Blogging for SEO

Rendering font in FireFox, IE, and Safari.

You can get pretty specific when declaring how you want text to look with CSS:
p {
font-family: Verdana;
background-color: #7A2121;
color: #B93333;
text-decoration: underline;
word-spacing: Normal;
text-align: left;
letter-spacing: 1px;
text-indent: 15px;
line-height: 16px;
font-size: 10px;
font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
text-transform: uppercase; }
And that’s not even all of it… But still, even if you get that specific, there are drastic differences from browser to browser on how the actual rendered text looks. The important lesson here is that you no matter how much control you try to exert over text, in the end, you don’t get much. Not to mention most browsers are able to let users re-size and override font settings on the fly.

Archives at css-tricks.com

Working on a site for easy daily cash I found the keywords to be absolutely daunting in amount. Luckily, the content had been already worked and I could avoid the task of writing the 11,000+ words that were written by them. In the event that I had to write it all myself, aside from what I could grab off of Wikipedia I would just have to rearrange sentences around and try to fit the keywords in to fill up the needed content amount.

Make the landing page copy short and the graphics simple. The landing page is a place to deliver a simple message and drive your prospect to respond to your offer. Don’t try to do too much.

Create the page with your company’s look, feel, and tone. A landing page is an extension of your company branding, so it must adopt the same voice, tone, and style as the rest of your site.

Write from the prospect’s point of view. Think carefully of who will be visiting the landing page, and write copy for that demographic. You want visitors to feel that the page speaks to their problems and that you have a solution for them.

A landing page is communications, not advertising. Landing pages are where you communicate valuable information. Advertising gets people to click to your landing page, but once a prospect is there, the landing page should focus on communicating the value of your offering to the buyer.

Only ask for necessary information. Don’t use a sign-up form that requires your prospects to enter lots of data—people will abandon the form. Ask for the absolute minimum you can get away with—name and e-mail address only if you can, or perhaps even just e-mail. Requiring any additional information will reduce your response rates.

Don’t forget to follow up! OK, you’ve got a great landing page with an effective call to action, and the leads are coming in. Great! Don’t drop the ball now. Make certain to follow up with each response as quickly as possible.

Information taken from WebInkNow
—————-
Listening to: Chevelle - Safewaters
via FoxyTunes

If you are doing some mad-flavor styling on some not-yet-but-soon-to-be-hip fonts then try these cool ’short-hand’

font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
font-variant: small-caps;
font-size: 1em;
line-height: 1.5em;
font-family: verdana,sans-serif

They’re so cool and they make the world a better place, so enjoy!

Keeping good communication with your hosting company is a must to stay on top of the reasons why connections go slow or stop in general. Such is the case with a server hosting a site for wealth creation. Stay in touch with your hosting company to find out how long a delay it will be before things run smoothly again so you know just what answers to give your clients.

This is a really cool stock image site that I found on the net.

DesignPacks.com offers free, high quality image collections that can be use in both personal and commercial web design projects. Each collection features a group of 15 images that share a common theme. We’ve created dozens of collections based on a variety of themes. New sets are added monthly so be sure to bookmark us and check back often.

—————-
Listening to: Chevelle - Emotional Drought
via FoxyTunes

Here is a list of depricated attributes I pulled off CSS-Tricks.com

Depricated Attributes:

• align: e.g. <p align=”left”>. Still works just fine, but you really should just apply a class and give that class a style of text-align: left; Or, if you have to, apply in-line CSS like style=”text-align: left;”.
• bgcolor: e.g. <table bgcolor=”FFF”>. I see this one all the time with many of the “copy-and-paste” code generators out there. They use it because they want to have full control over the look of whatever you are copying and pasting, and it works. But seriously, just apply a class or use style=”background-color: #FFF;”.
• border: e.g. <img src=”#” alt=”” border=0 />. This is probably the most common of all the deprecated elements. Borders on images generally look awful on webpages and should never be set as a default without a good aesthetic reason. By default on most browsers images don’t have border, except when they are used as LINKS. Then the default is to use some kind of nasty blue border. Many people force-avoid this by putting the border=0 right inside the img element. You can much more easily and cleanly avoid this with a single line of CSS: a img {border: 0px;}.
• height / width: e.g. <div width=150>. Not cool yo. Give that div and ID or class and put the width in the CSS where it belongs.
• target: e.g. <a href=”#” target=”_blank”>. Not only is it deprecated, it’s a usability faux paux. Smashing Magazine has a great quote about it:
  

  Visitors want to have control over everything what happens in their browser. If they’d like to open a link in a new window they will. If they don’t want to, they won’t. If your links open in a new window you make the decision which is not your decision to make.

• nowrap: e.g. <td nowrap>. This one comes from the table days when you wanted to make sure one cell of text would all stay on one line (not wrap). CSS has that one covered with the the white-space property. Just set white-space: nowrap;.

Let’s replacement an image using CSS, we’ll do so by taking a page element that isn’t normally an image and turning it into an image. This is a very common trick and popular because of it’s semantic meaningfulness and SEO benefits. Let’s try this out using the header tag.

One Way

<h1 class="header">
   CSS-Tricks
</h1>

h1.header {
	width: 350px; height: 75px;
	background: url(images/header-image.jpg);
	text-indent: -9999px;
}

PROBLEM:
If you turn CSS off, this will just degrade into text. Not a bad thing, but just because someone has their CSS turned off doesn’t necessarily mean they want their images turned off too.

Another Way

<h1 class="header">
   <a href="#">
       <img src="images/header-image.jpg" alt="CSS-Tricks" />
   </a>
</h1>

h1.header {
	width: 350px; height: 75px;
	background: url(images/header-image.jpg);
	text-indent: -9999px;
}

WHY THIS IS BETTER:
With CSS turned off you can still display an image. With CSS and images turned off, you will get the ALT text from the image.

REMAINING PROBLEMS:
Neither of these techniques are perfect yet, a problem still remains with CSS ON, images OFF. In this scenario you will get blank space instead of either text or an image, which is bad. The other issue is turning these elements into links. You can wrap the header tag in an anchor element, but wrapping a block element in an inline element is bad form. Make sure you change your anchor link to block level if you do this.

Working on a brand new client for affordable housing in San Diego I tried to mimic their site as close as possible, but the whole black center and white text just felt weird. So I stuck with a white background. Pushing up the links with a margin gave me more maneuverability with the other sections. Pushing them all to the right and extending the image border on the side, I think for the most part I was able to come very close to their style while having a bit of my own.

For this particular site dealing with Tampa home based jobs, I saw their original had a gradient shadow on their container for their content. For the site I was to build, I wanted that gradient shadow to be in there as well so this is where our friend CTRL + ALT + Prt Scr comes into play. A simple screenshot and a precice cropping and resize got me the image I needed to make the main div on the site appear to have that same effect.

I also applied it to the header image as well to make the gradient have no cutoff point until it’s absolutely no longer needed (i.e. the gap above and just before the bottom menu’s). With the CSS, I just put the 1 pixel high image of the gradient on repeat-y and bam, instant gradient throughout the main div.