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Web Essentials 2005: Day Two
If you haven’t already, check out my summary of day one (with many 3AM-ish typos now fixed).
The closing day of Web Essentials 2005 (WE05) in Sydney meant more of everything… except perhaps sleep. Having not had the foresight to register for Tantek Çelik’s breakfast session, I was able to sleep in till the blissful hour of 8AM, but then it was back to it:
Web Standards Workflow, Molly HolzchlagHolzschlag
Molly wanted to start out her second presentation by answering a few of the audience’s questions about the Web Standards Project (WaSP), Microsoft, and the future of Internet Explorer.
Items that were covered
- The next major release of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) is a project in crisis. People are leaving for all sorts of reasons, hobbling any progress on the spec, and parts of what has been completed is highly controversial.
- Microsoft may be seeing a revolution from within, now that its employees are in the position to blog and thereby communicate directly with users. Witness the IEBlog.
- The acceptance of standards in the Web development industry is a similar tale of an educated minority fuelling change from within reluctant organizations.
- XHTML 2.0: when will it be finished, and—more importantly—can it …
Web Essentials 2005: Day One
It’s very late and my fellow SitePointers are very drunk, but it’s been an excellent day here at Web Essentials 2005 (WE05) in Sydney.
As promised, here are my from-the-hip reviews of the first day’s sessions that I attended. All of these sessions will become available as podcasts, and no doubt a lot of the examples and presentation materials will become available online in the coming days.
Update: I mistakenly attributed something to Maxine Sherrin that was actually in Molly Holzschlag’s session. Fixed below using Çelik-approved markup!
Before the day got started, conference runner Maxine Sherrin said a few words of introduction. She did take a moment, however, to point out that there are still very few meaningful certifications for Web professionals, and that we still lack a meaningful standard nomenclature for how we describe our work in this field (are you a designer? a Web author? a content producer? a technologist? a programmer? an application developer? …or something else?). Food for thought.
State of the Web, 2005, Molly Holzschlag
As the keynote speaker, Molly spoke in glowing terms about the major presenters at the conference, basically doing what any good keynote speaker should: making the attendees feel good about the time and money …
Random thoughts on pricing
This week has been all about pricing. Not sure why. Here are some random observations:
1. A price increase can do wonders for you. I just announced to my newsletter list a big price increase (by $100) on the AttractNewClients site (based on testing), and invited them to get in before prices go up. Response has been fantastic, easily 3 times more than my usual newsletter offers. Price increases with a deadline can cause people on the fence to take action.
1a. A web designer I work with did the same thing recently. He indicated that he is raising rates to $75 per hour from $50 per hour, starting with all new clients. Old clients could still take advantage of his $50 rate through November. He got REAL busy, fast.
2. Asking for a high price can do wonders for you. A colleague of mine shared that a catalog company asked him to bid on developing a website. He’d worked with this firm before, and knew they were difficult to work with. So he bid high. Really high. High enough to make the job well worth it to him. And he got the job!
3. Stop being a low-self-esteem pricing victim. You don’t want …
SitePoint at Web Essentials 2005
As I write this, I’m rushing to prepare for Web Essentials 2005 in Sydney. Being based in Australia, SitePoint isn’t at many conferences, so it’s especially exciting to be at this one. Can’t be there yourself? Listen along to the podcasts.
Speaking from my own extensive conference-going experience (hah), with any mass gathering like this it’s very easy to get swept up in the social atmosphere and lose track of just what you’re getting out of the whole thing (besides an awesome bag with a free SitePoint book in it). So in issue #123 of the Tech Times, I’ve summed up my current thinking and expectations for each of the sessions I plan to attend at the conference. For your reading pleasure, I’m reproducing that run-down here:
State of the Web, 2005, Molly Holzschlag
Molly’s the expert reviewer on the Dreamweaver 8 book we’re launching today, and given her work on the book as well as her position on the WaSP steering committee, I expect Molly will see the Web through the lens of standards compliance.
That said, Web standards are cooler now than they have ever been. Uptake of Web design techniques based on standards like CSS and …
JavaForge: SVN hosting for your open source project
The fine folks at JavaLobby have just announced a new community for open source Java projects: JavaForge.
With SourceForge.net and Java.net already hosting thriving open source Java development communities, JavaForge is set to distinguish itself with the modern Subversion code versioning system (SourceForge.net and Java.net still use the older CVS system) and a raft of other features offered by the CodeBeamer platform.
I really hope this site takes off, or at the very least nudges the established sites closer to deploying Subversion. It really does address so many of the annoying issues that plague developers forced to use CVS.
What do you call this: =>
As languages go, PHP has more syntactic sugar than some. Esoteric constructs like list(…) are all over the place, making developers’ jobs easier, but tripping up beginners at the same time.
A particularly useful construct is the foreach loop, which provides a quick way to loop through an array (or, as of PHP5, an object):
$arr = array(1, 2, 3, 4);
foreach ($arr as &$value) {
$value = $value * 2;
}
With associative arrays, you can get both the key and value of each item in the array with a little of the aforementioned syntactic sugar:
$a = array(
“one” => 1,
“two” => 2,
“three” => 3,
“seventeen” => 17
);
foreach ($a as $k => $v) {
echo “$k => $v\n”;
}
Okay, so if you code PHP regularly I probably haven’t told you anything you don’t already know. But here’s the twist: what do you call the => operator in that last code sample? C’mon — it must have a name, right? As it turns out, no official name is documented in the PHP manual… so what do you call it?
Reportedly it’s called the “double arrow” in the source …
Case Study: The difference a web design firm can make
We took a vacation in Wyoming/Idaho last week to look for a summer log cabin property. The local real estate market provided a telling example about the difference a web design firm can make.
Before going on our trip, I contacted a few realtors via Google and the web to inquire about properties. Ultimately, one realtor proved to be extremely responsive. She provided me with excellent emails with a long list of properties that met our criteria, and also gave advice about where to look. She seemed well qualified and professional. And her web site was professional, and came up early if not first in searches, so I guessed she was a market leader.
When we arrived in Wyoming and met with her, she remained well qualified and professional, and she helped us find a property. But here’s the thing: She was a relative unknown in the marketplace. In fact, two real estate firms dominated the county where we were seeking property. They had all the listings and had been there for decades. Meanwhile, “our” realtor was just opening an office in the area.
But we found her thanks to an excellent web designer/SEO expert who placed her URL at the top of …
Stop The Texas Hold ‘Em Guy!
One of the most annoying forms of search engine spam is comment spam, and other automated attacks on dynamic sites intended to plant keyword-laden links to the spammer’s web site.
One spammer in particular seems to be exceptionally prolific. Although I don’t know if this individual is male, female, or in fact an artificial intelligence of some kind, I’ve taken to calling “him” the Texas Hold-Em Guy, or THEG.
THEG will attack any vulnerable script. I thought I was pretty safe running the off-brand WSNLinks for my webmaster resources directory, but it too was attacked by THEG.
We could wait for every software developer to build in better security, then wait for THEG to defeat it, but it’s an endless cycle. Even a CAPTCHA won’t stop THEG, but have no fear… there’s a better way.
All poker fans know that the most relevant resource for information on Texas hold ‘em is the Wikipedia, don’t we?
So why isn’t every blogger linking to that wikipedia entry, with every possible variation of texas holdem, texas hold em, texas hold’em, and texas hold ‘em in the anchor text?
Fight the THEG, link to Wikipedia today.
Keyword Intelligence – coming up short?
Keyword Intelligence is Hitwise’s entry into the ‘budget market’ for keyword research tools. At first glance, it looks promising: Hitwise is a major provider of competitive intelligence information, and their high-end offerings certainly are attractive to online marketers*.
Don’t give up your Wordtracker subscription just yet, though. While Keyword Intelligence does represent a different dataset (based on tracking the surfing habits of approximately 25 million users), different doesn’t necessarily mean better. Because of the way they obtain their data, it’s very skewed toward the consumer end of the market, and even on consumer-type search terms, the data is pretty shallow.
Priced at $89.95 per month for the entry-level product, KWI costs nearly double what Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery ask for a monthly subscription. So, for the extra money, what do you get? Well, you get a couple things that Wordtracker (WT) and Keyword Discovery (KD) don’t offer – country-specific data and industry-specific search terms.
For country-specific data, you can choose from the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. You get one country at the entry level, then each country costs a little extra. As far as I can tell, this is one of the few options available …
Marking up your Designs with HTMLstamps
Here’s a useful little idea designed to help you bridge the huge gap between mockup graphic and code.
The guys from Twinsparc have produced a very tidy set of what they call ‘HTMLstamps’ for your downloading pleasure. After dropping them into the symbols library of your preferred graphics editor, the idea is use them to visually tag your mockup by dragging and dropping ‘tag symbols’ (representing H1, H2, P, LI and all other major tags) onto page elements.
The real advantage of using this method is it forces you to take a ‘big picture’ overview of your markup strategy. I can see this being particularly handy on large and complex projects, where various page and template components are often built at different times by different developers. HTMLstamps may well help you to keep consistent relationships between those components.
Their original HTMLstamps was an Illustrator-only gig, but it’s good to see the guys have most bases covered now by providing versoins for Photoshop, InDesign, Fireworks and even Visio (?). They also provide a handy quicktime tutorial showing HTMLstamps in action.
I’m not sure if I’m 100% sold, but I’m going to give it a go …
