior http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/ It works by stopping spambots from accessing your site content if they are identified as malicious bots. So far it has worked well on the sites I used it on. There have been minor problems with it, but nothing that I could not solve fairly quickly.

Another popular option is the Captcha option, and the other variants for identifying a person instead of a bot. Those forms that ask you to answer a simple question, or type in some squiggly numbers? That’s Captcha. And spambots are the reason for it. It isn’t foolproof, but it works a good percentage of the time.

If you have to move into this realm of protection, look at your options carefully. Remember that IP blocking solutions are almost useless anymore. You want something that works beyond that. Make sure it is well supported also, and updated regularly – or IT can become the source of a problem!

If you have a cart, a content management system, a guestbook, a forum, or a blog, you’ve probably encountered the problem of spam. If you have not, you will, if you ever operate those, or any other dynamic websites.

See, here is what happens when you have a form on your site that allows someone to register, send information, post a listing, contact you, etc:

1.Malicious bots are programmed to trawl the web, looking for sites with vulnerabilities. They look for any way to take advantage of your site – one may be programmed to spam, another to abuse a form, another to look for more serious security holes. Some do more than one thing.
2.When they find a site with the type of form they are looking for, they try to take advantage of it. If they fail, they move on. If they succeed, it sets up a chain of events.
3.The bot will proceed to exploit whatever opportunity it found. It may be a weak form, a site that does not have moderation turned on, etc.
4.If it succeeds once, then it marks your site as a target. It is important that you understand that these bots only check ONCE for a hole. If they find it, they will exploit it, and they will keep hammering your site even if you DO install some kind of protection later. Once you are found, the damage is done. This means that if you leave your comments unmoderated, and a bot finds it, and starts plaguing you with spam, it will NEVER STOP. Even if you set the comments to moderated. It will still keep sending you stuff that you have to clean out. Some bots can even break through moderated comments to auto-post. And they never go back to check again to see if it is still working, they just hammer away in the background. They can be unbelievably aggressive, and it just wears on you to try to fight them.
5.In order to get them to stop, you have to do one of two things: You can install something to stop them (which doesn’t really stop them, it just makes it so you can see them anymore), or you can move your site. If you move it where any links still lead to it that lead them there before, or if you move it on the same domain, they’ll find you again within a few hours, because while bots are not programmed to check to see if posts are going live after that first check, they ARE programmed to look if your page disappears.

The first rule then, is to prevent from the start. That means turn ON comment moderation, or post moderation, or registration approvals. Don’t EVER allow a site to operate where someone can register without confirming an email address, or where they can post a comment without someone having to approve it before it goes live. If you do, you are asking for someone to come in and take over your site. If you want it to be valuable to you, you have to keep control of what goes on it.

Ok, so we know it is out there, where do we find it?

If you know what the software type is called, it is pretty easy to Google it and come up with something. Of course, you have to be careful what you download, because it can be infected with a virus or spyware. But you can usually find useful software through reputable directories, such as Downloads.com.

About half the software we use in our business is free software. That includes stuff we use on our desktop, and stuff we install for clients, to run a website from. There are a few types of software that we have not found good free alternatives for, but for most daily tasks, we are running free.

Part of me likes free software just because it is one way to break out of the MicroSoft box. Part of me likes it because it is a bit of an equalizer – it allows the little guy to get a foot in the door, then to donate to the cause when he grows a bit. That seems to capture the spirit of the American dream to me, even though many programmers who create free software aren’t American.

We always make sure that our students go home armed with a CD that has the course handouts on it, and a nice assortment of free software goodies. And they are usually pleasantly surprised as well, at the types of things that you can do with free software.

The simple answer, is, NO. You do not have to learn HTML in order to build a website, or work on one successfully.

The long answer is, that if you DO learn a little about HTML, and a little about CSS (try the For Dummies Books), it will make life easier for you. Especially when it comes to troubleshooting display issues, and customizing the appearance of your website inside a CMS.

A grasp of the simpler parts of HTML, such as link tags, div and table tags, paragraph tags, and line breaks, will help you to be able to spot errors and inconsistencies, and correct them. It will help you know when you want to move something from one part of the code to another, just how much you need to move. And it will help you know how to remove a piece from the code without getting errors from it.

Those are all secondary skills though. To start with, you can manage without it, if you use either a good HTML editor program, or a CMS with a template that you like (or if you have a friend who can tweak it for you).

In our classes, we teach our students how to use tools first, then how to recognize various pieces that they are most likely to need to work with directly in code. But that isn’t the focus of the class. The classes focus on more important things – such as working with design elements, good copy, effective promotion, and functional layout and SEO. The things that really determine whether a site is likely to be functional or not.

Learning code does not make you a web designer. Code is perhaps one of the least necessary things to learn, and a basic grasp of it, combined with a good knowledge of other aspects of web design and related skills, will propel you further than you’ll go if you can hand-code.