• Your Email Signature is Prime Real Estate. Have a few links (but nothing elaborate) to your website in your email signature. A well-written email to a client, associate or family member might entice them to visit your website.
• Use Online Profiles To Your Advantage. There are always curious people who might check out your profile on StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook or miscallaneous forums. Give them something to look at; post a link to your website.
• If Something You Wrote is Relevant, Forward It. If a coworker or old classmate asks me how to do something I’ve discussed on my blog. Instead of completely reiterating what it was that I wrote, I’ll forward them a link. Try not to brag or anything, just try to slip it in.

Hope that helps.

• Use HTML markup to style whenever possible. Use attributes like background=”" whenever possible. CSS backgrounds will incorrectly render in GMail, so whenever applicable, make sure your background will work if applied to a table cell (<td>)
• Text, Text, Text. In most email applications, external images will require an action (such as clicking “Display all image below” before images are displayed. Do your best to use CSS and Font tags to style text instead of including large images so that the user still has an opportunity to see content before having to click on a prompt.
• Emails have folds too. Like websites, emails will have folds (the portion of an email visible without having to scroll). The fold will be really high, because of headers and vertical space being taken up by applications or web applications. Keep that in mind when placing your call-to-action.
• Support the ability to unsubscribe. At the footer of your email, provide the user an easy way to unsubscribe to the newsletter. He may be breaching agreements with your hosting company or ISP if you send unsolicited email without doing so.
• Your subject line is more important then your email. You will lose a majority of your users before they even see your email. Be sure to take the time to think about a clever/catchy subject line for your target audience so that you can get more users into your email.

That’s all for now, hope that helps.

• Your first target should be the .com. If only the .biz/.net/.org/.info/etc is available, try another name. Other TLD’s just don’t come to someone’s mind when they’re buying a domain name.
• Try a solid domain name that uses its extension in the name. Examples include: script.aculo.us and del.icio.us.
• If it’s uniquely an online business, work out your company’s identity based on the available .com instead of the reverse. You don’t want to set up your entire website, only to find out the domain name doesn’t exist.
• Don’t buy from anyone who isn’t GoDaddy. Enough said.
• Is it pronounceable? Is it easy to communicate verbally?
• Can you make it shorter?
  

There are two general paths to follow when trying to come up with a domain name:

• Keyword-filled domain name. Example: pat-burt.com
• Catchy brand. Example: technorati.com

When working trying to pick out a keyword-filled domain name, you should focus on terms that users will actually search for. This should be the reasoning for going this route in the first place. Be wary of words spelled differently in different areas of the world, for example: Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimisation.

Although hyphens look unattractive in a domain name, they help with search engine optimization

When trying to think of a catchy brand, try some word generators or web 2.0 generators. Even though you probably won’t generate gems, it’ll certainly help you brainstorm.

Hope that helps, that’s all for now.

Design

Your design, is your identity. Your users will feel how much work you put into your site’s branding and identity. If your forum uses a common forum skin, or worse, a default forum skin. Users will pick up on it. You’ll get out as much as you put in. If your forum skin, for example, fits with your color scheme, content and logo, then we have a real masterpiece, and users will notice. It will show that you care.

That being said, if you use any mash-ups or purchased software, be sure to heavily customize it and tailor it to your site’s identity.

Usability

Usability is great for every website. One thing you’ll notice about online communities, is if you’re constantly adding content or features to please your community, you might soon find yourself with a myriad of applications and processes. Here are some tips:

• Make sure your stylesheets are similar across the board. This includes link colors, hover styles, buttons, etc.
• Consider revising your navigation if you see that you have more than 7 navigation items.
• Try to keep the same header and footer across all applications and additions.

That’s all for now, hope that helps.

Inline CSS

Inline CSS is referred to when CSS is inserted to the HTML tag via a style attribute. This CSS will only affect that particular HTML tag. Example: We can change our Header 2 to a sixteen pixel font size with the following code:

<h2 style=”font-size:16px;”>My Sixteen Point Header</h2>

This will not affect any other Header 2’s on the page. Since CSS does not observe line breaks, we can insert multiple CSS attributes into the style attribute:

<h2 style=”font-size:16px;color:#ff0000;”>My Sixteen Point Header</h2>

This method is not 100% recommended because it is tedious to revisit multiple files and dig into the code to make simple changes.

Page CSS

In your page’s <head> tag, you can insert CSS that will affect that page only. This will look similar to a stylesheet, except for that there will be HTML tags above and below the CSS. Example:

<style type=”text/css”>
p {color:#ff0000;}
</style>

Again, this is not 100% recommended because it is tedious to revisit multiple files and dig into the code to make simple changes.

Most Important Attributes

Before we get in knee deep in CSS, let’s go over the most important attributes.

• Height - Determines the height of the CSS item (Example: 10%, 70px)
• Width - Determines the width of the CSS item (Example: 10%, 70px)
• Color - Determines the color of the CSS attribute (Example: red, #ff0000, #f00)
• Font-Family, Font-Size, Line-Height, Letter-Spacing, Font-Weight - Changes the attributes of the text in the container. Examples:
  font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  font-size:16px;
  line-height:18px;
  letter-spacing:-1px;
  font-weight:bold;
• Padding - This is the buffer space on the inside of the CSS element. Formatted from the top of the div container, clockwise to the left of the div container. (Example: padding:5px 0 8px 16px;)
• Margin - This is the buffer space on the outside of the CSS element. Again, formatted from the top of the div container, clockwise to the left of the div container. (Example: margin: 5px 10px 0 0;)
• Background-Color, Background-Image, Background-Repeat, Background-Position. These are fairly straight-forward:
  background-color:#ff0000;
  background-image:url(images/background.jpg);
  background-repeat:no-repeat; /*also repeat-x or repeat-y*/
  background-position:top center; /*or pixel values*/

Those values alone can put together a pretty complicated website. Next week, I will discuss more difficult attributes and how to get started. Hope that helps.

Why It’s Bad

Search Engines, or, let’s be serious here, Google, is known to penalize sites with duplicate content. These penalties can range from de-listing your domain, to a hit on the search engine results page, to a PageRank hit. Regardless of the penalty, penalties are not good things. It is often in your and your website’s best interest to stay as far away as you can from those penalties.

How is it duplicate content? If you visit http://www.mydomain.com/register.html and that page (and other pages on the website) are identical to http://www.myotherdomain.com/register.html, you may know that it’s the same site, but Search Engines will interpret two different .com’s as two different websites.

Google’s negative response towards duplicate content is, I imagine, a method to discourage content scrapers, who use bots to steal content from other sites and post it on their own.

What’s Wrong

What’s wrong is that you’re likely you have likely set up the domain name to point to the same nameservers and same folder as your main domain name. That’s where the problem lies.

How To Fix It

What needs to happen is that all domain names other then your main one need to be redirected. Redirecting your domain name shouldn’t be confused with mirroring the content from your main domain name. These redirects should be 301 redirects. You can either:

• Redirect the domain name with your registrar. Some registrars will give you the option to set up redirects without any hosting configuration. If at all possible, go with this option.
• Host multiple domains on your hosting account. You will have to create a separate folder to point your excess domains to. Each of these should be set up with a 301 redirect to your main domain. These can be done with most (any?) programming languages, so you should look up which your hosting package supports, and do your best.

Hope that helps.

2 - Text Alternate (or simple HTML alternate)
If you’re launching HTML emails, be sure to include a text-only alternate (and vice-versa). Not only does it help with getting your email through filters, but also with recipients who check their emails on mobile devices.

3 - SMTP
If at all possible, use an SMTP server to launch emails instead of using unauthenticated email.

4 - Link Destinations
Have a look at your link destination, avoid including hyperlinks with the following destinations:

• An IP
• A port number
• A deep folder architecture (eg. http://www.pat-burt.com/insiders/content/avi/download/getit.html)
• Subdomains

5 - Recipient List
If at all possible, try to send the emails to recipients individually. Multiple recipients in a To, CC or BCC field can start to get flagged as bad news.

6 - To and From Fields
This is different for each programming language, but make an effort to list the sender’s and the recipient’s name or organization, instead of uniquely the email.

7 - External Applications
External email distributors such as Campaigner will actively make sure you’re email doesn’t get blocked by taking a few of the precautions mentioned above for you. They are also more likely to be making sure that their origin/IP isn’t blacklisted to most spam filters. It gets riskier if you decide to go with cheaper Walmart hosting and run the risk of getting flagged by other users who share the same server.

Hope that helps, that’s all for now.

You will need to have two files. An HTML file, and a CSS file. Both of these can be blank, but try to make sure they have the right extension in the filename. You can link the CSS file with the following code in your HTML <head> tag:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”myStylesheet.css”>

Okay, now that we’ve got two files, let’s get started.

Your basic element HTML markup consists of a DIV tag: <div></div> . A DIV container is a square. By default, it’s as tall as the content within it, and fits to the width of whatever element it’s in.

This DIV tag is modifiable in almost every way imaginable in CSS. What you need to do is establish the link between your HTML markup and your CSS element. You would do so using an ID, or a CLASS. The only difference is that ID’s are only used once on a single page. Let’s say you want to display the text within the div at a 12 pixel font size.

Using an ID

HTML Markup
<div id=”myCSS”>12 Pixel Font</div>
CSS
#myCSS {font-size:12px;}

Using a CLASS

HTML Markup
<div class=”myCSS”>12 Pixel Font</div>
CSS
.myCSS {font-size:12px;}

Notice how I had to use a pound sign (#) when defining an ID in the CSS and a period (.) when defining a CLASS. In your CSS file, you can add as many attributes as you like within the curly brackets and it will affect the respective DIV container. If we wanted our myCSS class to appear bold, we would do the following:

.myCSS {font-size:12px;font-weight:bold;}

Like HTML, CSS has little importance on how you space your markup. The above CSS will perform exactly the same as:

.myCSS {
font-size:12px;
font-weight:bold;
}

Other HTML Elements

All elements can be styled using CSS as long as they are references properly. Technically, the only difference between a DIV tag and a SPAN tag (or P tag, LI tag, etc.) is that they each have preset attributes to make coding easier. A DIV container, as mentioned earlier, will, by default, fill the width. A SPAN container will, by default, display inline with other elements. You can just as easily use one for the other like so:

HTML
<div id=”actsLikeASpanTag”>I’m a span tag.</div>
CSS
#actsLikeASpanTag {display:inline;}

That’s all for now, hope that gets you started.

2 - Recycle old code whenever possible
Have you done a similar top navigation before? Make use of the code you developed for a project you finished 6 months ago. Time is money and you don’t want to go through the headaches you went through 6 months ago.

3 - Keep in mind what needs to printed
Although you can prepare print stylesheets, you can save yourself headaches later by remembering what needs to be printed and using an image or a CSS background accordingly. For example, clients typically like having their logos printed out, something that won’t happen unless it’s an image or you do a CSS workaround on your print stylesheet.

4 - It’s more important to keep your HTML simple
In the event that you can to choose between a more complicated HTML markup or a more complicated CSS file, go with the more complicated CSS file. Although you won’t think your template will get too bad, content added to your template may start to get a little cumbersome.

5 - Keep a library of stripped down useful functions
I often search my own blog and take a peak at my CSS Popup code whenever I need it because the code is in its simplest form. Sometimes pulling a developed version from another site you developed is a little trickier because you’ll have to undo the customizations you did.

6 - Use multiple stylesheets
In some occassions, you will need a decent clump of CSS code to make a single page on your website display correctly. Use a separate stylesheet for that page so that users who don’t access that specific page don’t have to download all that CSS.

7 - Know how to deal with PNGs
PNGs require a decent amount of work to get them to function correctly in every browser AND to validate. This becomes especially useful as more and more websites have drop shadows over complex backgrounds.

8 - Easy custom bullets
The easiest way to do custom bullets that function correctly in every browser is to use a background image for the <li> item. For this not to go bonkers with the lists in general, set the margin and padding to 0 for the <ul> and <li> item and work from there.

9 - Know how to replace quotes and apostrophes
These can start causing problems in fields such as text fields or text areas. Example: <input type=”text” value=”He said:”I don’t know what you’re talking about”" /> This would cause a giant mess and an unintended result. A quote can be replaced by &#34; and an apostrophe can be replaced by &#39; (Don’t use &apos; or &quot; as these don’t work all that well across all browsers)

10 - Radio buttons? Make sure you have one selected
Having a radio button pre-selected saves you from having to validate a blank result if the user chooses not to select an answer. For example, if you ask the user to select either Male or Female and neither one is selected by default, you’ll have to run form validation that makes sure that one or the other is selected. If you select Male by default, it’ll save that extra coding time. Besides, if you allowed users to not select an option, you’d use checkboxes instead of radio buttons.

That’s all for now, hope that helps.

I’m not saying, go out and hunt for Top Commenters blogs and spam them. I’m just saying that maybe you should give these specific blogs a little more time of day then the regular blog. If you have malicious intent, be sure to be genuinely interested in the blog you’re posting on.

Hope that helps.