WordPress wins CMS Awards

November 20, 2009  FILED TO: Software, Web Design

I’ve been using WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System) for about four years now.  Back when I began, it was simply a blogging platform but I discovered it was easy to customise, easy for clients to add content and came with lots of useful plugins and an open API, which made it ideal in my eyes for a simple CMS.  Indeed, over the years I’ve created some interesting functionality for different sites using a mixture of plugins and custom code. It seems that other people reached the same conclusion over the years and Wordpress took note and began adding useful CMS features.

And this week, the makers of WordPress finally have recognition for their great work – they have won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award at the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Congratulations WordPress, I will continue to use and recommend your CMS!

         

Learning standards-based HTML & CSS

November 20, 2009  FILED TO: Web Design

A couple of people have asked me recently how I create clean markup so quickly. I don’t find it particularly hard, I do it by hand in a systematic manner. But I have a lot of learning behind me that I apply. So, in this blog I reveal my process as well as a few of the resources I have learned from along the way.

         

The morals of Search Engine Optimisation

May 4, 2009  FILED TO: Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but every time I get an email offering reciprocal links or paid website reviews, I immediately hit the “spam” button and sigh a deep sigh.  In the “real” world, it takes time to build a good reputation, for individuals and for businesses; in the Internet world, it seems that people don’t have the patience for this, they’re happy to follow immoral or unethical Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) practices in order to grow a false reputation for their website.  And the smarter search engines get, the smarter the schemes get.  “Black Hat” SEO used to involve reams of hidden keywords at the bottom of pages and keyword stuffing (adding large numbers of irrelevant keywords and phrases to pages).  Search Engines now penalise pages if they find this.  Instead, we’re seeing practices like duplicate sites and paid reviews (website owners pay a company to write a review of their site with a link to it). 

         

What do I do?

April 24, 2009  FILED TO: Web Design

Here’s a great explanation!

This YUI Theater entry captures one of the courses Nate has taught at Yahoo, “Professional Frontend Engineering.” It covers the foundations of the discipline, some of its core ideas, and some of of its best practices. If you are looking to reset your own assumptions about “web development” or “frontend work”, I know of no better place to start. If you have friends who are new to the discipline, or backend engineers transitioning to the frontend, this is also a fantastic resource to which you can point them.