Recently a client found a small bug in a custom application we built for them. The issue in question was — Who’s responsibility is any error and does the client have to pay for the fix?

The site has a rather large custom and complex CMS (content management system) or Admin area.  I found the question suprising because we are still tweaking and adding to the system, and this bug happened after making a modification that the client had requested. 

It is also helpfull to know that I never give flat prices on custom websites and applications. I give a high and low estimate and charge by the hour because things always change and evolve from the original plan, and you cannot account for the time that those changes will take to develop, test and refine. 

 This specific fix (like many) only took a few minutes to remedy and I didn’t plan on charging for it. But fixes on sites this large and complex can be an issue. It is always a good idea to explain the process of building and testing your applications to your client so that they understand the policy going forward.

On to the question of Testing, Errors and Responsibility. Even if we had the budget to hire a team of testers to test every aspect of what we build… sometimes that wouldn’t be enough. The true test is when the client or user begins to use his product. I test the best I can, but will still miss things because I think I know too clearly what I should be doing or looking for.  I hold my clients responsible for re-testing the tools I build for them, especially when they are custom applications.  Programming errors can be thought of like typos, but even more complex… and no spell checker will help. How many times do three or four sets of eyes (including the client) not notice a misspelling or bad sentence in print copy? It happens all of the time. It is an expected part of the process. We are all human. That’s why we have more than one person proof-read.

Same goes for programming but much more complex. Instead of just looking for misspellings and grammar errors… there are sometimes multiple ways to go about using the same application — each unique to the individual’s own thought process. The good news is nothing has been printed and mistakes are generally easy to fix.

Whether the programmer spends the time testing and retesting and then modifies or corrects any problems we find before the client finds the mistake… or the client finds the mistake afterwards – it is still the same time spent.  Having the client spend time using their custom product is the most efficient way to test an application. They will usually find errors faster, and the testing process will tell them where they may want changes to make their experience and the application more useful. In the case of making a change or modification – We make the modifications… then we test… then my clients test… then if there are any errors, they are fixed. In this case, there wasn’t enough data entered in the database to properly test, so the error was not caught until the client finally put it to use.

The true test is always the client working with the product. My policy is that if we are building custom applications and charging by the hour, time spent is time spent. Of course, if you have given a flat fee, you are resposible for any fixes.

Bottom line is - Test, test, test. Programmer and client. It’s part of the process.

Posted: March 16th, 2010 under General Website Design Knowledge.
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I recently attended a seminar held by Network Solutions on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I wanted to share some important points I thought were noteworthy.
Be aware that another way to get quick temporary results is “Paid Click Marketing” (this is a separate subject and will not be discussed in this article.) This article discusses SEO for “Organic links” (the links that are not paid for on the Google result pages).

To begin with, it is important to state that no one knows for sure what Google bases their ranking system by. Google keeps it a secret. As an example - there are some camps that claim that Google spiders don’t even look at Meta Key Words. This said, we will assume that they do, because even if they don’t, we do know that many other search engines do. The following assumptions are based on collective sampled results according to the Network Solutions seminar.

• “Organic listings” cannot be paid for.
• Google strives to have thier search results be relevant
• SEO results take time. After optimization and submittal of sitemaps, results can take 3 - 6 months (depends on the industry).
• Use Flash sparingly. (Unless your web is about entertainment) Search engines cannot search Flash. For the most part, user’s don’t want to be entertained, they want to do business.
• 65% of users click o0n the first 10 Organic listings on a Google result’s page.
• When visitors come to a site, they generally give your site about 2-3 seconds before they decide whether to stay or bounce. Most of this time is focused on a “Pupil Hotspot” (the top left portion of the website, about 15% of the entire webpage.
• There are plenty of tricks for “Keyword Stuffing”. Google programmers know all of them. They are some of the smartest PhD’s in the country. If you try to use these techniques, your search engine rankings will be penalized. BTW - Google hates link farms. Don’t try to trick Google.
• Make sure you use text-base navigations on your website so that spiders can find all of your pages
• Remember that most searches do not link directly to the “home page”. So be sure all other pages in your site have navigation to the other pages of your site, and that there are no “dead ends”.

Keywords (”keywords” will also mean “keyword phrases”)

• important not to use keywords that are too general
• when identifying keywords you would like to use consider:
  • Traffic - How often do people search using the keyword
  • Competition - How many other sites appear with this keyword
  • Relevancy - Is this the keyword people will use when searching for this product or service
• Location is often used as a keyword for small businesses located in a specific city, state or region
• Most effective keywords are going to be keyword phrases averaging  2-4 words
• People’s searches are becoming more and more specific
• Separate keywords for separate landing pages.

Keyword Don’ts

• Don’t waste space on keyword “misspells”
• Don’t use competitor’s names
• Don’t try “Comment” keyword stuffing
• Don’t simply copy keywords or copy from other sites and then paste them on to your site. Duplicate content is punished and counted as somewhat irrelevant (although you could change the copy enough to make it somewhat unique)

Page Titles

• 8-10 words
• No more than 72 characters
• Use keywords early on in the sentence

Meta Descriptions

• start with Benefit Statement

Meta Keywords

• number of words is controversial, but studies have shown that using too many keywords or many duplicate words in keyword phrases will hurt your ranking
• they suggest 10 to 12 keywords or keyword phrases that are related to the content on your page

Body Copy

• 250 - 600 words with 3 or 4 occurences of a keyword. (if you overdo it, you will be penalized)

Headline Tags

• Use keywords in headline tags <h1>
• use them  just for headlines and not copy
• you can style them with CSS

Optimization Of Your Page For Keywords

• Relevancy
• Fresh Content
  • Newer content can be seen as more relevant
  • Optimization is a never-ending process
  • Buzzwords change
  • Sites that keep up on optimization will have best success
  • Search Engine rankings will plateau and then decline if SEO is not kept up
• Unique Value
• Can’t optimize for too many products at once, best to narrow down to products that will pay off the most
• Links for other sites using those keywords

Build Inbound Links - Website “link popularity” is based on factors that include:

• Number of sites linking to a website
• Relevance of inbound links in relation to content
• Links are like votes for the word that is underlined or used as a link

Great Ways to Get Inbound Links

• One way links
• Reciprocal links
• Directory or Listings links
• Press Releases
• Blogs

Sitemap.xml

• have a sitemap.xml file at the root of your site
• more info at www.sitemaps.org

Locales

• one of the first things Google checks for when a user uses their search forms is Location and IP addresses
• Using locations in your keywords can help
• Use separate landing pages for different locales.

SEO Resources:

• http://www.sitemaps.org
• http://www.google.com/webmasters
• http://marketing.networksolutions.com/web-promotion-tools.php
• Keyword Research Tools
  • http://www.nichebotclassic.com
  • https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Free Press Release
  • http://i-newswire.com
• http://marketing.networksolutions.com/seminars
• http://marketing.networksolutions.com/blog

Posted: November 9th, 2008 under General Website Design Knowledge.
Comments: none

E-MAIL MARKETING can help your business grow, but a misstep can cause you to lose customers for life.

Here are some dos and dont’s –

Dos

• Create a snappy subject line that doesn’t sound like an ad. People are more likely to open e-mail that has a simple, newsy, and direct header.
• Use HTML rather than plain text. A well-designed newsletter or pitch containing product photos will help you get your message across.
• Design with e-mail reader preview panes in mind. Make sure key elements fit into an area no larger than about 600 pixels wide by 400 pixels deep.
• Rely on list-management software or services to deal with subscription changes, bounces, and new opt-in subscribers who have clicked links on your site or in your e-mail messages.
• Track your messages’ effectiveness. Most list-management tools track open rates, numbers of subscribers who unsubscribe, and click-through response.
• Test different messages and subject lines to see which ones produce designed the best results.

Don’ts

• Don’t send one large JPG or GIF image. Try to use mostly text with some images. One large image and no text is the best way to get rejected or caught by the spam filters.
• Don’t get blacklist-ed. Use a spam checker to see whether your e-mail will pass through common filters or put you on a spam blacklist. Many mailing services have checkers of this type, and Lyris.com and Sitesell.corn make similar tools available for free.
• Don’t use JavaScript or background images. These will not show up for recipients who are using Outlook 2007.
• Don’t fail to include an unsubscribe link and a physical mailing address with your message, as required by federal antispam law. Consider including a link to your company’s privacy policy, too.
• Don’t assume that message recipients will see included images-some e-mail programs won’t display them. Provide text descriptions for all graphics, and make sure your message is clear without the images. Never send attachments.
• Don’t send at the wrong time. The best days for business-to-business mailings are Tuesday through Thursday before 3 p.m. For residential customers, evenings and weekends work best.

*This article was taken from PCWorld.com and was written by Becky Waring.

Posted: July 19th, 2008 under General Website Design Knowledge.
Comments: none

• We discuss the client’s actual website needs
• The client approves final architecture outline (list of pages, forms and applications)
• The client provides example URLs of websites that illustrate their likes and dislikes in regards of website content, design and usability.
• I work up an interface design… look and feel that will be used throughout the website. This will be a mock-up image and not a working website page
• The client and I will discuss the mock-up design and any changes or revisions that need to be made.
• Once final design is approved, it will then be converted into working website pages.
• The client will provide content, copy and photos to be placed on pages
• An Admin section will be built based on the client’s needs.
• The site will need to be tested and any bugs will be fixed and/or tweaks will be implemented. We will require the client’s help with proof-reading and testing.

Posted: May 28th, 2008 under General Website Design Knowledge.
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I suggest to all of my clients to look at any new logo or website design and then sleep on it. Then look at it again.

Do not send email with comments on design. Please call to discuss.

I find the first instinct of most clients is to point out what they “don’t like”. This is helpful, but not as helpful as telling me what you do like and the direction you would like to go in.

Example of un-helpful critique: “We don’t like the background.”
This is not helpful because this only eliminates one of infinite options and does not give us any direction.

Example of helpful critique: “We like the background color choice, but would like to use another pattern. Maybe a more linear design.”
Now we know what specifically to change and we don’t waste your time by showing you backgrounds in different colors.

Give examples of websites that have some of the look and feel you are looking for.

I give these examples to help the design process go as efficiently as possible. I am usually charging my client by the hour and want to help my client stay within their budget. Through a phone discussion, we can apply a question and answer discussion, that can be more efficient and less frustrating than through many emails.

Posted: May 28th, 2008 under Logo Design, General Website Design Knowledge, Rodman Design.
Comments: none

The HREF link “mailto:name@yourdomain.com” is commonly used as a link on contact web pages.

Be aware that this link will only work if the visitor uses an email program that resides on their computer (IE: Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express). There are many people that use only webmail to check their email (they check their email and send email by logging into a webmail application via their web browser). For these people, the HREF “mailto:” link will not work. For this reason it is very important that any “Mailto:” links be associated with text that displays the actual address (mailto:name@yourdomain.com). This way, if the link does not work - the user can still manually type the email address into their browser based email program or any other mail program that is not configured to use the “Mailto” link. If you choose to associate a “Mailto:” link with text or a graphic that says something different (IE: “Contact” or something similar), the link will not work for some users and they will have no idea of how to contact you.

Solution for Contact Buttons: Have this graphic link to a Contact page that displays all of your contact info, and then you can have a proper “Emailto” link on this page.

I strongly suggest using a “Contact Form” for the following reasons:

• Displaying your email address on a page makes it easy for email extractors to harvest your email address. Get ready to receive lots of spam mail.
• Forms can make it easier for webmail users or users not at their own computer, to send you an email.
• Forms can save all of the contact info to a database for you, before the email sends. Email is not always fail proof and this gives you a backup method for saving this info.

If you are afraid that the user will not fill out all of the feilds that you have on your form, then you can either limit the number of feilds or simply make fewer required.

Best Solution:
I like having a Contact page with a contact form and an image of the email address with spider proofing javascript (fools email extractors) email link.

Posted: January 7th, 2008 under General Website Design Knowledge.
Comments: none

I wanted to write an article on why frames are bad, but don’t think I could write ten reasons better than Rueben Yau has. So I’ll just give him credit and link to his site. http://www.reubenyau.com

Here are his top ten reasons:

1) Orphaned Pages
This can happen when a webpage is linked to, but never links back to anywhere. Typical scenario is where a frame is used for a header, but has no navigation links. The header may be optimized with appropriate title and meta tags, but Google doesn’t tend to rank these orphaned pages very well at all.

2) Lack of Content
If you use a frame for the footer of a page, it typically may not contain any links (see above) or much content at all, apart from perhaps a small tag line and a copyright notice. In building a search engine friendly site, we try to maintain contextual relevance across the whole site, or at least across certain sections. This helps in the tail of the search curve where valuable traffic is obtained.

3) Crawl Path Problems
If you have a complex frame set up, search engines may not be able to access every page on your website. You can get around this by using a sitemap, but why initiate a problem in the first place?

4) Internal Link Integrity and PageRank Problems
Similar to the point above, you may not be spreading Google PageRank laterally, i.e. linking similar level pages together, instead of relying on the main navigation to provide the links. Where possible you want to link similar pages to each other because the text surrounding the link is important in determining the contextual relevance of the link, hence, making that link more valuable.

5) User Suspicion/Deception
When a website uses frames, the address in the user’s browser stays the same as they move from page to page. For websites which are expecting a conversion, like an ecommerce site, this may be perceived as trying to hide where the real content is coming from and conversions could suffer.

6) Bookmarking and Linking
Because the address never changes in the browser, it’s more difficult to bookmark or link to internal pages. If you are able to get the URL of the internal frame content to send to them in say a customer service email, it’s sometimes pretty useless for the user, since when they arrive there may not be a header or any website navigation.

7) Dynamic Content Limitations
Using frames makes it very difficult to offer dynamic navigation menus which expand by section depending on where you are on the website, or certain promotions or section advertisements. This can be achieved using Javascript but is a pain in the butt to code and keep track of. A simple mistake can cause problems with the navigation, which needs to be consistent and predictable for the best user experience.

8 ) Nested Frames
With just one small coding mistake you can end up with nested frames - i.e. multiple headers or navigation frames which is difficult for the user to “break out”. They either resort to having to go to the homepage and starting over, or they just leave.

9) Entry Page Problem
Since many times frames are used to hold the site navigation, if an internal page becomes an entry page from a search engine, there may not be any navigation for them to follow to go further into the site. And if you don’t link inner pages, there’s really nowhere for the user to go. They either manually adjust the address in the browser to get to the homepage, or just leave.

10) Limited Real Estate
Oftentimes the space right next to the main navigation is used for promotions or serving third party advertising. If you have the navigation placed in a frame, the “real estate” available to you is limited to the user’s screen resolution. You could use scrollbars within the frame, but if your main page content already needs a scrollbar, having 2 makes the user work extra hard to navigate your website.

Posted: November 27th, 2007 under General Website Design Knowledge.
Comments: none

Important places to place your keywords.

• Title Tags: <title>One of the most important place to have keywords at the beginning of your document.</title>
• Heading Tags : <H1>Search engine bots consider headers as good indicators of your site’s content. You can modify the fonts spacing and size using CSS.</H1>
• Hyperlink Text:  <a href=”link.html” mce_href=”link.html”>Using keywords as links can help boost your rankings. </a>
• Metatags: <meta name=”description” content=”Use keywords to describe your site.” />
  <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4, keyword5, keyword6″ />
• Alt Tags: Only Google and Alta Vista support them, but ALT tags still provide info to search engine bots that can’t read images.

Click here to read notes from a SEO seminar I attended.

Posted: October 11th, 2007 under General Website Design Knowledge.
Comments: none

PROS

• Enables you to make a big impression
• Good for presentations and demos
• Supports audio, animation, and advanced interactivity.
• Most visitors to a web page incorporating a Flash animation will be able to view it without downloading and installing the Player application. 96% of Web users already have Flash Player installed in their browsers.

CONS

• Bandwidth and Load Time Constrains: Sites designed with Flash take a long time to download and consume vast amounts of bandwidth. Not all users have a broadband connection and even if they do, they may not want to take the time to be entertained. 99% of users on line are looking for information.
• FLASH can go against the interactive nature of the internet. Since Flash technology resembles video, users are many times reduced to mere observers rather than the interactive players that the web was designed for. They may get bored. If they wanted that kind of entertainment, they could simply turn on Cable TV.
• Updating Content can be a bit more complicated and is done less often
• Search Engine Constrains: Although large search engines like Google now have some Flash indexing capabilities, these are still very limited. You will have a harder time achieving high rankings with a Flash site. One option around this problem is to design a second, search-engine-friendly HTML version of your site. This, though, usually represents an unnecessary expense in both time and money, since in most cases the HTML version alone will get the job done.
• Building FLASH content properly to answer usability issues is time intensive and generally costs at least twice as much as HTML solutions.
• Bookmarking FLASH sections is not a possibility unless you are bookmarking the html page the FLASH is contained in.

Evidence still points to the fact that most web users utilize the web to find information, and what they regard most important is quality of content, ease of navigation, and speed.

- Dave Rodman

Posted: June 27th, 2007 under General Website Design Knowledge.
Comments: none

I do not run a Web Hosting business. I do however host many of my client’s websites on my servers. The main reason for this is that it gives me total control of the applications and services that I can offer my clients. I have also learned that it saves my clients and I time and frustration by not having to debate with the tech support of hosting companies when something goes wrong at their end. Rodman Design shares rack space with Hot Media Group at Steadfast Networks. This data center is very impressive.
Go to: http://steadfast.net/corporate/datacenter.php for an overview of the facilities.

Pros for having your website hosted with Rodman Design:
(only available if you are a client of Rodman Design)

• I have full access and control of Server
• Tech Support easy and efficient (I am tech support)
  (My partner covers me when I’m unavailable)
• We can install and implement whatever applications you need.
  (Most shared hosting companies will not allow 3rd party applications on their servers)
• Bandwidth is maximized since you’re not sharing the server with
  hundreds, if not thousands of other clients, all being served from the
  same machine and using the same bandwidth. (This is usually the case on 3rd party shared server hosting) You’ll notice the difference of page download times.
• Client security is insured since we personally configure each
  client’s hosting area

- Dave Rodman

Posted: June 27th, 2007 under General Website Design Knowledge.
Comments: none