How to Evaluate an Online Marketing Service
If you’ve got a budget for website promotion, I know about a hundred companies that want your business. Be it PPC, banner ads, link placements, paid blogging, search engine optimization, or any of a dozen other industry buzz words, they all have different strategies for driving traffic. With so many choices, it can be hard [...]
NumberNeal Responds to Digg Bans: Insights in Community-Based Website Strategy
Earlier this month, popular social news site Digg banned a number of its users, citing script abuse. This sparked an outcry from the Digg community, including the following video letter from power Digg Neal “NumberNeal” Rodriguez (the same Neal to whom I recently offered some SEO career advice): I only started using Digg recently, so [...]
Bridging the Digital Divide to Combat Poverty
What can a person do to elevate him or herself from poverty? What can the rest of us do to help the less fortunate and combat poverty on the local, national, and even global levels? Everyone has a different opinion. Certainly, there are many good answers to this question, and you’ll probably hear a lot [...]
SEO Career Advice for Power Digger Neal Rodriguez
A few weeks ago, my good friend Simon Owens introduced me via email to noted Power Digger Neal Rodriguez. As it turned out, Neal was interested in a career in SEO, and I was more than happy to weigh in with the following advice. Don’t just be an SEO specialist; be an online marketer. SEO [...]
Explaining Blogs to the Uninformed
When I first mentioned the word “blog” to my wife back in 2005, she swore I’d made it up. It wasn’t until she started hearing it in mainstream media that she conceded blogs were real. (To this day, she still harbors suspicions that the whole thing might be some massive conspiracy I cooked up to [...]
Float vs Position in Layout: My Gripe with Andy Clarke
In his book, Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design, author Andy Clarke argues in favor of content-out markup. This approach centers around defining the content on the page in a semantic way that makes sense to those using browsers without style information. The base XHTML should be as free of layout coding as [...]
WYSIWYR: What You See is What You Regret
Once upon a time much earlier in my career, a coworker observed me composing code in a basic text editor and described the approach as, “Spartan.” I argued that my argument was cleaner, leaner, and all together better. My coworker argued that WYSIWYG code was more convenient and efficient. In the time since, I’ve progressed [...]