Web Design

A few years ago, I needed a Content Management System (CMS) for my site Voor Beginners and its English counterpart For Beginners. One of the requirements was, that the CMS should use "search engine friendly" URLs. This is fairly easy to accomplish with Linux and Apache; however, another requirement was that the CMS should run on the Windows platform... In this article, I will show how you can "simulate" the effects of .htaccess and mod_rewrite using Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) and classic ASP.

Anybody who monitors their rankings with the same vigor that we in the SEO community do will have noticed some fairly dramatic shifts in the algorithm starting last Thursday (July 5th) and continuing through the weekend. Many sites are rocketing into the top 10 which, of course, means that many sites are being dropped at the same time. We were fortunate not to have any clients on the losing end of that equation however we have called and emailed the clients who saw sudden jumps into the top positions to warn them that further adjustments are coming. After a weekend of analysis there are some curiosities in the results that simply require further tweaks in the ranking system.

Apache's asis feature, provided by mod-asis, is a very simple way of sending static HTTP headers along with static content. Many installations of Apache have this disabled (the default) and those of us not on Apache are out of luck. This combination has led to this simple and useful feature being overlooked by most web developers.

This document describe an approach to SQL queries of hierarchical data using ancestor tables. Multiple inheritance are allowed but cycles are not allowed for this approach to work.

Improving your use of color may open the door toward improving of the effectiveness of your site or portal. Our research shows that simple color-changes can improve click-through rates, registration numbers, and community activity.

This conclusion derives from research at LeerWiki.nl, a Dutch community for learning and earning. We have tested how different color schemes affect visitor behavior with regards to site goals, in order to optimize the use of color. This article outlines our research process and results.

I have been working with large organizations to create or move web and intranet sites from static HTML pages to the company's chosen CMS. My role is that of liaison between the IT department (or whoever manages the project) and end user. By default, my clients tend to be in clerical roles: the folks in the trenches. My job is to evangelize the product, explain the process, present, instruct, coach, and guide clients in web architecture basics and design best-practices, and in use of the chosen software.

I have a very simple anti-bot spam technique that works extremely well. It requires no javascript, cookies or complicated server weirdness, is fully accessible, has no hidden fields, has negligible overhead and takes just a moment or two to implement. It requires that the user fill out one field with a number, so it's good for anti-bot but will not prevent human spammers. In three years, I have yet to receive any spam on any of the many sites that I have installed this on. Sites that were being bombarded with hundreds of spams daily suddenly became quiet and good emails get though.