Posted by Dan Romanchik on May 22, 2009 in
Web Development Seth Godin has an interesting take on how to deal with freelancers. He says that you should either give them “a clean sheet of paper” and let them go to work with very little supervision, or to define their project as completely as possible.
Using the first approach, you could get something wildly creative, but the risk is that you get something that’s completely off-base, too. Using the second approach you’re more likely to get something that you can use, but it takes a lot of work on your part to give the freelancer the direction he or she needs.
The worst-case is when the freelancer is put in a situation somewhere between the two. That is, he or she is not given much direction yet expected to produce something that pleases the client. This rarely happens because the client doesn’t really know what he wants until he sees what you’ve produced.
That’s why I always try to work with a client before taking on a project to define the project as much as possible. If we can do that upfront, then both of us will be happy when the project is complete.
Posted by Dan Romanchik on May 5, 2009 in
Search Engine Optimization I find that there’s a lot of confusion about keywords and how to ouse them. Here’s a good article from Inc. that explains some of current thinking on keywords – “Keyword Density: The 9 Places to Put Your Keywords for SEO Power.” Note that keywords need to be in your site’s content, not just in the meta tags.
Posted by Dan Romanchik on Apr 3, 2009 in
Other Cool Web Stuff From the Stanford Report, April 1, 2009
BY DAN STOBER
Want to know how to write programs for the iPhone and iPod touch? Beginning this week, a Stanford computer science class on that buzzworthy topic will be available online to the general public for free.
The 10-week course, iPhone Application Programming, is a hot ticket. It begins today and videos of the classes will be posted at Stanford on iTunes U two days after each class meeting (http://itunes.stanford.edu). Copies of the slides shown in class will be available there as well.
The proliferation of third-party applications for Apple’s iPhone has changed the device from a popular cell phone to a miniature computer. The Apple App Store offers more than 25,000 titles, dealing with everything from maps to business tools, games, photography, fishing and restaurant recommendations based on your location.
“There’s a lot of interest in the iPhone,” said Brent Izutsu, Stanford’s project manager for Stanford on iTunes U. “This course provides an excellent opportunity for us to show the breadth and depth of our curriculum and the innovation of our students.”
There are applications that can turn your iPhone into a musical instrument and one that will measure G-forces on your body as you steer your car through a corner. Snap a photo of the cover of almost any book, CD, DVD or video game and—with the right software—get links to ratings and reviews. According to Apple, the download count from its App Store has passed the 800 million mark.
Online viewers of the Stanford course will see the same lectures as the on-campus students, but will not receive credit for the course (http://cs193p.stanford.edu). Some of the student-developed apps from the fall-quarter class, such as the Chinese-English dictionary Qingwen, are available at the iTunes store.
“For Stanford, working with Apple allowed us to focus our energy on identifying and capturing great content while Apple provided us the technology to distribute it globally,” Izutsu said.
The Department of Computer Science is part of the Stanford School of Engineering.
Related Information
Posted by Dan Romanchik on Mar 27, 2009 in
Web Development I just posted this article to Biznik…..Dan
Just as you wouldn’t move your business into a “bricks and mortar” building without budgeting for building maintenance, you shouldn’t start your business website without a budget for maintenance. An improperly maintained website can be just as much of a millstone around your business’s neck as a poorly maintained building.
Dynamic Businesses Demand Dynamic Websites
If you expect your business to grow, you should also expect your website to grow. For example, if you add new products or services to your portfolio, you’re going to have to add those to your website. And, if you’re selling products via the Internet, you must be able to quickly add new products and delete slow sellers from your online catalog.
Other content should also be dynamic. Nothing turns off users more than website content that hasn’t changed for months and is woefully out of date. One way to keep your site’s content fresh is to blog about your company’s products and services and about industry issues. Blog early and often, though, or don’t blog at all.
A dynamic website will also continually add features to attract new customers and enhance the loyalty of existing customers. For example, in addition to a section describing your company’s products and services, you may want to add a section containing videos of your product in action. You may not need this feature initially, but make sure that your website design can accomodate this feature down the road.
Software Always Needs Upgrading
Developers of popular Web software, such as WordPress or Joomla, are continually releasing new versions. These new versions add new features and plug security holes, and if you use this software, you need to upgrade regularly. You may not need to install every new version that comes out, but you will need to do it every 12 – 18 months.
This is also true if your website has custom applications. For example, if you run a website for a membership organization, your website might include a member directory. As the organization grows, you may want to add fields to that directory or use that directory in different ways. It’s important that the site be designed so that the directory can be upgraded easily when needed or desired.
So, What’s a Business to Do?
If your business is big enough, you can probably afford a full-time Web developer to keep your site’s software up to date and add new features. To keep content fresh, you can hire a staff writer or find someone in Marketing with the appropriate skills.
If your business is small, though, you may not have these resources. If you find yourself in this situation, consider hiring freelancers to do these jobs.
When hiring a freelance writer to keep your website content up to date, look for one that has experience writing about your industry. You can find them by reading industry trade magazines or going to websites such as FreelanceSuccess.Com that have searchable writers’ directories.
When hiring a Web developer to maintain your website’s “infrastructure,” look for one with experience with the technology upon which your website is built. For example, if your website was programmed in PHP and uses a MySQL database, you probably want to hire a developer with that kind of experience and not a developer whose only experience is with Active Server Pages and the Access database.
Also look for a developer who is already maintaining websites. For many developers, maintenance is not something they enjoy, and if that’s the case, they may not do a good job for you. If you can find a developer with lots of experience with maintenance, chances are that he or she enjoys this kind of work, meaning that you’ll be more satisfied with the work.
Website maintenance is a necessity, not a luxury. A poorly-maintained website will turn away customers, but just a well-maintained building can attract new customers and welcome existing customers, so can a well-maintained website.
Posted by Dan Romanchik on Mar 10, 2009 in
Blogging,
Social Media … and now there’s Twitter to contend with. “Predictions on How Twitter Will Change Blogs in 2009″ from Social Computing magazine examines this trend. Some interesting ideas here—including how to integrate tweets with blog postings. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of this.
Posted by Dan Romanchik on Feb 19, 2009 in
Other Cool Web Stuff With all the cool, new Web applications that are now available, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., we sometimes forget about that old standby, the bulletin board system (BBS). For some applications, though, the BBS is still the best tool for the job.
I’ve worked with a number of them, including UBB Threads, phpBB, Phorum, and most recently, BBPress. I was hired to install BBPress on the Center for Human Systems website. As you might gather from the name, BBPress was developed by the creators of WordPress.
This heritage shows, too. Like WordPress, it installs quickly, runs fast, and is very easy to customize. It doesn’t have all of the features that some of the older BBS apps do, but that’s a good thing, if you ask me. It means that the software is a lot less “bloated” than some of those other packages.
It’s a perfect fit for this particular website, and it just might be a good fit for your website, too.
Posted by Dan Romanchik on Feb 19, 2009 in
Blogging I’m a big advocate of blogging, but most blogs never seem to really take off. One reason for this, obviously, is that the blogger just lacks the commitment. But, even when there’s commitment, bloggers have trouble finding a groove.
One reason for this might be a lack of focus. Chris Brogan’s latest blog post, ”
Build Blog Posts Like Building Blocks” discusses this, and gives some good advice on building a solid foundation for one’s blog. I love this comment:
One focusing element I have that I try to practice all the time is: “will this help other people?”
If you focus on helping other people, then the readers will come.
Posted by Dan Romanchik on Feb 13, 2009 in
Website Advice Six Overlooked SEO Tips has a couple of great suggestions for publication websites. While they are all good, the last one is something that’s easy to implement and could be quite valuable:
6. LOCALIZE
Whether a publication sells directly or through distribution channels, Riegel suggests placing detailed sales information—or at least an address—on each page.
Posted by Dan Romanchik on Feb 12, 2009 in
Other Cool Web Stuff From the February 2, 2009 ACM Tech News:
Web 3.0 Emerging
Computer (01/09) Vol. 42, No. 1, P. 88; Hendler, Jim
Web 3.0 is generally defined as Semantic Web technologies that run or are embedded within large-scale Web applications, writes Jim Hendler, assistant dean for information technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He points out that 2008 was a good year for Web 3.0, based on the healthy level of investment in Web 3.0 projects, the focus on Web 3.0 at various conferences and events, and the migration of new technologies from academia to startups. Hendler says the past year has seen a clarification of emerging Web 3.0 applications. “Key enablers are a maturing infrastructure for integrating Web data resources and the increased use of and support for the languages developed in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Semantic Web Activity,” he observes. The application of Web 3.0 technologies, in combination with the Web frameworks that run the Web 2.0 applications, are becoming the benchmark of the Web 3.0 generation, Hendler says. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) serves as the foundation of Web 3.0 applications, which links data from multiple Web sites or databases. Following the data’s rendering in RDF, the development of multisite mashups is affected by the use of uniform resource identifiers (URIs) for blending and mapping data from different resources. Relationships between data in different applications or in different parts of the same application can be deduced through the RDF Schema and the Web Ontology Language, facilitating the linkage of different datasets via direct assertions. Hendler writes that a key dissimilarity between Web 3.0 technologies and artificial intelligence knowledge representation applications resides in the Web naming scheme supplied by URIs combined with the inferencing in Web 3.0 applications, which supports the generation of large graphs that can prop up large-scale Web applications.
Posted by Dan Romanchik on Feb 6, 2009 in
Search Engine Optimization Your SERP (or Search Engine Results Page) says a lot about you. It’s a New Me (As Seen on Google) describes the process that Julia Angwin, a Wall Street Journal tech columnist, went through to remake her image as presented by Google. It’s interesting reading.
That prompted me to take a look at my SERP. Overall, it’s not too bad, except for the fact that links to danromanchik.com are #1 and #2. Normally, this would be a good thing, but I’ve been using that domain name to experiment with different web-development technologies, so there’s not that much there.
Link #3 is my listing on ArborWiki. #4 is my LinkedIn page. I need to figure out how to move #4 up to #1, and also how to move my ham radio blog up onto the first page.