check out the 2.0 deprecated tags and the new way of coding it

These questions are fine and are part and parcel of the work flow process however it is in my opinion, more important for the service provider to ask about their business and what they do and how they do it, who they are, what they stand for, how are they different from their competitors, why should someone pick them over the competition etc.  As a web designer, developer and search engine marketeer all these questions need to be answered by the client so we as service providers can get a hollistic view of their business.  If a service provider doesn’t understand your business how can they possibly create a successful marketing campaign?

Are you asking the right questions?

I haven’t really taken any time for myself for a few years so I’ve decided to do just that so taking a couple of weeks off to think about where I’m going and build some new business strategies so I can enjoy the finer things in life.  I’ve just upgraded to the latest Adobe Web Design Software so it will be a good time to refresh my skills and learn some new tricks.  Also on the agenda is a well overdue web site redesign of Sydney FX to move into the realm of 2.0.  I’ll be restructing the site to make it easy to navigate, more pleasant to visit and restructing of content to re-inforce my position in the search engine rankings.

See you in two weeks…

Adobe – Creative Suite 3, Web Site Design, Graphic Design, Video Editing, Photo Editing Software

Well it’s not exactly the latest news but it is definately worthy of a mention that what used to be Macromedia products and now interwoven into the Adobe range of products so we have a whole new range of Creative Suites with packages for the print designer, web designer & developer, production studio or if you want to have it all, you can buy the lot with the Master Suite of the best of the best from Adobe.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to get my hands on these latest releases of CS3 however after spending alot of time on the Adobe site, I decided to preorder and upgrade my Studio 8 suite to the Web Design Premium package which has everything I need right now although I would have liked to have some of the software from the Production Suite but maybe next time.

From what I have seen from the information on the Adobe website, most of the new features seem to work on product cross over integration where it will now be easier than ever to work across multiple applications and importing graphics seems like a life saver solving many issues today working from Adobe products and Macromedia products.

I also like the improved CSS support and updated features particulary now in Dreamweaver that you can move the CSS rules around the CSS panel. Also the Ajax integration in Dreamweaver is another nice extra using the Adobe’s own Spry framework. There are quite a few extra features in both Photoshop, Illustrator, & Fireworks but currently I’m very curious to see if Dreamweaver has some better dynamic validation options for database driven sites as Dreamweaver 8 didn’t have any built in behaviours to fast track the process. Late last year in Sep 06 Adobe aquired the company Interakt who built some nice validation plugins for Dreamweaver so it will be interesting to see if Adobe has integrated some of this into Dreamweaver CS3.

Blogged with Flock

When I started, I remember checking my web stats and nobody could find me and they probably didn’t care either as I was a small time startup and my site didn’t have any online value yet. As I learnt about the web and learnt alot from others both in the web design & search I started to understand what makes you popular on the web. Aaron Wall often talks about being linkworthy and how social interaction on the web is a great way to become popular amonst others in the community. Seth Godin also talks about people talking about you and how this applys to every business in his best selling list of books and why being remarkable is important as part of your overall business strategy.

These days my web rankings are getting better and better with first page results becoming more and more common as I slowly climb the search engine rank ladder and over the competition. What I have noticed is that more web masters are noticing me now more than ever before and I am getting more link requests than ever. Isn’t it funny that people only want to know you when your popular!

One of my sites is ranked in the Top 5 in MSN & Yahoo but still only get a small fraction of overall traffic. Even a page 2 Google ranking can be better than a top spot on the other big two. So what good are the other two search engines for? Well I like to use them as Google ranking indicators as I usually find that MSN & Yahoo will give you early indications of rankings before Google will so if you were ranking in 9th position for a search term in Yahoo then it shouldn’t be too long before you see these same results manifest in Google too.

Another use for them is to use them to help you find trends with problems on your site. If you see your site dropping rapidly across all the search engines then you better start investigating as there is a fundamental problem with the site that needs to be fixed.

You might even want to include them on client web site ranking reports because the rankings look good on paper too! I don’t want to bag the other two too much but I have a good feeling that Yahoo is slowing moving in the right direction and might yet put up a challenge to Google’s domination in the future with their involvment in many social aspects of the web. Only time will tell.

CocoaMySQL – A MySQL GUI for Mac OS X

As a new comer to Ruby on Rails I thought it would be nice to have a GUI style application for my mac that allows me to create the databases, manage the tables and just browsing the table data without using the command line or phpmyadmin in a browser running on localhost.

Thankfully there is this free open source application called CocoaMySQL which is obviously developed using Objective-C with Cocoa which doe’s exactly what you need. I haven’t used this for very long, in fact only a couple of hours since I started writing this post.

So far it seems like a great little tool to have however I’m not sure if the program is still being developed with the current version release in 2003 and a beta version which is recommended which I decided to use.

Again it is free software however there is a donation button so if you think it’s useful then I recommend going back and giving a donation to show your support.

Blogged with Flock

Well Yahoo search sponsored search is about to change with a new improved interface and a bidding model that matches Google’s Ad Score and Relevancy algorithm. No more highest bidder wins on Yahoo anymore with relevancy becoming the key to low cost and higher rankings in sponsored search results.

Although I haven’t been able to take a sneek peek inside, early indications show categories changing to campaigns so managing Yahoo and Adwords may become more similar that we can imagine.

Other new features are

• Geo Targeting capability
• Campaign Budgeting
• Ad split testing
• Campaign Scheduling
• Bulk Ad Management
• Ads Up and Running in Minutes

I’m really looking forward to seeing the new improved interface as having alternative advertising opportunities outside of the Google umbrella is a welcome change.

Yahoo is doing some very innovative changes lately which leverage from social interactivity with hit sites like Flickr, and their comprehensive Developer Centre supporting developers of many languages to integrate Yahoo web services into client sites. Yahoo is also the default search engine for the Flock web browser which I really like.

The only thing left for Yahoo to do here in Australia is get more market share as the majority of traffic here is predominately Google search referrals.

Yahoo is just about to roll this out in the US in a few days time so I called Yahoo Australia and asked about the Australian rollout and they told me that the new Sponsored search upgrade is expected to be rolled out in Australia in about two months time.

You can find out more at the Yahoo Sponsored Search Upgrade Centre.