flyingrose/web design

Excellent advice from SEO 2.0 covering scanning online content versus reading, headline examples of what works, and other good tips.

From the page: "Write headlines and posts using plain English. Avoid difficult words; there is no reason - ever - to use tricky language.

Be specific and descriptive rather than generalizing. You are competing with millions in the blogosphere; tell people exactly what your post is about. Which would you prefer to read?"

From the page: "Websites are just like people; they want and need to be loved. But the web circa 2007 is in adolescence, and most sites are terminally selfish.

They've yet to learn that Lennon and McCartney were right: the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Of course the last place adolescents would look for advice is adults. But there are two wizened grown-ups who could offer websites some help: architecture and storytelling.

I know far less about architecture and storytelling them than do real experts. But I've seen things in these fields that have been useful to me in making websites that work. I've summarized some of those observations here.

* Be a part of something.
* Create stories about desire.
* Don't just sit there looking pretty."

From the page: "Web Site Optimization: 13 Simple Steps
By Stoyan Stefanov

Earlier this year, the Yahoo! Performance Team published a series of front-end performance optimization "rules" for optimizing a site. In this tutorial, Stoyan takes the lead, showing us step-by-step how to implement the rules to achieve the ultimate in speed and performance, no matter what your system's specifications."

From the page: "the principle that things that are related should be presented in a similar way and things that are not related should be made distinctive. Consistency applies across quite varied contexts:

* information should be presented in a consistent way: if bold is used to provide emphasis in one part of a document, italics shouldn't be used in another part
* input and output should be consistent (stimulus-response compatibility): pressing an up button should go up, not down
* an application should behave consistently in any context and on any platform (cross-platform compatibility)
* what one person sees should be consistent with what another person sees, so that they can effectively communicate about it (the WYSIWIS principle)
* an application should behave consistently with the metaphor that it presents: folders on a desktop may contain files, but files may NEVER contain folders"

HINT to SU: It takes me FOUR extra clicks to complete this review because of an inconsistency on THIS site. FOUR. Think of all the things I could have been doing INSTEAD to make the world a better place and create more unique content HERE that benefits SU and anyone else who sees it.

Roses for everyone, courtesy of doritsa.stumbleupon.com [doritsa.stumbleupon.com] who "borrowed" them from silverfox616.stumbleupon.com [silverfox616.stumbleupon.com] .

I "bumped" this review to thank Doritsa for how her contributions here benefit me. (For Newbies, to bump, or bumping something in a forum or blog means to send it back up to the top).

Doritsa is one of the many fellow stumblers whose work I admire. Her blog here is widely recognized and as I type this she has 141 reviews, has rated 3,484 sites, and has 341 fans.

I encourage stumblers to take the time to review, comment, and thank those who give freely of their time here. Many you may believe are "famous" or self-confident actually rarely hear from those who most benefit from their gifts.

Blogging and writing can both be like sending your blessings out into the world, never knowing whether they've landed or benefited anyone or not. If someone is blessing you and you thank them they will be encouraged to continue making a difference for that many more.

From the page: "Macromedia says Flash is "the solution for producing and delivering high-impact web sites." It's also a solution for making your site highly annoying and downright unusable. Here's why:"

Here is an advanced WordPress tip for linking to a series of posts before they've been published. From the page: "WordPress Tip: Finding Future Post Permalinks

In Technical Tips for Publishing a Series of Articles on Your Blog, I offered tips for how to use WordPress to publish a series of articles on your blog, linking manually between the blog posts after they have been published.

One of the benefits of writing articles series as future posts is that you can link between the posts before they are published - but only with links to past posts, not future posts.

When you include a link to a post that hasn't yet published, the reader will click on it and find themselves staring at a Page Not Found 404 Error. Not a polite thing to do, is it.

However, you can play some games with future posts to include links to posts which haven't published on posts which haven't published yet.

Why? Tracking all the links in past posts after the post has published can be time consuming. Why not shorten some of the fuss and link to the posts before they've published. You may still have to edit the posts once they are published to add links to upcoming posts, but let's do a little of it now as we are developing the posts and the thoughts are fresh in our heads.

I've been using this technique to generate links in my article series for a long time, and it helps speed up the process for me. Let's see if I can explain it so you can understand how simple this is and how much time you can save."