Will Chatham

So…you for­got that this blog used to focus more on web devel­op­ment and the Inter­net, didn’t you? No? Well I seem to have, so here’s a re-qualifying post to try and get things back on track.

Since I added SeoMoz.org to my regularly-checked RSS feeds, I’ve enjoyed many of the infor­ma­tive posts they have made. Recently, they fea­tured two arti­cles which hit home with me.

How to con­vince a client their site doesn’t need music was a good one. Web sites that force music upon you really grate on my nerves. Luck­ily, I have never had to make such a site on pur­pose or on acci­dent, though I have had peo­ple ask. The expla­na­tion that usu­ally wins the con­ver­sa­tion for me is the one about vis­i­tors to a site already hav­ing music play­ing in their speak­ers. Just hit Myspace on any given day, and dis­cover how annoy­ing it is to have people’s favorite songs start blar­ing at you when you load their profile.

Along the same lines of client coer­cion rela­tion­ships, they posted How to Con­vince a Client They Don’t Need a Splash Page. Splash pages were cool in 2000, but have since given way to usabil­ity and search engine approach­a­bil­ity. At least in the parts of the Web where com­mon sense rules, anyway.

My favorite quote from the article:

When we have clients who are think­ing about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local super­mar­ket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the super­mar­ket, and, as each cus­tomer tries to enter, do a lit­tle show that lasts two min­utes, wel­com­ing them to the super­mar­ket and try­ing to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today.

In other news, Site­point just released a PDF report titled The State of Web Devel­op­ment. The inter­est­ing part was that AJAX is quickly gain­ing pop­u­lar­ity (as if I had to tell you that), and looks to over­take Flash within the next cou­ple of years. Wow. From one inac­ces­si­ble tech­nol­ogy to another! This is progress!

At least AJAX isn’t so proprietary.

Lastly, Google announced Google Code Search today, which looks like it could be pretty use­ful. I haven’t played around with it enough to find out what it can really do, but they say it can find any crawlable code. I doubt this means server-side tech­nol­ogy such as PHP, but you could at least use it to find peo­ple who have ripped off your Word­Press layout.

Oh, speak­ing of Word­Press, The­me­Press just launched, which allows you to upload a lay­out, and con­verts it to work with Word­Press. It costs $10, which sounds pretty rea­son­able if it works well. I plan on try­ing it out for TheBestOfYoutube.com soon, so I’ll let you know what I discover.