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Quick AdSense Font Tips

Sunday, October 29, 2006

There's loads of advice on how to legitimately increase your AdSense click through rates on the Internet, and most of this tells you to try and integrate your ads as much as possible into the rest of your site.

This means matching the colours, font size, font family and line height.

The colours can be controlled through the AdSense code generator, but the font size, typeface and line-height can only be changed by Google themselves.

However, you can change the rest of your site to match the AdSense code through the use of stylesheets:

font-family - arial,sans-serif
font-size - 11px
line-height - 13px

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Signed by Emma

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How to deal with spam!

Saturday, October 28, 2006

I've been away on holiday for just six days and as such, didn't go near an Internet connection in that time. After getting back earlier today, sleeping off the jetlag and having a nice cup of tea (!) I have just switched on my computer.

I have several e-mail accounts for different projects and in total I received over 350 e-mails of which about 75 have NOT been deleted on first glance. That means 79% of those e-mails were spam. Argh!

On the plus side, I use a nifty PC utility called ePrompter which allows you to simultaneously track upto 16 separate e-mail accounts. Once you have told the software (which sits in your system tray) which accounts to check and how frequently to check them, it notifies you when there are new messages and how many there are. You are then able to read the e-mails within ePrompter and delete them if necessary, without ever fully downloading them onto your PC. Any original e-mails not deleted are left on your e-mail account server so when you do open your e-mail program on your PC, you will receive your e-mails as normal.

The e-mails are displayed in text format, so nothing is downloaded e.g. tracking images making your computer more secure and retaining a greater level of privacy. In addition, in my e-mail program, it often converts different character encodings (usually associated with undesirable e-mails e.g. =?shift-jis?blahblahblah which is Japanese) and I have to open the e-mail to see the content. ePrompter is much better at showing character encodings in the title of the e-mails so it makes spam filtering an even quicker process.

To go through the list of titles and delete the spam ones, just click on the inbox of the account you are interested in, and use the space bar and 'x' key to run down the list - space to skip to the next title, and 'x' to mark it for deletion. To see an e-mail just double-click it. Using this method I managed to delete a considerable portion of the rubbish in just a few minutes.

To minimise spam I do adopt a few practises; the overall aim being not to ever send a message to the spammers.

Firstly, unless it is your office policy, do not use an out-of-office autoreply - if you receive a spam e-mail and you send a reply, you are telling the spammer that your e-mail address is valid, and that is likely to vastly increase the amount of cr*p in your inbox. Your e-mail address will be added to a list and sold. If you do have to or want to use an autoreply, do read this post from Digital Inspiration for further advice.

Secondly, if you receive an e-mail that you do not fully understand, or is full of nonsense or you are in the least bit suspicious about - DO NOT reply to it. This again is asking for your e-mail address to be added to a list for spammers to sell and use.

NOTE - also be on the lookout for phishing attempts. These are e-mails purporting to be from (e.g.) eBay, PayPal and banks. They look authentic and ask you to confirm your details, state that your account has been suspended, that a new e-mail address has been added to your account or something similar. The phishers want to collect your login details so will misdirect you to a fake login page they have set up (the link in the e-mail looks authentic but the location it takes you to is not). If you are not sure about information an e-mail you have received, go to your account directly in your web browser - do not use the link in the e-mail - and see if there are any messages upon login.

Thirdly, if you can set your e-mail program to receive messages from unknown addresses in text-only format, this will increase your security and privacy. HTML e-mails can contain an invisible tracking image, so the sender can see if you have opened the e-mail. Whilst this can be used for harmless reasons, it can also be used maliciously. Using text-only e-mails from unknown sources can reduce this risk.

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Signed by Emma

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Why separate style from content

Thursday, October 19, 2006

...And what does this even mean?

Imagine this scenario - you have just started working for a company, and have basic HTML knowledge. In their infinite wisdom, management have decided this qualifies you to make sitewide changes on the corporate site. A quick look at the first page of code shows 'tag soup' - hundreds of nested tags that have no resemblance to anything that you can make heads or tails of. [font] and [b] tags are littered around, and each separate element of the site seems to have its own personalised bit of styling. Tags should be in angular brackets, but are not in this example so they print properly in Blogger.

Now imagine the same scenario, but the code is well laid out and everthing has a class or ID that is controlled by a master stylesheet. Now to make changes, all you do is change the one sheet and the site changes. In the previous example, to make sitewide changes, you would need to edit every single line of code.

Which scenario would you prefer?

The second example shows one very good reason to try and separate the style from the content. In practice, this means laying out your basic HTML document (the framework) and then putting all tags which control the appearance e.g. width and font, into a separate stylesheet.

A more detailed explanation can be found here - http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/page/separating_style_from_content and here - http://phrogz.net/CSS/HowToDevelopWithCSS.html

If you have no idea where to begin with CSS, have a look at W3Schools, Tizag and the excellent free courses at WestCiv.

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Signed by Emma

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How to set domain name servers

Monday, October 16, 2006

When you purchase domain names and hosting separately, you need to tell them how to talk to each other. This is done be setting your domain name servers (DNS setting). You will receive an e-mail from your web host confirming your hosting, and this will contain the addresses of the nameservers. These typically look like ns1.webhostnameserver.com and ns2.webhostnameserver.com. Instructions are provided below for 1&1 and GoDaddy, both of which are our recommended domain sellers .

With 1&1:

  1. Log into your 1&1 account at http://admin.1and1.co.uk; you can do this quite soon after registering your domain, by using your domain name in the account name field, and using the password you chose during registration.
  2. Click on 'Manage Domains'.
  3. You will see your domain name(s) listed - click on the box to the left hand side of the domain you want to change.
  4. Click on the down arrow on the DNS button and choose 'Edit DNS Settings'.
  5. In 'Basic DNS Settings' select 'My name server' from the dropdown list.
  6. In 'Advanced DNS Settings', you'll see 'Primary name server' appear.
  7. Type in the first nameserver as it appears in the e-mail from your webhost.There is no www or http at the start.
  8. Underneath, choose 'My secondary name server' from the drop down box.
  9. Type in the second nameserver as it appears in the e-mail from your webhost. The is no www or http at the start.
  10. Click 'save' and don't forget to logout.
  11. It will take a while for the information to be updated.
  12. Do this as soon as possible after purchasing your domain name and hosting - until you do this, your website will point to a 1&1 page.
With GoDaddy
  1. Log into your GoDaddy account.
  2. Click on 'My Account' that appear under your name on the right hand side of the page.
  3. Click on 'Manage Domains'
  4. You will see your domain name(s) listed - click on the box to the left hand side of the domain(s) you want to change.
  5. Click on the 'Set Nameservers' button in the choices above the list of your domain names.
  6. The screen will refresh and you'll see a new panel on the right hand side of your screen.
  7. Select 'Custom Name Servers'
  8. Type in the nameservers exactly as they appear in the e-mail from your webhost. There is no www or http at the start.
  9. Click on 'Save Changes' and don't forget to logout.
  10. It will take a while for the information to be updated.
  11. Do this as soon as possible after purchasing your domain name and hosting - until you do this, your website will point to a GoDaddy page.

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Help I lost my password!

Friday, October 13, 2006

If you've ever had that sinking feeling when you've realised you've forgotten your login, don't worry, help could be at hand. If your password is MD5 encrypted and is stored in a MySQL database to which you have acccess, this post will help.

If you are unsure about the MD5 encryption, follow the instructions below through to step 10 - if the password consists of 32 letters and numbers, then carry on, if not, find another plan! If you are very lucky (and the program isn't as secure as it should be), the passwords won't be encrypted at all and you can see what your password is.

Here are instructions for doing this in cPanel using phpMyAdmin:

  1. Login to cPanel and click on the MySQL icon.
  2. Scroll to the bottom of this page and click on 'phpMyAdmin'.
  3. Select the correct database from the dropdown box on the left hand side.
  4. In the left hand side list that appears, click on the name of the table that holds your password. NB - unsure of which table? First look for tables called 'user' or 'admin', then start browsing through each table (see step 5) until you find the correct location.
  5. Click on the tab at the top of page that says 'browse'
  6. Further down the page that appears there is a small table that shows users and their corresponding passwords.
  7. Click on the checkbox next to the correct user
  8. Click on the pencil icon.
  9. On the page that appears, you'll see a table that you can edit.
  10. Highlight and copy the 32-digit sequence from the password box and paste it into a new text document. SAVE THIS as a backup.
  11. Back in the password box, delete the existing contents and type the following in instead: e5f0f20b92f7022779015774e90ce917
  12. You are now able to login to your admin panel using the password temppass
  13. Now change your password to something else and don't forget it!!!
WARNING - You are manually editing a database which underpins your script or software. This is not recommended. Do this at your own peril and ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS keep a backup of any data that you change (see step 10).

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Signed by Emma

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AdSense on your website when testing

Thursday, October 12, 2006

When building a new site, it's quite common to make a few tweaks, save and upload the page, and load it into your browser to see what your changes look like 'live'. This process can be repeated many times.

Google AdSense rules (also referred to as TOS - terms of service) say that you can only put AdSense code onto pages that are launched and functioning. In other words, not on test pages or those with 'under construction' on them. In addition to making repeat requests from the AdSense server, you also run the risk of accidentally clicking on the ads.

However, it's useful to see the AdSense code to keep track of the overall picture. So what can you do?

Easy - make two simple changes to the AdSense code whilst you're finishing the page and then reverse the changes once the page is live. The second line of AdSense code normally looks like:

google_ad_client = "pub-your 16 digit id here";

But change it to:

google_adtest = "on";
google_ad_client = "ca-test";
//google_ad_client = "pub-your 16 digit id here";

Once you're done, just change it back to the original - simple!

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Signed by Emma

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Top level domains by country code

In a recent post I talked about how web addresses are formed and one of the things mentioned was top level domains (TLDs) e.g. com or net. There are country level TLDs as well though or cTLDs for short e.g. UK. And don't forget there may be permutations allowed within these e.g. co.uk and org.uk. The full list is below:

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Optimising your images for the web

Monday, October 09, 2006

Whenever you put graphics on a website, you should try and make them as small as possible. This makes your pages load faster, which keeps the attention of your visitor longer. However, you don't want to sacrifice too much quality, else you'll lose the attention of your visitor!

Dynamic Drive have a range of tools available and the one I use most is their image optimiser:

Free online tool- optimize your gifs, jpg, and png images

Useful for gifs, animated gifs, jpgs and png files, you can upload the image either from your hard drive or an existing webpage. There is an upload limit of 300kB, but if your image is bigger than that - it shouldn't be on your website!

Once you click 'optimize', you will be presented with a list of your images with decreasing quality e.g. higher compression levels in jpgs, and fewer colours in gifs. From this list, you can quickly make a file size vs. quality judgement. To save the image, just right-click and 'save as' (or 'save image as' depending on your browser). The filename given as a default will be the same as the uploaded file with a number appended, relating to the quality you chose. From there it's a simple job to rename the image.

I recommend saving the new file with the name given (e.g. myfile_2.jpg), then renaming the original file to myfile.bak.jpg or similar, and then renaming the new file to myfile.jpg. Although this is slightly more time consuming, it means that your original image file is preserved, with a useful name - the golden rule being "Always backup or you may regret it later."

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Signed by Emma

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Another Google Page Rank update

So, it looks like there's recently been another Google PageRank update. And fewer people seem to care, which I see as a positive sign. PageRank is only one aspect of how well your website can be found or ranked, and I feel that having a well-designed site, that meets with coding and legal requirements, and appeals to site visitors by providing content written for them is more important than scrabbling for PageRank.

However, PageRank can be a useful indicator of a site's authority - the higher the number out of 10, the more important Google views it. To see your live pagerank, see http://livepr.raketforskning.com/ which shows your current pagerank at 199 Google Datacentres.

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Signed by Emma

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Why I turned blog comments off

Thursday, October 05, 2006

I was recently asked why I people couldn't leave comments on my blog posts, and why if they wanted to get in touch, they had to use my contact form.

The reason for this is that there are plenty of unscrupulous programs out there that people use to 'comment spam'. This means that they fill in a few details and a link to their own site or blog, choose a keyword and press 'go'. The program then goes and finds all blogs that it can with that keyword and leaves a comment.

It sounds nice in theory but has several drawbacks:

1) It can leave comments on completely unrelated sites - if you had a blog about a serious medical condition but mentioned web design in one single post, would you really want several hundred comments saying "hey nice site about web design. check out my site etc..", no? I didn't think so.

2) A lot of people can't even use the software properly so you get comments left that make even less sense.

3) I DO NOT WANT Viagra, Cialis or any other medication, anatomy-extending device or anything else you could possibly spam me about, thank you.

And most importantly:

4) Most blog programs now automatically insert the rel=nofollow tag into any links in comments. This means the links have absolutely no value in the search engine's eyes - they will not index or follow the link and therefore you have not gained a backlink. The only way this link is useful is if someone follows it and visits your site. My guess is that 99% of link spam doesn't get followed.

To summarise - if you would like to comment on anything in my blog, please get in touch via the contact form. Whilst this doesn't allow comments to be viewed publically, it does mean that I control the quality of the blog.

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Signed by Emma

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Web addresses explained

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Web addresses, also commonly known as URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) or less commonly domain names, provide a unique, convenient and memorable way to access a particular website. But what do all the parts of the address mean?

Although you can for example type "littlefishwebdesign.com" into your address bar and the LittleFish Web Design page will appear, technically the full address is "http://www.littlefishwebdesign.com" and this is what we'll look at:

http: - this stands for "hypertext transfer protocol" and is the language or method that your internet browser must use to access the webpage in question. You don't have to type this into your address bar - if it is missing, your browser will assume this is the protocol to use.

// - this separates the access method from the address

www - this means 'world wide web' and helps to distinguish the address from other non-internet addresses e.g. a company intranet. It can also be used for a sub-domain e.g. orders.domainname.com.

littlefishwebdesign - this is known as the 'second level' domain and when combined with the next part of the address, make up the unique identifier which allows you to arrive at the correct web page.

com - this is the top level domain (TLD) and there are many different ones to choose from. Different rules apply to each TLD as they are regulated by different organisations.

. - the 'dot' inbetween different parts of the address signify the end of that part.


When you buy a web address, you are really exclusively renting it for the period stated. For addresses ending in UK, you can only have it for two years at a time. Other domains such as COM, NET and ORG can be held for multiples of a year or more. And you can always release the domain back into the system early if you choose you don't want it any more.

If you want to purchase a web address you will need to find a domain registrar. We recommend 1&1 for domains ending in UK (£4.68 inc. VAT for two years) and GoDaddy for other domains (from $5.99 per year) - both companies are reliable and have very competitive prices. For full prices see the LittleFish Domain Name Comparison.

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Signed by Emma

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Clock Link - rent a virtual clock!

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

"ClockLink provides fashionable clocks that you can easily embed in your web page. All you need to do is simply paste the tag on your web page. Our clock will display the city name of your choice if you choose. You can also choose a time zone for your clock so it will show the correct time. Decorate your website with our clocks!"

That's the blurb on the ClockLink website - and yes it really is that simple, just look at this blog's footer. The service is free - if you hover over the clock it will link back to ClockLink.com or one of their advertisers.

There's a big choice of clocks - from simple digital ones to funky animals and they're great fun. Colours, time and date format are customisable, and the clock in our footer took less than five minutes in total from starting at Clock Link to appearing on the site.

If, like me, you can never remember the date but you do check your site frequently, it's a good idea!

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Phishing - what web designers can learn

Monday, October 02, 2006

According to Wikipedia "phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message, although phone contact has been used as well. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, and technical measures."

A useful summary of a Harvard and Berkeley report into phishing attacks can be found on SEO Chat and it makes for interesting reading. Despite being academic research, the report has real-world implications as people will only buy from, or give their details to, websites they trust.

Phishing attacks are so common place and successful because the criminals behind such sites are one step ahead of many of us psychologically. Read the article and see how vulnerable you are.

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Signed by Emma

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BackLinks.com review and a small rant

After writing about Text Link Ads a few posts ago I thought I'd see what other programs are out there. I was recommended BackLinks.com, which is free to join.

It's quite a straightforward process - they provide a service which enables webmasters to either buy, or sell and swap links by providing a server-side script that you put on your website to do the 'behind the scenes' stuff for you. They also don't get involved in the payment process, so you do get all monies charged. To be involved your site needs a PageRank of 3 or more.

I looked at the selling and exchanging part of the process. After registering for a free account, you then complete your details - URL of the page, title and description, your geographical location, price you want to charge per link and payment method etc...

You then customise the link block and once this is done, choose the relevant code for your site and insert it where you want the links block to be. Once this is done, you'll be in the searchable database for other webmasters to request link exchanges or to buy a link. You have complete control over the process.

However, the code does have a downside. I did e-mail the technical support people about my issues (more in a minute) and to their credit, the reply was incredibly quick. However, I did ask that if the code could not be changed or split into different options then my account was deleted. The reply from them was literally:

"we deleted you...

James"

So what was my problem with the code? As a web designer I follow coding and legal standards. When previewing the link code I noticed the following issues. (It is possible that the preview code and the actual code are different, but this was not pointed out to me by the technical support and my issues therefore refer to the code preview only):

1) I use XHTML encoding on LittleFish Web Design - capitalised HTML tags are not allowed in XHTML and won't validate at http://w3c.validator.org. The BackLinks.com code uses capitalised tags.

2) Font size should be specified in % (percent) or ems. If they are specified in pixels, they cannot be resized in some web browsers and are therefore not compatible with section 508 (US) or DDA (UK) which is a legal requirement. Although highly unlikely especially for small websites, a site owner of a non-personal website could be sued for breaking the law. The BackLinks.com code uses pixel font sizes.

3) I don't use tables for layout as CSS is a more modern coding standard. The BackLinks.com code uses tables for its layout.

If you aren't worried about these issues, then have a look at BackLinks as it seems to be a very good idea. If you do want to take notice of what I've mentioned, try Text Link Ads (and remember you can get $100 off when buying text links).

Meeting with coding and legal requirements has many benefits - the code is more streamlined meaning faster loading pages; the search engines like it; your pages look the same across more web browsers and more browsing platforms and really there's no excuse for not doing so. Even if you are a complete HTML novice there are plenty of website tutorials out there that teach good practice e.g. W3Schools.com and Tizag.com to name two off the top of my head.

Rant over.

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Signed by Emma

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How to make FireFox work for you

Sunday, October 01, 2006

You might have noticed the 'Get Firefox' button in the toolbar to your left but you may not have a clue what it is.

Firefox is an alternative web browser to Internet Explorer, and like Internet Explorer, it's free. Unlike Internet Explorer however, it is open source and that means there is much more potential for extensions and add-ons. Some of it's features have proved so popular that Microsoft have incorporated them into the new version of Internet Explorer e.g. live RSS bookmarks and tabbed browsing. The tabbed browsing in particular means that instead of having to have three different browser windows open, using up three times as much computer memory, you can have one browser window open, and have each site you are looking at open in a new tab. FireFox also adheres to web standards more than Internet Explorer, which is one less browser to have to 'hack' bits of code for. On the downside, there are a few websites that do not function properly in FireFox but in about two years of use, I've only come across three or four.

So what about the add-ons? There's a myriad of them, mostly listed at Mozilla's extensions website, accessed through Tools > Extensions. Other ones can be found on the Internet. They can alter almost any aspect of your browsers behaviour and provide much more functionality.

Extensions I've got loaded include:

And yes, of course they are web design orientated. If you haven't already done so, download FireFox and see what you think - I run FireFox and Internet Explorer side by side, so you can have the best of both worlds!

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