| LED Digest 2642: Automagical Web Page Creation |
|
|
|
==================================================
The LED Digest
Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom http://www.AudetteMedia.com : the LED's Publisher Boutique Internet Marketing: SEO, SEM, Social Media http://www.SEOToolSet.com/training/ : the LED's Premier Sponsor Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization Training & Certification ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. May 8, 2008 Issue no. 2642 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== <Moderator Comment> ~ Trials and Travails of a Traveling Man --== Has the Stone Age Ended? Xara ==-- ~ Shaun Johnston "Xara will export whatever you create on the screen into a web page..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== SEO Standards ==-- ~ Megan Carruth "What I'm really curious to hear about are the real, tangible risks people think we're facing..." ~ Tom Anson "...the standards are no better than the understanding of those who set them." --== Triangular Linking ==-- ~ Dan Thies "...this kind of relationship building and audience sharing deserves a different name..." ========= NEW ===================================== <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, I'm at the tail end of a business trip, a short one, but it seems longer than others that lasted 2 weeks. Business is really going up, and that's a great thing! My hard work is paying off. Only problem is, I have a baby due any day now :) Sally's official due date is May 15, but she's already 3-4cm dilated. Pretty exciting. This week though, I had to be in Portland to train a traditional agency on SEO, then to Las Vegas for a day with Zappos working on SEO with them. What would normally be a casual trip is making me feel like I'm on borrowed time, just jonesing to get back to my wife and 2 year old daughter. Anyway, enough of that. Just feels good to vent a bit :) I got an interesting email today from a brand new subscriber who, being dissatisfied, gave me the following input upon unsubscribing after a single issue: ------------------- This is an enquiry e-mail via http://www.led-digest.com from: Jessica I received my first newsletter today and found two things that prompted me to unsubscribe immediately. 1) Why no HTML option? I simply cannot read the digest in its current form. Since I know my email is set up to receive HTML and I could find no other options on the LED site, I assume that it's not availble. I won't read it as is. 2. The SEO Standards article talked about everything but SEO standardization. There are plenty of other resources on SEO written by experts who know how to write. ------------------- I sort of chuckled at that... sort of. I also bristled a bit. And replied to Jessica that the LED has been published for over a decade. It's probably not fair to judge it by a single issue that isn't in HTML per your liking! Just feels good to share that too! Have a great week, I'm heading home tomorrow. Then I think I'll stay until my new little baby is born. Travel safe if you're traveling, and if you're home - give someone you love a hug! Adam ----------------- From: Shaun Johnston Subject: Has the Stone Age ended? For my lodgings' clients I have developed special slide show formats for showing rooms, content self-management pages (in Word), php/MySQL programming, a nice set of tools. But I have been steadily falling behind in web design technique, to the point where I felt I should give up webmastering altogether. My failing was in design itself - I refuse to use CSS, and I was exasperated with the limitations of the design programs. Suddenly, like blue sky after a storm, I get the latest version of Xara Extreme Pro, a graphic design program. Xara will export whatever you create on the screen into a web page with Flash, 3D effects, drop-down menus, links, imagemaps, for all the pages of an entire site, all created in one file in the program. You can export graphics from the same file for print or web. I experienced this once before. About 25 years ago I was struggling to learn Postscript programming to create graphics when Freehand burst on the scene and rapidly outdistanced anything one could do by hand coding. I feel Xara may be doing the same now, with the Web. OK, I haven't really tried it out, I don't yet have the CD and the manual, just a download of the program. Maybe it hasn't finessed the problem entirely. But it signals the coming of design programs that will obsolete hand coding. Already I see replacing some of my procedures-for one directory page, each time I get a new client or lose one I update a map-overlay-graphic in Freehand, export it to Photoshop for touch-up and web export, and upload it to replace an existing jpg over a background gif. Now I can make the whole thing in Xara and export directly as a webpage. Xara could for some sites replace Fireworks, Illustrator, Flash, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver. It covers the entire spectrum from wooly concept exploration to finished output, in a single creative process. Whatever you group get's output as a single graphic, text unless grouped remains editable. In essence a young designer starting with Xara and abiding by its limitations could produce the highest quality web sites while knowing little of what the rest of us have been doing over the past decade. The learning curve would shrink enormously. Web design would become intuitive, truly wysiwyg. If web-design standards existed, this would pulverize them. Sample http://nycgetaways.com/temp/xaratest/webTest%20of%20flyer.htm On my Windows machine, in Explorer, this look identical to the graphic as seen in Xara, even to line breaks in the text. The test is editable, searchable by search engines. I can export this as a pdf at 300 dpi for printing, as easily as for a web site. From having fallen behind I feel the promise of having leapt out in front-if I can forget enough. Shaun Johnston ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Megan Carruth Subject: SEO Standards So let's not be so gung-ho in calling for- Michael Linehan, LED 2641 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/2056/190/ I like this one - nice piece. To explore further... Industry players themselves have been calling for 'standardization' since 1998. (For those who care to read the history, here's a timeline http://searchengineland.com/080222-160051.php ) To my knowledge, the farthest we've come to standardizing web promotion activities is the Internet Advertising Beureu's best practice document http://tinyurl.com/5rfy9n [iabuk.net] But that's not really *standardization* is it? I mean, just because best practices are published as 'standards' on AIB, will the discerning customer read it and use it as a due-diligence litmus test? Is it enforceable? And is that even the issue anyway? A distinction needs to be made between standardization and regulation in these arguments. What I'm really curious to hear about are the real, tangible risks people think we're facing if either is imposed. My view is that programmers code their sites to W3C compliancy; make them cross browser compatible. They're still able to evolve, improve their skills, and *charge money *within those parameters. As an aside, when I disclose my shockingly minimal level of education, people are most often impressed, not appalled. People want to make money, and will hire you if you have a track record of doing so for others. I'm certain that standards imposed on the search industry will have nothing to do with training and degrees. Megan Carruth Online Marketing & Business Development Consultant www.bizdevmarketing.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Tom Anson Subject: SEO standards As always, Michael Linehan offered us some good things to consider in his post (LED Digest 2641). As someone who is fighting the good fight for natural healthcare -- or at least the option to choose it -- I heartily agree with Michael's assessment of the relative value of education and standards. His examples of midwives and pharmaceutical drugs (which kill more than 120,000 people every year, when taken as prescribed by physicians -- part of the 780,000 who die each year from conventional medicine; and, which is estimated at being only 5-20% of the actual number) and schools are really on-point, and clearly demonstrate the problems of setting rigid standards, etc. When in comes to standards, whether they be medical/healthcare, science-at-large, educational or SEO, the standards are no better than the understanding of those who set them. If the basic premise is off (as is so clearly the case with medicine), everything else will bear that weakness. So, when Michael says, "As the saying goes, passing exams only proves one is good at passing exams", there is more truth to that than most might people see, at first glance. You can pass an exam without really knowing much; but, you can also know it all and actually know very little, if you're learning the wrong things. Furthermore, knowing it all tends to blind you to the truth, even when it slaps you in the face. When doctors had written me off, and I was very near to death, my life was saved by a healthcare professional who could not even list his credentials on his office door because the standards-setting body in this state had a different (and very faulty) philosophy of healthcare. His "good work" did more for me than I can tell you, but none of it was "standards compliant". Michael, I, for one, loved your post. Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials http://www.therapeutic-grade.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Dan Thies Subject: Triangular linking Within niches, plenty of site owners still- Dirk Johnson, LED 2641 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/2056/190/ You're right, Dirk... I think this kind of relationship building and audience sharing deserves a different name than "reciprocal linking." The reciprocity implicit in this goes beyond simple backscratching. One might even call it... marketing. Dan Thies http://www.seofaststart.com (c) Copyright 1995-2008 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story." - Anthony de Mello |
