Northlander.org is the online persona of Dan Bowling, a web developer living in Missoula, MT.
It would seem that spammers are getting even more tricky. Today I noticed my first trackback spam.
I guess when I upgrade Wordpress and apply a new theme (long over due) I won’t allow trackbacks to be posted in the comments. Such a shame, spammers are really ruining the internet in every possible way.
02.04.07 | # | 5 Comments
I don’t know about you, but when I am testing a website I sometimes find it difficult to find every kind of user that will be using it to test with and get feedback. This is especially true in my field of Higher Education, where the prospective students simply are too young to be in my circle… I usually have to make do with some work study students (whose opinions have helped me greatly).
The types of users I have trouble with are the disabled ones. Not so much the blind users, as I can easily test my designs using a screen reader myself. But the colorblind user isn’t something that I traditionally could test myself, or go back to some theory that I learned back while reading A List Apart. That all changed when I found a great site called the “Colorblind Web Page Filter.” It is truly a resource I can’t be as effective with without.
One thing that I will add as a tip on this is that you can test an image of your design prior to building it (or sending it as a proof too). If only I could find a way to make designing for cognitive disorders so easy.
01.23.07 | # | Start the conversation
It’s another year, and another chance to try to reinvigorate this blog. I just thought I would update everyone on what is going on, and what to expect.
Working on new brand
As with many young designers, I am having some difficulty in defining my brand… certainly that includes the sites look and feel, but there are other things to consider as well. Some time in the first quarter of the year, you can expect a better defined northlander.org website, with a clear topical emphasis, and unified look and feel.
Podcasting
I have some new hardware support for podcasting, so at some point in the first half of the year I expect to add podcasting to my lineup. Rather than a single long running podcast, there will be several mini-series podcasts covering specific niche’s.
Topics in the Queue
I also wanted to let you know of some topics in the queue for the blog. I’ll be addressing many topics this year, with specific focus on SEO, Freelancing, CSS, design, and Higher Education web development & marketing. If you want to suggest a topic for a post, leave a comment or contact me via email, or the form on the contact page. I will reward your suggestion with a link in the article to your site.
Also expect a series of focused tutorials, designed for the basic to the advanced users. These take a while to write, so they will be in the distant future, and fairly spread out.
Working on a book
That’s all I am going to say for now.
01.12.07 | # | 2 Comments
There are two major things that prospective students are searching for during their college search: a college and money to pay for it. Every college and university out there knows they have to focus their content on prospective students searching for college admission, specific programs and degrees, and the campus life opportunities that come with life at a college or university; this is the status quo of higher ed websites, and it works well. If an institution wants to stand out in the search results for prospective students’ web inquiries, then they have to think creatively and outside of the standard box.
Most institutions offer scholarships, grants and loans; each of which are thoroughly advertised on their websites in the admissions/prospective students’ pages. This is a good start, getting the content out there in the first place, but taking it the next step can potentially deliver a huge boost in new student inquiries.
Drive students to your scholarship pages through links in targeted academic content. Let students know while they are browsing the College of Education that there is a scholarship available through a link in the sidebar. This will help funnel traffic to your scholarship page and increase your conversion rate as well as passing the PageRank from your academic site to your admissions site and vice-versa, all while building a more definitive keyword presence for your site (a good link for our example page may read “Scholarship for teacher education majors.”) This method takes little to no resources or time, and can be a quick addition to any institutional website.
If you have the resources to go the extra mile, I suggest building additional content in your admissions site about opportunities for scholarship and other methods to pay for college. Prospective students are searching for this content, and right now the private sector is the main cafeteria for what they crave. Even a mid-sized college could challenge giants like FastWeb.com in the search results if they offered keyword rich content that uniquely addressed scholarship programs for each major, ethnic group and income level that the school provides for. Your students will thank you for the resources, and this increase in quality targeted content will bolster web traffic for years to come. Your school probably has all the content written already in the form of flyers, posters and guides placed on the Student Services and Financial Aid department walls.
09.06.06 | # | Start the conversation
There are two kinds of users that probably read your blog: those that know what they are looking for, and those who don’t. Sure, this seems like a bit of an oversimplification, but it is probably more important than you know. Today, I would like to discuss how these two kinds of users are different, and how you can serve to cater to them while authoring your blog content.
The first—those who know what they are looking for—visit your blog either from direct traffic, a link from another website, or a search engine. These users probably don’t know who you are, nor do they care… they know what information they need, and have that goal alone in mind. These users are looking for very specific content, and targeting them is a great way to get your traffic up and maybe even convert them to the second group.
This second group is the kind of visitor that already knows they like your work, and are checking back up on you expecting to find more high quality writings. At some point they said, “this one is a keeper” and either bookmarked you, or subscribed to your RSS feed. For a blogger, this traffic is the most important. Keeping this second group of users interested is a great challenge for many bloggers, and here are a few tips to help out:
I hope these few tips have given you some ideas on how to increase your blog traffic and reader loyalty. Did I miss anything?
09.03.06 | # | 2 Comments
An SEO company whose services I have used in the past just underwent a redesign of their site architecture. Now powered entirely by the blogging software Wordpress, Netconcepts has turned their entire corporate website into a blog.
As Stephan Spencer, CEO of Netconcepts, said in his blog, I don’t think anyone has ever done this before for a major corporate site. Personally, I think it is mostly a PR stunt, with many of the advantages they claim being easily obtainable on several mainstream CMS platforms.
Stephan claims that now he can get exposure to more search engines because his site is a blog. Poppycock! Any good quality CMS out there (like what I use, Modx CMS) can output an RSS feed for recent content, sections, or whatever you like; this enables any website to be placed in blog search engines, which should be more aptly named RSS search engines (the non-blog portion of my site is in Technorati, for instance.)
Furthermore, I think Netconcepts is going a bit overboard here about marketing their site to any and every search engine. I would challenge them to produce two clients a year from these blog search engines… I just don’t think that’s where people that need to hire consultants do their looking. Even if they did, the most popular blog search engine, Technorati, is date focused, so their website exposure has already faded from the charts (a search for SEO yields nothing of them, and even a search for the tag Netconcepts produces only one result, in Stephan’s personal blog nonetheless!)
But their move to Wordpress is no joke either; it has some real benefits that many companies should consider:
If I was a fly on the Netconcepts wall this week, I would love to pick up on whether they are feeling restricted in their site architecture now that they don’t have a more flexible CMS (I know that is why I moved away from Wordpress as a CMS) and if the traffic they generate from RSS search engines actually lead to sales. If their conversion rate remains high, I am sure we can expect a report out on their site within a few months that will probably be syndicated across the SEO landscape.
What do you think of this new turnaround in CMS structure? Can it provide results?
Dear Google,
I use Gmail for Your Domain, and since the calendar function has finally been added, I am in love with this service. I do have a small request though, one that I believe many customers would like to utilize.
My suggestion is simple, integrate the calendar and email clients more fully; give me a checkbox when I set up an appointment to activate the email auto-responder during the time that I am scheduled for that event.
Thank you,
Dan Bowling
06.21.06 | # | 2 Comments
After browsing the internet, I have grown to hate ads. I discovered the FireFox extension AdBlock, which will create filters to remove content from web pages. I decided to add my own filters as I ran into ads arount the web, and I figured it is time to offer them to the world. (more…)
04.19.06 | # | Start the conversation
Wow, I just found Hamachi, which is the easiest VPN software I have ever seen. From their website:
Think - LAN over the Internet.Think - Zero-configuration VPN.
Think - Secure peer-to-peer.
Access computers remotely. Use Windows File Sharing. Play LAN games. Run private Web or FTP servers. Communicate directly. Stay connected.
I’ll add two of my own:
It simply works.
It works simply.
I use it for file sharing, iTunes listening, and gaming. It even lets rendevous work on Trillian. Hamachi just rocks, Go get it.
04.18.06 | # | Start the conversation
In the world of SEO the title tag really is king, not to mention the fact that users see the title tag as the label to their bookmark. Because of this, a developer must spend much time making sure the title tag is well formed.
Luckly, the user’s mind and a search engine work very similarly to each other. The first words are the most important, and often the only ones looked at. Because of this, the true nature of your content must be first in the title tag. For pages this is the title of the page, for posts, the title of the post, and for my home page, a place where there is a hodge-podge of information, I decided it should be my name (so I actually show up in search results for my name). This means I have to first write a bit of PHP code to distinguish these different types of situations, and print some info in the title tag for each of them. Here is what I came up with: (more…)
04.17.06 | # | Start the conversation
Where did all the style go? No need to adjust your browser, today (April 5th, 2006) is CSS Naked Day. (more…)
04.05.06 | # | Start the conversation
I recently got my invite to Gmail For Your Domain, which basically lets me run Gmail as my back end to my personal domain email. I have been fed up with using the ugly webmail clients that come with my hosting company for a long time, but haven’t wanted to give up the luxury of my own domain name in my email. Enter Gmail For Your Domain, and my problem is solved. (more…)
04.01.06 | # | Start the conversation
I decided to implement the Fold Page Menus plugin for Wordpress on my site to allow me to give users a deeper navigational display than I previously had. It worked great, but with one problem, and I’d like to share my solution with the community. (more…)
03.16.06 | # | Start the conversation
I noticed a while ago that there are two forms of punctuation that I like to use in my writing, the semicolon and th em dash (—). Semicolon is an easy one, because it is easily recognized in the standard character set, the em dash is another story altogether! Here I will show you how to add an em dash to your WP Quicktags in less than a minute (file transfer included!) (more…)
03.16.06 | # | Start the conversation
KeepVid, a new web based service, lets users download videos from services such as Google Video, YourTube, Break.com, and iFilm. (more…)
03.14.06 | # | Start the conversation
Recently I found Scuttle, another social bookmarking tool, but one that is open source, installs on my website and most importantly, is free. I like the idea of sharing notable bookmarks with my peers, and with scuttle, it may come to fruition much more easily than I had thought before. (more…)
02.21.06 | # | Start the conversation
I recently installed the lightbox plugin for WordPress. I think it adds some neat functionality to blogging in general, and I have found that it incorporates greatly with my flickr account. (more…)
02.20.06 | # | Start the conversation
Tag clouds (a form of Folksonomy) seem to have creeped into web applications all over the internet. First seen on Flickr, tag clouds showed great promise as a novel way to view user trends and graphically showing relative the popularity of tags (think categories, but on steroids). The question I am interested in is: do tag clouds belong in the blogosphere? (more…)
02.12.06 | # | Start the conversation