Internet
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are all the rage, though both systems are merely new approaches to age-old marketing principles that successful companies have always benefited from.
Wikipedia defines SEO as the process of:
…improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from
search engines via ‘natural’ (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results.
On the other hand, SEM includes a broader online marketing approach that includes paid placements.
Many companies claim they offer SEO as one of their premerie services.
We do too.
But FSI take is a step further and applies its wide and varied marketing experience to current web and SEO/SEM standards. We apply the following basic principles to help build a successful site:
- Positioning – Analyzing your target audience and competition to best position your site with the equivalent of a
“unique selling proposition”. This includes:- Analyze the competition, finding their strengths and also gaps/opportunities your site can provide.
- Optimizing website content and structure to differentiate your site from the competition
- Conducting a key-word analysis to see how prospects are searching for similar products/services
- Findability – It doesn’t matter how good your site is if prospects can’t find it:
- Making sure search engines know where to find your site.
- Building inbound links to your site to increase your site’s search ranking and generate more traffic.
- Attracting local traffic to your site through free and paid sources
- “Stickiness” – You can rank #1 everywhere and drive thousands of visitors to your site, but if it is poorly written, and lacks a compelling message or “call to action”, people will “slip away” as quickly as they arrived. We have professional writing experience, so that your site isn’t a
mish-mash of key words and phrases, but tells a cohesive and compelling story.
As a web developer, I have evolved into building sites that are an intricate maze of pages that allow the user to surf the site. The idea is to provide multiple avenues to arrive to each page, which should be short to allow reading without much scrolling. If the user needs to scroll, build another page. Pages can be targeted for search engines.
But there are single page websites out there which have their place. A nice example of this Seven Places Productions, a WordPress implementation with an elegant graphic design. It is almost a one page site. They cheat on “our services” by showing examples, which are separate posts. But they use sliders to allow all the content to be on a single screen.
There are also less desirable solutions. I shy away from sliders that move a long way, because it tends to make me dizzy. Think Green Meeting is an example of this. It is complicated to build, and I need to take seasick pills if I browse the whole site.
A single page site may work well if there is not too much content or too many pages (less than 10). If graphic design is a premium, this could be a way to go.
I always felt that one page sites would compromise on SEO, but this may not be the case. I’m not convinced, but Mayur Jobanputra in his blog, gives 6 reasons why one page sites offer advantages for SEO. I have to believe, however, that a well structured website with many pages, cross-linked, will always do better than a single page site.
For simple sites that don’t need much content, there are creative ways to build a single page site and have it work to your advantage. One page, however, does not necessarily translate to inexpensive. The sophisticated graphic design (I particularly like the top right corner peeling away for recent sites) means the single page can cost at least as much as a multi-page site.
Charting is a totally different animal in Office 2007 from its previous 2003- versions. Charts are not MS Graph objects (by default) but Excel.
Working with PowerPoint in VBA is never fun, because managing slides and the objects on the slides is limited, and can not be seen from the interface (like naming a slide or object).
Usually a major new release makes life easier, but in this case, not so. Read the following from PPTFAQ:
If you need to automate charts in PowerPoint 2007, it’d be best if you change your name and move to another town where nobody knows that you do PowerPoint programming.
The chart objects you get in PowerPoint 2007 when you add a new chart expose no methods or properties to VBA. In short, you can’t do anything with them in code.
When you install Office 2007, you have the option of including MSGraph, the application PowerPoint used for charts in previous versions. You’ll want this if you need to work with charts from previous PowerPoint versions and/or to create new charts via automation.
These are not encouraging words. I hoped that SP2 of Office 2007 would solve the answers, but it appears that even though we now have access to the chartdata object in PowerPoint and Word, there is virtually nothing we can do with it.
One would think with a major upgrade like 2007, that automation would get easier. Unfortunately as far as automating graphs in PowerPoint, which is a common need, we are worse off. So there are several choices, none good:
- Configure PP 2007 to default to use MS Graph (see article). This involves using regedit, and obviously is a poor choice if it will be used by other people since they will all have to do the same configurations.
- Use Excel to contain all the graphs and then push them to PP with copy and paste as enhanced metafile. This is probably the best choice, but pasting into a PP file is always difficult since it is so difficult to manage the objects/shapes in the PP slides.
- Use linked graphs in PP to an Excel file as the data source, and then edit the Excel file. This seems to be buggy, and graphs disappear and act in an unstable way.
So item 2 is the best way, to manage the charts in Excel and push them by copying/pasting them into the slides and locating them.
The trick is that pastespecial returns a shape range, not a shape, so the item(1) at the end returns the first item in the range. At least I KNOW it will be the first item since I am pasting my object into the slide.
Set oPPTSlide = oPPTFile.Slides(iSlideNum)
Set oPPTShape = oPPTSlide.Shapes.PasteSpecial(ppPasteEnhancedMetafile).Item(1)
oPPTShape.Left = -6
oPPTShape.Top = 164.25
We are unable to edit data underlying the charts. Check out the posting on an MSDN blog.
Key Differences Between the Chart object in Word 2007 SP2/PowerPoint 2007 SP2 and ChartObject object in Excel 2007 SP2
The Chart object in Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 does have a few differences from the Excel 2007 SP2 implementation.
* Programmatically creating or manipulating a ChartData object in Word 2007 SP2 or PowerPoint 2007 SP2 will cause Excel 2007 SP2 to run.
* Chart properties and methods for manipulating the chart sheet aren’t implemented.
The concept of a chart sheet is specific to Excel 2007. Chart sheets aren’t used in Word 2007 or PowerPoint 2007, so methods and properties used to reference or manipulate a chart sheet have been disabled for those applications.
* Properties and methods that, in Excel 2007 SP2 normally take a Range object reference now take a range address in Word 2007 SP2/PowerPoint 2007 SP2.
The Range object in Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 is different than the Range object in Excel 2007 SP2. To prevent confusion, the charting object model in Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 accepts range address strings, such as “=’Sheet1′!$A$1:$D$5″, in those properties and methods (such as the SetSourceData method of the Chart object) that accept Range objects in Excel 2007 SP2.
* A new object, ChartData, has been added to the VBA object models for Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 to provide access to the underlying linked or embedded data for a chart.
Each chart has, associated with it, the data used to draw the chart in Word 2007 SP2 or PowerPoint 2007 SP2. The chart data can either be linked from an external Excel workbook, or embedded as part of the chart itself. The ChartData object encapsulates access to the data for a given chart in Word 2007 SP2 or PowerPoint 2007 SP2. For example, the following VBA code displays, then minimizes, the chart data for each chart contained by the active document in Word 2007 SP2:
Many people want WordPress to power their site’s root (e.g. http://example.com) but they don’t want all of the WordPress files cluttering up their root directory. WordPress allows you to install the WordPress files to a subdirectory, but have your blog exist in the site root.
The process to move WordPress into its own directory is as follows:
1. Create the new location for the core WordPress files to be stored (we will use /wordpress in our examples). (On linux, use mkdir wordpress from your www directory. You’ll probably want to use “chown apache:apache” on the wordpress directory you created.)
2. Go to the General panel.
3. In the box for WordPress address (URL): change the address to the new location of your main WordPress core files. Example: http://example.com/wordpress
4. In the box for Blog address (URL): change the address to the root directory’s URL. Example: http://example.com
5. Click Update Options. (Do not worry about the error message and do not try to see your blog at this point! You will probably get a message about file not found.)
6. Move your WordPress core files to the new location (WordPress address).
7. Copy the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address). The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not using pretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file.
8. Open your root directory’s index.php file in a text editor
9. Change the following and save the file. Change the line that says:
require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);
to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files:
require(‘./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php’);
10. Login to the new location. It might now be http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/
11. If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can’t write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)