YBO Interactive Blog

Checkout this excellent post by SEOmoz, 8 Innovative Design & UI Elements That Make Sites Better

My favorite item was news via the Logo that shows a super cool use for your logo for hot news or announcement. This is the most innovative logo concept I’ve seen , the only company I saw that changes it’s logo every now and then is Google, but who am I to say a word about Google’s innovation…

Another great item was the Product IS the homepage which is a very creative way to make the home page behave like a landing page. Very unusual, very nice. I WILL do that.

There are more cool tips there. Worth reading.

I found a really nice research article made by the Psychology Department of Wichita Sate University, about The Effect of Website Typeface Appropriateness on the Perception of a Company’s Ethos or  in other words - which font should you use to make your users trust you more.

It makes perfect sense that there are fonts that are more trustworthy, but I never thought about a research proving it. But then again, this is the reason that I’m blogging about it, and they have proved it…

It happened lately a few times that I asked customers to make changes on their website and got the answer “the company that built our website said that it is impossible”.

I heard it even on simple requests like removing the company name from the pages <TITLE>. Not mentioning META tags, ALT tags, nofollow links, 301 redirects, and many others requests that were simply rejected.

So I made this list.

This is what I want from web development companies that are going to work with my customers.

1. Configurable <TITLE> tags: I would like to set the title of every page myself. I don’t want the company name added to the title automatically and I don’t want the title to be the anchor text of the link from the main menu (I may want that, but let me choose). I need full control on title with no exceptions.

2. Configurable Meta <Description> tags: Most companies will let you do that through their CMS, but some that I have seen never heard of it.

3. mod_rewrite: Let me decide how I want the URLS on site to look like. In some cases, instead of having this URL http://www.example.com/product.php?action=7&id=8 I may want this one: http://www.example.com/blue-car-with-sun-roof

4. Nofollow links: I need the option to set links on site to nofollow. This may include links on the main menu or links that appear on every page on site.

5. ALT Attributes: It should be possible to set ALT Attributes to every image on site.

6. H1 H2 H3: Let me add any HTML tag I want on my page. Especially Heading tags.

7. Crawlability: site must be fully crawlable, with no javascript links that block the flow.

8. Javascript: In some cases I will still need the ability to add javascript code. Whether it is Google Analytics, or other e-commerce tracking codes, many CMS systems I saw do not allow javascript. The ones my customers use need it.

9. Editable Footer: I will need to edit the footer for many reasons. Mostly for adding tracking codes that should appear on every page on site, and in some cases adding links or graphics. Don’t show me a fixed footer with sitemap and privacy policy links. Let me change it.

10. Dedicated IP: This is a hosting issue, that in many cases comes in the same package. Dedicated hosting is a big advantage. This means that our site is the only site that has our IP address. I don’t want to get search engine penalties because of adult sites running on my machine.

11. USA hosting: I know that hosting in India is great. I really do. But my market is in the US, and my site should be where my customers are. Both in terms of SEO and network aspects. My site should be rocket fast both to my customers and to Google.

12. LAMP: Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP is my favorite. CMS built on these machines just makes me happier. I can’t explain this one. It’s a matter of belief.

13. Standards: Standard site according to the world wide web consortium is an advantage. I’ll be actually very surprised if anyone will say yes to this one.

14. Firefox: That is the easiest request. I saw web sites that belong to web development companies that can not be viewed with Firefox. How stupid is that?

15. Flash: I don’t like flash websites. Neither does Google.

If you have any additions to this list please comment…

I’m using Google analytics quite a lot on every site I work on. Recently we had a problem at one of my customers sites, where the marketing people working in that company were browsing their website all day, searching in Google their website keywords again and again, and made Google Analytics reports become unreliable. There were so many visits in the reports that were not real customers but our own staff, that we didn’t really know which part of the report was real and which part was our own tracks.

Like in every crime scene, we just needed our guys to put on gloves before touching everything…

The solution was very simple.

1. We created a file called disable_analytcis.php

<?php
SetCookie(”disable_analytics”,”1″ ,time()+91536000,”/”);
echo “Yuhu!, Google analytics is disabled!”;
?>

2. In the site footer, next to the Google analytics code, we added this:

<?
if (!empty($_COOKIE[’disable_analytics’]))
{
echo “Google analytics is disabled”;
}
else
{
?>
//put google analytics code here…
<?
}
?>

That was easy. The hard part was to send the link to disable_analytics.php to all the sales and marketing in that company and ask them to click on the link. They ALL wanted to know exactly WTF is going on here… are we spying on them? yes? no? what do you mean Google keeps track??? anonymous? who authorized this…

Once everybody got their cookie, our statistics cleared up. Real client analytics emerged and logs turned useful again. When you do it on your site, make sure your cookie gets to all computers, home computers, laptops and any computer that you don’t want to track.

update: (Thanks Pieter!)
Google offers cookie based filters, as described in Google Analytics Help Center:
Create an Exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie. Follow these instructions to create a filter with the following settings:
Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: disable_analytics
Case Sensitive: No

Does your website suppot Apple iPhone?

iPhone Dev Center explains how easy it is to create a WebClip Bookmark Icon for iPhone users.

To specify a bookmark icon for all pages of a web site, place a PNG
image named “apple-touch-icon.png” at the root directory of your web
server - similar to the “favicon.ico” for site icons.

To verride the site bookmark icon on a specific web page, insert a
<link> element similar to <link rel=”apple-touch-icon”
href=”/customIcon.png”/> within the <head> element of the page.

I found this excellent piece of art that made me smile…

In case you were wondering what SQL Injection means, it is a trick to inject SQL command as an input possibly via web pages.

As seen above, the kid’s name is Robert’);DROP Table STUDENTS;–

Now, if you run a login form that has a user name and a password, usually the sql query behind this login form looks like that:

SELECT * FROM STUDENTS WHERE NAME=’$name’ AND PASSWORD=’$password’

Now, if someone is trying to perform an SQL Injection attack, take Robert’s name and put it as $name, and the SQL query will look like that:

SELECT * FROM STUDENTS WHERE NAME=’Robert’);DROP Table STUDENTS;–‘ AND PASSWORD=’$password’

It is quite easy to protect your system from SQL Injection on the coding phase but usually web programmers tend to do a bad job regarding security.

I’ll write some more about this issue soon…

htaccss is used to manipulate URLS on Apache web servers.

As we all know, URLs are a tremendously important factor in SEO, and the easiest way to improve them is htaccess.

here is a simple example for htaccss file. The file we have is called /aboutthecompany.html but we want out viewer to see a clean path - /about/

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^about?$ ?aboutthecompany.html [L]

That was simple, here are some more tricky examples:

Zen-cart product pages urls usually look like

/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=7

how powerfull would it be if we could auomatically change them to look like

/gemstones/7/Aquamarine-Round-Blue

here is an htaccss file that will do exactly this:

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^gemstones/(.+)/(.+)/?$ index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=$1 [L]

isn’t that nice?

another nice example is changing the url of images

instead of /images/1212121212.jpg

we’ll see /gemstones-images/1212121212/Ligh-Blue-Aquamarine

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^gemstones-images/(.+)/(.+)?$ images/$1.jpg [L]

and this example shows how to redirect all the gemalaya.com traffic to www.gemalaya.com

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^gemstones/(.+)/(.+)/?$ index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^gemalaya\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.gemalaya.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Isn’t that cool?

all the examples above can be seen live on Gemalaya Loose gemstones

I just found a great javascript code for Vertical Scrolling Text / News Ticker in JavaScript/DHTML

Works like a charm.