We are happy to announce that we won an award for our work on newmommyoais.com . This is truly an honor to receive this award. Working with Lisa and Holly was a lot of fun and we are proud of the work we did.
Thanks
Award Winning Web Design
More Google Stuff
AdSense Upgrades:
New AdSense options look to help publishers and developers better target their users. AdSense for search ads only lets publishers include ads on pages and include them in native search results — above, below or beside the results. In the past, publishers could only use AdSense for search within Google results.
AdSense for Ajax solves the problem of serving relevant ads when content of a page changes. When a user is on an Ajax-heavy website, they can now be served changing ads based on the changing context within the page. In the past, new ads were only served when the page was refreshed. As Ajax does not require refreshing the page even when the context of the page changes, relevant ads were a problem.
There’s an added benefit of AdSense for Ajax. From Google, “In addition to the ads refreshing, you might wonder why the subject of the ads changed since the crawlable content on the page didn’t change much when the tab changed. The second benefit of AdSense for Ajax is that it allows you to provide hints about your site’s uncrawlable content with each refresh.”
Google Font API and Directory:
Google’s Font Directory and API are now available, providing “high quality open source Web fonts” for everyone. The fonts are enabled by CSS3 @fontface standard, hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.
Each font is cross-browser compatible, fully searchable and accessible to users with screen readers. Utilizing search-engine friendly fonts is a nice way to separate your website from others and provide a little “flair” for users to enjoy.
Google Wave (Labs):
Wave might have started slow, but Google’s new Wave (Labs) announcement might turn the tide. Wave is now open to businesses, schools and organizations. The focus is on collaboration within organizations. Members of a wave can play back previous developments within the wave and remove the discussion when the project is complete. Also, new extensions (such as maps and voting gadgets) allow for more collaboration, and developers can develop custom extensions within Wave to suit their needs.
More information about Wave is available, as is registration for a webcast that will detail new additions and answer user questions.
Do it yourself Web Design
I’ll be the first one to let you in on a secret: building a basic website isn’t too difficult. However, building a creative, search engine friendly, and professional website Is very difficult. One large aspect of building a website correctly is an html validator.
There are several specific reasons for writing valid HTML, and using an HTML validator to insure that what you write is valid:
Future compatibility
As browsers evolve, they come closer and closer to supporting the standard HTML as written by the W3C. Even if they don’t fully support the most recent version of HTML, the browser builders go in and make sure that they are compliant with older versions of the standard.
If you are writing non-standard HTML, there is a chance that as browsers evolve, they will no longer support your Web pages. A good example of this is a trick that some Web developers used with an older version of Netscape. If you included multiple body tags with different colors, Netscape would load them all in in succession creating a fade-in or flicker effect as the page loaded. This trick no longer works, as it relied on an incompatibility of the browser.
Unless you know for a fact that your entire audience is using a specific browser, you are setting your site up to annoy some of your readers if you make it inaccessible to them through invalid or non-standard HTML. Many HTML validators will check your HTML for browser specific entities and alert you to their use.
Browser specific HTML can be part of the standard (IE supports the iframe tag, but Netscape does not) or not a part of the standard (the <marquee> tag is supported by IE and the <layer> tag is supported by Netscape, but neither are a part of the HTML 4 standard).
For example, often people will design a beautiful page with tables and view it in IE. Then, a couple days later their friend calls them up to ask them why they have a blank page up on their site (as viewed in Netscape). The problem is that Netscape interprets the tables standard (the ending </table> tag is required) strictly and IE does not. You could argue that IE is being more flexible, but what if they decide in IE 6 to interpret the HTML standard more strictly? With the merging of XML and HTML into XHTML, this may easily become a reality. And suddenly, your pages no longer work for IE. But if you had written valid HTML, you wouldn’t have had that problem.
We have found that more experienced entreprenuers stick to what they know. Sure, I can paint the outside of my home but when it does not look good, whom is to blame? We have designed hundreds of websites over the past 8 years.
Let us do what we do best. Make happy web design customers.