Website Lessons

This is the second episode of my slow series documenting the path of the problogger through my personal views. The first was about monetizing your blog via Google’s Adsense that you can find via Path of The Problogger – Adsense. As much as everyone wants to make ‘easy money’ via their blogs, the other part that powers the engine of the blog is the content.

In this chapter, I realize that content is a really general topic to be discussing on but because my power of copy isn’t as great as some, I decided to cover things like scheduled blogging, good content, original content, copy-n-paste content and others that come to my mind later.

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Technically when we say homepage, we actually mean the first page you see on your website. When we say your landing page, it’s actually refering to your other main pages or the top page of every sub-category/level.

For instance, if I had a button called Categories and when you click on it or place your mouse cursor over it, it drops down several other options. The Categories link when clicked on brings you to your landing page for that parent link.

Some people don’t have a landing page for their parent link because it doesn’t benefit their website. However, when some people do use their landing pages, some don’t use it beneficially.

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Observing the current wave of emerging professional bloggers (probloggers) has left me nothing but envious and inspired me to write a series that isn’t at all new. However, I hope to use this series as my little notes put aside on things that I’ve learnt through my own learnings and observations of these probloggers.

To kick start the series, I’d like to make the first note about revenue gaining through Google Adsense. I’m aware that everyone already knows about this Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program that I don’t have to explain. However, if you’re new and very interested to learn more about Google’s program, please take the Google Adsense Tour.

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Back when I was in college, Drew introduced me to his uncle who needed someone to help prepare template designs. These template designs were to help propose a project to the Danga Bay developers. And believe me, when I think about it (I don’t have a copy anymore) I’m laughing at myself thinking how terrible a website designer I was at the time.

During that time, there wasn’t such an existence as web standards or it was just being introduced by Jeffrey Zeldman. That was also when his book was released, Designing with Web Standards. At that time in college, being nothing but a student who just wanted to graduate and enjoy life, website designing was nothing but a hobby with an occasional side income.

Being a fresh designer who hasn’t turned his passion into a career yet, I was confused and lost on how much should I charge Drew’s uncle. Hence, the uncle instead offered me RM100 per template and I needed to prepare 3 different ones. If he offered me that now, I’d say, “That’s LUDICROUS!”

So how do you find the right price for your design work?

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Have you seen this particular scene in a movie where a group of movers were carrying a large furniture or object that needed to placed somewhere however because of the undecisive family member, they end up moving from one area to the next?

That is exactly how a designer sometimes feel when designing a website. I was designing for a project and suddenly became indecisive over a content section and a Google Adsense ad. According to Google Adsense tips and the common human reading habit, the left side is where most humans concentrate on first when they’re doing some reading. Hence, making the left side one of the main spots for content.

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Now that the Merdeka fever has toned down a notch, I’m able to catch up on some reading online once again. As much as I’d like to say there’s nothing better than sitting in front of the screen, reading the papers and sipping my hot cuppa latte, it just doesn’t fit.

So cutting right to the chase, I pulled up a few of my favourite reading sources. Digital Web Magazine has matured in style ever since I started reading it, their articles are applauded by me half the time. *applause* This time around, they were discussing request for proposal (RFP) or clients requesting for a proposal.

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Recently I received an email from a fellow reader (I think) and he wanted to know how some users made a ‘read more’ link to their entry. If you’re using WordPress (WP) or MovableType (MT) or any other stand-alone publishing engine, there normally is an Entry Body and Extended Entry section when typing a post.

WP and MT have built-in codes to generate the ‘read more’ link for you. However, for Blogspot users, they only have the Entry Body to put up their post and by default, the whole post is published on the homepage.

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Last week I read an article either in InTech or Computimes that questioned the movement of web development today. The writer was explaining how some websites aren’t designed anymore to conceptual design and instead head down simple lane. As much as I’d like to hammer the writer at first, but what was typed was true to each word of it.

The border or crossing between usability, accessibility and web design have been questioned quite a few times. The same question has been asked over and over again of how does a person know where is the line and balance of all this? Because of usability and accessibility, Flash media had started to be disregarded by some developers and designers today.

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No, it’s a weblog! Confused yet?

Well, don’t be embarassed by it because a study by Shel Holtz at WebProNews.com shines some light to the agenda, Blog Design An Obstacle To Acceptance. His study was about the usability of blogs. Not only in terms of design but the overall view of it. The study was conducted by enlisting few users who are web-savvy but didn’t know much about blogs.

A clear example of how even a web-savvy person might not be as knowledgeable as the blogger was proven when Shel said;

Most didn’t know they were looking at a blog at all and were surprised and confused when told they were.

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There are actually more than ten commandments to good web design but I only want to speak about one of it. This commandment is dubbed;

Thou shall NOT kill thy website with ads.

I wonder who’s doing this right now?

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