| LED Digest 1843: Focusing on the Big Picture |
|
|
|
================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ July 20, 2004 Issue #1843 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Site Redesign Blues ==-- ~ Peter D'Aprix "...the focus of the discussion is on the tools rather than the goal of the site." ~ David Mead "...only practice and lots of reading will improve your pages." --== The End of Email as You Know It? ==-- ~ Haakon Rian Ueland "...ask your ISP to set up greylisting." ~ Michael Linehan "You might find it useful to try stopping the spam at its sources." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Cached Pages ==-- ~ Thom Reece ~ Stephen Mareches ~ Michael Linehan --== Search Engine Relationship Chart ==-- ~ Bruce M. Clay --== Random Spam Email ==-- ~ Viggie Bala ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Peter D'Aprix Subject: Redesign blues This is an interesting topic, most especially, I think, because it illustrates a proclivity current in the web design field - a tendency to focus on the details before defining the big picture. Rather like a photographer saying he always uses a 35mm camera instead of asking himself / herself "what camera / film combination is right for this assignment?" In this case, the focus of the discussion is on the tools rather than the goal of the site. While tools are certainly important, a carpenter will first decide what he needs to build, then pick the tools and materials relevant to producing the desired product. The same should be true of web sites. Once the goal is decided, then the best tool to achieve it can be picked. Not the other way around. The debate between FrontPage, GoLive, Dreamweaver and other wisiwig tools versus hand coding seems to me to be missing the point. Any one of the wisiwig tools, if used in capable hands, despite all their drawbacks, will produce sites that load reasonably quickly, especially if broad band is being used by the viewer. Most of them, the best ones anyway, provide a self coding feature which on the most recent versions is better than on older versions. If used correctly, search engines will spider sites produced by them all. And, conversely, there is nothing wrong with hand coding, again when used by capable hands. There is nothing to suggest that a site built using hand coding is going to be a better or worse site than one built using a wisiwig tool since it depends entirely on the ability of the designer to use the tools well. And is it not the ultimate user of the site, not the designer of the site, for whom sites are intended? So frankly, who cares how the site is built? Who cares what tools are used if the visitors to the site like it, return to it, find it loads quickly and gives them what they want in a manner in which they can find it easily and the information fulfills their needs? If the search engines are happy enough with the site to index it and it appears well placed on a search. Certainly this last is not the province of hand coded sites exclusively. So just as a site should be graphically designed with the product, the message and the user in mind, not to mention the client; so should the choice of tools. Having said that, it is most useful for a wisiwig designer to at least be familiar with the code. In addition to the dummy book mentioned, www.lynda.com has an excellent group of books to help with many web applications. Her "Creative html Design 2" is a very good place for anyone starting html or currently using a wisiwig (what you see is what you get) application. http://www.htmlbook.com/ I am a current user of Adobe GoLive simply because I started with very first version of it and I took Lynda Weinman's class in Ojai which partnered Adobe PhotoShop with Adobe GoLive since they work well together and I have been a long time user of PhotoShop as a professional photographer for 25 years. But GoLive has not kept up with Dreamweaver and I am going to switch, so have been exploring Lynda's web site for the appropriate instruction book to bring me up to speed. Same goal for the web site but different tools to achieve the goal. Lastly and I will give you all a break from my pontificating, different craftsmen feel comfortable with different tools. Here again, who cares what tools you use as long as you and your tool kit achieve the desired result. So a discussion of tools must rest on how well suited they are to the desired result and to the user. The desired result should first be defined before the resulting discussion can have much relevance. Peter D'Aprix peter, daprix.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: David Mead Subject: Redesign blues "HTML for Dummies" is an excellent book (still have my dog-eared copy) and FrontPage is a great tool for the novice home-user. But skimming through both of these in a weekend does not make you a web designer. Do you know about DOCTYPES and how they affect different browsers? Does your code validate? Is your content lost below a ton of propriety tags, JavaScript and nested tables? Is it HTML or XHTML? Use the afore-mentioned items to get a basic understanding, but only practice and lots of reading will improve your pages. David Mead ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Haakon Rian Ueland Subject: End of Email There are a few options you might try. The most efficient one is to ask your ISP to set up greylisting. This system, which works serverside, sends a message back to the mails originating server saying it did not receive the mail. Typically, spammers hide the originating servers. A disadvantage to this system is that the first mail sent will take about 1 hour to reach you. However, once you have received one mail, you will not have to wait. Greylisting is free for Linux servers, and is a standard plugin. Another option is to search for "spam" one www.sourceforge.net and www.freshmeat.net. There are many free apps to be found. Haakon Rian Ueland http://www.i-q.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: spam frequency > My spam has now got silly with over > 2,000 messages a day. - Richard Graham, LED 1842 Hi Richard, You might find it useful to try stopping the spam at its sources. One major source for anyone is the web site. The email address "forms, genkienglish.net" is plainly visible in the code of your contact form. If I can see it, so can the spam harvesters. If this were held in a CGI script, it would not be gathered by spammer robot. Or you could try plain email links, encoded to prevent harvesting. Michael Linehan http://www.marketing-alchemy.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Thom Reece Subject: Cached pages > How can I make sure that a browser ALWAYS pulls the > recent web page from my server as opposed to pulling > a cached page from the local machine? - Steve Wicks, LED 1842 Aloha... I believe that if you hold down the 'Shift' key at the same time you click on 'refresh' you will force the the data to be taken from the server and bypass any cached pages. Thom Reece On-Line Marketing Resource Center http://www.e-comprofits.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Stephen Mareches Subject: Cached pages Steve, The best thing I've found so far is to use these two lines in the "head" portion of your page: <.http-equiv name="Pragma" content="No Cache"> <.http-equiv name="Expires" content="-1"> This lets your visitors browser know to not use a cached page on their machine older than yesterday. If your content changes frequently you may wish to also include <.http-equiv name="Revisit" content="2 weeks"> These little guys can be especially helpful in presenting your freshest content. Stephen Mareches, Web Consultant Sophia Solutions www.sophiasolutions.net ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: Cached pages <.meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> <.meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive"> Hopefully, someone else knows what to do about pages already there. Michael Linehan http://www.marketing-alchemy.com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Bruce M. Clay Subject: Search Engine Relationship Chart Since so many of you already have this chart, I thought it okay to announce that the update is available. Free, of course. FLASH: http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm PDF: http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginechart.pdf Click on the icons for backup data. Comments always welcome. Bruce Clay www.bruceclay.com <Moderator Comment> Congrats on the Wired article, Bruce! ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Viggie Bala Subject: Random email > I have been receiving spam emails that have strange strings > of words at the beginning and/or ending of the email. - Diane Dennis, LED 1839 You will not see these strange strings of words if you are using Outlook. Instead, the HTML part of the email will be displayed. So while they fool the filters with this text, they still show their ads the same way for most of the recipients. I have now resigned to checking mails in web browser before downloading in my Outlook. I do have anti-virus protection, but this way I can delete all virus mails before it lands in my PC. Even now, 5 - 10 virus email arrives in a day. While checking the subject and file size in browser, it is easy to delete all obvious spam. This manual filtering is a bit tedious, but I am not taking chances after two hard disk crashes with vital data loss. Regards, Viggie Bala Viggie - Helping websites to work http://www.viggie.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Adversity is the first path to truth." - George Gordon Byron |
