visnum
When one door closes, another opens.
A New Visual
May 20th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneBlogging is hard. Doing a custom template for yourself from scratch in WordPress is harder.
I have completed most of the job. There may be portions of my website which still does not function. Please do me a favor and leave a comment to this post if you encounter anything that doesn’t work.
By the way, this blog is going to be the new home of my other blogs in english. I have some other blogs about sex and relationships, clinical psychology and alternative treatments, web design and development and several geeky stuff, etc.
I have recently decided to unite them under one. This is the address.
Some parts of the new template still needs a little fiddling. Thank you in advance for your patience.
Creating Purposeful Home and Landing Pages
January 6th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneI recently added something to my home page. The addition is a little information on what this web site is about.
I have done that because I noticed the fact that even blogs have to identify their home pages. When users land on to any post or page from search engines like Google, there is a purpose there. The visitor reads the page, gets the information she needs and that’s it. However, if she clicks for the home page, than there must be some additional information where she is and what this place is all about. Briefly, of course.
Do this for your own good. The less confused visitors you have, the more user-friendly you will become (Master Yoda, 2007). Becoming more user-friendly is beneficial for your sites search engine optimization, results in more people bookmarking your site and increase overall quality of experience of your website or blog.
Saddam’s Execution and Visitors It Brings To Your Website
January 3rd, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneI see that Saddam’s Execution Video brought great traffic to many web sites that blogged or posted the video of execution from youtube and google video. Some of those blogs and web sites are about daily news, political stories, catch-all news stories etc. It is very natural for them to seek for the newest and brutal and most graphical video of Saddam’s Execution in Iraq.
However, there aren’t only such blogs and web sites that published this video. There have been many blogs and web sites where two videos of Saddam’s execution was published. Both the formal one and the one taken with a cell-phone’s camera.
Those posts and articles and the video brought a considerable amount of traffic to those blogs and web sites. Unfortunately, not all of this traffic is beneficial to web site owners.
Well, if you blog for the joy of blogging and you like to see the increase in traffic after you post something new, and if financial gain or public relations of yourself and/or your company isn’t your concern, then you are fine. Go for it. You have every right to publish anything that is not illegal.
But if you are a problogger or responsible from a web site that makes money from advertising, or an online shop, then you must be careful about how you provide your website with traffic, especially via content you publish.
Hundreds of thousands of web sites benefited from the huge traffic that Saddam’s execution video brought to their web sites. Most probably, the traffic wasn’t targeted. I have seen many blogs and web sites that published this video regardless of their blogs main topic. If you are after increasing your traffic because you earn money from targeted text links, then this has no benefit to you. Apart from not being beneficial, it would also harm your consistency on your content and thus may result in less targeted traffic than before.
Now, those blogs and web sites that experienced a huge traffic thanks to Saddam are going to experience a considerable amount of decrease in their traffic, if their topic isn’t executions of dictators.
Worse than publishing the video is publishing the video without any comments or your own thoughts or feelings on the subject because you have became the same with hundreds of thousands of other bloggers. No difference. The video can be found anywhere on the web.
By the way, the same holds valid for people that use common popular keywords for increasing their numbers of visitors. I have seen many blogs that put every post into categories or tags like Miss Nevada, Boise State, Google, Jobster, Zune, Edelman. Those are the most searched topics on Technorati. Or they put keywords like “Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Harry Potter, etc.” in their meta tags. I am sure they have gain tremendous amounts of traffic with those keywords. However it brings also a guarantee to failure when it comes to targeted traffic and efforts about earning money from targeted ads. Those blogs and web sites are eliminated by major search engines when somebody reports them or simply automatically as robots get more and more developed each year.
Targeted traffic is very important in terms of online businesses and Saddam’s execution is just an improvement to the world peace, not an improvement to your pocket.
Semantic Markup Is More Important Than Tableless Design
January 2nd, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneI appreciate tableless design and I am an eager advocate of a semantic web, divs instead of tables, content that form the shape, all the bells and whistles and the better accessibility it brings.
Unfortunately, there are still problems with tableless design. For instance, there is this firefox bug about two divs nested in one. Firefox does not recognize the width of the first div when you nest two divs inside a container div. More important than that, Internet Explorer still cannot handle divs properly.
Of course there are always workarounds to those problems. You can create tableless cross-browser design via css hacks, conditional internet explorer html interpretations, etc.
However, when it comes to everyday designer with deadlines and less time for the learning-curve of tableless design and css hacking, design without tables can become a nightmare just because of cross-browser compatibility issues.
The optimum solution to this might be using tables less than before and creating a design where tables are just used for main positioning. This can eliminate the time and effort until each and every designer have her/his time to develop skills enough to cover tableless cross-browser compatible design, or until Internet Explorer dies, or until each and every browser agrees upon a certain CSS specification especially on positioning of elements.
Good news is tableless design is not necessary for a valid XHTML design and making use of semantic markup. More important than tableless design is the semantic markup and the use of proper (x)html elements when organizing the data, the content that the page should serve to visitors.
You can still make use of h1, h2, h… header tags, li, ol, ul, dd, dt, dl, etc., tags that tells search engine robots what your page is about and how it can be indexed properly.
Tableless design is still necessary and should be a standard when we talk about a more accessible web. Making use of tables for positioning is not a good practice, I am not here to tell you that there is no harm in using tables. I just want to tell you that you can still create valid (x)html and semantic markup and be more accessible than the past, until you learn about CSS hacks and a cross-browser compatible tableless design.
Don’t give up on accessibility, valid and semantic markup just because you are not ready to do tableless design. Try to take your time and make progress in this transitional period. This is why we call certain DTD (Document Type Declaration) as transitional.
Why Not To Use Word
December 30th, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneA must read short article for bloggers from WordPress.Com
Yet Another Technorati Annoyance
December 23rd, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneI just made a search over Technorati for the word WordPress. There are many results just linking to “Hello World”, which is the default post of a WordPress installation.
WordPress Features Shadowed by Blog Usage
December 23rd, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneWordPress is beautiful and functional content management system. However, due to its excessive popularity among bloggers, it is mostly seen as a blogging-only tool.
WordPress has native features for a static home page in it. For instance, a WordPress installation first looks for home.php which can be used as a front page. It only loads index.php if there is no home.php specified. Let me tell you what that means in plain english: You don’t have to be stuck with themes and templates that are prepared primarily blogging in mind. WordPress has a feature so called pages, that are apart from the blogging cycle. By using home.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php (alongside with sidebar widgets or not) and several pages.php, you can easily use WordPress for your static web site content, for instance for your corporate web site or brochure-ware.
I won’t go into detail right now because there are tons of documentation on the web about how to prepare a home.php, how to prepare page templates for WordPress.
Why should I use WordPress if I am going to have just a static web site?
Because you will still benefit from hundreds of plugins developed for bloggers. Then you will also benefit from a great documentation. Furthermore, you will take the advantage of WordPress’ builtin editor, management panel, etc.
Why don’t you put together a tutorial for what you tell here?
It’s just a matter of time. I’ll try to provide one soon.
Weird Criticisms Over Web 2.0
December 21st, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneIt was a couple of months ago, I started to track criticisms of web 2.0, after having read something like “web 2.0 is all about fancy graphs and ajax” on the web.
Well, first of all, web 2.0 is a set of web applications and web sites which were not available with the technology and broadband internet connections a couple of years ago. Thus, first of all, web 2.0 is being able to watch a video of a breaking news over the net, without major interrupting of the video and and without being stuck in a low resolution and being able to watch it in a size that is bigger than a square-inch.
Now, I would like to say some more on “the fancy graphs”. It looks weird to me that when some people come across a design which is more usable and more readable than the past, their first reactions is really cheesy. I agree that there are very amateur designs that aim just being fancy only. However, there are lots of improvements in usability and readability of the web since web 2.0 is here. The reason it got more usable and more readable is that educated people on design and usability are hired more than the neighbor’s son as a web designer and developer.
Some people even criticize the use of big fonts, white space, etc. in a way as if they are not necessary for the presentation of information in a web site.
I just don’t understand why sometimes some people tend to get irritated by better design and better usability. This is why I call that a weird criticism.
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