SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

Having reviewed Microsoft Expression Web back in June 2006, giving it rating of 3 out of 5, I was glad of the opportunity to have a look over the final release version of the product, to see how well it supports designers in creating sites using CSS. Opening the boxed version I liked the enclosed guide to CSS selectors and the fact that the product actively markets itself on support for standards. Page 3 of the Quick Start Guide opens with the words,

"Standards-based websites

Expression Web solves a problem facing all web designers today: how to build websites that fully adhere to published standards, including support for XHTML."

The product

Expression Web will only install on machines running Windows XP Service Pack 2 and newer versions of Windows. Once installed, the product looks slicker than the technology preview I reviewed in June, and it seems quite light on its feet. The rendering engine at the time of my last review was based on Internet Explorer 6, in this release the product claims to be using a non-browser based rendering engine and it certainly seems very accurate with the fairly complex designs that I tested in it.

The rendering engine picks up, from your DOCTYPE, whether you are aiming to render pages in 'Quirks Mode' - rendering as in Internet Explorer 5, or in 'Standards Mode'. On removing the DOCTYPE from my XHTML page and then returning to Code View, the rendering engine switches from 'Standard' to 'Quirks' alerting me to the fact that my layout will now be rendered using an outdated rendering engine.

As a hand-coder I really like the real-time "as you type" validation of mark-up. Forgetting to close an element in XHTML for example will immediately cause the problem to be highlighted in the mark-up. Expression Web will also highlight non-standard elements according to the DOCTYPE you are using.

There are a whole host of CSS tools included with Expression Web and in this product designing using CSS is just how it is done, which is great to see. My personal favourite tool is the CSS Report. Running a CSS report on a page will locate all of the CSS rules you have used on that page - whether they are inline, in the head of the document or in an attached stylesheet - and list them in the Reports Window. Clicking on the Definition Location for that style jumps you to the actual location of the CSS. This is such a useful little tool - I wish I had something similar in the editors I use day to day, especially when working with other people's CSS!

A puzzling issue

Things are going very well thus far, but in addition to looking at the product as an experienced developer I wanted to see how it might function to someone who has just purchased a copy because they want to build a website, without any prior experience. What better place to start than with the Quick Start Guide tutorial? The tutorial takes the user through setting up a site and then creating a new page using one of the CSS Layouts included, selecting a layout with Header, nav, 3 columns and a footer. This can be quite a tricky layout to achieve using CSS and so I was interested to see how it was implemented here.

In the next stage of the tutorial I used the Apply Styles Task Pane to add background colors to the sections of the layout, and to this point everything was going along swimmingly. Then I tried to add some content to the design, and things didn't look so great with the sidebars laying over the footer. I had a pretty good idea what was going on before I looked at the CSS - the columns were absolutely positioned and so there was no way that this layout could work!

It is a strange enough fact that broken layouts were included with the product, what is even more puzzling is the fact that one of these broken layouts was selected for use in the Quick Start Guide. The screenshot in the guide even shows the sidebars overlaying the footer.

While these layouts being broken is not going to be an issue to the experienced developer who will already have their own favored methods of achieving them, it is a shame that what may be someone's first introduction to using CSS layouts is going to be a problematic one.

Conclusion

Expression Web is an enjoyable product to use and for designers working on Windows XP it is certainly worth evaluating the trial download. For those working in a team with developers using Visual Studio the integration between the two products and the ease by which you can create and preview standards-based designs within Expression is going to be a real benefit.

For experienced developers who are happiest working in the code, Expression Web doesn't get in the way. Unlike its predecessor Frontpage it doesn't try to change your code to suit itself and the excellent rendering engine seems capable of rendering most layouts. As with any visual environment, working out how to create CSS visually takes a little effort, but if you are someone who enjoys working visually it would be worth the time spent as the rendering engine is very faithful to the view in a modern browser.

There are many features of this product that I do really like, and I think will be of real benefit to many designers. However it's a shame that oversights such as the inclusion of non-working CSS layouts take the edge off the great work that has been done on this product.

• Software Name: Microsoft® Expression® Web
• Maker: Microsoft
• URL: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/
• Price: $299 USD
• Rating out of 5: 3

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Summary of findings from a large scale study of wireless search behaviour on Google Mobile Search. Interesting findings by analysts at Google about wireless search usage patterns.

Summary of findings from a large scale study of wireless search behaviour on Google Mobile Search. Interesting findings by analysts at Google about wireless search usage patterns.

Well there is another SEO contest going on, so we'll see how much SPAM comments start accumulating on discussion boards and blogs all over the world. This contest is for the keywords "globalwarming awareness2007 ". Those that rank highest on the big three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) will win (if there is a tie then of course the highest Google rank wins).

Official Rules

1. Site must include either a SEO World Championship text link or a banner . (The banner may be linked or not linked)
   
2. Valid contact information must be found on the site, E-mail is preferred.
   
3. Your official domain must be registered the same day or after January the 15th 2007.(All domains registered before the 15th of January 2007 will not qualify for the competition, no record of the domain is allowed. See archive.org)
   
4. Website will not use SEO methods which are clearly not approved by Search Engine Guidelines for example: doorway pages, etc. See Google webmaster Guidelines. (Any participant ignoring the Google webmaster guidelines will not qualify for a prize)

It is good that they get rid of "old domains" to help level the playing field. However, with an end date of May 1st, people will be hard pressed to get in and rank in such a short amount of time. I am also impressed that they chose a topic that people can benefit from instead of some random garbage word that no one will ever use after the contest is done.

Well good luck and we'll see you in May.

Questions to ask before hiring a web developer. 

SEOmoz recently posted some questions that they would ask when interviewing web developers. Figured I'd have a go at the questions and let you know where I stand:

1. What Industry sites and blogs do you read regularly? I consistently read Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zawodny , Jim Boykin , and Brue Clay . I also have some other favorites like Shoemoney , 9-rules (Design) , Aaron Wall , SEOmoz , Devlounge , and Stuntdubl .
2. Do you prefer to work alone or on a team? Alone, unless I can find a competent team. I've known too many "experts" that couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
3. How comfortable are you with writing HTML entirely by hand? What, you mean people don't normally do that? We do everything by hand because of the control it gives over the code.
4. What is the w3c? World Wide Web Consortium. They are the group that is trying to bring standards to the web (although there are way too many that don't listen.)
   
5. Can you write table-less XHTML? Do you validate your code? Yes. and Yes to a point. If we don't put an alt tag on every image, we are still good people.
6. What are a few of your favorite development tools and why? I like Textpad for coding, Photoshop for image editing, and HeidiSQL for database interaction.
7. Describe/demonstrate your level of competence in a *nix shell environment. (not really necessary in my opinion, SQL knowledge would be a bigger requirement)
   % If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?
   Too many ('s.
8. What skills and technologies are you the most interested in improving upon or learning? Right now I'm looking more at DOM scripting. With AJAX going mainstream and more and more UI's expecting more dynamic interaction, I expect to learn even more about javascript (DOM) and CSS interaction.
9. Show me your portfolio. OK. Take a look at my portfolio .
10. What size websites have you worked on in the past? Everything from one pagers to 100% user defined dynamic websites with hundreds of pages.
11. Show me your code. OK. Right click, view source.
12. What are a few sites you admire and why? 2Advanced. They have amazing flash design. 9rules. Great community. Good Organization. Nice clean straightforward look.
13. Fix this code, please. Haven't I already told you about all the "expert web developers" I've interacted with (or that my previous clients had interacted with before they found me.) Been there, fixed that.
14. I just pulled up a website you built and the browser is displaying a blank page. Walk me through the steps you'd take to troubleshoot the problem.
1. Did you type the URL correctly?
2. Do other pages from the same site show up?
3. Are other site that are on the same machine available?
4. Does it show up in a different browser?
5. Can you view the source?
15. What is your favorite development language and why? PHP. Open source. Simple, yet powerful. Good documentation.
16. Do you find any particular languages or technologies intimidating? I never really cared for C (I liked C++ much better). I'm quite interested in what the "up and coming" technology is. I just find there isn't as much time to explore all of them to figure out which one is going to be beneficial.
17. HTML, CSS, WYSIWYG? Hyper Text Markup Language. Cascading Style Sheet, What you see is what you get (plus normally a lot more code than you wanted)
18. What web browser do you use? Firefox 2.0 for normal browsing. IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox for most testing.
19. What are a few personal web projects you've got going on? Constantly updating, tweaking, and improving the websites I oversee.

Wow.... that was quite the list.

I am very happy to announce that my latest project has gone live: Design-Feed.

Design-Feed is a design feed aggregator. We hand-pick the most interesting design related RSS feeds and present them in an easy-to-browse format. This means you can get all the latest design news in one place, rather than trawling through hundreds of sites a day. Every post aggregated is also searchable by keyword.

Basically, it’s a one-stop shop to get all the latest web-design buzz. If you are familiar with MXNA, you can think of this as MXNA for designers. Take a look, and if you like it, make sure you send the link on to your designer buddies! Read more about design-feed here.

A big thanks to Stan Wiechers for building out the fantastic admin app that keeps the site ticking, and Thiago deMello Bueno for the graphic design.

Next generation marketing techniques, technologies and services, such as Web 2.0, social networking, and user generated content, are explained in this simple article.

Next generation marketing techniques, technologies and services, such as Web 2.0, social networking, and user generated content, are explained in this simple article.

osCommerce is a fully featured open-source (free) online shop which can be downloaded from www.oscommerce.com. While it's abundant with features there are a few tweaks that should be done before launching your e-commerce website. This first part describes how to automatically rename all uploaded images to prevent images being overwritten.