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Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Ad Pacement



Something I have asked myself several times since re-launching RD where the best place to have advertising is, the one thing I have always done is place the ads in there own area so they aren't hidden with regular content to trick people into clicking. I have found that the best place to put them is on the right column and footer, this is because if the ad server is slow it will cause your site to stall while it waits for the ads, if they are in your footer or in the right column your website navigation has already loaded with the main body of the content, so it causes less disruption.



Sites to check out:
Rampant Designs

Baby Seal Productions

Stick Guy

The Club

BSP Blog

Stick Guy Blog

Friday, May 4, 2007

Search Engine Friendly URL's



This isn't about creating Search Engine Friendly URL's, if you are looking for one RD has one.

Until recently I was not a big fan of these url's as I liked the old fashioned file.php?id= type link, but search engines aren't the best at indexing that type of url so I decided to switch.

Some advice when implementing these URL's:

  • Includes are done at server side so they are fine to be left as they are
  • If you have a style sheet, instead of 'includes/style.css' use 'http://domain.com/includes/style.css' as if your url is domain.com/news/05/index.html it will think the style sheet is at domain.com/news/05/incudes/style.css.
  • Same goes for links, use the full url.
  • Also check the image urls are the full ones.
  • Be careful with the url's, I add index.html to my urls as if I ended it news/05/ then its easy to make a mistake, for example if I link to news/05 it will give a page not found error, take myspace for example if you link to your profile say myspace.com/somerandomexample and you post a link too myspace.com/somerandomexample/ it will give the user a page not found error

    The reason for this is because your computer renders the html side as far as that knows the url you are viewing is the directory/file in the address bar so renders it as it would any html file.

    Search Engine Friendly URLs are mostly about trial and error, when you implement them try all the links and check everything appears as you want them to appear.



    Sites to check out:
    Rampant Designs

    Baby Seal Productions

    Stick Guy

    The Club

    BSP Blog

    Stick Guy Blog

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