Newsletter 12: New website settings for SEO

From the speeches of the extra website winners, I learned something new about making websites on the top of search engineering:

1. Choose static hosting:
·The “edu” and “org” websites have high rank for SEO.
·The Japanese “fc2xom” is a good hosting.

2. Submit to get sitemap.xml:

·Having sitemap.xml can help search engineering rank your site.
Reference: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html

·Sitemap.xml example.
http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~hwchun/sitemap.xml

·Google, Yahoo and Msn can use the same tool to get your sitemap.xml.
http://www.sitemapspal.com/
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

3. Submit your website links to Google, Yahoo, and Msn:
http://www.ineedhits.com/free-tools/free-tools.aspx
http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html

4. Tools to get Back Links from other sites:

·Google Page Creator - a free tool from Google that allows you to easily create web pages in your browser. The format of your URL would look something like this: http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com

·Microsoft Office Live Basics - an absolutely free online product from Microsoft that allows you to easily create your own website. Although it takes a few weeks (perhaps it's shorter now since the rush has died down a bit) to get your invitation, free domain name of your choice and free hosting is way worth the wait.

·Blogger - blog spam would be an accurate term to describe sites set up for backlink purposes using Blogger, but hey, what are you go to do if need calls for action? Besides, not everything has to "look" spamy.

·Squidoo - yet another free websit-ish application that provides you with your very own "lens" and has the ability to display basic RSS feeds without a nofollow attribute.

·Google Base - here you have the ability to create and submit your own pages and content and it appears that Google Base items are slowly making their way into main SERPs.

·Newsvine - as a free member of Newsvine your are elegible to create your own column with a subdomain name of your choice: yourdomainname.newsvine.com

·Wordpress - Wordpress is a mix between Blogger and Newsvine in that you can select your own subdomain name and set up a promotional site with custum content and URLs. Your site then appears easily in search engines such as Google and Technorati.

Reference: http://www.hawaiistreets.com/seoblog/?itemid=862

Newsletter 11: web site company

We are learning the course ”web usability design and engineering”, but does it really useful in our future career? How does it can help us doing our jobs? How to design a web site in a site design company? Here is something we should consider about:

·The web standard should be followed in practical site design.

·The SEO is an import part in the business.

·The CSS and JavaScript are important technologies in our career.

The homepage of website design companies are important, but not all the homepages are good. After the course, we can figure out which company is skilled at web design from their homepages:

Better ones:
http://www.e2solutions.net/website_design_company.htm
http://www.stevesims.com/
http://www.psisolutions.com/
http://www.smartinfo.com.hk/index.php

Not good enough:
http://www.rebound.com.hk/

bad homepage:http://www.nu-vista.com/

Newsletter9: Usability Testing

What is usability testing?

Usability testing is a means for measuring how well people can use some human-made object (such as a web page, a computer interface, a document, or a device) for its intended purpose, i.e. usability testing measures the usability of the object.
Usability testing focuses on a particular object or a small set of objects, whereas general human-computer interaction studies attempt to formulate universal principles.

What to measure in usability testing?

Time on Task:
i.e. How long does it take people to complete basic tasks? (For example, find something to buy, create a new account, and order the item.)
Accuracy:
i.e. How many mistakes did people make? (And were they fatal or recoverable with the right information?)
Recall:
i.e. How much does the person remember afterwards or after periods of non-use?
Emotional Response:
i.e. How does the person feel about the tasks completed? (Confident? Stressed? Would the user recommend this system to a friend?)

http://stats.bls.gov/ore/htm_papers/st960150.htm

Usability testing steps includes:

Part I: Planning your usability test
Part II: Conducting your interviews
Part III: Organizing data, analyzing data and presenting your findings

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/usability_testing.html
http://www.cusys.edu/irm/stds/usability/index.html

THE PPT OF NEWSLETTER 8

Here is the link of my newsletter ppt, in which contains some expales.

http://personal.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~40008944/image format.ppt

newsletter8: Image Formats( GIF & JPEG )

Nowadays, GIF and JPEG are the most popular image formats in web design. To use images of the most appropriate formats, you need to know the difference about GIF and JPEG.

JPEG format

Useful for photographic images with a large range of colors.
May introduce artifacts for images with large flat areas of color.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jpeg

JPEG is preferred for digital photographs because it allows images to contain more than 16 million different hues (GIF gives a choice of only 256 per image frame) and it compresses photographs better. Uncompressed bitmap formats like Windows bitmap are sometimes preferred for images in computer software when speed is more important than reduced file size, because uncompressed bitmaps contain raw pixel information, and thus can be displayed more quickly.

GIF format:

Useful for images containing flat areas of color.
Limited to a 256-color palette and dithering is required to approximate the missing colors.
Simple web animations can be made using a sequence of GIF images called animated GIFs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

Although JPEG has replaced GIF in many situations, especially those where accurate representations of photographic-quality source images are required, the GIF format is still widely utilized.

As it remains the only natively-supported animation format for most web browsers, GIF is frequently used to make small animations and short, low-resolution films for web pages.

In addition, a large portion of web page logos and design element images are GIF (or, increasingly PNG) as those formats are better at successfully compressing images that contain large blocks of matte color or of repeating patterns; JPEG does not compress flat, single-hued areas with sharp transitions to adjacent areas as well.

Bad example: http://www.cityu.edu.hk/
Due to lingering browser issues related to rendering PNG transparency, GIF remains the only format that supports transparent images in almost all web browsers.

The dithering:

Dither is a form of noise, or 'erroneous' signal or data which is added to sample data for the purpose of minimizing quantization error. Dither is routinely used in processing of both digital audio and digital video data.

Using dither, we can get better gif format. Unfortunately, although dither was invented during 70 century, it’s still not widely used nowadays.

Here are examples:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithering

newsletter7: Details about Page Rank

Do you know? The average Actual PR of all pages in the index is 1.0!

PageRank is only part of the story about what results get displayed high up in a Google listing. For example there’s some evidence to suggest that Google is paying a lot of attention these days to the text in a link’s anchor when deciding the relevance of a target page – perhaps more so than the page’s PR…

But PageRank is still part of the listings story though, so it’s worth your while as a good designer to make sure you understand it correctly.

Good ways we can do:

1. Content Is King! There really is no substitute for lots of good content…

Mega-sites, like http://news.bbc.co.uk/ have tens or hundreds of editors writing new content – i.e. new pages - all day long! Each one of those pages has rich, worthwhile content of its own and a link back to its parent or the home page!

That’s why the Home page Toolbar PR of these sites is 9/10 and the rest of us just get pushed lower and lower by comparison…

2. Make it worth other people’s while to use your content or tools. If your give-away is good enough other site admins will gladly give you a link back.

3. It’s probably better to get lots (perhaps thousands) of links from sites with small PR than to spend any time or money desperately trying to get just the one link from a high PR page.

http://www.phpbb.com/ has a Toolbar PR of 8/10 (at the time of writing) and it has no big money or marketing behind it! How can this be?

What the group has done is write a very useful bulletin board system that is becoming very popular on many websites. And at the bottom of every page, in every installation, is this HTML code:

Powered by " phpBB"

The administrator of each installation can remove that link, but most don’t because they want to return the favor…

Bad ways:

This is a technique used by some disreputable sites (mostly adult content sites). I can’t advise this - if Google’s robots decide you’re doing this there’s a good chance you’ll be banned from Google! Disaster!

http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/

Internet search engine: Google!

According to the Nielsen cabinet, Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 54% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (23%) and MSN (13%). However, independent estimates from popular sites indicate that more than 80% of search referrals come from Google, with Yahoo! a distant second and MSN occupying barely 5%. The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.

Since Google is so welcome, all of us want our web site can be found by Google and at best on the top of the result list. That is possible! First of all, what you need to know is how Google search:

How dose Google search:

Google employs data centers full of low-cost commodity computers running a custom Red Hat Linux in several locations around the world to respond to search requests and to index the web. The indexing is performed by a program named Googlebot, which periodically requests new copies of web pages it already knows about. The more often a page updates, the more often Googlebot will visit. The links in these pages are examined to discover new pages to be added to its internal database of the web.

Google uses an algorithm called PageRank to rank web pages that match a given search string. The PageRank algorithm computes a recursive figure of merit for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. The PageRank thus derives from human-generated links, and correlates well with human concepts of importance. Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page. In addition to PageRank, Google also uses other secret criteria for determining the ranking of pages on result lists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_search

Methods to be on the top:

Buy text links.
(If you are willing to, this is the quickest way.)

Beg others to link you.
(If you have enough friends with enough sites, this is a good way too.)

Cheat the PageRank:

A current flaw is that any low PageRank page that is redirected, via a 302 server header or a "Refresh" meta tag, to a high PR page causes the lower PR page to acquire the PR of the destination page. In theory a new, PR0 page with no incoming links can be redirected to the Google home page - which is a PR 10 - and by the next PageRank update the PR of the new page will be upgraded to a PR10. This is called spoofing and is a known failing or bug in the system. Any page's PR can be spoofed to a higher or lower number of the webmaster's choice and only Google has access to the real PR of the page. Spoofing is generally detected by running a Google search for a URL with questionable PR, as the results will display the URL of an entirely different site (the one redirected to) in its results.

Google's home page is often considered to be automatically rated a 10/10 by the Google Toolbar's PageRank feature, but its PageRank has at times shown a surprising result of only 8/10.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Notes:
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.

Use more wise way:
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/

Tools to check the rank (check PR) of all your web site pages:
http://www.prchecker.info/

Newsletter5: all about the colors (II)

In the second part, I will introduce some healthy colors, good colors preferred by color blindness and the tools helping us to choose our web colors.


1. The colors for health.

Facing the computer with a long time is not good for users’ health, so if the colors of the web sites do some good help for users’ eyes, these web sites will be more welcome, especially by youth and their parents.

Mostly all of us know the green color is good for our eyesight. Green has great healing power. It is the most restful color for the human eye; it can improve vision.

http://www.gp.org/
http://www.serenegreen.com/
http://www.greenparty.ca/

In fact, some soft and light colors also benefit our eyes, because they can reduce the pungency of the screen, such as yellow, brown.

http://yp.yahoo.com/
http://www.myyellow.com/dynamic/services/content/index.jsp
http://www.amybrownart.com/
http://www.cfa.org/breeds.html
http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/letter/anatomy.htm

Of course, these colors can not eliminate the hurt of our eyesight. They just can reduce it. So the most helpful way to protect our eyes is not see the screen for a long time.


2. The colors for the color blindness.

Since there are too many types of color blindness, it is impossible to make a web site visited by all of them. But what we can do is make our web site meet the normal colors-blind people’s needs.

There are two major types of color blindness.

The most prevalent causes are confusion between red and green. This type affects approximately eight to ten percent of the male population.

Protanopia - shades of red are greatly reduced, if present at all, in depth and brightness
Deuteranopia - shades of green are greatly reduced, if present at all, in depth and brightness

In another type, an additional one to two Percent of men suffer from a deficiency in perceiving blue/yellow differences. Less than one percent of women suffer from any form of color blindness.

Tritanopia - very rare case where shades of blue are greatly reduced, if present at all, in depth and brightness

http://www.vischeck.com/examples/
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kirillcool/archive/2006/09/how_colorblind.html
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/accessibility/color.html

To understand color blindness better, it is helpful to be familiar with the ways in which colors differ from each other. One standard way to discuss color is to divide it into hue, saturation and brightness. Or just not make the red and green, blue and yellow together.


3. The tools for us to choose colors in our web sites.

Using this can help you to see how the colors do in your web site.
http://www.visibone.com/colorlab/

You can see the different levels of the same color in one web site.
http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html
http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme/index-en.html

Clearly using these computer-generated colour schemes will work well, but ultimately they are no substitute for the eye of an artist, as Luke Wroblewski indicates in Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design.
http://www.lukew.com/
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/natural_selections_colors_found_in_nature_and_interface_design

Newsletter4: all about the colors (I)

Everyone knows the colors design is an important part of the web design. All of us desire the good color scheme, but how to choose colors and make them match well in your web site?

So in this page and the next page, I’ll show you how to use colors and what you should consider when you do your color scheme.

In the first part, I will introduce some basic good colors loved by different kind of people.


1. The colors liked by children.

We all know the children have little patience and they are easy to be attracted but not long. So we often fall into the desire of indiscriminate, randomly-chosen bright colors.

Actually, to catch children’s eyes, we do use some bright colors, but they are not the only choice. And a website can not only have bright colors. That is not good for their eyes.

There are some examples:

http://www.kids-space.org/
This web site has too many colors. It will make children feel confused to find the information and make their eyes uncomfortable. But the interface is interesting. They can easily attract children’s attentions, but won’t last long enough for them to find the things they look for.

http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forkids/kidsclub/flash/index.html
This is a very interesting web site for children. The colors are bright, and the good contrast makes the information outstanding. Adding the voice increases the interests. They can catch the children’s attentions till the moment they find their right things.

http://www.lego.com/eng/Default.aspx
http://www.whitsend.org/
Notice lots of them use the blue color, which can make children calm and peaceful.


2. The colors liked by females.

All men think females are the hardest things to understand. Not only men feel hard to understand, but we women also can’t say we know ourselves very well. It’s impossible to find out some colors schemes liked by all the women, but it’s possible to find some liked by most of them.

There are some examples of the colors loved by females:

http://www.ivillage.com/
The cliche when attempting to appeal to a predominantly feminine audience is of course floras, laciness, and lots and lots of pink.

http://www.aauw.org/
With such a wide range of women to consider - ages, ethnicities, professionals vs. stay-at-home moms, etc. - this is one generalization we may do well to avoid. Of course, we don't want to avoid pink so diligently that our site ends up too masculine.

A happy medium is our goal:
http://www.bareescentuals.com/
http://www.davidsbridal.com/index.jsp
Another much-accepted maxim however, is the use of pastel colors, more sophisticated typography, and of course, lots of pictures of the target group, all with the goal of visually assuring readers that, "hey, they're talking to ME."


3. The colors liked by males.

Compared with women, men are easier to be satisfied. This does not mean that there is no need to consider their thoughts.

Relatively, they prefer clear colors scheme. Easy to find out the key point, simple colors, less complex and no huge contrast, that is OK.

It’s human nature to want things orderly and look for recurring patterns. However, men and women seek this order with different motivations. Perhaps it’s masculine nature to want order so our “hunt” will go more smoothly, vs. a feminine desire for orderliness based on a nesting instinct.

There are some examples of the colors loved by males:

http://www.berettausa.com/
http://www.stanleyworks.com/
http://www.jeep.com/grand_cherokee/?pid=10423000&adid=11472836&rid=google
http://www.cabelas.com/home.jsp;jsessionid=XUF1CEIBKCGSQCWQNWSCCOIK0BW0KIWE?_requestid=17534


4. The colors liked by old.

Maybe you can not understand what old men think when you are young. But to design a good web site for old men, we should consider more about the old men. Anyway, when I am old, I won’t like to visit my web site with the colors I hate.

But what do the old men like? The soft colors with light contrast are good. And avoid dark colors, which will make them feel sad about their ages. The bright and colorful web sites will make them feel young. But facing too many colors they will feel confused and hard to find the information.

There are some examples of the colors loved by old men:

http://www.sunriseassistedliving.com/Home.do http://www.encoresl.com/
http://www.nationalseniors.com.au/


Reference:
http://www.warrenkramer.com/design/index.php