Web Development

The flood of “professionals”

Jul 9th

Posted by Stefanos Demetriou in Cyprus

1 comment

Is it just me or are we being flooded?  Recently numerous companies popped up that provide services for web-development, hosting, IT services and generally all kinds of fruit the basket can be filled with.  They all claim they are professionals, yet I’ve seen that quite a lot lack basic knowledge in their fields.  So can they really claim they are professionals?  This is how dictionary.com describes a professional:

a person who is expert at his or her work: You can tell by her comments that this editor is a real professional.

This is an expert:

a person who has special skill or knowledge in some particular field; specialist; authority: a language expert.

So is it normal to assume that at any given time professionals would be only those that have the most knowledge or are the most skillful in their field?  Can I call myself a professional when it comes to IT and web development?  I’m not sure, because I think I have self-awareness.  On one hand I see all these people flooding us with advertisments of their “skills” and how good they are, but on the other hand I know some people that are REALLY GOOD at what they do; people that I look up to.

These are some of my very recent experiences:

  • Seeing developers writing HTML in tables only (no DIVs).
  • Seeing people dreaming of designing a game without any prior experience, or even knowledge of what copyright and patents are.
  • Receiving an e-mail from a web development company saying that they are willing to redevelop the Gamers-Cy web-site for free, as long as it is based on Joomla, they host in on their servers and they get exclusive right to put ads on from which they’ll generate revenue.  They mentioned that their contract will last for 1 year.

So, correct me if I am wrong for what I understood from that e-mail.  Are they saying they can only develop in Joomla (who can’t?), they’ll be making revenue from ads for 1 year, and after 1 year they’ll give me the choice to either buy it or let them still have their ads on?  Are they asking to host it on their servers so I can’t “steal” it?  Whaaaat???

Anyhow, back to being professional.  Self-awareness is a huge problem in Cyprus…If you like the idea of being professional so much then go work to become one, instead of advertising yourself as one trying to find the sheep in the market.  There are not enough sheep for all of you.

SEO: Basic Principles

Jul 7th

Posted by Stefanos Demetriou in Web Development

No comments

Lately I’ve been going through some basics of how to get your web-site optimized for search engines, in order to rank higher when users search.  This might not be as important as the earlier days of internet where about for all web-sites an average of 80% of hits came from search engines, however even nowadays a close to 50% still may come from search engines, which is definately something one should pay attention to.  The subject is vast, and a little bit hard to be absolutely efficient since search engines do not release their ranking algorithms, however there do exist some basic guidelines:

  • Analyze your market and choose the right keywords (words or phrases that users may search for) and make sure you use them in your content.  Your web-site logs, or services like Google Analytics should already be able to give you a hint as they contain the keywords users searched for before they reached your site.  After you have collected those, together with what you feel you should include as keywords, you can use tools such as WordTracker or other similar tools to find other keywords you can use together with their competitiveness in the “keywords fight”.
  • Forget flash animations, or text in images.  Search engine crawlers will most probably not be able to read text within flash animations or images.  If you feel the need to include text in images then make sure you also use the ALT property of the IMG tag to describe your image.  Also make sure you use the right filename; “my_car.jpg” is much better than “IMG20042.jpg”
  • Use plain text menus.  If your menu is flash or dynamically created at the client side via JS or AJAX then the crawler will not be able to navigate through your web-site.
  • Use appropriate values for your “title”, “description” and “keywords” meta tags.  A keyword in the title gets much more weight than in the body text when ranking your web-site against competition, so you probably want to use your most important keyword there.
  • Use “h1″ and other heading tags to include keywords but only one “h1″ per page.  Googlebot and other crawlers will complain if you include more than one h1 tag.  If you feel the need to have more than one title in a page then use one “h1″ tag and the rest “h2″, giving them the same style.
  • Do not use black-hat techniques.  We are not living in the 90s and you can not trick ranking systems.  Visibility none to paragraphs, or any inline tag for that matter will get you punished.  Or even keeping text visible but moving it out of the screen or far down the page will still be recognised and get you punished.
  • Get incoming links to your web-site.  Search engines will rank your web-site higher if they find that other web-sites are linking to you, so wherever possible (forums, article submissions, etc), write an article about your service and include a link to your web-site.